At last, a scandal that the media can focus on.
The fact that the Bush administration lied us into war, a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, has been a nonstarter of a scandal. The media yawns.
The destruction of the Constitution, the turning of America into a near fascist state? A yawner.
Bush’s embrace of torture? Who cares.
Letting New Orleans die? Good riddance.
The destruction of the environment, global warming threatening all mankind? You’ve got to be kidding. That’s a nonstory.
All of it, ho hum.
But now!
A Republican congressman, Florida Rep. Mark Foley, sent a naughty email to an underage page!! And get this! It’s not a girl; it’s a guy!!!
The media is riveted!
to be self-evident -- the Constitution is irrelevant.
I grew up with racial segregation, lynchings, imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps and other monstrous acts. But through it all, there was a reverence for the Constitution in principle, no matter how often it was ignored in practice.
But this Congress -- the worst I’ve ever seen -- and this president -- the worst I’ve ever seen -- shows a disdain for the Constitution that is brutal, outrageous, disgusting, and frightening.
The new torture law – oh, it’s officially called “the Military Commissions Act of 2006" – trashes the Constitution, undermines the Geneva Conventions, and gives a "get out of jail free card" for Bush and Cheney and others who love torture.
The idea that the government should be allowed to hold people in secret torture cells, put them on trial based on evidence that they cannot see, sentence them to death based on testimony beaten out of witnesses, and then prevent courts from even looking at the case leaves me speechless.
With only a handful of exceptions, our Congress is composed of scum.
Under the disturbing headline 'Why Bush Will Nuke Iran', Paul Craig Roberts writes in antiwar.com that the administration will do so because it is the only way the neocons believe they can rescue their goal of U.S. (and Israeli) hegemony in the Middle East.
I'd like to think it's all hyperbole, but it's all too possible with the lunatics in charge. “It is astounding that such dangerous fanatics have control of the U.S. government," Roberts says, "and have no organized opposition in American politics.”
Roberts is always worth reading:
http://www.antiwar.com/roberts/?articleid=9749
Meanwhile, at smirkingchimp.com, Mike Whitney has a trenchant take on our idiot in chief:
"What makes Bush original is that he is the first purely synthetic president we’ve ever had. There’s not a trace of the real man left. He is a mixture of mythic cowboy legend and the Old Testament “fire-n-brimstone” preacher-man, a John Brown-Ronald Reagan hybrid. The draft-dodging, hard-guzzling, cheerleader has been transformed into a sanctimonious, war-mongering American Samurai resolving the planet’s problems with just two “common sense” solutions; war and tax cuts."
And then there is a lovely image at rense.com -- a group portrait of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld surrounded by the words: "Just Say No to Thugs."
EXCERPTS from The Republican Dictionary:
Alternative energy sources (n): New locations to drill for gas and oil.
Compassionate conservatism (n): Poignant concern for the very wealthy.
Fox News (n): Fiction. [From the French; Faux News] .
Free markets (n): Halliburton no-bid contracts at taxpayer expense.
House (n): Exclusive club; entry fee $1 million to $5 million.
Senate (n): Exclusive club; entry fee $10 million to $30 million.
Patriot Act (n): The pre-emptive strike on American freedoms to prevent the terrorists from destroying them first.
Simplify the tax code (n): To cut the taxes of Republican donors.
I received an e-mail from a friend asking me to honor the 9/11 victims: "Please join us in this FLY THE FLAG campaign and PLEASE forward this email immediately to everyone in your address book asking them to also forward it."
I have a much better idea: Demand a real investigation on what happened on 9/11. (One hint, it wasn't planned by a clown in Afghanistan.)
We have a little less than one week and counting to get the word out all
across this great land and into every community in the United States of
America. If you forward this email to least 11 people and each of those
people do the same...you get the idea.
Here's what we need you to do...
1) Go read the essay at
http://www.swans.com/library/art12/rdeck068.html
2) Forward this email to everyone you know (at least 11 people).
Thank you for your participation. God Bless You and God Bless America.
[BTW, if the words don't exactly sound like Deck, I borrowed a lot from the original message.]
Tomorrow we take a cruise to Alaska. We hope to beat global warming and see one of the wonders of the world before it's too late.
Time dictated this to Dragon, wished always is a trial.
TRANSLATION NOTE:
What I just told Dragon is not what Dragon typed.
It should have typed:
"I am dictating this to Dragon, which always is a trial."
We haven't reached Star Trek yet. One can't simply say, "Computer...."
Sigh.
See you all in a couple of weeks.
The U.S. Senate, which is concerned that Israel misused American-made cluster bombs on civilians in Lebanon, has decided it’s okay if WE use cluster bombs on civilians.
The Senate voted 70 - 30 in favor of the cluster bombs. Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, argued that the Senate shouldn't restrict "the ability of our military to use these munitions to protect our people."
You know how dangerous a three-year-old Iraqi child can be. Best let a cluster bombs take him out before he can grow up, get a passport, come to the United States, and blow us all up.
I’m so proud that the U.S. Senate is protecting us from things like that.
"Our global furnace is out of control,” James Lovelock says.
“By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return."
Lovelock the author of the Gaia theory, which holds that Earth acts like a living organism, has written a book on global warming,"The Revenge of Gaia.”
Support for his doomsday scenario comes from a new study of the Antarctic ice core by the British Antarctic Survey which shows that the rapid rise in greenhouse gases over the past century is unprecedented in at least 800,000 years.
Never in that time has carbon dioxide ever exceeded a 30 ppm increase in 1,000 years -- now carbon dioxide has risen by 30 ppm in the last 17 years.
"The rate of change is probably the most scary thing because it means that the Earth systems can't cope with it," Dr. Eric Wolff says.
We are so lacking in evocative invective that we are content to call Bush an idiot, Cheney a pig and Rumsfeld "deluded," Jane Smiley says with a sigh..
That's not polemic; THIS is polemic, she says, citing Sen. Hiram Johnson, speaking of Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the L A Times in the 1890s:
------------------
"In the City of San Francisco, we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy; we have had vile officials; we have had rotten newspapers. But we have nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy.
He is one thing that California looks at when, in looking at Southern California, they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent--that is Harrison Gray Otis."
------------------
That’s more like it.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060903/cm_huffpost/028636
A University of New Hampshire psychology professor, William Woodward, has publicly theorized that the U.S. government orchestrated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Gov. John Lynch condemned the professor’s remarks as "completely crazy and offensive," and wants the universities do something about it. "Although academic freedom is important," he said, "if the professor is promoting that view, it reflects a reckless disregard for the true facts and raises questions as to why such a professor would be teaching at the university in the first place."
You can’t have anyone questioning the official lies, now can you?
So far, the university is standing behind Woodward.