BottleOfBlog

We Have Met The Enemy And It Is Not Us

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE - President Bush on Thursday stood by his demand for legal protection for phone companies that help the government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists, saying he sees no prospect of a compromise with congressional Democrats…

If phone companies need legal protection for helping the government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists, why on Earth doesn't Bush ask for that? Why is he asking for legal protection for phone companies who help the government eavesdrop on Americans???

Oh, that's right! I forgot.

Because he's the Worst President Evah and the least son of the Worst American Family.

In the meantime, a temporary surveillance law adopted by Congress last summer expired at midnight last Saturday. House Republicans and three dozen Democrats voted against extending it last week in hopes of pressuring House Democrats into adopting the Senate bill.

"It's positively Orwellian that the president forgets that he's the one who blocked an extension of the warrantless wiretapping program," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.

Asked about a potential deal with Democrats, Bush said, "I would just tell you there's no compromise on whether these phone companies get liability protection." The administration says it needs the help of the phone companies for its post-Sept. 11, 2001, surveillance.

Bush said his strategy for breaking the deadlock on the surveillance bill will be to keep talking about why it should be passed on his terms. "The American people understand we need to be listening to the enemy," he said.

Yes, they do. They also understand that they are not The Enemy. And about eighty percent of Americans now understand that anyone trying to foist this bullshit on them might possibly be.

If Democrats don't stomp this lame-duck loser Gestapo horseshit back down into the dirt where it belongs, then they don't deserve to run the gubment any more than the pedophiles, and perverts, and drug addicts, and criminals who make up the modern Gee Oh Pee.

Please, Make That A Campaign Talking Point

It’s slightly counter-intuitive that Obama could sound more hawkish than McCain, but when it comes to Pakistan, that may be the case. Last night at his Wisconsin victory speech in Columbus, Ohio, McCain came out swinging against what he perceives as the Illinois senator’s naiveté of international affairs and world events.

Providing a potential sneak preview of his general election talking points, [McCain] asked, “Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?” The likely nominee’s comments referenced a counter-terrorism policy speech that the presidential hopeful gave in August in Washington, DC….

Obama at the time was talking about attacking known al-Qaeda terrorist targets, not suggesting mounting an attack on the country or government of Pakistan. Still, he caught flak shortly thereafter from some on both sides of the aisle for discussing the merits of attacking a sovereign ally.

And McCain saw no distinction, while speaking with reporters, today. “That’s still bombing Pakistan,” he said when pressed on the topic.

What an idiot Obama is! How naive can this rube be??? Obama clearly knows nothing about international affairs or world events or about fighting terrorism! He certainly doesn't know anything about national security or military matters--those are things which only Republicans know about!

And John McCain, who is not only a Republican--so he automatically knows everything about national security--but is also a former member of the military--so he, even though he was a pilot, automatically knows everything about fighting guerillas in the mountains of Pakistan--would never do anything as stupid as bomb Pakistan!

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone's operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.

The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA's dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda's core leadership in two years…

Having requested the Pakistani government's official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval…

Officials say the incident was a model of how Washington often scores its rare victories these days in the fight against al-Qaeda inside Pakistan's national borders…

D'oh!

This shit is supposed to be one of McCain's strengths.

And he has no idea what he's talking about!

Gee, imagine how fucking stupid he is about stuff like economic policy which he admits he doesn't know anything about!

It's really amazing to me that, in the modern Gee Oh Pee, they can't come up with one single candidate--not one out of millions of party members--who isn't either a pervert, a criminal, undeniably grotesque, or an idiot.

And This Is Why Congress Polls Lower Than The Worst President Evah

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- who may be the most super delegate of all as chair of the Democratic national convention in Denver -- gave an interview with Bloomberg TV's Al Hunt in which she laid down the law for super delegates:

Don't veto the people's choice.

"I think there is a concern when the public speaks and there is a counter-decision made to that," she said, adding quickly, "I don't think that will happen."

She said the governors, lawmakers, DNC members and others picked as super delegates are chosen through a grassroots process and are accountable to the party's voters.

