Bush's Boogeyman is Back

Curiously timed and conveniently undated videotape of Osama Bin Laden has surfaced, right when we have Bush administration officials proclaiming their "gut feelings" about imminent terrorist attacks and then being ridiculed all over everywhere for it. This was then followed up by Condi Rice proclaiming warning signs of a terrorist attack.
And now we have Osama, once again providing tape of an unspecified origin, right when the Bush administration needs their boogeyman. Support for the war in Iraq is slipping, not only amongst the citizens of America, but amongst the GOP itself. What better way to cloud the minds of the people with fear than to wave the scariest boogeyman (and former CIA asset) at them. That is so, like, 2004, dude.
Now we know that while we're bogged down with war in Iraq Al Qaeda has regrouped in Pakistan and garnered more recruits, making them stronger than ever. While we're wasting time waging a war against Iran, we're no safer than we were on September 10, 2001. All the illegal wiretaps, torture and spying on the American people haven't made us any safer, and neither has the Republican party, or it's incompetent leadership in the White House, which has bathed itself in secrecy to no end. But in order to end this madness, we need a new strategy, which no front runner from either party has offered up, only the same old same old, which has been so (in)effective so far.

Hey, You! Remember Us? The People Who Vote For You And Pay Your Wages?

Today must be the day that all is right with this country. New Orleans has been rebuilt, our borders are secure, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have ended, Dick Cheney has impeached, and the White House has accepted subpeonas in the US attorney firing case. Oh, wait a minute, none of that has happened.
What has happened is the House of Representatives has passed H Con Res 21, which passed with only Reps. Kucinich and Paul voting against it. What this resolution does is pressure the UN to bring Iranian president Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Convention on Genocide and the United Nations charter. Something that has never happened. That's right folks, we're punishing a man for making a statement that he never said. What he did say was:

this occupation regime over Jerusalem" to "vanish from the page of time.'

This hardly qualifies as genocide (especially with regard to how Americans are slaughtering Iraqis and IDF forces are killing Palestinians), and would more likely be tantamount to suicide, since Israel has nuclear weapons and Iran has yet to be proved to have them. What this is in reality is part of the Likudnik party's "A Clean Break", which calls for breaking up all Arab states in the region into smaller pieces (like we're doing in Iraq, since the Neocons are so chummy with the Likudniks)for the security of Israel. This is also a ramping up of rhetoric against Iran in preparation for a US strike against them using tactical nuclear weapons, which will likely kill a lot of Iranian civilians, but in no way can that be construed as genocide.
While all this is happening, the US is committing war crimes, violation UN resolutions and the Geneva conventions, but that's okay (not really). And Israel stands in violation of numerous UN resolutions itself.
So with the conitnuing slump in housing sales, the health care crisis, global warming trends, outsourcing of jobs, and lack of support for the wars overseas, it's nice to know that Congress could get together on one thing totally irrelevant and unnecessary to the American people. Good job!
(Well, they also came together on a pay raise for themselves, after all, ignoring the American people is hard work.)

Random Rantings

Last week, on Face The Nation, independent (yeah, right) Senator Joe Lieberman advocated the bombing of Iran. While not in line with the way many people feel about excelerating the MidEast conflict (most of them want it ended, hence the Democraps control of Congress in 2006), it is in line with the neocons and the Israeli government, who have been looking for an excuse to drop nuclear weapons on Iran for as long as two years ago. As Charley Reese put it:

Iran has no intercontinental missiles, and the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons is Israel. Please note that the United States flatly refuses to endorse the idea of a nuclear-free Middle East. Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has refused to sign it. Iran admits international inspectors. Israel flatly refuses to allow international inspectors. The only country in today's Middle East with weapons of mass destruction and a history of invading and occupying other people's countries is Israel.

As for Iran's alleged threat to "wipe Israel off the map," that is propaganda based on a mistranslation. Nobody in Iran has ever threatened to attack Israel militarily. The accurate quotes from Iranians have been simply that Israel as a Zionist state will eventually collapse, just as the Soviet Union as a communist state did. Iranian officials have even explicitly said they have no desire or intention of attacking Israel.

