BottleOfBlog

The Dumbest Shit Ever

I know this isn't exactly timely.  But it took me a good week or so to calm down to being merely hysterical after watching this total fraud embarrass frauds all over the globe.

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Tuesday the decision about when to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq will fall to future presidents and Iraqi leaders, suggesting that U.S. involvement will continue at least through 2008.

No fucking shit.  Really?  Wow!  What a surprise!  What a bombshell! 

That kind of candor must have really shook the plaster off the ceilings in the corridors of power in
Washington!  It must have blown the Washington Press corps right off of their barstools!

Who could ever have imagined that American troops would be stuck in Iraq until Bush left the White House!!!  Who could ever have imagined that the bravest, most masculine, most resolute leader America has ever had would create, all by his lonesome, the biggest mess in American history and then leave it for someone else to deal with?

The pundits, the experts, the insiders--those in the know, with their fingers on the pulse of the heartbeat of America--and their thumbs up their asses--are womperjawed!

Major combat was over in--what?--May of 2003!  Rumsfeld was going to bring nearly everyone home by August!  There was nothing in Iraq but a bunch of dead-enders we were rounding up--torturing a little bit, maybe--but we were making good progress. 

We turned over sovereignty to the Iraqis in 2004.  The Iraqis had historic elections!  Republicans got purple fingers to celebrate! 

We built like a bazillion schools!  We built like a dozen schools for each and every Iraqi child.  We built so many schools, the Iraqis finally said, "No more fucking schools!"  Then, without any more schools to build, we painted the schools we already built.  Again, and again, and again.

We lost like 8 billion dollars building and painting schools.  All because Schlieffen once said, "Keep the right wing strong...and don't forget to build a lot of schools!"

Then the Iraqis had more elections.  They elected and elected and elected.  The Iraqis elected so many people, shit, they wound up with two vice presidents.

And still we made great progress.  We ended major combat.  The Iraqis "elected" a provisional gubment.  We killed Saddam's sons.  We caught Saddam.  We turned over sovereignty to Iraq.  The Iraqis "elected" a bunch of preznits and a Vice President to preside over each and every new school in the country.  The Iraqis "elected" a parliment.  The Iraqi Army swelled to 400,000 million elite counter insurgency storm troopers, shrunk to four guys who were probably working some local militia, and then rebounded to massive, well disciplined ranks who totally control the country, though can't ride the local bus for fear of winding up dead in a ditch.

Also there were more elections.  The Iraqis "elected" and "elected" and "elected".  And they got a Constitution, an entire article of which was dedicated to the construction of schools.  And they got a Motor Vehicle Code. They got civil rights.  They got newspapers.  They got way too many newspapers.  The newspapers started talking shit.  They had to shut down the newspapers.  But, to make up for it, each and every Iraqi was appointed Vice President.

Also, our Preznit held up a fake turkey!  Later, he levelled an entire city.  But not with the turkey.

Things were going great!  Just the way we "planned".

With all the straight shooting, with all the "truth squadding", who could ever have imagined that Bush and Rumsfeld, and Rice, and Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Myers and every single right wing "pundit" and blogger and FOX News and AM radio big mouth could be sooooo full of shit?

Bush will not end this disaster now.  He will not do it next year.  He will never do it all.  He doesn't have the guts or the character or the morality.  He will leave it to someone else.  And then, when someone smarter and braver and more responsible than him finally makes the hard decisions that this stupid and dishonest war requires, Bush will annoyingly criticize those decisions from his boozy hideaway in Crawford, all the while claiming he is above criticism of people smarter and braver and more responsible than him.

Amazing, isn't it?

Wait!  There's more!

No, of course, Bush is not going to voluntarily withdraw troops from Iraq. Bush knows that no matter what the cost in dollars or lives, he can maintain the status quo in Iraq until he leaves the White House.  Iraq won't get any better.  But it won't get much worse.  And he can leave that mess to the next president and no matter what happens, he and his insane clown posse can claim it's not their fault!  The next guy fucked it up!

Just like Nixon was going to "win" Vietnam, the Bushies will claim they were just about to "win" Iraq.

