BottleOfBlog

No Surprise Here

BAGHDAD — When President Bush convened a meeting of his National Security Council on May 22, 2003, his special envoy in Iraq made a statement that caught many of the participants by surprise. In a video presentation from Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III informed the president and his aides that he was about to issue an order formally dissolving Iraq’s Army…

Colin L. Powell, the secretary of state and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was never asked for advice, and was in Paris when the May 22 meeting was held.

Mr. Powell, who views the decree as a major blunder, later asked Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, for an explanation.

“I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’ ” he recalled. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”

We'll just add that to the list of national security and diplomatic events our former National Security Advisor and current Secretary of State was surprised by.

And, as always, remember: this clownish, horribly, comically, tragically, incompetent moron is the rock star of this administration.

Time To Go, Joe

Never mind your horrendous 55 and 42 record--in Division I football, at Penn State--since 2000, apparently, year in and year out, about ten percent of your team is suspended for something or other:

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) -- Penn State tight end Andrew Quarless was suspended indefinitely Wednesday for an unspecified violation of team rules, the sixth player suspended in the offseason.

Quarless could be the second coming of Kyle Brady. And, for some reason, he can't walk from College Avenue to Beaver Avenue without breaking six hundred unspecified team rules.

Now, I know, a college football team is made up of a bunch of young guys. And young people are stupid. And young people in college are stupid and they're drunk. So they're double stupid.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

Lord knows, if there's ever a time to be drunk and stupid, it's when you're young enough to be that drunk and stupid and still be able to walk away, fully intact, from whatever it is that you've done.

But, Joe, a lot of your players aren't even doing that. They're winding up in jail.

Like Maurice Humphrey.

Some of your players--good players--are killing people.

So, if you aren't winning football games, and year in, year out, about ten percent of your team is suspended, indicted, or beating or murdering people...

It's not a failure of your Great Experiment.

It's just time for someone else to put the lab coat on.

You Can't Expect Good Gubment From A Party That Doesn't Believe Gubment Can Do Any Good

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Lawmakers grilled bank regulators Tuesday about why they didn't intervene as lax lending standards led to a meltdown in the mortgage market and a credit crunch that threaten the economy.

"Again and again the question has been asked over the past year as our credit markets have grown increasingly impaired: Where were the regulators?," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the banking committee. "Why didn't they do more? Were they asleep at the switch? And when the alarm went off, did they merely hit the snooze button?"

Yes, why didn't the regulators do more? Where were the regulators? It's so hard to understand!

I mean, we haven't had a hundred billion dollar banking crisis, which will surely require a taxpayer bailout, in almost twenty years!

Not since Reagan and Bush I de-regulated the Savings and Loan industry, while brave, straight talking, ethical Congressmen like John McCain leaned on regulators to back off from doing more.

Because, remember, as Sainted Ronny Rotten used to tell us: government is not a solution to our problems, government is the problem!

So Reagan and the Reagan Republicans took that pesky ol' gubment out of the Savings and Loan industry and let the miracle of the Free And Unfettered Market work its magic. And within a couple of years, taxpayers had to come up with one hundred and twenty billion dollars--and those are 1980s dollars--as a solution to our problem.

So how could this happen again?

Gee, let me think...

Hmmm...what's similar...

Could it be that once again Republicans were running the gubment? And that Republicans not only don't believe in gubment regulations but actively thwart them?

There's a reason we have all these regulations--all this interminable red-tape the insane Bush clown posse is always whining about:

In the very distant past called the twentieth century, the American People suffered horrible catastrophes. And the People learned hard lessons from these catastrophes, and They made rules and regulations so that these awful events could never, ever happen again.

And after the People made these rules, everything was fine for four or even eight years.

Until another Republican got into the White House and told the People that these rules and regulations weren't solving any problems--they were the problem!

And then a bunch of limp-dick Democrats let the Republicans get rid of the rules and regulations, predictable catastrophe ensued, and then gubment had to spend an ungodly amount of taxpayers money to solve the problem.

Hundreds of Congressmen and Women do not vote to pass laws or create agencies which will be contrary to the interests of their corporate sponsors just because Congress likes passing laws. Congress does that shit at gunpoint.

Congress only passes regulatory bills when things get so unbelievably fucked up that a veto proof majority of them are afraid that if they don't do something they'll all be out of their phoney baloney jobs and lose their awesome Government provided healthcare and benefits.

That's it. They never do it before the fact. It's always after the fact. It's always too little too late. And it's always something that is and was desperately needed.

Your FDA, your EPA, your FCC, your SEC, your FDIC, your SSA--all of that shit--all of it--came in response to catastrophic disasters that Congress just could not ignore, no matter how many corporate dollar bills it cost them. The People were that angry.

And your modern Gee Oh Pee doesn't want to do anything with gubment except get rid of all the answers to all the problems we've ever had so we can have all those problems all over again.

