‘Puzzled’
Filed Under War & Politics | Leave a Comment
- White House colleagues were stunned, but not lacking for the day’s response. “We are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew,” said Dana Perino, the current press secretary who was first hired by McClellan as a deputy.
Later in the day, she relayed the reaction of Bush himself: “He’s puzzled, he doesn’t recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years.”
– Terence Hunt, Associated Press White House Correspondent, sfgate.com, (5/28/08)
All this puzzling talk from the White House yesterday was response to McClellan’s book about his time as Decider George’s mouthpiece and how the entire administration was all-the-time geared to a high-energy, crush-their-balls, full-speed-ahead political campaign.
Scottie to now dead to all those people.
Of course, all those so-called revelations from Scottie’s book is not current news.
Decider George using “propaganda” instead of facts, or maybe lying about the facts?
One has to be shitting us.
The real, current news here is why all those mainstream media outlets are just now proclaiming this information as revelations.
We are puzzled and do not recognize this media from one back in the day in which we confided and worked for so many years.
Frightfully puzzling is CNN hiring nit-wit Fran Townsend, Decider George’s former Homeland Security Advisor, to communicate propaganda on security issues.
Tony Snow, also now with CNN is not so puzzling — one has to love the gosh-darn, let-them-have-basic-desert-training-in-Iraq appeal of the guy.
Not-so-puzzling — the reality of it makes the bowels move — is Karl Rove on Fox.
Uncle Karl said Scottie’s book looks like the work of a “left-wing blogger.” (Maybe the next angle of Rovian attack as a threat to national security/sanity: left-wing bloggers.
And indirectly passed spiritual judgment on himself: “If he (Scottie) had these moral qualms,” Rove told Fox News Channel, “he should have spoken up about them.”
‘Moral qualms’ — As anyone with any kind of falling-down sense has by now come to realize, Decider George and his complete operation this past near-eight years has had absolutely no moral qualms about doing anything.
Maybe the last piece of this ugly puzzle has a last chance to fit.
Rep. Robert ‘Bullet-Bob’ Wexler, a Democrat from Florida and a long-time, sharp-as-a-prick critic of Decider George, wants Scottie to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.
In a statement released yesterday, Wexler wrote, in part:
- “The admissions made by Scott McClellan in his new book are earth-shattering and allege facts to establish that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby – and possibly Vice President Cheney – conspired to obstruct justice by lying about their role in the Plame Wilson matter and that the Bush Administration deliberately lied to the American people in order to take us to war in Iraq,” Wexler said. “Scott McClellan must now appear before the House Judiciary Committee under oath to tell Congress and the American people how President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and White House officials deliberately orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign to sell the war in Iraq to the American people.”
– rawstory.com/news, (5/28/08)
What becomes of this is a puzzle now, but not for long.
If Congress does not take action in the near future on the showing-up-and-telling-the-truth-under-oath situation now confronting at least three former members of Decider George’s inner circle, then the republic as we know it — separation/balance of powers — will have disappeared.
We have also appeared bothered by an unusually high number of hyphens used in this particular blog.
Although the vast majority of these hyphens separate long, clumsy, descriptive phrases, one wonders if it’s good writing, or just a vain attempt by the authors to be cute.
Not so much a puzzle, but an enigma inside the envelope of a mystery.
One has to be shitting us.
Frightful Future
Filed Under Mad as Hell, Orwellian, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
In the waning days of Decider George’s grip on reality, events and disclosures reveal just how bad the past nearly-eight years have been — an ugly, multi-generational inheritance.
If one is heartless and puts aside the shredding of the US Constitution, the legislative disaster for global warming and environmental issues, the political Karl Rove bullshit, and on-and-on-and-on, only two words dominate Decider George’s time as leader of the free world: Katrina and Iraq.
