Liberal Repercussion: 11/30/2003

samedi, décembre 06, 2003

December 4, 2003 | Daily Mislead Archive
More Photographic Dishonesty from President Bush

In the most famous picture from his trip to Baghdad, President Bush
had himself artfully photographed to look like he was serving turkey
to the troops.1 The image was emblazoned on front pages throughout
the country - and now appears to be an entirely false depiction.

According to the Washington Post, Bush was actually holding "a
decoration, not a serving plate."2 In other words, he was holding a
prop, not real food, and thus only pretending for the cameras to be
serving up the holiday meal.

The Post notes that "the foray has opened new credibility questions
for a White House that has dealt with issues" like this in the past.
In fact, the flap marks the second such distortion in as many days
about his trip to Baghdad. Just yesterday it was revealed that the
White House's tall tale of Air Force One crossing paths with a
British Airways plane was entirely false.3

The deceptive picture also harkens back to the controversy
surrounding the President's "Mission Accomplished" banner4. On May 1,
he stood on the deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln in front of the giant sign
and declared that "major combat operations have ended."5 Since that
time, more troops have been killed or wounded than before he made
that statement, prompting more questions about his photo-op.6

When asked why he chose to stand in front of the "Mission
Accomplished" banner at a press conference six months later,
Bush "disavowed the background banner," saying the White House staff
had nothing to do with producing it.7 But then Navy and
administration officials admitted the President had been dishonest,
saying that "the White House actually made it."8 White House
spokesman Scott McClellan specifically said, "We took care of the
production of it. We have people to do those things."

Of course, Bush's penchant for taking misleading and dishonest photos
has not been confined to Iraq. In July of 2002, the President visited
a low-income housing development in Atlanta to tout his commitment to
funding it. He then proposed a budget that eliminated its
funding9,10. Similarly, the President visited a Boys and Girls Club
in January of 2003 to tout the organization's efforts.11 He said the
club "has got a grand history of helping children." Just four days
after his photo-op, he proposed to cut 15% out of funding for the
Boys and Girls Club12.

Sources:
CBSNews.com, 11/27/2003.
"The Bird Was Perfect But Not For Dinner", Washington Post,
12/04/2003.
"Pilots Didn't Radio Air Force One, Airline Says", Washington Post,
12/02/2003.
CBSNews.com, 10/29/2003.
"President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have
Ended", WhiteHouse.Gov, 05/01/2003.
"Postwar Deaths of U.S. Troops in Iraq Exceeds Combat Toll", New York
Time, 08/26/2003.
"Bush disavows background banner in May speech", USA Today,
10/28/2003.
"White House pressed on 'mission accomplished' sign", CNN,
10/29/2003.
President Calls for Expanding Opportunities to Home Ownership,
06/17/2003.
Atlanta Journal Constitution, 2/5/2003.
President Commemorates 1st Anniversary of Freedom Corps, 01/30/2003.
CNN Crossfire, 1/30/03.

President Bush is now asking Congress to hastily approve one of the
biggest spending bills ever -- 820 billion dollars. Bush and his
people are also cutting lots of last-minute, back-room deals, doing
favors for their friends who run huge corporations, at our expense.

Last-minute giveaways in this bill include:

- Rolling back rules requiring that people be paid for overtime. Eight
million hard-working families count on these fair compensation rules.

- Allowing media giants to monopolize even more local media outlets
than before. Companies like Fox that have bought more outlets than
current law allows would now be allowed to keep them. In fact, this
bill raises the limit just the amount that Fox needs.

Please join me in calling on Congress to stop this bill, at:

http://www.moveon.org/looting/
Many of the bill's worst provisions have been inserted at the last
minute by top Republican negotiators. The final bill, more than 400
pages long, was first shared with Democrats the day they were leaving
for Thanksgiving (Tues. Nov. 25th), in an obvious attempt to force an
immediate vote, sight unseen.

Instead, Congress is returning for a special session next week. The
House is expected to vote on it on Monday, December 8th. The Senate
is being asked to approve it on Tuesday the 9th.

