Too much Rummy

Everybody's sick of this guy, even the First Lady.

According to a new book by political reporter extraordinaire Bob Woodward (or the Big Woody, as I like to call him), former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card tried multiple times to get Shrub to fire Rummy's sorry ass for mucking up Iraq the way he has. After Shrub decided to listen to Cheney and Rove instead of Card, Card wound up resigning, essentially in protest. He was "convinced that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam and that history would record that no senior administration officials had raised their voices in opposition to the conduct of the war," and he didn't want to be one of those guys.

Gotta give Card credit for wising up, I suppose.

The book also outlines a number of criticisms of Rummy, and paints a picture of an insecure dilettante who basically refuses to deal with the situations he himself has helped to create.

Woodward writes that Rice and Rumsfeld have been warned repeatedly about the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

Returning from his assignment as the first head of the Iraq Postwar Planning Office, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner told Rumsfeld on June 23, 2003, that the United States had made "three tragic mistakes" in Iraq.

The first two, he said, were the orders his successor, L. Paul Jerry Bremer, had given banning members of the Baath Party from government jobs and disbanding the Iraqi military. The third was Bremer's dismissal of an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term.

"There's still time to rectify this," he said. "There's still time to turn it around."

But Rumsfeld dismissed the idea, according to Woodward. "We're not going to go back," Rumsfeld said.

The article goes on to describe Rumsfeld's personality traits.

Rumsfeld received an even more blunt criticism from Steve Herbits, a longtime friend who according to Woodward has served as an informal adviser to Rumsfeld since he became defense secretary. In a seven-page memo in July, 2005, entitled, "Summary of Post-Iraq Planning and Execution Problems," Herbits... described "Rumsfeld's style of operation," which he said was the "Haldeman model, arrogant," referring to Nixon's White House chief of staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman. "Indecisive, contrary to popular image. Would not accept that some people in some areas were smarter than he. . . . Trusts very few people. Very, very cautious. Rubber glove syndrome---a tendency not to leave his fingerprints on decisions."

Along with a true outline of the incompetence with which Iraq has been handled, I also can't even begin to remember the number of Republicans and military men who have criticized the Secretary of Defense. I do know it's a whole lot. And that right there says something about Rummy: it says that for the good of the country, he should be taken out back and beaten with a hose.

Hmmmm. I think some beef kifta kabob today. Extra sesame sauce.

Adriane!

After a two-week long hiatus from this little site o' mine, what shall I write about? Hmmmm? So much going ON! Shall I talk about the National Intelligence Estimate that found Iraq to be creating more terrorists as opposed to winning the war on terror?

Nah.

How about the abounding conspiracy theories that surround our plummeting gas prices? Shall I give throat to my own suspicions that someone somewhere thinks that if I'm only paying $2.40 a gallon in November I'll be more likely to vote for the GOP?

Nah.

How about the various races in my very own Colorado, and the fact that newly-released polls indicate that a number of previously "safe" Republican districts are now estimated to be in danger of being taken over by Democratic candidates?

Nah.

I know! I'll talk about Uwe Boll!

Who?

Y'know, that German film director who just challenged each of his film critics to a boxing match. Boll, who is responsible for such hideous B movies as "BloodRayne" and "Alone in the Dark," was apparently sick and tired of the bad rap his movies were getting, and he started taking it personally. So personally, in fact, that he managed to KO every single one of the critics that accepted his proposal- even the ones who thought the whole thing was a joke.

Jeff Sneider of Los Angeles, a journalist with Ain't It Cool News, went down in a technical knockout in the first round after his trainer threw in the towel.

He said Boll, 41, had told him it was just a joke, a public relations stunt.

"Then he started beating the crap out of my head," he said. "I think he's a jerk. This might be PR but I don't want to keep getting punched in the head."

Meanwhile, Boll's trophy actress, Kristanna Loken, admired his fighting style from the audience.

"It's absolutely ridiculous. That's why I love him," she said.

Me too, Boll. Me too.

Not very graceful

Okay, I'm disgusted. Partly at CNN, for retaining the services of such a blatant sensationalist, but mostly at Nancy Gracer herself. Her latest accomplishment is the dead mother of a kidnapped 2-year-old.

The woman, 21-year-old Melinda Duckett, shot herself after taping an interview with Grace, who relentlessly hammered her about where she was when her kid was stolen. Grace wouldn't let the point go, even though the girl said she'd been told by police not to discuss details of the case, because the investigation was ongoing. Grace, not surprisingly, essentially accused her of negligence and complicity in the boy's kidnapping. Her tone was prosecutorial, and she sounded disgusted, as though she was talking to a criminal and not a victim.

"Nancy Grace and the others, they just bashed her to the end," Duckett's grandfather Bill Eubank said Tuesday. "She wasn't one anyone ever would have thought of to do something like this. She and that baby just loved each other, couldn't get away from each other. She wouldn't hurt a bug."

