More tax dollars at work

According to The Washington Post this morning, the Pentagon is putting up 20 million of our hard-earned tax dollars to find a way “to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq.”

Yes indeedy, having failed miserably at achieving any of their stated goals in Iraq, Team Bush has decided instead to throw millions of dollars at finding a way to trick Americans into thinking the apocalyptic clusterfuck they’ve wrought is actually a burgeoning Garden of Eden suffering from a simple case of bad P.R.

Twenty million taxpayer dollars to sell us a more finely-crafted lie. It’s enough to make you proud to be an American, ain’t it?

Where’s Fang Been This Month?

Don’t think I’m not still outraged by national/world politics and all things W, but lately the energy usually allocated to decrying the hypocrisy in DC has been redirected at feeling wicked sorry for myself, and that doesn’t make for the kind of blogging one would care to be remembered for, so I have kept a deliberately low profile.

Instead, I’ve been focusing my efforts on trying to get a handle on being a better father to The Man Cub. He’s cutting teeth and almost walking at the same time, so when he’s not keeping us awake with his howls of outrage and oral pain, he’s keeping us busy crawling up on high, rickety-ass places and getting stuck and screaming for rescue.

If there is a common theme emerging, it has to do with screaming. These days, I’m happy to report, it’s mostly coming from the boy.

Thanks to my friendly neighborhood GP kicking up the Daddy Doesn’t Get Mad Pills dosage, and my spiritual advisor finally talking me into seeking out this crappy, tiny town’s sole homeopath, the last couple weeks have been mostly pretty good. I’ve got another long stretch of Daddying to do tomorrow, as The Missus chases after The Dissertation That Will Not Die, like some deranged Van Helsing trying to drive a stake through the black heart of her indestructible, elusive nemesis.

But she swears that by The Man Cub’s birthday next week, she’ll have the damned thing put of our lives for good, and we can refocus on our lives. I’ve never lived this close for this long to something that was trying to kill my ass so badly. And frankly, I haven’t responded this poorly to stress since I was a teenager. Seems like every day brings a mea culpa instead of a “what can I do for ya?”

I promise to do better, Sweetie. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day. Thanks for being strong for both of us. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it…

Yet another sure sign of the coming apocalypse:

#8,000,006:
Hezbollah launches boy band to stardom

I thought making this was a geeky waste of time...

That is, until I came across THIS.

“Step away from the library paste…”

I’m tired of being treated like an idiot.

Not by the people who know me – if you know me, you know I’m an idiot. On a deeply personal level, I could be reasonably construed as an idiot. But in the details, and the way I run my life in the world at large, I try to keep the idiocy under wraps; steer a straight course. Pass, as it were.

That’s why I get pissed when strangers (salesmen and politicians, usually) automatically assume I’m an idiot, and treat me like one. And I’m not just pissed for me, I’m pissed for everybody. Who dares assume my fellow Americans are, collectively, idiots?

Telemarketers aside, I think it’s probably Karl Rove and some of them college-educated neocon fellas that used to run DC back in his first term when W was still wet behind the ears. Oh, how they dared. And until pretty recently, America has been happy to allow itself to act the idiots we’re being treated like.

Personally, I don’t mind so much when a Karl Rove or Dick Cheney gets out there and says something outrageously insulting to my intelligence. I recognize the malevolent genius at work behind the hooey and I have to at least admire the craft.

It’s when Dumbleyou does it – wags his finger and talks down to the camera – that it really boils my nanny! It’s much worse being treated like an idiot by somebody generally acknowledged to be an idiot himself. It’s doubly insulting.

And all the insolent Village Idiot hilarity was on display today at Bush’s press conference about – guess what – national security and the bang-up job he’s doing on it. Bush always speaks to a roomful of reporters in the disapproving, sing-song cadence of a kindergarten teacher who’s just walked back into the room to find the whole class eating paste, and this was no exception.

What really rubbed me the wrong way though is the bullshit they’re peddling; even without Bush’s Sesame Street delivery of it, the actual text of the GOP’s message is so nakedly disingenuous that it could only possibly be a total crock of crap. I mean, think about what they’re selling to their loyal third – two ideas are pounded home relentlessly:

Liberals are Soft On Terror And Will Endanger Your Lives!

We Must Attack Them There So We Don’t Have to Fight Them Here!

Let’s start with just the concept of “soft” on terror. Does Bush’s insistent 30-ish percent base honestly believe that Democrats – patriots all, not to mention seasoned, professional political hacks of the first order – look at 9-11 and say, “Eh, that wasn’t so bad. I’m sure the terrorists had their reasons, maybe we should have hugged it out with them.”?

