Month: March 2006

North Korea Touts First-Strike Capability
SEOUL, South Korea – North Korea suggested Tuesday it had the ability to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States, according to the North’s official news agency. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the North had built atomic weapons to counter the U.S. nuclear threat. President George Bush said in an official statement,” “Bring it on, Kimchee boy!”

Iran Leader OKs Talks With U.S. on Iraq
TEHRAN, Iran – Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Tuesday that he approves of talks between U.S. and Iranian officials on Iraq, but warned that the United States must not try to “bully” Iran. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice agreed to the extraordinary conditions, but observers said she had her fingers crossed when she said it.

‘We’re Not Disposable,’ French Youths Say
PARIS – When student demonstrators in France wear trash bags to protests, their message is: “We’re not disposable.” They’re angry about a new government job plan that will allow employers to fire them more easily. Shouting “Au contraire!” gendarmes grabbed the protesters and, in a largely symbolic gesture, tossed them into large bins labeled “Le Dumpster.”

Documents Show Saddam’s WMD Frustrations
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Exasperated, besieged by global pressure, Saddam Hussein and top aides searched for ways in the 1990s to prove to the world they’d given up banned weapons. “We don’t have anything hidden!” the frustrated Iraqi president interjected at one meeting, transcripts show. We wonder where these transcripts were three years ago ….

At his news conference today, President Bush took a question from Helen Thomas for the first time in four years. Helen, who is in her 80s, has been a critic of President Bush, so naturally he is terrified of her.

Helen has made it well-known what question she intended to ask Mr. Bush: Why did we go to war in Iraq?

His answer: You wanna know about Iraq? Let me tell you about Afghanistan. The president launched into the reasons we went to war against the Taliban, which gave him an excuse to connect the dots to Al Qaeda, and September 11 — and then he went a dot too far and connected September 11 to Saddam.

There you have it: We went into Iraq because of 9/11. The remedy for 9/11 was to get rid of Saddam. Yesterday, the president said he had always been “very careful never to say that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks on America.”

When you read the president’s verbatim answer below, you’ll see that his statement makes no sense. This is intentional. It is a prima facie example of “mirroring,” a term I learned today which describes the linguistic hat trick that Mr. Bush and his team use to create their patented brand of truthiness.

According to BuzzFlash, mirroring is a way of obliquely phrasing an untrue statement so that a) listeners draw the intended false conclusion and b) the phrasing cannot be deconstructed to show that the statement was untrue.

Here is the master mirror man at work:

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Smells like low tide: As the idiot-fest that is the Bish presidency continues to blunder along (see yesterday’s abysmal face-to-face with citizens and today’s abysmal performance before the WH yes corps), some observers are beginning to see parallels with the situation in 1994, when the GOP junta took over.

National Journal’s Charlie Cook has done an analysis of poll results 12 years ago versus today, and finds the Republicans in much the same boat as the Dems were back then when they got swamped by the tidal wave of change the nation thought it wanted.

Cook says the “micro” approach to analysis, which looks at race by race, favors the Repugs, but the “macro” approoach to forcasting, which looks at all races in light of the national political environment, “suggests that the GOP could get swamped by a tidal wave. By almost every relevant measurement, national polls indicate that Republicans are at least as bad off as Democrats were at this point in 1994, before suffering devastating mid-term losses,” writes Cook.

Here is some of his evidence, edited for brevity:

Heading into the spring of 1994, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 33 percent of Americans thought the country was headed in the right direction and 47 percent said it was on the wrong track, a 14-point advantage for pessimism. A new NBC/Journal poll, taken March 10-13, shows 26 percent “right direction” to 62 percent “wrong track,” a 36-point edge for pessimism.

At this stage of 1994, President Clinton’s job rating was 55 percent approval, 36 percent disapproval. In contrast, President Bush enjoyed only 37 percent approval — and 58 percent disapproval — in the latest NBC/ Journal poll. The March 10-12 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll pegged Bush’s approval at 36 percent, with 60 percent disapproval.

