Calling Bullshit

Great editorial by Philip Gailey in the St. Petersburg Times:

If only George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld hated war as much as they hate admitting a mistake. To hear them tell it, Iraq is a success story and the Guantanamo prison is a tropical paradise.

[…]

Army Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, provided a sober reality check on the Iraqi insurgency. "I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago," he told the committee, adding that insurgency's "overall strength" is about the same. "There's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency."

Was the general off-message? Only last month Dick Cheney assured us that the insurgency was in its "last throes." Asked if he was contradicting the vice president, Abizaid sidestepped the question, saying, "I gave you my opinion."

[…]

Meanwhile, Cheney shrugged off charges from domestic and foreign critics that Islamic detainees have been abused at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "They're living in the tropics," he said in a CNN interview. "They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want."

Except due process, perhaps.

Read the whole thing. It’s good.

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General Admits to Secret Air War

The “spikes of activity” intended to provoke Saddam Hussein into war, referenced in the Downing Street Memos, were seemingly confirmed in a 2003 briefing:

THE American general who commanded allied air forces during the Iraq war appears to have admitted in a briefing to American and British officers that coalition aircraft waged a secret air war against Iraq from the middle of 2002, nine months before the invasion began.

Addressing a briefing on lessons learnt from the Iraq war Lieutenant-General Michael Moseley said that in 2002 and early 2003 allied aircraft flew 21,736 sorties, dropping more than 600 bombs on 391 “carefully selected targets” before the war officially started.

The nine months of allied raids “laid the foundations” for the allied victory, Moseley said. They ensured that allied forces did not have to start the war with a protracted bombardment of Iraqi positions.

If those raids exceeded the need to maintain security in the no-fly zones of southern and northern Iraq, they would leave President George W Bush and Tony Blair vulnerable to allegations that they had acted illegally.

Moseley’s remarks have emerged after reports in The Sunday Times that showed an increase in allied bombing in southern Iraq was described in leaked minutes of a meeting of the war cabinet as “spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime”.

Moseley told the briefing at Nellis airbase in Nebraska on July 17, 2003, that the raids took place under cover of patrols of the southern no-fly zone; their purpose was ostensibly to protect the ethnic minorities.

The more information we receive, the more pertinent the question asked in a recent column by Robert Steinback becomes: Do you want to know?

Finding out whether we were lied to by our government shouldn’t be a partisan issue. So how about it, conservatives? Do you want to know? I do.

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“It's not who I am underneath, but what I do, that defines me.”

When I offered my Top 5 list of the best movies of 2004, one of the films on the list was Spider-Man 2. I declared it the best superhero movie ever, and noted that “One is left with the notion that the world needs more Peter Parkers, rather than more Spider-Mans, and that is the film’s greatness.”

I’ve yet to decide if Batman Begins has eclipsed Spider-Man 2 as the best superhero movie ever (a tough call made tougher by Spidey’s always having been my favorite), and I don’t know if such a decision even needs to be made. The truth is, Batman Begins is simply fantastic, and allows Bruce Wayne to be as much a hero as his alter ego, much like Spider-Man 2 did the same for the endearing Peter Parker, letting the superhero genre serve once again as an extraordinary backdrop for an ordinary story of struggling to be one’s best self.

For those who prefer their superheroes on a pedestal, to be admired and regarded as having broken the bounds of mere mortaldom, the opportunity is left intact, but as those of us who were raised on the flawed and fallible, inimitably human, heroes populating a galaxy far, far away are coming into their own as filmmakers, we are given the chance to relate to our heroes as well. Far from taking anything away from our heroes, instead behind this door left ajar for those who want to venture inside, we find that seeing ourselves in our heroes elevates us all, and encourages us to be our best selves, too.

There is a time for perfect heroes who are handed powers of someone else’s design and never doubt their destinies, but this is not it. This is a time of self-made heroes who take on more than they might have been meant, and who do the right thing not because it is easy, or because there is glory to be had, but because we are defined by what we do, and so doing nothing is not an option.

I like these new superheroes of ours. They are quite different from their previous incarnations and yet seem accessible, familiar, in their very humanness. As I recently noted to someone who resists acknowledging his own ability to be a hero, being familiar is not insignificant, even if it sounds so. It's rare in heroes, even ones without a cape, and thus awe-inspiring in its own way.