Either that, or Congress will finally have enough and force Bush to withdraw troops.  And, in that case, Bush will claim whatever happens is not his fault--Congress fucked it up!

But don't expect anything from Bush.  He's not about to take responsibility for the fiasco he's created.  He's going to make someone else do that.

Say it again!  It's amazing!

I may be the Greatest Blogger of All Time.

And what's really amazing about that is:  I'm not really even that good!

But maybe that's not really the amazing part.  Maybe what's really amazing is that a guy who from time to time drinks a few Rolling Rocks, farts around on Al Gore's internets, and doesn't work in the gubment, doesn't work in the Washington Press Corps, has never been to a Washington establishment cocktail party, and doesn't really even follow American politics that closely could see this coming looooong before it ever even came out of the Cretin In Chief's mouth.  Long before our "liberal" media was shocked at the long term potential disaster Iraq was going to be.

Acknowledging the public’s growing unease with the war — and election-year skittishness among fellow Republicans — the president nonetheless vowed to keep U.S. soldiers in the fight.

“If I didn’t believe we could succeed, I wouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t put those kids there,” Bush declared.

As horrible as he is, I just love what an absolutely oblivious idiot Bush is.  No matter what kind of disaster Bush creates, no matter what kind of world-wide angry astonishment his stupidity ignites, Bush dimwittedly says, "You have to unnerstan':  I think blah, blah, blah...I believe blah, blah, blah..."

Christ, what a jackass.

Dude, you're long past the hero on the pile of rubble stage!

No one cares what you believe. They only care if you have a reason for believing what you insanely and ridiculously keep believing.  And obviously you don't.  Or you wouldn't keep saying, "Hey, even I, the Bubble Boy, realize this looks really, really bad, but I believe..."

He also stood by embattled Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

“I don’t believe he should resign. He’s done a fine job. Every war plan looks good on paper until you meet the enemy,” he said…

See what I mean?

He believed he had "darn" good intelligence.  He believed Brownie was doing a heck of a good job.  Hell, he still believes he was elected Preznit in 2000!

Someone, please, for the sake of all things holy, please tell this idiot that not everyone gets their news from FOX!  And when he keeps saying that he believes things that are objectively, obviously, screamingly untrue, he doesn't reassure the American people.

He frightens us.

It ain't the "liberal" media that's got his approval ratings in the thirties.  It's the growing fear that we've got an insane, incompetent, bullshitter running the gubment.

“Nobody likes war. It creates a sense of uncertainty in the country,” he said. “War creates trauma.”

What an imbecile. 

In the long list of things that are horrible about this guy, this is probably, like, number twenty five:  he and his whole incompetent administration are sooooo stupid that it took the lot of them their entire grown-up lives and five years in the White House to learn the simple lessons of two hundred years of American history and ten thousand years of human experience have already dropped in their laps.

Other people already did the hard work.  And, because they knew imbeciles might follow, one day, in their footsteps, they wrote it down so even if you were an oblivious, ignorant fool who was too damn dumb learn a single thing from a lifetime of experience, you could just read what they wrote.  And get smart quick.

But the Bush people don't read shit.  And, therefore, remain helplessly, hopelessly stupid.  And have to reinvent the Segway every time Bush feels inclined to impossibly fall off it.

And yet these people, who are wrong about everything, who are ignorant of everything, who are only now learning things that everyone knew years ago, keep talking to us like we're three years old.

Bush does it.  Rice does it.  Cheney does it.  Rumsfeld does it.  They keep telling us stuff like "Things happen" and "Freedom is messy" and "War creates trauma" and ridiculously stupid shit that we, Americans, have known since we actually were three.  But the Bush people say this inane, blather like they're doling out pearls of wisdom to us because the Bush people have just learned this crap recently.

It's been five years of listening to an assortment of overpaid, self-satisfied jackasses get on television and say, "People have got to unnerstan' that if you got two apples and two oranges, you got yerself four fruit.  But, and people got to unnerstan', apples and oranges are different fruit."

The "liberal" Washington Press corps thinks Helen Thomas is rude.  I think Helen Thomas is old.  I watch her and all I can think is:  Helen, ask the question:  "Mr. Idiot, thank you for telling us, once again, how dumb you are.  Did you get that little insight into war from the History of Salt?  But my real question is:  when you're a history major at Yale, is it a core curriculum requirement that you ever attend a class?  Does Yale even require that, as a Yale student, you ever even set foot in New Haven?"

