Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.    The Honorable Governor of Texas, George W. Bush

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.    Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

The War Against Christmas, regarding the hideous oppression of the Christian majority in America

Fanning the flames of "holiday" jeer, conversation builds about John Gibson's book The War on Christmas. It's not a new theme, as all of your dime store variety hate-mongers get around to this. Anne Coulter likes to go around scaring the crap out of people with her demon-screech of "MERRY CHRISTMAS!" O'Reilly has carped on it. Rush too, and all the usual suspects. It's just Gibson's turn to cash in this year, pandering to the put-upon, downtrodden Christian masses who just might happen to have $20.00 or so of disposable income to toss after this trash.

Okay, let's zero in on one bone of contention, the National Christmas Tree, a tradition for 82 years.

By several accounts, America is about 77% to 82% Christian. The next largest group is secular or non-religious, though this doesn't include avowed atheists and agnostics. I couldn't guess how many of these non-religious believers might like or dislike a governmental Christmas display, so with enigmatic charity we'll lump them all in with the Christians and call it something like 90%. We don't need to be all that specific here, despite those who insist on serials smothered in sweet, sweet facts.

90% of 82 is―let me call up the calc―74 or so. Now, let's skip around the abyss full of conversations about jurisprudence from the days of the Magna Carta and focus on a couple of fundamentals. The United States is a democracy, majority rule for the most part. But the fathers realized that the majority could in fact be quite unfair, which was a major impetus for the establishment of the Bill of Rights―that basic rights need eternal protection from the democratic, majority driven process. Yes, my beleaguered baptized, this includes the Entitlement Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits federal (and generally by the 14th amendment the states') repression of religious expression.

It would seem that at this point John Gibson and the Godocrats, should they correctly regard the opportunity to celebrate one's religion as an American right, owe the rest of Americans eight holiday seasons to display with historically consistent prominence.

Considering the depths of despair over the expression "Seasons Greetings", imagine the horror when President Feingold lights an eighty foot high menorah on the White House lawn? Guess what, Johnny, you already owe them one. And what about atheists and agnostics? You're a little short on that account too. According to the Pew Research Council, so far you owe the 3% of us two years of no display at all!

Sometime in the next two hundred years you are obligated by your own principles to skip Christmas and in May set a big old Buddha down on the lawn, though I'm not sure how you would go about lighting it. Maybe the Wiccans could negotiate with the Buddhists and block out a few Mays jointly. Other partnerships might surface, but I'm guessing that the Hindu and Islamic interests will each wait for their alternate centuries.

And so, John Gibson and the similarly set upon, here you are stomping your little Italian shod feet at the unfairness of it all. You want to talk fair, then you think about whose turn it is next year. Unless you're ready to hear a month of chanting across the Oval from a minaret on the White House lawn maybe, just maybe, fair isn't a place you want to go.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Big Whopper, Small Fries

Came across this bit from Michael Barone, he of the US News and World Report:

"At the same time, we must remember that the United States and our allies did not go to war solely because of weapons of mass destruction. There were other reasons, which Bush articulated at the time and which have been vindicated by events."
While this may be true for Neo-Con tank-thinkers, most American people accepted the call to war solely on the premise of WMD's. To suggest that we would have spent a half a trillion dollars to depose an internationally impotent dictator on the other side of the world or that we would have sacrificed thousands of American lives in an experimental program to plant the seeds of democratic process in Iraq is at least distracting, if not outright lying.

I again looked up President Bush's October 7th, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, a major presentation of the case for war coming just days before the Senate vote to authorize use of force on Iraq. Forty of forty-eight paragraphs of Bush's speech (I think, don't make me count again) reference the existence of weapons of mass destruction in some way. This was the sizzle, there can be no doubt. This was the double beef whopper, with a small order of fries. With gloriously consistent incompetence it apparently hasn't occurred to anyone to change the banner over the speech on the White House web site. Here it is.


