Stand Up To Telecom Lobby, Get Swiftboated

It had to happen. When Boozo the Clown doesn’t get his way, tantrums will follow. He wants retroactive immunity for telecom executives and he wants it now. He said NOW!! He's gonna thrust out his lower lip, stamp his foot and hold his breath until Congress bends over for him. Or until a group of rightwing millionaires steps in to purchase the democratic process (I thought they already did).

A group of his fellow wingtards calling themselves Defense of Democracies has sprung to the rescue. They’ve raised $2 million (so far) for the defeat of fifteen Democrats who had this wacky idea about telecom VIPs being subject to the same laws as the rest of us.

Here is a YouTube video of one of their ads. It’s hilarious. If it was a skit on Saturday Night Live or the Daily Show, it would have you in stitches. But it becomes less funny when you realize: there are millions of cerebrally-challenged knuckledraggers out there who actually believe this shit.

Here is some more information about this illustrious group, including their membership. If you're at all familiar with the Project For A New American Century (PNAC), the personnel from Defense of Democracies will be “déjà vu all over again.”

Pay no attention to the same fifteen wingnuts behind every curtain.

cross-posted at Bring It On!

Chickenhawks Drooling Over War With Iran

Here is another sheltered keyboard potato who's willing to fight Iran to the last drop of somebody else’s blood. Where do these pitiful douchebags keep coming from and why do they keep multiplying?

Joshua Muravchik is a member of the American Enterprise Institute and has been affiliated with the Project For a New American Century (PNAC). He has also “been associated with a string of hawkish pressure groups supporting George W. Bush’s interventionist policies in the Middle East” according to this article.

In other words, here is somebody who's led a gritty hardscrabble life and would have a deep empathy with the hardships suffered by our soldiers and veterans. And you can tell he's very sensitive to the grief and despair suffered by the Iranian victims of our bombing. Asshole.

He says “I’m just a pathetic sissy but I love to watch men fight. Oooooh, it’s such a turn-on Our choice is stark. Accept Iran with an atom bomb or cripple its nuclear program by force.”

He also boasts that airstrikes against Iran “would not require a ‘declaration of war,’ an antiquated concept that has not been employed since World War II.” Ah yes, another one of those antiquated concepts, along with the Constitution and the Geneva Convention.

Contact your recruiter, Dickhead.


cross-posted at Bring It On!

Oil Empire

This website is just too chilling and too troubling to ignore. Is it just a bunch of wacky conspiracy nuts, or is there some truth to it? The neocons (PNAC etc.), al Qaeda, the CIA, the oil industry and several Shiite and Sunni governments — are they all just one giant interconnected organization, manipulating the “events” of the world? Are the Terrorists and the War on Terror both on the same team, and just pretending to be at war with each other? A lot of people accuse the Democrats and Republicans of doing this — being the same party and just pretending to argue with each other — but these other accusations are a lot more far-reaching.

Was September 11th America’s version of the Reichstag fire?

Maybe liberals are too carried away with conspiracy theories. That’s what the rightwingers keep saying. And we should listen to them since they're so rational and level-headed, right?

The party that’s out of power is always more prone to farfetched theories and accusations. During Bill Clinton’s presidency we all had a good laugh over those paranoid survivalists and militia groups who kept blubbering about black helicopters and America being invaded by the United Nations. And don’t forget Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster and then made it look like a suicide.

So is that what the Left is doing now — just making a bunch of sweeping accusations that can't be proven or disproven? We’ll probably never know. But that website sure is thought-provoking. I’d suggest bookmarking it; there's a lot of information there.

Iraq vs. Vietnam

This columnist is saying “A generation ago, Vietnam blew up politics as we knew it. Why isn’t that happening now?” Then he answers his own question by saying the Democrats haven’t offered any solutions yet. He says “Democrats haven’t fashioned a compelling (even to themselves) alternative to George W. Bush’s world view. Unless they do, they could lose in 2008.”

Regardless of whether that’s true, there's another reason Iraq hasn’t blown up in our faces. We don’t have a draft any more. At least technically we don’t. (Although, with the same “volunteers” being herded back to Iraq again and again and again, even after their doctors have declared them medically unfit for battle — but I digress…)

The Vietnam War had its share of chickenhawks —Cheney, Wolfowitz and all the rest of those pathetic armchair warriors at Project For A New American Century. But they had to work for it. They had to constantly make sure their draft status didn’t change to 1A. The most reliable way to keep from getting drafted was to stay in college — even if it meant getting Ph.D.s in twelve different subjects. At one time being married would keep people from being drafted, but that changed sometime during the Vietnam war. After they changed it, you could be drafted even if you were married with children. And the number of occupations that were “draft-safe” kept on shrinking.

So it was a constant struggle if you wanted to be a chickenhawk, and it made for some awkward contradictions. “We need to keep fighting over there and do whatever it takes to keep the Communists from taking over uh oh I just got a letter from my Draft Board, I have to go straighten this out right away. Oh God…”

Today’s chickenhawks, on the other hand, only have to do one thing to stay out of the military: Don’t enlist. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

A tiny percentage of America’s population — service members and their families — is gravely affected by the Iraqi war. It’s the center of their lives; it’s turning their lives upside down. Meanwhile, the other 99% (just guessing at the number) can just go on about their routines, totally unaffected by the war. They might argue about it, but they aren’t contributing anything to it and they aren’t inconvenienced by it.

And THAT is why Iraq hasn’t “blown up American politics.”

Invading Iran: It's Been Planned For A Long Time

Ever since we got bogged down in Iraqmire, we've been learning that this invasion was being planned even before Bush’s election in 2000. And now we learn that Bush’s sudden hysteria over Iran is just the latest chapter in a longtime game plan. Our government has been mapping out an Iranian invasion since the 1990s.

In 1992, toward the end of Bush 41’s presidency, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Pentagon staffers Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz — don’t those names have a familiar ring to them — drew up plans for the U.S. to act as the lone superpower. These plans included pre-emptive attacks to prevent any other country from becoming a regional “competitor.”

These plans were drawn up in more detail by the Project For A New American Century in 2000. Libby, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Dan Quayle and Jeb Bush were all members of this illustrious crew.

So when you start hearing frantic reports about Iran supplying weapons to Iraqi insurgents, or Iran threatening to nuke Israel, consider the source. You’ve heard it all before. Remember, Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Iraq, and Saddam had close ties with al Qaeda.

But don’t worry. When we invade Iran, it'll be a cakewalk. Our soldiers will be greeted as liberators and they’ll be showered with cake and ice cream by throngs of grateful Iranians.