Enemy Combatant
Monday, November 20, 2006
The Wizard Of Ozymandias Abroad
Apparently the lying sneaking cowardly little shit who occupies the White House is finding that his Emperor's-New-Clothes schtick is selling overseas even worse than it is domestically:
Asian leaders fail to back Bush's strategy to curb North Korea's nuclear ambitions
· President loses battle for united anti-nuclear stance
· Trip to Indonesia curtailed over security concerns
Suzanne Goldenberg in Hanoi
Monday November 20, 2006
The Guardian
President George Bush suffered his most visible diplomatic setback since his party's defeat in mid-term elections yesterday when Asian leaders failed to back Washington's call for robust action against North Korea.
Mr Bush, in Vietnam on his first foreign trip since the elections, had lobbied strenuously for a unified strategy aimed at getting Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions, meeting the Russian, Chinese, South Korean and Japanese leaders on the sidelines of the summit.
The rebuff - the second for Mr Bush this weekend on North Korea - underlined the president's diminished powers in the wake of his election defeat. So too did the muted response to Mr Bush's presence in Hanoi, a shadow of the tumultuous reception for President Clinton, when he visited Vietnam six years ago.
But that is far better than the hostile reception that awaits Mr Bush today when he flies in to Indonesia, where thousands of protesters were on the streets yesterday accusing the US of war crimes. Mr Bush is to spend just six hours in Indonesia after the secret service decided that it would be too dangerous for him to remain in the country overnight. Intelligence officials say there have been warnings of a militant attack during Mr Bush's visit.
We're fleeing them over there, so we don't have to flee them over here.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Bush is down to 33% approval in the latest Newsweek poll.
That's damn near Nixon-waving-from-the-helicopter numbers, folks!
Bush is down to 33% approval in the latest Newsweek poll.
That's damn near Nixon-waving-from-the-helicopter numbers, folks!
Monday, August 14, 2006
When you get to DC, please remember to visit the National Statuary Hall Collection, located in the Capitol Building.
And I see they've decided on Bush's statue for the collection:
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Wingnuts: Wrong From The Beginning
Before it disappears down the dark tubes of the internets, I wanted to bring to everyone's attention an excellent historical/analytical essay about the American Right Wing from Harper's magazine, entitled "Stabbed In The Back." (The essay is all the more timely given the latest news about the neocons' attempts to throw Condi Rice under the bus, over Bush's wall-to-wall trainwrecks in the area of foreign policy.)
What's particularly engrossing is the history of how the wingnuts have been wrong about every major policy issue for the last 75 years (and it doesn't even touch on civil rights)! But what saves the Right, time after time, is its enduring ability to forget entirely its past mistakes (even its past positions!), and blithely adopt new heroes and causes without breaking its stride.
Case in point: Harry Truman. The wingnuts of his day loathed the man, and did everything in their power (fortunately not much) to bring him down. Now, of course, they'd like to canonize him. His biggest sin, in their eyes at the time, was firing Gen. MacArthur in the midst of the Korean War. But does anyone remember what MacArthur had in mind as that war's "endgame?"What the general proposed was a massive escalation of the war. U.N. troops would not only "blockade the coast of China" and "destroy through naval gunfire and air bombardment China's industrial capacity to wage war" but would also "release existing restrictions upon the Formosan garrison" of Chiang Kai-shek, which might lead to counter-invasion against "vulnerable areas of the Chinese mainland." Above all, MacArthur urged that no fewer than thirty-four atomic bombs be dropped on what he characterized as "retardation targets" in Manchuria, including critical concentrations of troops and planes. Even this soon seemed insufficient. MacArthur later added that had he been permitted, he not only would have launched as many as fifty atomic bombs but also would have used "wagons, carts, trucks, and planes" to create "a belt of radioactive cobalt" that would neatly slice the Korean thumb from China. "For at least sixty years," he said, "there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north."Sound familiar?
