One must always keep in mind when giving any thought to how Republicans govern to this heart-felt comment from mush-faced twit Mitch McConnell from last October: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
All GOP action dovetails to this one, succulent point.

In the history of US politics there has never been a more nasty-toned political debate (unless one looks back to the election of 1876) over some of the most-dangerous and long-lasting problems facing this country — a seemingly perfect storm of energy, financial and environmental disasters already gathered and just waiting for the final size 10 shoe to drop.
And it’s pretty close.

In just more than a month, the gong will chime on the now-infamous US debt ceiling — the debt deal is a cap set by Congress on the amount of debt the federal government can legally borrow, first instituted in 1917 with a ceiling at $11.5 billion, the whole thing is now out-of-whacked-control as the tally is currently at $14.294 trillion.

Despite President Obama’s seemingly willingness to compromise, a couple of GOP pricks Eric Cantor and John Kyl (not to be confused with calling Obama a dick)) took a power from the talks, took whatever balls they have, put them in a mayonnaise jar and went home.
From Forbes:

Still believe that the Republicans really want to make a deal?
They do not — at least not unless they get it at 100 percent in spending cuts with a big goose egg in raised revenues.
Our governing system is built on good faith negotiations and compromise.
Yet, clearly, one of our political parties participating in this discussion has no interest in perpetuating that system.

Indeed.
There’s been so much bickering, even Obama quipped at his presser Wednesday night: “They are in one week, they are out one week,” he said. “You need to be here. I’ve been here. I’ve been doing Afghanistan and bin Laden and the Greek crisis.”
The GOP don’t give a shit, however.
They are willing to blow the US boat out of the water instead of trying to bring this fractured place into some kind of normal, easier-to-manage operation, and all they seemingly know how to do to cry, whine and lie.
All of the GOP presidential candidates just make shit up — a must read is Matt Taibbi’s profile in Rolling Stone magazine of total nutcase, flipped-out crazy Michele Bachmann, who could be the ultimate Republican front-runner in 2012.
What a mess.

Paul Krugman in his column in the New York Times this morning nails the GOP onto the block:

Bear in mind that G.O.P. leaders don’t actually care about the level of debt.
Instead, they’re using the threat of a debt crisis to impose an ideological agenda.
If you had any doubt about that, last week’s tantrum should have convinced you.
Democrats engaged in debt negotiations argued that since we’re supposedly in dire fiscal straits, we should talk about limiting tax breaks for corporate jets and hedge-fund managers as well as slashing aid to the poor and unlucky.
And Republicans, in response, walked out of the talks.
So what’s really going on is extortion pure and simple.
As Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute puts it, the G.O.P. has, in effect, come around with baseball bats and declared, “Nice economy you have here. A real shame if something happened to it.”

Yes, a bat-shit crazy shame.

Another excerpt from the US shame files was cut open this week with the New York Times release of some WikiLeaks documents on the nefarious Guantanamo Naval Base — most likely you’ve heard or read already — and how Americans misbehaved way-badly, doing shitty things to people, which in reality and which in the end, gained nothing but the hatred and loathing of the entire freakin’ planet (not to mention a massive recruiting tool for insurgencies everywhere).

And on top of that, and as it turned out, a goodly group of these so-called inmates weren’t the bad guys: In at least 44 cases, U.S. military intelligence officials concluded that detainees had no connection to militant activity at all, a McClatchy Newspapers examination of the assessments, which cover both former and current detainees, found.

(Illustration found here).

Even as this torture, oops, I really meant “enhanced interrogation,” was going on at Gitmo, physicians on duty there, and it was there duty to call this shit out, turned a blind eye away.
From the abstract of a study conducted by the Public Library of Science (h/t antiwar.com):

The medical affidavits in each of the nine cases indicate that the specific allegations of torture and ill treatment are highly consistent with physical and psychological evidence documented in the medical records and evaluations by non-governmental medical experts.
However, the medical personnel who treated the detainees at GTMO failed to inquire and/or document causes of the physical injuries and psychological symptoms they observed.
Psychological symptoms were commonly attributed to “personality disorders” and “routine stressors of confinement.”
Temporary psychotic symptoms and hallucinations did not prompt consideration of abusive treatment. Psychological assessments conducted by non-governmental medical experts revealed diagnostic criteria for current major depression and/or PTSD in all nine cases.

