Needlenose

 

“I shure love the smell of napalm in the morning!”

Seems like only yesterday Shrubya was silently gloating over his secret plan to deceive American into invading Iraq.  But that was almost 10 long years ago and the costs of the Republican’s elective war have been extreme:

“More than 4,400 American military lives have been lost since the start of the war in March of 2003, and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed, according to Iraq Body Count, which cross-checks news reports with hospital and other official data. As of March, the war had cost the U.S.$806 billion.”

Looks like Obama is finally going to get us out of it.  Send this to every Reactionary you know and remind them of how much they supported this war back in ’03 and ask them who really failed America.

Was reading about Bin Laden’s ‘trail’ from Kabul to Abbotabad, when this little bit caught my eye:

“Gul also accompanied bin Laden to Kunar, where they met Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his military chief Kashmir Khan, who “provided protection for the group before they continued to an unknown location at the request of Hekmatyar,” the interrogation report said.”

Surely not the same Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who was Shrubya’s ally among the Northern Alliance in 2001, and his daddy’s ally back in the 1980s?  Et tu, Brute?  The Bush’s old pal is a bit irked by the killing of their mutual ’80s pal Osama.  Don’t take his crocodile tears too seriously folks as he whines about all the U.S. injustices in the region, just remember that it was his militia that leveled Kabul after the Soviet occupation because he didn’t get the job he wanted.

The Re-Baggers are busy jumping in their time machine to take us back to their (imagined) golden time.  All they need is a reconditioned DeLorean, a few thousand gigajewels (of unlimited, anonymous corporate funding, courtesy of Chief Justice Roberts) and a Capacity Fox Generator!  How far back will they take us?  Depends on the number of gigajewels they can get!  How far back?  Check it out:

1990 – George HW Bush – Discriminate Against the Disabled!

1979 – Jimmy Carter – Eliminate the Department of Education!

1973 – Richard Nixon – Abolish Abortion!

1973 – Richard Nixon – Drive U.S. Wildlife to Extinction!

1971 – Richard Nixon – Return to the Gold Standard!

1970 – Richard Nixon – Unrestricted Polluting!

1965 – Lyndon Johnson – Ban Birth Control!

1938 – Franklin Roosevelt – Restore Child Labor!

1935 – Franklin Roosevelt – Strip Labor of the Right to Organize!

1935 – Franklin Roosevelt - Screw the Aged!

1918 – Woodrow Wilson - Eliminate Public Schools!

1913 – Woodrow Wilson – Abolish the Income Tax!

1868 – Ulysses Grant - Legally Discriminate Against Women, African Americans and well anybody!

The street protests have finally spread to Iraq.  Surprising only because it took so long – I would think the Iraqi people are suffering more than anybody in the Arabic world nowadays, along anyway in which you wish to measure quality of life. During the early days of the Shrubya occupation, co-blogger Swopa was fond of discussing the role of Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s role as the behind the scenes ‘power broker,’ who could always pull the card of a popular uprising to stop the worst overreaches of Shrubya’s various Mayberry Machinations.

I had once mused that a real popular uprising could upstage Sistani and really bring about an end to the occupation (a concept that Swopa laughingly disparaged).  Well it seems like Sistani is in fact trying to get in front of the popular uprising train, except that it has already left the station.  Hard to say though if this is in fact the beginning of the end for Maliki, or whether this is just another bloody miserable episode in the string of misery that has become the lot of Iraq since the Repugs decided to trash the place and seize the oil

Well the Tea Baggers aren’t completely useless and their rhetoric not completely empty – and the Dems aren’t completely spineless!  Who knew?  Passive aggressive bi-partisanship has accomplished what Obama and his previously overwhelming control of Congress was unable to do – kill Shrubya’s Spying on America Patriot Act!!

After living through the Repug beatification of St. Ronnie, wherein they ascribed such miracles to him as the tearing down of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Soviet Union, I was wondering when the Neo-cons and other remnants of the old regime would start on the rehabilitation of Shrubya.