Here's the big finish, though:

Later in the news conference, Bush was asked whether there would come a day when no U.S. forces are in Iraq.

“That, of course, is an objective. And that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq,” he said.

Worst President Ever.

What a coward and a disaster.

This may be the single worst thing an American preznit has ever said.  And this preznit has said a whole lot of shameful things.

This is a guy who calls himself a "War Preznit".  This is a guy who's supporters have worshipped him as a decisive "leader".  This is a guy who says he makes decisions in the Oval Office with War on his mind.  And this is a guy who has "led" the country into two wars and not even had the decency to give up a single month long vacation to even try to win either of them.

And after two thousand dead Americans, 17000 horribly wounded ones, after 300 billion taxpayer dollars, for a war his administration campaigned for and he campaigned on, he says, well, whatever happens in Iraq is really someone else's responsibility.

That's leadership.

Asked if that meant it won’t happen on his watch, the president said, “You mean a complete withdrawal? That’s a timetable. I can only tell you that I will make decisions on force levels based upon what the commanders on the ground say.”

Though, his ground commanders have said repeatedly that Bush doesn't listen to what they say.

“We all recognized that there is violence, that there is sectarian violence. But the way I look at the situation is, the Iraqis looked and decided not to go into civil war.”

The Iraqis looked and decided not to go into civil war. 

What an imbecile.

What does that even mean?  What an idiot.  Dude, the Iraqis have been storming police stations and killing mayors and generals, and dumping bodies in ditches.  It's already a civil war.  What is this fool talking about?  On TV?

Bush said he’s confident of victory in Iraq. “I’m optimistic we’ll succeed. If not, I’d pull our troops out,” he said, warning that abandoning the nation would be a dangerous mistake…

On Iraq, Bush bristled at a suggestion that he had wanted to wage war against that country since early in his presidency.

“I didn’t want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong ... with all due respect,” he told a reporter. “No president wants war.” To those who say otherwise, “it’s simply not true,” Bush said.

Ugh.  How can the "liberal" media print this shit without a disclaimer that this is entirely untrue.  The Bushies spent a year hyping their case for War.  Every Sunday, every member of the Bush administration was on every talk show bullshitting about mushroom clouds over Manhattan, about Atta and his phantom meetings with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague, about Saddam's awesome stockpile of WMD's.  Christ, at one point, they resurected dead Navy pilot from the first Gulf War for one of their reasons to go to War.

Bush, the revisionist historians should remember, actually kicked the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq so he could rush to War.

And now, this horrendous, incompetent, irresponsible, cowardly, lazy goof-off is telling the American people that it's important that they unnerstan' that no Preznit wants War.

“I can understand how Americans are worried about whether or not we can win,” Bush said, adding that most Americans want victory “but they’re concerned about whether or not we can win.”

Americans are not concerned about whether or not we can win.

Americans, over sixty percent of them, are concerned with whether we have a blithering idiot in the White House.

But, please, "liberal" media, please continue your important discussion as to whether Helen Thomas was out of line or not.

We'll just ignore the last five years of total catastrophe and let history sort out how many people Helen Thomas killed for no good reason at all.

Even The Liars Are Tired Of The Lies

This is a White House, according to insiders, that is physically and emotionally exhausted, battered by scandal and drained by political setbacks…

...created by...this White House!

To Rollins, the uproar over an Arab-owned firm taking over management of some American ports represents a classic example… "This White House would not have made this mistake two years ago," Rollins said.

Rollins isn't even a part of this White House and he's as big a bullshitter as the Exhausted Ones!  This White House wouldn't have made the Dubai mistake two years ago???  What is he talking about???

This White House made the Iraq mistake three years ago!

The succession of crisis after crisis has taken its toll. Some in the White House sound frazzled. While there are few stories of aides nodding off in meetings, some duck outside during the day so the fresh air will wake them up. "We're all burned out," said one White House official who did not want to be named for fear of angering superiors. "People are just tired."

