Criminalization of (Iraqi) Politics

This article is on the Guardian, but as I write this, it's the top story on Excite:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Iraq's election commission announced Monday that officials were investigating ``unusually high'' numbers of ``yes'' votes in about a dozen provinces during Iraq's landmark referendum on a new constitution, raising questions about irregularities in the balloting.

Word of the review came as Sunni Arab leaders repeated accusations of voter fraud after initial reports from the provinces suggested the constitution had passed. Among their allegations were that police took ballot boxes from heavily ``no'' districts, that some ``yes'' areas had more votes than registered voters and that supporters of the charter were allowed to vote in crucial provinces where they do not live.

American-style democracy, indeed. If it's good enough for Bush, it's good enough for the Iranian-backed politicians the Cheniacs support as well.

Honestly, does this surprise anyone? After Florida and Ohio, I find the notion that the administration's party operatives disguising themselves as advisors in Iraq would have the slightest qualm about voter fraud laughable.

The good news: this is actually being covered by the American media. Is our once-pathetic Fourth Estate finally struggling to free itself from bondage, perhaps shaking off (at last!) the Svengali-esque control of Rove and his ilk? Only time will tell.
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(/) Roland X
Zoe: "It's a fair bet the Alliance is going to know what's coming."
Mal: "No. They're not going to see this coming."

Not Getting It

Jonah Goldberg proves how completely he doesn't get it by getting it this once (linked to Washington Monthly because I try not to link directly to Wingnuttia):

We already know that lots of conservative are skeptical about Harriet Miers, but what's more interesting is the number of conservatives who are turning their guns on George Bush himself. Here's a sampler:

...

Jonah Goldberg: Bush's instincts about where his principles should be are often right. But in this case the principle seems to be that Bush's instincts are principle enough.

The last sentence is all you need to know about both George W. Bush and the rutting morons who have placed their faith in him for the last five years. "The principle seems to be that Bush's instincts are principle enough" is the defining trait of George W. Bush's vision of the presidency. He has no other principles, which is the entire gorram problem.

(Oh, and for the record, I feel compelled to add that the idea of Goldberg's statement about Bush's principles being "often right" is so laughable, given the unbroken string of policy failures this administration has presided over, as to border on self-parody. What, was this culled from the Onion or something?)

Ye gods. I was stunned by the attacks on 9/11 -- I have an uncle who works at the American Stock Exchange about a block away from the site, and my father used to work there -- and even now, I kick myself for the second chance I gave this idiot. The difference is, I learned my lesson (and fast). Liberals and conservatives alike have been making excuses for this shaved chimp for years, like battered wives saying how their abusive husband is "really a good man" and he's just doing what he has to do.

Democrats have to win in 2006 if there is to be any hope for the republic in the foreseeable future, but IMHO it would behoove Republicans to disavow this venal, corrupt administration ASAP. Then again, what do I know? Whenever movement Republicans give Democrats "advice," all I see is them throwing a drowning man an anvil.
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(/) Roland X
Which I must admit, I'm not averse to doing in this situation... *G*

Don't Mince Words

Hunter of Daily Kos tells us what he really thinks of those who prostitute their minds and souls to the evil, corrupt SOBs running our country:

At Blogs For Bush, which bills itself as the Whorehouse... er, "White House" of the Blogosphere, the ever effervescent Mark Noonan writes about the DeLay indictment:

...

This is not the actions of a political Party engaged in seeking a majority - it is the action of a Party determined to destroy its opponents entirely and sieze all power for itself...it is, in short, the stuff from which civil wars are made...

I really do urge our Democrats to step back from the edge - you are sitting in a lake of gasoline and you are playing with fire. We on our side will only put up with so much before we start to pay back with usury what we have received.

...

Mark... may I call you Mark? I feel when someone has shown me the insides of their own rectum, we're pretty much on a first name basis... I have some words for you.

