‘Await Your Arrival With Simple Survival’
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“I have these moments all steady and strong
I’m feeling so holy and humble
The next thing I know I’m all worried and weak
And I feel myself starting to crumble
The meanings get lost and the teachings get tossed
And you don’t know what you’re going to do next
You wait for the sun but it never quite comes
Some kind of message comes through
And it says to you…
Love when you can
Cry when you have to
Be who you must
That’s a part of the plan
Await your arrival with simple survival
And one day we’ll all understand
One day we’ll all understand
One day we’ll all understand”
– Part Of The Plan, Souvenirs
When we learned of Dan Fogelberg’s death yesterday from prostate cancer there was a small, silent sob from way back when.
Fogelberg was a true poet of the soul, at least on his early albums, a soft, warm voice that reached way down past the anixiety, the loneliness and the chaos of growing beyond the means.
The first three albums — Home Free (1972), Souvenirs (1974) and Captured Angel (1975) — were written just for us, a yearning for things not understood and love not found.
Although the music was still good, by the time Fogelberg recorded Twin Sons of Different Mothers (1978) with flute-great Tim Weisberg, the personal touch was gone.
Maybe it was us who had already departed that lonely stretch of road and entered a more-widespread, more-peopled avenue.
We hate to admit it, but some here at Compatible Creatures spent long hours crying to the sound of Fogelberg’s gentle, understanding voice, trying to make sense of a twisted, strange story that is life.
And feeling good about feeling bad.
“And my feelings have grown rigid like a wooden post
And my love is like a curtain that has been drawn closed
And my life just isn’t going the way I thought it was supposed to
And I’m crying and I find myself
Looking for a lady
I’m looking for a lady to change my night to day”
– Looking For A Lady, Home Free
Misplaced ‘the forgotten war’
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- Deeply concerned about the prospect of failure in Afghanistan, the Bush administration and NATO have begun three top-to-bottom reviews of the entire mission, from security and counterterrorism to political consolidation and economic development, according to American and alliance officials.
The reviews are an acknowledgement of the need to greater coordination in fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, halting the rising opium production and trafficking that finances the insurgency and helping the Kabul government extend its legitimacy and control.
– The New York Times (12/16/07)
After more than six years, the mission to route out Osama and his boys has become another 1993 Somalia — failure to fully concentrate on the task at hand while launching a total, unmitigated disaster in Iraq.
The Times report concludes:
- Julianne Smith, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and Internation Studies, said the mission in Afghanistan was at risk of failure, as political support in European capitals strained NATO’s ability to sustain, let alone expand its effort there.
“The mission in Afghanistan has been suffering from neglect on all sides,” she said.
Neglect is just another word for Iraq. The US now has about 26,000 troops in Afghanistan, out of about 40,000 total from a dwindling selection of countries. NATO has been in charge since last year. Meanwhile in Iraq, near 160,000 US troops are being ground down into fine powder.
When Decider George decided to go into Afghanistan in October 2001, the nation, the world, just about everybody was OK with the mission — the US was actually going after the culprits behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
And everything seemed to work, except by December in his first mission accomplished — not — Decider George gave Tommy Franks his marching orders for Iraq and Osama made an escape from Tora Bora. The entire Afghan scenerio then collasped.
Indeed the forgotton war. Iraq turned into a bloodfest and pulled the eyes of the world away from the original true mission — find Osama and his boys.
The attacks on 9/11/01 united the world. Even Iranians displayed sympathy for the first terrrorist attacks in the US in the modern era (excluding Wounded Knee and all those other unspecified slaughters against Native Americans) and the world, almost as one, were behind the project.
Decider George, however, couldn’t leave well enough alone. Although his main objective since he took office, he and his VP, Dufus Dick Chaney, wired up some real-dangerous people (Rumsfeld, Wolfawitz, et al) and set them loose on Iraq. The result is the worse, most-tangled up mess in US history, and pending an outcome, in all of world history.
Afghanistan will always be forgotten, just as Decider George’s bullshit-patriotic oratory in the days following 9/11 will be forgotten.
Damnit! George, why couldn’t you be fogotten.
Shredder Header
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Although Decider George’s horrifying time as chief asshole still has another year to run, all evidence of the lies, the backstabbing and dirty-tricks will apparently end up as recycled bits of confetti: Federal spending on paper shredding has increased more than 600 percent since he took office.
- In 2000, the feds spent $452.807 to make unpleasant truths go away: by 2006, the “Cheney Effect” had bumped that number up to $2.9 million. And halfway through 2007, the feds almost matched that number, with $2.7 million and counting.
– radaronline.com (12/14/07)
The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 allows citizens to view all federal-awarded contracts and one of those contracts was for paper shredding. The breakdown of the contract, though, does not reveal how much shredding was done by Vice President Dufus Dick Chaney, but one could bet the farm a shitload of paperwork has been destroyed.
According to records, Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services has made many trips to Dufus Dick’s compound at the Naval Observatory in DC. Dufus Dick has a lot of sordid secrets to confetti-nize.