White House officials are never genuinely away from the job. Tied to their BlackBerrys and cellular telephones, they are often called to duty even during rare vacations. Weekends are often just another workday. Hadley, for one, schedules a full day of meetings every Saturday. Card comes to the White House on days off to go bicycle riding with Bush.

Oh, my gawd!  Are these big, tough talking, Texas swaggering, slappin' their dicks on table Bush guys the biggest fucking pussies America has ever produced since someone inflated a four hundred foot Garfield during the Macy's parade?

They've cycled over a million Americans through the desert, Americans in 110 degree heat, carrying 80 pounds of weapons and ammo, and body armor--when they actually got it--and hot bottled water.  And those Americans were getting shot at, getting blown up, they were riding around in unarmored Humvees over heavily mined roads with rocket propelled grenades zinging past their ears...

And the people who sent them there have utter lack of decency to complain about how tired they are just thinking about the situation they created???

These fucking guys who put a 130,000 Americans in a combat zone, twenty four hours a day, on the other side of the world, for years are whining about having to come in on their day off for a bicycle ride???

They weren't shitting when they said they made their own reality.  The Bush people really do.  In their reality, the world's softest, stupidest, weakest, laziest, greediest idiots are super smart and tough as nails, and doing some hard, hard work.

While other professions demand 14-hour days and six- or seven-day weeks, few involve as much consequence, much less the intense scrutiny of the Internet age. A former Bush aide said, "You don't really realize until you're gone" just how exhausting it really is…

130,000 Americans in the desert. Over 2000 dead in the dunes.  Over fifteen thousand horribly wounded.  And these muthafuggers are complaining about the rigors of meetings and the twenty four hour news cycle.

These are the worst people in the world.  And they are running the greatest nation in the world.

Bush has resisted emulating Reagan, who brought in a fresh team led by Howard H. Baker Jr. when his second term was threatened by the Iran-contra scandal. Reagan and Clinton accepted Washington figures outside their own circles, and each had four chiefs of staff during their tenures. Bush emphasizes loyalty and surrounds himself mainly with people he knows…

After six years of the repeated brutal and public and underhanded and sinister professional and personal ratfucking of former Bush administration officials at the hands of the Bush administration, it's fucking hilarious to read the "liberal" media writing about Bush's "famous" loyalty.

Yeah, Bush doesn't like to fire anybody.  You know why?  Because he values loyalty?  Hell, no!  Bush is afraid that if he fires anyone they're going to, like Brown, actually tell the truth about the awful, illegal, incompetence of Bush's White House.

It ain't loyalty.  It's a bribe.  Like Linda Tripp.  Like Katherine Harris.  Keep your mouth shut about what you've done, we'll get you a job.  A good job!  A job you can't even do.  And if you can't do any job, we'll pay you a bunch of money.

Cross us?  We'll get Wolfe Blitzer to say on live TV that there are some "weird aspects(He's a big, icky Gay!)" of your life.  We'll leak sealed court records.  Fuck, we'll pay a no-bid Haliburton contract to murder you in your goddamn bed!

And, if you're a political liability, like Brown, like Myers, like Wolfowitz, like the bin Laden family friends from Dubai?  Shit.  You get publicly humiliated, cut off at the knees, and problably privately "rewarded"--bribed.

And your "liberal" media keeps pretending this kind of awful intimidation, extortion, and bribery has anything to do with something as noble as "loyalty".

Grover G. Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and an adviser to Rove, said he thinks the situation owes not to fatigue but to political realism at the White House. "What they don't have are unreasonable expectations of what can be moved through Congress," he said. "It's not a question of coming up with new ideas. Sometimes you just don't have the votes."

I just want to remind you for a second that this article is actually from the Washington Post. That's the Post that's in Washington.  And it's been there forever.  Where also our gubment is.

And the Washington Post prints, without any kind of instruction to it's readers to laugh until they cry, that Grover Norquist, that great unbiased fountain of reason says, "Hey, sometimes, good government just doesn't have the votes."

That doesn't mean government isn't great!  Norquist, one of the new, truly brilliant Republicans who theorize on government is famous for saying, he wants to government "down to the size where you could drown it in a bathtub."

