13 posts tagged “idiot”
This was actually available for sale on the McCain campaign webstore....
Wow... just chalk this up to one more in the seemingly never-ending list of reports out of the Bush administration which could have been posted in the Onion.
Detainees released from the prison at Guantanamo Bay have complained about inhumane conditions there, but according to the admiral in charge, their living situation is "pretty much" like that in a fraternity house.
"We don't have any solitary confinement down here in Guantanamo," Buzby replied. "What we have is single cells. I mean, there's one person to a cell. All the cells are all right next to each other."
"That's like having a single apartment in a fraternity house," suggested Lubin.
"Pretty much," Buzby agreed.
You know, the writers for the Onion, the Daily Show, and Colbert Report are going to really have to work for a living when the Bush guys are gone...
People wonder why the rest of the world hates us... I can't even imagine how insensitive crap like this gets covered in the Middle East. This guy is an idiot. Guantanamo needs to be shut down... now...
One of the things that really bothered me the most about Bush's electoral win over Kerry was the prospect of him packing the courts with conservative troglodytes. To be sure, he has done his fair share of damage, from the supreme court on down. I was very heartened by the Democrats (barely) winning the Senate last year. I knew that would put the kibosh on the most extreme of the Bushie nominations. However, one thing I didn't factor in was the total and utter incompetence of the Bush administration...
From the Carpetbagger:
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals is now one-third empty: there are five vacancies on the 15-member bench. The Senate wants to fill those vacancies, but the president’s nominees have proven to be so controversial that he’s been forced to pull a few who couldn’t even pass an up-or-down vote.
To help Bush out, Virginia’s senators — John Warner (R) and Jim Webb (D) — compiled a list of five bipartisan selections who are qualified and confirmable. The president, true to form, blew off the Virginians’ list and did what he always does — he nominated two ideologues who are going to spark a fight.
Not just any ideologues, mind you, Bush picked real doozies. First up is Steve Matthews.
Now, I am certain Mr. Matthews is an able lawyer, and the fact that he has logged no time at all as a judge should not necessarily count against him. But a brief glance at his résumé suggests that Matthews’ strongest credentials for this federal appeals court seat include his role as former state chapter president of the Federalist Society, and ranking close behind that is his membership on the board of directors for the Landmark Legal Foundation.
The Landmark Legal Foundation? Wait: Isn’t that the outfit run by Mark R. Levin, the man who brought us Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America? The constitutional theory proffered in that book was, as you may recall, that any judge who arrives at a different legal conclusion than Levin or Rush Limbaugh is an “activist” who threatens America with imminent “tyranny.” Matthews is thanked by name in Men in Black. Is it a bit strange that Bush’s latest judicial nominee was intimately involved in a best-selling book that argues for kneecapping the federal judiciary?
Why, yes, it is. It’s also odd that the Landmark Legal Foundation’s most notable recent contribution came when the group nominated Rush Limbaugh for a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. The group’s nominating letter argued that “everyday [sic] he gives voice to the values of democratic governance, individual opportunity and the just, equal application of the rule of law.”
Bush picked one of the group’s directors, who has never been a judge a day in his life, to have a lifetime position on a federal appellate court, one step below the Supreme Court. Seriously.
And then, there’s Bush’s other 4th Circuit nominee.
[Webb and Warner were] rudely smacked upside the head with the president’s second nominee, Virginia’s E. Duncan Getchell, whom they’d met with but left off their final list. Maybe from Bush’s point of view, that’s a selling point for him. Is Bush truly this tone deaf?
Getchell is best known for being active with the Federalist Society (natch), and has also never been a judge.
This is a reminder of what we’ve seen repeatedly for almost seven years — Bush would rather fight than govern. What’s important isn’t filling those 4th Circuit vacancies; what’s important is not filling those vacancies and giving right-wing activists something to whine about.
We’ve seen this game before. The White House will send unqualified ideologues to the Senate for consideration … Senate Dems will balk … the president will bluster about the crisis in judicial vacancies … Dems will implore Bush to send real nominees who can be confirmed … far-right groups will use the fight to raise a lot of money … culminating in a recess appointment.
I can’t wait for grown-ups to be in charge of the White House again.
So what we have here, is that a few republican senators are trying to get the Bushies to nominate some conservatives to the courts, but the Bushies are ignoring them in favor of nominating raving lunatics. Of course, these same lunatics would have probably been confirmed a few years ago when the senate was under republican control. Because the Bushies are incapable of either competent governance or compromise, they'd rather nominate the incompetents and have them rejected, rather than nominate compromise (but still republican) candidates and have them confirmed. Their stupidity boggles the mind. However, that's great as far as I'm concerned. Those five seats on the Court of Appeal will (hopefully) remain vacant for another year and a half, and be filled by the new incoming Democratic president, who will have a large Democratic majority in the Senate.
This is a crucial post by Josh Marshall at TPM.