But as Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) said, "A legislator would have to have
rocks in their head to agree to something they haven't yet read."

I couldn't agree more.

Especially when you consider that majorities in both houses of Congress
have already rejected both the media ownership change and the overtime
rollback.

Process aside, the spending itself is also outrageous. It's part of a
long pattern of Bush spending billions of our tax dollars to reward his
friends and campaign contributors, a pattern the Nobel prize-winning
economist George Akerlof has described as "a form of looting."

Please join me in calling on Congress to stop it, at:

http://www.moveon.org/looting/
Thank you.

vendredi, décembre 05, 2003

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Web News

Want to know what President Gore is up to?
http://www.gorewatch.com

Want to know what unelected Smirky is up to?
http://www.bushwatch.com

http://smudgereport.com/
"More fact checkers than PigBoy and Drudge combined."

Scaife-O-Rama!

http://members.aol.com/fszamazon/scaife3.htm

Political Amazon

http://www.american-politics.com
American Politics Journal

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Old Stuff
(Eargasms, BartCop Interviews Rush, Steve Kangas, etc.)

Click Here

http://www.onlinenewspapers.com has links to every newspaper web site.

http://www.geocities.com/verisimus101/

JFK Assassination Page

http://home.comcast.net/~freshlaundry/bush.html

I bet Karl Rove could really have a love hate relationship with this site.

What a timesaver! What a hoot!

Smart people back at Bartcop Forum. The news breaks there first.

"The Secret Pipeline is REAL"

Remember this story from Bartcop? Ex US Airforce Colonel and MIT grad Brandli found the following from watching satellite images:

http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/peoplestoryA1172A.htm
http://www.bartcop.com/1105.htm

It turns out that the guy was right! There is a secret pipeline from central Kuwait to the rich southeastern Iraqi oil fields.

According to the allied command, the pipeline does not exist.

Turns out, it is a pipeline. It's being built by McGraw Hill Construction and the Army. It was a secret project begun well underway before the war began.

McGraw Hill has deep ties to the Bushes going back generations according to Molly Ivin's new book "Bushwacked."

See the 12/4/03 Randi Rhodes show 2:20 into it. You can get the show from http://www.whiterosesociety.com.

http://home.comcast.net/~freshlaundry/bush.html?bs=ASftjefou%21Evnctiju

mercredi, décembre 03, 2003

Remember Watergate?

"...The sergeant-at-arms has called in espionage experts to help in grilling dozens of Capitol staff members. But the affair is hardly comical; in fact, it is further sad evidence — as if any were needed — of the blood-sport level of partisanship in Washington.

At first, the Republican majority denied any G.O.P. complicity after the memos were leaked and published. The documents detailed how Democratic senators had strategized and consulted outside interest groups dedicated to opposing some of President Bush's more extreme judicial nominees.

But after the police moved in last week, Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who is the Judiciary Committee's chairman, reversed himself and announced that he had been "shocked" to find out that it was a member of his own staff who had hacked into the minority's computer files.

"I am mortified," he said in acknowledging the breach of confidentiality. "There's no excuse that can justify these improper actions."

The President and First Lady lit the giant Xmas tree tonight, with a swell set by rocker Brian Setzer and his band.

Well, actually it was Martin Sheen and Stockard Channing. (MY POTUS AND FLOTUS). And it was Rockefeller Center and not the White House. But it almost felt like we had leadership for a moment.

Triumph, Terry Gross and NPR bend Bill the Shill O'Reilly over and give him the bone. If you don't know Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, he arguably the most offensive puppet out there, and among the funniest.

http://freshair.npr.org
It's even funnier when you listen to it... starter link above. Archived in 11/21/03 audio files.

Terry: Do you feel like you've been sexist or condescending in your treatment of female dogs?

Triumph: Holy Christ! Listen to this! Let me ask you something? I feel like I'm being bombarded here.

I know what's happening here! I know what's happening here! Did you ask the same questions to Kermit the Frog? Did you do this?

Terry: Kermit didn't do our show.