And concluded:

The findings in these nine cases from GTMO indicate that medical doctors and mental health personnel assigned to the DoD neglected and/or concealed medical evidence of intentional harm.

Another take on the NYT Wikileak-Gitmo-dump comes from the searing keyboard of Chris Floyd and how torture is downplayed against the bad guys:
Money words:

Almost as sickening as the atrocities themselves, however, is the way the release has been played in the New York Times, whose coverage of the document dump will set the tone for the American media and political establishments.
The Times’ take is almost wholly devoted to showing how evil and dangerous a handful of the hundreds of Gitmo detainees were, and to justifying Barack Obama’s betrayal of his promises to close the concentration camp.
We are treated to lurid tales (many if not most of them extracted under torture, but who cares about that?) of monsters seething with irrepressible hatred of America, and so maniacally devoted to jihad that they inject themselves with libido-deadening drugs to ward off any sexual distractions from their murderous agenda.

Ugly, huh — read the whole post.

One main reason for all this horror is the institutional lie that’s become the norm, especially among the GOP, which just loves war, torture and death panels.
A great post on this shameful aspect was up yesterday at Mother Jones.
Rick Perlstein starts with the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor and works up to the current line of bullshit from Republican assholes:

And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it’s not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it.
It’s just about anyone — a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera — who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.
Sure, there will always be liars in positions of influence — that’s stipulated, as the lawyers say.
And the media, God knows, have never been ideal watchdogs — the battleships that crossed the seas to avenge the sinking of the Maine attest to that.
What’s new is the way the liars and their enablers now work hand in glove.
That I call a mendocracy, and it is the regime that governs us now.

And when a US senator gets on the floor of the US Senator and lies through his asshole, and then later walks back the lie by proclaiming the statement was “not intended to be a factual statement,” and no one calls the shithead a freakin’ liar, then something’s way-wrong.

And no amount of clothing will cover the shame.

(Illustration found here).

While the ICRC report detailed the rise in civilian causalities, NATO issued its own document stating the exact opposite — The number of civilians killed or injured by coalition airstrikes has dropped dramatically over the past several years, despite an increase in fighting in Afghanistan.
NATO says only 88 Afghan civilians have been killed so far this year.

And to that claim is an one word answer — bullshit.
An UN report says there’s been a 31 percent increase in civilians being killed — total number of civilian casualties in the first six months of this year is 3,268 – including 1,271 deaths and 1,997 injuries.
Due to the nature of the violence — IEDs, drone rockets, helicopter strikes — the Red Cross also reported a “drastic increase” in the number of amputations from war injuries, and as the war continues to bog down via quagmire style, collateral damage will only get worse.
Just to add a spice of dumb-shit and to counter the slaughter, King David Petraeus has ordered a drastic increase in the number of air strikes being launched across the nation.
Blasting the Afghan ground from above increased 172 percent in September — 700 sorties as compared to just 257 during the same time in 2009.

And to make this little story so asshole-like and sad — the Afghan war is a conflict in futility.
History writer John Prados via HuffPost:

The difficulties of war — any war — in Afghanistan are immutable and rooted in physical reality.
These problems dogged Soviet armies in the 20th Century and British ones in the 19th.
They are more deeply embedded in the fabric of the situation than the headaches of Afghan politics, the divergent goals of the Karzai government, rampant corruption, military ineffectiveness, Taliban determination, or the features of a harsh land.
…
In 2009, according to Pentagon estimates, allied forces were consuming over half a million gallons of gasoline per day, a figure that nearly doubled before the new “surge” troops began reaching the country.
During the Vietnam war the Pentagon calculated that every soldier in-country represented $7,000 in the war budget.
For Afghanistan that figure is $1,000,000.
…
In the American military, the saw is that captains and majors study tactics, colonels do strategy, and generals plan logistics.
But in Afghanistan, American generals have created a logistics nightmare incapable of solution, and then compounded the dilemma by demanding a surge that pushes the deployed force to the very edge of the abyss.
…
This conflict has reached the point where the failure modes are many and obvious, and the path to success obscure, under conditions where Americans are at risk.
The handwriting is on the wall.
To proceed further under these circumstances is to march into folly.

