Mike Luckovich

By Dusty

November 21, 2005 07:40 PM | Link to this

Sorry, but I don’t get the point here. Is this a commercial, political or comic cartoon? It doesn’t seem to fit anywhere.

By buff

November 21, 2005 07:46 PM | Link to this

Dusty, rather meaninfless, I think. I guess Looney-Tooney-Lucko is rediculing the size of het facility. Worst part is that it si boring, but, al lest his drawing is more professional.

By buff

November 21, 2005 08:00 PM | Link to this

Say, I have trouble getting AJC.com to fully load quickly. I am on a dsl w/ 512 of ram and the page will not load completely. It is teh only website that does that. Does anyone else have that problem?

By buff

November 21, 2005 08:06 PM | Link to this

Mike, I am truly curious; how did you get started in the political cartoon business?

By RW-(the original)

November 21, 2005 08:32 PM | Link to this

ml, The airflow around a hurricane is counter clockwise so the sign, trees, and reporter should be blowing the other direction.

But in your world everything leans left, I guess.

By buff

November 21, 2005 08:45 PM | Link to this

RW, that is funny

By RW-(the original)

November 21, 2005 08:53 PM | Link to this

buff,

The AJC page is loading a little slow today. Telco DSL can be sensitive to peak traffic. If you always have the problem you might want to clean temporary files from your browser and run a spyware check.

By Edwina

November 21, 2005 09:02 PM | Link to this

Andy were you Army or Marine? What was your MOS? Did you get a medical or mental discharge? I noticed from some earlier posts that you might have been a chippendale dancer at some point in your previous life. Is that true?

By buff

November 21, 2005 09:13 PM | Link to this

RW, thansk, I keep my pc clean as can be. But, what I cannot figure is why the Ajc’s site is the only slow one

By Edwina

November 21, 2005 09:14 PM | Link to this

Oh Andy where are you. Can’t you come out and play tonight or you all used up.

By edwina

November 21, 2005 09:23 PM | Link to this

Where oh where can Andy be.

By Edwina

November 21, 2005 09:28 PM | Link to this

Oh I know where Andy is. He is out working on his lawn display. Probably putting a spear through Bambie.

By getalife

November 21, 2005 10:30 PM | Link to this

By Andy | on murtha on meet the press:

getalife: War is not pretty; it is there to be won. Protracted, drawn out battles are a waste of lives. When are we going to get serious? Which side do you want to win? Are you with the libs? Get behind your troops, no matter which side you choose, don’t get wishy washy on me. By getalife | on murtha on meet the press:

Sir yes sir. I pick the greatest fighting machine to ever roam this world sir. Please do not put that pinko war loser Hillary Clinton on this blog sir. It makes you look wishy washy sir.

By RW-(the original)

November 21, 2005 10:47 PM | Link to this

CNN version of X-files, no bias here

By Alexander

November 21, 2005 11:43 PM | Link to this

I’m sorry Mike, I usually enjoy even your most wry cartoons, but think you really missed the boat-shaped tank on this one.

I would have expected one of your more poignant cartoons for the opening of the new aquarium.

You must not have thought for a moment that maybe, just maybe, having this big-ol tank right here just might help turn the status-quo on its ear. I’ve worked around enough kids in this town who sadly want to grow-up to be just like their culture’s celebrated gang-bangers.

So how about making for us a picture of the simple image of a lil’hip-hopster inner-city tyke pointing at a diver feeding the denizens of the tank and saying something almost profund like “When I grow-up I wanna be like him”.

Frankly, I wasn’t originally in favor of the idea of an aquarium in Atlanta; as a municipality we’ve truly got bigger fish to fry, but now it’s my hope that the 8-million gallons of sunshine that’s made a splash-down on our city might do as much for its progeny as its prestige.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 06:47 AM | Link to this

As promised, since the cartoon were stuck with is so lame, here’s one to break the boredem-

Puddle Under The Tank

By Proud Pinko

November 22, 2005 06:47 AM | Link to this

The wingnuts can’t get over the fact that they are in the minority. The majority of Americans think:

You may not agree but you can’t refute the facts.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 06:49 AM | Link to this

What “facts?” The fact that this is an all volunteer army? The fact that 60% of veterans support George W Bush, America and the War on Terror? You war losers have nothing but defeat for us, we are tired of it.