Triumph: All right, well Ok, how about when Beethoven did your show? Did you challenge him the way you're challenging me?

Terry: It was a different kind of interview. It was a different kind of interview. Beethoven was funny.

Triumph: Oh, is that right? It's satire what Beethoven does! I'm just... you know I can't believe the government is paying for this interview. That's what I can't believe , you know.

My money that that could go be going to Pekinese hookers is instead going to this, you know, public radio show that is obviously more slanted than my BEEP after I BEEP a Saint Bernard. That's what we're talking about.

Terry: Triumph, I don't think you're being fair I think if you gave public radio a chance you wouldn't feel this way. I think public radio has always been fair to the dog world.

Triumph: I'm trying to give it a chance, but you keep bombarding me. You keep bombarding me. I'm evaluating this interview very closely. That's what I'm doing.

You know, this is 10 minutes of defamations; 70 minutes in dog-years!

You think it's fair Terri? You need to go into another business! That's right!

No, good, this is going to be fodder for Harpers Magazine, for Dog Fancy magazine which I know is liberally... its, the liberal publishers of Dog Fancy.. I mean, that thing is like gay porn anyway.

Terry: Well, Triumph I really don't think you're being fair, I'm going to change the subject.

Triumph: Good because I'm not going to walk out of this interview.

Terry: No, good...

Triumph: No, I'm not going to do that, I'm better than that. But I'm going to take a poop right now. I'm going to poop in this studio right now.

Terry: I think that's fair, I think you should control yourself.

Triumph: Well it's already happening. It's already happening.

The man who wrote this is brilliant and doesn't have a blog yet.

I do, and I'm too tired to write, at the moment. So, I'm taking it. Read more of this good stuff at http://bartcopnation.com/dc/dcboard.php

boom. this is excellent

Here's the screwed up GOP attack mode...LONG but worth it"

This is from The Weekly Standard....I'll put the link to the original article at the bottom. It's the lamest defense of Clinton hating and attack on Bush hating ever printed. Of course, it will be the "intellectual" basis for the pure morons like Handingmylittlemanhoodity and O'Really to quote like it's respectable.

In essence, this clown admits that he and his shithead friends were way over the line in hating Clinton. He calls him a liar, but never shows what, apart from getting blowjobs. But we must be Bush-Haters because we call him a liar.

"SOMETIMES without straining I can remember the long-ago 1990s, when a number of people, including many of my friends--well, including me, to tell the truth--succumbed to what some of us came to call "Billy Bob Gasket Disease."

This creepling's point is that Clinton was such a good liar, he drove his opponents insane, so reporters wrote them off as loonies. He never mentions, of course, what lies those might be. He IS a right-wing scumbag, so that should not surprise me.

Haha, ambition means lying, to this right-wing sewage bag. Gasket, who is probably one of Clinton's many opponents for governor, who all lost, is probably the "disappointed office seeker" we all know from assassinations past.

Now we reach the crux. Of the intro, anyway. They didn't hate Clinton because of any reasonable dislike. They hated him because of his LOOKS.

"those who caught the disease didn't just dislike Clinton, as, say, they might have disliked Jimmy Carter. The crux of Gasket Disease was not contempt but unendurable frustration. They could not fathom why everyone else didn't grasp his essential, transparent fraudulence: the phoniness of the lower-lip-bite, the moist insincerity of the smile, the vanity in every tilt of the carefully coifed head. As with syphilis, so with Gasket Disease: Some Republicans recovered, others were driven mad."

So evidently, we are as crazy as the right wing for hating Bush. We MUST hate him for his looks, not his policies, this punk says. Why, "the nuthouse lately vacated by the Clinton-haters has suddenly filled with Bush-haters," he says, admitting he's a nuthouse resident.

Here's where he gets clever. He sort of cops to being a lunatic hatemonger, then admits that Ann Coulter and that crazed auntie-in-the-attic Amrose Evans-Pritchard and, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Terry Reed and so on are completely nuts, he calls the latest batch of anti-Bush books, by Ivins, Franken, Krugman and so on are the equivalent of those hate-filled screeds.

