Enemy Combatant
Monday, April 21, 2003
Those of us who still mourn the loss of Paul Wellstone could use a few laughs, nowadays. Thank you, Al Franken.
Sunday, April 20, 2003
Apr 20, 1:53 PM EDT
Religious Group Helps Lawmakers With Rent
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Six members of Congress live in a $1.1 million Capitol Hill town house that is subsidized by a secretive religious organization, tax records show.
The lawmakers, all Christians, pay low rent to live in the stately red brick, three-story house on C Street, two blocks from the Capitol. It is maintained by a group alternately known as the "Fellowship" and the "Foundation" and brings together world leaders and elected officials through religion.
The Fellowship hosts receptions, luncheons and prayer meetings on the first two floors of the house, which is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a church.
The six lawmakers - Reps. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn.; Bart Stupak, D-Mich.; Jim DeMint, R-S.C.; Mike Doyle, D-Pa.; and Sens. John Ensign, R-Nev. and Sam Brownback, R-Kan. - live in private rooms upstairs.
Rent is $600 a month, DeMint said.
{snip}
Oh, and one more thing. They've all been neutered, and they all just bought identical Nikes.
Nothing further to investigate here!
Thursday, April 17, 2003
Great letter in yesterday's Juneau Empire:
On to Damascus
To all those whiners and complainers who've been wringing their hands about the destruction over the weekend of the National Museum and National Library of Iraq - hey, there's a war on, and bad stuff happens during a war. Sure, it was a war that didn't have to happen, but we won, so quit bellyaching. Yeah, you'd think that the most powerful military machine in the history of the world could have spared a couple of platoons of Marines to keep the local criminal element from burning and pillaging the irreplaceable heritage of Mesopotamian and Iraqi antiquity and you'd think that an administration that can manage to round up more than enough federal employees to search every last airline passenger in every airport across the country, right down to their skivvies, could manage a little bit of security, even for a bunch of broken statues and crumbly old cuneiform tablets, but that's the "old American" way of thinking.
Sure, the French and their sympathizers will denounce the destruction of this museum as an act of cultural, artistic and even spiritual vandalism, but what do you expect from a nation that spends more on the arts than on smart bombs? Anyway, they're practically socialists, which is pretty close to communist, and communists are against private property, and museums and libraries are public property, which means they must be a waste of taxpayer money, if not downright subversive! The common good is so "old Europe."
What everyone has to realize is the museum wasn't looted, it was privatized. Priceless Iraqi antiquities, which until now were merely safeguarded for future generations of Iraqis, are now free to be purchased by the entrepreneurs and job creators who have the cash and the acquisitiveness to truly appreciate them where they belong, in the good old US of A.
Its too bad about that library in Baghdad, but it's probably on line somewhere and history is irrelevant anyway, 'cause let's face it, you're either with us or against us, and if you're against us, that makes you an evildoer. Besides, print is "old Europe" too.
Art historians, museum curators, and other shameless apologists for international terrorism are starting to compare last weekend's cultural catastrophe with the burning of the library at Alexandria. No way! That is just so not true! When the library at Alexandria got torched, only about 1,000 years of history and literature went up in smoke - at the Iraqi National Museum, 10,000 years worth of artifacts and art were smashed or stolen.
Welcome to the New America! And on to Damascus!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't these people know that every time you even think an "unpatriotic" thought, it makes Flagwaving Jeebus cry, and then he smites down one of our troopers in the field?
I mean, have they lost the power of rational thought?
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
In a BBC radio interview (transcript not yet posted), former (Bush I) Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger opines on the possibility of Operation Likudnik Wetdream spreading to Syria and Iran next:
Lawrence Eagleburger, laughing) I can only tell youÖ.maybe Iíll be made of fool of when I say this but I canít even imagine that and Iíve only recently heard somebody else say that this is a possibility. I just donít think that anybody who says that truly understands the American people. You saw the furor that went on in this country before the President got sufficient support to do this. Weíre just not built like that. Whether anybody is prepared to admit it or not, this is still a democracy and public opinion and the public still on these issues rules. If George Bush decided that he was going to turn the troops loose on Syria now, and Iran after that, he would last in office for about 15 minutes. Youíre talking to somebody who frankly wishes we could knock Syria around a bit because I think they have been absolutely outrageous for years in terms of their support for terrorism. But, because I happen to believe that, doesnít mean itís going to happen. If President Bush were to try it now, even I would feel that he ought be impeached. You canít get away with that sort of thing with this democracy. Itís ridiculous.