By Proud Pinko

November 22, 2005 06:50 AM | Link to this

Reading some of the above posts I’ve come to the conclusion that wingnuts simply can’t spell.

By candide

November 22, 2005 06:56 AM | Link to this

I guess if others are talking about Bush rather than the fish, I can too.

Considering the mess Bush has plunged this country into it is not enough to vote for a democrat in 2008. Something needs to be done with Bush. Perhaps impeachment for incompetence. Better, what Voltaire mentioned was done with failed generals: shoot them! pour encourager les autres (to encourage the others).

I could go for shooting Bush after a trial for incompetence and treason. Cheney too.

Ecrason l’infame!

By Ricky

November 22, 2005 06:59 AM | Link to this

Proud Pinko, you on the left can’t get over the fact that you can’t win an election. You guys have been losing power since 1980. And in 2008 the Republicans will have a new candidate who will take down your golden child Hillary. Here’s some numbers for you, 97 of the fastest 100 growing counties voted for Bush in 2004. Bush received the most votes ever in 2004.

By Erik

November 22, 2005 07:13 AM | Link to this

One last note for all the armchair hawks out there. The most basic and critical support for troops is to ask them to do the right thing, for the right reason, at the right time, and with the right support. On all points this adminstration has and continues to not support it troops despite all the public blather.

By Ricky

November 22, 2005 07:17 AM | Link to this

Its funny how the left desribed people on the right who haven’t served in the military as chickenhawks or armchair hawaks or whatever, but gives a completely free pass to those on the left. If that is the standard we are going to use, who are you going to run in 08. Are you going to run Kerry again? I sure hope you do. That will just guarantee anothe four years

By Andy

November 22, 2005 07:20 AM | Link to this

Erik: And what would be the right thing to do? Conduct the war from 50,000 feet with complete disregard for innocent civilians and the Chinese embassy? Maybe drop of a small unit of soldiers in a city full of terrorists, call them peacekeepers and run screaming from there after they are killed and dragged through the streets? When will you war losers call for your own withdrawl from national security? How many defeats are you going to inflict on us before you surrender?

By Erik

November 22, 2005 07:21 AM | Link to this

Ricky, yes I’m on the left and am also a retired Amry surgeon who has seen more than you will in several lifetimes what the kids over there are going through and what they will have to live with. Armchair hawks ? You bet.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 07:29 AM | Link to this

Erik: What medical unit did you serve in?

By kt1066

November 22, 2005 08:15 AM | Link to this

This is a funny cartoon, but it requires viewers to make some connections that evidently you lot haven’t made yet, possibly because it has more than one target.

By candide

November 22, 2005 08:15 AM | Link to this

Ricky: Hillary will wipe you fascists out!

By Andy

November 22, 2005 08:16 AM | Link to this

That’s all you war losers have to bring to the table is lies? What’s wrong with telling the truth? Tell us about some of your bigger defeats. About how we had the war in Vietnam won, how you were the enemies only hope and how you abandoned the South Vietnamese democracy when they neede our help the most. Tell us how you held hands and sang songs while they died.

By gttim

November 22, 2005 08:22 AM | Link to this

Its funny how the left desribed (sic) people on the right who haven’t served in the military as chickenhawks or armchair hawaks (sic) or whatever, but gives a completely free pass to those on the left.

Another wingnut shows that not only did he not learn about evolution in school, but he also did not learn about hypocrisy and irony (or spelling). The left opposes war, for the most part, so why would they serve? However, many have, and that is why they oppose many of the GOP’s wars. They understand what is going on. The righty wingnuts, who love war, should sign up and serve- putting their butt where their mouth is, so to speak. They would rather send other people to fight, however, showing their true nature. Thus chickenhawk! Can you understand that now?

I wish these wingnuts would actually get a job, and then they wouldn’t have all day to post repetitive nonsense.

And for the record, more Democrats in the government have served in the military than Republicans. That is very easy to research, but I know you would hate to have a fact screw up your GOP conspiracy theories.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 08:24 AM | Link to this

Tell us about Somalia, one of your “littler” defeats. Tell us how you were trying to look sweet in the eyes of the “world.” Tell us how you left our soldiers unprotected. Tell us how they fought valiantly with no help from the Commander in Chief. Tell us how they bravely died, left alone to the terrorists, betrayed by their country. Tell us how they were dragged through the streets while Bill Clinton was chasing skirt in the White House. Tell us what ideas Bin Laden had after seeing your fiasco.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 08:25 AM | Link to this

Hey, I hate pinkos. I think everyone who is tolerant of others is a liar. pinkos, pinkos, pinkos. I have no job and I live every minute of my life for this blog, but as long as I hate pinkos, I’m going to heaven. Oh my God, I’m such a douchebag.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 08:32 AM | Link to this

I hate Africans, which is why I criticize Clinton for trying to intervene in Somalia.