The modern Gee Oh Pee is proud of our American heritage and they long for a simpler time--a time of bank failures, and burning rivers, poisoned food, fake medicine, soup kitchens, and exploding automobiles.

And the only thing between the American People and that Republican Utopia is your federal gubment.

Government is the problem!

And that's why the regulators didn't do anything.

And when the gubment has to poney up a couple hundred billion dollars to bail out the banks again, your modern Gee Oh Pee will insanely say that just proves what they were saying all along.

Oh, No, Not Washington

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An investment executive who paid more than $20 million for an original, handwritten copy of the Magna Carta presented the ancient paper Monday to the media and plans to loan it to the National Archives…

The original Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Rubenstein's is one of four remaining copies of the document commissioned by the King of England in 1297 to establish basic human rights as part of English law.

Great.

How much you want to bet asshead shows up and tacks a "signing statement" onto it?

They had to bring it to Washington...

This Ought To Be Great! Or, At The Very Least, Surprising!

The world's longest, most expensive, least productive on-the-job training program goes on:

GAZA CITY (CNN) -- Israeli soldiers returned to southern Gaza on Tuesday hours after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared in the West Bank calling for Israelis and Palestinians promptly to resume peace talks…

Speaking in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Rice said Israelis and Palestinians should renew the talks sidetracked by a recent wave of violence "as soon as possible."

She added, "We must all must keep our eye on what we are trying to achieve, and what we are trying to achieve is indeed not easy -- and that is to conclude an agreement that can lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state, to conclude that agreement by the end of this year. I still believe that can be done."

Yes, we must all keep our eye on what we are trying to achieve. And what we are trying to achieve is not easy.

When you're an imbecile.

Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’_”

The World's Most Incompetent Woman didn't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas's strong showing!

Apparently, Condi Rice, like Harriet Miers, only knows one person.

George W. Bush.

Here are some other things Condi Rice was caught off guard by:

That al Qaeda was a very serious threat to our national security, despite being briefed by her own counter-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, in January of 2001 that al Qaeda was a very serious threat to our national security.

That an attack by al Qaeda was imminent, despite a June 21, 2001 meeting with George Tenet, in which his hair was described as being "on fire" and during which he said, "Something is going to happen."

That bin Laden intended to attack the United States, despite an August 6, 2001 PDB entitled: "bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside The United States".

That terrorists might possibly use airplanes as suicide weapons, despite a 1999 report for the National Intelligence Council that terrorists were planning to do exactly that--a report, by the way, that Ari Fleisher said everyone in the Bush administration was aware of, except, apparently, our National Security Advisor.

That terrorists might possibly use airplanes as suicide weapons, despite being told by the CIA that terrorists were training to use airplanes as suicide weapons.

That terrorists might possibly use airplanes as suicide weapons, despite FAA warnings in the Spring of 2001 that terrorists intended to use planes as suicide weapons.

That there were problems with the WMD allegations in the NIE the Bush Administration presented to Congress despite the many footnotes stating that there were problems with the WMD allegations.

That the aluminum tubes Bush cited as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program in his State of the Union address were not suited for uranium centrifuges, despite being told by the nation's foremost nuclear experts nearly a year before the State of the Union that the tubes were not suited for nuclear weapons.

That the troops being sent to Iraq were insufficient to stabilize a post war Iraq, despite a report prepared by the National Security Council and presented to the National Security Advisor, Condi Rice, stating that at least 300,000 troops would be required to prevent a second war.

I could go on all night.

I mean, honestly, is this the stupidest woman on God's green Earth, or what?

When she gets dressed in the morning, is she "caught off guard" when her hand pops out of her shirt sleeve?

When she's late for work, does she say, "No one could have imagined that there would be traffic on a Monday morning...at rush hour..."???

When she mixes alcohol with prescription drugs and sleeps through intelligence briefings, does she explain that the label warnings were very general and not specifically related to her becoming drowsy during intelligence briefings?

And then, afterwards, does Condi Rice lecture everyone she knows about the uncertain outcome of hands entering sleeves, the impossibility of predicting the exact number of motorists on our dangerous roadways, the uncertainty of how each individual will react to alcohol and prescription drugs?

I'm sure she does.

It's like each and every new day is the first day she ever walked upon the earth. Everything is new and surprising! No one knows anything! All outcomes are wildly unpredictable!

And she can hardly wait until tomorrow so that she can condescendingly explain to the rest of us mindless cretins all the hard learned lessons from her first day on Earth.

She seems totally oblivious to the fact that the rest of us have resided here for all of our lives, while she, every day of the year, just got here at sun up.

She's like our national Drew Barrymore in "50 First Dates".

There's so much about the Bush administration that's wrong, and stupid, and appalling.

But, for my money, Condi Rice is top of the list.

I mean, honestly, she could not do clerical work for me. She's that bad. She's that incompetent.

If she didn't work for the Bush administration, if she weren't a Republican, can you imagine this woman succeeding at anything?

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"?