Looney Tunes America

Lots of us remember when Ronald Reagon added a political meaning to the famous Hollywood cartoon nomenclature that included Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd. I think Looney Tunes is a pretty good way to describe the present mindset of that one third of Americans who still support Bush's disastrous Iraq war.

If 2,814 American deaths and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths do not stifle their support for The Decider, if $8 billion a month (i.e., $367 million a day, $11 million an hour) beng spent on this senseless war does not shock them out of their stupor, then we may be dealing with incurable looniness.

It is simply nuts when anybody believes Dick Cheney when he says that the "war is going remarkably well" or White House spokesman Tony Snow when he proclaims "we don't torture."

Unfortunately, Bushworld is not a world of fantasy. It is a world of very blatant lies and very deadly results. A pity the electorate didn't vote for Elmer for president.

Bush of Oz

More than ever, George W. Bush is playing the role of the Wizard of Oz. Just look at the levers he was pulling behind the curtains today.

He had his generals (Pace and Casey) doing a jolly dance to try to draw US voters into fantasyland exactly two weeks before our elections. General Casey went so far as to say that Iraqi forces would be able to take over their country's security in 12 to 18 months. These are the same forces that include army units that sometimes just disappear when they are called into action and the national police force that has been thoroughly infiltrated by the militias.

Pass out the aspirins, folks. It is going to be a very weird two weeks for people who prefer to hear about reality.

(And speaking of reality, this month--with a week yet to go--has seen a total of 90 US troops killed, while 40 Iraqis are now being killed each day by sectarian religious fanatics.)

As the tables turn

Finally, finally. Masses of our fellow Americans who for so dreadfully long supported George W. Bush's beloved war are finally waking up. Not from a nightmare but to THE nightmare. Two out of three Americans are now against the madness. The Democracy-Via-Invasion-And Occupation myth is coming apart even in the conservative South; only 12% of Southerners now say they are proud of the war.

With so much senseless death on all sides since March 19, 2003, what is making the big difference now? Surely a lot of things, but especially the surging number of U.S. troops killed. This month 78 have already died (and that is without a major battle.) The total of U.S. troops killed as of today is 2,792.

On the anti-war meter, the gain of every single percentage point merits a sigh of relief. I just wish that all the "switchers" accepted the fact that this war was and is illegal, immoral, born of lies and cosmically stupid. But many of them have gone sour simply because Rumsfeld "did not send in enough troops."

Nevertheless, every vote against the deadly Presidential Hubris counts toward starting withdrawal from the quagmire.

Today's a day of dread

You can bet that millions of Americans who were soaking up the news on Condi, Madonna and Wesley Snipes had no idea that George W. Bush today (10/17) - by the poison stroke of his pen - signed the Military Commission Act and thereby killed the Writ of Habeas Corpus in these United States.

It was quite an accomplishment. Going back to the Magna Carta (1215), English Law (1679) and the U.S. Constitution (Article 1, Section 9), habeas corpus means a detainee has the right to be brought to court for a determination of whether his/her imprisonment is legal and whether he/she should be freed.

The torture president has acted definitively - in a threat to detained foreigners and American citizens alike - and apparently almost nobody has noticed. For sure, voices of sanity and alarm are out there, like Russ Feingold and Keith Olbermann. But how can they compete with Madonna?

Talk about an entire nation going to hell in a handbasket...

In the Sunday news (or not)

This afternoon I decided to click back and forth among a number of TV news and discussion programs over a period of about two hours (admitedly a possible sign of insanity.) Of course there was abundant reporting on the Hawaii earthquake and North Korea, along with the pope's new canonizations. But I found content on Iraq only once. Of course there is nothing at all scientific about this clicking business; I could have just missed Iraq references. But it does make me wonder.

Afterwards, I sat here at the computer. My home page has long been the BBC, and up came their headline. No surprise that it was about Iraq. Here is some of what the headline article reports:

- Six bomb attacks in Kirkuk killing at least 10 and wounding dozens.
- 40 corpses found in Balad and close to 30 in Baghdad.
- Two bombs hitting a Baghdad government convoy, killing seven.
- The Mutayibeen Coalition (Sunni) proclaiming an independent Islamic state covering Baghdad and several other provinces.
- The death of five US soldiers on Saturday.
- Attacks (some of them suicide) in Kirkuk injuring more than 70.

