BottleOfBlog

And Here's What You Won!

BAGHDAD — It's a damning indication of how poorly things have gone for the United States during its five-year misadventure in Iraq that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can drive in broad daylight though this war-ravaged city and spend the night at the presidential palace, but George W. Bush can't._

Mr. Ahmadinejad was greeted with lavish ceremony yesterday as he became the first Iranian President to visit Baghdad, a trip some said reflected Iran's great and growing power in Iraq and how severely the U.S. effort to remake Iraq into a Western-friendly democracy has gone awry._

Nearly 4,000 American soldiers have died since the war began in 2003, but Iraq's U.S.-backed government warmly welcomed Washington's No. 1 enemy with flowers and a band.

Apparently ignoring repeated U.S. charges that Iran is destabilizing his country, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani smiled broadly as he greeted Mr. Ahmadinejad outside his palace. Hailing a new era in ties between their states, the two men clasped hands and exchanged traditional kisses on the cheeks before walking together down a red carpet to review an honour guard as a military band played the two national anthems.

Despite the presence of 157,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, the visit left the impression that Iran's President now feels more comfortable in Baghdad than his U.S. counterpart does.

Unlike Mr. Bush's cloak-and-dagger visits here — fly-in trips to heavily guarded U.S. military bases that only last a few hours, often with no advance notice given to even the Iraqi government — Mr. Ahmadinejad's schedule was announced days earlier…

Joost Hiltermann, a regional analyst with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, noted that the groups now in power in Iraq, including key Shia and Kurdish political factions, are some of same groups that allied themselves with Tehran during the conflict while the United States was supporting Mr. Hussein. Many Iraqi Shia leaders lived in Iran during the war, while Mr. Talabani, a Sunni Kurd, speaks fluent Farsi.

"There was always a contradiction in American policy in Iraq," he said. "If you want to turn Iraq into a democracy, you're going to bring Iran's friends to power.

"If people in Washington are surprised [at the reception for Mr. Ahmadinejad] it's because they didn't understand what they were getting into."

Whether we can "win" or not, whether the "surge" is "working" or not, what will happen if we "lose"--these are all imbecilic questions.

They always have been.

The only important question, the only important consideration since this fiasco started five years ago has always been: what can we "win"?

What will "winning" look like?

And will "winning" be worth the cost?

Three trillion of your dollars. Four thousand dead American sons and daughters, and fathers and mothers. Over twenty thousand seriously wounded American soldiers.

And what did all that "win" you?

A mid-eastern country where the President of the United States can only fly in and out of in the dead of night, while the very nearly insane President of Iran gets greeted with flowers and marching bands.

Playing the Iranian national anthem.

And you paid for it.

And you'll pay for it for the rest of your lives.

And still, through dozens of Democratic and Republican debates, after millions of words in magazines and newspapers and on the Tee Vee, not one single "mainstream" journalist is asking the only question that ever should have been asked about this stupid, expensive, catastrophic, illegal war:

Just what exactly can we hope to "win"?

Liberal Media Wonders Whatever Happened To The Man Who Wasn't There

…Edwards' boundless optimism and energy has his limits, and today he admitted what all the pundits and politicos have been saying for the past month: the Democratic contest is a two-person race, and Edwards is not one of them…

Yes, it is difficult to understand why, as Time Magazine wonders, John Edwards message never caught on with people when all the pundits and all the politicos have been saying for the past month that Edwards isn't even part of the Democratic primary.

When people turn on their TV sets, or open up a magazine or newspaper, or read the news on Al Gore's internets, and all the pundits and all the politicos therein tell them that there are basically two candidates for the Democratic nomination--Obama and Clinton--it sure is a big mystery why a third candidate, John Edwards, somehow couldn't appeal to more people.

