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Oh Fa Chrissake...
 You next. Any movie, any line...so long as it comes with a pic. Go. http://www2.iava.org/o/436/t/8492/tellafri...
Rollins did the voice-over for the video. They're trying to get 4,000 views by the 4th of July. Henry Rollins says "Watch the vid."   Former President George W. Bush with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at a press conference in December 2008. (Photo: AP) Made of Lies By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t | Columnist Tuesday 30 June 2009 It began more than six years ago with a lie, followed by another lie, and another lie, and then two more, ten more, a hundred, a thousand, an avalanche of lies from heads of state and hatchet men and well-fed media types more interested in getting the interview than in getting the facts. It began with lies like this: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." - Dick Cheney, Vice President Speech to VFW National Convention 8/26/2002 ... and this: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." - Condoleezza Rice, US National Security Adviser CNN Late Edition 9/8/2002 ... and this: "We know for a fact that there are weapons there." - Ari Fleischer, Press Secretary Press Briefing 1/9/2003 ... and this: "We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more." - Colin Powell, Secretary of State Remarks to the UN Security Council 2/5/2003 ... and this: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." - Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense ABC Interview 3/30/2003 It began with George W. Bush standing before both houses of Congress and an international television audience for his January 2003 State of the Union address and stating that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons - which is one million pounds - of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 missiles to deliver the stuff, mobile biological weapons labs, al-Qaeda connections and uranium from Niger for use in a robust nuclear weapons program. Lies. All lies. 4,321 American soldiers have died in Iraq because of those lies, 101 during this year, including Sgt. Timothy A. David of Michigan, who was killed on June 28 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Four more soldiers were killed in Iraq on Tuesday in the midst of the withdrawal. Tens of thousands of American soldiers have been shredded and maimed because of those lies. Nobody knows how many innocent Iraqis have been killed and wounded because, to this day, we don't do body counts. Estimates range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to perhaps more than a million, depending on who you ask, all because of those lies. Now, more than six years later, a new president and a new policy has brought about one of the most dramatic and determinative days Iraq has seen since the initial invasion and occupation. "Six years and three months after the March 2003 invasion," reported The Washington Post on Tuesday, "the United States has withdrawn its remaining combat troops from Iraq's cities, the US commander here said, and is turning over security to Iraqi police and soldiers. While more than 130,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, patrols by heavily armed soldiers in hulking vehicles have largely disappeared from Baghdad, Mosul and Iraq's other urban centers. Iraqis danced in the streets and set off fireworks overnight in impromptu celebrations of a pivotal moment in their nation's troubled history. The government staged a military parade to mark the new national holiday of 'National Sovereignty Day,' and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki made a triumphant, nationally televised address." Triumph comes in strange packages these days. The reality of the situation in Iraq has been best described by Robert Dreyfuss in a Nation article titled "Little to Celebrate in Iraq." Dreyfuss writes: As we pull back, we're leaving Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in charge. Increasingly, Maliki is taking on the trappings of a dictator. He's established a network of security agencies that report directly to him. He's built a countrywide patronage system to bribe and pay off tribal allies, in anticipation of 2010 elections. He's shown no compunction against using the army, the police and the secret agencies he controls to eliminate rivals. He's used divide-and-conquer tactics to outflank the Sunni-led sahwa movement, known as the Awakening or the Sons of Iraq, driving some of them back into armed resistance and others into sullen resentment or fear for their lives. And Maliki, despite his protestations that he is a born-again "nationalist," has close ties to Iran. With Iran now revealed as a fundamentalist-run, naked military dictatorship, I expect Iran to act ruthlessly vis-a-vis Iraq, and if he wants to stay in power Maliki will pretty much have to go along. A prominent Sunni activist from northern Iraq told me Tuesday that anyone who thinks about opposing Maliki in Iraq has to fear for his or her life. The fact remains that despite the resurgence of secular nationalism in Iraq, as evidenced by the results of provincial elections last February, Maliki sits atop a conspiratorial little party called Al Dawa, a fundamentalist Islamist grouping, and he is reliant on a small, secretive clique that surrounds him. During the February election, in order to appeal to Iraqi voters, Maliki posed as a nationalist of sorts, but in fact he is dependent on two outside powers. First, he's dependent on the United States, for despite his bravado about the US withdrawal from Iraq's cities, Maliki desperately needs American backing to remain in power, to build up his armed forces. And second, Maliki is dependent on the good will of Iran, which could topple him instantly if he crossed Tehran. While Iraq's Shia population celebrated in the streets and Iraq's Sunni population crouched in fear, another group got right to business. "The long-awaited auction of licenses to develop Iraq's huge oil reserves began Tuesday amid unusual contentiousness," reported The New York Times on Tuesday, "as multinationals demanded far more revenue from every barrel of increased production than the authorities were willing to allow. Scores of Chinese, Russian, American and British oil executives, representing eight of the world's top 10 non-state oil companies, gathered in a hotel meeting room in the Green Zone. They listened closely on headphones to translations as bids for six oil fields and two natural gas fields were read out and then rushed into consultations." The more things change, the more they stay the same in an Iraq torn to pieces, covered in blood, and made of lies. http://www.truthout.org/063009R  Again. Hee.    