Incompetence and Lies: lather, rinse, repeat

President "Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead!" Bush. He wants to stay the course. So simple, yet so wrong: "From the moment that Baghdad fell in April 2003 and much of the public infrastructure was systematically destroyed, the United States failed to fulfill the first overriding obligation of an occupying power: to establish and maintain order."

Advice to Liberals :: Ignore it at your Peril

Some advice from the best of the best..........

Eric Alterman
American politics has become a game with no rules and no referee. Play by the old rules--fairness, honesty, good faith--and face political extinction.

George Lakoff
Karl Rove is still outsmarting us, and we fed right into it.

What should liberals have learned from reading the Rockridge Institute website and Don’t Think of an Elephant?

Start with resisting Rove’s juicy bait.

Spell out the progressive philosophy of Total Security – keeping a strong military while also supporting job security, pension security, and security in the form of health and education. Attack Bush for giving up on homeland security, failing to protect cargo shipments, nuclear and chemical plants, and so on.

Point out Rove’s attempt to cover up Bush’s disaster in Iraq, and dwell on the public’s repudiation of the Bush policy for good reasons.

Keep pounding on the Downing Street memo, pointing out how Bush doctored intelligence and sent troops to war on false pretenses. Goad him about there being no WMD’s in Iraq, but plenty in North Korea.

Attack Bush for weakening our military and our economy, while strengthening al Qaeda, Point out that Bush is al Qaeda’s best friend, since he is their best recruiter.

Raise the stakes. Point out how the administration has been using 9/11 for their own political ends; of using the war in Iraq as a pretext to carry out a radical political agenda at home, and to get re-elected. Point out the immorality of using American and Iraqi lives for political ends.

Use the opportunity to brand the right wing as political fundamentalists, showing the intimate connections between Christian fundamentalism and Islamic fundamentalism.

Raise the question of whether the brutality arising from the US occupation of Iraq led to an anti-US reaction in Iran and the squelching of democratic forces there – exactly the opposite of Bush’s predicted result.

We complain about our leaders all the time, usually with sufficient justification. Will they absorb these simple points in how to win? If they don't, the next logical step of implementing good policy and returning common sense to our government is just a pipe dream.

Take That, Karl!

Taking the fight to Karl, from real troops with real guts.

Hey chickenhawks, don't apply.

Osama, you there?

After 9/11, President Bush rightly placed a priority on getting Osama bin Laden. The architect, financier, and public face of fundamental terrorists in Afghanistan claimed his place as the General Officer of the 9/11 attacks.

Bush said we'd get him dead or alive, and note to Karl: most of us surely preferred him dead. But something happened and Bush dropped the ball: Osama is still free, we are in Iraq, and our military is being ground to a pulp in the new center of terrorism in the Middle East: Iraq, a product of BushCo™ - Stay the Course!

Now Osama's being quoted in Presidential speeches and being used to justify our strategies in Iraq. From Bush's speech -- "Hear the words of Osama Bin Laden: “This Third World War … is raging in Iraq. The whole world is watching this war.” He says it will end in “victory and glory or misery and humiliation.”

Porter Goss recently said we know where he is, but don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by going in and grabbing him. Maybe Porter is being coy, you know how those CIA chiefs are.

Donald Rumsfeld even had the nerve to claim the isurgents have "no Ho Chi Min, no Mao". Hey Rummy, they have Osama! They don't need Mao! Osama did the dirty work and translated from Chinese to Arabic. Remember Osama? You can ask your boss. (Sheesh, I forget stuff and I'm in my forties, but lives and nations don't depend on my memory.)

You've come a long way, Osama.

Voting Practice

Practice makes perfect:

www.cnn.com
www.msnbc.com

You know what to do.

Another Take on Rove

By the smartest guy in the room - Dave Neiwart of Orcinus: this is the logical conclusion to Rove's smears and Rush's despicable lies.

And they call us shrill.

Reality vs. Hallucinations

Think Progress, working overtime:

War duration: 27 months, could last any number of years.

War cost: over 200 billion, with much more to come.

War dead: 1727 as of today, published. Unfortunately, many more to come.

Can someone explain to me how the word "success" can be associated with these disturbing facts?