Edwards' challenge from the beginning of his presidential quest was to stay relevant…

Yes, Edwards' big challenge was to stay relevant. But what Time Magazine doesn't tell you is that Edwards' big challenge was not to stay relevant to actual voters. No, Edwards' challenge was to stay relevant to Time Magazine.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its latest campaign coverage index for January 6-11, a study that does its damndest to try to quantify which political figures are sucking up the most media oxygen and why.

It found that Edwards only got 7% of political coverage during those days -- less than one-fifth of what Hillary earned, and less than one-forth of that accorded to Obama. Edwards even got less attention than Mike Huckabee, even though he, like Edwards, finished third in the New Hampshire primary…

For literally the past year we've been hearing justifications for the fact that Edwards, despite being competitive in Iowa polls, didn't get the attention that his Dem rivals got -- he didn't raise as much money; his candidacy isn't as historic as theirs; etc., etc. Indeed, the virtual media blackout of Edwards got so glaringly obvious that even New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt urged his paper to give Edwards more attention back in November. At a certain point we should just acknowledge that Edwards basically got screwed and that this shouldn't have happened to the extent that it did.

During the primaries, John Edwards, a former Vice Presidential candidate and totally viable candidate for the Presidency of the United States, got seven percent of the political coverage and Time Magazine is explaining to people now that Edwards problem was that he wasn't relevant to voters. Edwards problem was that his message never caught on.

He got one fifth of the press Clinton got and he beat her in Iowa. Can you imagine how well he might have done if he got five times as much press as he got?

Gee, it sure is a mystery worth explaining why his message never caught on with voters who never got to hear it.

[Edwards’ strategy] at first seemed shrewd: build on Edwards' surprisingly good showing in Iowa in 2004 and make his native South Carolina his firewall while garnering union support…

While he managed to pull out a surprising second-place showing in the Iowa caucuses, beating out Clinton, he placed a disappointing third in New Hampshire and his campaign was stunned when he garnered just 4% of the vote in the Nevada caucuses.

At first, Edwards' strategy seemed shrewd! His second place finish in Iowa was surprising! That's the kind of thing that can really breath life into a campaign. And we all remember how shrewd Edwards seemed and how surprising his second place finish was because of all the attention it got!

For instance, let's look at how CNN, a partner of Time Magazine, couldn't stop talking about Edwards' shrewd strategy that led to his surprising second place finish in Iowa!

DES MOINES, Iowa (CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama's victory Thursday in critical Democratic Iowa caucuses indicate voters saw him as a candidate of change, according to entrance polls…

The finish was a blow to Clinton -- the presumptive front-runner in the months leading up to this year's campaign who had hoped a win in Iowa would be the start of an uninterrupted run to the nomination….

"Just over half of Democratic caucus-goers said change was the No. 1 factor they were looking for in a candidate, and 51 percent of those voters chose Barack Obama," said CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider. "That compares to only 19 percent of 'change' caucus-goers who preferred Clinton..."

Twenty percent of Democrats said Clinton's campaign mantra -- experience -- was the most important attribute of a presidential candidate.

At Obama's caucus-night headquarters in Des Moines, the hall filled with people late Thursday in anticipation of the candidate's speech…

Obama's victory came despite Clinton's support from EMILY's List…

The Clinton campaign itself also contacted tens of thousands of Iowans who had never caucused…

Appearing in front of cheering supporters Thursday with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, at her side, Clinton refused to back down...

"I am so ready for the rest of this campaign and I am so ready to lead," she said, smiling.

And there's more. The whole article is about Obama--fine, he won--and Clinton, who came in third.

Edwards, who shrewdly and surprisingly finished second, gets mentioned four times with an entire twenty words devoted to him.

Half of those words were "and", "the", "a", "North Carolina" and "also".

John Edwards campaign, the one that pulled the Democratic party millimeters towards the left where most Americans interests and hearts reside, was killed by your Liberal Media.