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From the Friday Night Newshole (Again)

I trust that Dick Durbin will be receiving a much-deserved and heartfelt apology:

Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the United Nations that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistan and Iraq, a UN source said.

The acknowledgement was made in a report submitted to the UN Committee against Torture, said a member of the ten-person panel, speaking on on condition of anonymity.

[…]

Four UN human rights experts on Thursday slammed the United States for stalling on a request to allow visits to terrorism suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, and said they planned to carry out an indirect probe of conditions there.

Huh. But see, what I’ve been reading on conservative blogs is that there’s obviously no torture happening at Gitmo, the proof being that the US lets people in to visit whenever they want. Gee, does that mean conservatives might have been wrong about what’s been going on at Gitmo? Yikes, what a shocker!

"[Washington] said it was a question of isolated cases, that there was nothing systematic and that the guilty were in the process of being punished."

The US report said that those involved were low-ranking members of the military and that their acts were not approved by their superiors, the member added.

More isolated cases, eh? Nothing systemic, you say. It’s simply amazing, so coincidental as to be completely unbelievable, in its quite literal sense. Anyone who steadfastly insists on remaining an apologist for the administration at this point is either manifestly stupid, delusional, or a thoroughly disingenuous ass who will parrot lies without compunction. We’ve got a real problem, folks, and we can either stare it in its ugly face and take it on honestly, or we can continue to pretend like what we’re doing is somehow different from the historical analogies we stubbornly resist simply because we’re Americans.

Read The Heretik on this issue here.

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Friday Night Name That Movie

1. It was dark... All I can tell your for sure is that they all wore Brut after-shave and reeked of Lavoris.

2. You know…for kids!

3. If I'm gonna shit in a bag for the rest of my life because I got shot after the war was over, that would pretty fucking stupid wouldn't it, Major?

4. Did I ever tell you that this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom?

5. You Americans, you're all the same. Always overdressing for the wrong occasions.

6. I like art; I work in a gas station; my best friend is a tomboy. These things don't fly too well in the American high school.

7. He's weird, he's strange, he's sloppy, he's a total nightmare for women... I can't believe I haven't slept with him yet.

8. To a New Yorker like you, a hero is some type of weird sandwich, not some nut who takes on three tigers.

9. I used to live like Robinson Crusoe…I mean, shipwrecked among 8 million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand and there you were.

10. You see the whole culture—Nazis, deodorant salesmen, wrestlers, beauty contests, a talk show. Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling? But the worst are the fundamentalist preachers. Third grade con men telling the poor suckers that watch them that they speak with Jesus, and to please send in money. Money, money, money. If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.

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Breaking: Kerry Grows a Pair!

Raw Story reports (not blockquoted due to length):

Senator Kerry (D - MA) sends letter to Senate Intelligence Committee pressing for answers on the Downing Street Memo and other Downing documents. The letter leaked to Raw Story, is also signed by Senators Johnson, Corzine, Reed, Lautenberg, Boxer, Kennedy, Harkin, Bingaman, and Durbin. The text of the letter is below.

###
June 22, 2005
The Honorable Pat Roberts, Chairman
The Honorable John D. Rockefeller, IV, Vice Chairman
United States Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence
SH-211

Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Roberts and Senator Rockefeller:

We write concerning your committee's vital examination of pre-war Iraq intelligence failures. In particular, we urge you to accelerate to completion the work of the so-called "Phase II" effort to assess how policy makers used the intelligence they received.

Last year your committee completed the first phase of a two-phased effort to review the pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Phase I-begun in the summer of 2003 and completed in the summer of 2004-examined the performance of the American intelligence community in the collection and analysis of intelligence prior to the war, including an examination of the quantity and quality of U.S. intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the intelligence on ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and terrorist groups. At the conclusion of Phase I, your committee issued an unclassified report that made an important contribution to the American public's understanding of the issues involved.

In February 2004-well over a year ago-the committee agreed to expand the scope of inquiry to include a second phase which would examine the use of intelligence by policy makers, the comparison of pre-war assessments and post-war findings, the activities of the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) and the Office of Special Plans in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and the use of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress.

The committee's efforts have taken on renewed urgency given recent revelations in the United Kingdom regarding the apparent minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting between Prime Minister Tony Blair and his senior national security advisors. These minutes-known as the "Downing Street Memo"-raise troubling questions about the use of intelligence by American policy makers-questions that your committee is uniquely situated to address.

The memo indicates that in the summer of 2002, at a time the White House was promising Congress and the American people that war would be their last resort, that they believed military action against Iraq was "inevitable."