But still, of course, it could turn out that Duckett had something to do with her kid's disappearance. If she did, if the kid is dead in a field somewhere, then so be it, she's guilty. But if not, if she shot herself out of grief that she allowed her child to be kidnapped, then hopefully Grace will live up to her namesake and apologize to Duckett's family.

Either way, however, Grace was out of line. What she did in that interview was judgmental and accusatory, not journalistic. She acted like a cop, not an interviewer. Her taste for sensationalist stories has led her to cover topics like Natalee Holloway's Aruba disappearance and the Mark Karr arrest extensively, when other networks gave those matters much more cursory attention. She belongs on daytime television, without the credibility CNN brings to the table.

In short, Nancy Grace is a piss-poor representative of journalists everywhere, and someday I'd like to slap the shit out of her.

This is what Colin Powell's middle finger looks like

The former secretary of state has finally stepped out of the shadows and into the mixer. He sent a letter to Sen. McCain and others, arguing against the White House's attempt to exclude American Forces from the Geneva Convention restrictions on torture and like-minded rules. You know, pesky humanitartian ideals that get in the way of the "War on Terror."

Pfah.

Powell wrote, "I just returned to town and learned about the debate taking place in Congress to redefine Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. I do not support such a step and believe it would be inconsistent with the McCain amendment on torture which I supported last year... The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 would add to these doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk."

According to CNN, Powell also wrote that he agreed with the position of General John Vessey, Reagan's chairman of the joint chiefs, who had counseled McCain that redefining Common Article 3 would "undermine the moral basis which has generally guided our conduct in war throughout our history."

Said Vessey, "In my short 46 years in the armed forces, Americans confronted the horrors of the prison camps of the Japanese during World War II, the North Koreans in 1950-53 and the North Vietnamese in the long years of the Vietnam War, as well as knowledge of the Nazis' Holocaust depredations in World War II. Through those years, we held to our own values. We should continue to do so."

A-fucking-men.

This is an important step, methinks. The number of Republicans and former supporters abandoning Shrub are growing, almost by the day. But Powell carries weight with both sides, and has been known as an almost apolitical figure of integrity. I can't see Shrub brushing this off any time soon.

"But Mr. President, the man YOU chose as your first secretary of state has said that this is a stupid idea."

Yar. Here's to you, Mr. Powell.

Sage advice

Say hello to my little friend

Guess what thelatest invention in crowd control is? Yup! It's a heat ray! Zap!

Could it have come from the minds of trekkies, Star Wars lovers, idolizers of Spock and Boba Fett that somehow managed to work their fantasies into reality? That's what I'm guessing.

Whichever, I'd like a big bowl of chicken soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. Comfort food. Because the world is a scary place.

Take it to the limit

Can't do much- it's the end of the day and I need to skedaddle, but this
is something that was too important for me to leave unposted. Dig it.

American Retard

I wish this was a joke, but it's not.

Shrub has appointed former American Idol contestant Clay Aiken to serve on his Committee for People with Disabilities.

Music soothes even the savage beast, eh?

The left-ing of the Bible Belt

Republicans aren't all psychotic right-wing nutjobs that hate sexuality, evolution, and darkies. And here's some proof.

It's a story about how more and more, moderate Kansas Republicans are beginning to run as Democrats. For example, there's Mark Parkinson, the former chair of the Kansas GOP. He's fed up with how the party's been pushing divisive social issues like intelligent design, and he decided to do something about it. He ran for lieutenant governor- as a Democrat.

"There's been a long series of Republican infighting over issues that do not affect people's daily lives," Parkinson explains. "I'm 49. I got tired of fighting about whether Charles Darwin was right when I was 14 or 15. I'm not spending the rest of my life on that issue."

The article discusses how Kansas' governor, Democrat Kathleen Sebelius, is using the rift between social moderates and extremists to give the Dems a much-needed boost. In the process, she's recruited a good number of former Republicans to run as moderate Democrats. Parkinson is only one of them.

In 2002, [Sebelius] beat a conservative Republican nominee by appealing to voters who care more about schools and taxes than abortion and evolution -- and by recruiting a centrist Republican to run as her lieutenant governor. Four years later, Sebelius has again tapped a moderate Republican as her running mate, and this time eight other party-switchers will join her on the Democratic ticket. Depending on whom you believe, in her cross-the-aisle raids Sebelius has either found an effective strategy for turning Kansas a little less red, or she has used her personal popularity to mask the slow decline of her party.

Paul Morrison, another former GOPer-turned-Dem, is running for attorney general. He said he was fed up when

incumbent Phill Kline had turned the attorney general's office into a platform for partisan politics. Kline made headlines when he attempted to access the medical records of Kansas women who'd had abortions. "So much time and energy," Morrison says, "is being spent on pursuing a narrow partisan agenda that most people don't agree with."

About another convert-

For Cindy Neighbor, who's running for the state House, the decision to ditch the Republican Party came when she looked at a platform that included opposition to stem cell research and support for school vouchers and the teaching of intelligent design. "Even when they say they're a wide-open party," Neighbor laments, "it's, 'If you don't agree with us, you're not one of us.' It was about being able to have some freedom to be an individual rather than just a puppet."