While Decider George and Jackboot John McCain caked-it-up on a tarmac faraway, New Orleans was slammed with the greatest calamity in US history; now getting-close-to-three-years later there’s no relief in sight:
- “It’s just the sickness. I can’t get rid of it. It just keeps coming back,” said Bouffanie, 27, who was pregnant with her now 15-month-old daughter, Lexi, while living in the trailer. “I’m just like, `Oh God, I wish like this would stop.’ If I had known it would get her sick, I wouldn’t have stayed in the trailer for so long.”
The girl, diagnosed with severe asthma, must inhale medicine from a breathing device.
Doctors cannot conclusively link her asthma to the trailer. But they fear she is among tens of thousands of youngsters who may face lifelong health problems because the temporary housing supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency contained formaldehyde fumes up to five times the safe level.
…
Arch Carson, professor of occupational medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, said preliminary exams alone for trailer residents could cost more than the trade center bill. But he said class-action lawsuits over the formaldehyde — at least one has been filed — could be even more expensive, costing many billions of dollars.
“It would be best for the government to get its act together now,” Carson said.
More than 22,000 FEMA trailers and mobile homes are still being used in Mississippi and Louisiana.
– John Moreno Gonzales, Associated Press, (5/27/08)
Katrina is a blight on recent US history. Jackboot John toured New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward earlier this year during one of his shit-for-brains tours, and couldn’t blubber-up a decent answer to a when/if/and why not question about what to do with the destroyed neighborhood.
The US government has been screwed.
The Department of Homeland Security is a cruel, ironic joke.
And Iraq:
- WASHINGTON – The number of troops with new cases of post-traumatic stress disorder jumped by roughly 50 percent in 2007 amid the military buildup in Iraq and increased violence there and in Afghanistan.
Records show roughly 40,000 troops have been diagnosed with the illness, also known as PTSD, since 2003. Officials believe that many more are likely keeping their illness a secret.
…
The Veterans Affairs Department said recently it has seen some 120,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have received at least a preliminary mental health diagnosis, with PTSD being the most common diagnosis at nearly 60,000.
– Pauline Jelinek, AP, (5/27/08)
Since the Iraqi war started 4,084 US GIs have died with 30,329 wounded. Total cases of PTSD could top 300,00: PTSD to medical experts is considered in the same as a physical injury, such as loss of a limb.
What a military-medical horror for so many years to come.
And this:
- A full-fledged cottage industry is already focused on those who eagerly await the end of the Bush administration, offering calendars, magnets, and T-shirts for sale, as well as counters and graphics to download onto blogs and Web sites. But when the countdown ends and George W. Bush vacates the Oval Office, he will leave a legacy to contend with. Certainly, he wills to his successor a world marred by war and battered by deprivation, but perhaps his most enduring legacy is now deeply embedded in Washington-area politics – a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition.
The Pentagon’s massive bulk-up these last seven years will not be easily unbuilt, no matter who dons the presidential mantle on January 19, 2009. “The Pentagon” is now so much more than a five-sided building across the Potomac from Washington or even the seat of the Department of Defense. In many ways, it defies description or labeling.
…
The Pentagon’s core budget – already a staggering $300 billion when George W. Bush took the presidency – has almost doubled while he’s been parked behind the big desk in the Oval Office. For fiscal year 2009, the regular Pentagon budget will total roughly $541 billion (including work on nuclear warheads and naval reactors at the Department of Energy).
The Bush administration has presided over one of the largest military buildups in the history of the United States. And that’s before we even count “war spending.” If the direct costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Global War on Terror, are factored in, “defense” spending has essentially tripled.
– Frida Berrigan, tomdispatch.com, (5/28/08)
And yesterday, it was reported one of Decider George’s former press people, Scott McClellan, has written a nasty book about the current leader of the free world, aptly-titled, we guess, ‘What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.’
McClellan claims is former boss is a liar, though, he still “like and admires’ the sonofabitch.
An excerpt from politico.com:
- “One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”
Duh!
What else can be said?
- WASHINGTON — At the same time the Bush administration has been pushing for deep cuts in a popular crime-fighting program for states and cities, the White House has been fighting for approval of $603 million for the Iraqi police.
The White House earlier this year proposed slashing the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program, which helps local law enforcement officials deal with violent crime and serious offenders, to $200 million in the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1 .