Whitewater. Rush Limbaugh. "Drug Dealer" Bill Clinton. Swift Boats.

Vince Fucking Foster.

Playing with fire, you say? Because the indictments ringing Tom DeLay finally reached up that one, final step from his ring of closest advisers to DeLay himself? Because the SEC has launched a formal investigation into the same behaviors by Bill Frist that put Martha Stewart recently in prison? Because one of the single most visible, highest profile Republican money men has been indicted for fraud, is being investigated for client shakedowns, and has his close business associates being investigated for a mob-connected murder?

What utter cowardice. What pathetic anti-American pedantry. What laughable protestation. The crimes of campaign money laundering, of fraud, of conspiracy, the violation of the laws of the nation, to be answered with stern visions of potential gunfire if Democrats have the audacity to pursue it.

...

Your party has set aflame the entire political landscape, and now, once burned, you warn sternly from the branches of a burnt-out tree about "playing with fire". You used the ashes of one of the great liberal cities of America, New York City, as war paint for your own sick, racist dreams. You shudder at a burning flag, yet are willing to snip-and-cut basic tenets of the Constitution as needed or convenient.

...

Welcome to the world of the politics of personal destruction, you tubthumping, chin-jutting, Bush humping gits. Welcome to the nasty and partisan world that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and a legion of insignificant lowest-rung toadies like yourselves nurtured into fruition daily with eager, grubby hands, and now look upon with dull-faced faux horror.

...

Step back from the edge? You poor boy, asleep in the back of the car the whole trip, finally waking up and wondering where you're at.

...

You can't even see the edge from here. You left it behind a hundred miles back.

So don't give me chest-thumping crap about civil wars, if your politicians are indicted. Don't give me visions of a lake of fire, if all those who find you loathsome refuse to suck at your teats of scientific ignorance in the name of religion, racism in the name of freedom, and corruption in the name of the New World Order.

Or, as a great playwright once put it:

"Oh? And when the last law was down, and the devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws being all flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it) d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?"

DeLay has no place left to hide from his crimes, and the poor sods who have sold their souls to this monstrous pack of traitors have no place left to hide from the truth, except in citadels built from the mortar of their own frightened denial. They want to believe that they are righteous when they are only self-righteous, that their leaders are virtuous when they are corrupt, that their beliefs are noble when they are vile, and that all their enemies are cut from the same cloth. Wish as they might, however, John Kerry is not Osama bin Laden and George Bush is not Thomas Jefferson.

I truly do believe that we can alter what is possible through perception and will. But such power comes from wisdom, and whenever someone tries to alter reality from a place of towering hubris, Truth will repay such arrogant folly many times over. They have sown the wind, and now they decry the whirlwind as partisan?

No. This is not backstabbing, revenge, or even justice. This is simple physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The madmen who have hijacked the once-noble institutions of the Republican party and the government of the United States have acted with absolute contempt for honesty. The bitter harvest is clear for all with eyes to see: the death and tragedy in Iraq, the return of the drug lords in Afghanistan, the price of blindness and neglect in what was once New Orleans, $3 a gallon gasoline, a government deficit so massive it beggars the imagination and the near-universal hatred of a world that gave us nearly universal, unconditional support a scant four years ago.

And the storm is still just now breaking.

I am saddened that so many -- a full 40 percent of the American people -- still don't want to see the truth. I can't blame them, though. It is something terrible and painful to see, like watching a beloved uncle slowly dying of a cancer he refuses to admit exists. But our Uncle Sam does have a cancer, and only by confronting him with the truth can he be saved. Joining in his denial will only prolong the pain, and if we wait too long, even that mightiest of relatives may perish.

The time to awaken is upon us. Either this country chooses to face the consequences of its leaders' actions, allowing us to begin to face their mistakes, or it will remain blind and embark on a path that ends in a nation indistinguishable from Oceania.

