Wednesday, October 04, 2006

talk about freedom, democracy is bullshit

* billmon:
"One of the things that makes watching the Cheney Administration so exciting is that you never know how paranoid you ought to be. Would the cabal really time the launch of a massive air strike against Iran to gain maximum advantage at the polls in an off-year congressional election? Are they that depraved?

Considering what we've just learned about the GOP's two-strikes-and-you're-out policy for Internet sex criminals in the House leadership, maybe I should consider my question answered already.

But -- despite everything -- I still find it hard to believe an American president and his political hit team would deliberately use a war, and the inevitable war hysteria, to hold a few more marginal seats in Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

Call me naive, but I still don't think we've sunk quite that low -- yet.

It remains a fact, though, that this administration, and the criminal conspiracy it calls a political party, both desperately, desperately need to change the subject, and fast, if they're going to preserve their death grip on power and keep the process servers at bay. It doesn't look like a Code Orange Alert is going to cut it this time.

It would, in a totally perverse way, be carthartic (in both senses of the word) if the real October surprise turned out to be a tactical nuclear strike on Isfahan. At least the uncertainty would be gone. We would know beyond a reasonable doubt that the United States is no longer a constitutional republic, at least not in any meaningful sense, and could respond as our consciences and courage dictate. And I could finally stop worrying about whether I'm being too paranoid.

Like I said, I don't expect it happen. War with Iran may be and probably is coming, but I doubt it's coming on Karl Rove's timetable.

Still, given the hole the Rovians now find themselves in, and the stakes they're playing for, I'm going to be nervously paranoid each and every day until the polls close on November 7.

Can you blame me?"
* digby:
"Frist may have ben speaking out of turn, but I think he was probably saying what he's been hearing privately. And it explains why the admnistration has been acting so strangely about that truce between Pakistan and Mullah Omar in Waziristan a couple of weeks ago. The policy in Afghanistan is changing, only they aren't telling anybody. And apparently that means allowing the Taliban back in power.

Aside from the absurdity of allowing that threat to fester again, this means that all that talk about freedom and democracy is, as we suspected, bullshit."
* digby:
"WTF? Why did the White House and Rice say last week that the meeting never took place? What's up with the 9/11 Commission? Did they cover up for Condi or did they fail to note meetings that Condi took seriously? (I doubt that last since the commission's main author is Condi's good buddy, Phil Zelikow.)

This is important because, as we know, the Republicans are working overtime to write the history to say the Clinton administration let the situation develop and fester without any real action while the Bush administration did everything it could within the short time it was in office. That is demonstrably false.

I honestly don't care if Tenet and Black "felt" they were brushed off or not. It's clear that the intelligence communities were warning the administration in dire terms all summer long that a terrorist attack was looming and yet Junior went off to Crawford and cleared brush for the entire month of August."

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