He particularly hates Krugman and Ivins. See, Princeton economists and journalists with 40 years of experience are comparable to uneducated street punks (Hannity), stupid cumdumptsters (Coulter), and legitimately insane hatemongers (Savage). This is a common Republican trick, which I spent hours emailing and calling NPR about. They USED to have a discussion with a college Polisci prof on one side, and Max Boot, the aptly named nazi, on the other. The right wing is only interested in polluting the argument, never in making one.

Skipping his "literary" criticism of Krugman's book, which basically comes down to running a few years of columns tends to become repetitive (duh, read a Dave Barry book, moron), and that 750-word columns tend to be skimpy on back-up, this guy goes after him for hating Bush. Then he goes after Ivins. And Franken. And Hightower. And others. See, HE was insane for hating Clinton, so EVERYONE ELSE is insane for hating Bush. This is, of course, a false analogy. It is equivalent to comparing the Dime-Refusing Roosevelt haters of the 50s with the Hitler-haters of every age since 1933. He already admitted that they hated Clinton for no real reason other than thinking he was a phony. (and just to point out, Clinton came from poverty, raised himself up by his own effort, and for some reason didn't pull up the gangplank after him...BAD BAD BILL CLINTON.)

Let's see what he says about Krugman. " What happens is mayhem. Krugman sees a country in which free speech is disappearing, the poor are paying more taxes than the rich, and religious superstition is supplanting evolution in grade-school curriculums. That none of these things is actually taking place does not dampen his eagerness to spread the word."

Notice the denier? None of these things are taking place. Andrew, you make good money. So you might be excused for being a moron. Start adding up sales tax, which is a regressive tax for necessities, and the payroll tax, and the cap on SS contributions, look at the Free Speech zones the unelected Punk set up the second he got unelected, look at the people slammed into jail for protesting his illegal war, look at the soldiers who were arrested for criticizing the war, look at the ban on photographs of coffins returning home, just keep looking Andrew, you punk.

Notice he offers no proof for anything he says? The people he attacks do offer proof.

Now, the moron goes after the word "lies." He claims Bush never lies and then goes into a long history, courtesy of Joe Conason, about how other presidents have lied. To this punk, the SOLE lies are his denial of drunk-driving charges, his draft-dodging/AWOL episode and stealing the Arlington Stadium to make $16 million on a (borrowed) $600K investment. How about Weapons of Mass Destruction, Andrew? Remember he said there were drone aircrafts with bio weapons ready to cruise over the U.S. killing us all? Remember the rockets ready to launch in 45 minutes? Remember the huge stashes of ricin and other chemical weapons, and WE KNEW WHERE THEY WERE? Remember the nukes they were ready to produce? Remember the fack that they were working with Al Qaida? Yeah, numbo, you remember. You don't want to , but you do.

Now, of course, he has to lie blatantly. "As James Carville's ghostwriter cleverly puts it in "Had Enough?", "Democrats lied about something we really like: sex. Republicans lie about something they really like: war and money." Calling Bush a liar is a twofer. It at once underscores the gravity of the present president's misconduct, and it condemns the frivolousness of the previous president's accusers."

Want to prove his book was written by a ghostwriter, punk? C'mon, BRING IT ON, PUNK. You have an affadavit, of course. Oh, you don't? Oh, damn. You are SO SCREWED. Oh, who ghost-wrote YOUR stupid article?

Now, let's look at your latest piece of sophistry.

"The problem for polemicists in attacking a relatively popular president is that the People are implicated as well: Maybe they like him because they're as depraved as he is. Which is unthinkable. (For if the People are evil, what of their Tribune?) Conservatives struggled with this difficulty in the 1990s, when Clinton, despite their well-orchestrated abuse, maintained his popularity through both his terms. "

HAHAHA, Relatively popular. Like 50%. Clinton was in the 60s. In fact, the Unelected Punk's father was way over this at the same time in his sole term. So, Andrew, stop lying.

