The Warnings of History

From Common Dreams.

Words cannot express ...

... how horrifying this extremely well-documented article is.

Yesterday while talking to Liz, I said that Bush had managed something that Nixon, Clinton, Reagan, , never did, namely make me embarrassed to be an American. It seems like every day there's a new parallel to draw between Bush & Hitler, between Bush's faux "democracy" and fascism. It's awful, it's scary. But though I bellyache & moan about how awful it is, I have never had to deal with anything like this:

Captain Terry Riordon unknowingly brought radiation poisoning home with him from Iraq to his wife, Susan Riordon. As recounted in the November, 2004 issue of the mainstream Conde Nast publication Vanity Fair, Mrs. Riordon was constantly burned by her husband's semen during intercourse.

Seems Terry's semen was turned to a fiery alkali by the radioactive uranium that settled in his testicles. The happily married couple had no idea what this new and horrifying complication was in this intensely private part of their life together. Little did they know the American Department of Defense had hopped into bed with them with a deadly intent.

With her husband slowly dying of radiation poisoning and in intense pain herself, Mrs. Riordon resorted to filling condoms with frozen green peas to use on herself to obtain relief from the internal burning's intense, excruciating, lasting pain. Other couples do that and other wildly frantic and imaginative measures seeking relief. The burning can leave blisters and contamination.

"It hurt [Terry] too. He said it was like forcing it through barbed wire," Riordon says. "It seemed to burn through condoms; if he got any on his thighs or his testicles, he was in hell." In a last, desperate attempt to save their sex life, says Riordon, "I used to fill condoms with frozen peas and insert them [after sex] with a lubricant." That, she says, made her pain just about bearable. Perhaps inevitably, he became impotent. "And that was like our last little intimacy gone."

Bumper Sticker Du Jour

THE LAST PEOPLE WHO LISTENED TO A BUSH
WANDERED AROUND THE DESERT FOR 40 YEARS!

Some thoughts on Bush's Blood Thirst

According to the Washington Post, the Army is having trouble finding new recruits. It seems that fewer kids are willing to engage in a year-long game of Russian roulette for nothing in Iraq (or wherever). The recruiters bemoan this.

"Very frankly, in a couple of places our recruiting pool is getting soft," said Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, the Army's personnel chief. "We're hearing things like, 'Well, let's wait and see how this thing settles out in Iraq,' " he said in an interview.

"The youngsters that are joining us are spending more time with the recruiters before they raise their right hand," he said. Today, most prospective enlistees contact the Army via the Internet, he said, asking numerous questions that require more recruiters to answer online and follow up with phone calls.

But few candidates will join up before meeting a recruiter in person and spending significant amounts of time with one, he said. "They ultimately want to see a soldier, a recruiter, and talk to them eyeball to eyeball," he said. As a result, "the recruiter who could go out and recruit two people this week might be consumed with recruiting that one."

The average cost of signing up a recruit is also beginning to rise, from $15,265 in fiscal 2001 to $15,967 in fiscal 2004 -- the result of more recruiters, advertising, and increased enlistment bonuses. In January, the Army announced a new six-month advertising contract with Leo Burnett USA worth an estimated $100 million.

I wonder how the recruiters feel as they attempt to talk youngsters into joining up to fight the great fight in Operation Blood for Oil? Do you suppose any of them have a conscience? How many can truly believe that what the Bush adminstration and the US military is doing is the right thing?

Coincidentally, columnist Bob Herbert of the New York Times has a piece about Iraq, in which he compares the voices against the war just before it began two years ago versus the voices now from within the administration.

The Times ran a front-page article on Sunday March 16, in which a senior counterintelligence official said: "An American invasion of Iraq is already being used as a recruitment tool by Al Qaeda and other groups. And it is a very effective tool."

On the same day The Washington Post reported that "specialists inside and outside the government question whether a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would deliver a significant blow against international terrorism. Experts warn that war and occupation could also have the opposite effect by emboldening radical Islamic groups and adding to their grievances."

The Bush adminstration of course was touting the line that the war would be quickly over -- indeed, that any US forces would be back home by 2005, having been greeted by flowers strewn in their path on the march to Baghdad.

(Okay, so, they were a little off in their estimation of how things would go. )

Now fast-forward to last week's testimony of top administration officials before the Senate Intelligence Committee. If the war in Iraq was supposed to stem the terrorist tide, the comments of these officials made it clear that it hasn't worked.

