Fundamental Bush Developmental Disability--No Sense of Irony

When the Germans are shaming your country about its detention camps, maybe it's time to reevaluate the policy, wouldn't you say?

There is widespread skepticism in Germany about the way the United States is fighting its "war on terror," compounded by the recent scandal over the CIA's abduction and detention of German citizen Khaled el-Masri -- later acknowledged to be a mistake.

Oops! Yes, and we're the beacon of liberty around the world. And we don't torture...unless the president says we can even though he signed the McCain bill against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, but you see, he had his fingers crossed...

Bush Signs with Fingers Crossed: "King's X!" he declares. Too bad we're not in the schoolyard any longer.

The Chimperor, after realizing that being the lone holdout against a ban on torture was beginning to darken his already shit-and blood-stained legacy, grudgingly signed the McCain bill banning cruel, unusual, or degrading treatment. However, not being of sufficient intellect to deal in nuance and debate whether the interstices left between the definition of "torture" and "cruel, unusual, or degrading treatment" as his buttlicking minions have started to do, Bush resorted to another of his childish responses to real-world politics.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a ''signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

''The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush wrote, adding that this approach ''will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."

That's right, he pulled the old, "Naw, naw, naw, naw nad--King's X! Doesn't count!"

The real force behind it all, of course, is Dick "Champion of Evil" Cheney who made his belief in the Emperor of the USA mode of rule even clearer:

Vice President Dick Cheney recently told reporters, ''I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it. . . . I would argue that the actions that we've taken are totally appropriate and consistent with the constitutional authority of the president."

You know, maybe I should agree with this, because imagine that some opposition party--I can't think of one, but just humor me--was voted into power after a successful campaign against the abuses of the Bushit administration. The new president then wouldn't have to bother with justice or legislative issues. In the interest of national security--and who is a bigger threat to it than the Bush-Cheney cabal of evil--he could have the former leadership remanded to a military prison by the power of his or her "strong, robust executive authority," and then, by God, let the games begin!

I always wanted to be an interrogator.

The Disgusting Spin of Chris Matthews

There is something very fishy about Chris Matthews' support and spin of the Bushits and the Republicans in general. Yesterday, he claimed that the Abramoff scandal "wasn't partisan," which fits nicely into the right-wing spin that is being used to try to defuse this huge bomb of a scandal. The tactic is to make it a Congressional scandal rather than a Republican scandal, which it clearly and exclusively is, at least according to the way Abramoff spread his largesse around. From Bloomberg News on December 21:

Between 2001 and 2004, Abramoff gave more than $127,000 to Republican candidates and committees and nothing to Democrats, federal records show. At the same time, his Indian clients were the only ones among the top 10 tribal donors in the U.S. to donate more money to Republicans than Democrats.

So why would Matthews join in the spin game in the face of hard facts of the dough distribution by now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff, claimed as a "best friend" by Tom "Giant Flying Cockroach" DeLay?

Well, over at Americablog, John Aravosis has stitched together the details of an event planned for an Abramoff-related charity that would have had Matthews as a host. And, surprise! surprise! this charity was as crooked as Abramoff's other endeavors:

In its first four years of operation, the charity has collected nearly $6 million. A gala fundraiser last year at the International Spy Museum at one point attracted the Washington Redskins' owner as its chairman and was to honor the co-founder of America Online.

Records for GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff's Capital Athletic Foundation show that less than 1 percent of its revenue has been spent on sports-related programs for youths, and federal investigators are looking into how large amounts of money were funneled through the nonprofit group to support Abramoff's interests.

Once again, we find the media "watchdogs" aiding and abetting interests that they then claim to objectively report. Shouldn't Matthews have disclosed his connection to Abramoff before passing on opinions (falsely supported) of bipartisan corruption in this scandal?

No, I guess not. If you drink the yellowing spooge from the peckers of lying scum, then you can't be anything different yourself. Understand, of course, that the reason for this tactic is that the Repugs know that they're fucked because Abramoff is going to sing his ass off, and I imagine he has a paper trail to support every contention. So as they have done in the past when faced with irrefutable evidence of their corruption, the Repugs will try to dilute the charge by turning it into "everyone does it," and "business as usual" while at the same time running like hell from any association to anyone indicted. The only thing more certain than Republican corruption is Republican turncoating. "Jack who? Tom who?" And you can bet that Chris Matthews will take his finger out of Chimpie's ass long enough to test the winds and shift accordingly.