South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford admitted to having an affair with a woman from Argentina. (Photo: AP) The Girl From Ipanema By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t | Columnist Friday 26 June 2009 Dozens of people have been killed by suicide car-bombers in Iraq over the last several days in an ominous upswing of violence that gives lie to the recent veneer of stability in that nation. The streets of Iran run with the blood of protesters seeking a fair election and the end of their country's oppressive fundamentalist regime. North Korea has threatened to fire long-range missiles at Hawaii over the Fourth of July if anyone so much as looks funny at one of their weapons-laden cargo ships on the high seas. Tall and tan and young and lovely The girl from Ipanema goes walking And when she passes, each one she passes goes ... ah Ah, indeed. There are other things in life besides mayhem, madness and butchery, a fact South Carolina's Republican Gov. Mark Sanford was kind enough to remind us of this week. There is irony of the purest ray serene; there is hypocrisy like a house on fire, and there is perfect comedy, and when a man like Governor Sanford takes the time and energy to combine all three, the magnificent absurdity of it all reminds us of the joy that still exists in this cruel and crazy world. So, yeah, Governor Sanford fell off the planet last week, disappearing entirely from the grid over this past Father's Day weekend. Neither his wife nor his staff would say for sure where he was beyond some blurry allusions to writing a book on the Appalachian Trail - and, by the by, it should be noted that the person who initiated the "Where Is Sanford?" press frenzy is a Republican enemy of the South Carolina governor, because this story wasn't weird enough already - until his car was discovered in a parking lot at the Atlanta airport. Except it wasn't his car, really, but a state-owned vehicle Sanford had apparently borrowed from one of his security guards. When she walks, she's like a samba That swings so cool and sways so gentle That when she passes, each one she passes goes ... ooh Flash forward to Wednesday, when Governor Sanford got up on his hind legs and delivered one of the single most preposterous press conference performances in the history of the universe. He said he was sorry, very sorry, sorry to you, to me, to the people of South Carolina, his wife, his sons, Jesus, all the saints and your little dog, too, because he had not, in fact, spent the weekend writing a book in Appalachia. No, Governor Sanford had been an entire hemisphere away, crying for five days with a girlfriend in Argentina. The conservative Washington Times was kind enough to explain the crystalline hypocrisy buried within what could be dismissed as another instance of a politician having a problem with his fly. "Republicans' family-values platform often invites charges of hypocrisy," explained Times writer S.A. Miller on Thursday. "It happened when conservative pundit and former drug czar William Bennett was discovered in 2003 to be a gambler. In the late 1990s, during and after their pursuit of President Clinton on impeachment charges for a sexual liaison with an intern, several Republican luminaries acknowledged they, too, had indulged in affairs, including pro-life leader Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia and former Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana, who resigned just before assuming the speaker's chair. Mr. Sanford voted in favor of three of four articles of impeachment against Mr. Clinton." Wait, what? Governor Sanford, that jet-setting Lothario, whose passionate taste for marital infidelity was strong enough to hurl him thousands of miles across the planet for a date with his mistress, was in favor of impeaching President Clinton for lying about sex? "I think it would be much better for the country and for him personally (to resign)," Sanford said of Clinton in September of 1998. "I come from the business side. If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he'd be gone." When Republican Congressman and impeachment champion Bob Livingston was exposed for cheating on his own wife later in 1998, Sanford said, "The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. He lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it's got to be taken very, very seriously." Three weeks before Wednesday's epic press conference debacle, Governor Sanford gave an interview to Fox News, during which he was asked about the Clinton impeachment directly. "It was blown into a huge constitutional issue which if a president's lying, it's a big deal. It is a constitutional issue," said Sanford. "But it missed the larger point of human nature. You ask any guy, particularly one in office, you've been screwing around on your wife - maybe there's 1 percent or maybe there's 2 percent or maybe there's 5 percent. But 95 percent of the time, whoever it is, is gonna say 'no.' And so, I think the public said no matter what Clinton did, whether he did or he didn't do whatever it was that happened with Monica Lewinsky, is that guy gonna stand up and admit it. They said no, he's not." Eloquence? Perhaps not, but at least Governor Sanford sounded as if the strength of his convictions and integrity regarding marital fidelity was genuine. If you want true Sanfordian eloquence, however, you must peruse the recently-released emails Sanford wrote to his lady friend. In one, for example, he implores her to "please sleep soundly knowing that despite the best efforts of my head my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul." Or, you can read the other Sanford email to his lady friend that says, "I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night's light - but hey, that would be going into sexual details ..." But I watch her so sadly How can I tell her I love her Yes I would give my heart gladly But each day, when she walks to the sea She looks straight ahead, not at me Thank you, Governor Sanford, for reminding us that life can be good, that life can be saccharine sweet, but above all else, that life can be really, really, really, really funny. http://www.truthout.org/062609J In a surreal press conference, where for some inexplicable reason his aides allowed him to show up without a prepared text and even take questions from the media (!), Sanford apologized to his wife and family, to his staff and his state and his party, and resigned as chair of the Republican Governors Association.