Didn’t take too long!  Former Bushie Elliott Abrams is already moving to credit Shrubya with the various ‘People’s Movements’ springing up in Tunisia, Egypt & Yemen.  Well I don’t see him crowing about the one place Shrubya did directly intervene, Iraq.  And we don’t see the angry crowds waving US Flags and yelling Viva Bush (or the Arabic equivalent thereof).

But I guess Abrams is right in one sense.  The protesters undoubtedly have a lot of issues on their plates, including a desire for more democracy.  However, what has them taking to the streets is the joblessness and growing poverty, stemming directly from the current economic crisis, which has direct roots in Shrubya & GOP policies to recklessly deregulate the U.S. Financial industry.  So in a sense, you could call Shrubya the “Godfather” of Arabic Street Protests!

I  wonder if the he or the GOP will still rush to claim credit if any of these People’s Movements take a turn towards Fundamentalist Dictatorship.

This:

Or this:

Who's the Saudi's beeatch?

I sure hope there was no tongue involved *shudder*

Shrubya antagonized Russia and bilked US taxpayers with his expensive plan to build a cordon of missiles  around Western Russia under the guise of defending Western Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles – a cordon that would be ineffective at shooting anything out of the sky but extremely effective at putting our money in the hands of his defense contractor buddies.

Obama has sensibly shelved this bogus European missile defense plan. Wrong-wingers are already screaming that we’ve given Russia something for nothing, but the real winner of this decision is the US taxpayer – who will no longer be paying something for nothing.

I’ve been warning for some time about the rising levels of wrong-wing hate, and how that hate is again turning to either outright violence, preparing for violence or just simple hate-mongering and hate-speech that can incite others to violence.  Now others are noticing a dramatic resurgence of militia activity that is

“(is) reminiscent of what was seen in the 1990s – right-wing militias, people ideologically against paying taxes and so-called “sovereign citizens” are popping up in large numbers, according to the report to be released Wednesday. The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights group that, among other activities, investigates hate groups”

Did you catch the news about the wing-nut who brought and dropped a gun at a political meeting?  I mean I know the reactionaries are crazy and stupid, but do they really believe the Libruhls are gonna attack their crazy tea-bag parties and protests?  Don’t they realize that we aren’t armed?

Back in the Clinton era my own life was threatened by some wing-nut because I had posted a tongue-in-cheek website parodying the ‘black helicoper’ crowd (the main reason why I remain anonymous on this site).  Bad as the Bush years were, the wing-nuts seemed to calm down in spite of the volume and stridency of the reactionary media hate speakers like Billo the Clown and Ann Coulter.

However the massive rejection of the Repugs at the polls and the election of a centrist President seems to have thrown them back into a frenzy that if anything seems even nastier and scarier than before.  Living in San Francisco as I do I rarely encounter reactionaries, but today I was having a conversation with a self-described “moderate” from the South who went on at length about Obama’s Socialist agenda for health care and financial services, and railed about the swelling deficit – a guy who never squawked once about how Shrubya threw Clinton’s balanced budget to the wind and drove up the deficit like a two-bit lobbyist with a federal credit card.

I guess one of the downsides of the end of the “War on Terror” is that the reactionary talking heads have turned the other half of their hate rhetoric, formerly targeted at the Islamic world, at us Libruhls, again firing at us figuratively and literally with ‘both barrels.’

*Update* Bill Clinton better worry if he plans to participate in the contentious health care ‘town hall’ meetings - wing-nuts might use this guy’s technique to conceal an assassination weapon.

Following the hand-jive of uber nationalist and former Israeli PM Sharon, current Israeli PM Whatayahoo just gave the finger to Obama and his foreign policy.

Seriously, unless there are some consequences to their actions (like, oh, cutting off the $2.4+ billion in aid we give them every year), why would Israel do anything else but flip us off and laugh at us in disdain?

*Update 5/29/09* I guess the Israeli wrong-wingers grew unaccustomed to push back on their slo-mo colonization program, but Whatayahoo is puzzled by Washington demands to back off their settlment expansion program.  Unlike Shrubya, Team Obama at least told Israel to get back with the program.  Still, dialoging has done nothing during my lifetime, so unless Washington follows up with some consequences, Whatayahoo will stay ‘puzzled.’