Another socialist blog

George Bush has condemned Russia’s invasion of Georgia.  Bush, who tramples on the sovereignty of three countries before breakfast, said “Russia has invaded a sovereign neighbouring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century.”  Unacceptable indeed.

Bush further criticized Russia’s actions as “disproportionate.”  If he was aware that last week marked the 63rd anniversary of the one-sided nuclear first strike against Japan, he didn’t give any sign of it.

It sure could be.

If former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan isn’t going to Hell, nobody’s going.  He helped the Bush administration use big-lie tactics to sell a war that has killed over six hundred thousand people.  Now he’s written a memoir in which he simultaneously accuses the Bush administration of dishonesty, and denies that he himself was an enthusiastic part of the conspiracy.

He must think we’ve all got short memories.  McClellan claimed to possess proof that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons.  He claimed Iraq supported terrorists.  He claimed that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program.  (These are documented at the excellent searchable database on Bush administration lies at http://www.publicintegrity.org.)  He strongarmed reporters who dared ask embarrassing questions about the war.  He lied for Bush about the Valerie Plame Wilson affair and then refused even to stand by his own remarks about the subject.

These lies, told with his very own lips, he spins as “It’s just the way the game’s become played in Washington….”  You’ve heard this argument before, usually from fourteen-year-olds, and usually phrased as “Everybody’s doing it.”  Bullshit.  He’s a liar.  He knew he was lying.  He could have refused to lie, but he didn’t because he knew he’d get fired.  Simple as that.  And he’s still lying now.  Because “I was deceived” sells more books than “I’m a lying scumbag.”

It’s a new year, and time to get back to the blog.

Today the families of thirteen trapped coal miners” wait to hear of the fate of their loved ones. President Bush sent his prayers and said that the government would do all in its power to help bring the trapped men out.

Wait a minute, this sounds familiar. Oh yeah, I remember. This is the same George Bush who stopped action on 13 job safety initiatives from the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Maybe he could try giving real job safety to workers, and send the prayers to his corporate backers.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall August 29. That was a month ago, which means we are scheduled to forget all about it any minute now. A massive effort is underway to rebuild George Bush after all so much unfiltered bad news. But I’m not at all sure that raising the terror alert level again will do the trick.

Getting rid of Michael Brown only seems to have helped a little. Brown is not only an incompetent, he’s an incompetent with a padded resume who helped Bush win Florida by paying $31 million in bogus hurricane claims.

Homeland Security sources told the Post that after the hurricanes that Brown “and his allies [recommended] him to succeed Tom Ridge as Homeland Security secretary because of their claim that he helped deliver Florida to President Bush by efficiently responding to the Florida hurricanes.”

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel uncovered emails from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush that confirmed those allegations and directly implicated Brown as playing politics at the expense of hurricane victims.

“As the second hurricane in less than a month bore down on Florida last fall, a federal [FEMA] consultant predicted a “huge mess” that could reflect poorly on President Bush and suggested that his re-election staff be brought in to minimize any political liability, records show,” the Sentinel reported in a March 23 story.

“Two weeks later, a Florida official summarizing the hurricane response wrote that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was handing out housing assistance “to everyone who needs it without asking for much information of any kind.”

The records the Sentinel obtained were contained in hundreds of pages of Gov. Jeb Bush’s storm-related e-mails the paper received from the governor’s office under the threat of a lawsuit.

The search for those elusive weapons of mass destruction is winding down, because they simply have not turned up. The central justification for the war against Iraq turns out to have been a fraud.

Meanwhile, another sovereign power—Microsoft—has admitted it lied when it claimed that the iLoo was a hoax. For those of you who weren’t following, press reports (confirmed by Microsoft) said Microsoft was planning to develop an Internet-connected portable toilet, complete with monitor and keyboard. After a tidal wave of satire, Microsoft then claimed the whole thing had been a hoax. This too, seemed implausible: an elaborate hoax that somehow involved an entire division of the company, plus a number of hired consultants from outside the company. Now they say they were lying when they said they had been lying before. But they’re telling the truth now—really, they promise.

My long-time friend and comrade J. Quinn Brisben analyzed Bush’s speech of March 17, and came up with a list of 54 lies in it, which is depressingly unsurprising.

While George Bush deliberately uses loaded words like “appeasement” as he beats the drum of war, there are those who think there are other ways to take the lesson of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power:

It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion - “a sign from God,” he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

Boy does that have a familiar ring to it.

Another Bush loyalist is enjoying his reward. Miguel Estrada has been nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals after his work as a legal strategist for George W. Bush’s in the 2000 Florida election dispute at the Supreme Court, which made it possible for Bush to steal the electionC in broad daylight. Much has been made of his lack of any written legal opinions (he’s never served as a judge), but it’s not as if we don’t know what he’s hiding. The People for the American Way point out that Miguel Estrada has worked to defend anti-loitering laws “which have been demonstrated to disproportionately harm African-America ns and Latinos. Federal and state courts, including the Supreme Court, have inva lidated a number of these provisions as violating the First Amendment and the du e process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, including in several cases that Es trada has worked on.” His former former direct supervisor in the Solicitor General’s office, Paul Bender, told the Los Angeles Times that Estrada is so “ideologically driven that he couldn’t be trusted to state the law in a fair, neutral way,” and that he is a “right-wing ideologue” with “an agend a that’s similar to Clarence Thomas”. Miguel Estrada doesn’t believe the courts have any role in striking down unconstitutional laws.

Senator Grassley (R-IA) has defended Estrada, saying that for the Senate to refuse to confirm Estrada “would be to shut the door on the American dre am of Hispanic-Americans everywhere.” Strange talk from a Republican who has voted against affirmative action in the past. Maybe Trent Lott changed Grassley’s mind on that.

From last night’s State of the Union address: Your enemy is not surrounding your country — your enemy is ruling your country.

Yesterday’s Fresh Air on NPR featured an interview with Joseph Cirincione, who specializes in defense and proliferation iss ues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He’s no peace activist, but he does a great job debunking a lot of the Bush administration spin on the arms inspection, including the oft-mentioned aluminum tubes (which are not usable for nuclear weapons production).