He is term limited for 2010 and he only has a year and a half left as governor. But it's hard to imagine him staying in office much longer. Members of both parties have fought with him for much of his term, and many will be pushing him to leave. He said he's known this woman for eight years but it became romantic about a year ago. Sanford had made national headlines months ago when he refused to take stimulus money for South Carolina out of principle. When it comes to Mark Sanford, stimulus now has a new meaning. http://www.npr.org/blogs/politicaljunkie/2...   Grand Old Parachutes By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t | Columnist Tuesday 23 June 2009 George W. Bush crawled out of the puckerbrush last week to deliver a speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, in which he took a poke at President Obama. "I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor," he said, before doing exactly that. "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind." Ah, yes, the eloquence we've all missed so much since January. "I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work" has to be tall in the running for first-ballot induction into the Gibberish Hall of Fame, and that quip about terrorists in therapy absolutely pegged the needle on the Irony Meter, as ABC News pointed out. "Interestingly," reported the network, "it was the Bush administration that sent some Gitmo detainees to a Saudi jihadi rehabilitation camp - called the "Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Centre for Care and Counseling. To decidedly mixed success." Well, go figure. It wouldn't be vintage Bush without a few hearty dollops of mangled verbiage combined with maddening factual inconsistency, now, would it? It almost makes one nostalgic for the daily brain cramps our former president used to deliver with such gruesome consistency. Well, no, actually, not really. In all likelihood, a day will come when the Republican Party will recover from the dazzling carnival of buffoonery, insanity and self-destruction it has become over the last three years, but that day has neither come nor looks to anytime soon. For the time being and until further notice, mostly because no new leader has stepped forward without sounding like an Appalachian snake-handler far gone on the still, the GOP is the party of George W. Bush. There's bad; there's worse; there's worst, and then there's that. Greg Sargent, on his Washington Post blog, pointed out some data buried in a recent Wall Street Journal poll that must have every breathing Republican strategist grinding their teeth in despair: The overall popularity of the Republican Party has now dropped below even the abysmal level of approval enjoyed by Dick Cheney. The poll found that 26% of respondents have a very positive or somewhat positive view of Cheney, up eight points from April. Meanwhile, it found that the GOP overall is viewed very or somewhat positively by only 25%, down four points from April. Okay, the difference is within the margin of error, making this a statistical tie. But still, this is pretty awful for the GOP, given that for a long time Cheney's historic unpopularity seemed to define a kind of low-water mark among Republicans. There a couple of takeaways here. First, it appears that Cheney is doing a better job of making his own case than the current crop of GOP leaders are doing on behalf of the party as a whole, even though he's no longer in office. And second, it gives the lie to the notion that Cheney's ongoing media tour is helpful to the GOP overall, as some party leaders have publicly claimed to think. In reality, he only seems to be helping himself. All is not lost in GOP Land, however. Those loyal Republicans bemoaning the current state of their party will be heartened to know that the people who personally detonated the GOP through rank incompetence, rampant avarice and lust for power are actually doing just fine, thank you very much. Dick Cheney is shopping his memoirs around to publishers and asking for multi-millions in return, which some idiot will probably give him. Karl Rove just got a seven-figure deal to write his own Bush-era memoirs. Condi Rice just signed a three-book deal reportedly worth $2.5 million. Michael Mukasey, Tommy Thompson and Harriet Miers have all landed lucrative gigs at prestigious law firms, and Ari Fleischer somehow went to work for the Green Bay Packers. Richard Armitage and Michael Hayden have landed on the board of directors for a pair of large defense contractors. Only Alberto Gonzales stands out as the lone Bush administration official unable to cash in on his time in government; his book deal was roundly rejected by publishers, and no law firm has seen fit to add his name to their roster. Can't imagine why. And as for George W. Bush himself? Nothing less than $7 million for his memoirs, apparently to be titled "Decision Points," which will contain "a dozen of the most interesting and important decisions in the former President's personal and political life." Laura Bush has also inked a book deal for $3.5 million, meaning the former First Family will be getting more than $10 million to tell us what it was like to annihilate the Republican Party and grievously damage the country while eating off the best White House china. The Republican Party is less popular than Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney is about as popular as the shingles, but the folks who ran the GOP's train off the tracks and delivered the nation into this multifaceted mess are doing quite well in the aftermath. One is left to wonder how the people who voted for them feel about that. It's a damned safe bet they're not doing nearly as well as their erstwhile leaders are. Some might call that karma, but nobody should be surprised. It's the George W. Bush Way, after all: I got mine, screw everyone else, amen. http://www.truthout.org/062309A |
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