Obviously, Mr. Eagleburger has yet to "drink his Kool-Aid," like a good American. We'll see how long it is before he's forced to eat those words like a good Bushbot (which, for a GOP member, usually just means granting another interview to claim you were "misquoted" or that your words were "taken out of context"). In the wake of this administration, the ground is littered with the remains of eaten hats.
Of course, Mr. Eagleburger may prove to be one of those increasingly rare species, the Principled Republican, and refuse to backtrack from his statements. If this happens, watch for the Keystone Crips in and out of the Bush administration to savage him in true thug fashion, beginning with snarky comments about his obscenely-unpatriotic surname.
Friday, April 11, 2003
I read an article today in the Wall Street Journal (paper edition, of course; online they CHARGE for) entitled: "U.N. Rifts Could Block Iraq Oil":
Hussein may have vanished, but U.N. economic sanctions devised to contain him remain in force, creating a diplomatic tangle that could tie up plans to fund Iraq's reconstruction with its oil revenue.
So the UN might well put the kibosh on the backdoor-Bush-baksheesh . . .
Thursday, April 03, 2003
from Eschaton, a blog by Atrios (emphases mine). For those rightwingers who have the collective memory of a fruitfly when it comes to "anti-war" talk:
Last Refuge of Scoundrels
From the Baltimore City Paper.
excerpt:
So here's a few questions. When the Clinton administration sent troops to quell the ethnic cleaning in Kosovo, we can presume Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) was giving "aid and comfort" to mass-murdering tyrant Slobodan Milosevic when he said, "The administration's campaign has been a disaster. . . . [It] escalated a guerrilla warfare into a real war, and the real losers are the Kosovars and innocent civilians." What a traitor to America.
When then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said of the intervention that "Clinton's bombing campaign has caused all of these problems to explode," we can presume that his criticism of the president's foreign policy provided clear and forthright evidence that DeLay hates America.
You see, "freedom" is funny like that. Of course DeLay and Nickles were no more unpatriotic for denouncing administration policies while U.S. troops were in the field back in 1999 any more than [singer Natalie] Maines or [Sen. Tom] Daschle are today.
There's no shortage of it, and it's not new to this period of conflict, either. Recall White House spokesman Ari Fleischer's veiled warning after colossal boob Bill Maher remarked on the cowardice of U.S. fighter pilots--that Americans need to "watch what they say."
And remember when critics asked Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett exactly what information the government had prior to Sept. 11, 2001. Bartlett said that asking pointed questions like those "are exactly what our opponents, our enemies, want us to do."
Last September, then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) posed the ludicrous question, "Who is the enemy here? The president of the United States or Saddam Hussein?"
The simpleminded, the Know-Nothings, the John Birch-style ¸ber-patriots like to create a "slippery slope"--a classic logical fallacy--to support their contention that the president equals the troops, which equals the flag, which equals the Constitution, which equals freedom. There's no daylight, no wiggle room, between any of them--as long as it's their guy in power.
There was no shortage of criticism of Bill Clinton during his presidency, and it hasn't abated since he left. The far Right has tried to draw a metaphor from an act of consensual sex to everything from fiscal policy to the refrain that the Clinton administration somehow bankrupted the U.S. military. Funny how this criticism never was seen as treasonous. I suppose it's all depends on whose ox is gored.
When a government seeks to paint any opposition as unpatriotic and any dissent as treason, when it uses its allies in industry and the media to hound skeptics and blacklist celebrities, when it attempts to paint legitimate questions of policy as either a vote for America or a vote for dictatorship, that's not freedom any more.
That's fascism. Smart people know the difference.
-Atrios, 8:45 PM