It is unfortunate that Dems are barking up the wrong tree with their emphasis on who lied to whom, however. It's not a critical point whether we were lied to, and certainly we might have expected it. We should resist the temptation of investigating how these great leaders of the free world were duped by amateurish forgeries and focus on the surreality that their defense is that they were. We need to disregard the specter of dishonesty in the maintenance of the aluminum-tubes-as-centrifuge-component theory and concentrate on the absurdity that the administration's defense is their mishandling of known information, such as DOE's conclusion that these tubes were ill-suited for the purpose; that Iraq lacked the technology to reformulate them; State's opinion that these were likely for rockets; and that the PO for these "burning guns" was posted on the internet.

Eventually we will know whether dishonesty, incompetence, or a combination of both was at work here. Any or all are indefensible and, far worse, direct causation of national and international tragedy.

Dems who voted for the war are equally flawed, and some will get their knocks early on along the next presidential campaign trail from more courageous examples.. Russ Feingold has consistently fought such adventurism, joining conservatives in opposing the continuation of operations in Kosovo as well as leap-frogging liberals in the call for an exit strategy in Iraq.

There are many, many of us on the left who view with great skepticism johnny-come-lately Democrats like Kerry and Edwards and their elephant tears over being "duped" into taking a position popular with the misinformed majorities of their constituents.

We were the exceptions―the distinct minority for whom the WMD discussion was moot. We needed only words like these, from Washington's Senator Jim McDermott:
"There is no question that Saddam Hussein is not a nice person or that he's broken the resolutions of the United Nations, but that does not give us the power to pre-emptively strike a country. Once you start down that road, where do you stop?"
To the righteous this is self-evident. It is not mere coincidence that this truth is one of many lying along the road not taken.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Imagine

My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never believed it till now.                John F.Kennedy

When leaders had courage.

Friday, November 18, 2005

If Looks Could Kill, It Would Have Been Us Instead of Him, Parte Deux

Tomorrow is the day when manly men around here dismiss the primal urge to pull fish out of the water by their lips, put on their finest Elmer Fudd's, grab a case or two of Leinenkugels and some extra ammo (the gun is always ready), and head out for The Great Outdoors to stand in a tree and hope a deer comes close enough for them to blast it to kingdom come, whereupon they gather the sportsmanlike courage to grab the beast by the horns, take a snapshot and then try to figure out what the hell to do with the damn thing, cuz if they eat it they may suffer a horrible death from a brain-wasting disease..

Okay, I admit I come from a place where "nice rack" puts in mind an altogether different form of hunting (and a pretty funny Michael Keaton role), but I listened in for a while today to descriptions of a bittersweet season in these parts. You see, last year some guys came across a Vietnamese Hmong guy hunting on the wrong private property and decided to put a little scare into him. This they accomplished very well, as he proceeded to kill six of them.

Which gets to the point of, well, it's getting a little crowded out there for the 650.000 deer licensed hunters in Wisconsin. "Conservation" groups are voicing their disgust over the growing restrictive nature of private lands. To their horror, hunters have looked up to find that Wisconsin has become civilized to the point where landowners are a little leery to allow a half a milliion high-powered rifle armed people unlimited access to their lands. Someone could get sued.

Huge corporations with nothing else to do with their wealth are buying up lot of land and don't want the hassle. Private owners are seeing the advantage of leasing hunting rights. The deer get chased off the public lands but nobody's chasing them back.

Now, I don't want to excessively over-generalize (sure I don't), but I'm thinking that this particular interest group is fairly heavily populated by your "Don't Tread on Me" libertarian, "you'll have to pry my gun from my cold dead hands" NRA kind of guys. I'm guessing when the talk around the old fire finds its way to politics, the "guvament" takes a pretty big beating from this bunch.

Are you sensing a dilemma? Where can they turn to?

Just like the "law and order" conservative who goes after the school administration when his kid is suspended for a beer party;

Just like the "free market" championing supermarket owner who goes after village hall for stricter license laws for roadside produce vendors;

Just like the "strict constitutionalist" who wanted a "one-time" Terri Schaivo law;

...our guys went straight for the nanny, in this case the US Congress, for a 50 million dollar (for starters) handout for the states to use to grease landowners to let them come play.

It's not the money, that's a pittance to this regime.

It's the unmitigated gall.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

It's in the Hole, or Life at Wyndfall CC

There's been lots of talk recently about BIG OIL and price gouging. Sooner or later you know the Senate had to stick it's two cents in and round up a whole bunch of CEO's out of golf carts in Palm Springs to come and sort of testify as to whether they might have twisted the knife a bit.