Stop the killing — bring US GIs home.

(h/t to Jason Ditz at antiwar.com)

NATO is scrambling to do damage control tonight after a number of weekend incidents led to the deaths of Afghan civilians, including several children.
US troops killed two civilians, including an eight year old girl in a shooting in Logar Province, while NATO air strikes in the Helmand Province killed another three civilians and wounded a number of children.
NATO troops also shot and killed a child in Kandahar Province.

(Illustration found here).

In war, a parent’s anguish never abates and is never quiet.
One of the horrors of being a parent is seeing/and/or hearing about one of your kids getting hurt, in trouble, or the worst of the unspeakable — getting killed.
And in this time of pure war, parents all over the planet are mourning.
According to UNICEF: Between 1945 and 1992, there were 149 major wars, killing more than 23 million people, including two million children killed, four to five million disabled, 12 million left homeless, more than 1 million orphaned or separated from their parents and some 10 million psychologically traumatized.
And those records are now two decades along — more than enough branches on Anne Frank’s Tree.

Since March 2003, 4,424 US military service people have died in Iraq with 31,964 wounded, while in the ongoing second theater of slaughter, Afghanistan, where after nearly nine whole years of fighting, 1,206 US troops have died with more than half that total killed in the last two years alone — 354 this year and 303 in 2009.
A nasty, terrifying ordeal for the more than 6,000 set of parents, along with other relatives and friends.

The anguish of war for parents also in the horror of the US war machine.
Case in total point, the parents of Spc. Adam Winfield, shown at left in an undated photo with their son, who is accused along with four other US Army personnel of murdering Afghan civilians “for sport,” despite Adam’s attempts to warn his dad about the situation.

(Illustration found here).

According to salon.com:

Winfield wrote his father, Chris, on Feb. 14 about his concern that two members of his platoon had the previous month murdered “some innocent guy about my age just farming.”
The correspondence from that day illustrates the young soldier’s horror at the murder, and also reveals a shocking indifference about the killing among the other troops in his platoon.
“Well, it was two guys who did it actually killed the dude (sic) but the whole platoon knew about it,” Winfield wrote to his father. “Theres (sic) no one in this platoon that agrees this is wrong.”
…
“There are no more good men left here,” Winfield wrote in the Feb. 14 exchange released to Salon by Chris Winfield through his attorney, Neal Puckett.
At one point, Winfield seemed to echo Sen. John Kerry’s haunting 1971 testimony about Vietnam when Kerry asked rhetorically, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
“I started to think whether I should quit and just give up because it’s stupid to get smoked in Afghanistan,” Winfield wrote.
“The Army really let me down when I thought I would come out here to do good maybe make some change in this country I find out that its all a lie (sic).”

Adam’s dad tried to alert the Army, but he was shit-out-of-luck:

Chris Winfield has said that he made multiple calls to the Army (including at least four to various offices at Fort Lewis) in an effort to report the murder his son described to him. On Friday, the Army announced that it is investigating this claim.
…
He said nobody ever got back to him. Members of his son’s platoon allegedly committed at least two more murders in the months that followed.
The Army has now implicated Adam Winfield in one of those later killings.
“The Army had the opportunity and they dropped the ball,” Chris Winfield said.
“The Army has the blood on their hands on those two [later] murders.
They want to sweep it under the carpet and make it disappear,” he claimed.
“I’m not going to let them do that.”

War is bad, ugly shit for parents, too.

Yes, why indeed.
So why with all the shit, would bullet Bob Gates blubber this out last May: “We’re not leaving Afghanistan prematurely,” Gates finally said. “In fact, we’re not ever leaving at all.”