By Bill

November 22, 2005 08:37 AM | Link to this

Geez. From all the comments you’d think this is the Bash Bush/Defend Bush channel. Well, Mike, I really enjoyed today’s cartoon. It was a refreshing change from the usual political statement ones. Too bad there are those on BOTH sides of the political spectrum who can’t lighten up.

By Bill

November 22, 2005 08:41 AM | Link to this

Two comments:

1) Not every cartoon has to have some tired swipe at the President. Some of you lefties have lost your sense of humor. Even Mike Lukovich can lighten up and joke about the weather. It’s funny, topical, and harmless.

2) It frightens me to hear a mindless comment like “Hillary will wipe you fascists out!” What does that mean, and do you even know the meaning of the term? Many of us who tend toward conservatism are not knee-jerk supporters of all ultra-conservative directions. But these kinds of radical threats and your embarrassing choices for leadership (Gore, Clinton, Kerry) have closed the door for middle America.

By Ricky

November 22, 2005 08:44 AM | Link to this

Eric, I have served two tours in Iraq. I am pretty sure I have seen just as much as you, including good friends being killed. So you don’t need to lecture me on what war is about.

By BR

November 22, 2005 08:44 AM | Link to this

It’s interesting that none of the anti-science crowd is telling us that “global warming is a fraud.”

By Eric

November 22, 2005 08:52 AM | Link to this

It’s easy to support a war if it has no adverse affect on you. The only Americans adversely affected by Bush’s folly are the ones who are there or are friends and family of those who are there. It’s exceedingly selfish to blindly support this illegal, immoral, destructive war.

By Dusty

November 22, 2005 08:54 AM | Link to this

gttim, why don’t you join forces with Candide? He thinks we are fighting the French Revolution and has his guillotine ready. You can lead the traitors’ group, the ones who won’t fight for their country. GOP wars, right? Not Americans fighting for their country? You are both short sighted and narrow minded. Most Democrats that I know are still patriotic so don’t disgrace them and the country. You can rant all you want but I will be posting very little today and may miss your disloyalty.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 08:58 AM | Link to this

Ricky: Don’t bother with Eric, he’s a war loser. They can never see the good in the country they live in, only the bad. They have no pride. They live pathetic, sorry little existences whining about how bad things are. They are a drag on our greatness. Just leave them with their “sorrows.”

By Andy

November 22, 2005 09:05 AM | Link to this

I think that because the aquarium doesn’t offer family passes, they must be anti-family, and they must support gay marriage. Therefore, I am anti-aquarium. I think that the aquarium is for sissy war losers.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 09:14 AM | Link to this

This article is bad to the bone-

Allah’s Waiting Room

By Jesus

November 22, 2005 09:20 AM | Link to this

IMPEACH BUSH NOW !!!

By Andy

November 22, 2005 09:28 AM | Link to this

Look at these war losers. They don’t even have the courage to stand up for their own convictions and “ideas,” all they can do is put up fake posts and then freeze the update on the main page so that the fake post stays on top. So brave.

By Ricky

November 22, 2005 09:30 AM | Link to this

Eric, so what you are postulating is that only people with friends or family members who have served in Iraq can offer opinions on the war. Is it also excedinly selfish to be against the war if you have no interest in it? Becuase you can’t have it both ways. Of course you are going to tell me that you can, that the opponents are doing their duty to oppose this “illegal action.” That is fine that is your opinion. But then you have to recognize that the people who support his war, support it based on the larger vision of opening the Arab world to deomcracy. Then you are going to say that wasn’t the justification. We all acknowledge that no WMD’s have been found. But if we can create a democratic state that is pro-Western to go along with Jordan, don’t you think that is a good thing?