Beginning in the months just after 9/11 and ever since the president and his deputies have tried to float their foreign policy on the shock, fear and desire for revenge spawned by the 9/11 attacks. The first signs (though these weren't clear in their details at the time) came in the decision to pull troops away from the hunt for bin Laden himself in late 2001 in order to ready them for the assault on Iraq little more than a year later. There we have the kernel of deception which is like the original sin of the Iraq War and, because of that, keeps coming resurfacing again and again. The claim that attacking Iraq was attacking the people who attacked the United States on 9/11, that the two things were related in anything more than a mental figment.
So at the outset it was that Iraq and al Qaeda are connected and either did attack us together (as Dick Cheney frequently suggested) or could in the future (as everyone else did). Then the beginnings of the insurgency were not a problem because we were drawing al Qaeda into Iraq to fight them on our own terms. Then we couldn't leave Iraq because doing so would hand it over to al Qaeda.
As the cycle progressed there was an mounting tendency for the administration to argue that we could not abandon its policies precisely because of the scope of the failure of those policies up to the present point -- a veritable perpetual motion machine of incompetence and disaster. But setting that aside, the enduring pattern has been for the White House to ask us to make our decisions about Iraq not based on what is happening in Iraq but on what happened in New York and Washington on 9/11.
Don't look at Iraq to make this decision, look at the Twin Towers. That's been the administration strategy for over five years. So when we see the scam popping up in a slightly different guise, even if it requires getting deep into the weeds and raising an alarm over key points of word choice and emphasis, then we simply must do so. Because this is the original sin, the founding deceit upon which everything has been built and from which the entire catastrophe unfolded.
As we all know, we live in some pretty absurd times. The Bushies are pretty much nuts, and they just keep spiraling downward. These people just seem to have decided to just actively fuck up everything they can at this point. I just don't get it. I mean, I get it, these people are interested in short term gain for their supporters, everything else be damned... someone else will pick up the mess. But that said, I just don't get how anyone else goes along with this crap. It is pretty disturbing, that even now, there are still people who think what these clowns are doing is ok. Bush may have a 27% approval rating, but that still translates into like 75 million people who think he's just dandy. I don't get it.
On that tip, I just read this blog post, which is on that topic...
Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.
Tyrone: (shrugs) Probably right, then. Speaking of Obama, I need to get t-shirts printed up to sell.
John: I can do that on the web. What do they say?
Tyrone: Don't You Dare Kill Obama
John: How about Don't You Dare Kill Obama (... and we know you're thinking about it)
Tyrone: Niiiiice.
John: Or You Kill Obama and WE WILL BURN SHIT DOWN
Tyrone: Even better. Nobody wants their shit burned down.
John: Glad to help.
Tyrone: I'm having you taken off the list for when the revolution comes.
John: ... there's really a list --
Tyrone: Oh yeah. Hell yeah.
Here's a quote from a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War...
This is a dark chapter in our history. Whatever else happens, our country's international standing has been frittered away by people who don't have the foggiest understanding of how the hell the world works. America has been conducting an experiment for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn't make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment [laughs]. If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference.
This came in a round-table discussion of the likely outcomes of the war in Iraq. Here's a hint, they go from utterly horrible, to truly unbelievably disasterous.
It is pretty sad when you overhear some bigot, or idiot, or total neaderthal say some really off-the wall stuff. You know, like this...
[I]f American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran, ... I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped."
Now, if I heard someone on the street saying something totally insane like this, well, I'd just call him a bigotted nit-wit, and move on. But here, the person saying this, is actually an elected member of Congress. I give you Virgil Goode, who has now picked up the crown as the "dunce of the month."
So I'll just put this down to reason #1,223,940 why the republican party is run by stupid children who really can't be trusted to leave their backyard.
Cheney was on his favorite territory yesterday. Limbaugh's lie fest. A safe zone where there would be no questions and reality would never destroy the fantasy world that he tries to build up. Read it for yourself...
CHENEY: Well, I think there’s some natural level of concern out there because in fact, you know, it wasn’t over
instantaneously. It’s been a little over three years now since we went into Iraq, so I don’t think it’s surprising that people are concerned.
On the other hand, this government has only been in office about five months, five or six months now. They’re off to a good start. It is difficult, no question about it, but we’ve now got over 300,000 Iraqis trained and equipped as part of their security forces. They’ve had three national elections with higher turnout than we have here in the United States. If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.
Now you can contrast that with just a little dose of actual reality from outside the delusional fact-free zone that the so-called leaders of this country live in. There was an article in the paper today by an Iraq analyist and expert from the Hoover Institution, a bastion of conservatism, which said we are weeks away from the point of no return in Iraq.
But in a sign of the growing sense of urgency, a member of a high-powered government advisory body that is developing options to prevent Iraq's chaotic collapse warns that the United States could have just weeks, not months, to avoid an all-out civil war.
"There's a sense among many people now that things in Iraq are slipping fast and there isn't a lot of time to reverse them," said Larry Diamond, one of a panel of experts advising the Iraq Study Group, which is preparing a range of policy alternatives for President Bush.
