Not Photoshopped

Appropriate.

Adminstration at Odds with itself.

Scott Mclellan claims he doesn't want anyone to play the "blame game."

Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett are doing nothing but "playing the blame game," blaming everyone but Bush for his failure.

Seems like that would warrant a few questions to McLellan and others.

What Was Said at that Photo Op?

Here's our pseudo-compassionate leader not listening to two human props for his photo op:

Bush strides up to two African American women, who are sisters. Hovering nearby is a white guy wearing shades and shorts.

With the cameras rolling, Bush hugs the two women, one of whom starts sobbing.

Here's a partial transcript:

Bush to women: 'There's a Salvation Army center that I want to, that I'll tell you where it is, and they'll get you some help. I'm sorry . . . They'll help you. . . . '

Woman 1: 'I came here looking for clothes. . . . '

Bush: 'They'll get you some clothes, at the Salvation Army center. . . . '

Woman 1: 'We don't have anything. . . . '

Bush: 'I understand. . . . Do you know where the center is, that I'm talking to you about?'

Guy with shades: 'There's no center there, sir, it's a truck.'

Bush: 'There's trucks?'

Guy: 'There's a school, a school about two miles away. . . . '

Bush: 'But isn't there a Salvation center down there?'

Guy: 'No that's wiped out. . . . '

Bush: 'A temporary center?'

Guy: 'No sir they've got a truck there, for food.'

Bush: 'That's what I'm saying, for food and water.'

Bush then turns to the woman who's been saying how she needs clothes and tells her: 'You need food and water.'"

I'll tell you what you need, even though I met you sixty seconds ago. I won't listen to what you say. You're a prop in my photo op.

Red Tape?

CNN.com - Cut the red tape, Lott says - Sep 5, 2005: "Sen. Trent Lott berated both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and his own state's emergency management, MEMA, for being mired in red tape at a time of urgent need given the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina."

Of course, even blaming red tape is blaming Bush and his FEMA. "Emergency management" means you have the red tape worked out before the emergency, or find means to overcome it quickly during the emergency.

Therefore, this is not due to red tape: it's just more of the atrocious planning and management we've come to expect from this administration. Incompetence, thy name is Bush.

Lake George

A fitting name for the shit and poison soup that is currently New Orleans. George diverted funds to Iraq from levees and other flood control for New Orleans.

Lake George it is.

Bush Luck

I've said it before but it's pertinent again.

A major American city evacuated and unihabitable for over a month? Thousands possibly dead?

George W. Bush is bad luck for the United States.

Of course, it's not just bad luck. Bush making a patronage pit of FEMA didn't help. Hunter at DailyKos sumarizes it well with his headline: Category 4 Hurricane Determined To Strike U.S.

And, for that reason, New Orleans needs help more than it would otherwise. So find a worthy charity and give.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Dulce Et Decorum Est Pro Shi'ite Theocracy.

Is that book Who's Who?

Josh Marshall finds Kaus making an interesting assertion.

So, is that book on the table Who's Who?

I don't know. This is the best image I could extract from the video:

I sure can't read the text, and I am not familiar enough with Who's Who to identify it at sight from a distance.

That's a promotional image of the current Who's Who from the publisher's website. Looks like a probable match to me. TV color is off, of course, and there may have been some design changes in the intervening years, but it looks probable.

Tweety

I always wondered why Atrios and others called Chris Matthews "Tweety".

Quick, Enemy of the Good

I see that Bush is planning on nominating someone to the Supreme Court more quickly than he intended. This is probably due, in part, to the flap over Karl Rover outing a CIA agent.

Hurring this process can't be such a great idea for Bush. I hope they have the same person vetting the justice nominee as they had checking up on Bernard Kerik.

And then they push the vettor to hurry up.

A Voice of the CIA

If you've wondered what a rank-and-file CIA person thinks of the Plame affair, you should stop in at TPMCafe.com, where ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson is a guest blogger. He currently has three posts up, and they're all informative both about the facts of this case and the larger issues of how Rove has hurt national security. The link above may not last long so I'll link to all three of his posts below, in reverse chronological order:

1. Mr Bush, Have You No Shame?
   
2. The Intelligence Challenge: Can We Trust Our President? [The meat of this post is a statement made in a Capital Hill hearing in October 2003 made by several people who worked with Plame at the CIA.]
   
3. The Big Lie About Valerie Plame
   

He shoots down most of the Republican echo chamber talking points, including "Wilson said Cheney ordered him to go to Niger" [False.] "But Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger!" [False.] "Plame was the one who sent Wilson to Niger!" [False.].

In addition to Johnson's contributions to correcting falsehoods in Republican talking points, it's also helpful to get a feeling for how CIA agents past and present feel about the whole disgusting business. Not happy in the least.

Highly recommended in addition to your other Plame-related readings. And, to top it all off, he's a registered Republican.

Hah!

Uggabugga has a decent bumper sticker idea. But an anonymous commenter there has an even better one:

"Who do I have to blow to get a president impeached?"

What Crappy Idiots

One major thing wrong with the Iraq debacle was the utter incompetence of the Bush Administration, as evidenced by the nutcases they sent over there.

From a Larry Diamond OpEd, excerpted at TAPPED:

TAPPED: June 2005 Archives:

One young political appointee (a 24-year-old Ivy League graduate) argued that Iraq should not enshrine judicial review in its constitution because it might lead to the legalization of abortion.

Make sure to populate the US people in Iraq with those who think preventing abortion is the most important thing in the world.