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 09:51 AM | Link to this

You hit the nail on the head Ricky, IRREGARDLESS of HOW we got there, we are there. We might as well make the best of it. I’m not so sure that our reasons for going over there were so altruistic (sp?) in the beginning but, again, as long as we’re there, why not bring about some good? Top of the list though, get Osama. What kind of havoc will he wreck on the fledgling democratic Iraq if he is still free? He won’t have to hit us on our own soil becuase he can make us look just as bad by hitting the democratic Iraq that we set up. BTW Ricky, which war did you serve in? Iraq the 1st or Iraq the 2nd? If it was in the first, which unit? I was deployed out of Fort Bragg, 1st Corps Support Command.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 09:52 AM | Link to this

by “fake” I mean any post that doesn’t support Bush or Republicans. If you like gays, then you’re not on my side, war losers.

By HairyDawg

November 22, 2005 10:11 AM | Link to this

IRREGARDLESS isn’t a real word.

By Talon News

November 22, 2005 10:12 AM | Link to this

Hi everyone! Next week I am going to President Bush’s press conference. Hopefully I’ll get picked up to ask alot of questions, cross your fingers.

Anyway, if any of you have ideas on what questions to ask let me know, I’m definately open to suggestions. I like really hard hitting stuff. I really enjoy being next to the seat of power.

I’m going to ask Mr President the same question I asked his press secretary at a press conference a couple of years ago:

Mr. President sir, how are you going to work with Democrats who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

Jeff

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 10:15 AM | Link to this

Thanks for the English lesson Hairy

By RW-(the original)

November 22, 2005 10:20 AM | Link to this

Has the left been reduced to glorified spell checkers?

and, HairyDawg, irregardless is a real word, it’s just not necessary since it means regardless.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 10:20 AM | Link to this

BTW Hairy, Dawg isn’t a real word either.

By cutandrun

November 22, 2005 10:22 AM | Link to this

Jeff, here is a question: Are you going to cut and run like your Daddy and why didnt you go after OBL, you scared of him?

By Andys

November 22, 2005 10:25 AM | Link to this

Andy, you dork. You’re giving a bad name to all of the thinking Andys of the world.

By Ricky

November 22, 2005 10:27 AM | Link to this

Sick, I served in OIF. Have done two tours. What annoys me about the anti war arguement is all they want to do is bash Bush about the prewar intel. They never offer viable solutions.

By Talon News

November 22, 2005 10:31 AM | Link to this

Great question cutandrun, I’ll ask it!

I would love to be the one that puts the cuffs on Osama. I Better get out the military uniform!

Jeff

By Ms. Walters

November 22, 2005 10:32 AM | Link to this

Hi everybody! Next week I’m going to do another Hillary Clinton interview. I’ve already got a bunch of tough questions put together that I’m going to ask her like “How does it feel to be so smart?” What I need from you war losers is to make sure that Ann Coulter doesn’t find out about it. I don’t need any of her hurtfull comments like the one she made about if she ever saw two women make love. Ann said the closest would be my interview with Hillary. Bawawawawa.

Barbara, love to all you pinkos.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 10:33 AM | Link to this

Andys: I agree. If you don’t agree with the war then in my opinion you’re a non-thinking nazi war loser who should move to San Francisco which is where O’Reilly rightly thinks should be leveled by terrorists. You sissy pinkos.

By cutandrun

November 22, 2005 10:36 AM | Link to this

Jeff, No cuffs but alot of bullet holes.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 10:42 AM | Link to this

Hey: They same war loser that put an X over Dick Cheney and tore all of the W’s out of the White House computer keyboards is in this blog right now! It must be some pinko couples child; as usual they have no control over their little brat. Chelsea? Kerry’s daughter with the see through dress? One of the Kennedy kids?

By Midori

November 22, 2005 10:50 AM | Link to this

yeah Andy — too bad those kids aren’t models of the Bush’s slut alcoholic kids, or Jeb’s drug addict daughter, or his out of control son.

By Transplant

November 22, 2005 10:52 AM | Link to this

Yes Andys, Andy is dumber than a box of rocks. Pretty soon he will be talking to himself here because anyone that can think or act with any amount of intelligence will be gone.

By cutandrun

November 22, 2005 10:55 AM | Link to this

Jeff, here is another question:

We had OBL holed up in a cave and let him off the hook, did Saudi Arabia tell you to do that while you were holding his hand?

By Midori

November 22, 2005 10:55 AM | Link to this

I believe Andy, Dusty, RW and Ricky are all the same person.

