I Hate What You Just Said

Remember when George Bush addressed the Israeli Knesset on the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel and mocked Barack Obama’s idea that we should engage our enemies in dialog? You know, the speech where he said this:

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Guess what!

The Bush administration has now decided that they will send one of our highest ranking diplomats to “participate in international talks with Iran this weekend”:

President George W. Bush has authorized the most significant U.S. diplomatic contact with Iran since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, sending the U.S. State Department’s third-ranking official to Geneva for a meeting this weekend on Iran’s nuclear program, administration officials said.

The decision appeared to bend, if not exactly break, the administration’s insistence that it would not negotiate with Iran over its nuclear programs unless it first suspended uranium enrichment.

I’m going with “break.”

If he was ever on it, Governor Sanford may have just stumbled his way right off the Republican veep shortlist:

Ooops.

Well, with Mark Sanford looking like a bit of a confused tosser, perhaps the McCain campaign should opt for the best available remaining Sanford:

Grady, Aunt Esther, and Lamont were unavailable for comment.

Wheeeeee! I’m popping open a cold EuroBud in celebration of a really big number.  Ahhh, freedom never tasted so good.

Who do those Europeans think they are, pretending to show us Americans how to brew beer?  Hop pellets, rice…ginseng, guarana.  B-to-the-E doggg, it’s what fine brewing is all about:

B^E is Budweiser’s newest entry in a long line of innovative beers. This remarkable new product combines beer with caffeine, ginseng and guarana giving you a new malt beverage with a variety of ingredients.

B^E has a bold and bracing beer taste with lightly sweet/tart tones, and a “wow” factor in the finish. Created for those contemporary adults who are looking for the latest flavors and variety of mixtures to keep up with their fast paced and highly social lifestyles, B^E takes beer to the next level.

It’s different. It’s exciting. It’s beer with something extra!

How’d that work out?

Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc. will reformulate its alcoholic energy drinks to remove caffeine and other stimulants they contain as part of a nationwide legal settlement, it announced Thursday.

An investigation by attorneys general of 11 states found the largest U.S. brewer was marketing its caffeinated alcoholic beverages to minors and misrepresenting the drinks’ health benefits, New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said.

Though the company agreed to make changes, it insisted its Tilt and Bud Extra drinks were not marketed to minors.

CNN

Any more questions about how the King of Beers became the Belgian biatch?   Europe is kicking our ass, admit it.

This actually explains a lot about Dick Cheney and the administration’s response to 9/11. Seems like he lives in a state of constant, pathological fear:

In the days after 9/11, when fears of another terrorist strike were at their peak, Vice President Dick Cheney was convinced that he had been subjected to a lethal dose of anthrax, according to a new book.

White House insiders from that white-knuckle time told author Jane Mayer, who authored “The Dark Side, The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,” that the scare contributed to Cheney’s insistence on hard-line tactics for fighting terror.

Mayer, a writer for the New Yorker, claims that the vice president became the driving force in pushing for tougher interrogation tactics that critics charge went over the legal line and constitute torture.

In the days after the horror of 9/11, the country seemed to be under assault from many sides, with anthrax letters showing up in Congress and newsrooms.

On Oct. 18, 2001, a White House alarm went off indicating that sensors had detected dangerous levels of radioactive, chemical or biological agents. According to Mayer, anyone who had entered the White House situation room, including Cheney, had been exposed.

“They thought Cheney was already lethally infected,” said a former administration officer who had kept the White House secret until now, according to the book.[. . .]

Miraculously, he survived.

But in the days after the incident, Cheney was taking no chances. Eleven days later, Cheney insisted on leaving the White House and retreating to one of his “secure, undisclosed locations,” the book claims.

Cheney and other Cabinet members took turns hunkering down in one of several cold war era bunkers built to survive a nuclear attack. The bunkers, deep underground, were crammed with communications gear and Cheney would stay in what was dubbed the “The Commander in Chief’s Suite,” Mayer writes.

When vice president wasn’t in the bunker, Mayer claims that “a sense of constant danger followed Cheney everywhere.” The route was altered daily during the veep’s commute to his above-ground office. On the back seat next to him would be a duffel bag stuffed with a gas mask and biochemical survival suit. And a doctor nearly always traveled with him, “The Dark Side” claims.

Of course, Cheney and Rumsfeld share a deep history of delusion, paranoid ideation, persecution complexes, and a variety of unreasonable fears.

Update:

Andrew Sullivan is out today with a chilling piece on Cheney: “Vice President For Torture.”

In the situation room

There was a toy world

And a flight costume

and a picture of–

It’s Goodnight Bush!  Sweet Dreams…

The New York Times and Washington Post present the following set of stomach-churning facts gleaned from investigative journalist, Jane Mayer:

“Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.”

“A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were ‘enemy combatants’ subject to indefinite incarceration.”

“[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees’ cases . . .’There will be no review,’ the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. ‘The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.’”

“[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp’s detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions — up to half — were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda.”

[T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were ‘categorically’ torture, which is illegal under both American and international law”.

“[T]he Red Cross document ‘warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.’”

Constitutional law professor, and former NSA lawyer, Jonathan Turley, throws in his two cents:

John McCain’s recent attack on Barack Obama just got shot down:

In a statement criticizing Obama’s positions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the organization claiming credit for the missile launches, McCain wrote, “This is the same organization that I voted to condemn as a terrorist organization when an amendment was on the floor of the United States Senate. Senator Obama refused to vote.”

The problem with the critique? McCain also missed that vote on the Kyl-Lieberman amendment on September 26, 2007. Records show that Obama was in New Hampshire and McCain was in New York instead of being in the Senate chamber for the vote in question.