The Bush Doctrine Applied To Other Countries
Now suppose Iran, who has been threatened by not only the US, but Israel as well, decided to pre emptively strike first? Wouldn't that be okay? By the Bush regime's specious reasoning, the attacks on 9/11 were perfectly justified because the US had threatened the Taleban first with a carpet of bombs, after they rejected our carpet of gold to build a pipeline through their country.
Send Your Kids To Die, Leave Mine Alone
Mitt Romney has stated he wants to increase the size of the military. But like Joe Lieberman, Rudy Ghouliani, or any other war pimps running for the presidency (which includes everyone, with the exception of Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, and Mike Gravel), none of them have any family members in the military.
That's why there's the big push to pass the immigration "reform" bill, not only will it lower wages by flooding the labor pool, but:

a provision in the stalled immigration bill that would have allowed some undocumented aliens to join the military

What right-thinking white person wouldn't endorse a war where we send all them brown-skinned people from over here to fight all them brown-skinned people over there? When this bill passes, it won't matter that the Army missed it's recruitment goals, because there'll be plenty of people to send off to kill and die for big oil and the military-industrial complex. Especially when the war engulfes the whole MidEast because some idiots decided we needed to bomb Iran.

Suppose They Gave A Straw Poll And Nobody Came?

Rudy Ghouliani came to town today, and while I didn't get the chance to go see him, perhaps it's all for the best as far I can see, I don't need to be arrested by his staff should I pose the wrong question (so much for freedom of the press under Blinky). But I guess I should be glad Ghoulianai showed up at all, especially after I read where both Ghouliani and McCain will skip the Iowa straw poll. No candidate in the straw poll's nearly 30 year history has bypassed the event and won the caucuses. And since the Iowa caucus is so important, either Blinky has no intention of winning, or he's relying on the Republican vote fraud machine to do it's dirty work.
Or maybe it's because the gargoyle knows that every online poll conducted following the debates like this one, or this one, or even this one (why do they all ask who was the snappiest dresser? Does that matter?)place Ron Paul as the winner. Even Fox News poll placed Ron Paul second. A straw poll now when Ghouliani the front runner is presumed to be the nominee would look pretty bad if he gets the tar beaten out of him by Ron Paul, unless, of course, he doesn't make an effort. Than he and the backing of the corporate media propaganda noise machine can once again discount Paul's support like this piece as a quirk, rather than the people trying to have a voice in the democratic process. The Blinky wins, and we all lose.

Those Damned Democrats........

.....soft on the idea of nuclear war. Who wouldn't want a nuclear war? That seems to the Republicans to be the most viable way to fight terrorism-drop nuclear weapons on Iran!
Those damned Democrats, living in the nineties, when people actually used things like diplomacy to achieve a goal, instaed of starting another war because somebody somewhere is doing something that Republican leadership doesn't like. If Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons (which, they insist they're not, but our government doesn't believe them because our government is populated with people who lie, therfore they don't trut other people to tell the truth) they might use them, even though any use by them (or anybody else) would be a violation of international law. But it's okay for us to use them, even though we're a bunch of duplicitous hypocrites who only want to control the world's oil supply so oil companies can gain a complete monopoly and gouge American drivers even more (watch your back, Chavez, you're next).
Those damned Democrats, who (claim to) want to end the war in Iraq, even though it means "the terrorists will follow us home", but only if you exclude the latest terror plot which only proves that killing mass civilians in Iraq hasn't dissuaded people from other countries from trying to attack us on our own soil.
Republicans have painted themselves in a corner with this whole "terrorism" thing (terrorism is what they do to us-Noam Chomsky) tying every other issue to it. Immigration bill? Depending which (lunatic) fringe of the party you're trying to appeal to, the new bill will either help terrorists, or hurt terrorists. I'm sure these guys can't even choose which tie to wear until they decide how it will hurt the terrorists (frankly, in the above picture, McCain's tie hurts me the most, so I can only imagine the devastating effects it will have on alQaeda).
Those damned Democrats don't have enough front runners either. While two or three Democrats can be considered front runners, the Republicans now have four, including that former GE employee with the hot trophy wife, who hasn't even joined the race yet.
(Of course, they don't include Ron Paul who leads this poll,even though analysts say he's really 3% higher than polls indicate)

In Rudy's Dreams......

Rudy "Blinky" Giuliani said that yesterday's news of a plot to blow up fuel lines at JFK airport is an example of why he should be elected president, because he has the most experience fighting terrorism. Funny, I don't see a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan on his resume`. There was that time on September 11, when he made some pronouncements from the safety of his office, but I don't think there were any terrorists there to fight (because, you know, they all died in the plane crashes).
In fact, I think that yesterday's foiled terror plot is one more example of why Giuliani shouldn't be elected President. It should be obvious to anyone with a brain that the war in Iraq hasn't made us any safer from terror plots here at home, and seems to have attracted more people to strike against us. Great job, fuck-ups!
No, the only one who has any experience fighting anything but a couple ex-wives is John McCain, and he flip flops more than that goldfish at the end of that Faith No More video for "Epic". Personally, I hope when Fred Thompson joins the race he wipes your scrawny blinky ass out of the race, even though as a former actor employed by GE, Thompson scares me more than any other Republican candidate.