And like CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President — Dick Nixon’s 1972 organization) as the truth of Watergate began to boil over, a paper shredder was highly overworked to destroy anyone’s ability to “follow the money.”
In Dufus Dick’s case, it’s follow the lies.
And with a ‘hole lotta shreddin’ goin’ on, the trail will just blow in the wind.
Fifteen Percent Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
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- The president’s approval rating in the poll, conducted Dec. 6 through Sunday by Opinion Research Corporation, was 32 percent, tying his all-time low rating from June.
Sixty-six percent disapproved of how Bush is handling his job, the poll found, about equal to the 65 percent early last month.
Only 15 percent said they approved “strongly” of how the president is handling his job, while nearly half, 49 percent, disapproved “strongly.”
– politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com (12/13/07)
The big question here, of course, is whether or not that 15 percent had recent brain scans.
- Over the past four years, Inspector General Stuart W. Bowen Jr. and his staff have probed allegations of waste and fraud in the $22 billion US effort to rebuild Iraq. Their work has led to arrests, indictments and milions of dollars in fines. And it has earned Bowen, who has been a legal advisor to President Bush, many admirers among both parties on Capitol Hill for his efforts to identify overspending and mismanagement.
But Bowen’s office has also been roiled by allegations of its own overspending and mismanagement. Current and former employees have complained about overtime policies that allowed 10 staff members to earn more than $250,000 each last year. They have questioned the oversight of a $3.5 million book project about Iraq’s reconstruction modeled after the 9/11 Commission report. And they have alleged that Bowen and his deputy have improperly snooped into their staff’s e-mail messages.
– washingtonpost.com (12/14/07)
Four government investigations are therefore underway into the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, including one by the FBI, according to the Post story, and even federal presecutors have a grand jury in Virginia looking into the sordid, lying, and corrupt mess.
This is Decider George at his finest. Is he catering to a dwindling power base, now down to just 15 percent, who “strongly” think the shithead is doing a good job? One wonders at the total lack of insight in such people.
In this age of information, how could even 1 percent believe Decider George and his corrupt, incompetent cronies, appointees and staffers are doing a good job. The list of the major problems created by this adminstration and its details could fill the freakin’ World Wide freakin’ Web!
Even the investigator investigating Karl Rove is himself under investigation. Scott Bloch, the Decider George-appointed head of the US Office of Special Counsel, is being probed for improper deletion of emails, one of the charges leveled at Uncle Karl.
Maybe it’s not a real-good idea to use the word “special” to describe some government functions.
Unless that 15 percent think they are indeed special: Mental hospitals usually have special wards for the real, crazied-assed patients, ones suffering from delusions, visions of grandeur and self-importance.
Only if Decider George and his bunch could be rounded up and locked away — oh, what a fairy-tale life this would be.
And it would make us all special.
‘Psychobabble’
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Hypocrisy in war is worse-case scenerio for horror.
In this Decider George’s terrifying war on terror (root of the word, “war”: wers from Indo-European, “to confuse, mix up”) nothing says shit better than the old boots on the ground.
On Monday, an US Army hearing officer advised that 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside should not be court-martialed for breaking down under stress, including attempting suicide, while serving in Iraq.
According to The Washington Post:
- The 25-year-old reservist, who led a small unit of medics based at the prison where Saddam Hussein and other top Iraqi figures were kept, suffered a mental breakdown on Jan. 1, possibly triggered by the stresses of war. An Army investigation also later found that her executive officer created a hostile work environment.
Not only being a reservist in a surreal, dangerous, twilight-zone environment, Whiteside’s boss apparently was an asshole, adding to the continued deathly chaos. And can you believe it: ..”possibly triggered by the stresses of war.”
Duh!
The US military has a mental health/suicide epidemic on its hand due to the botched butchery in Iraq and Afghanistan. Media reports indicate 6,256 US veterans (of all wars) took their lives in 2005 — an average of 17 a day — while of the 3,888 military deaths in Iraq since 2003, there’s 2.4 suicides a day.
The US Deapartment of Defense mental health system is innudated. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, in a report last month, among the 88,000 US GIs back from Iraq, 20 percent of all active duty soldiers, and 40 percent of all reservists were found on screenings to have a such mental health problems that they required treatment.
And what did tough-guy Decider George have to say? “Bring ‘em on!”
And The Washington Post story continued:
- Once at Walter Reed, Whiteside was diagnosed with a severe mental disorder. The Army offered her a chance to resign under a status that would have given her no Army or veterans medical benefits. Whiteside’s seven years in the Army has been exemplary, according to her evaluations.
An Army sanity board found her insane at the time of the shootings (Whiteside’s Iraqi episode). Whiteside’s commanders at Walter Reed, who first filed criminal charges against her, derided her psychological diagnosis and problems as “an excuse” for her actions. The Army prosecutor in the case, Maj. Stefan Wolfe, had warned Whiteside’s lawyer of the risk of using a “psychobabble” defense.
The heart of the so-called “psychobabble” comes from Decider George, blubbering in a well-set-up lie about World War III and Iran while crowing about supporting US troops in his created Middle Eastern inferno.
One false sonofabitch.