I could write something, but it just sorta stands all by itself, doesn’t it?

Pickles has a headache, but he’s in Australia right now.

Pavarotti has died. What a shame. The ‘big man’ is gone forever. Thank God we have digital media, so we can continue to hear a lot of great music from bygone eras.

Dangers of a Cornered George Bush By Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity & Dr. Justin Frank July 27, 2007
Editor’s Note: As the nation and the world face 18 more months of George W. Bush’s presidency, a chilling prospect is that Bush – confronted with more defeats and reversals – might just “lose it” and undertake even more reckless military adventures.

[snip]

[CHS notes: Please do not post exceedingly long tomes in the threads. It takes up excessive bandwidth and it is a copyright violation to simply paste whole articles in. Do a snippet and a link. Thanks.]

INTEL DOES NOT MAKE POLICY.

Policy comes first, and then intel either supports it or is ignored.

Bush and Cheney WANTED TO INVADE IRAQ. They didn’t make a horrible mistake about anything. They ignored intel that DIDN’T SUPPORT THEIR POLICY.

To say Bush is stupid is to let him off the hook. That’s one thing I really don’t like about the lefty progressive liberal folks: They don’t smell the blood in the water here.

Wake up: You live in an empire.

3 cheers for Madeleine Albright’s ‘truthiness.’

Anyway, this is the first time I’ve heard the nickname, and I read tons of political blogs all the time.

You shouldn’t just assume that because you’ve heard something everyone else has. I can’t be the only person who had to repeatedly re-read your reference to Pickles, and then had to search Google after saying “Huh?”

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — Members of an Australian TV comedy show, one of them dressed as Osama bin Laden, drove through two security checkpoints Thursday before being stopped near the Sydney hotel where U.S. President George W. Bush is staying.

Police officers were not amused by the comedy group’s stunt. Eleven people were arrested.

The stunt embarrassed Sydney police who have imposed the tightest security measures in city history for a summit of leaders from Pacific Rim countries, including Bush.

Police arrested 11 cast and crew members from the TV program, “The Chaser’s War on Everything,” and impounded three vehicles, the Australian Broadcasting Corp., which airs the show, said on its Web site.

Cast members put together a sham motorcade, hiring two motorcycles and three large cars on which they put Canadian flags. Police waved the motorcade through two checkpoints before pulling it over near the Intercontinental Hotel where Bush is staying.

Why did the American people get it so wrong? Why did we as a country pick bush in 2000 and 2004?

I can’t figure it.

Sure, stolen votes and piss-poor campaigns by his opponents.

But it shouldn’t have even been close either time.

Best I can speculate is that he said clearly (even if dishonestly) who he was and what his positions were. Yes, he’s a moronic psychopath, but Americans thought they knew who he was.

I think a lot of Americans never got as clear cut an image of Gore oor Kerry.

Maybe that’s what Americans want from a prez candidate, a sharply defined image.

Good morning everyone.

I can’t get over how disheartened you sound lately, Jonathan. It bothers me. Kind of like seeing cognitive dissonance playing itself out in someone.

We have that common Vietnam experience which, I think, gave us a head start on cynicism when it comes to trusting those who would claim to lead us.

If you look at the 2004 Ohio numbers in the context that many of them were inflated and extrapolate that to other localities the numbers of people who actually voted for Bush aren’t as large as they are made out to be. Then there’s the outright meddling, the unconstitutional meddling by the Supreme Court in a decision that was blatantly stretching the limits of credulity. Read that thing and then look at Bennett’s pleadings in the case…he didn’t even plead correctly but given the argument he put forward, the justices were constrained in how they ruled and what they ruled on.

I keep myself centered on how these people are operating by continually going back over books I have on Stalin and his manipulation of public perception. Here’s a guy who was murdering millions of the Russian people, people were seeing their neighbor’s taken away in the middle of the night, and the people truly loved him. Fawning bureaucrats aside, people loved him. It wasn;t until 1956 that many of them learned a limited bit of the truth about him. We’ll be lucky to ever see documentary proof of how over the top the administrations of Reagan/Bush, Bush/Quayle, or Cheney/Bush really are.

Or look at Richard Evans’ excellent books on the Third Reich. He’s written two books of a planned trilogy on the history of the rise of the Third Reich from the end of WWI through the Weimar Republic up to the declaration of war against Germany after the invasion of Poland 68 years ago.

These people are performing according to a script. They have a good grasp on how to get to some people with carefully crafted lies and that’s all they need. They use the tools the right has always used of calling their opponents names and painting them with the disloyalty brush while telegraphing to the general population that they really care for the country and its people all the while pillaging the treasury and sending other peoples’ kids off to die.

Stalin had Trotsky and the fascists as his boogeymen; Hitler had the Jews and the communists; Cheney/Bush uses bin Laden and the terrorists the same way. Stalin even invented a word in Russian to spread fear among the people “terakt” meaning terrorist act.

There are many reasons to be resigned to what’s going on here as never changing. I’ve felt that way myself. But when I remember that it was guys like Bush and his dad and Cheney and Rumsfeld who left me and my team to die out by Laos and that some pilot decided fuck no you won’t, I know that I won’t let these fascist creeps win this battle.

And it’s is a battle…the same battle I was fighting with the Young Republican assholes before I went to Vietnam and they went to law school. Until we in this country finally resolve the issues that have separated us since the Sixties we’ll continue to be divided and conquered by the protofascists in the GOP and the Democratic Party.

Now where’s that smile??