Their posts sounds exactly the same.

They all show up at the same time.

By Talon News

November 22, 2005 10:57 AM | Link to this

Wow, I have been so inspired by my fellow war loving friends that I have decided to become a hero myself. At the next Bush press conference I am going to wear one of my military uniforms.

Help me chose the right one, I have 11 military uniforms but don’t think the 3 sailor outfits or the Coast Guard ones are appropriate. I’m thinking full on Marine or Air Force, maybe carry a helmut.

I’ll ask “Why don’t the Democrats support those in uniform?”

Jeff

By getalife

November 22, 2005 11:02 AM | Link to this

Midori, I think you are right and they work for the AJC to stir up this blog.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:05 AM | Link to this

Midori, you are losing it: You war losers don’t never forget to drag Dick Cheney’s daughter into it, when given the chance. And with you being the Voice Of The Enemy and all. Shame.

Do you libs talk to your dogs and, most importantly, does your dog talk back? “We had Osama holed up in a cave” and, creepy pinko music please, we let him go!!!! I seen Rumsfeld drive him to the border of Kashmir!!! What’s that buzzing noise!!!

I’d like to ask, maybe I missed it, has any of you seen Osama Bin Ladentorest lately? Heard any audio tapes? Seen him directing the Jihad on Al Jazeera?

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 11:07 AM | Link to this

Really, how much fun would it be to post on this blog if we can’t jaw with our friends on the right?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:14 AM | Link to this

I love matt drudge. He’s no pinko. He is a true genius. My idol, really. If I didn’t hate gays so much I would turn gay and stalk him.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:21 AM | Link to this

Hey look everybody: Cartoon boy has learned how to type uppercase! He’s been listening to the Cons and all of their talk about hard work and effort. It has paid off for him and we should all be proud!

I love matt drudge. He’s no pinko. He is a true genius. My idol, really. If I didn’t hate gays so much I would turn gay and stalk him.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 11:21 AM | Link to this

Andy, he doesn’t have to anymore, he now has the much younger, much healthier Al-Zarqawi (sp?) to do it for him.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:22 AM | Link to this

Midori - war losers and pinkos who hate america don’t deserve to breathe the air of freedom. there’s a reason we have gitmo, and it’s for traitors who hate america. if you hate us for our freedom, then welcome to gitmo.

By The Vent

November 22, 2005 11:23 AM | Link to this

Pop quiz: Name all the religions that believe in killing nonbelievers.

By Mike

November 22, 2005 11:25 AM | Link to this

Unfortunately, the best example we have of a true traitor - John “Jihad Johnny” Walker Lindh - is going to be out on the street in no time!

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:29 AM | Link to this

I know you war losers are fond of polls, so I would like to share one with you-

A Pew Center for People and Press poll this summer found that, by a margin of 73% to 21%, Americans believe that news organizations are “often influenced by powerful people and organizations,” instead of being “pretty independent.” Republicans increasingly believe that the press is excessively critical of America (67% now compared to 47% in 2003) while the percentage of Democrats who believed this declined to 24% from 32%, evidence of a deepening partisan divide.

Can you say loss of circulation?

By Mike

November 22, 2005 11:31 AM | Link to this

Gitmo is for a whole bunch of people who may or may not be terrorists. Unfortunately, the best example we have of a true traitor - John “Jihad Johnny” Walker Lindh - got a light sentence and will probably be back out on the street in no time. All because he has rich parents who could hire expensive lawyers.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:32 AM | Link to this

There you go sickofneocons: Keep up the hope, that’s the spirit!

By Mike

November 22, 2005 11:34 AM | Link to this

Sorry about that - double post is an accident.

By buff

November 22, 2005 11:37 AM | Link to this

I notice that the class warfare mongers are beginning to ratchet up criticize Bernie Marcos and his aquarium. Atlanta finally gets something good downtown and people like Derrick Boazman demand jobs for homeless people.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:44 AM | Link to this

Mike - If you have money and can afford the best lawyers, then you should get off with a light sentence. That’s what capitalism and free markets are all about. But these pinko war losers could never understand that. For those who can’t afford expensive lawyers, it’s off the jail for you! Now, that’s evolution for you, survival of the fittest.