They hated him, they ignored him, they buried his message, and wrote him right out of the simple and exciting narrative of a two candidate race between an establishment woman and a fresh faced black man. Which was the story they always wanted to tell and was waaaaaay more interesting to them than writing all that boring blah, blah, blah whatever about falling median incomes and jobs going to Whereeverstan and something stinks and poor people are Americans, too, and whatever!

Let's talk about what's really important in this campaign: is Hillary showing more milky white cleavage these days to counter the fact that most voters think black guys have big dicks? Or maybe she's going totally lesbo with her staffers to triangulate and negate the big, black dick factor!

John Edwards may not have been the best Democratic candidate. I thought he was. But that's a personal preference, and come November I'll gladly, gleefully pull the lever for either Obama or Clinton.

But the John Edwards' Presidency was not killed because of his campaign. It wasn't killed because his message didn't catch on. And it didn't die because of money or relevancy or hair cuts or mansions or any of that other bullshit.

His campaign died because all the pundits and all the politicos killed it. Because they hated it.

And his campaign died because, once again, the good people of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina--three states you'd have a hard time finding anyone else in the remaining 47 states saying are representative of America--got to have their ridiculously disproportionate say in who will be the next President of the United States.

For the Democrats, twenty three of the most populous states in the country have zero say in who is going to be the Democratic candidate until, election after election, the field is narrowed to two.

I live in one of the ten most populous states in the country, and, in the last twenty years, I have never been able to cast even a single vote in a Democratic primary.

But every four years, the people of Iowa have a slate of six or seven or eight candidates.

The people of New Hampshire can vote for any number of candidates.

The people of South Carolina get to cast the deciding votes on whoever's left from Iowa and New Hampshire.

And the other forty seven states have to go along.

Otherwise, their delegates get stripped and they have to go along, anyway.

And afterwards, Time Magazine explains to you that the vote that 98% of you never got to cast for the candidate you never got to see 93% of the time was a clear indication that some message you never got to hear just didn't resonate with Americans.

The Man Who Wasn't There, Part III

The Nation -- In the edgiest debate of the Democratic presidential race, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton repeatedly engaged on Monday night in bitter and at times personal exchanges with one another.

And John Edwards effectively pointed to the heated squabbling between the two frontrunners in anticipation of Saturday's South Carolina Democratic primary as a deviation from the issues that matter…

Clinton accused Obama of doing legal work for a Chicago slumlord and charged that her opponent "did the bidding of the insurance companies" when health care was debated in the Illinois legislature.

Obama told Clinton he was fighting to help workers in Chicago when "you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Wal-Mart…"

Way to go, Obama! Way to go, Hillary! Way to get on a national stage and make a powerful case that Democrats are a bunch of hypocritical stooges for corporate interests!

Karl Rove couldn't have said it better! Or for a bigger audience.

Christ, it's like having Joe Lieberman back in the Democratic primaries. Only worse.

I mean, only centrist Democrats, with their DLC Democratic strategists, could unbelievably make the party, whose leading candidates are a woman and a black man and the son of poor mill worker, look like a bunch of sexists and racists, and corporate lackeys.

In a primary of unprecedented, historical, and progressive firsts--where, for the first time in the history of our country, the two leading candidates for President of the United States were candidates simply as people without regard to their race or their sex--and these two idiots have managed to make race and sex an issue.

They seem unable to stop tarring Democrats as racist, sexist, unreasonable, uncivil hypocrits, all the while singing the praises of Ronald Fucking Reagan.

I can barely stand to listen to either one of them.

The Republicans have handed them this election. It's a Democratic White House. And not because of anything Democrats have done. Lord knows they haven't fought against having troops in Iraq until 2018 and beyond. They haven't fought against that appalling Iran resolution. They didn't fight against that awful bankruptcy bill. If their constituents hadn't howled bloody murder--along with Republicans--Democrats would have "compromised" on privatizing Social Security.

Jesus, Obama was bringing it up even after we shouted it down.

