It always is....

WHITE HOUSE CAUGHT IN COVER UP
The White House claimed they had released ALL the documents, now tonight, conveniently after 60 Minutes shows the NEW documents on TV, the White House somehow releases the very documents it said it never had? Where did the documents come from, and why didn't the White House release them BEFORE 60 Minutes exposed their existence? And finally, what else is the White House hiding?

Family friends Pulling Strings to get into the National Guard isn't the story and won't win or lose the election. More friends Pulling Strings to get you out again won't be as crucial either.

Not when the President gets caught Pulling His Own Strings by withholding key documents which show what other strings were pulled. Besides, we can look at cover-up, after cover-up, after cover-up.

Oh yes, can't you just wait to see yet another President's administration completely crippled by scandal and investigations while the world burns. Tough choice, vote for Bush and watch Washington implode or vote for Kerry and die.

Or more precisely, just how much stomach do you Bushies have for an administration crippled by scandal and investigations? This is not an idile threat -- like Cheney's warning that a Kerry Victory Will Bring Devastating Terrorist Attack (as if terrorism is under control under the current regime).

No, this is merely an educated prediction that if you are a true scandal junkie, Bush is your guy! Think about it, especially if the delicate balance in Congress is shifted ever so slightly to the Democrats. Partisan rancor rivaling Whitewater/Lewinski for its divisiveness, more serious allegations of abuse of power than ever contemplated during Watergate, with many of the same players as Iran/Contra.

The list of unanswered questions about who knew what, when, is enormous. Missing WMD's and 9/11 are tje easy ones. Lies about the real cost of medicare, the war and the tax cuts will not be what consumes us under a second Bush term. No, it will be intrigue with shocking details and players whose status as household names is not even suspected -- yet.

• We've got CIA agents outed, (Plame-Gate)
  
• classified pentagon secrets ending up in Israel, (AIPAC-Gate)
  
• a trusted source/ally/special guest of Laura Bush at the SOTUA in spite of being a convicted felon turns out to be an indicted forger and letting the Iranians know we broke their codes, (Chalabi-Gate)
  
• illegal campaign collusion between POTUS and a 527, (Swiftboat-Gate)
  
• two words, abu-Ghraib Prison, (Hate-Gate)
  
• memos from administration lawyers justifying tourture, (Gitmo-Gate)
  
• one word, Haliburton, (Cheney-Gate)
  
• the oh-so convenient announcements from Ridge and Ashcroft over terror threat (Level Orange-Gate)
  
• litigation continues on Cheney's Energy Task Force, (Cheney-Gate part-deux)
  
• Ken Lay's trial will start, be televised, and the connections between Lay and Bush as well as his pay-offs to Afghanistan's Taliban rulers to build a pipe-line will become common knowledge, (Enron-Gate)
  

My guess is that you have little stomach for this kind of thing at all, because you have no guts. I say that because I believe that those of you who agree with the thrust of the Vice President's scare tactics, and believe (quite erroneously) that you are safer with Bush in office, then the terrorists of 9/11 have already won. You are already too terrorized, too paralyzed with fear to change course, even when you acknowledgte that Bush lacks the basic skills for his job. You will vote for him even though it is obvious that he is not only incapablle of living up to his '04 campaign promises, he had no intention of doing anything about his '00 promises other than cutting taxes.

You are already terrorized into voting for Bush despite knowing he is the most divisive public figure in living memory. You don't care that when his unit was called to active duty he couldn't have been bothered or that most of his National Security Team will not be around for the next term. You simply don't care that Bush has bankrupted this country, reallocated wealth to the most wealthy from the middle class

You are so scared that you have no problem with the errosion of privacy represented by the continuation of the Patriot Act -- as long as they only snoop though the credit card records and library logs of people with names that sound like Faisal or Hakim and Fatima but leave you and yours alone.. You eagerly await the expiraiton of the Assault Weapons Ban because that means that you too can buy an Uzi for those occasions when you want to feel safe from suicide bombers when going to Wallmart .


The terrorists terrified you and you deserve the gutless wonder of a president you want. He's everything you aspire to be.

