Losing Feith
Douglas Feith, one of the men highly responsible for our being in the Iraq-mess we are in today, will be leaving the DoD in six months. It couldn't happen soon enough for me.
"Someone" must have "something" on him. Something he may not be able to deny. Something incriminating, I'd guess.
Don't ask me what - I'm only guessing. Maybe he's just "damaged goods" after the implication of his involvement with Larry Franklin and the security disaster in Iraq. Sy Hersh's recent allegations certainly couldn't have helped to boost Feith's PR. It takes a major uncovering of impropriety and an elephant-sized monkey wrench to unloose the feithful..er, faithful.. from the Bush Administration these days. It seems it's been done, though.
See Laura Rozen's comments HERE and HERE.
Spongebob vs. the Missionary-Position
Spongebob and the missionary position?!?
What could they possible have in common, you ask?
They both appear in a clever piece by SFGate columnist Mark Morford.
Excerpts:"Note the people who look at hilarious children's cartoons and see only sinister mind control, who look at their fellow human souls and see only an army of debauched heathens, who look (reluctantly) at their own genitals and see only a gnarled clump of pain and confusion, who look up at the beautiful blue sky and see only a massive canopy of daggers.
How incredibly sad. And, for right now, how very, insidiously dangerous...[..]
[..]....They have jammed a black seed of paranoia and dread into the tired soil of American consciousness, and have made it their lifelong duty to ensure that the seed festers and erupts into a gnarled weed of hate and ignorance and bad missionary-position sex with the lights off."
Flip Flopping On The Definition of ‘Freedom’
The Bush administration’s had a lot of explaining to do about their meaning of “freedom”, the one little word which speechwriters had sprinkled throughout the President’s January 20th inaugural speech, leading to a lot of big questions. Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne says: “You can spin a lot of things. Freedom shouldn’t be one of them.” LINK
The day after the inaugural address, the White House basically said they didn’t really mean what we may have thought they’d meant when President Bush talked about the expansion of “freedom”. They went on to try to explain what they did mean, which in reality, had little to do with the bold speech itself. Dionne calls it the “Freedom Shuffle”. The uncertainty, after sounding oh-so certain and determined, can only increase political division in America and enhance further mistrust amongst foreign nations, according to Dionne. When it depends upon what the definition of “freedom” is on any given day, the President makes it easy for anyone to easily doubt his intent and tenacity in standing up for whatever he thinks the word means. We are only left to scratch our heads and wonder. Dionne says:The younger Bush’s Freedom Shuffle — he’s an idealist on Thursday and a realist on Friday — may come as a relief to the many foreign policy specialists allergic to grand visions. A majority of Americans will be pleased with the elder Bush’s reassurance that the speech does not mean “newly asserted military forces.”
But the Freedom Shuffle is a terrible mistake for Bush, because the greatest barrier to Bush’s success in his second term is the intense cynicism he has inspired about his motives. This cynicism affects the near majority that voted against him at home but also a vast number of citizens in nations around the world that were once American allies. It is a cynicism that, if it spreads further through the Muslim world, could doom the very best aspirations of Bush’s policy.
Bush supporters see this cynicism as mean-spirited. In fact, it is the bitter fruit of bitter experience. A war originally justified in the name of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction is transformed with some well-chosen phrases into — presto! — an episode in the long struggle for freedom. The shifting rationale is never acknowledged. His disquisition on this struggle did not even mention the central theater of battle in Iraq. No need to mire grand dreams in grim realities. A nation that should be the world’s leading advocate of human rights gets caught up in a torture scandal, and the president has yet to hold himself or high officials accountable for this deep stain on his country’s reputation.