Porter Goss, the C.I.A. director, told the committee, "Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists." He added, "These jihadists who survive will leave Iraq experienced and focus on acts of urban terrorism."

The war, said Mr. Goss, "has become a cause for extremists." In his view, "It may only be a matter of time before Al Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons."

We invaded Iraq without just cause, we destroyed its infrastructure, allowed looting of its historical relics, hospital supplies, ammunition storage dumps. We leveled whole cities, killing thousands upon thousands of Iraqis (they can't all be insurgents -- yet, anyway). Iraq is in chaos and that chaos is not clearing up. And the farcical and inane recent elections have been a major victory for Iran -- not democracy. We did all these things without having an exit strategy. Basically, the Bush adminstration saw Iraq as an opportunity for a permanent presence of US forces with the lovely bonus of plundering some of the richest of the world's natural resources.

And they not only got the US into a war it didn't need at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars, but they've mishandled every single part of the process.

Between 69 and 82 percent of the (still living) Iraqi population favor a "near-term" withdrawl of American forces. (What do you want to bet that the Bush brain trust interprets that statistic as a sign that, darn it, we've been killing off the wrong folks after all?)

Read Baghdad Burning for a moving account of just what it's like over there for the Iraqis, and how far astray our policies have wandered.

Pity the poor recruiters if the fresh meat they're after at your local high school should actually pay close attention to any of this.

Mr. Herbert also notes:

Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said: "Our policies in the Middle East fuel Islamic resentment. Overwhelming majorities in Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia believe the U.S. has a negative policy toward the Arab world."

Stop the presses.

Magnificent Obsession

Sherlock Holmes had Moriarty.



Batman has the Joker.



And the Boston Red Sox have the New York Yankees.



Winning the World Series, to be honest, was an anticlimax for the true hard-core
Sox fan. You don't hear people at the post office or around the water cooler
or  at the lunchroom counter dissecting the victory over the St. Louis
Cardnials last fall -- to be honest, I had to think a bit to even remember
who it was we beat.



No, what really counts is what we had to do to *get* to the World Series.



We beat the Yankees.



No, we *humiliated* the Yankees.



And it felt so *damn* good.



Unless you grew up in New England, as we both did, you can never hope to
understand this.



There was some concern that with the Sox having finally won it all, that
baseball this year would end up a ho-hum experience. But as they're reporting
at the Boston Dirt Dogs website,
home page for Sox Nation, there isn't much chance of that. We aren't even
a week into spring training and already there's a juicy Yankees-related scandal
brewing.



Is it any wonder I can't wait for Opening Day?

Link of the Day

From Belgium. I can't say I really blame them, either.

"Gannon" article links

The Frank Rich article at the NYT has gotten a lot of attention. So far it's the best thing I've seen from the mainstream media in the US. Worth a read, though unfortunately what Rich writes can hardly be considered "hard news."

Fortunately though, MSM elsewhere in the world doesn't wear the blinders that reporters in this country must don.

Post With No Title

I'm actually not sure what to call this post. What springs to mind first is "Loving Words" since the person who wrote the item I'm linking to very obviously does love words. But it would be ironic in another way, since the piece addresses not loving words, or at least being critical of the way some of us string words together.

So this post has no title, and if you're not interested in writing, or poetry, or words (loving and otherwise), I guess you won't be interested in this link either.

Bush visits New Hampshire

Bush held one of his "town hall" meetings in New Hampshire last week to attempt to scare people into buying into his false claims regarding the imminent demise of Social Security. (Though traditionally a Republican stronghold, it's worth pointing out that NH was the only state to switch from red to blue in the presidential election.)

From the Murdoch rag the Boston Herald, here's an article on how it went. (It's nice to see that folks can be NH people first, and fools & Republicans second. Now if we could just do something about the corrupt state officials we manage to elect ...)

Masterpiece

From the Whiskey Bar, the Creation of Gannon.

(TOTH: The Sideshow.)

Link of the Day

From World O'Crap.

(Going out of town for a while now...)

Compassionate Conservatism

From the Los Angeles Times comes a story about how the White House is trying to overturn compensation promised to American POWs tortured in Iraq during the Gulf War.

(TOTH: I'm Just Sayin')

Thought of the Day

How do you throw away a trash can?

Kitty Blog

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille..."