In 2002, the year before the Iraq war, the program received $900 million.
– David Lightman, McClatchy Newspapers, (5/27/08)
A frightful future for US peoples.
High Road History
Filed Under Musings, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
Just a couple of news items that caught our eye this morning:
- I think there is so much that is disturbing in the documents, the fact that they lied to us to begin with — and you know, when you are lied to and you see discrepancies, it just makes you more concerned and confused and outraged. And at every turn we just kept finding new pieces of information that made it seem there was huge deception and cover-up. So I feel it’s very important to find out who’s accountable for the cover-up.
At this point I think most of the evidence is gone. It’s been four years, and these soldiers (the ones who shot Tillman) are young, they were in a stress situation. I think it’s horrific they were so negligent, but I think if there’s some kind of consequence, it should have happened early on. I think putting them through that at this point — I don’t think Pat would have wanted that. But for these men in positions of authority and power to willfully deceive the public and cover up and use a young man for propaganda is outrageous, and I think they should be held accountable.
– alternet.com, (5/26/08)
This is just part of an interview with Mary Tillman, mother of Pat Tillman, killed in Afghanistan by “friendly fire.”
The trouble was the Pentagon lied about the whole thing — first saying Pat Tillman died in a heroic charge, then finally spilling the truth.
He might have been murdered.
And the second item (also via alternet.com):
- The invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US has trebled the price of oil, according to a leading expert, costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone.
The oil economist Dr Mamdouh Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation (Unido), told The Independent on Sunday that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.
– Geoffrey Lean, The Independent, (5/27/08)
A couple of examples of Decider George’s legacy.
In Memoriam: ‘Shut Up and Die!’
Filed Under Mad as Hell, War & Politics | 1 Comment
As another Memorial Day three-day weekend draws to a close, the oratories reported given across the country by anyone remotely attached to Decider George’s government makes one want to spew junks.
In a time of war, especially with the Iraqi war so widely held to be a disaster, “a debacle,” a slaughterhouse of errors, any Memorial Day observance should be aimed not only at the past, but also the right now.
Since 2003, nearly 4,100 US GIs have been killed in Iraq.
In Afghanistan, 507 have died in combat (since October 2001).
There’s a huge veteran population in the US. There are about 23.8 million living veterans, with nearly eight million from the Vietnam era.
And these guys are dying: An average of 1,800 each day.
The memorial thrust forward by Decider George’s crew for all those vets and those still in uniform: Shut Up and Die!
Just this past week, the US Senate passed the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, sometimes called the 21st Century GI Bill, with wide bipartisan support and the first real, updated overhaul of the original GI Bill of Rights since 1944.
Although Decider George whimpered about being “humbled by those who have made the ultimate sacrifice” during a speech today at Arlington National Cemetery, he plans on vetoing the bill.
The New York Times this morning jumped his ass on the possible veto:
- He is wrong, but at least he is consistent. Having saddled the military with a botched, unwinnable war, having squandered soldiers’ lives and failed them in so many ways, the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform. He does this on the ground that the bill is too generous and may discourage re-enlistment, further weakening the military he has done so much to break.
So lavish with other people’s sacrifices, so reckless in pouring the national treasure into the sandy pit of Iraq, Mr. Bush remains as cheap as ever when it comes to helping people at home.
…
The Senate version was drafted by two Vietnam veterans, Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, and Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska. They argue that benefits paid under the existing G.I. Bill have fallen far behind the rising costs of college.
Their bill would pay full tuition and other expenses at a four-year public university for veterans who served in the military for at least three years since 9/11.
…
By threatening to veto it, Mr. Bush is showing great consistency of misjudgment. Congress should forcefully show how wrong he is by overriding his opposition and spending the money — an estimated $52 billion over 10 years, a tiniest fraction of the ongoing cost of Mr. Bush’s Iraq misadventure.