The two of them have no stomach whatsoever to fight the worst Republican president and Congress in the history of our country, but they are ready to go bareknuckled at Democrats every chance they get.

In short order, Edwards had gotten the best of both his opponents. That was the order of the night. Again and again, Edwards took the side of one of the frontrunners against the other, effectively serving as an arbiter between the two.

It was an ideal position for Edwards, the outsider candidate who is struggling to distinguish himself from two opponents with more money and better poll positions.

Not to mention the fact that they, as far as Americans know, apparently exist.

But the former senator from North Carolina had to fight for it. More than half an hour into the debate in South Carolina, where voters will participate in a high-stakes Democratic primary on Saturday, CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer had presided over what was essential a showcase for Clinton and Obama.

"Are there three people in this debate, not two?" interjected Edwards. The 2004 Democratic nominee then delivered what may have been the most effective soliloquy of the night. Referencing the bitter back-and-forth between his two opponents, Edwards asked, "This kind of squabbling -- how many children is this going to get health care? How many people are going to get education because of this? How many kids are going to get to go to college because of this?"

"I respect both of my fellow candidates," he continued, "but we have got to understand this is not about us personally. It's about what we are trying to do for this country,'

Of course, Blitzer interrupted. But Edwards held his ground. "Let me finish here," he said. "Lord knows, you let them go on forever."

The crowd cheered as loudly as it had for anything said by Obama or Clinton.

Anyway, there is actually a liberal media. It's tiny and hard to find. But that's how they saw the debate: Edwards won, while Obama and Clinton continued to act like jackasses who'd throw their own mothers under the campaign bus to get elected.

Course, if you, like most of America, read the corporately owned, conservatively dominated, imaginary "liberal" media, you'd know who the real winner in last night's Democratic debate was:

MYRTLE BEACH, South Carolina (CNN) -- The gloves came off quickly Monday night as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama traded blows just days before the South Carolina primary, and two weeks before voters in 24 Super Tuesday states weigh in on this wide-open presidential contest...

Still, there was no clear winner in this Democratic slugfest, the most contentious yet, unless you count John McCain, the Arizona Republican senator who took the gold in last Saturday's South Carolina Republican presidential primary.

That's right--John McCain.

And it shouldn't surprise you that a Republican, in a field of really sorry hopeless Republicans, won a Democratic debate. If you recall, back in November of 2007:

He was nowhere to be found on stage, but Rudy Giuliani's campaign shrewdly rushed to declare victory after Tuesday night's Democratic debate in Philadelphia - chiefly because the former New York mayor emerged as the preferred whipping boy among the seven Democratic rivals.

Shrewdly, said your liberal media, approvingly.

In November of 2007, the presumptive Republican nominee was the clear winner of the Democratic debate in Philadelphia. In January of 2008, the new presumptive Republican nominee was the clear winner in the Democratic debate in South Carolina.

With such a pathetically weak and unpopular Republican field, one can only guess which Republican will win the next Democratic debate!

And that's what Democrats are up against.

And neither Obama, nor Clinton seem to notice or care.

In our time, there is a very real struggle for the soul of our country.

And neither Obama nor Clinton seem to want to fight for it.

They want to talk about unity and civility and inclusiveness, and whatever.

Four years ago, the highest ranking military officers in this country were publicly discussing turning our country into a military dictatorship.

In seven years, we've gone from a $230 billion surplus to nearly doubling the national debt.

We have secret prisons, "First Amendment Zones", millions of missing White House emails, billions of missing dollars, two hopelessly mismanaged wars, warrantless wiretaps, we torture people and destroy the tapes.

This is not the time to be all fucking touchy feely.

This is a time to scrap. And not with the people--Democrats--who didn't create this godawful mess.

John Edwards was a lousy Senator. And he was a lousy Vice Presidential candidate. But he strikes me as a man who tried to play the game and wound up getting played himself. And he's a little smarter now, and little bit bitter about it, and a little bit angry about it. And he doesn't need the money, and he doesn't need the fame, and all he wants to do is feel his fingers wrap around the tape.