Ok, I promise never to quote Noam Chompsky again. And I proimise not to use Common Dreams as source material again either -- as long as you read this, it changes your mind about supporting Bush, and you vote Kerry into office -- I promise.

War Crimes and Imperial Fantasies: "The group around Bush are real fanatics. They're quite open.

They're not hiding it; you can't accuse them of that. They want to destroy the whole array of progressive achievements of the past century. They've already more or less gotten rid of progressive income tax. They're trying to destroy the limited medical care system. The new pharmaceutical bill is a step towards that. They're going after Social Security. They probably will go after schools. They do not want a small government, any more than Reagan did. They want a huge government, and massively intrusive. They hate free markets. But they want it to work for the rich. The Kerry people will do something not fantastically different, but less so. They have a different constituency to appeal to, and they are much more likely to protect some limited form of benefits for the general population. "

Yahoo! News - Russia prepared for pre-emptive strikes on 'terror bases' worldwide

MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia is prepared to make pre-emptive strikes on "terrorist bases" anywhere in the world, the Interfax news agency cited the country's chief of staff as saying.

Can't say that I really blame them, In it's way, the school seige was worse than our 9/11. Not in causualty count, but for the fact that so many of the victims were children and because the drama played out over such a longer period of time.

In Russia, the terrorists were well prepared for a long seige and took their time to terrorize those inside and outside the school. They were methodical and tore at the psyche of every parent worldwide with the thought that, "it could happen here...". 9/11, although not to minimize it for one minute, was more akin to a quick stab at the heart, not a prolonged bloodletting.

"With regard to preventive strikes on terrorist bases, we will take any action to eliminate terrorist bases in any region of the world.

I wonder how comfortable former Soviet expert Conoleeza Rice is about this development? Can you imagine how Reaganites would react to Russia engaging in pre-emptive strikes and preventative wars?

Not well to be sure. This is hauntingly similar to the Brezhnev Doctrine which gave us the Czechoslovakian and Afghanistan invasions. However, I can think of little that I would consider an overreaction to the tragic results of the school seige.

But this does not mean we will carry out nuclear strikes," General Yuri Baluyevsky said Wednesday.

OK, that probably would be going too far. How disturbed are you that Russia's Military Chief of Staff felt he had to reassure anybody that they weren't going nuclear, yet?

Of course in the topsy-turvy world created by Gworge W. Bush and his fanatical neo-conservative minions, nothing should surprise you anymore; not in a world where paleoconservative Pat Buchanan who rails against imperial America, is accused of finding common cause with the nation's most endearing libretarian/socialist/anarchist, Noam Chomsky.

There's something very wrong in the world when the far left and far right join hands with a moderate position compared to the administration, and the Pentagon and the Kremlin are at odds with Foggy Bottom.

Maybe it's too late. Maybe America has Jumped the Shark. I do long for the time where things made sense, where I could lightly dismiss as radical the polemics of Buchanan and Chompsky; where an America and the world were united by tragedy, were in no danger of being furhter divided by a leader professing to be a "uniter, not a divider." I long for the days when I only disagreed with some of our official policies, not every single stinking decision our president makes.

And make no mistake, my vision is not clouded by constant Bush-bashing, except the times where they insist on pulling the wool over my eyes.

Read this, seriously. Just do it. You'll be glad you did.

The Blogging of the President: 2004 | 1968, The Sequel by Stirling Newberry.

The only thing I can think of in response to Mr. Newberry's profound analysis, is that what you, and I, and he are doing, blogging, may be the answer -- maybe.

HAT TIP: Hal

Ironic, isn't it.

Roy F. "Latch" Hoffman, one of the co-founders of the pro-George W. Bush group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had publicly criticized Kerry, a former Swift boat commander, for having brought back stories about alleged war crimes by U.S. forces -- often carried out, Kerry said in 1971, "with the full awareness of officers at all levels."

Hoffman himself, the Navy Captain in charge of the entire Swift boat task force in Vietnam, while "hitching a ride up the coast aboard their Swift boat, had ordered the crew to fire on a small group of unarmed Vietnamese fishermen working their nets in unrestricted waters."

