BottleOfBlog

Charles Pierce Commenting On What The Rest Of The "Liberal" Media Pretended They Didn't See

You’re the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES – Excuse the shouting -- and you have to follow a script written down by the unelected hacks in the West Wing because, without it, somebody might ask you a question beyond the scope of the 15 or 20 cliches you brought into the room?  To embroider a line from a truly great Texan, Dan Jenkins, if he had a brain, he’d be on the South Lawn playing with it.  I no longer care whether or not he’s dumber than a bag of hammers, or whether he’s uneducated or uncurious, or whether he’s simple and plain or arrogant and foolish.  What is plain is that he’s not up to this job.

Bush Faking WMDs In Iraq

BASRA -– Fifty days after the first reports that the U.S. forces were unloading weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in southern Iraq, new reports about the movement of these weapons have been disclosed.

Given the recent scandals to the effect that the U.S. president was privy to the 9/11 plot, they might try to immediately announce the discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to overshadow the scandals and prevent a further decline of Bush’s public opinion rating as the election approaches.

Sources in Iraq speculate that occupation forces are using the recent unrest in Iraq to divert attention from their surreptitious shipments of WMD into the country.

An Iraqi source close to the Basra Governor’s Office told the MNA that new information shows that a large part of the WMD, which was secretly brought to southern and western Iraq over the past month, are in containers falsely labeled as containers of the Maeresk shipping company and some consignments bearing the labels of organizations such as the Red Cross or the USAID in order to disguise them as relief shipments.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that Iraqi officials including forces loyal to the Iraqi Governing Council stationed in southern Iraq have been forbidden from inspecting or supervising the transportation of these consignments. He went on to say that the occupation forces have ordered Iraqi officials to forward any questions on the issue to the coalition forces. Even the officials of the international relief organizations have informed the Iraqi officials that they would only accept responsibility for relief shipments which have been registered and managed by their organizations.

The Iraqi source also confirmed the report about suspicious trucks with fake Saudi and Jordanian license plates entering Iraq at night last week, stressing that the Saudi and Jordanian border guards did not attempt to inspect the trucks but simply delivered them to the U.S. and British forces stationed on Iraq’s borders.

My only question is: what took these crooks so long?

While He's Never Read It, Bush Believes Patriot Act Necessary, At Least That's What He's Been Told

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush (news - web sites) on Saturday urged the U.S. Congress to renew the Patriot Act, the post-Sept. 11, 2001 law that beefs up law enforcement powers, as he sought to highlight his national security credentials.

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But the president accused those who would allow the law to lapse of having "willful blindness" to the terrorist threat.

And if anyone knows about having a "willful blindness" to terrorism, it's George W. Bush.

Cheney Accuses Kerry Of Agreeing With Position Bush Lied About

PITTSBURGH (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) used a speech to the National Rifle Association on Saturday to paint Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) as a firearm industry foe bent on over-regulating gun makers and owners.  

Playing to conservative voters, Cheney appeared in the election battlefield state of Pennsylvania to pledge the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign's support for gun ownership.

"John Kerry's approach to the Second Amendment has been to regulate, regulate and regulate some more" Cheney said in a salvo aimed at the Democratic senator running against President Bush (news - web sites) in the November election.

Kerry's campaign fired back by accusing Bush of ignoring a campaign promise to renew a federal ban on assault weapons passed by Congress in l994.

Bush has said he would sign renewal legislation, which is stalled in Congress. The ban expires in September.

Scrapping the ban is a top priority for the politically powerful gun lobby, but Cheney did not mention it in his speech.

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Kerry, a decorated Vietnam war veteran, offers his former military service and lifelong hunting hobby as proof that he supports gun ownership.

Big words from a guy who never fired a shot in anger. Course, Dick had "other priorities" back when he could have owned an assault weapon courtesy of the United States army.

Colombine Victims No Longer Useful To GOP

PITTSBURGH - A man whose son was killed in the Columbine High School shootings literally walked in his child's shoes to the National Rifle Association convention, where he hoped Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) would address the federal assault weapons ban set to expire in September.

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However, there was no indication Saturday afternoon that Cheney would address the matter. He was expected to reaffirm President Bush (news - web sites)'s position that the Second Amendment protects individual gun ownership and tout statistics that federal prosecutions of gun-related crimes have risen significantly under Bush's presidency.

The dead children of Colombine were useful in attacking video games, violence on television and movies, Godlessness and anti-social behavior like wearing trenchcoats, but when they start talking about assault weapons, well, the less heard from their families the better.

Bush Neglected Afghanistan, Lied To American People

WASHINGTON - Following an important meeting on Iraq (news - web sites) war planning in late 2001, President Bush (news - web sites) told the public that the discussions were about Afghanistan (news - web sites). He made no mention afterward about Iraq even though that was the real focus of the session at his ranch.

