The sad truth, bluntly put.

I do love Watertiger, bless her!

And it's the sad truth. The whole Tea Party movement is astroturf, not grassroots, funded and planned by powerful people who are out for their own interests, not the interests of the crowds they foment, stirring up fear and anger.

It's a graphic graphic and I can just imagine the shitstorm if I put it here, so you can click over to it.

--the BB

Cheney Redux?

Avid pursuit of WMD - anthrax - links with terrorists - be very afraid!

Ah yes, Cheney's favorite fiction: the Mohammed Atta meeting in Prague that wasn't. The standard White House lines leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. What White House stooge was uttering them on November 28, 2001?



Here's some background for y'all on the allegations that the lead hijacker of 9/11, Mohammed Atta, met with an Iraqi spy in Prague. First a clip of Darth Cheney denying what he'd said earlier:



And some follow-up:

The claim that terrorist leader Mohamed Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi spy a few months before 9/11 was never substantiated, but that didn’t stop the White House from trying to insert the allegation in presidential speeches, according to classified documents.

Cryptic references to the White House efforts are contained in a new Senate Intelligence Committee report released last Friday that debunked purported links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. However, attempts by committee Democrats to make public a more explicit account of White House interest in the anecdote were thwarted when the “intelligence community” refused to declassify a CIA cable that lays out the controversy, according to congressional sources. Democrats charged in a written statement that intelligence officials had failed to demonstrate “that disclosing the [cable] ... would reveal sources and methods or otherwise harm national security.” The Democrats also complained that officials' refusal to declassify the cable “represents an improper use of classification authority by the intelligence community to shield the White House.”

According to two sources familiar with the blacked-out portions of the Senate report that discuss the CIA cable's contents, the document indicates that White House officials had proposed mentioning the supposed Atta-Prague meeting in a Bush speech scheduled for March 14, 2003. Originated by Czech intelligence shortly after 9/11, the tendentious claim was that in April 2001, Atta, the 9/11 hijack leader, had met in Prague with the local station chief for Iraqi intelligence. The sources said that upon learning of the proposed White House speech, the CIA station in Prague sent back a cable explaining in detail why the agency believed the anecdote was ill-founded.

According to one of the sources familiar with the Senate report's censored portions, who asked for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, the tone of the CIA cable was “strident” and expressed dismay that the White House was trying to shoehorn the Atta anecdote into the Bush speech to be delivered only days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The source said the cable also suggested that policymakers had tried to insert the same anecdote into other speeches by top administration officials.

--Newsweek
[Emphasis mine]

Cheney. McCain.

Wrong then. Wrong now.

Oh, and while we're all obsessing on economic woes, what might you suppose will be the effects of a 50% unemployment rate? That's the case in Iraq right now. Heckuva job, Dubya.

h/t to Juan Cole at Informed Comment
--the BB

Sober assessment

The most sensible comment I've seen on the so-called recent confrontation in the Gulf of Hormuz is this by A. J. Rossmiller on Americablog:

The comparison to the USS Cole is one that I've been hearing a lot, but it's not really a helpful analogy, and here's why: the Cole attack was carried out by terrorists, i.e., there was nobody for us to hit back against. Were an Iranian navy ship to suddenly decide to randomly carry out a suicide attack against a US ship, we'd bomb Iran back to the stone age, and of course they know that. There's absolutely *no* incentive for them to do such a thing, which is why we can coexist all the time in the Gulf with their ships. Iran is absolutely not going to attack us (at least not openly) because they're a state, not a terrorist organization. So while they *could* have done something to the ship, it's so extraordinarily unlikely that to hype it like it was a close call or something seems pretty disingenuous of the administration.

Given that no one has identified the source of the threatening sound byte that was added to the video, it seems that a threatening mountain has been created out of a perfectly ordinary molehill. Fortunately, the public is increasingly skeptical of the administration that cried wolf.
--the BB

What sort of hellspawn are they?

Cthulhu image via pathguy

I refer to these evil creatures walking among us and pressing for war on Iran? And cheerleading the iniquitous and barbaric mess in Iraq? I am fast approaching the point where even by faith I can no longer call them human. Evil, evil, evil!

My mother used to speak of situations that made her "lose" her Christianity, which was probably no more than wanting to say "bad" words and harbor uncharitable thoughts. I am way past that point.

If Cheney, Podhoretz, Bloody Bill Krystol, and the entire Kagan family, combined with the idiot boy-king Bush don't scare the hell out of you this Hallowe'en, nothing will.

Instead of giving way to exaggerated and groundless fears, however, it might be more effective if we all acknowledge that not only does the chimperor have no clothes, the whole lot of them have no rationality, no integrity, and no credibility and we therefore collectively and heartily and publicly and repeatedly laugh them to scorn.
--the BB
UPDATE: And when the media and pundits give them any time and attention as though they had anything reasonable, intelligent, or credible to contribute, call the media and pundits on it and ask they why on earth they bother listening to and propagating such steaming piles of feces.
STOP THE INSANITY!