– NYT Editorial, ‘Mr. Bush and the G.I. Bill,’ nytimes.com/2008/05/26/opinion, (5/26/08)
And the White House got pissed:
- “This editorial could not be farther from the truth about the president’s record of leadership on this issue,” White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said in a statement. She added that the newspaper’s editorial board “doesn’t let the facts get in the way of expressing its vitriolic opinions – no matter how misleading they may be.”
Perino noted that the Pentagon has “specific concerns” about the legislation that was passed in the Senate, pointing out that the White House supports a GOP-sponsored version of the measure. In addition, she touted several steps Bush has taken to help service members and their families.
– Klaus Marre, thehill.com/leading-the-news, (5/26/08)
Perino is some piece of work.
We especially enjoyed the word, vitriolic, which means a variety of spiteful things like hurtful, bitter, cruel, malicious, and even vicious.
One reads the Times editorial, and though the piece scores some hits, it’s far from ugly and vitriolic.
We think Perino might be a little bitter.
Decider George and his boys are scared shitless GIs will leave the service and there won’t be enough soldiers for the ongoing wars.
On Saturday, two of Decider George’s biggest assholes acted the part.
According to vetvoice.com, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Veterans Administration Secretary James Peake displayed “their opposition to — and lack of respect for — today’s newest veterans” at the Disabled American Veterans’ 19th Annual Department Convention in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Stevens let it be known the real opposition to the Webb/Hagel bill was warm bodies.
He cried about a possible “mass exodus” from the military, blubbering, “There are worries that people who are already in for two years will serve one more and leave, and there’s really no incentive to stay.”
When you face horror in Iraq over and over again — does one call that ‘incentive’?
Secretary Peake, however, revealed he’s fairly heartless. The VA is is a big, blundering machine, which like the US military itself, is coming apart at the seams.
The big clincher is the immeasurable combat stress of Iraq.
A Rand Corp. report last month revealed repeated tours in Iraq and Afghanistan caused an insane high number of psychological injuries — about 300,000 U.S. military personnel are suffering from PTSD or major depression.
Peake don’t want to hear about no PTSD, saying, “I worry about labeling all these kids coming back. Just because someone might need a little counseling when they get back, doesn’t mean they need the PTSD label their whole lives.”
Hey! Peake!
Tell that shit to the family and friends of US Marine Chad Oligschlaeger, 21, of Corpus Christi, Texas. He committed suicide this weekend at the Twenty Nine Palms base in California.
- Byron Smith, Oligschlaeger’s uncle, told a local TV outlet, “the first tour he came back and he asked for help, and they sent him back over there. I guess that was their idea of help. He did what a marine does — he went over there.”
His father, Eric, said, “The second tour … I don’t think he was ready to go back. I think he was fighting it. I think he was afraid to go back.”
“We sent these kids over there, we’re putting them through things that we’ll never see in our lifetimes. Things we see in the movies that are not real, it’s real to them,” said Christine Judan, a family friend of the Oligschlaegers.
– Greg Mitchell, huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell, (5/25/08)
And to top off that ugly bit of news, the top US military guy literally told GIs to shut up and die:
- WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has written an unusual open letter to all those in uniform, warning them to stay out of politics as the nation approaches a presidential election in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be a central, and certainly divisive, issue.
“The U.S. military must remain apolitical at all times and in all ways,” wrote the chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, the nation’s highest-ranking officer. “It is and must always be a neutral instrument of the state, no matter which party holds sway.”
Admiral Mullen’s essay appears in the coming issue of Joint Force Quarterly, an official military journal that is distributed widely among the officer corps.
…
“As the nation prepares to elect a new president,” Admiral Mullen wrote, “we would all do well to remember the promises we made: to obey civilian authority, to support and defend the Constitution and to do our duty at all times.”
“Keeping our politics private is a good first step,” he added. “The only things we should be wearing on our sleeves are our military insignia.”
– Thom Shanker, www.nytimes.com/2008, (5/26/08)
No matter the lie.
Cash Flow
Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment
Irony can sometimes be just the black residue of a lie.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Decider George has spent US peoples’ money like there was literally no tomorrow.