"I do think that they have a respect -- it's not just following the returns, it's also having a respect for what has been said by the people," Pelosi said. "It would be a problem for the party if the verdict would be something different than the public has decided."

Yes, it's a problem when the public speaks and there's a "counter-decision" made to that.

PRINCETON, NJ -- The latest USA Today/Gallup poll finds that a majority of Americans continue to express opposition to the war in Iraq, attitudes that are unchanged in the last two months. According to the Jan. 30-Feb. 2 poll, 57% of Americans say it was a mistake for the United States to send troops to Iraq, while 41% say it was not a mistake. Those numbers are identical to what Gallup measured in late November/early December.

Though, to be fair to our strong, principled House Speaker, you have to admit: at least 57% of Americans generally wear body paint with anarchist slogans like "Impeach Bush" just so they can build Bhuddas on public streets and hide behind ridiculously flimsy legal technicalities like the First Amendment to our Constitution, when they should all be held seriously accountable to the Rule of Law of upscale municipal public nuisance codes for trespassing on the gardens and angering the neighbors of our leaders.

So there's that. When our leaders take into account what the public has decided, they have to discount at least what sixty percent of us say.

More and more bullshit.

Have you ever in your life seen politicians afraid to do things that were politically popular?

What, on Earth, is really going on with this noble experiment of Ours?

Blanks For Our Bucks

It's time for our annual game: How much is really in the U.S. military budget?

As usual, it's about $200 billion more than most news stories are reporting. For the proposed fiscal year 2009 budget, which President Bush released today, the real size is not, as many news stories have reported, $515.4 billion—itself a staggering sum—but, rather, $713.1 billion…

…It is (adjusting for inflation) larger than any U.S. military budget since World War II.

It’s astonishing, isn’t it?

In 1952, the United States had 180,000 American soldiers and Marines fighting in Korea, against like a million Chinese. We had the entire 7th Fleet plus a bunch of other ships in constant combat. We had air forces in Japan and Korea flying day and night. And, to top it off, we had about 300,000 Americans in Europe to keep the Red Army in check.

The defense budget in 1952, adjusted for inflation?

About $500 billion.

In 1968, with 500,000 Americans serving in Vietnam. 300,000 still in Europe. SAC flying twenty four hours a day, ready and just aching to drop the Big One.

The defense budget in 1968. adjusted for inflation?

About $450 billion.

Today, with 130,000 troops in Iraq and another—what?—10,000 in Afghanistan and about seventy thousand in Europe and our defense budget is seven hundred and thirteen billion dollars?

Where in the great big Red, White and Blue fuck is the other two hundred billion dollars going???

We’re spending at least two hundred billion dollars more than we spent during the hottest years of Korea and Vietnam because 19 fucking lunatics, whose last known addresses were caves, hijacked a couple of planes???

Are you shitting me???

Christ Almighty, we could do what the Saudis do and just pay bin Laden directly a couple hundred million a year to not attack the United States and we’d save two hundred billion dollars.

And if that encouraged every single homicidal maniac in the world to also come calling with their hands out, we could pay all of them too and still save one hundred and ninety nine billion dollars.

What is the sense of this War On Terrorism???

I mean, honestly, for two hundred billion dollars a year, we could just cut each and every Palestinian—all nine million of them--a check for $20,000 a year. I don’t think that’s a great idea, but I bet it would do a hell of a lot more to prevent mid-eastern terrorists from attacking the United States. And zero Americans would come home in body bags or wheel chairs or back braces with screws in their foreheads.

But then again, getting value for your tax payer dollar is something fiscally conservative, Republicans can’t even begin to understand.

That’s why most of them still think that lowering something like 40 million Americans’ tax payments by an “average” of $1500 a year, while doubling the national debt was a tax cut.

But even worse than the multibillion dollar rip off is the inescapable rip off that’s coming, but most of us don’t even know it yet:

("National Defense," by the way, does not include programs in the Department of Homeland Security; that's another story.)