Well, the whole experience was apparently unsatisfactory to our Governor Doyle, who has decided to subpoena the same guys to visit Milwaukee in a couple of weeks. Good luck with that. Today's 7 AM guest on WPR was Erin Roth, executive director, Wisconsin Petroleum Council, who had a few things to say on the subject.

And a fine defense of windfall profits it was, that given by Mr. Roth. Those big shot CEO's had nothing on our guy. No, he had every club in the bag, his game hot to go. Even at this early hour he stepped right up to the first tee with the big dog and tthhwackkk!!!, "supply and demand", right on down the middle.

Is it then?

retail pricesupplied gasoline by the gazillions
Aug 01, 20052.209,483
Aug 08, 20052.319,408
Aug 15, 20052.519,471
Aug 22, 20052.599,406
Aug 29, 20052.599,027
Sep 05, 20053.038,636
Sep 12, 20052.888,819
Sep 19, 20052.668,836
Sep 26, 20052.718,840
Oct 03, 20052.898,783
Oct 10, 20052.758,961
Oct 17, 20052.578,981
Oct 24, 20052.439,045
Oct 31, 20052.309,246
Nov 07, 20052.219,151
These are figures from the DOE. It's true that it's not hard to figure out where the hurricane stuff began. Clearly there is a supply (as in produced that week) drop; 8% by the second week and then easing to something more like 6%. Prices in the first week were up 36% (these are midwestern average prices). Oh, our boy will tell you all about this as he glides down the fairway.

But then you might have to point out to him that his ball has found the rough, as inspection of last year's supply runs for this same period―it is the end of summer, after all―reveals a drop in supply during the first two weeks of September of 5%.

In fact, nearly every year reveals a supply drop somewhere near this time frame as companies tighten inventories in anticipation of the autumn lull.

So the supply situation doesn't seem all that unusual, certainly not to the tune of 36% retail price increases. Demand? Inventories of gasoline increased during the last three months of September while prices continued to hover around $2.75. This is not about supply and demand, my friend, at least on a retail front.

No problem; our boy takes out his new hybrid escape club and, crack!!!, "free markets", high and long for the green. but he doesn't seem to mean the market where you actually buy your gas. So what gives?

Well, you know the whole idea of free markets is that eventually everything comes out in the wash. If I may mix metaphors―and who's going to stop me?―all this kind of works at the speed of a lava lamp in real life, which is simply not fast enough for financial types to achieve financial nirvana. The solution is markets within markets within markets. These futures markets tend to drive spot gasoline markets, and spot gasoline markets drive gasoline pricing. The DOE says this isn't a big part of the pricing picture, but short-term it can have a big effect, especially when driven by an emotional event. That's when we can get hung out to dry. (Okay, metaphorically speaking I've gone full circle: new paragraph)

Ostensibly, the big guys are just along for the ride on this one, to the tune of about 23 billion profit last quarter. The refiners reap the windfalls from prices driven by a bubble on a futures market; that's nothing they control, or so they say. With all this newspeak about fragile supply one naturally questions our golfer if some of these profits will go back into increasing production capability. He pulls out his Cleveland Wedge and fffluff!!, "EPA and NIMBY's messin' every thing up," while nestling the ball right up under the hole for a gimme.

Okay, fine, you got your windfall this time. But while senators and governors are grandstanding we're going to start looking into this futures market. We want to know who these traders are and just how intertwined they might be with BIG OIL. We want to know if BIG OIL has been conspiring to rig the futures market. We want to know just how "free" this little market setup is. We want to know if BIG OIL, the futures market, and the administration are going to turn out to be one and the same.

Mr. Roth gets all huffing and dismissive and says its not like BIG OIL can get up one morning and turn on a switch for higher prices, and that may or may not be fundamentally true.What we want to know is just how easy it is for them, given the opportunity of a Sept. 11 or Katrina, to pour gasoline on the fires of misfortune and hardship.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Wild in the Streets

Could there be a more welcome event for writer's blocked, inferiority complexed panderers to culturally naive mainstream America than riots in France? Oh, man the words just fly onto laptop screens across the country as cheese fattened France bashers like Rush Limbaugh and Cal Thomas offer their "I told you so, na na na na"s.

