Category: Politics

Heath tipped me off to William Gibson’s blog which had this quotation from Ron Suskind’s article, “Without a Doubt“, in New York Times Magazine:

“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were in what we call the ‘reality-based community’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’; I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

Dear God, I think I am now more afraid about the state of the world than I have been since 9/11. Probably more because if this sentiment is true, and if it does in fact define the thought processes of the Bush Administration at large, then the real threat is within us.

OK this is pretty sick:

Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of the largest chain of television stations in the nation, plans to air a documentary that accuses Sen. John Kerry of betraying American prisoners during the Vietnam War, a newspaper reported Monday.

The network has ordered all 62 of its stations to air “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal” without commercials in prime-time next week, the Washington Post said, just two weeks before the Nov. 2 election.

More on the liberal media here.

Now, I’m all for equal time for candidates and an informed electorate, but the only way to balance this thing out would be for them to run leftist propaganda like Fahrenheit 9/11. Either way, it would seem illegal that the head of the chain can just order network affiliates to run programming whenever he wants. These are network affiliates who have agreements with their networks and their own local programming already scheduled months in advance. Now they’re being forced to air something because their whack-job top brass gets a wild hair and decides they want to air something? This is a gross abuse of power.

In other news, Jacques Derrida and Superman died over the weekend. So without the Nietzschean über-mensch and the father of Deconstructionism, what ever will modern philosophy do?

I was just flipping through the channels (yes, Comcast still hasn’t disconnected my cable) and saw Pat Buchanan on Hardball with Chris Matthews. Ordinarily I wouldn’t give either of these savage twits the time of day but since The West Wing was on commercial, I figured what the heck and gave them a couple of minutes to speak to me. What followed was nothing short of a paradigm shifting without a clutch.

On this day, September 7, 2004, I fully agreed with every word that spilled from the mouth of erstwhile Presidential candidate and noted religious whack-job Patrick J. Buchanan.

I screamed in a toxic mixture of confusion and relief, which I imagine is how people must feel when Spiderman saves their child – suddenly this insect-man-thing comes to the rescue out of nowhere? Seems old Pattycakes is breaking from the party line and writing his own Bush administration-dissing tome. It’s called, ever so cleverly, Where the Right Went Wrong. Click this link to the Drudge Report’s list of quotations from Buchanan’s book and read along at home. Periodically pause to remind yourself that this is the man who called AIDS “nature’s retribution” to homosexuals, and who said “our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity.”

Looking at the quotations from his book, I could not ask for a more striking sign of the Apocalypse than the fact that, at least for today, Pat Buchanan provided me with a voice of reason and a breath of fresh air. Were I looking for a surer sign of the End Times, I have found it. What does it say about this administration when the liberals are standing hand in hand with the likes of Pat Buchanan?

Here are some great quotations that I came across recently
from Malcolm Forbes (1919-1990).

“Profits shouldn’t be the sole measure of success. It’s also making sure that not too many people are getting screwed by the system, and that people understand that the system as a whole is working for the benefit of the most people. I’m not suggesting that they do that just to be nice to everybody but to be damned sure that the system survives, and it doesn’t help if everybody thinks he’s getting the short end of the stick.”

“I’ve found it hard to swallow a Republican candidate, and in the privacy of the voting booth, I didn’t always [vote Republican]. The majority of the people lean to the Democratic Party because it is the party of greater awareness and greater conscience, and the voice of the Republican Party is often the voice of reaction.”

“The Republican label is endangered, in my judgment, because often the people who call themselves conservatives are merely using a polite word for reactionary.”

“In terms of Government and the economy, I simply think that the way you conserve what you value is to anticipate change, and if you’re not in the vanguard, at least be flexible and open to the nuances. You don’t preserve by dropping roadblocks in the path of change.”

— Malcolm Forbes, 1979

All of these domains are registered to a guy in Little Rock:

www.kerrypicksedwards.com
www.kerrypicksvilsack.com
www.kerrypicksgephardt.com
www.kerrypicksclark.com
www.kerrypicksbayh.com

and they all forward to a mile-long page at GOP.com (the Republican National Committee’s website) that tells of the horrors of John Edwards:

http://www.gop.com/RNCResearch/Read.aspx?id=4345

I’m impressed. If they registered all those domains, then that means the RNC probably wrote up mile-long pages for each of the other contenders as well…pages that they won’t get to use. Those are some motivated cats. I humbly bow to the superior flying monkey forces of the Republican party.

Sadly, www.kerrypicksclinton.com is still available, despite Matt Drudge’s fever dream scenario of a John Kerry-Hillary Clinton ticket.

1.) Budget allotted the 9/11 commission to investigate one of the most horrific atrocities in American history: $15 million.

2.) Budget allotted Ken Starr and his flying monkeys during the GOP’s appallingly nasty effort to crucify Bill Clinton because he had mediocre oral sex in the Oval Office: $70 million.
Thanks for some perspective, Mark Morford

Something else I’ve noticed recently:

commie, pinko, leftist, treasonous, pot-smoking hippie, traitor, Bush-hater, environmental wacko, tree-hugger

All terms of derision for liberals. I can’t think of any similar adjectives to describe conservatives. I suspect the reason for this has less to do with liberals’ failings and more to do with conservatives’ skills at name-calling. In fact, if a liberal wanted to resort to ad hominem attacks, I’m not sure what words they would use. Imperialist? Bourgeoisie? Those just don’t have enough bite. Plus they’re too long and many people don’t know what they mean.

I like Dennis Miller’s new show (which, weirdly, seems to not exist over at MSNBC’s website). Miller has turned into a cranky old bastard who almost makes Andy Rooney look like Al Roker, but he did have Scott Ritter on last week, and Scott mentioned this passage, so I dug it up. Very enlightening stuff to anyone whosays the reasons for this war were based on human rights:

“There have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people…The third one by itself is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.”

Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense
Vanity Fair, 5-15-2003

Naturally he said that before the first two reasons were all but shot down for lack of evidence. Now they openly admit there was no terrorist connection. Now that WMD and terrorist links have been disproven, the administration are betting everything on the human rights angle. With all the bad intelligence that went on in the first two angles, I have to wonder — is this administration horribly corrupt, or just horribly inept? And which is worse?

And if the argument for war is still human rights violations, then I have to ask what makes Hussein any different than these guys – because it sure isn’t WMD:

1. Kim Jong Il — North Korea (in power since 1994)
2. King Fahd & Crown Prince Abdullah — Saudi Arabia (in power since 1982 & 1995, respectively)
3. Than Shwe — Burma (in power since 1992)
4. Teodoro Obiang Nguema — Equatorial Guinea (in power since 1979).
5. Saparmurad Niyazov — Turkmenistan (in power since 1990)
6. Muammar al-Qaddafi — Libya (in power since 1969)
7. Fidel Castro — Cuba (in power since 1959)
8. Alexander Lukashenko — Belarus (in power since 1994)

That list was pulled from Parade magazine’s list of the top worst dictators, as compiled by human rights organizations. Of course there are others: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Omar Bongo El Haj of Gabon, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela…

Looks like the Google bomb battle rages ever onward. Luckily, now that it is long since past its 15 minutes of fame, the term “miserable failure” now belongs to Michael Moore in Google. So just for kicks, I’ll do my part to restore that Bomb to its rightful owner, George W. Bush. Speaking of Dubya, this is a great analysis of his mindset.

"Why of course the people don’t want war. . . That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

– Hermann Goering
Nazi SS Officer, on or about 18 April 1946
Nuremberg War Crimes Trial