And if it is true that this is "business as usual," then the whole stinking thing needs to be taken down, regardless of politics. If any Dems were stupid enough to succumb to this selling out of the American people, I hope they end up rotting in a federal prison right next to DeLay, Hastert, and the rest. Maybe it's time for a true revolution in the political order.

The New Slogan for 2006

Happy New Year to all of you!

This is the year to Rise Up.

This is the slogan of the year: Rise Up!

Here is reason # 1 to rise up:

The same report, by the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning research center, and United for a Fair Economy, a group seeking to narrow the gap between rich and poor, found that in 2004 the ratio of C.E.O. pay to worker pay at large companies had ballooned to 431 to 1. If the minimum wage had advanced at the same rate as chief executive compensation since 1990, America's bottom-of-the-barrel working poor would be enjoying salad days, with legal wages at $23.03 an hour instead of $5.15.

Is the work done by minimum wage employees more important or less important than that done by most executive level leadership? Which group, were they to go on strike for two weeks, would paralyze the country more?

Unite, workers! Rise Up!

This Week's Best Description of the Bush Strategy

From Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone:

Up until now this president's solution to everything has been to stare into the cameras, lie and keep on lying until such time as the political problem disappears. And now, unable to comprehend that while political crises may wilt in the face of such tactics, real crises do not, he and his team are responding to this first serious feet-to-the-fire Iraq emergency in the same way they always have -- with a fusillade of silly, easily disprovable bullshit. Bush and his mouthpieces continue to try to obfuscate and cloud the issue of why we're in Iraq, and they do so not only selectively but constantly, compulsively, like mental patients who can't stop jacking off in public. They don't know the difference between a real problem and a political problem, because to them, there is no difference. What could possibly be worse than bad poll numbers?

Right on the money. The money shot, so to speak.

Someone Who Knows About War Crimes

Last night I watched a rerun on C-SPAN of a panel presentation at Georgetown Law School regarding the Nuremberg Trials after World War Two. What particularly struck me were some of the fundamental principles that had been set down in 1945-46 for the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court, to which agreement there are now over 100 nations. The United States, however, is not one of them.

Mr. Benjamin Ferencz, one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg, has a terrific website, and has devoted his life to international law. If you don't yet subscribe to the idea of the Bush regime as a collection of war criminals, I would ask you to consider that the invasion of Iraq was done without United Nations authorization (unlike the 1991 Gulf War) and on the basis of "pre-emption." Here's what Mr. Ferencz has to say about that after he had obtained convictions for war crimes of Nazis by their own admission

The twenty-two defendants in the Einsatzgruppen case were selected on the basis of high rank and education. Many held doctor degrees -- six were SS Generals. The principle defendant, General Dr. Otto Ohlendorf, patiently explained why his unit had killed about 90,000 Jews. Killing all Jews and Gypsies was necessary, said Ohlendorf. as a matter of self-defense.

According to Ohlendorf, it was known that the Soviets planned total war against Germany. A German preemptive strike was better than waiting to be attacked. It was also known, said Ohlendorf, that Jews supported the Bolsheviks - therefore all Jews had to be eliminated. But why did he, the father of five children, kill the little babes -- thousands of them? The bland reply was that if the children learned that their parents had been eliminated, they would grow up to be enemies of Germany. Long range security was the goal. He lacked facts sufficient to challenge Hitler's conclusions. It was all very logical -- according to General Dr. Ohlendorf.

Please note how a kneepad press might contribute to the dissemination of such beliefs.

I had not called for the death penalty, although I felt it was richly deserved. I simply asked the court to affirm the right of all human beings to live in peace and dignity regardless of race or creed. It was "a plea of humanity to law." The three experienced American judges concluded that a preemptive strike as anticipatory self-defense was not a valid legal justification for mass murder. If every nation could decide for itself when to attack a presumed enemy, and when to engage in total war, the rule of law would be destroyed and the world would be destroyed with it.