Here's O'Reilly:
But now the tide has turned, hasn't it? France is under bitter siege by Muslims. And the weak Chirac government has been exposed in front of the world. For nearly two weeks, Chirac has allowed the insurrection to build in ferocity, refusing to use his military, allowing anarchy in the streets. This makes hurricane Katrina look like a comic book.
For the O'Reilly's of the world there is always one answer, escalation. Call in the Army, shoot the bastards. Ramp it up. Wouldn't it make more sense to let the fire burn out? Wouldn't it make more sense for the community to come to its senses, see for itself that violence is no solution, and learn that to police itself is the only way out of this mess? These riots are not about religion, despite the Great Crusaders' glee in taking the bait while characterizing all Moslem/Christian relations as Holy War. These riots are about, as are most aspects of this "Holy War", and all wars, money.

These rioters are the second and third generations of immigrants to urban France who find themselves left out of the loop economically in a France that is still far more capitalist than socialist. The ultimate destination for these youths is gang-style street life. These riots are far more rooted in economic frustration, like those in 60's Watts and Detroit and Chicago, than in Jihad.

Today's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel contained three pieces, back to back to back. "Fire in the Streets", "A Warning for our Future", an "What the French Have Failed to Learn". There is so much crap in these, it's hard to know where to start.

From the first I read:
The United States needs to safeguard its tradition of effective economic and cultural integration.
Wow! This coming in a city that is one of America's most segregated. A recent New York State University study said the disparity between white and black family income in the Milwaukee-Waukesha region was the fifth worst among major U.S. population centers.

And how about that second op-ed, syndicated and from late-night Faux-News guy Cal Thomas?

Again hopelessly blind to the economic reality of racism, like most fascists he sees a cultural solution:

Why shouldn't we fight back by reaching out to them with our religious and political doctrines?

I know Muslims who have been converted and now live peaceful and productive lives among us. We shouldn't passively allow them to proceed with their conversion agenda with no response.

Let's peacefully and lovingly share our far better religious and cultural message with them.
Shall we look for an example of this lovingly shared and better religious and cultural message our not so silent Cal has in store for potential converts? We don't have to look far; let's try the first paragraph of this worthless screed:

Observing the riots in the suburbs of Paris, an American is tempted to rejoice.
I guess that would be you with Bill O'Reilly, over there giggling by the coffee machine when San Fran gets anthraxed.

And then there's what's behind column number three, by the Washington Post's Annie Applebaum:

Although there isn't yet evidence that this bout of rioting is Islamist in origin, it's pretty clear that large un-integrated, ungovernable and unemployed Islamic communities in Western Europe will continue to incubate radical Islam.
For proof of this Annie-get-Your-Gun cites that the twentieth hijacker was French-Moroccan. I guess it's also pretty clear to her that evidence of the rampant radical Christianity of unemployed rednecks that helped put Bush in the White House might have been sniffed out in the actions of one Timothy McVie.

Of course, the straw that broke Frenchy's back was non-belief in the free market, she explains:
...the refusal of French politicians to lift restrictions on employers, to promote entrepreneurship or to deregulate make it impossible for young people to integrate through the economy, as immigrants do in this country, despite discrimination.
This is ownerspeak for bust labor, give away working class jobs to immigrants, cut social programs and cut your own taxes and pay your maid and every other immigrant contractor that works on your suburban cul-de-castle in cash. The American Example.

I'm sure the French upper class, speaking the universal language of money, are fully aware of the benefits for them in such a system, however short-sided they will likely turn out to be. The difference in France is that the labor class, not being ignorant dupes munching Doritos in front of Fox News, realize that in a democracy they have the power, and they will not give up their livelihoods to the sons and daughters of the upper class's maids and landscapers.

No, the French will have to come up with their own solution. Our assimilation of Mexicans is no example for them, as their workers will not simply stand aside and let North Africans take their jobs, and we have little evidence of our own assimilation of blacks to point to. The "Free Market" scenario will only enrich a few while staving off the inevitable surplus of working class.