And we ought to put the bat in his hands.

He might be full of shit. But, honestly, he's the only one promising to swing it.

Well, Maybe He Gets Some Press...

...in Europe

WASHINGTON, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Ask corporate lobbyists which presidential contender is most feared by their clients and the answer is almost always the same -- Democrat John Edwards…

But beyond his profession, Edwards' tone and language on the campaign trail have increased business antipathy toward him. His stump speeches are peppered with attacks on "corporate greed" and warnings of "the destruction of the middle class."

He accuses lobbyists of "corrupting the government" and says Americans lack universal health care because of "drug companies, insurance companies and their lobbyists…"

"The lobbyists and special interests who abuse the system in Washington have good reason to fear John Edwards.

"Once he is president, the interests of middle class families will never again take a back seat to corporate greed in Washington," said campaign spokesman Eric Schultz.

And that is exactly why John Edwards gets no press in America.

Because, if our corporately controlled "liberal" media let more Americans know that Edwards was a serious threat to the pervasive and corrupt influence of corporate lobbyists on our American democracy, they might actually fucking vote for the guy.

The guy could actually wind up President! And then where would we be?

I'll tell you: we'd be in some crazy fucked up society where a corporation with a post office box in the Cayman Islands has less say on where tax dollars go than a taxpayer in the United States.

And that's just not right.

The Founding Fathers certainly wouldn't have included freedom of the press in the First Amendment of our Bill of Rights if they could have possibly imagined it might somehow lead to empowering the voters in our democracy.

So I, for one, applaud our Free Press, for their childish and spiteful--yet principled--blackout on John Edwards.

As a lobbyist who asked not to be named, so that he or she may maintain their awesome and disproportionate influence over our elected representatives anonymously, so awkwardly put it:

One business lobbyist, who asked not to be named, said Edwards "has gone to this angry populist, anti-business rhetoric that borders on class warfare ... He focuses dislike of special interests, which is out there, on business."

Christ, the last thing the voters need is something that they want!

No, what they need is someone representing them who knows where their funding comes from.

"My sense is that Obama would govern as a reasonably pragmatic Democrat ... I think Hillary is approachable. She knows where a lot of her funding has come from, to be blunt," said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Stanford Group Co., a market and policy analysis group.

This is the kind of thing Europeans, with their five or six weeks of vacation and universal health care, can hear about it, but Americans can't.

Otherwise, the next thing you know, we Americans will wind up with five or six weeks of vacation and universal health care. And we wouldn't want that, would we? When we could be fantastically working longer hours, with no health care, at two or even three jobs?

I can not think of one single better qualification for any government office than being the most feared candidate by corporate lobbyists.

Edwards ought to make it his campaign slogan.

Though, even if he did, who, in America, would know?

The Man Who Wasn't There, Part II

A new study finds that John Edwards doesn't exist.

Allow me to explain.

After John Edwards placed second in the Iowa caucus on January 3, Elizabeth Edwards took to the airwaves to argue that his finish should occasion the media to stop covering the Dem contest as little more than a showdown between two political superstars, Hillary and Obama. Not surprisingly, nobody listened to her.

Comes now some statistical evidence of this fact. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its latest campaign coverage index for January 6-11, a study that does its damndest to try to quantify which political figures are sucking up the most media oxygen and why.

It found that Edwards only got 7% of political coverage during those days -- less than one-fifth of what Hillary earned, and less than one-forth of that accorded to Obama. Edwards even got less attention than Mike Huckabee, even though he, like Edwards, finished third in the New Hampshire primary...

I didn't need a graph or a study to tell me that. The guy is under a virtual media blackout.

I swear to God, if he wins a primary the Big Story will be about how Hillary or Obama came in second and Edwards won't even get mentioned until the sixteenth paragraph.

It's shameful.