In August, Gates retorted himself: “We’ll have completed the surge. We’ll have done the assessment in December. And it seems like somewhere there in 2011 is a logical opportunity to hand off.”
And King David Petraeus also shitting out his face: “You have to recognize also that I don’t think you win this war. I think you keep fighting. It’s a little bit like Iraq, actually. . . . Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”

(Illustration found here).

And while these assholes blubber and lie and stall and backbite, young US peoples and Afghan peoples of all ages are dying, being blown apart, and just not living.

Despite President Obama insistence the US will hand-off the war to the Afghan government next July, he told Rolling Stone magazine, “[I]t’s going to take us several years to work through this issue.”

And the dying is forever:

2010 is already the deadliest year of the Afghan war for U.S. forces. So far, 354 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan this year compared to 303 in 2009, which was the second deadliest year of the war.
A total of 650 U.S. troops troops have been killed in Afghanistan since President Barack Obama was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2010, after campaigning for president vowing to shift the focus of U.S. military efforts overseas from Iraq to Afghanistan.
The 650 U.S. casualties in Afghanistan since Obama’s inauguration equal almost 54 percent of all U.S. casualties for the entire duration of the war.
Given that Obama has been president for 618 days, U.S. troops have been dying in Afghanistan at a rate of more than one a day since he took over as commander in chief.

And apparently the killing will continue forever.

(Illustration found here).

Of course, mush-mouth Mitch was yakking about the 1 percent at the top of the US income braket — the rich.
Paul Krugman this morning takes a whack at the self-pity wailings of the rich if George Jr.’s tax cuts are allowed to expire at the end of this year — it’s just so pathic.
The economic bottom dwellers aren’t the ones blubbering:

Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans.
You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
…
At the same time, self-pity among the privileged has become acceptable, even fashionable.
Tax-cut advocates used to pretend that they were mainly concerned about helping typical American families. Even tax breaks for the rich were justified in terms of trickle-down economics, the claim that lower taxes at the top would make the economy stronger for everyone.
These days, however, tax-cutters are hardly even trying to make the trickle-down case.
Yes, Republicans are pushing the line that raising taxes at the top would hurt small businesses, but their hearts don’t really seem in it.
Instead, it has become common to hear vehement denials that people making $400,000 or $500,000 a year are rich.
I mean, look at the expenses of people in that income class — the property taxes they have to pay on their expensive houses, the cost of sending their kids to elite private schools, and so on.
Why, they can barely make ends meet.

And in a similar vein from Robert Reich:

The rich spend a far smaller portion of their money than anyone else because, hey, they’re rich.
That means continuing the Bush tax cut for them wouldn’t stimulate much demand or create many jobs.
But it would blow a giant hole in the budget — $36 billion next year, $700 billion over ten years.
Millionaire households would get a windfall of $31 billion next year alone.
And the Republican charge that restoring the Clinton tax rates for the rich would hurt the economy — because it would reduce the “incentives” of the rich (including the richest small business owners) to create jobs — is ludicrous.

But dude, cake is expensive.

If there’s going to be any kind of future history — or any kind of logical future history with all the shit hitting the earth’s fan right now — President Obama will be named/remembered as the most-greatest letdown of all time.

Indeed, there’s thousands if not millions of people completely discouraged by US politics after Obama talked cool during the 2008 campaign, then became a toady for business-as-usual, despite all the nefarious goings-on created in the past decade — a shitload of young people have lost their ‘yes, we can.’