By Midori

November 22, 2005 11:46 AM | Link to this

MURTHA SPEAKS TRUTH TO BUSH’S LIES By Bill Gallagher DETROIT — Privately, President George W. Bush is having a political panic attack as he retreats to his cocoon, seeking comfort from his nannies. Babs, his mommy, wife Laura, Condi Rice and Karen Hughes serve as his ladies in waiting, assuring our courageous leader that the boo-boos he gets on his head will get better and those bad boys criticizing his war are just meanies who don’t like him.

Vice President Dick Cheney, whose bum advice has cost him his male-nanny status, still is called upon for political valet duties. He made a pitiful attempt to quiet Iraq war critics and rewrite history. Cheney, the Lord of the Lies, still sticks to the bogus script he, more than anyone else, crafted: that Saddam Hussein was a dangerous threat to our security and war was the only way to save the republic.

On Capitol Hill, the Republican enablers in Congress shamelessly branded Democratic Rep. John P. Murtha, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, as a “coward.” Murtha, one of the most respected members of Congress on military matters and until recently a staunch a supporter of the war in Iraq, had the temerity to call for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops.

The Pennsylvania congressman, a former Marine colonel and Bronze Star winner, twice wounded in Vietnam, said it is time to bring the troops back home. Murtha said the war is based on “flawed policy wrapped in illusion.” His unexpected defection caused the Republicans to panic, slur Murtha, and force a vote on a transparently disingenuous resolution calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces.

The Republican members of the House are trying to save face and their political hides as public support for the pre-emptive war is plummeting. They are getting their cues from the White House, which means they can’t even acknowledge the obvious truth that the Iraq threat was, at very least, wildly exaggerated to sell the war. If they had some smarts — they don’t — they would paint themselves as well-intentioned victims of the administration’s propagation of bogus intelligence.

You know the Busheviks are deep in desperation when they drag Cheney from his bunker to denounce critics who dare to say “the president of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence.” The intelligence was cooked and the only way that could be done was with purpose and premeditation. Only blind partisans and fools argue otherwise.

Cheney made his denunciation wearing a tuxedo at a dinner for rich Republicans as the children of people of more modest means die in Iraq in a contrived war, doomed from its inception. Violence explodes every day in Iraq because our troops are seen as invaders and oppressors. Bush’s horrible experiment in using military aggression to “spread democracy” is an irredeemable foreign policy disaster that has done immeasurable damage to our national security.

Cheney tried to stem the growing chorus of criticism for the lies he fashioned, scowling that those who expose the deceptions are “irresponsible,” “dishonest” and “reprehensible.” He used that threadbare argument that criticism in the middle of a war “harms the troops who hear these cynical and pernicious falsehoods day in and day out.”

Cheney said he was proud of the men and women fighting the “war on terror in Iraq,” and lamented “a few opportunists are suggesting that they were sent into battle for a lie.” They were. The “terror in Iraq” is the direct result of the invasion and occupation. Murtha recognizes a fundamental truth that sends the Busheviks reeling: that the continued presence of U.S. troops is “inciting the enemy against us,” and the only hope to quell the violence is to get them home as quickly as possible.

The more indignant and solemn Cheney sounds, the more outlandish and transparent his lies. He has no soul, shame or conscience. He and his dauphin in the Oval Office are desperate, angry and vindictive. “If we screwed up,” they whine, “so did everyone else.” They are so addicted to their reckless irresponsibility and supreme arrogance they are incapable of ever recognizing and soberly reflecting on the manifest failures they’ve created.

Now that six out of 10 Americans have concluded they lied to get the war they wanted, Bush and Cheney are scrambling to collectivize their failures and tell those who are now seeing and speaking the truth that their actions will harm the troops and the war effort.

“We will stay in the fight until we have achieved the victory that our brave troops have fought for,” Bush bellowed last Saturday to cheering American military personnel at Osan Air Base, near Seoul, South Korea. Aside from the company of his nanny corps and at the coffee shop in Crawford, Texas, military bases are the only places Bush can feel appreciated these days.

He loves to don a faux flight jacket, get into his military mode, salute the troops and hear the adulation from the crowd. There’s our commander in chief. He’ll lead us to victory.

By the way, what is victory in Iraq? Disarmament? Regime change? Capture and try Saddam Hussein? Freedom and stability for Iraq? Create a viable democracy? Hold elections? Bring peace to the Middle East? Protect Israel? Defeat al-Qaeda? Build military bases? Protect the oil fields? Win the mid-term congressional elections? Victory is all, any or some of the above. It depends on the Bushevik talking points of the week.