So, again, that's a guy the Washington Post should really quote on the practical functioning of government.

Though, to be fair, I'm sure Grover didn't really mean what he said.  I kind of think his remarks were just more extremely manly, macho Republican posturing.  Because, as we've been told endlessly, by our "liberal" media, Republicans are manly and tough, and masculine and brave, and daring, and resolute, while liberals are kind of girly and sensitive and complicated, and emotional.

Get out your tape measure, here comes your big Republican dick:

He displays what he hopes will be the world's largest collection of airsickness bags. At staff meetings, employees say, he holds court while variously sitting on a giant red plastic ball, eating tuna from a can, rubbing his feet against a massager and sniffing hand lotion as he kneads it into his fingers. He excuses himself to go to "the ladies room."     

Personally, I don't think there's any correlation between toughness and whether you use the men's room or ladies' room.  And I'm pretty certain where or in what position you pee has nothing to do with how smart you are--with the exception of peeing into the wind.

Which reminds me of what I completely forgot I was even talking about!  Which is:  what a bunch of fucking whiney, crybaby bitches Republicans are!  How on earth can Bush not have the votes to pass his new ideas???  Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House.  What else do they need???

Who else is voting???

What a bunch of total, fucking crybaby, sissy pussies!  Waaah! 

Jesus Christ, if you own the White House, the Senate, and the House and you still don't have enough votes to pass your agenda, you don't have new ideas.  You have horrible ideas.  You have ideas so awful that even you don't want them associated with you in history books.

And that's fine.  We, and by we, I mean, those on the right hand side of the intelligence bell curve--the Democrats--already understand that.  And probably about 25% of Republicans--the 25% who disapprove of Bush--do as well.

But the rest of you?  Please ask yourselves:  what kind of party can't pass it's own legislation when it has an unbeatable majority in the legislature?  Ask yourselves, how awful is our agenda if even we won't advance it?  Without opposition?

And while most Republicans don't really care or think too much about that shit--mostly, we're told, Republicans want a manly man surrounded by masculine men in the White House, these are the kind of tuff, resolute, manly men, whose dicks G. Gordon Liddy and Chris Matthews drooled over, creepily and publicly, on TV(I had to link to the Howler because MSNBC has for some reason deleted the actual transcript;  I'm sure it was innocent)--the Republicans put in the White House, a bunch of babies whining about how tired they are of bike rides and showing up for meetings, and dealing with the 24 hour news cycle and all those exhausting questions the thousands of Americans they've gotten killed.

In a the middle of a war, they never seem to tire of reminding us of. But in the middle of a war, they have absolutely no shame in saying they're tired of dealing with it.  They're weary!  They're exhausted!  Fuck, we could win, we could lose--who cares at this point?

All these guys want is one fucking weekend without a goddamn bike ride!  Shit, Iraq could replace each and every oil well on its God forsaken desert with missile silos if only the exhausted, worn out Bush administration White House staffers didn't have to brave one more paper cut! 

Arabs could rename Iraq al-Qaedazhan if only the battle weary, exhausted White House staff could sleep through one weekend bike ride, where Bush gets drunk and rides over a policeman!

Sorry about the sarcasm.  But we Americans are paying these whining, lazy, incompetent pussies to complain about how tired they are of dealing with the endless, expensive, deadly disasters they created.

Has there ever been a group of Americans as despicable as the squatters residing in Al Gore's White House? 

Please let me know.

It's Like Franco's Spain All Over Again

Another tough war for liberals:

"This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right."
(New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)

 I shamelessly stole this link from Duncan Black's little known or read blog Eshcaton because, again, hardly anyone reads him, and I'd hate to this stuff go unnoticed because I didn't mention it.

If there's one link you hit today, hit this one.  And read the whole thing.  Then print it out and save it.  Then make copies and give them to your friends and family.  Hell, fax them to your local newspaper or television station.

It's not comprehensive.  It's good--don't get me wrong.  But it's not the whole story.  There was much, much more.

But this is a nice, brief summary of the kind of "liberal", American hating, Bush-bashing media bias which we're now told is probably to blame for the whole ugly situation in Iraq.