The minutes reveal that President "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

The American people took the warnings that the administration sounded seriously-warnings that were echoed at the United Nations and here in Congress as we voted to give the president the authority to go to war. For the sake of our democracy and our future national security, the public must know whether such warnings were driven by facts and responsible intelligence, or by political calculation.

These issues need to be addressed with urgency. This remains a dangerous world, with American forces engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other challenges looming in Iran and North Korea. In this environment, the American public should have the highest confidence that policy makers are using intelligence objectively-never manipulating it to justify war, but always to protect the United States. The contents of the Downing Street Memo undermine this faith and only rigorous Congressional oversight can determine the truth.

We urge the committee to complete the second phase of its investigation with the maximum speed and transparency possible, producing, as it did at the end of Phase I, a comprehensive, unclassified report from which the American people can benefit directly.

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

Go DSM 10, go!

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Kristen Breitweiser’s Open Letter to Karl Rove

That noise you hear is the sound of a new poop chute being torn in Turd Blossom’s big white arse:

…Karl when you say, “Conservatives saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and prepared for war,” what exactly did you do to prepare for your war? Did your preparations include: sound intelligence to warrant your actions; a reasonable entry and exit strategy coupled with a coherent plan to carry out that strategy; the proper training and equipment for the troops you were sending in to fight your war? Did you follow the advice of experts such as General Shinseki who correctly advised you about the troop levels needed to actually succeed in Iraq? No, you didn't.

It has always been America's policy that you only place soldiers' lives in harm's way when it is absolutely necessary and the absolute last resort. When you send troops into combat you support those troops by providing them with proper equipment and training. Why didn't you do that with the troops that you sent into Iraq? Why weren't their vehicles armored? Why didn't they have protective vests? Why weren't they properly trained about the rules of interrogation? And Karl, when our troops come home – be it tragically in body bags or with missing limbs – you should honor and acknowledge their service to their country. You shouldn't hide them by bringing them home in the dark of night. Most importantly, you should take care of them for the long haul by giving them substantial veteran's benefits and care. To me, that is being patriotic. To me, that is how you support our troops. To me, that is how you show that you know the value of a human life given for its country.

Go read the rest.

And on a related note:

The Bush administration, already accused by veterans groups of seeking inadequate funds for health care next year, acknowledged yesterday that it is short $1 billion for covering current needs at the Department of Veterans Affairs this year.

The disclosure of the shortfall angered Senate Republicans who have been voting down Democratic proposals to boost VA programs at significant political cost. Their votes have brought the wrath of the American Legion, the Paralyzed Veterans of America and other organizations down on the GOP.

When, exactly, can we declare the troops officially unsupported by this jackhole administration and the rest of the GOP?

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Idiots

Via Political Wire:

"Now I want you to pay careful attention to this — he's the PhD, and I'm the C student, but notice who is the advisor and who is the President."

— President Bush, speaking at a Maryland nuclear energy plant with Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman.

See? See all you willfully ignorant dumbfucks who wear the stereotype of the ugly American like a Scout badge and proudly display your contempt for intellect and reason and science and facts with a swagger usually reserved for those who have accomplished something? See? I’m just like you. And I’m the leader of the free world, and I get to make the smart folks lick my fucking boots.

Keep eating it up, dumbos. Should the champion of your ignorance and all his Ivy League educated buddies finally get all the power they want by exploiting you and your dumb-dog loyalty for every ounce you're worth, you’ll be left in the shit—and those of us who bothered to educate ourselves will find welcome in places that haven’t been led to ruin by the likes of you.

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D’oh!

Damn:

Forty-nine percent (49%) of Americans say that President Bush is more responsible for starting the War with Iraq than Saddam Hussein. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that 44% take the opposite view and believe Hussein shoulders most of the responsibility.

In late 2002, months before the fighting began, most Americans thought that Hussein was the one provoking the War. Just one-in-four thought the President was doing the provoking at that time.

[…]

Among those not affiliated with either major party, 52% name Bush and 34% Hussein.

I believe those are called swing voters.

(I know, in some cases, dedicated Greens or Libertarians, etc., but you take my point—which is that a lot of people prefer to be led by a competent person rather than a lame duck.)

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Friday Blogrollin'

This is, across the board, the week of the overdue additions. My apologies to you all; I probably have month-old milk in the fridge, too.