It’s just plain old good policy to be out for terrorist blood right now, so terrorists’ blood it shall be! Bipartisan resolution passed, drinks are on the house.

How can anyone be so stupid to not see through ‘soft’ on terror. “Not only is my opponent soft on terror, but he doesn’t think puppies should be cuddly. Plus I understand he is pro-cancer!”

They’re the same thirty-third percentile who think indefinitely policing a country the size of California halfway ‘round the world is somehow making it safer for us here in the USA.

How does anybody honestly believe that John Q. Jihadist, who killed 23 civilians in a suicide blast yesterday in downtown Baghdad, would have detonated himself in Times Square instead if we hadn’t happened to stop by to stay in Iraq three years ago?

The whole concept is as logically inconsistent as ‘soft on terror.’ It doesn’t hold water, 2/3 of us know that, but the GOP keeps successfully repackaging it and handing it back to us anyway.

The British didn’t find out a damned thing in Iraq about their recent terror scare. They found it at home, using weapons of mass intelligence that we apparently do not possess, or at least have chosen to no longer wield, in favor of proactive military dickswinging abroad.

In spite of all of that, Bush’s poll numbers on terror took a healthy bump-up after the British plot was revealed. WTF??!?

All I can think of is that we – my fellow Americans – went out and made the Village Idiot king. Maybe we are as stupid as they treat us.

Our Repugnant President v The Rule of Law

Remember when the Supreme Court recently bitch-slapped the Bush administration for flouting the Geneva Conventions with its torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan? Remember how most of us hoped that would force Dumbleyou and his cadre of crooks into behaving in a more decent, civilized way to detainees and prisoners held in American custody? You know, to help distinguish our actions from those of the terrorists we’re supposed to be morally superior to?

[cue laugh track here]

According to this morning’s Washington Post, Team Bush is responding not by bringing its behavior into line with the law, but by altering the laws it has been violating to bring the law into line with the torture and degrading practices they favor:

“The Bush administration has drafted amendments to a war crimes law that would eliminate the risk of prosecution for political appointees, CIA officers and former military personnel for humiliating or degrading war prisoners, according to U.S. officials and a copy of the amendments.”

As I’m about to dragged off on a Sleep-Deprivation Vacation by well-meaning, if misguided in-laws, my expression of personal outrage will necessarily be atypically abbreviated.

The America that Bush is crafting is not the America my Dad fought to defend in WWII, it’s not the America I proudly pledged allegiance to all those years in elementary school (“one nation under God” and all), and it damned sure isn’t the America I want my son to grow up in.

Thank God there’s only a couple years left in this bastard’s term. I just hope there’s enough America left to salvage when we run this fucker and his criminal cronies out of town in January ’09, and that his successor, be he or she Democrat, Republican or Independent, has the decency to undo the repulsive, un-American outrages perpetrated against our democracy and national dignity by the thugs currently running the show in DC.

It oughtta be a crime… well, it is, but not for long, apparently.

The Vacationer-In-Chief

Hey, if it’s August, it must be time for Dumbleyou to head to his Texas truck farm for some serious brush-clearing – this from no less an authority on the White House agenda than Fox News.

Well, it’s been a busy July. Standing back and actively declining to take peace-making action while Israel kills hundreds of civilians – and the occasional Hezbollah soldier – with bombs he fast-tracked to them; making a howling ass of himself on the world stage at the G8, fondling the German Chancellor and talking smack with a mouth full of food on an open mic to lapdog Tony Blair; high-fiving his homies in the House when they tacked on a $753 billion reduction in the estate tax to a piddling minimum wage increase bill; using the Constitution as toilet paper with his hundreds of ‘signing statements,’ negating the implementation of bills passed by his own Congress; poor people dying in droves in the heat wave at least partially caused by the global warming he doesn’t even believe exists (sorry, no Biblical citation about global warming, must not be real) … no wonder our cute little president is so darned Bushed.

Mission Accomplished! Have a nice vacation.

And remember, if any Presidential Daily Briefings cross your path about imminent al Qaeda assaults in America, make sure you get your political team together asap to brainstorm how to use the attack you fail to stop to shore up your bogus cred as our infallible national protector and stick it to the impotent Dems. After all, those pesky mid-term elections are right around the corner and right now you’re about as popular with the American people as a chronic case of diarrhea.

Come to think of it, I bet all you’d need is one more 9/11-type attack and your last couple years could be the free ride with Congress and the media that your first few years were! It could turn out to be a great vacation after all!

Postscript: USA Today reports that W has had to cut his vacation this year back to just ten days. Ten days! Why, that’s barely enough time to ignore indigent hurricane victims! There oughtta be a law – and that would be one the President might actually obey.