You read this and you remember how much the "liberal" media wanted Bush to fail in Iraq from the start.  The undeniable rightness and truthfullness of conservative commentators and politicians who tirelessly expose the left wing, irrational, Bush-bashing, American hating media in this country is self evident.

You just can't read this kind of stuff without coming to the only possible conclusion: 

The American media is biased.  It hates Bush.  It's hopelessly, irrationally liberal.  And it has been rooting for our failure in Iraq since this war began.

You Call That A Threat?

Meyer threatens his running backs

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) -- Florida coach Urban Meyer threatened Tuesday to play without a running back if someone doesn't step up at the position.

You can tell Urban is new and out of Utah.  In Florida, college football players don't consider something a "threat" unless you actually use a gun.

Must Have Missed Another Memo

I love this picture.  Doesn't it look like Bush is trying to figure out where he knows this guy from?

Hey, Monkey, it's your latest nightmare of a crony! 

Ah, well, I'm sure you'll know his name by the time you ask him to withdraw his nomination.  Like Harriet.

Out of loyalty. 

Theirs, of course.  Not yours.

Chaos And Carnage Monkey

WASHINGTON, March 13 — President Bush on Monday pushed back at critics on the left and right who had urged that American troops be withdrawn from Iraq before they were caught in a civil war, contending in the first of a new series of speeches that his strategy is working and declaring, "We will not lose our nerve…"

Good Gawd, Almighty.  Why are Republicans not running this gutless Carnage Monkey out of Washington on their own?  "We will not lose our nerve"??? 

Asshole, "we" have never lost our nerve.  We are not on the verge of losing our nerve.  And nothing anyone has ever even suggested involved the American people losing their nerve.

What we've lost is our confidence that you have the competence, the honesty, the intelligence, or the work ethic to lead the American people in a war.

To even suggest that the American people might lose their nerve, the American people who have footed the bill in blood and dollar bills, the American people who have given up their hard earned dollars, their jobs, their sons, their daughters, their fathers, their mothers, their lives and limbs, while Bush and his family have put nothing on the line is, frankly, the most outrageous statement an American president has ever made to the American people.

Again, I know it chafes Nick Kristoff, but, really, it's the kind of thing Hitler used to say in his bunker--if we lose this struggle it's because the volkstrum lacked the will to win.

Sizing up a loser and a bullshitter and a lazy, incompetent for what he is is not the same as losing your nerve.

And it's sooooo Bush all over.

If Iraq implodes in civil war and winds up a fractured, unbelievably costly failed nation, it ain't Bush's fault.  It will be the fault of Americans.  Who lacked nerve.    Who lost their nerve.

These are the same Americans who didn't lose their nerve after Pearl Harbor.  They didn't lose their nerve after Tarawa.  They didn't lose their nerve at Monte Casino or Anzio.  They didn't lose their nerve at Bastogne.  They didn't even lose their nerve at the long retreat from the frozen Chosin Reservoir.

And Bush is trying to hang on us--the Americans who have fought and died, and paid, and sacrificed, and bled, and suffered, and perservered, and earned the pride we have in America and Americans--the awful stain of cowardice if we don't mindlessly follow his incompetent and thoughtless "leadership" down into the extreme reaches of failure and cost and disaster.

This from a guy who went out of his way, a guy who requested he not be sent into combat in a war he "supported", who couldn't even be bothered to show up for stateside duty.

Fuck him.

What right does this guy have to even question our motives for losing faith in him???  What right does this guy have to even equate that with nerve???

What a jerk.

"I wish I could tell you that the violence is waning and that the road ahead will be smooth," Mr. Bush said in a speech before the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an institute created after the Sept. 11 attacks that has been supportive of Mr. Bush's agenda. "It will not. There will be more tough fighting and more days of struggle, and we will see more images of chaos and carnage in the days and months to come."

If we've got the nerve to see it through.

By the way, what are your service age daughters and nephews and neices doing right now?  Carrying a weapon under the desert sun in full battle rattle?

Don't lecture us about nerve. 

Welcome To Our World

TEHRAN - Prominent activists inside Iran say President Bush's plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote democracy here is the kind of help they don't need, warning that mere announcement of the U.S. program endangers human rights advocates by tainting them as American agents…

The workshops, conducted by groups based in the United States, were held last April, but Iranian investigators did not summon the participants until last month, about the time the Bush administration announced plans to spend $85 million "to support the cause of freedom in Iran this year."