OK, time to stop going point-by-point. He attacks Molly Ivins and moans and bitches about us mean democrats. Read the whole piece and see why I didn't bother. It's like punching kittens.

Now, his next point, and this idiot gets paid by the word, no doubt, is that the Smirking Moron is a LIBERAL. This adds totally new meaning to the word disingenuous. What he means is that Bush has spent more money than any president in history, so us liberals should be delighted. He never mentions of course, that most of the spending goes to the rich, corporate donors and various other constituencies like ranchers and anti-environment activists. His Clear Skies motion, for instance, will cost tons of money, by allowing coal burners to pollute everything in sight, which will have to be cleaned up. He signed an education bill, then didn't fund it. He signed an Aids In Africa bill, promising $15 billion, then wrote the funding for it out of his budget. But according to dear Andrew, Smirk is a caring liberal who is spending HIS precious taxes. He even dares to bring up the Medicare prescription bill, which is unfunded (22% TOPS) and is basically a tax giveaway to HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, and rural states. Of course, Andrew doesn't want to bring up any evidence; he likes to sling mud without ANY proof.

This goes on and on. He quotes Corn's book with some inconsequential lies, leaving out the BIGGIES. Like, "we will have a humble foreign policy," "this will be the education presidency" and of course all those lies in front of the U.N. and in his state of the union speech.

Heh, then he does a neat trick. He says the critics, "always excepting foreign policy" attack the IdiotBoy. In fact, most of these books were written before the Iraqi war. And in fact, all of them attack Smirk over his foreign policy, apart from Ivins, who was concerned with his Texas career. What Andrew means is this: They didn't attack him for his war plans a year before the war, so they must agree with heroic, sexy, smart, intelligent, handsome, sexy, smart, lovely, wonderful, brave, sexy, smart, wonderful, smart-as-all-getout, hot as hell, really, really handsome, jeez-I-gotta-get-into-his-pants, man-did-you-see-that-HUGE-bulge-when-he-flew-that-plane-onto-the-aircraft-carrier, preznit.

At the end, he does THIS.

"At the end of "Bushwhacked," Molly Ivins speaks for all Bush-haters when, with typical artlessness, she sums up our present state of affairs: "There is something creepy about what is happening here." But they can't quite put their finger on what it is." He also mentions that we can't make up our minds if he's a moron or a genius.

Andrew, you moron, let's break it down. Stop talking for liberals. Smirk IS a moron. He ADMITS he doesn't read the newspapers or watch news on TV. He is an incurious, spoiled, stupid, dull little boy. A punk. He has some semi-bright, and I accentuate the SEMI here, because anyone who thinks Wolfowitz, Rice, Negroponte, Reich, Perle, Cheney, Rove and Card are deep thinkers is probably working for the...Weekly Standard. Remember, Andrew, these were some of the people who came up with the Nuns With Guns argument for Reagan. Remember the lay sisters in El Salvador who were kidnapped, forced to dig their own graves, anally rapped, the executed? Nah, YOU FORGOT. Remember Negroponte writing the speech for Reagan about "they might have been smuggling guns?" HAHAHA, of course you don't.

You know what? Intellectual dishonesty like this SHOULD have the death penalty attached. You are a whore much worse than the average Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. You are obviously educated. You KNOW better. Rush was out picking up gay hookers and Sean was out shooting bathtub speed when you were in college.

You, sir, have no such excuse for your lies.

Pete Hisey
Chicago

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/437txvzt.asp

ANOTHER COOLER ANAGRAM

George Walker Bush, President of the United States
That bugger seeks of oil. He's a warped runt.

COOL ANAGRAMS

President George Bush
There's God! Superbeing!
Bugger the depression!
Oh! Desert Purge begins!

G. Dubya
Bad guy

George Walker Bush
Pretender grabs White House -- flag use OK?

We've moved. Welcome to the new space. Never mind the boxes. We're still unpacking.

Liberal Repercussion

samedi, décembre 06, 2003

vendredi, décembre 05, 2003

mercredi, décembre 03, 2003

Qui suis-je

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