These last couple of weeks have been grueling for Bush. He’s been on the road to Latin American and Asia, and our leader hates to travel. He has to eat all that “fur’n” food, listen to “fur’n” languages, stay up past his 8 p.m. bedtime and pretend he’s interested.

In Korea, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest Bush and his war. The totalitarian Chinese government doesn’t permit such public displays, but the Chinese people are dead-set against the American aggression in Iraq.

In fact, everywhere on the planet, save among a dwindling number of Americans and the Bushevik cheerleaders in Congress, people are opposed to the war in Iraq and want a speedy U.S. withdrawal.

We lost any remote hope of pacifying Iraq when the horrors of the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison were revealed. The torture policies forever alienated the Iraqi people, and assured popular support for Islamist extremists and insurgents and their violent campaigns.

Now, we learn Iraq’s new police force has been systematically torturing prisoners and even carrying out non-judicial executions. The brutality occurred right under the noses of American military commanders. British reports describe the Shiite-dominated police using torture on captured Sunnis, further inflaming the sectarian violence unleashed after the U.S. invasion.

ABC News reports two former Iraqi detainees were repeatedly tortured by U.S. forces trying to squeeze out information about Saddam and his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. This new revelation comes as Bush and Cheney continue to resist a Senate defense spending authorization that includes a no-torture provision.

Adding to the Iraqi resistance and international outrage over U.S. behavior, the Pentagon admits, after repeatedly denying it, that white phosphorus was used as a weapon during the U.S. assault on Fallujah, the insurgent stronghold, in the summer of 2004.

RAI, the Italian television network, recently produced a disturbing documentary, “The Hidden Massacre,” the story of the use of the chemical weapon on the people of Fallujah.

The video of the corpses burned to the bone and eyewitness accounts of the suffering are difficult to see and hear. First denying the reports of the use of white phosphorus, Condoleezza Rice’s State Department then admitted the chemical had been used in artillery shells over Fallujah for “illumination purposes.”

But in the face of the documented evidence of civilian casualties, a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, finally admitted, “It was used as an incendiary against enemy combatants.” Venable told the BBC that earlier statements were based on “poor information.” I’ll say.

Among the changing reasons for the war, Bush, Cheney and Rice repeatedly warned us that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and someday he would use them on another nation or provide them to terrorists. Rice loved to remind us Saddam had used chemicals on “his own people.”

Fallujah has been pretty much destroyed, its 300,000 residents displaced and in despair. The bodies of many of their loved ones are charred beyond recognition with chemical weapons. These people want us to leave their country.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney want us to stay until they declare victory. We have already lost the war in Iraq and we also may have lost our national soul there. http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/gallagher240.html

By ChickenHawk Bush

November 22, 2005 11:48 AM | Link to this

LA Times on morale

“When I first got here, I felt like I could actually do some good for the Iraqi people,” Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Barker said. But the last six months had hardened him, he said. “We’re not going to change the Iraqis. I don’t care how many halal meals we give out,” he added, referring to food prepared according to Islamic dietary laws.

“Morale is a roller coaster,” said Lt. Rusten Currie, who has spent 10 months in Iraq. “We were all idealistic to begin with, wanting to find Osama bin Laden and [Abu Musab] Zarqawi, and bring them to justice — whatever that means. Now we just want to go home.”

“So many deaths, so many wounds,” said the 47-year-old Blessing, his voice thickening with repressed tears. “Supposedly it’s peacekeeping, but it’s a war.”

By cutandrun

November 22, 2005 11:50 AM | Link to this

Mr. Murtha is right. The Iraqis want us out of there even after Bush’s daddy cut and ran the first time and 200,000 got slaughtered.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 11:51 AM | Link to this

Andy, what do you mean by that post? Can’t interject any realism into the forum? It’s true, why would Osama pump up his publicity and make people remember - Hey, we haven’t caught him yet! when he has Al-Zarqawi right in the spotlight?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:54 AM | Link to this

Catfight!

Mike - If you have money and can afford the best lawyers, then you should get off with a light sentence. That’s what capitalism and free markets are all about. But these pinko war losers could never understand that. For those who can’t afford expensive lawyers, it’s off the jail for you! Now, that’s evolution for you, survival of the fittest.

