It was a very bad year

New Year's Eve - Kazumi Honda



This was such a lousy year that I don’t even know where to begin. Okay, let’s go with Congressional interference in a family matter about pulling the plug on a brain-dead woman (her brain was determined during the autopsy to be basically a puddle of Jell-O), to a Congressional give-away to usurious credit card companies obliterating the ability of their victims to get relief in bankruptcy court, to over 2,100 dead American soldiers in Iraq. 2005 was a year for the record books.

Wounded American soldiers in military hospitals were charged for their meals. The Veterans Administration had over a billion dollars slashed from its budget while the cost of the Iraq war went over 200 billion dollars.

In Iraq, rigged elections left and right prepared the Middle East for the resurrection of the Persian Empire; wingnuts adopted the phrase - and endlessly repeated it - “Islamo-fascism” - an absurdist oxymoron that is meaningless, except to cretins. The US military was revealed to have used nerve gas (white phosphorus) on civilians as well as “enemy combatants” in Iraq, not to mention incendiary bombs.

In fact, stupidity was rampant this year on every front, from the President on down to the citizen in the street. Confronted by in-your-face evidence that the 9/11 Commission’s report – the so-called Kean-Zelikow Report – was bogus and a whitewash and a massive cover up, as evidenced by literally hundreds of Internet websites flaying the report and publishing the actual facts of the September attack with pictures and circles and arrows, the American public yawned.

This was a bad year for the nation’s flagship newspapers: The New York Times was forced to apologize for Judith Miller while sitting on information that revealed the PeRezident to be guilty as hell of illegal wiretapping while continuing to publish the myopic op-eds of Tom Friedman. The LA Times still carries the slop of Max Boot while firing everybody else in sight. Woodward was revealed to be sleeping with the enemy and so what. White chicks dominated the news, both domestically and in fair Aruba, but President of the Senate Dick Cheney neglected to emerge from his undisclosed location to cast a deadlock-breaking vote, so we continued to be inundated with non-news, including the pederast trial of a robo-entertainer and breathless reports of assorted actors’ possible pregnancies or on-again, off-again divorce proceedings.

The LA Times published at least three of John “Torture Is Good and the President Is Above the Constitution” Yoo’s op-ed pieces, all of them certifiable moonbat drivel. This person got tenure as a professor of law at UC Berkeley, and the public yawned.

The Republican dominated Congress – with the advice and consent of the Congressional Democrats – took the American taxpayers to the cleaners, and the public yawned. Hurricane Katrina barreled through the Gulf states, killing hundreds and leaving half the populace homeless and the PeRezident told the man in charge, “Brownie, you’re doing a helluva job.” Congress suspended the prevailing-wage act in the Gulf states and the public yawned.

Not only is the NSA illegally tapping your overseas phone calls, they (and at least 23 other government agencies) have been placing persistent cookies on the computers of visitors to their websites as well, allowing them to track your web-surfing habits. The CIA, under instructions from the PeRezident, continues to maintain a fleet of rent-a-jets overseas for those extra-special rendition trips, shunting between atolls on the torture archipelago. And the legal whiz kids in government employ still maintain that the PreZ can do anything he wants in the GWOT because there has never been terrorism in the world before and this is a new kind of war and Congress said he can use any kind of force he wants and fuck you, Concerned American Citizens, and screw his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, he has a “homeland” to protect.

In the blogosphere (yes, we know: skippy invented that phrase), comment email spam arrived. My computer crashed; twice. I switched to Linux Xandros. It crashed. I went back to Windows. My computer is hanging in there, barely. John Hindracker – of Powerline infamy – endlessly appeared on radio talk shows where he endlessly droned on about George Bush’s “unrecognized genius”; David Corn’s fall from grace in aligning himself with the Pajamas Media project and the incredible stupidity of the Pajamas Media project’s “borrowing” of the Open Source trademark, which even a simpleton would know better than to do. The sheer fact of Michelle Malkin’s existence. Blame Bush failed to receive Humor Blog of the Year award. Liberal Larry blames Bush for that, as do I.

There were a couple of bright moments; I could tell you about them, but you’d just yawn.Not that I’m paranoid or anything, but Sitemeter reports that this website got two separate hits from a “blocked referrer” using a “generic crawler” in Ashburn, Maryland, just after the publishing of my article on the possibility of dropping jumbo jets on Goat Boy’s head. I’m thinking to myself, who or what is in Ashburn, Virginia? Upon tracking down same, it is revealed that Ashburn is home to George Washington University (YAY!) and also the National Transportation Safety Board. (Hmm). Another fine example of your tax dollars at work?
Happy Freakin’ New Year.