As to those 100 nations who do support the International Criminal Court, the signatories include our European allies from WWII as well as Germany itself. Mr. Ferencz makes this final point that is perhaps what should have the Bushits running scared most of all:

Aggression, according to the Nuremberg judges and other precedents, is "the supreme international crime" since it includes all the other crimes. There can be no war without atrocities and unauthorized warfare in violation of the UN Charter is the biggest atrocity of all.

I encourage you to visit this site and look over Mr. Ferencz's writings in which he lays out a convincing case of the ICC, the UN, and the need for law instead of war. When we, as a nation that spends more on its military than all other nations combined, fail to adhere to international law, then it is clear that our ideas need reexamination, paricularly regarding the means by which we wish to spread these ideas.

Question of the Day

Joe Conason, one of the true journalists still standing, poses a question worthy of speculation in this paragraph posted today in an article on the requirement for impeachment of Bush:

Why would the President instruct the Attorney General not to seek warrants from the FISA court, as the statute requires? What did he and his aides fear from that court's conservative judges -- appointed by the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist -- who have routinely approved all but a tiny percentage of the warrants presented to them by this and other administrations over the past quarter-century? Which wiretaps did he expect those pliable judges to reject?

Wiretaps on people from his enemies list? Wiretaps on journalists who badmouth his administration? You have to wonder that when a FISA warrant can be obtained after the wiretap has been ordered, and when the FISA court has rejected almost none of the 19,000 requests made since the law was enacted, just how outrageous were the wiretaps that El Presidente wanted?

At home my telephones sport stickers that say "This phone is tapped," and it was originally meant as a joke. Little did I expect that it would turn out to be an accurate assessment of the violation of the Fourth Amendment by the criminals that continue to assault the Constitution in the name of security.

Assault on the First Amendment

Those-who-wish-to-be-tyrants despise a free press. Of course, if we really had a free press, I wouldn't be to worried about what is happening when Bushito summons New York Times and Washington Post editors for some strongarming on truths they might care to tell. You see, although the First Amenedment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to a free press, it does not guarantee the existence or availability of a free press, particularly within an environment so controlled by strictly commercial interests (GE owns NBC, Disney owns ABC, Viacom owns CBS, etc.) whose leadership hobnobs and begs favors from the political establishment. So this revelation is all the more chilling by its secrecy.

Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, would not confirm that he, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman had an Oval Office sit-down with the president on Dec. 5, 11 days before reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed that Bush had authorized eavesdropping on Americans and others within the United States without court orders.

But the meetings were confirmed by sources who have been briefed on them but are not authorized to comment because both sides had agreed to keep the sessions off the record. The White House had no comment.

You see, now we not only have to depend on leakers to get the truth out about what goes on in the White House, we have to have leakers to find out what goes on in the press when it deals with the White House.

If these meetings had occurred three years ago, or even one year ago, do you think that Keller and Taubman would have had the courage to run the stories Bush was trying to suppress? Well, we already know that the Times sat on the NSA domestic spying case for a year.

Free press my fucking ass.

Mythology of Terrorism

Do terrorists exist? Yes, of course, and they exist in many guises. Do some of them want to do us harm? Unquestionably! It's a fact of life in any civilization, and 9/11 brought it home in spades to the U.S. (but let's not forget domestic terrorism like McVeigh in Oklahoma City, or Eric Robert Rudolph in Atlanta and Birmingham).

But the way the Bush administration wants to cast what is really a highly fragmented and variegated collection of terrorist groups into some monolithic threat on the order of the Cold War Soviet regime is a lie on a scale so massive that it can only have a single purpose. The so-called "War on Terror" has been fabricated so that under this phony blanket of fear the fascist-minded zealots can keep chipping away at limits to their power, visibility into our own government, and our very rights as citizens.

The War on Terror is a marketing scheme, designed to collect any threat or act anywhere and put it into the pot of rationalization that this group of thugs keeps stirring and serving up as a gruel of repression. Quit eating this shit! Quit using the term. Start talking about the war on Al Qaeda, or Indonesian bombers, or Islamic extremists in Spain. Get specific.