In mid-March 1994, Clinton’s approval was at 50 percent and disapproval at 41 percent. In the final poll before the ’94 election, Clinton’s approval and disapproval scores were tied at 46 percent — 10 points more positive than Bush’s current standing.

Twelve years ago, Congress’s approval rating was just 31 percent, compared with 58 percent disapproval. The most recent survey found 33 percent approval and 53 percent disapproval.

Incumbents are slightly more popular as a group than they were a dozen years ago. Then, 35 percent of voters were inclined to re-elect their House member; 47 percent preferred someone new. Now, re-election is the choice of 41 percent, while 48 percent want a new face.
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Published today under the sick-making headline, “A ‘Third Term’ for Bush,” Fred Barnes has drafted a plan to help Dear Leader salvage his presidency by re-arranging the same set of incompetents who ran up the deficit; okayed torture, spying and black bag jobs; bungled Iraq and Katrina:

• Condi Rice becomes vice president; Cheney retires or…
• Cheney moves to secretary of defense; Rumsfeld is out
• Sen. Joe Lieberman replaces Rice as secretary of state
• Glenn Hubbard to Treasury, John Snow out
• Dan Senor or Dan Bartlett to replace Scott McClellan as White House spokesman
• Economic adviser Al Hubbard to replace Andy Card as chief of staff
• Replace national security adviser Stephen Hadley with U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad
• Move Karl Rove to chairman of the Republican National Committee; move current chair Ken Mehlman to head of White House communications

This would be funny if the situation weren’t so dire. As a partisan, I hope the president either does nothing or takes Fred Barnes’ advice. Both courses would lead the GOP to doom and damnation.

But we have a leadership team at the White House that has a record of dereliction of duty and criminal negligence for which no one has taken responsibility or suffered consequences. The re-shuffling Barnes recommends would result in more of the same and worse.

NSA Is Being Sued for Alleged Illegal Surveillance

US News says President Bush’s authorization of warrantless domestic spying went beyond wiretapping to include physical searches of businesses and residences inside the United States — an apparent violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable” searches and seizures by the government.

The decision to authorize so-called “black bag jobs” was made by President Bush’s lawyers in the months after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks — at the same time the president authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to wiretap phones of American citizens without obtaining warrants.

An attorney in Oregon told the magazine that he believes someone, probably the FBI, has conducted multiple warrantless searches of his law offices and possibly his home:

At least one defense attorney representing a subject of a terrorism investigation believes he was the target of warrantless clandestine searches. On Sept. 23, 2005–nearly three months before the Times broke the NSA story–Thomas Nelson wrote to U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut in Oregon that in the previous nine months, “I and others have seen strong indications that my office and my home have been the target of clandestine searches.” In an interview, Nelson said he believes that the searches resulted from the fact that FBI agents accidentally gave his client classified documents and were trying to retrieve them…. Nelson’s wife and son, meanwhile, repeatedly called their home security company asking why their alarm system seemed to keep malfunctioning. The company could find no fault with the system.

Nelson said the classified documents appear to show that his client was the subject of warrantless eavesdropping by the NSA. He filed a lawsuit against the NSA on March 2 in Portland:

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In an editorial up this morning headlined,”BuzzFlash Now Officially Declares Bushevism a Cult,” the editors of one of the most widely read liberal websites write:

Let’s face it, there are only three segments left to the much-vaunted GOP Base: the corporate profiteers who wouldn’t care if Satan was president, as long as they got their pockets lined with taxpayer funded no-bid contracts; the Stepford Evangelicals; and the Bush cultists…

After all, what is a cult? It’s a movement that is comprised of people who believe in a leader contrary to reality and the harm that the person does them.

That sounds like people who support Bush alright, except for the corporate profiteers (who will always be hanging around for the money, no matter who is in power.)

Last December, I had the same thought. It came to me while watching a glassy-eyed Ken Mehlman, the closeted gay chairman of the Republican Party, reciting GOP talking points on television. He reminded me of glassy-eyed defenders of the Unification Church back in the day when they were called “Moonies” — before they began publishing the rightwing Washington Times newspaper.

In Is Bush Worship a Cult, I posted a list of the traits that experts use to define a cult. Here it is again:

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