But that's your Free Press. That's your "liberal" media, laboring under the glorious protections of the First Amendment of our Constitution, and actually undermining our democracy.

The Man Who Wasn't There

At least according to this poll, it is true that there has been one candidate who has been genuinely surging in the last week or two among Democratic voters nationally -- John Edwards…

Edwards -- who, just one week ago, was 10 points behind Obama nationally among Democrats -- is now only two points behind him. Less than a month ago, he trailed Clinton by 29 points. Now it's 13 points. He is, by far, at his high point of support nationwide. Apparently, the more exposure Democratic voters get to Edwards and his campaign positions -- and that exposure has been at its high point during his surge -- the more they like him. By contrast, Obama is more or less at the same level of support nationally, even having decreased some since his Iowa win (for most of mid-Decemeber, he was at 27-28 points).

Yet to listen to media reports, Edwards doesn't even exist. His campaign is dead. He has no chance. They hate Edwards, hate his message, and thus rendered him invisible long ago, only now to declare him dead -- after he came in second place in the first caucus of the campaign.

Hardly got a mention after Iowa. After New Hampshire? Forget it. Only two stories--Hillary and McCain. And yet?

That's right. With two of the dinkiest, least Democratically representative states putting in their quadrennial crazy say so, John Edwards only slightly trails both Obama and Clinton, and he's won more delegates than McCain.

Despite a virtual media blackout and being outspent by his opponents by about 5-1.

With 96% of the country yet to have their say, it's clearly a two horse race in the Democratic party against a wildly surging McCain.

Journalism is not history's first draft--political journalism, anyway.

It's that little drink special card, propped up on the table, you see before the waiter even brings you the menu.

This Is Awesome!

DES MOINES, Iowa (CNN) -- Barack Obama will win the Iowa Democratic caucus and Mike Huckabee will be the Republican winner, CNN projects, based on early results.

Now, maybe Obama can use this momentum to help advance his new flat tax proposal and capture the rest of the Republican vote he's been so doggedly pursuing!

And Huckabee can use his new Iowan Fantastic Jesus Hammer to pound the final nails into the coffin of the Permanent Republican majority.

Again, good for you, John Edwards, for losing this albatross.

And kind of amazing, isn't it, that he's running a strong second with--bad press aside--virtually no mass media coverage at all?

Like the disastrous and unpopular failed Bush presidency, like the colossal fiasco in Iraq, once again, the American people had to disregard the silliness and irrelevancy of their own free press when considering something of importance.

Absurd Is Not The Word I Would Use

MATTHEWS: I think in terms of world news, it's the second headline. Maybe it's the biggest news domestically. Because if you look at the numbers as they're shaping up, it looks to me like even if Hillary Clinton does manage to squeak it tonight -- I don't think she will -- she's been rejected here in Iowa by two-thirds of the Democratic Party. She is lucky to get 33 percent.

...

And after all that knowledge, we say, by 2-to-1, no. I mean, I'm talking about the Democratic Party participants in the caucuses tonight. That's a resounding rejection if she only gets, like, a low 30 percent. Very resounding.

Gee, that is a resounding rejection! Not nearly as bad as when 97% of Iowans rejected Bill Clinton in 1992, but still pretty bad.

Bill also lost in New Hampshire.

In the last forty years, only one Democratic candidate who won Iowa won the general election. And that was Bill Clinton running unopposed, as an incumbent, in 1996.

Christ, even Jimmy Carter lost the 1976 Iowa caucus to "uncommitted".

If it weren't for all the blithering idiots on your teevee sets and the six million pages of wasted newsprint, this thing would be entirely irrelevant. As it should be.

I hope John Edwards gets soundly defeated in Iowa. That should bode well for his run for the White House.

Yer Librul Media

He was nowhere to be found on stage, but Rudy Giuliani's campaign shrewdly rushed to declare victory after Tuesday night's Democratic debate in Philadelphia - chiefly because the former New York mayor emerged as the preferred whipping boy among the seven Democratic rivals.