Servants have children, somebody should have thought of that.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

And I Helped

This post is about the dogs of war. I was going to post a photo here, but I find I can't. Instead I will provide a description of the effects of white phosphorus munitions. This from those friendly, family owned and operated folks at GlobalSecurity.org

White phosphorus burns spontaneously in air. Contact with these particles can cause local burns. These weapons are particularly nasty because white phosphorus continues to burn until it disappears. If service members are hit by pieces of white phosphorus, it could burn right down to the bone. Remove quickly all clothing affected by phosphorus to prevent phosphorus burning through to skin. If this is impossible, plunge skin or clothing affected by phosphorus in cold water or moisten strongly to extinguish or prevent fire. Then immediately remove affected clothing and rinse affected skin areas with cold sodium bicarbonate solution or with cold water. Moisten skin and remove visible phosphorus(preferably under water) with squared object (knife-back etc.) or tweezers. Do not touch phosphorus with fingers!
In other words, if you see victims whose flesh has burned off to the bone underneath their clothing, as you would have in the photo from Fallujah I did not post, you may well suspect considerable exposure to white phosphorus. Though the phrase "These weapons are particularly nasty" seems to the point, in the same article these humankind-as-pit bull terrier thinkers offer this:

The use of white phosphorus or fuel air explosives are not prohibited or restricted by Protocol II of the Certain Conventional Weapons Convention (CCWC), the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects.

So, they are particularly nasty, but not excessively injurious. This may explain there being some difference of opinion, as well as the confusion of reportage related to use or uses of these weapons in the assault on Fallujah. It seems that "Willy Pete" is close enough to a chemical weapon to have stirred up a bit of controversy early on in the events of last November. The ghastly effects of WP led to cries of chemical warfare from Arab and peace fronts alike, to the point where our government had to respond beyond scraping up and burying topsoil and accompanying families to burials in order to limit photography of victims.

And so we did what we do best, we lied. This is our State Department, ironically appearing in a statement containing a little morality lesson in how untruths gain momentum as they are repeated:

Finally, some news accounts have claimed that U.S. forces have used "outlawed" phosphorus shells in Fallujah. Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. U.S. forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters. There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using "outlawed" weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq.

Which is what leads us to the reality that the time has come when such disinformation is simply not going to fly. The blogoshere consists of hundreds of thousands of little enthusiasts searching every little nook and cranny of the WWW for the truth. We aren't pros. We don't get the facts all the time. We spread our own misconceptions and untruths. But by the time an issue has percolated down, truth is outed with unprecedented regularity. Thus we have this account from none other than the US Army's Field Artillery March/April edition, a rundown on the Fallujah operation from the mouths of those good old boys at Ft. Sill, OK, whose enthusiasm for blowing people up apparently can get in the way of supporting the company line:

b. White Phosphorous. WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired “shake and bake” missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.
Well, at least we wouldn't use such a weapon indiscriminantly, would we? From the same article:
We learned to use indirect fires early and often in large volumes. During the course of the battle, more than 2,000 artillery and mortar rounds were fired and more than 10 tons of precision Air Force munitions were dropped.
And then there's "napalm". The civilized world banned napalm after the Vietnam War, from which nobody living in those days will ever forget the picture of the young Kim Phuk running from her napalmed village with her clothes burned off. This civilized world excludes us. We have improved our napalm-like weapon to something called the Mark-77. I say "napalm like" because after numerous outsider and insider contrary reports the DOD/DOS brain trust amended this:

Your story ('Dead bodies everywhere', by Lindsay Murdoch, March 22, 2003) claiming US forces are using napalm in Iraq, is patently false. The US took napalm out of service in the early 1970s. We completed destruction of our last batch of napalm on April 4, 2001, and no longer maintain any stocks of napalm. —Jeff A. Davis, Lieutenant Commander, US Navy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense ― Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald
to this:

Although all napalm in the U.S. arsenal had been destroyed by 2001, Mark-77 firebombs, which have a similar effect to napalm, were used against enemy positions in 2003. ―usinfo disinfo from the State Dept.
Explanation for this "misunderstanding" was offered in that the brand name Napalm (DOW made billions on it) had been dropped. Well, we all stand corrected, you miserable, petulant little10 year old miscreants! Maybe our confusion stems from things like the DOD's own publication Defend AMERICA, which offered this in its Feb.12th, 2003 edition (there seems to be no end to the slick publications our tax dollars pay for):