(the reason she looks less than happy is that due to unfortunate circumstance, the cat Jessica has had to go on a diet -- she is not happy about this)

From the Emerald Isle

Here is a post from the blog Crooked Timber about Antonin Scalia's visit to Dublin (one of my favorite places on earth, fwiw).

I'd like to hoist a pint of Guinness to the chap who said this to Justice Scalia:

‘So you’re on the American Supreme Court? What’s all this craic about hanging chads?’

Rumsfield Meets Congress

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has an interesting commentary piece about our Secretary of War -- ah -- Defense.

End of the Tunnel

This has been an awful winter.

It's been an awful winter on the political level, the financial level, the personal level, and the emotional level. We've spent pretty much all our time and all our energy trying to cope with things we wish we didn't have to cope with.

But as of today, that winter is officially over.

Yeah, yeah, I know what the calendar says. It's still more than a month to go till spring. But that's not what matters.

Here in the wasteland of New England, spring begins on a certain day in mid-February, when pitchers and catchers report to Fort Myers for the opening of the Boston Red Sox Spring Training Camp.

The *WORLD CHAMPION* Boston Red Sox Spring Training Camp.

Sure, it's stupid and superficial and self-delusional to think that makes any real difference -- but we're not talking reality here, we're talking *symbolism.* Indulge me on this, okay?

Spring Training has begun. Opening Day is just a month and a half away.

We survived another winter.

Just barely.

But we survived.

White House Press Credentials

How hard can they be to get anyway?

When the "Jeff Gannon" story started to break there was a rather inane remark from someone defending the idea of a non-journalist with a false name getting access to the White House press room. I don't recall the exact wording or even who it was (someone from the Washington Post, mabye?) but it was something along the lines of oh, there are so many new venues out there, what with the internet and bloggers and so on -- the inference being that bloggers were somehow privy to the same credentials issued to folks working for long-standing news organizations. (I am trying not to give in to temptation and put the word "news" in quotation marks...)

And then the White House's own Scott McClennan commented "when he ["Gannon" or Gluckert] started coming to the White House about two years ago, the staff asked to see that it -- that he represented a news organization that published regularly. And they showed that, so he was cleared and has been cleared ever since based on that time."

This remark wasn't terribly realistic either, since the "news organization that published regularly" turns out to be an internet site with an extreme right-wing agenda with little to support any sort of claim to be a real or primary source of news to anyone (despite rash boasts of large readership, until very recently, site traffic had languished badly). At best, it could be viewed as a partisan op-ed boutique. Wares on display, hefty price tags well-hidden, in the best tradition of the Bush administration itself.

But now there is an interesting op-ed piece in today's New York Times from that reckless liberal Maureen Dowd, who seems genuinely puzzled over the whole affaire "Gannon":

I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the "Barberini Faun" is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?

At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I'd been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he'd renew the pass - after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.

The mind boggles at contemplating the potential skeletons in her closet that must have kept her out of the White House briefing room, eh?



I had no intention of posting about the "Gannon" thing -- it just seemed to be so sordid & low that the story told itself and it sure didn't need my help in any way. But the idea of this non-journalist with a phony name working for a pseudo news organization gaining White House credentials while Ms. Dowd is denied them is just too heinous to ignore.

I have been growing increasingly worried about the trend in the current administration toward ringers -- propagandists masquerading as journalists. (The biggest irony here is that traditional journalists are already so slanted in favor of the Bush regime than they don't need ringers.) Joseph Goebbels was someone who thought the news could be molded and manipulated to serve a political agenda. As a result of his harnessing of whatever message the media could make, a whole population was misled, or even worse, brainwashed into believing and accepting as fact the most blatant lies. For many years I studied this phenomenon with the complacency that comes from knowing that such a thing could never occur in my country.

I'm no longer complacent.

Family Values

You've got to hand it to Alan Keyes -- sure, he's a self-righteous sanctimonious
blowhard, but by golly he practices what he preaches. When his daughter came
out as a lesbian, and then *compounded* the sin by demonstrating against
the Bush inaugural, he threw the little sinner right out on her hiney and
cut off her tuition to Brown.



One of my favorite columnists, Derrick Z. Jackson, has an apt commentary
on l'affiare Keyes in today's Boston Globe.



That's doing the Lord's Work there, Brother Keyes. Praise Jeeeayzuz. And
let it be a lesson to Dick Cheney, the limpwristed poofter.

Howdy Dave