And most of this cash flowed to the Middle East in pursuit of the perfect war.
Now the out-stretched hand comes beckoning.
This would be absolutely hilarious if people weren’t being killed every hour of every day:
- A Tuesday fund-raiser headlined by President Bush for U.S. Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign is being moved out of the Phoenix Convention Center.
Sources familiar with the situation said the Bush-McCain event was not selling enough tickets to fill the Convention Center space, and that there were concerns about more anti-war protesters showing up outside the venue than attending the fund-raiser inside.
– Mike Sunnucks, Phoenix Business Journal, bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories, (5/23/08)
Jackboot John McCain’s campaign for president appears to be coming apart at the financial seams.
In this past week, he knocked two knuckle-headed preachers off his endorsement list, he’s got all kinds of problems with lobbyists, and now a sitting president can’t bring in the crowds or the money.
Of course, Jackboot John should know Decider George has an incredibly incompetent bunch of people working for him (and supposedly for US!).
This just yesterday:
- WASHINGTON — The Pentagon cannot account for nearly 15 billion dollars in payments for goods and services in Iraq, according to an internal audit which members of Congress blasted Friday as a “shocking” accountability failure.
Of 8.2 billion dollars in US taxpayer-funded defense contracts reviewed by the defense department’s inspector general, the Pentagon could not properly account for more than 7.7 billion dollars.
The lack of accountability of the funds, intended for purchases of weapons, vehicles, construction equipment and security services, amounted to a 95 percent failure rate in basic accounting standards, according to the report.
…
The Pentagon also was found to have given away another 1.8 billion in Iraqi assets “with absolutely no accountability,” said Congressman Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
“Investigators examined 53 payment vouchers and couldn’t find even one that adequately explained where the money went.”
– Agence France-Presse, (5/23/08)
The above is really not a ‘new’ news story:
- Tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, crates of machine guns and rocket propelled grenades are just a sampling of more than $1 billion in unaccounted for military equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces, according to a new report issued today by the Pentagon Inspector General and obtained exclusively by the CBS News investigative unit. Auditors for the Inspector General reviewed equipment contracts totaling $643 million but could only find an audit trail for $83 million.
–cbsnews.com, (12/6/07)
And the big dust-off cash-flow:
- The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.
The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.
…
“One CPA official described an environment awash in $100 bills,” the memorandum says. “One contractor received a $2m payment in a duffel bag stuffed with shrink-wrapped bundles of currency. Auditors discovered that the key to a vault was kept in an unsecured backpack.
“They also found that $774,300 in cash had been stolen from one division’s vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was given $6.75m in cash, and was ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds.”
…
Bremer’s financial adviser, retired Admiral David Oliver, is even more direct. The memorandum quotes an interview with the BBC World Service. Asked what had happened to the $8.8bn he replied: “I have no idea. I can’t tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn’t – nor do I actually think it’s important.”
Q: “But the fact is billions of dollars have disappeared without trace.”
Oliver: “Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah I understand. I’m saying what difference does it make?”
– guardian.co.uk/world, (2/8/07)
Out of the mouth: Admiral Oliver displayed the very sense and soul of Decider George’s entire time in office and its moral philosophy — Who gives a shit?
According to icasualties.org, 4,080 US GIs have been killed in Iraq.
And yesterday, one soldier was killed southwest of Baghdad, and in another form of bitter irony, another soldier died yesterday in Chicago from injuries in a hit-and-run auto accident while on leave from Iraq.
In tune with several reporting sources, anywhere from 80,000 to 1.4 million Iraqi civilians have died since Decider George instigated the killings in 2003.
And the horror continues. Air strikes by the US in the tightly-packed Shiite slum of Sadr City the last few weeks has started to take its toll.
On Wednesday, at least eight people, including two children were killed. The US reportedly has bombed that section of south Baghdad into rubble.
CNN reported the increasing number of civilians dying from US gunfire does nothing to win hearts and minds, but the exact opposite as “anger against the Americans is only increasing.”
More than a cash flow problem? Huh, Jackboot John.