"I'm right now focused on the military operations in Afghanistan," Bush told reporters after talks on Dec. 28, 2001, with top aides and generals. A "war update" was the White House description of the news conference Bush held with Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of U.S. Central Command.

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According to Woodward's book, Franks gave participants in that meeting the first briefing on Iraq war plans. He described options that could allow a war to start with as few as 105,000 U.S. troops, assuming full foreign cooperation with the force growing 230,000 over 60 to 90 days.

The books says Franks presented a list of assumptions that were behind the plan. They included that Iraq would be the main effort of the United States and would get priority on resources, and that the Afghan operation and the global fight against terrorism would provide a noise level under which Iraq operations could proceed. But these efforts would not diminish the Afghan or terrorism efforts.

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The book says Franks uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon (news - web sites) told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.

Dumb, Disinterested, and Dangerous

Bush, in fact, does not read his President's Daily Briefs, but has them orally summarised every morning by the CIA director, George Tenet. President Clinton, by contrast, read them closely and alone, preventing any aides from interpreting what he wanted to know first-hand. He extensively marked up his PDBs, demanding action on this or that, which is almost certainly the likely reason the Bush administration withheld his memoranda from the 9/11 commission.

"I know he doesn't read," one former Bush national security council staffer told me. Several other former NSC staffers corroborated this. It seems highly unlikely that he read the national intelligence estimate on WMD before the Iraq war that consigned contrary evidence and caveats that undermined the case to footnotes and fine print. Nor is there any evidence that he read the state department's 17-volume report, The Future of Iraq, warning of nearly all the postwar pitfalls, that was shelved by the neocons in the Pentagon and Vice-President Cheney's office.

Nor was Bush aware of similar warnings urgently being sounded by the military's top strategic analysts. One monograph, Reconstructing Iraq, by the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, predicted in detail "possible severe security difficulties" and conflicts among Iraqis that US forces "can barely comprehend". I have learned that it was suppressed by the Pentagon neocons, and only released to US central command after Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the foreign relations committee, directly intervened. A revolt within the military against Bush is brewing. Many in the military's strategic echelon share the same feelings of being ignored and ill-treated by the administration that senior intelligence officers voice in private. "The Pentagon began with fantasy assumptions on Iraq and worked back," one of them remarked to me.

Pale, Nasty, Repulsive Blob Hero To Republican Party, Aware Of Election Fraud

WASHINGTON - President Bush (news - web sites)'s top political adviser said this week he regretted the use of a "Mission Accomplished" banner as a backdrop for the president's landing on an aircraft carrier last May to mark the end of major combat operations in Iraq (news - web sites).

"I wish the banner was not up there," said White House political strategist Karl Rove. "I'll acknowledge the fact that it has become one of those convenient symbols."

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"I don't mean that it's going to be close," Rove said. "What I mean is, it's going to be where everybody is going to be paying a lot of time and attention. I think we're going to win Ohio comfortably, but I do think that Democrats are going to contest it strongly."

Of course, Rove is comfortable about Ohio. These guys have engaged in election fraud before. They know how it's done. And this one is the easiest yet! It doesn't even require striking tens of thousands of Democrats from the voter rolls or counting overseas ballots that were postmarked days after the election was over. This one is a breeze:

COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.

It's Katherine Harris all over again. Ohio will be as close as they decide it needs to be.

War President Who Exerted Great Pressure On Congress And World To Go To War Not Anxious To Go To War

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush secretly ordered a war plan drawn up against Iraq less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan and was so worried the decision would cause a furor he did not tell everyone on his national security team, says a new book on his Iraq policy.

Bush feared that if news got out about the Iraq plan as U.S. forces were fighting another conflict, people would think he was too eager for war, journalist Bob Woodward writes in "Plan of Attack," a behind-the-scenes account of the 16 months leading to the Iraq invasion.

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"I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq," Bush is quoted as telling Woodward. "It was such a high-stakes moment and ... it would look like that I was anxious to go to war. And I'm not anxious to go to war."

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Woodward says Bush pulled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld aside November 21, 2001 -- when U.S. forces and allies were in control of about half of Afghanistan -- and asked him what kind of war plan he had on Iraq. When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Bush told him to get started on a fresh one.

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The Bush administration's drive toward war with Iraq raised an international furor anyway, alienating long-time allies who did not believe the White House had made a sufficient case against Saddam. Saddam was toppled a year ago and taken into custody last December. But the central figure of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, remains at large and a threat to the west.

The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.

September 11th Commission Naive, Unnecessary

Because I'm a masochist, I'm watching that stupid, fucking moron Rudi Bakhtiar on CNN Headline News, and unless I'm completely out of my mind, she just said, in a segment with some yutz from U.S. News and World Report, on whether Congress shares some blame for September 11th, "Well, people aren't naive enough to believe that September 11th could have been prevented..."

I swear to God she just said that.