Infuriating and idiotic.

Someone had a good putdown in reply, but a good retort doesn't make up for those dead and maimed due to idiocy like the above.

A much more senior Iraqi interlocutor (a widely experienced Iraqi-American lawyer) became so exasperated with the young man's audacity that he finally challenged him:

'You must have thoroughly studied the history of the British occupation of Iraq.'

'Yes, I did,' the young American replied proudly. 'I thought so,' said the Iraqi, 'because you seem determined to repeat every one of their mistakes.'

You can't trust these idiots to do anything important. Except, I guess, have an echo chamber that gets idiots elected.

Not Hard To Guess Who Said This

President Urges Patience on War:

"Why must we take this painful road? Why must this nation hazard its ease, its interest, and its power for the sake of a people so far away?

We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny, and only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure.

This kind of world will never be built by bombs or bullets. Yet the infirmities of man are such that force must often precede reason and the waste of war, the works of peace.

We wish this were not so. But we must deal with the world as it is, if it is ever to be as we wish."

On a blog-related note, we're still here, but posting may be sparse for a bit.

Comparitive Morality

So the rightwingers believe that Amnesty International is biased against the US.

The Poor Man finds that others have made very similar complaints for having human rights complaints leveled at them -- sometimes even n vigorous language!-- by Amnesty.

And, yes, the US under Bush isn't as bad as Idi Amin and others on this list. But is "not as bad as the most horrible in history" really a position you want to retreat to? "Yes, we're moral lepers, but not as leprous as the worst to have trod the earth."

I can't be surprised by the moral positions taken by Bush supporters anymore. But it's worth noting how moral standards have slipped and moral relativism is rampant nowadays.

Derrida Bush.

And On That Bombshell

Tonight BBC America begins to air I'm Alan Partridge, a hilarious sitcom featuring Steve Coogan's most famous creation, the failed chat-show host Alan Partridge.

In the sitcom he's working as an overnight DJ on Radio Norwich and attempting to get the BBC to renew his chat show (Knowing Me, Knowing You) for a second season. The first words of the first episode of the series are as follows, which Alan announces over the fadeout of a Joni Mitchell song:

"That was "big yellow taxi" by Joni Mitchell, a song in which joni complains that they paved Paradise to put up a parking lot, a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of Paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, perhaps because it doesn't quite fit in with her blinkered view of the world."

Watch and enjoy, and thank the BBC.

By Design

H. Allen Orr in the New Yorker writes a good piece on Intelligent Design, including this bit:

In 1999, a document from the Discovery Institute was posted, anonymously, on the Internet. This Wedge Document, as it came to be called, described not only the institute’s long-term goals but its strategies for accomplishing them. The document begins by labelling the idea that human beings are created in the image of God “one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built.” It goes on to decry the catastrophic legacy of Darwin, Marx, and Freud—the alleged fathers of a “materialistic conception of reality” that eventually “infected virtually every area of our culture.” The mission of the Discovery Institute’s scientific wing is then spelled out: “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.” It seems fair to conclude that the Discovery Institute has set its sights a bit higher than, say, reconstructing the origins of the bacterial flagellum.

On so many fronts, this is the type of things we're up against. People with extreme agendas who are relentless in continuing to push for any crack they can to advance their cause. We think a stake was driven through the heart of an issue years or decades ago, but the retrograde groups take a new form, adopt new language and tactics, and keep pushing at every chink they can find. They're relentless and largely immune to reason. And they win a lot of battles, and may likely win some wars.

Jesusland's Air Force

You may recall that at the Air Force Academy, evangelical students and instructors are apparently harassing non-evangelicals. The Air Force ordered an investigation and a report.

Two prominent crtitics -- a Yale professor who documented harassment previously and a Academy alum who is Jewish, has a child currently attending, and who has reported harassment as well -- were not contacted during the investigation.

They really are intent on keeping the Air Force just for the red states it seems.

Crocodile Tears

Ken Layne on the Newsweek non-scandal:

"Beautiful: The White House just announced the total retraction was a “good first step.”

Ah, and Rumsfeld says “People need to be careful what they say, as well as careful what they do.” Thanks, you sociopathic bag of shit! I’ll keep that in mind!"

If the Pentagon had bothered to dispute the story when it was run by them before publication I'd have a harder time scoffing at this deplorable spectacle.

Layne nails quite a few aspects of this story, including the "crocodile tears shed by the Bush-apologist crowd."

Unpopularity Contest

Actually, it's no contest. From Editor & Publisher

Gallup: Bush Approval Rating Lowest Ever for 2nd-Term Prez at this Point: "It's not uncommon to hear or read pundits referring to President George W. Bush as a 'popular' leader or even a 'very popular' one. Even some of his critics in the press refer to him this way. Perhaps they need to check the latest polls.

President Bush's approval rating has plunged to the lowest level of any president since World War II at this point in his second term, the Gallup Organization reported today.

All other presidents who served a second term had approval ratings well above 50% in the March following their election, Gallup reported.

Presidents Truman and Johnson had finished out the terms of their predecessors, and then won election on their own for a second term.

Bush's current rating is 45%. The next lowest was Reagan with 56% in March 1985.

More bad signs for the president: Gallup's survey now finds only 38% expressing satisfaction with the 'state of the country' while 59% are 'dissatisfied.' One in three Americans feel the economy is excellent or good, while the rest find it 'only fair' or poor. "

There's more at that page.