The reason for this is that how we use language to describe what must be done reveals whether or not we understand--or intend to explain--what our plan is for dealing with the situation. If the police simply talked about our "war on crime" every time a robbery occurred, wouldn't you be asking who did it, where, with what, and how? And yet our news media doesn't seem to want to delve any deeper than the thin porridge of platitudes that Chimpie's gang serves up in steaming bowls.

The threat of terror is real, but it is no more or less than it was four years ago, or ten, or twenty, or fifty. It's a fact of life, but rather than effectively dealing with terrorists, the game is now played to hold up terrorism as a justification for acts by government that are much more of a real threat to our way of life.

Don't be conned. Demand specifics, and demand specific actions. The next time someone says "War on Terror," ask where that war is being waged, with what means, and against whom. These are not phantoms or supermen or boogiemen. And we don't have to surrender to fascist fear-mongering to effectively deal with them. Unless, that is, you're running a corrupt and incompetent evil empire of your own.

The Belly Laugh

Last night on The Late Show with David Letterman, I had myself a truly purging release through laughter. Dave introduced a segment called "The Late Show Response to Bush Spying" (or something like that), bringing up stage manager Biff Henderson, who was standing next to a telephone.

Dave: Take it away, Biff.

Biff: All right, Dave. (Picks up telephone receiver.) Hey Bush. Mind your own fucking business. (Hangs up.)

Dave: And there you have it.

I think I had an abdominal rupture or something after that.

Another chant for the season.

Oh My, More on Impeachment

Go to this Editor and Publisher issue for a great piece on this subject. And they answer the accusation that the MSM is still largely a gargling nest of bum-slurpers:

When Washington Post pollster Richard Morin finally answered the "I" question in his online chat, he said, "We do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion -- witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in '08 are calling for Bush's impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls."

Oh, WaPo, how far you've fallen since Nixon.

Told You So

My relatives, even my wife, have long considered me to be wild-eyed and prone to overstatement with regard to the Bush administration. Two years ago I was severely taken to task for referring to them as a "criminal enterprise," and when I was hollering for impeachment on the basis of the many, many offenses committed against the U.S. Constitution and international law, again my various in-laws told me I was nuts. There was no way that was going to happen, what with a Republican controlled Congress, blah, blah, blah.

Well, friends, the word "impeachment" has now reached a level of play that even the mainstream media is afraid to ignore, and when even those sycophants rise up far enough from their kneepads to clear their throats of Cheney's cock and cough out the "I-word," then things must be in a state of panic inside the White House.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek, who I must grudgingly respect as he seems to have remained an actual journalist instead of an eager-to-swallow stenographer for the Official Word of Emperor Bush, has put the issue front and center.

For months now, I have been getting e-mails demanding that my various employers (Newsweek, NBC News and MSNBC.com) include in their poll questionnaires the issue of whether Bush should be impeached. They used to demand this on the strength of the WMD issue, on the theory that the president had “lied us into war.” Now the Bush foes will base their case on his having signed off on the NSA’s warrant-less wiretaps. He and Cheney will argue his inherent powers and will cite Supreme Court cases and the resolution that authorized him to make war on the Taliban and al-Qaida. They will respond by calling him Nixon 2.0 and have already hauled forth no less an authority than John Dean to testify to the president’s dictatorial perfidy. The “I-word” is out there, and, I predict, you are going to hear more of it next year — much more.

And Patrick Fitzgerald is still working on the Karl Rove treasongate issue too.

It's getting to feel a lot like Christmas, everywhere you go. Hee-hee-hee.

Time to Impeach, and then Indict

Am I missing something? Here's the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Now here's George W. Bush, presidential impostor, lying about how he has authorized violations of this law, from the White House's own website, from April 20, 2004:

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

Further on in the speech, however, he was frighteninly candid about how far he and his criminal gang were prepared to go:

. And we needed to change the whole attitude about how we protect the homeland. We'll do everything we can to stay on the offensive.

Apparently, even to the point of tossing out the Constitution. Who needs to fear Osama (still on the loose, by the way) when we've got our own domestic forces destroying our protections?