My own problem with Obama began as a kind of metaphysical, too-cool-for-school sense that there was more to the guy than just a nearly-incredible ability to say what the mass of people wanted to hear, and do it in such a sincere way that it formulated an almost giddy, happy-time feeling.
This nagging doubt surfaced within my own brain when Obama visited Afghanistan in 2008 and pulled off a three-point basketball shot in front of adoring US troops — see the video here.
Although this doubt continued, I was more than overjoyed by how the young were grouping around candidate Obama — a photo from some political blog (might have been Daily Kos) depicting a white, middle-class-looking teenager sporting a tee-shirt which proclaimed: ‘My Future Rests With Obama’ at a huge campaign rally in Portland, OR, seemed to say it all.
And, of course, John McCain’s horrible, trainwreck of a campaign helped a great deal — McCain’s biggest dumb-ass, long-lasting piece of action was to inflict the US with the Sarah Palin disease, thus lowering the political IQ into the negative.
When I told one of my daughters about my gut feelings with Obama’s basketball shot, she didn’t want to hear it — in fact, many people, young and old, didn’t want to hear it.

There’s a long list of Obama’s disappointments, starting nearly right away with the naming of a nit-witted economic crew (literally giving control of the hen house to the fox) to the re-designing of the endless Afghan war, but the most degrading, simple-minded move came just the other night on his sugar-moistened speech continuing the big lie on the Iraqi war.
He praised George Jr.
Obama gave the former Decider an near-direct bit of commendation: “…no one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security… As I have said, there were patriots who supported this war, and patriots who opposed it, and all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women, and our hopes for Iraqis’ future.”
Despite George Jr.’s role as a war criminal — read Jonathan Steel’s piece on the 2001 set-up for the Afghanistan invasion and see how the US has lost more than troops and treasure.
And that little move was one of the least of the disasters formed by George Jr. and The Dick, among them, torture, illegal wars, wholesale slaughter of Iraqis and Afghans, nothing more than just an all-around horrifying time for all.

And I’m not the Lone Ranger in a growing legion of former Obama supporters.
A striking example is today’s post by James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, on his blog, Clusterfuck Nation.
The biting bit:

I voted for Barack Obama.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a tad disappointed in how things turned out with him.
These days he makes Millard Fillmore look like Frederick the Great.
His speech last week on Iraq and, incidentally, economic matters, was such a puffery of hollow platitudes that I was a little surprised he didn’t go up in a vapor at the end of it like a genie and retreat inside his desk lamp in a little trail of steam.
Nobody can figure out why he keeps the same krewe of viziers at his elbow after all these months of failure to engage with reality.
The voters were expecting a champion and got a Labradoodle instead.

Sad, way, way-sad.

UPDATE

Another similar view of Obama’s Iraqi war speech last week from Jeff Huber in a post this morning (9/7/10).
Is Obama out-sourcing Bush?
The scoop:

Bush could give a speech like that with a straight face because he lacked sufficient moral and cognitive subtlety to understand how full of crap he was.
Obama doesn’t have that excuse.
His father didn’t even stick around to watch him grow up, much less buy him degrees from Harvard and Yale, and Air National Guard pilot wings, and spiritual redemption from a televangelist, and a baseball team, and a political career.
Obama had to acquire clout the hard way, which means he spent more time operating under the table than a Bangkok bar girl.
As a result, Obama has developed a sophisticated capacity for Orwellian Doublethink, the ability to simultaneously accept both of two contradictory beliefs as truth.

Read all of Huber’s piece, it also covers Obama’s timeline on warmongering.
And, yes, once again, sad, way, way-sad.

A big problem, however, might lie in some kind of lie.
Sharp-eyed blogger Eric Metze might have uncovered a glitch:

I’ve used a web service called Splicd to highlight these five seconds of the original two minute piece from Inside Edition.
In this clip, you will see/hear a glitch in the video.
This glitch causes the narrator to say, “Doctors say what happened to Desire should [glitch] discourage people from getting a flu shot.”
Now listen to this longer clip so you can hear the glitch in context.
It’s obvious that the doctors say that even though this happened to the young woman, people should not be discouraged from getting the flu shot.
But considering how that clip is edited, it’s not exactly clear what they mean unless you happen to catch it.
…
What does this mean? It means that someone took the original Inside Edition article, chopped out the word “not”, and provided physical copies for people to upload. There are dozens (hundreds?) of people actively spreading an obvious propaganda virus that was edited by an anonymous person and injected into the veins of the internet.

Another Fox News moment — Run with a falsehood no matter the facts.