"We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush," human rights activist Emad Baghi said as he waited anxiously for his wife and daughter to emerge from interrogation last week. "When he says he wants to promote democracy in Iran, he gives money to these outside groups and we're in here suffering."

"It seems to me the United States is not studying the history of Iran very carefully," [Vahid Pourostad, editor of National Trust, a new newspaper aligned with Iran's struggling reform movement] said. "Whenever they came and supported an idea publicly, the public has done the opposite."

Jesus!  I think I owe someone an apology--the Iranians think Bush is stupid, they wish he'd go away, and whatever Bush tries to do winds up backfiring and causing the people to suffer at great expense.

It's just like America under Bush! 

Bush really is spreading Republican styled "democracy"!

Retarded Or Insane, Or Convinced They've Invented Something Called "The Wheel"?

Young Republicans Go Crazy For Their Flip Flopper In Chief!

WASHINGTON, March 12 — The president who made pre-emption and going it alone the watchwords of his first term is quietly turning in a new direction, warning at every opportunity of the dangers of turning the nation inward and isolationist, and making the case for international engagement on issues from national security to global economics…

It is yet another change for a man who came to office talking of a "humble foreign policy," and after Sept. 11 used the hammer of the world's sole superpower around the globe…

…A search of the White House Web site confirms that Mr. Bush, who in the days before he took office kept the take-no-prisoners speeches of Teddy Roosevelt on a table at his ranch, made little mention of "globalization" for much of his first five years in office, even when European leaders brought it up.

Asked once, several years ago, about his aversion to the topic, one of his senior aides said Mr. Bush associated the word with "mushy Clintonianism."

"Mushy Clintonianism"?  Would that be like offering a country, which refused to abide by the non-proliferation treaty, like say, North Korea, nuclear power plants for energy purposes in exchange for inspection of their nuclear weapons programs?

"It ranks up there with 'nation-building,' " he added.

Oh, brother.  I won't even start with this.  Suffice it to say that when those mushy Clintonians engaged in "nation-building" with a country, when they were done?  There was actually a recognizable nation left in the aftermath.

Maybe, if Bush had four or five terms, he might get the "nation" and "building" parts of "nation building" down.

No longer. Now Mr. Bush is moving into a new phase of his presidency, not by choice or natural inclination, it seems, but by necessity…

His new theme is different, because it is all about interdependence…

Holy Cow!  Is the New York Times really telling us that the resolute, straight shooter, who's contemptuous of polls, who sticks to his gut instincts because he's so brave and resolute and gutsy and...contemptuous...the New York Times is telling us that Bush has now flip-flopped like three times in five years on what his own foreign policy is?

And his latest spastic belly flop is the result of public opinion???  Isn't this the foreign policy Dream Team who openly mocked the mushy Clintonians for their weak kneed deference to opinion polls?

And now they're embracing "globalism".  And after September 11th, they decided that, hey, maybe non-state sponsored terrorism might just kind of be a little bit of a threat as well. And, now, if you can believe it, Bush is starting to realize that our incredible indebtedness and our mind boggling trade imbalance with China might actually be in some way...significant...

Jesus, Bush has got to be the slowest learner in the history of the world.  It took his whole administration five years to figure out that Clinton, unlike Bush, got into Yale because he was actually pretty smart.

Texas? I Think Ann Richards Was From Texas...

WASHINGTON, March 12 — Pharmacists say they have been losing money under Medicare's new prescription drug benefit, and they have taken their concerns to the White House, forcing the administration to confront political problems caused by the rocky start of the program.

In a meeting last week with Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser, the druggists said many independent pharmacies might have to shut their doors because they were not being paid adequately or promptly under Medicare. In the last two months, they said, pharmacists have given away millions of dollars' worth of medications for which Medicare drug plans should have paid.

