Author: Trish

Rumsfeld Chortles Over Lack of Intelligence, Utter Cluelessness about bin Laden

Trish

Absolutely astounding. Dumbfounding. Just too much for words.

The recent comments by Secretary of Defense Donald Dimwit Rumsfeld about Osama bin Forgotten defy credulity.

The war we’re in has so little to do with this guy that we can’t even be roused to find out if the so-called target has passed away from natural causes while waiting on us to get it together enough to find him

“I think it is interesting that we haven’t heard from him for close to a year,” Rumsfeld told reporters en route to Islamabad.

“I don’t know what it means, but I suspect in any event if he is alive and functioning that he is spending a major fraction of his time trying to avoid being caught,” Rumsfeld said.

So Donnie just finds it “interesting” that bin Laden hasn’t bombed us lately. And he doesn’t know if bin Laden is dead or alive. Doesn’t sound like he cares too much, either. Is it me, or is this guy just begging for something really bad to happen?

Wait, it gets worse.

Rumsfeld’s comments echoed earlier assessments by the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Ryan Crocker, but contradicted the assertion of al Qaeda’s deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahri in a video interview earlier this month that bin Laden’s battle against the West was only just beginning.

Said Rumsfeld, “We just don’t know.”

That’s a big “Duh!” there, good buddy. We don’t know squat and you’re making it sound like you have as much control over that as the weather; like you’re not the frickin’ defense secretary and the war we’re in has so little to do with this guy that we can’t even be roused to find out if the so-called target has passed away from natural causes while waiting on us to get it together enough to find him.

The Precarious Iraq Domino Theory

Trish

Good job of staying on message by Dewayne Wickham in USA Today. Wickham reminds us of last year, when Bush told Matt Lauer that the war on terror couldn’t be won, that we can only “create conditions so that … those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world, let’s put it that way.” He worries that Bush has now morphed into thinking that we can win after all, if we win in Iraq.

It sounds as though he thinks the war on terror will end when the U.S. declares victory in Iraq

…it wasn’t the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his ilk that sparked the war in Iraq. It was the Bush administration’s desire to settle old scores with Saddam. And it’s an illusion because it masks the president’s failure to pursue the man who ordered the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on this country as aggressively as he does the fight in Iraq.

Think about it.

When was the last time you heard Bush speak more than fleetingly about other fronts in the broader war? Virtually all of the troops and resources devoted to the war on terror have been sent to Iraq. If you listen closely to what Bush has been saying recently as he has stumped the country trying to reignite support for the war in Iraq, it sounds as though he thinks the war on terror will end when the U.S. declares victory in Iraq.

“These terrorists view the world as a giant battlefield — and they seek to attack us wherever they can. This has attracted al-Qaeda to Iraq, where they are attempting to frighten and intimidate America into a policy of retreat,” the president said Sunday night in an Oval Office address to the nation.

That’s the new “domino theory.” It’s born of the Bush administration’s warped war policies — a jingoism that used the war on terror as an excuse to topple Saddam’s brutal regime. Unlike the broader war on terror that Bush once said we couldn’t win, the president is certain we will prevail in Iraq.

I worry that he is obsessing on the wrong fight.

Works For Me

Trish

You know… Bush doesn’t feel like obeying the government’s laws… neither do I. He is the crux of government power yet doesn’t want to follow the government’s laws, why should I, one who has had no say or motion regarding their establishment, feel compelled to do anything but reciprocate?

I’d consider myself lucky not to enjoy excessively destructive behavior because in my mind, life is nothing but anarchy. I shall no longer let the legal skeleton that beauacracy supposedly creates confine me. I will do what pleases me most at any given moment, and fight whatever force tries to punish me, to death if need be.

– Comment from alert PR reader Matt

Deal With It: Xmas Has Been Around Longer than You

Trish

Before anyone writes PR in outrage over Buck’s use of the phrase “Xmas,” read what one Florida historian says about how much “Christ” has historically been in Christmas.