Chimpie Clobbered by Conservative George Will

This is a first for me, I think, but I absolutely must quote George Will in today's Washington Post:

The president's authorization of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency contravened a statute's clear language. Assuming that urgent facts convinced him that he should proceed anyway and on his own, what argument convinced him that he lawfully could?

I think the answser to this is that he, or his controllers, were convinced that he could get away with it. "Urgent facts" or "facts" in general are not anything that this administration feels are relevant to any action they take. Given the timidity of the mainstream media to call him on his blatant lies in his news conference yesterday, I can understand why the Chimpie criminal gang continues to believe that they can violate the law of the land, jeopardize our liberties, and do so with impunity and no fear of prosecution.

Welcome to the North American Banana Republic of the United States. All that is lacking is a flashy uniform with giant epaulets and a gold-braided high-peaked cap for El Presidente.

Chimpie: No Irony Gene?

If you're a Seinfeld fan, then you'll remember the episode where the four characters split up in the subway--Jerry to head to Coney Island, Kramer to pay some fines, George to interview for a job, and Elaine off to a lesbian wedding. At one point, Elaine says to a woman, "That's ironic." The woman says, "What do you mean?" Elaine begins to explain why what she has said is ironic. The woman stops here. "No," she says, "what does 'ironic' mean?"

Don't you imagine a similar conversation with Chimpie Bush if you tried to explain the following as ironic:

After initially refusing to discuss whether he had authorized domestic spying without court approval, President Bush decided to come clean. He acknowledged over the weekend that such spying had taken place, much as it was described in Friday's New York Times. He argued that it was vital to thwart an enemy that knows no boundaries.

And which enemy would that be? Well, the greatest threat to my constitutionally protected personal liberties seems to be a presidential imposter who considers himself completely above the law, who personally, repeatedly, ordered the National Security Agency to spy on citizens, which they could legally do by simply getting a secret court to authorize them. This court, created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which almost never refuses such requests (in fact, it has approved over 15,000 of them!), and was instituted to give some oversight to such extraordinary measures, which is all fair and good. But even that little bit of bother is too much for the Chimperor who must at all costs maintain his fantasy of monarchic power, missing the days when he could regularly sign death warrants and rule like Caligula, which may be fine in Texas, but ought not to be considered anything but criminal behavior on the national level.

"An enemy that knows no boundaries." Was he pointing a finger at his temple and winking when he said that?

To My Faithful Readers...

You may have noticed a dearth of postings these past two weeks. I have no excuse other than a kind of exhaustion of rage against increasingly outrageous behavior of the Chimpie Criminal Empire. Even when the whole world cries "Liar, Thief, Criminal" at Cheney, Chimpie, Rumsfeld, and company, they forge ahead, stripping our nation of respect, protection for the individual, sovereignty of nations, sanctity of life, and compounding their lies with an unimaginable level of hypocrisy. Their minions in the national legislature and in the exectutive continue an unrelenting assault against the environment and the working person, education, expression, sexual freedom, and separation of church and state. And on and on it goes.

I'm tired of ranting and raving and marching and carrying signs. It's not enough, at least for now.

So I'm taking a little break over the holidays. I hope you'll check back in in a week or two when perhaps I'll be refueled with anger and bile. But for now, I'm turning to some self-indulgent reading and musical enjoyment.

Have a great holiday season. May all your dreams come true.

Condi Rice to World: We Are the Torturers and Mighty Proud of It

Berlin may be my favorite city on earth, and it just galls me that Condoleezza Rice is not persona non grata there as a principal liar and handmaiden to war crimes for the Bush administration. She's appearing in Europe essentially to bully the Europeans into keeping quiet about our torture policies lest they lose our "protection" for them in the overhyped and underplayed "war on terror."

European governments have expressed outrage over reports of a network of secret Soviet-era prisons in Eastern Europe where detainees may have been harshly treated and reports of CIA flights carrying al-Qaida prisoners through European airports.

Several countries have denied they hosted such sites. If the United States did operate such prisons, or is still doing so, the information would be classified. The Bush administration has refused to answer questions about it in public.