The pharmacists who visited the White House were all from Texas. Several have close ties to Mr. Rove and President Bush. But their concerns are shared by retail pharmacists across the country, who said that Medicare drug plans were paying them less than it cost to fill prescriptions for the beneficiaries…

In February 2005, Mr. Bush proposed significant cuts in Medicaid payments to pharmacies. Many of those cuts were included in a deficit reduction bill that he signed into law last month. In his 2007 budget, he proposed further cuts.

Critics called the cuts immoral. Mr. Bush replied, "It's not immoral to make sure that prescription drug pharmacists don't overcharge the system." His comment, in Manchester, N.H., on Feb. 8 this year, infuriated many pharmacists because it seemed to suggest that they were cheating the government…

In an e-mail response, Mr. Rove said: "The president was not attacking pharmacists and pharmacies. He was responding to the Democrat leader of the Senate who called the Medicaid reforms 'immoral.' "

Yes, he was responding to the Democratic leader of the Senate by saying his cuts weren't immoral because some of his biggest supporters were overcharging--or cheating--the system.

My hero.

There isn't anybody Bush wouldn't throw off the lifeboat to save his pampered, princely ass.

Are These The Craziest People Who Ever Lived?

MEMPHIS, Tennessee (AP) -- Restless Republicans are already looking beyond the embattled presidency of U.S. President George W. Bush to the 2008 campaign.

Nearly 2,000 Republican activists opened a weekend conference Friday to hear from presidential prospects and share strategies on a conservative agenda that many believe Washington has forsaken…

Yes, many Easter Bunny believing Republicans finally, after six of the absolute worst years of American government in our history, also believe that the Gee Oh Pee has forsaken an agenda the Gee Oh Pee never embraced.

And we can argue about that and blah, blah, blah.

Who cares?

But has it ever occurred to the millions of Gee Oh Pee faithful why the Republican party decided to now forsake its "conservative" agenda?  I mean, doesn't that strike any of them as a little odd?

The Republican party has had a "conservative" agenda for the last sixty or seventy years.  And they had to pound sand and crap their "conservative" diapers through the New Deal, and the Great Society, and nearly sixty years of Democratic control of the gubment.

After all that time, the Republicans gain total control of the gubment, finally, all three branches, and then the Republicans abandon their conservative principles???

After sixty years, the Gee Oh Pee finally has the chance to run the gubment the way they've been claiming they'd like to run gubment for sixty years, and, right at that moment, the moment when they can finally run the gubment exactly the way they've been claiming they'd like to run the gubment for sixty years, what's the first thing they do?

They abandon their "principles".

Now???

A smarter man than me would say:  "They were entirely full of shit for sixty years.  And they haven't abandoned dick.  They never had any principles."

Despite controlling the White House and Congress for most of the past five years, many Republicans feel both have fallen short on a number of issues including tax reform, fiscal responsibility, immigration, Social Security and family values.

Yes, the Gee Oh Pee has controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House and they've failed to do anything conservative with our gubment despite the appalling lack of any real opposition from Democrats.

The Gee Oh Pee had total control of our government without any opposition and they've left Republicans feeling like the Gee Oh Pee has been ineffectual.

Again, either the Gee Oh Pee was a full fledged baloney factory running round the clock to gin up, bust out, and totally sucker the rubes or the modern Republican party is so freaking amazingly incompetent that they can't even advance their agenda without any kind of opposition.

At all.  They've been frustrated and stimied by themselves.

"A big problem with our base is our spending," said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is sometimes mentioned as a presidential prospect. "My time at this convention will be spent talking about a Republican Party that (Republican activists) are familiar with -- a party of controlling the size of government and reforming the government."

What Republican activists has Lindsey Graham been talking to???  How old are those Republicans?  Was he in a room full of, like, one hundred and twelve year old Republicans?

They're familiar with controlling the size of government?  They're familiar with reforming government?

Then they're familiar with the engine workings of the Model T Ford or entirely unfamiliar with the difference between their asses and holes in the ground.

Nixon, Reagan, H.W. Bush, and Dubya.  All free spenders--two of them were record setting spenders on your national credit card.  All expanded government.  All expanded the power of the federal gubment to interfere with your lives.  All of them contemptuous of the Constitution.  And nearly all of them escaped impeachment and indictment by pardon.

The lone exception being Dubya. 

And Cheney might have to pardon him, yet.