Just past the sell-by date*: Two Glasses and Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane

Starting to get whiffy: Night Light and Sumo Merriment

Covered in green fuzz: TBogg and An Angry Old Broad

Good lord; it’s evolved into its own species: Lawyers, Guns and Money

All worth your time. Give ’em a peek.

* Categories based on how long I’ve been meaning to add these blogs and failed to do so.

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Action Items

Go read Mahablog, from which I nicked the below image:

Sign the petition to fire Rove here.

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Rovian Tricks

It would be unlike the Master of All Things Evil to say something as outrageous as he did without some diabolical reason lurking beneath its just plain old reckless and offensive veneer. So I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so it has. Thud.

Wednesday night on Hardball, guest host David Gregory asked Rove about the Downing Street documents (emphasis mine):

GREGORY: As you well know, critics of this war have seized on what’s being called now the Downing Street Memo, based on meetings that Britain’s Chief of Intelligence had with American officials about the war. One issue that comes up in that memo and subsequent memos is British concerns about the fact that the White House in their view wasn’t adequately thinking about what happens after the regime falls.

ROVE: I'm glad you brought that up because I want to put that in context. First of all that is the British — a Brit making a comment about what he perceived to be U.S. policy. But remember the time frame, it is months and months and months before the balloon goes up in Iraq. And in those intervening months there was plenty of time planning for post-war efforts, vast amounts of planning. You never know exactly how a war is going to plan out. Napoleon once said, 'vast numbers of refugees enormous problems with food aid'- did not happen. Vast uprising- didn't happen. That we would see a vast uprising by hundreds of thousands of Iraqis- didn’t happen. War is ugly, but a lot went very well with this effort and in part it was because the United States government and our coalition partners used the months to plan for any eventuality.

GREGORY: But if you're talking about the number of troops necessary, the level of American casualties, the force and intensity of the insurgency…did the president mislead the American people about the cost of the war or was he just simply surprised by what happened?

ROVE: I would go back to the president’s statements over the last several years and I would defy you to find one speech which he talked about Iraq where he doesn’t say there would be difficult times ahead, that we had a long road to hope that a great deal of sacrifice was going to be called for by both the American people and by the Iraqis to achieve this goal. Look, we do not underestimate the ferocity and the anger and the viciousness of the people that we face. We are in a war. Some people may treat it as a law enforcement matter and be worried about indictments from the U.S. attorney from the southern district of New York. But we recognize this administration and the American people we are in a war and the only way you have a successful outcome in the war is to aim for a complete and total victory, which is exactly what we’re doing.

Clearly, he used questions about the Downing Street Documents to set himself up for the comments he made in his Wednesday night speech (to recap):

"Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said Wednesday night. "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

Today, the RNC issued talking points obviously constructed in support of Rove’s statement, in addition to an attack ad against Dick Durbin based on his Gitmo comments.

And so the red herring is cast ashore for all to admire.

This is their defensive play—deflect all interest in the Downing Street Documents by some controversy and force liberals to defend themselves…again.

It’s nothing but subterfuge, designed to detract from this major issue with their usual disingenuous bullshit. The Good News: This is their last line of defense against something that’s big and bothersome for them, so we’re on the right track. The Bad News: This line of defense has worked for them before and it will work again, if we don’t call them on it.

Whatever you’ve done to push the Downing Street Documents out into the world, redouble your efforts to discredit Rove and the GOP’s obfuscation of the issues raised by the documents.

Rove must resign. His dirty and divisive brand of politics has gone far enough.

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What a Dick

Cheney, that is:

Cheney said he had not read the so-called "Downing Street memo," a document written by a British official in the fall of 2002 suggesting that President Bush had already decided to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and that U.S. officials were over hyping intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to build support for the policy.

However, the vice president said the premise of the memo -- that a decision to go to war had been made months before the March 2003 invasion -- was "wrong."

"Remember what happened after the supposed memo was written. We went to the United Nations. We got a unanimous vote out of the Security Council for a resolution calling on Saddam Hussein to come clean," he said.

This response is, of course, utter crap. Considering the Memos indicate that going to the UN and backing Saddam into a corner would help “sell” the war, this hardly passes as a defense. He's basically trying to discredit the memos by saying, "How could they be true? We did exactly what they said we were planning to do." Illogical garbage from a heinous jackass who’s used to saying whatever mumblefuckitude comes out of his mouth and having the American populace never question it.