"The civil war is already well along. We have no way of knowing if it's too late until we try a radically different course," said Diamond, an expert on building democracies who is at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and is a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
I really don't know what needs to happen before people start just calling it like it is, and calling Cheney a liar to his face. The facts are there. Why won't any serious journalist just point out the facts every time Cheney lies to our face. It isn't that hard. "Cheney said X, the facts on the ground show that he is wrong, here they are..." See how easy it is. All you journalists out there, you have my permission to crib my outline here, and simply fill in the appropriate blanks. You can play that little game every time Cheney opens his mouth. It'll be fun, and even help save the country...
From the carptebagger, we learn some wonderful news... the annual census report came out today which revealed the following:
* In 2005, 46.6 million people were without health insurance coverage, up from 45.3 million people in 2004.
* The percentage of people without health insurance coverage increased from 15.6 percent in 2004 to 15.9 percent in 2005.
* The median earnings of men declined 1.8 percent to $41,386. The median earnings of women declined 1.3 percent to $31,858.
* In 2005, 37.0 million people were in poverty, not statistically different from 2004.
* 20% of income earners saw their real median household earnings increase 1.2% — while everyone else saw their median earnings drop.
As for the statistically unchanged poverty rate, which was the only modicum of decent news, this is the first time since Bush took office that the poverty rate did not go up. That's the good news. The bad news is 37 million people in poverty is 12.6% of the population — and we're still looking at an economy that has as many people living in poverty as there have been since the government started keeping track.
And let's make this very clear: 2000-2004 was an expansionary period. The economy was getting better and growth was roaring forward. And yet, during that time, millions of Americans fell into ever-more severe impoverishment.
This has never happened before. A few years ago, economists
marveled at the first time a three-year expansion had accompanied three
straight years of increased poverty. A year later, they wondered how it
had happened for a fourth time. We'd never seen three -- much less
four! -- years of expansion coincide with straight increases in the
poverty rate. In the past, rising economic tides had lifted all boats.
Now, the poor are capsizing.
See the carpetbagger report and tapped for more.
No, this isn't some sort of a sequel to the Samuel Jackson movie, but is is a tragedy nonetheless. As we all know by now, we are not going to be able to take any liquids on a plane anymore, which I suppose is fine - but let's look a bit at the reason why we can't do that. The direct reason was that the British caught some "terrorists" who were going to blow up a bunch of planes. So that sounds on the surface like something that is pretty scary, and like a major catch for the British.
Alas, just like everything connected with the Bushies and the GWOT, as time goes on, the whole thing is starting to smell fishy.
A week ago, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters, "Certainly in terms of the complexity, the sophistication, the international dimension and the number of people involved, this plot has the hallmarks of an al-Qaida-type plot." That's largely true, except for the parts about the complexity, the sophistication, and the international dimension.
Home Secretary John Reid, Britain's chief law-and-order official, acknowledged that some of the suspects would likely not be charged with major criminal offenses, but said there was mounting evidence of a "substantial nature" to back the allegations. […]
Two top Pakistani intelligence agents said Wednesday that the would-be bombers wanted to carry out an al-Qaida-style attack to mark the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 strikes, but were too "inexperienced" to carry out the plot.
The two senior agents, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that if the terror cell members arrested in Pakistan and Britain had appropriate weapons and explosives training, they could have emulated massive attacks like those five years ago in New York and Washington as well as the July 7, 2005, London bombings.
Now, go back and read that again.... Ok? Some of the suspects would not be charged? Mounting evidence? "Substantial nature"? !!!! What? So these guys have been under surveillance for about a year, and the British government does not even have enough evidence to charge them with anything? The only have "mounting evidence", what does that even mean? One would think that if they have been watching these people for a year, and finally decided to apprehend them, that they would have ROCK SOLID evidence against them. Don't you think?
Now put some of the other pieces of the puzzle together. One is that these guys did not seem to have any sort of weapons of bomb training. Newsweek reported that the suspects didn't have airline tickets and some didn't even have passports
Then we have the news that the Bushies put significant pressure on the British government to make arrests now, rather than wait for the plot (if it was actually more than just idle chatter) to develop more fully. NOw this together with what we now know about how the Bushies played games with the terrorst threat level system in the run up to the 2004 elections...
And finally, note that these arrests came on the day that a major Bush stooge, Leiberman, lost a primary election, and while the Bushies were taking a beating in world opinion for supporting Israel in Lebanon. With elections coming up in the US, and nothing but bad news and abysmal polls for the republicans in the US... one really starts to get the idea that this whole thing was a cruel joke, orchestrated to help Bush and Blair in the polls. Note how Bush and Cheney (and Lieberman) were all over this story as soon as it broke, and were trying to hype it for political advantage.
It is pretty insane that the last six years have really made it hard not to put on the "tin foil hat" and wonder about stuff like this. A real leader would never even think about pulling stunts like this... alas, we all know by now, we don't have anything like a real leader in Bush.
Excellent coverage of the unfolding facts in this case can be found at the Carpetbagger Report.