There's just one problem for the would-be Big Brothers of God's Own Party: there is a real resistance out here. We pay attention to facts, rescue the past from the memory hole and continue to point out inconvenient truths. The simplest and most important one is this -- they are not America, no matter how much they pretend to patriotism and decry their enemies as 'anti-American.' We are all America, and their delusional, hateful Frankenstein's monster of corporate mega-greed, xenophobic bigotry, and budding theofascism is only a tiny, insignificant portion of the legendary Melting Pot.

Most Americans would be shocked if they saw it for what it is -- their dropping poll numbers are the result of a few more coming around to the truth all the time -- and the monster is coming apart at the seams. If it weren't, would they be desperately be threatening violence like Chicken Little screaming about the sky falling? Then again, for them, the sky is falling, but it's really just the ceiling of their little bubble of falsehood caving in. And really, what's one more lie among friends after so many?
--
(/) Roland X
And the Truth Shall Set Us Free
(those poor bastards are on their own, though)

Rules

I've thought a lot about the strain of Republicans that we oppose -- the Cheney/Rove axis that threatens both the systems and ideals that make up America. They play the rules like the worst sort of lawyers, bending them into pretzels when convenient and breaking them whenever they can get away with it, but holding their opponents to the most minute definitions whenever it can provide them an advantage. (See Clinton, William J.) And the basic definition of this sort of Republican is simple. For them, there are no rules.

To be sure, there are guidelines. Win at all costs. Never let the marks see past your image. Spin can beat any truth if you're shameless enough and persistent enough. No slander is too foul, as long as it works. (See Kerry, John F.) Loyalty is the only important trait for office holders. Hypocrisy is a virtue. "Orwellian" is an ideal, not an insult. And finally, if you do lose, never admit you lost, pretend it never happened, and immediately go back on the attack, preferably on another flank. When it comes to the "lost" issue, there's always tomorrow.

It's easy -- too easy -- to give in to anger or despair when faced with this sort of villainy. It's like being ruled by the Legion of Doom (but I'll get to that in another post :-). They must be stopped. They must be beaten. They must be driven from power, discredited, and the memory of their administration recorded solely as a lesson for future generations of the ways evil can hide behind an innocuous face.

Yet we must adhere to a higher standard than the pseudo-cons. Most of us disagree with their actual ideology, true, but that's not what makes them so poisonous. It's their lies, incompetence, cronyism, and worst of all, their sheer willingness to turn American against American. Nothing is too low for them if Rove can use it to squeeze a few more votes out, whether in the House of Representatives or among regular people.

They used the attacks on September 11, 2001 -- the single most unifying event in American history since Pearl Harbor, its one silver lining -- and used it to club their political rivals over the head. They started an unnecessary war for a variety of reasons, but one of them was for the exact same purpose. And now, with an entire city under water and massive amounts of the deepest of red states left in disarray thanks almost entirely to their incompetence in the one area they claimed as their sole bailiwick, they decry the "blame game" while playing it for all they're worth.

J'accuse!

It is our duty as Americans to cry out at this injustice. We must speak out, resist to the best of our ability, this obscenity. I firmly believe it makes the most sense, strategically and morally, to proclaim their mendacity, greed and heartlessness at every opportunity. Find decent people and run them against the vermin that walk like men (See Hackett, Paul). Decent Republicans, I'm looking at you, too -- Democrats of conscience are working to take back our party, and yours is in greater need of you.

What we cannot, must not do, however, is allow ourselves to stoop to their level. Will it make any real difference if liberals or moderates return to power if back room deals and political payback define our governance? What good will restoring balance to government finances if health care and welfare become Democrats' ways of rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies? It may be possible to bring down Bush with a lie, or an irrelevance (yeah, the bathroom note is fun, but can you imagine impeaching him over it, even if he were to lie to Congress about it?), but what would that turn us into?

