Sunday Morning Rant

Which is it? Is the Bush Administration this incompetent, or is their hatred of All Things Non-Christian beginning to bleed through their so-called Iraq policy?

First, we have the photos of Saddam Hussein in his prison cell, published in a Murdoch-owned British tabloid, and taken by U.S. military personnel (they can't blame THIS one on Newsweek), and released in the hope that the photos would "deal a body blow to the insurgency".

WTF? Regardless of how Iraqis feel about Saddam Hussein, I don't think anyone thinks that publishing pictures of him in his tidy-whities is acceptable foreign policy. What on earth are these people in the Administration thinking? We expect things like "President Bush said he did not think the images would incite further anti-American sentiment" from President Delusional, but you'd think that others in the Administration would be smarter than that. Of course, anyone who posits and opinion opposed to that of C-Plus Caligula is quickly purged, so perhaps they really DON'T know any better.

Now they've sent Laura Bush over there, in the hope that Mrs. Horse Masturbator will win hearts and minds in the Middle East by calling for increased rights for women at the same time as her husband's Brothers in Christ are calling for a return of American women to the 13th century, with an end to abortion rights, an end to access to contraception, and a return to their role as property of men. Of course, something tells me she's not going to chastise the Saudis for not allowing women to vote. When it's Saudi Arabia, it's about "cultural differences."

Oy.

Last night I watched a network television national newscast for the first time in months, and realized anew why I don't bother. The networks really HAVE become Pravda. In this case, the broadcast was on the so-called liberal CBS, which has become so cowed by the Air National Guard memo fracas that it no longer even attempts to give the news, but instead brings on commentators to talk about the wonderful things we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan -- while Hamid Karzai is furious at us because of the prisoner abuse in his country and the car bombings continue in Iraq unabated. Then, after the obligatory 5-second rah-rahs for the Administration, we moved on to the important news -- like a house in Cleveland that burnt down with a woman and children inside it, and a small plane crash on the beach at Coney Island in which four people died. You know, the really vitally important stuff.

The depths to which journalism has sunk in this country are just unbelievable. Here's what the new obmudsman at the New York Times had to say about the paper's reluctance to give significant positioning and column space to the Downing Street memo:

...it appears that key editors simply were slow to recognize that the minutes of a high-powered meeting on a life-and-death issue — their authenticity undisputed — probably needed to be assessed in some fashion for readers.

Have you picked up your teeth from the floor yet? Good. Can you imagine? How on earth can "key editors" be "slow to realize" that this memo was newsworthy? Are they that incompetent, or just that cowed by the Administration?

I understand that there are people who just don't want to know just how corrupt this Administration is. I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's fun knowing that the President of the United States and the people around him allowed the United States to be attacked because it gave them a pretext for the war against Iraq they wanted -- a war for which they never would have had support without the 9/11 attacks, given Bush's approval ratings in the 40's before 9/11. And I understand not wanting to believe that a president baldfacedly lied to us, not about something so trivial as a tawdry sexual affair, but about a war -- about sending hundreds of thousands of American kids off to die because either the neocons wanted empire, or because Israel wanted protection, or because campaign contributors wanted the oil and reconstruction money, or because the president has issues with his father. I understand not wanting to look at your children and know that you have compromised their future by voting for this president because you were scared and thought he had your best interests in mind. I understand these things. But there's no longer a choice, folks. Denial of the facts doesn't make them go away.