"Were I to confirm or deny, say yes or say no, then I would be compromising intelligence information, and I'm not going to do that," Rice told reporters on her plane to Germany. Before leaving Washington, Rice told reporters that fighting terrorism is "a two-way street" and that Europeans are safer for tough but legal U.S. tactics.

If there are any Europeans reading this, I'd like to know your views on whether or not you're safer because my country is now cheerfully and energetically engaged in cruel, inhumane, and degrading practices for interrogation to the point that even language in a Senate bill outlawing such practices is grounds for Chimpie's first veto of his entire administration. And don't forget Dick Cheney's sexually charged defense of the practice. I know it's harder to get it up when you're married to Lynn and have heart trouble, but having innocent people beaten, shocked, chained to the floor in their own feces and forced to perform homosexual acts for the camera is a kind of pornography he should be shy of admiring in public.

You see, these war criminals don't deny such charges against them; rather, they seek to reclassify torture and unprovoked invasions of sovereign nations as legitimate enterprises. The slippery slope that that unrolls is a terrifying one indeed. Maybe that's the "war on terror" they should be studying for a change.

The Joy of Greed, the Danger of Hubris: America Waking Up

You don't have to be a radical anti-capitalist to realize that when the nation's largest employer is Wal-Mart that something is dreadfully wrong. And when the behemoth retailer controls both the production and retail ends of consumer products, that it essentially has dictatorial power. Well, they may have overstepped their bounds at last and even the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil mass of the middle and lower consuming class addicted to Wal-Mart's alleged low prices (low because they make a public cost every obligation that does not enhance the bottom line). The Walton family is worth over $90 billion. Should we be afraid?

Here is at least one way people are becoming aware and fighting back.

Nancy McShane used to spend $600 to $700 a month at Wal-Mart on everything from groceries to oil changes. Then in March she abruptly switched to other discount stores, upset over what her turkey-farming relatives saw as undue price pressure from the world's largest retailer.
McShane, a Springfield, Mo., housewife with children aged 11 and 12, is among what organized critics claim is a growing number of Americans turning against Wal-Mart amid allegations from unions and others that the company is bad for workers, the environment and communities.

When regular folks like Ms. McShane come to the realization that their savings is coming out of someone else's hide, they can change really quickly in their opinions and habits.

But at Springfield, McShane said she changed stores after her relatives, who also raise produce, complained Wal-Mart exerts too much pressure on suppliers to cut their prices.

"That's too much power for one company to have," she said.

And this underlines a basic problem in our country today--the substitution of economic relations for social relations. When people care more about saving ten cents on a pair of tube socks than about maintaining the spirit of community, we're all sunk. Wal-Mart is just part of the problem, which links to sprawl, dependence on the automobile, shrinking workers' rights, etc. but it's a hugely powerful and visible manifestation of a way of thinking that's got to change.

And perhaps, in its grab to own the world, Wal-Mart may have overreached and at last alarmed a lot of Americans.

Textbook Definition of Religious Megalomania?

Too bad he's in the White House. From The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh gives the country some very scary confirmation of our worst fears:

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remain convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparage any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.
Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

At what point does this constitute a diagnosis of mental illness? Who voted for this fanatic with the messiah complex?

Whoever you all are, I hope your consciences are kicking your asses. Chimpie thinks he's bringing about the New Jerusalem from a smoking pile of ruins and broken lives. That's on your heads, you motherfuckers, every last one of you.

Rover Goin' Down

RawStory has some outstanding inside dope on Plamegate. Boy, talk about dishonor among thieves. Karl Rove is in the hot seat and may not pull the G. Gordon Liddy bit.

Two things are clear, the sources said: either Rove will agree to enter into a plea deal with Fitzgerald or he will be charged with a crime, but he will not be exonerated for the role he played in the leak.

If Rove does agree to a plea, Fitzgerald is not expected to discuss any aspect of his probe into the President’s senior adviser because Rove may be called to testify as a prosecution witness against I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was indicted last month on five counts of lying to investigators, perjury and obstruction of justice related to his role in the leak.

So will it be Liddy vs. Rove?