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.

It ain't a rainbow, but -

The Republican monolithic facade is beginning to crack at the foundations, weakened by the slow but steady drip of leaks coming from within its own house. The foundations are crumbling, and the once-might monolith of the party of the Contract With America is beginning to list. There is little apprehension on the part of this writer that it will actually crash, but it is apparent that some of its walls have been breached, the party is seriously weakened, and some rats are making their escape already.

Neocons may have been blinded by those gleaming promises of global hegemony, but they aren’t stupid. Earlier this summer, having seen some of the light of harsh reality dawning where all was gleaming wonderfulness before, a couple of leading neocons - William Krystal of The Standard, and Tom Donnely of The American Enterprise Institute - stabbed Donald Rumsfeld in the back, preparatory to fleeing the edifice before all was lost for good. In an op-ed in his rag The Standard, Krystal said that “... Rumsfeld has fouled up everything in Iraq and ought to be fired for his failures...,” thus beginning to distance himself and the rest of his neocon buddies from their ill-conceived and badly executed attempt at global hegemony beginning with the war in Iraq.

Republicans with consciences, and there are some,showed a return to ethical behavior ...

Senate Republicans with consciences – and there are some – showed some return to ethical behavior in the final dash to the congressional holiday break when they sided with Democrats in their refusal to endorse the full reauthorization of the grotesquely named USA Patriot Act, in the face of the threats and ire of Republican Senate leader Bill Frist.

Connecticut Senator Lincoln Chaffe deserves some kind of medal for siding with the Dems in the ongoing battle to block drilling in the ANWAR, which ended in success for environmentalists everywhere.

But the most glaring sign of the times, from no less than the editorial mouthpiece of corporate America (in the final analysis, the only people with juice that really count), is a recent editorial in this month’s Barron’s magazine, a part of the Wall Street Journal’s capitalist propaganda machine. It was written by Thomas G. Donlan, hardly a free-thinking liberal. In their carefully worded piece, they make the case that the Congress ought to investigate this matter and seriously consider either changing the law or report a bill to impeach the president for his patently illegal wire-tapping.

I don’t know about you, but my first New Year’s resolution is that every Republican in Congress immediately takes out a subscription to Barron’s magazine.

Flights of fancy

If you're a curious type like I am, Gentle Readers, you may have found yourself wondering why George W. Bush spend those seven minutes sitting on his ass in that 2nd grade classroom in Sarasota, Florida, listening to an uninspired reading of "My Pet Goat" while our country was being attacked on September 11, 2001.

If you have thought about it even cursorily, you may have found yourself wondering why the hell the Secret Service didn't just grab his ass, frog-march him out of there and wisk him off to one of those undisclosed locations they have all over the damn place. Dick Cheney was apparently bum-rushed to his bunker so fast he lost his toupee, and he's only the Vice President. Surely, the President deserves some kind of priority in the security department? Remember the video of Reagan getting shot at? Boy, howdy, the Secret Service dog-piled him in a heartbeat and then basically threw him into his limo and peeled out. Those guys have some reflexes. So where were their reflexes on Sept 11?

The Sarasota Herald Tribune reported (Sept 10, 2002) that a Secret Service agent in the President’s detail said - after word was passed that the second tower had been struck by a plane - “We’re out of here.” But grabbing the president and splitting isn’t what actually happened. What happened is that Andy Card, Bush’s then chief of staff, entered the classroom, whispered in George’s ear and the Prez then went into a state of shock and sat there for seven solid minutes, frozen like a pre-Thanksgiving turkey. Watch that tape, if you don’t believe me.

A lot of damage can happen in seven minutes, folks, while the sorry fact is that the President’s party didn’t even leave the school for thirty whole minutes. That’s longer than the flight time for a Russian ICBM from Siberia to Miami, so this entire affair stinks like leftover gefilte fish, if you ask me. It’s a pretty well established fact that the Secret Service has as its highest priority the protection of the life of the President of the United States, and they are under orders not to wait for orders when the gravy turns to shit. They just move.

But on this fine day, with the FAA reporting as many as 11 hijacked aircraft in the skies over America, the Secret Service just milled around out in the corridor, like turkeys waiting for the block. Come on, what a crock. Somebody should have done something. But then again, maybe not, if the intention is to not save the President's life. Maybe somebody’s intention was a little darker than just wasting two New York skyscrapers and 3,000 stockbrokers. Maybe the Prez was meant to go down on September 11, too, but somebody bungled his part of the operation.

And I’m not talking about Osama’s boys putting the hatchet to Bush’s neck; nope, I’m talking about somebody with enough juice to tell the Secret Service to ignore their standing orders and back off while the president sits there vulnerable to a jumbo jet falling out of the sky. Have you ever considered that? No? Well, do. And then ask yourself, what is the order of presidential succession?

Scary, huh? The hell of it is, though - when you think about it - it all makes sense. The man with the most to gain from all of this terrorist hokum is the chief global hegemonist himself - dark ruler of cabals from Watergate to Nicaragua to Iraq and then back again to Iraq - Richard “Dick” Cheney. Yup.

But, but ... you stammer, George was pals with all those Saudi guys, hell, he even holds hands with them! The Sauds have been financial partners with the Bush family forever! Why would a bunch of Saudis want to help off their buddy George? Well, folks, besides the fact that the Smirker is an expendable poophead in any case – and good ridance - there are two (2) more Bush brothers (Marvin and Jeb), and one of them – Jeb - actually has some brains, not to mention being in politics, what with him being the governor of the state of Florida and all. Ho, ho, makes you think, doesn’t it? And guess who used to run the company that manages the security for the World Trade Center? Right -  Marvin Bush!

And if you still think that the object that hit the Pentagon was a Boeing 757, then I’ve got a war in Iraq to sell you.