The subtitle of this blog is "proud supporter of the reality-based community" because I believe that reality is far more malleable than most believe. (I find it most ironic that the "Vulcans" of the modern Republican party have done more to undermine the concept with their hubris than the flakiest New Ager ever could.) I've seen/read The Matrix, What the Bleep Do We Know, Stranger in a Strange Land, and a variety of books on the implications of quantum physics to what we think of as a hard and unyielding universe. As a result, I have a healthy respect for those who see rules with a skeptical eye, and those who break them with style can be quite noble. After all, I look forward to a day when humanity can twist the 'rules' of reality itself into proverbial knots, making of it what we will -- who am I to denigrate the honorable rogues among us?

The thing is, honor is the key. Even if we overturn every law of physics and make a game of existence itself, there must still be some codified limits to behavior for people to get along together. If anything, rules of honor and decency are far more important than mere laws, whether of government or physics. These are the rules for which the Rovians have so much contempt, and the ones we must hold on to in spite of their outrageous flaunting of them if our victory is to mean anything.
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(/) Roland X
"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fail. Think of it...always." -- Gandhi

Political Emergency Management Agency

So much for the defibrillator.

To paraphrase a friend of mine (who apparently takes exception to my giving Dubya the least amount of credit -- with good reason, it turns out), he's still trying to weasel his way out of admitting he screwed up. To quote COBRA's Baroness, "I take the responsibility, but not the blame! It's [his] fault!"

As others have pointed out (the brilliant Digby in particular), Bush has used liberal rhetoric before (anyone remember No Child Left Behind?) to cover up his fringe pseudo-conservative agenda, and he's doing it again now. If anything, the lies and greed are worse than ever. As Digby notes:

I missed the speech last night but I was on the road and tuned into KTALK, the liberal talk radio station here in LA shortly after it was over and heard Johnny Wendell, whom I usually quite like, saying that he hadn't heard a politician say anything like this in 30 years. And he thought that it was such good news that we should give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt. It just proved that the era of Republican small government conservatism was over and liberalism was back, baby!

I was confused. I had read that article in the morning, after all. Then I came home and fired up the creaky computer and saw that Karl Rove was in charge of the rebuilding effort. Ah.

Read the whole thing -- Digby quotes an article on how the reconstruction effort is already being turned into one gigantic boondoggle combining radical conservative "free-market" theology and cronyism on a $200 billion dollar scale.

Okay, so he hasn't learned anything about the effectiveness of laissez-faire policy and placing spin doctors in charge of actual organization. I mean, ye gods, Karl Rove in charge of reconstruction efforts? Karl Rove?!? Given that they called it "reconstruction" in the announcement, I imagine for Southerners, even white fundamentalist men have to be twitching while they wonder what Cheniac is really up to. (Hint: expect a lot of Halliburton employees to make suitcases out of rugs.) But hey, he must realize that we have to start paying for this stuff, right?

To quote the title of another great blog, sadly, no! Read his lips, no new taxes. No old taxes, either -- don't worry about him even slowing down on tax cuts. After all, we can't hobble our brave, can-do billionaires as they feast at the trough of federal recon...er, I mean, rush in to bring that capitalist ingenuity to making money hand over fist...um, that is, creating a Brave New City built on conservative ideology and a whole new demographic. (IOW, no blacks need apply. Unless they're rich wingnuts.)

Even Prescott "The Profiteer" Bush would blush at the shamelessness of making money on the dead and destitute of a devastated American city. The debate is over: Bush is unbelievably stupid and amazingly evil. He is the front man for the Cheney/Rove axis, the living veil for a toxic stew of domestic piracy and foreign conquest. In spite of his stupidity, on some level he is clearly aware of this. It's time for Democrats to stop pussyfooting around this trained ape and wage politics with the same intensity (albeit not with the same mendacity) the Republicans do: as the small-d democratic equivalent of total war.
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(/) Roland X
Theoden: I will not risk open war.
Aragorn: Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not.