Dr. Susan Parker of St. Augustine (aka, the nation’s oldest city) said the recent controversy is not only just that – recent – but didn’t exist for people with their hearts in the right place.

People writing letters and reports written centuries ago in Spanish colonial St. Augustine as well as many other parts of the world used the “X” substitute all the time.

Documents conserved in Spain, Cuba, Mexico and the United States reveal this practice.

It was just one more abbreviation in a time when almost everything was hand written. Fingers wearied as the pages of writing piled up and any way to shorten the task was welcome. Certainly the Franciscan friars, writing in their small rooms…did not think of using the X as taking Christ out of the word.

That would have been unthinkable. Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, the missionary friars shortened the Spanish word “Cristianos” as they wrote about the “indios Xianos” (Christian Indians) in Florida.

The X showed up also in the name Cristobal (Spanish for Christopher), too. We do not know if someone of that name felt slighted when it appeared as Xobal (that is, if Xobal could read).

Taking the Christ out of the word for Christmas was no concern, for the Spanish word for the holy day is “Navidad.”

So happy holidays and merry Xmas. Yeah, I said it.

Iraqi Democracy Sullied by Bush

Trish

Having George W. Bush explain democracy to the Iraqis is a lot like a man writing a book about pregnancy, which has itself been equated to taking your car to a mechanic who doesn’t drive. In each case, basic facts and concepts are not in dispute. What is lost, however, is a deeper understanding of the spirit of the thing, a knowledge that the costs along the way make reaching the final goal even sweeter.

What we have here are not the wrong students, we have the wrong teacher.

For George Bush, democracy requires no sacrifices, no trade-offs.

True democracy requires leaders who refrain from tyranny, but Bush has given himself a free pass. True democracy requires a marketplace of ideas, but the only members of the public Bush meets have been screened and validated to agree with him. True democracy requires the consent of the governed but Bush neither asks our permission nor heeds our protests.

If I were an Iraqi and was taking my view of democracy from what I’ve seen so far, I would think that in a democracy, the government uses propaganda to lie about the news and distort public opinion. I would think elections are rigged so that the right people can vote and the right people can win office. I would think torture is used on the state’s enemies. I would think democracy is exactly the same as dictatorship. And for George Bush, it probably is.

What we have here are not the wrong students, we have the wrong teacher. George Bush can no more be the instrument for spreading democracy than a cat can spread understanding of fish – and all the cat knows about fish is how to get fat off them.

Ralph Reed: Poster Boy for the Abramoff Effect

Trish

Surprisingly good commentary from the MSM on Ralph Reed’s troubled run for the Number Two spot in Georgia next year. CBS:

Reed is an example of what Jack Abramoff will mean to the GOP next year

For Reed, this run for lieutenant governor is part of an assault on greatness: lieutenant governor in 2006, governor in 2010, and president after that. But Reed is an example of what Jack Abramoff will mean to the GOP next year. Reed was an integral part of the Abramoff gambling swindle in Texas in 2002, in which the former super lobbyist worked both sides of the gambling debate, working for one client to get a casino shut down, with Reed’s help, then signing up the vanquished Indian tribe for more than $4 million to get the casino reopened, which he tried to do with the help of the now embattled Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio.

It is hard to measure but impossible to deny the damage that Abramoff has done to the GOP’s chance in 2006, and Reed may become the poster boy for the Abramoff Effect in the 2006 midterms. If Republicans can’t pull off the political reversal they need in the wake of Iraq and Katrina and get rid of the scandal cloud over the Congress, the 2006 elections may go down in history as the end of the GOP revolution of 1994, a 12-year period during which they not only ran the government, but developed a pugnacious, unsentimental way of doing business and an overconfidence that Democrats still have not figured out how to match. And in a lot of ways, Reed and Abramoff were archetypes of the times, and weaved into the collapse of their personal and political fortunes, is the demise of a political movement.

From CBS’s lips to God’s ears.

