WTF Is It Now?!?

The Unelected Idiot: 'Warmonger-in-Chief":

In a speech at the Inter-American Development Bank on Thursday, March 14, Crusader Bunnypants said that the United States has a "calling" to "wage war...to keep the world safe from terror," according to the Washington Post.

It is difficult to gauge what makes me more nauseous: the statement itself, or the fact no one has challenged the ludicrousness of the statement in the more than two weeks since it was made.

The United States has actually done precious little to keep the world safe from terror, but we have followed our "calling" to wage war, so Mr. Bush has accomplished that part.

In actuality, we have conducted less than stellar campaigns in Afghanistan; we have failed to locate and capture the man we blame for the September 11th attacks; the only person we have indicted for the September 11th tragedy was in jail at the time the attacks occurred; and there are signals that the White House wants to unilaterally engage Saddam Hussein on the basis that he is part of Mr. Bush's nefarious "Axis of Evil."

- - YellowTimes.org


'Playing politics with talk about war plans' - more tales of repuke hypocrisy, what a surprise:

Just imagine that Representative Lindsay Graham were one of those dangerous liberals.

Just imagine the hue and cry if one of them had told the Iraqi dictator when the US-led armies were coming and dressed his revelation in the clothing of solid intelligence information. Imagine how that hue and cry would have been magnified by the war-engulfed press and embellished with calls for investigations and more.

Graham, however, is a conservative. What is more, he is running to become the next Republican senator from South Carolina to succeed Strom Thurmond. And President Bush needs very badly for Graham to win. That, apparently, is enough to trigger a flagrant double standard in politics this year: If you merely want to have a national discussion about which countries we will be going to war with in the next several months you are giving (as Tom DeLay puts it) aid and comfort to the enemy if your partisan credentials are not in order. On the other hand, if you have your party card, feel free to have all the political fun with Iraq or the war on international terrorism you wish if it might help your campaign.

What Graham - who is mostly known as one of the people who thought impeaching President Clinton was worth a half-year or so of government paralysis - did last week was at least entertaining in its flagrancy and certainly illustrative of the double standard.

For now, however, there has been a good object lesson in the use of war for pure politics and in the public misbehavior of a congressman who has demonstrated how easy it is to be irresponsible.

- - Tom Oliphant at The Boston Globe


'Energy files show gusher of payoffs' - Arbusto admin lied about energy policy - what a surprise....:

File the first Criminal Crawford administration energy policy documents under "Suspicions Confirmed" -- if the file cabinet is big enough.

The 11,000 pages of text and blank space from the Energy Department show how biased the policy-making was. An order to describe "the effects of certain regulatory actions" went from the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry lobbying group, to Executive Order 13211, which the Toxic Tinhorn signed with hardly any words having been changed. That's just one example the Natural Resources Defense Council turned up in a first look at the 11,000 pages.

- - Read the whole thing at The Palm Beach Post