"The president of the United States took advantage of every possibility to try to resolve this without having to use military force. It wasn't possible in this case."

Oh shut up, you lying sack of shit.

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Hot Karl

Crooks and Liars has the video of Rove's bloviating here. Keep a barfbag handy.

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My Answer…

…to my own question below:

Sir, you have orchestrated one of the great disappointments of my lifetime. No one has done more to divide this country and turn people with different ideas against each other than you, and not only have you made being the ugly American fashionable, but you have turned being the ugly American into a political movement to be used against other Americans.

But I’ve got news for you, buster. I’m an American, try as you might to marginalize, demonize, or silence me. Short of throwing me out on my ass, there’s nothing you can do to make that untrue, as much as you’d like it not to be. I’m a progressive, I’m a voter, and I’m an American. And all your vitriolic rhetoric from here to eternity won’t change that. So I win.

Phbbbbt!

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Question of the Day

If you came face to face with this man, what would you say to him?


Do Your Worst.
Get It Out Of Your System.
Let Him Have It.

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WTF?!

Gay.com:

CENSORED! BY U.S. GOVERNMENT!
Changes to our photo policy mandated by the Bush Administration
Always on the lookout for hot guys and ways to keep people from having fun, the U.S. Dept. of Justice is taking a break from prosecuting terrorists to do something it thinks is more important: restricting your right to view and share photos online.

All member photos identified as adult on our site are temporarily unavailable for public view as the result of the sudden, and unconstitutional, decision by the U.S. Dept. of Justice to place new restrictions on all Web sites around the world that do business in the United States. (I guess nobody ever told them the internet is borderless.) Gay.com thinks your adult photos should be sexy, secure and legally protected, so we've joined with other companies to seek an injunction against this ruling. We're doing everything possible to minimize its impact on you.

[…]

Make your voice heard!
Contact U.S. elected officials and the Dept. of Justice to tell them you oppose 18 U.S.C. §2257

U.S. Dept. of Justice: www.usdoj.gov/contact-us.html
U.S. Senate: www.senate.gov
U.S. House of Representatives: www.house.gov

What the fuck is going on?

(And whatever will Jim West do?)

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The Sound of My Voice

I was a quiet child.

My shyness was for no good reason, really, other than that I was strange. I felt quite out of place in childhood; rambunctiousness didn’t suit me. The ability of most children to inhabit their bodies without inhibitions—flailing arms and legs, tumbling somersaults, endless spinning to a dizziness that left them stumbling until they collapsed to the floor in a giggling heap—was as foreign to me as I must have seemed to other children, with my knitted brow studying them curiously, or my nose buried in a book. I was ever acutely conscious of my own physical presence, intimidating myself with my own awkward gestures, until I folded myself inward and tried to stay very still. I couldn’t relate, and so I retreated.

Nothing brought me outside the safe space in my head more quickly than the sound of my own voice in a public space. I spoke so rarely that, when I did, my classmates would stare at me, which made me miserable. I never raised my hand in class, and when I was called on, hot tears would burn my eyes, and I would desperately will them away as I choked through giving my answer. Painfully shy only begins to describe it. I was 13 when I laughed out loud in a classroom full of my peers for the first time.

At 14, the shyness went away, disappearing one day so completely it was as if it had never existed at all. Suddenly, the eyes out of which I looked at the world seemed to belong to me; I no longer felt like an interloper in my own skin. I happily contributed to conversations in and outside class, and I discovered I was an unafraid (and hence skillful) public speaker. Accused of being weird for the books I read or the music I liked felt like a badge of honor, even if it wasn’t intended to be so. There only needed to be one other person in a high school of 3,000 who carried a copy of Camus’ The Stranger under his arm and knew down to his bones what I am the son and the heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar really means to make the world perfect, and I found him (or he found me), and so it was.

And then I was raped. I’d barely ever kissed a boy, no less had sex with one; of course, rape isn’t about sex, but about control. It’s about controlling another person, both during the act and often, particularly in the cases of acquaintance rape, afterwards. Victims of acquaintance rape, especially young ones, as I was, are easily controlled (and silenced) using fear, threats of imminent danger to themselves or loved ones, and, for the most unfortunate among us, repeated abuse. After three years of such a cycle, my shyness had returned. I spent many of my days at university crumbling inside myself and hating the sound of my own voice. Only with my Camus-carrying friend could I find any peace—and even that was dependent on his compassion, and his infinite patience with my madness.