Everything from hand grenades to 2,000-pound bombs and napalm are shipped, ready for use whenever 3rd MAW needs them.
The State Department says we didn't use nap―er...um...cannisters of fuel and oxidizers that turn to burning jelly that sticks to everything―in Fallujah. This time we really, really mean it, cross our fingers and hope to die. And anyway, as far as we're concerned it ain't illegal, as we still have our unsigned copy of protocol whatever it was that you all stupidly agreed to.

Shake and bake, man. Onward, Christian soldiers.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Drip, Drip, Drip

It is becoming clear now that the ouster of George Bush is a real possibility. This is no story of white lies and sexual confessions ala Clinton, or of the political shenanigans of the Plumbers squad of the Nixon White House. This is the sad tale of the systematic misrepresentation of intelligence undertaken in the intention of selling an ill-advised, immoral, and ill-planned war on Iraq to the world, America and to our Congress.

We've already witnessed the massacre of the truth these dolts proliferated in the Niger yellow cake uranium/Plame/Wilson fiasco. Now the New York Times runs a story of a documented report from February, 2002, the gist being that the "revelation" of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, long since debunked, was immediately considered most likely untrue.

What revelation was this? That Iraq was training Al Qaeda terrorists in the use of explosives and chemical/biological warfare. This nay-saying report was done by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and would certainly have crossed the desk of one Donald Rumsfield and one Dick Cheney, yet this report was not offered up during phase one of the Senate investigation of intelligence quality, an interesting fact of itself. Now lets look at the speeches of our armchair warriors that offered this highly doubted intelligence as evidence of the necessity of war. This is from Colin Powell's infamous speech to the UN one year later, making the Administration's case for military action:

This senior al Qaeda terrorist was responsible for one of al Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan.

His information comes firsthand from his personal involvement at senior levels of al Qaeda. He says bin Laden and his top deputy in Afghanistan, deceased al Qaeda leader Mohammed Atef, did not believe that al Qaeda labs in Afghanistan were capable enough to manufacture these chemical or biological agents. They needed to go somewhere else. They had to look outside of Afghanistan for help. Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq.

The support that (inaudible) describes included Iraq offering chemical or biological weapons training for two al Qaeda associates beginning in December 2000. He says that a militant known as Abu Abdula Al-Iraqi had been sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poisons and gases. Abdula Al-Iraqi characterized the relationship he forged with Iraqi officials as successful.


What did the DIA report, done one year prior, have to say about this "senior al Qaeda terrorist"?

It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers.

The Times article goes on to report that around the time of Powell's speech a declassified statement from the CIA called al-Libi's story credible, while at the same time a classified assessment stated "the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place."

But Powell wasn't the first to refer to this "credible source". Turn the page back to Bush's October 7th, 2002 Cincinnati speech done just three days before Congressional vote on the Iraq war resolution. This speech should live in infamy―should be looped forever in the W Presidential Library as an example of the extremity of corruption that is possible in the political arena. The level of distortion throughout this speech―the White House, with typical bone-headedness, still heads it up on their site as "Iraq, Denial and Deception"―is only surpassed in repugnancy by the President's sledge hammering appeals to the public's fear of WMD's throughout.

Back to the subject of the day, though. Here are Bush's words given a full eight months after the recently declassified report had been distributed:

We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy -- the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America. (emphasis mine)

But we now know you knew you didn't know any such thing.

Increasingly the focus becomes not that information was wrong, but that the Administration knew it was wrong and used it to scare the begeezus out of us anyway.

This is beyond impeachable, this is seditious in it's recklessness. It's time to head the vans over to the White House and start loading documents. It's time to impeach the President and the Vice President, and for finding out who in the hell the senate pro-tem is because the Speaker is likely to be disqualified as well.

Judgment day is coming, it's clear that the flow of revelations is widening. Will we progressives be happy to see such a day? Hell, no. But it won't be the saddest day in America lately.

No, that would be the day so many of you voted for what was clearly to us a pack of self-serving liars.