Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Ya Think ?!?!?




From the AP today , we have a story that Scott McClellan, the former White House Press Secretary is disenchanted with Bush and that in a memoir wrote "that President Bush relied on an aggressive "political propaganda campaign" instead of the truth to sell the Iraq war, and that the decision to invade pushed Bush's presidency "terribly off course.' The Bush White House made "a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed" — a time when the nation was on the brink of war, McClellan writes in the book entitled "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception."

The way Bush managed the Iraq issue "almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option."

"In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage."

Of course we knew this. We've know this for years. We didn't respect the lies & manipulation then either. Now the new press secretary's spin is that McClellan has an axe to grind or something. Whoop. Te. Do.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20080528/D90UNQ2O1.html

Thursday, May 08, 2008

So I'm Thinking....

... there's a fug of a lot of crap going on out there.

The big elections are mostly out of the way. The news said that Dems are discretely suggesting she call it quits, that the numbers "aren't there" and that she can't possibly make them up in the last two elections in Montana and Wyoming. Yah. I once thought an Obama/Clinton ticket could prove to be real sweet, but with the acrimony of the last few weeks, I'm not so sure. Depends on what kinda chops the lady really has as a politician. If Hillary's a 'statesman' and not just a pol and is asked to share the ticket as veep, then yeah they could make a powerful great team.

I'm still wrapping my head around what that Austrian guy Fritzl did to his daughter for nearly 25 years. It beggars the imagination to think what she went through. How do you conceive of not seeing the sun or feeling as though you've been buried alive? Of course she wants guarantees she'll never have to see his face again in her life. I'd want it like that. I think, though, that once he is convicted, as he surely will be, that instead of being hidden from view in a prison, that he should be put on full public view for the duration of his sentence. Put him in a secure, climate controlled room with a minimum of two glass wall so he has no privacy whatsoever during his sentence. He eats in public, he shits into a toilet in open view... all of it, from his first waking moment to him sleeping through the night. And it shouldn't matter if people throw rotten tomatoes or other stuff at him either. The glass walls would shield him, but he'd get to see it comin' at him.

Did I ever mention that I have odd revenge fantasies???

I've been reading about the mess in Philly with a group of cops wailing on some drug suspects following the murder of another cop a few days earlier. I hope my one of my blog buddies (from another blog place) neighborhood isn't involved and is safe for him to be in. I understand things are very, very tense. There has to be some value in hewing to a higher standard of better behavior when one is a cop. Police violence was bad form in the 60's when practiced against the hippies and protesters and it's still bad form when practiced against idiot criminals today.

Myanmar is so screwed right now. Of course, maybe the dictatorship there will have it's death knell in the aftermath. That's another thing that is pretty incomprehensible. The likelihood of 100,000 or more dead from the storm. There's hardly any clean water there now which is a hazard even more dangerous than the storm... bad water can fuel outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, possibly malaria and yellow fever which would lead to even more deaths. Gods grace and bless all the local relief workers there, whether the monks in their temples and monasteries or anyone else lending a hand because the junta isn't allowing outside aid workers entry at all.