The shyness has never quite gone away again.

But I’m not called quiet anymore. Aloof, maybe; bitchy, definitely, in those moments when the shyness takes me, because even though I can sound terse, I won’t be quiet, or still, and eventually people realize I was just being awkward. Better to be awkward, I've decided, than quiet; it’s important to have a strong voice, and a loud laugh, and to use them both as often as you can, even when it feels futile.

The current political climate can sometimes seem as little more than a constant barrage of attempts to silence dissent. It’s easy to become weak with not getting heard, and frustrated to the point of apathy with the humiliation of opponents, the attempts to ensure capitulation and forced loyalty through threats and intimidation, the control of people through fear, the slow encroachment on free speech rights. I doubt, sometimes, whether anything, anyone, can make a difference.

But lately, I’ve started to appreciate the sound of my voice again. It’s a smoker’s voice, low, infused sometimes with gravel and always with sibilant S’s—a speech impediment that will never leave me. My voice has become familiar in a way it has not been before, and useful, too. When I think about the time I have spent stranded in my self-imposed quiet, I am scared of my own will taking me there again. I remind myself, then, firmly and as often as is needed, that whether it is I, or someone else, who demands my silence, it is simply not something that I can afford to offer. And all it takes to break the silence is the sound of my voice, which now, finally, makes me happy.

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I misunderestimated him

Just when you think Karl Rove can't morph into an even larger asshole, he goes and opens his yapper.

NEW YORK - Speaking in a ballroom just a few miles north of ground zero, Karl Rove said the Democratic party did not understand the consequences of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said Wednesday night. "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

Karl, you ignorant slut.

In case you forgot, even though you were standing in the frigging city just a few miles away from the site of the tragedy, 9/11 occured in one of the most liberal cities and states in America, if not *the* most liberal. New York City is Democrat. Always has been; always will be.

You were NOT there on 9/11. I was. I was standing in the street watching when the towers went down. I inhaled those buildings and those dead people for weeks afterwards.

I have never, ever felt the strength of the American people like I did that day, and the weeks following. We pulled together as a community. We fought back in the best way we could: By offering support and compassion to our fellow New Yorkers. I was goddamned proud to be an American.

And what did you do? I'm not exactly sure, you didn't show your weasely face anywhere that day, but I'm willing to bet you hid under the frigging bed and wet your fatass dockers.

We were not Democrat, Republican, Liberal or Conservative that day. We were New Yorkers, and we were Americans. We were united.

I know that idea is completely fucking foreign to you.

YOU saw 9/11 as an opportunity to sleaze every unctious, despicable plan you and your cronies had on the back burner into American life. YOU saw 9/11 as a way to play on America's fears to attack the wrong country. YOU saw 9/11 as a way to keep Americans afraid, obedient, and ready to look the other way while you destroyed everything that America stands for.

You see 9/11 as an opportunity to divide Americans. You took the horrible event that could have finally united us as a country, and made it your own personal wrecking ball.

And as for the "consequences of 9/11?"

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

The wrong war. A war built on lies and deciet. A war against a country that never attacked us, while you let the attackers escape. Attackers that you have never pursued, never made a true attempt to locate, and in the words of your own boss, "Don't think that much about."

I see the consequences of 9/11 every day when I watch the death count in Iraq click closer to 2000 American soldiers, and 30,000 civilian deaths.

I see the consequences of 9/11 when I see how your actions have destroyed every bit of goodwill and American support that we gained on that day.

All you saw on 9/11 was death.

And the deaths you saw were not the people that died in the twin towers, nor the Pentagon. Any sympathy you offer to the victims and their families is a hollow lie.

All you saw on that day were the deaths of the people you could now slaughter in the future.

"No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals," Rove said.

No more needs to be said about the motives of conservatives.

Death and Greed.

Racism and Fear.

And more goddamned Lies.


Update: We're not taking this shit lying down.

More Update: Go read Erratum's post for more.

Even More Update: LabKat says it short 'n sweet.

Still More Update: The Green Knight brandishes his sword.

Even Still More Update: More at BarkBarkWoofWoof, and RJ Eskow . (Thanks for the heads-up)

Edited for a completely stupid spelling error.



(No cross-post gag. I'm just too disgusted, angry and sad about this.)

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Me, Too

But last night the plans for a future war
Was all I saw
On Channel 4...

-- The Smiths, "Shoplifters of the World Unite"

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