I do hope that someone with the necessary expertise will be charting the amount and prominence of US media coverage of Iraq between now and November 7.

His hand in every mess

I am sure that to a lot of people it seems unfair to find the shadow of King George in one messy corner of the world after another. But fact is fact, and the unitary hand of Bush seems never to tire at throwing monkey wrenches pell mell all over the global stage.

In yesterday's NY Times, Nicholas Kristof (in "Talking With The Monsters") wrote about what The Decider has NOT done vis-a-vis North Korea. Here is an excerpt from Kristof's article:

"The administrations of both the first President Bush and of President Clinton talked to North Korea. That engagement sometimes seemed distasteful, but it averted war and created incentives for North Korea to moderate its behavior — just a bit.

"The bottom line is reflected in the plutonium obtained by North Korea. Here’s the scorecard: Amount obtained during the Clinton administration, zero; amount obtained under this administration, enough for about eight nuclear weapons. (North Korea has also tried since late in the Clinton administration to enrich uranium for a separate path to nuclear weapons, but apparently still hasn’t succeeded and perhaps never will.)"

27 days from today it will be election time. With the right outcome, damage control should kick into gear.

About all those fundamentalisms

I think deep concern about Islamic fundamentalism is as important these days as deep concern about nuclear proliferation. But it is terribly sad to see so many Christians sweating bb's over the Muslim fundamentalist in Iraq or Pakistan while not paying an ounce of attention to the Christian fundamentalist next door.

How in a supposedly educated country like ours can we there be so many evolution deniers? How can millions of believers read a Bible written over a period of some 900 years as if it were a history and science text book? How can there be so many adherents of Rapture "theology" and the merciless "divine" violence that is supposed to come with it? How can so many who go by the name Christian wring their hands over the Koran (that they have not read) and not even blink when they pray the psalms in their own Bible and come across "Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!" (Those are the final words of Psalm 137; for another example, take a look at the whole of Psalm 109.)

For an excellent piece on religious fundamentalisms (yes, plural for sure), read Andrew Sullivan's article in the current TIME (print and online). It entitled "When Not Seeing Is Believing."

Alienating the base

In my last post, I wondered how much Foleygate was going to chip away at the Republican base. It now seems that the chipping may become a true chopping. Foley himself may be enough to make the religious base people sit on their hands on election day. But it is looking more and more like he is not wreaking all the havoc on his own. If it is proven that Dennis Hastert et al. are guilty of a Foley coverup, we can expect to hear a very loud crash. Already Richard Viguerie, the grandfather (since 1965) of that conservative superweapon known as Direct Mail, has pronounced his anathema. Listen for the crash, folks.

In the meantime however, we have got a communication problem on our hands. The huge around-the-clock coverage of Foleygate is taking a lot of media space away from Darfur (where genocide is accelerating in the wake of 450,000 killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes), from Iraq (where the insurgents are now attacking US troops four times every hour of every day), from Afghanistan (which is now the biggest illegal drug source in the world) -- and on goes the list.

Is Bush's ship finally sinking?

King George must want to strangle Bob Woodward. Even though attentive millions around the world have long known the White House was a lie machine on everything Iraq, we've had that U.S. "base" that continued to believe the constant outpouring of Rovian garbage. Woodward's just-published "State of Denial" might cut those base numbers way down, at least among people who know how to read and don't just feed at the Fox trough. There is no denying it any more: Plan Bush has been going downhill for a very long time (now with four attacks by the insurgents every hour), and it is going to be worse next year if we don't get out of there. But Bush knows no turning back; he's said he won't change his mind even if it turns out that his only supporters are Laura and Barney The Dog.

In the meantime, the latest polls are most interesting. They tell us that 61% of Iraqis back the insurgents. The latest State Department poll (yes, the STATE Department!) tells us that a majority in all areas but that of the Kurds -- we might as well say Kurdistan, because those folks already consider themselves a separate country -- want the U.S. to leave immediately.

Head for the lifeboat, George. Your ship is Swiss cheese. Probably even Barney understands that now.