Why is this so bad? Because Homeland Security will be just like the Department of Defense when it comes to handing out dollar bills. And how are dollar bills handed out to the Department of Defense now?

Congress exposes this budget to virtually no scrutiny, fearing that any major cuts—any serious questions—will incite charges of being "soft on terror" and "soft on defense." But $536 billion of this budget—the Pentagon's base line plus the discretionary items for the Department of Energy and other agencies—has nothing to do with the war on terror. And it's safe to assume that a fair amount has little to do with defense. How much it does and doesn't is a matter of debate. Right now, nobody's even debating.

We could probably have a bigger, meaner, more effective military machine for half of what we pay every year for our bloated defense budget.

The Pentagon is and has been for at least fifty years the world’s biggest shopping bazarr. And it’s a monstrously corrupt, almost comically inefficient machine—for just a taste, I’d highly recommend reading this book, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War.

(And we can thank our lasting monumental military waste on the Sainted Ronny Rotten and his Reagan Republicans, who, just at the moment the Church Committee and the Military Reform Caucus, and the Pentagon reformers were gaining a bit of traction, spent the next eight years hysterically citing Team B reports and throwing billions of unnecessary dollars at totally inexistent threats. Our military has never recovered. It probably never will.)

And it’s political suicide for any Congress man or woman to object to anything the Department of Defense wants. Beyond that, it may even be political suicide for a politician to agree to what the Department of Defense wants—you all remember the Bush/Cheney ’04 ads accusing John Kerry of depriving the military of the Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters and F-16s it needed to combat the terrorism of men with plane tickets and plastic knives?

Oh, on September 11th, if only we had had more tanks flying from Boston to California!

That aside, Kerry voted for Defense cuts proposed by Dick Cheney! And he still got murdered for it! By Dick Cheney!

It’s insane!

And now we have a second Department of Defense—the Department of Homeland Security. Which was appallingly stupid and unnecessary from its retarded inception in dumbass Joe Lieberman’s war fevered little brain.

In like seven years, I think the only thing I ever agreed with Bush about was how we did not need a creepy, Orwellian sounding Department of Homeland Security. It didn't eliminate any government agencies. It just added one more level to them. And nothing ever gets more efficient by adding a gigantic whole new level of administrators.

Seriously, I was a big Bush backer on his one good decision, in seven years, to oppose that stupid thing.

But, then, Bush, , waffling, irresolute flip flopper that he was, caved because of politics—because stupid ass Joe Lieberman had the votes—and created a bigger monster than even Lieberman had envisioned in his wildest, stupidest, twisted little bobble-headed retarded garden gnomed dreams.

And, gee, guess what? Though, the Department of Homeland Security now gets a relatively small amount of our federal budget. It won’t be long before it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And it will face less and less scrutiny, as more and more Congress men and women become afraid of being called “weak on Homeland Security”. And more corporate Congressional lobbyists and donors, seek out those lucrative gubment Homeland Security contracts.

And soon, there won’t be any debate or scrutiny, or competitive bids on our brand new $700 billion Homeland Security budget.

And we’ll all get used to that.

Just like we’re used to spending outrageous and totally unjustified money for defense.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said recently that, quite apart from the wars, the nation should get used to spending 4 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. This isn't an unreasonable sum in terms of what the nation can afford. But the same could be said of many other functions of government. It has very little to do with what the nation needs. The $515.4 billion in the base line Defense Department budget amounts to 3.4 percent of GNP. Is that not enough? Should we throw in another $85 billion to boost it to 4 percent? The relevant question, in any case, should be not how much we spend, but what we buy.

Until the modern Gee Oh Pee hollows this country out like a gourd and totally bankrupts us, we will not have any intelligent discussion, with regard to defense or Homeland Security, about what we need.

If I believed in irony, I'd say it's ironic. The people who shout and scream the loudest about a strong military will, in the end, be the very people who wreck our American military.

Because when we finally do start talking about what we need, we’ll be so busted out and in debt, and hated and broke, we won’t have the money to pay for it.