The account of one of the crewmen as well as the boat's skipper -- who was punished for upholding the Geneva Convention by refusing Hoffman's order -- is more than interesting reading about the man who heaped high praise on Lt.(jg) Kerry in 1969, but lately has called Kerry a "loose cannon," and chastized Kerry for having "bugged out," after securring his "specious medals."

This guy wasn't angry at Kerry for lumping him in with the likes of Lt Calley and Tiger Force. He had no inclination to act any different. He's upset with Kerry for blowing the whistle on his own actions.

HAT TIP: Atrios

I'm sensing a pattern here. So does Maureen Dowd (the liberal version of the Queen of All Evil).

The Manichaean Candidate's convention was a brazen bizarro masterpiece. The case to sack John Kerry featured the same shady tactics used to build the case to whack Saddam - cherry-picked facts, selective claims and warped contexts.

Swift-boated again.

Didn't we learn the first time around? If this administration will over-inflate a non-existent threat, personalize a clash of ideologies, create a boogeyman out of an opponent lacking comparable resources, and promise a rosey post-conflict future with vague plans and unrealistic projections of the cost -- do you believe for one minute that Bush would hesitate to use these tactics to win an election when he used them to justify the sacrifice our troops?

The so-called liberation of Iraq, where we would be greeted with flowers, has transformed into a catastrophic money-pit. So has the treasury of the United States. Do you honestly have any faith his policy proposals will not do the same in a second term?

Do you honestly believe that Bush is sincere in his desire to eliminate 527's, especially since the 60-day window has arrived where they can no longer run ads like the ones we have seen? Do you honestly believe that the Swift Boat tapestry of lies and distortions did not meet with the White House's full approval?

Do you have any doubt that nothing would have stopped Bush from invading Iraq, regardless of whether WMD's or terrorists where there? Likewise, do you honestly believe that Bush and his operatives will stop at anything to win reelection?

There are no limits Bush will acknowledge in his quest to remain in power, nothing. He has absolutely no honor in the normal sense of the word. Any and all means are justified in his warped mind to further his desired ends. That is more thereatening to America and the world than anything Saddam could have done, Osama did, or Kerry will do.

To Bush, Kerry is no differenct that Saddam -- an enemy to be eliminated by any means necessary. This is the sad state of American politics, and it is clinically insane. If you agree with any part of what I write daily, you are an insurgent or enemy sympathizer to the mind of the Bush Bundesreich -- watch your back comrade. We sill be marginalized as whackos for demagoguery. Dismissed as zealots by the faithful. But one thing they won't do is counter the logic of our beliefs -- they cannot.

What's Compassionate or Conservative About This? VIA: The Washington Monthly

Medicare Premiums to Jump a Record 17% Bush administration announces the increase for 41.8 million disabled and elderly beneficiaries as the capital empties for the holiday weekend

Funny, Bush didn't mention this in his speach.

::Overheard in a Karaoke Bar last night.::

"All hurricanes suck dick, which is why most are named after women. Hugo and Andrew were of course militantly gay."

I was filling in for the KJ last night, watching Frances destroy West Palm and half of FloriDUH with a customer who owns a 30 foot sailboat she left anchored in the intercoastal there. She laughed, and cried, and sang and drank enough to enjoy the show. Thank goodness for insurance. And yes, I was the smart-ass who described the sexual preferences of hurricanes. You had to be there. What a fricking amazing storm.

Iraq Closes Al-Jazeera Office Indefinitely

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP)--The Iraqi government shut down Al-Jazeera's Baghdad operations indefinitely on Saturday, extending a one-month closure order imposed after the pan-Arab channel was accused of inciting violence.

OR HERE

Osama could be arrested soon: US official

Islamabad: Al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden and his other top associates could be arrested anytime now, as the recent spate of Al Qaeda arrests in Pakistan have provided significant clues, a senior US official has claimed.

This Ladies and Gentleman is the freedom we brought to the so-called liberated people of Iraq. And this is the cynicism the administration deals with 9/11, timing the capture of the worlds most notorious terrorist just in time for the October Surprise.