This, to me, spells hope. The traditional base on which Reagan drew 20 years ago is realizing that their party has warped into something they don't like, something strange and dogmatic and completely removed from reason. These are the people who are Republicans because they don't like excessive legislation or overtaxation. These are the people who pledge allegiance to the flag but believe so strongly in personal privacy rights that they don't particularly care whether their neighbors are queer. They, like the left, are more interested in having a dialogue and getting things done than they are about condemning godless heathens. They're the kind of people that are open and care about their communities, and they're one of the reasons that Bush hasn't completely won yet, and they're why he never will.

Shhhh! No prisons here!

This is becoming a year for admissions. First shrub says flat out that Saddam never had anything to do with 9/11, and now he's come out of the proverbial closet on the CIA's secret prisons.

Wonkette offers this hilarious summation of the scene:

Recap: Terror, Iraq, Terror, Bad People … and oh, by the way, all those secret CIA prisons where U.S. goons torture people? The ones we always denied even existed? Well, uh, yeah, they all exist. We have secret torture prisons all over the world. But it’s OK now, because I have authorized the transfer of 14 brown people to the acknowledged torture prison at Guantanamo Bay. Rock on.

Can't you just see shrub posing solemnly, like Wayne and Garth, and then ever so slowly raising his hand, with only the forefinger and pinky extended?

Oh, and he still wants Congress to make federal agents immune to prosecution. He'll grant the "terrorists" their Geneva Convention rights, but only when it's convenient.

Hopefully, it won't matter soon. As CNN reports, 55% of Americans are pissed off enough about the shrubbies fucking up the war in Iraq that they're likely to vote against any GOP candidate who supports it. Which means (gasp!) that the shrubbies are about to lose Congress and a LOT of flexibility!

If there's one phrase that sums up how I feel about the GOP's abysmal numbers, it would be "boo-yah." Here's hoping shrub's last two years are filled with moments that make him look like this:



Pepperoni pizza today. Extra marinara. And breadstix. Yum.

Candidate Stewart

Sign the online petition to get Jon Stewart to run for President of the United States here.

Corporate pirates or butt pirates?

A new book called "The Architect," all about Karl Rove's life, has a stunning little tidbit that I couldn't leave alone. It seems that Bush's Brain's Dad was batting for the other team. Read about the new book here.

In other words, the Creator of the Architect liked Erections.

Though not strictly speaking, unfortunately. The gentleman in question, Louis Rove, was Karl's stepfather, not his biological one. Still, Rove never really knew his real pop, just his gay one. At least until he was a senior in high school, at which point Louisss up and left for L.A. with no real explanation. Poof, gone, like a fairy in the springtime.

What this does, however, is beg the question how many more of these hawks have GLBT connections. There's already the case of Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Mr. Halliburton himself. How much further can this be pushed? Especially by an administration so hellbent on GLBT discrimination?

A footnote to this is the widely suspected homosexuality of RNC chairman Ken Mehlman. In an article for Huffington Post, James Moore (who also wrote the above-mentioned book about Rove's life), points out that Mehlman has repeatedly caused confusion as to whether he's straight or not.

Mainstream reporters have never asked Mehlman if he is gay but Eric Resnick, a journalist for a gay publication in Cleveland, chased Mehlman down at a GOP fund-raising dinner in Akron. Resnick told Mehlman that he had been outed on blogs and talk radio and he wondered how he justified being gay and pushing an anti-gay agenda. Mehlman was non-responsive. Resnick persisted and finally asked Mehlman if he was gay.

"You have asked a question no one should have to answer," Mehlman responded.

The delicately chosen words annoyed Resnick and John Aravosis of Americablog. According to Aravosis, Mehlman, who is in his early 40s and unmarried, gave a "non-answer, answer."

"He's at the top of his profession in a conservative political party," Aravosis told me last year. "If he's not gay, why wouldn't he react the same way every straight guy does when someone asks them if they are gay? They sort of energetically tell you hell no they're not gay. Mehlman says nothing. Seems like he would want everyone in his party to know he's not gay. Maybe he's a closeted heterosexual."

Mehlman subjected himself to such speculation after deploying a voter profiling mechanism for the 2004 election. The RNC used background data on voters such as what type of car they drive, how much they earn, marital status, the color of their skin, the neighborhood where they live, and other factors to arrive at various political conclusions about individuals and determine if they were likely GOP voters. His political critics have decided it is now fair to talk about what type of profile best fits Mehlman.

Strange secrets, and stranger bedfellows.

Ha! Bedfellows!

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

*Chuckle.*

Crikey!

Steve Irwin's lucky streak finally ran out.

I'm by no means an expert, but from the little I've seen of that fucker's antics, he pushed the envelope on a number of occasions. I recall one instance where he was holding a four-foot-long snake that was extremely poisonous, and the lithe bastard almost caught Irwin in the jewels with his fangs.

Still, Irwin was a crackup. So raise your glasses, mates. Here's to the Croc Hunter.