And this line of attack is not really the best idea for McCain since he’s the most MIA senator in the entire 110th Congress, missing more than 60 percent of the votes cast.

Oh, I’m just getting warmed up Berlusconi today.  His latest scandal centers around a series of recorded telephone conversations that show just how hard he’s willing to work to secure policy positions for topless models.  This man’s sacrifice is truly mind boggling; why he’s the Jesus Christ of Politics! In response to the incriminating transcripts, Berlusconi did what any self-respecting unreconstructed fascist would do: try to make government accountability illegal.  So in America, wiretapping expands while in Italy, it becomes more limited.  Excuse me for a moment while I laugh and cry at the same time.

Problem is, the cat is already out the bag on this one, and it is a non-stop quote machine.

First, there’s the case of Mara Carfagna, the current minister for Equal Opportunity.  This headline pretty much sums up her situation: Carfagna denies pleasuring Berlusconi.  Even better is this long piece from the Guardian:

For more than a week now, Rome has been alive with rumours that police in Naples, working on yet another investigation of Berlusconi for alleged corruption, taped sexually explicit discussions between the prime minister and his 32-year-old equal opportunities minister, Mara Carfagna, a former topless model. The tapes were reportedly made while investigators were probing the relationship between Berlusconi and the head of drama at RAI, Italy’s equivalent of the BBC.

Moving on, it’s the case of the journalist Virginia Sanjust di Teulada, that has the most, ahem, legs.  What happened here?

As for Sanjust di Teulada, the intelligence officer’s wife, her role remains mysterious. According to Armati’s version, set out in documents submitted to the Rome court and summarised this week in the daily La Repubblica, the flowers his wife received were the prelude to a lunch the next day at the prime minister’s office and a gift of a diamond bracelet. The intelligence officer claims it was the start of a intense romance from which he initially benefited…

Contacted by a journalist from Corriere della Sera, she replied with a refined ambiguity worthy of a character in a Pirandello drama. “The truth,” mused Virginia Sanjust di Teulada, “is always - but in this case particularly - impossible to explain in words.”

Courts in Naples and in Rome are currently sifting through over 250 hours of transcripts.  Stay tuned.

The Italian left Bush Administration pulled no punches during the recent G8 conference on climate change, setting the record straight once and for all on the record of Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (born 1936) is one of the most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for governmental corruption and vice. Primarily a businessman with massive holdings and influence in international media, he is regarded by many as a political dilettante who gained his high office only through use of his considerable influence on the national media.

Encyclopedia of World Biography

Oops!  Picture the scenario.  Intern X is charged with circulating a short biography of G8 leaders for a White House press release.  Like any other red blooded 21st century American scholar, she hops online and nabs the first thing that looks authoritative, cuts and pastes, and voilà, the job is done.

Hated by many but respected by all at least for his bella figura (personal style) and the sheer force of his will, Berlusconi has parlayed his business acumen and influence into a personal empire that has resulted in Italy’s longest–running government ever and in his becoming the country’s wealthiest man. Bursting onto the scene with no political experience in 1993, he campaigned—using his vast network of media holdings—on a promise to purge the notoriously lackadaisical Italian government of corruption. He won appointment to the office of prime minister in 1994. However, he and his fellow Forza Italia Party leaders soon found themselves accused of the very corruption he had vowed to eradicate.

This is an extremely sloppy mistake for an administration that has been so disciplined in distributing its version of reality.  Did someone at the White House forget that Berlusconi and Bush are good personal friends that go way back?  Ah, who can forget the good times they had together after September 11, 2001?  But why, oh why do they always leave the best parts out?

He released a CD in 2003 of Neopolitan love songs. The prime minister prefers to spend his spare time at his 70–room villa in Sardinia named “Arcore,” whose amenities include a private park, a movie theater, and walls of large–screen televisions.

Bush is just jealous I guess.

Call me old fashioned, but it might be a good policy to actually write the things published under the guise of official government communications.  It’s easier to stay on message that way and cuts down on the written apologies, not that it’s necessary to apologize for speaking the truth every now and then.

President George Bush signed off with a defiant farewell over his refusal to accept global climate change targets at his last G8 summit.

As he prepared to fly out from Japan, he told his fellow leaders: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

The Independent

What else can I say?  Our president is a dick who thinks that he’s funny.  Sure, you argue, Bush gave some ground at the talks, agreeing for the first time to reduce greenhouse emissions by 50% by 2050 after extracting signatures from China and India.  But these targets are well below those set by Kyoto protocol and such emissions are still on the rise worldwide and in the U.S.

Yeah, things are looking up, good times ahead.  We’re finally headed in the right direction and the G8 is showing the kind of leadership necessary to get the job done:

One day, in particular, he said, was “gloriously incoherent.” At a meeting in the morning, participants focused on finding ways to reduce gas prices, he said, while a session that afternoon focused on raising them through caps or taxes on fossil fuels.

The most discouraging aspect of the statements out of Japan, for many experts, was seeing the persistent gap between what science is saying about global warming and what countries are doing.

New York Times

Speaking with one voice…out of both sides of the mouth.  Now, that’s funny.

Today the FISA bill passed and every meaningful amendment designed to protect our civil liberties was defeated.

A Democratically-controlled Congress just aided in the cover-up of at least 30 federal crimes committed by George Bush and Dick Cheney.

As an added bonus, we no longer have a meaningful 4th Amendment to the Constitution or any protection against government intrusion into our “private” communications:

UPDATE:

The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation vow to challenge the FISA bill on the basis that it is an unconstitutional violation of the 4th Amendment and that it further usurps the Judicial branch of government.

Good luck.