Giuliani's name came up a few times, most notably when Sen. Joseph Biden called Giuliani the "most under-qualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency...I mean, think about it. Rudy Giuliani. There's...there's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11."

Those lines played to laughs, and a member of Giuliani's team fired back quickly Tuesday night, noting that Giuliani, unlike Biden, "rarely reads prepared speeches, and when he does he isn't prone to ripping off the text from others," a reference to stump speeches Biden gave in 1987 that lifted heavily from campaign talks by the British Labor Party leader at the time.

But Biden's remarks were significant less for their humor than what they dramatized: Giuliani has become the Republican the Democrats seem to worry most about of late.

Hahahahahaha!

Joe Biden pantsed Rudy on national television. First, Biden gave Rudy a melvin. Then, he pantsed him, then he spanked him, then he lifted him up by his ankles and dipped him in the Boy's room toilet for a good ol' fashioned swirly.

And, for the rest of the day, everyone laughed and pointed as Rudy walked around with a wet head, a sore ass, and the elastics of his underpants up around his armpits.

You don't believe me? Watch:

Christ Almighty! If a Republican laid that line on a Democrat? It would be over. Every freaking gibbering monkey on every single network and cable new show would be breaking their necks bobbing in agreement about how that was The Quip of This Election.

Every dipshit pundit would be falling all over themselves to pronounce that quip "Endgame!" "Devestating!" "Hilarious!"

Twenty seven years ago, Sainted Ronny Rotten badly recited his lameass and overly rehearsed, "There you go again" and your librul media still can't stop talking about what genius that was!

And, here, Biden says something that's not only actually funny, but it's true, and what does your librul media have to say about that?

Rudy wins!

People, there is no librul media.

There are a few very, very wealthy and powerful men and women, who own 90% of the equity in this country, and they send 90% of your representatives to Washington, and they live and operate outside the laws of the rabble you and I call The People.

And, oh, by the way, they own all your television stations, and they own all your radio stations, and they own all your magazines and newspapers.

And they aim to keep it that way. Forever and ever and ever.

Two Seconds Of Googling Too Hard For CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Five days after setting off a political firestorm with an ad in The New York Times attacking the top U.S. commander in Iraq, MoveOn.org has set its sights on President Bush…

Also Friday, Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a fellow Republican presidential candidate, criticized MoveOn.org during a television interview.

"MoveOn.org has purchased the Democratic Party, if you will," Romney told Joe Scarborough during an interview on MSNBC. "Its funding, and the status of this 527, and the voice that it has in the Democratic Party is so powerful that's now calling the shots."

Romney also said Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and former Sen. John Edwards, who are all Democratic presidential candidates, are afraid to renounce MoveOn.org and the ad.

Romney called MoveOn.org's ad "unacceptable and reprehensible" and praised Petraeus as "a great American."

Good for Mitt Romney! I'm so glad to see him take a principled stand on these shady characters who hide behind disreputable 527s, pretending that they aren't mere political operatives and party hitmen!

I'm so glad to see Mitt Romney condemning these 527s for the "unacceptable and reprehensible" behavior of questioning a soldier's service!

And I'm so very, very glad to see Mitt Romney, Man of Principle, calling out Clinton and Obama, and Edwards for their cravenly fear to renounce Move.On for its shameful attack on an American soldier!

The primary funder of an independent group that raised questions about the résumé of Sen. John F. Kerry during the 2004 presidential election has signed on to raise money for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's GOP presidential campaign…

Perry has earned a reputation for his willingness to finance "527" groups. He gained notoriety for the $4.5 million he donated to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam War veterans who questioned Kerry's military credentials.

Mitt Romney's got to be one of the biggest, stupidest, most reflexively dishonest douchebags on God's green earth.

That alone should lock up the Gee Oh Pee nomination for him in 2008.