Nobody Said Democrats Were Funny

Trish

Florida Democrats proved they should cling desperately to their day jobs during the recent state convention, held in Disney Central, aka Orlando. Lakeland Ledger:

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama: “I feel like Katherine Harris. I can’t count all the Democrats.”
"We ran into the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. You know: Goofy! "Then I ran into Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff: Pinocchio! "And even Cruella De Vil, whom I ran into when I was checking in, remarked to me that even she couldn't vote for Katherine Harris." Howard Dean didn't scream, but he did mock President Bush's efforts to boot undocumented aliens from the country. "I say, if the president can't find a 6-foot-4 Saudi [Osama Bin Laden], he's not going to find" -- we presume he was going to say "undocumented aliens," but he was drowned out by applause. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama was the main speaker and won the audience over with this opening line as he praised the large conference room filled with party loyalists: "I feel like Katherine Harris. I can't count all the Democrats."

Congress Has No One But Itself to Blame for Coronation of King George

Trish

As lawmakers and Sunday show pundits finally began to notice that Pres. Don’t Bother Me With the Constitution is out of control vis a vis domestic spying, there is proof that it’s not all in our minds. A.P. interviewed Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, who admitted Congress has abdicated its Founding Father-envisioned role of checking and balancing the other two branches.

The panel issued 1,052 subpoenas to probe alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party between 1997 and 2002 [which] cost more than $35 million. By contrast, the committee under Davis has issued three subpoenas to the Bush administration

“Republican Congresses tend to overinvestigate Democratic administrations and underinvestigate their own,” said Davis, who added that he has tried to pick up some of the slack with his committee. “I get concerned we lose our separation of powers when one party controls both branches.”

Democrats on the committee said the panel issued 1,052 subpoenas to probe alleged misconduct by the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party between 1997 and 2002. The Democratic analysis found that those congressional probes cost more than $35 million. By contrast, the committee under Davis has issued three subpoenas to the Bush administration, two to the Energy Department over nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain, and one last week to the Defense Department over Hurricane Katrina documents…

“I do not think you can argue today that Congress is a coequal branch of government; it is not,” said Lee Hamilton, president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman and vice chairman of the Sept. 11 commission…

A partial list of egregious, no-brainer starting points for investigations includes:

…14 areas where the GOP majority has “failed to investigate” the administration, including: the role of senior officials in the abuse of detainees; the leaking of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame; the role of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office in the awarding of contracts to Cheney’s former employer, Halliburton; the White House’s withholding from Congress the cost of a Medicare prescription drug plan; the administration’s relationship with Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi; and the influence of corporate interests on energy policy, environmental regulation and tobacco policy.

Meanwhile, the House ethics committee has not opened a new case or launched an investigation in the past 12 months, despite an array of outside investigations involving, among others, [California Rep. Duke] Cunningham and Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Go Senate! Go Democrats! Go Us!

Trish

The U.S. Senate, led by its Democratic members and dragging a few brave Republicans, has voted not to reauthorize portions of the Patriot Act. A.P.:

Frist, R-Tenn., changed his vote at the last moment after seeing the critics would win.

Five Republicans voted against the reauthorization: Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, John Sununu of New Hampshire, Craig and Frist. Two Democrats voted to extend the provisions: Sens. Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Who? Bill Frist?

Frist, R-Tenn., changed his vote at the last moment after seeing the critics would win. He decided to vote with the prevailing side so he could call for a new vote at any time. He immediately objected to an offer of a short term extension from Democrats, saying the House won’t approve it and the president won’t sign it.

Of course, Republicans are already figuring out how to gain political advantage from the defeat.

If the Patriot Act provisions expire, Republicans say they will place the blame on Democrats in next year’s midterm elections. “In the war on terror, we cannot afford to be without these vital tools for a single moment,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. “The time for Democrats to stop standing in the way has come.”

Standing in the way? Hey Scottie, I’m an American and I can stand wherever I want. And for a little while longer, it looks like you’re stuck with that.