Yeah, like I was all for letting Michael Jackson get off. If this freak is going to mock me, could he at least get the ideology right.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:01 PM | Link to this

sickof: I’m sorry if I mistook your “realism” for hope. It just seems so silly that the same people who couldn’t find Eric Rudolph for 3 years in their own back yard, stalk the Bush Administration about not finding bin Ladentorest in enemy territory.

By Midori

November 22, 2005 12:02 PM | Link to this

Daou Report by Peter Daou NEW THE STRAW MEN OF IRAQ: Ten Pro-War Fallacies Friday’s hastily staged congressional vote on withdrawal from Iraq may have been designed to embarrass John Murtha, but the raucous session offered valuable insight into the various rationales for war and the tactics used to attack Democrats who oppose Bush’s Iraq policy. A parade of House Republicans went after the Dems and laid out a surprisingly weak case for the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. Here, in my view, are ten of the leading pro-war fallacies…

The typical framing is: “Democrats got the same intelligence and reached the same conclusion, so blaming Bush for misleading America is purely political.” The argument is also presented in ‘gotcha’ form by people like Sean Hannity, who use a lengthy blind quote about the threat posed by Saddam that turns out to be from Bill Clinton, John Kerry or some other Democrat. The conclusion is that if Bush was lying, they must have been lying too.

There is a false assumption underlying this argument, namely that Dems received the same intel as Bush (they didn’t), but setting that aside, here are two reasons why this is a straw man:

a) The issue is not whether people believed Saddam had WMD (many did), or whether there was any evidence that he had WMD (there was), it’s the fact that Bush and his administration made an absolute, unconditional case with the evidence at hand, brooking no dissent and dismissing doubters inside and outside the government as cowardly or treasonous. That’s what “manipulating the intelligence” and “misleading the public” refers to, the knowing exaggeration of the case for war (whether by cherry-picking intel or using defunct intel or by speaking about ambiguous intel in alarming absolutes). As I wrote in this post: “There we were, more than a decade after the first gulf war, two years after 9/11, and Saddam hadn’t attacked us, he hadn’t threatened to attack us. And then suddenly, he was the biggest threat to America. A threat that required a massive invasion. A bigger threat than Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Iran, Bin Laden. A HUGE, IMMEDIATE threat. It simply defied belief.”

b) In addition to the fear-mongering described above, the contention that Bush ‘misled’ the public is not simply about Saddam’s WMD, but about the way the administration stormed ahead with their plans and invaded Iraq in the way they did, at the time they did, with the Pollyannaish visions they fed the world, all the while demonizing dissent and smearing their critics.

In both (a) and (b), the crux of the issue is proportionality. Whether or not Bill Clinton or France or the U.N. believed Saddam was a threat, the administration’s apocalyptic words and drastic actions (preemptively invading a sovereign nation) were decidedly out of proportion to the level and immediacy of the threat. THAT is the issue.

This is often used as a counterpoint to the notion that Bush overhyped the rationale for war. It’s a vacuous argument whose logic implies we should invade a half-dozen African countries as well as North Korea, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Every day that goes by that Bush allows these threats to “materialize,” he is failing in his duties to protect the American public and should be impeached. And if the pushback is that North Korea and others are being dealt with diplomatically, isn’t that exactly the approach this argument purports to refute?

Furthermore, the war’s opponents never claimed they’d prefer to “wait” for threats to materialize. This is another straw man. Nobody wants to wait for threats to materialize; they just want to deal with them differently.

The Iraq War Resolution (IWR) debate has been flogged to death, so there’s no need to fully resurrect it here. Suffice it to say that:

a) Many elected Democrats did NOT vote in favor of the resolution. Not to mention the millions of rank and filers who marched down the streets of our cities and were largely ignored by the press and brushed off by Bush. So to say, generically, that Democrats “supported the war” or to imply that there was tepid resistance to it, is false.

b) No matter how many people contest this point, a vote to give Bush authority WAS NOT a vote “for war.” Bush also had the authority NOT to invade. Since Republicans are so fond of quoting John Kerry in support of the case for WMD, here are his words on the floor of the Senate the day of the Iraq War Resolution vote.

“In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days—to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out.

“If we do wind up going to war with Iraq, it is imperative that we do so with others in the international community, unless there is a showing of a grave, imminent—and I emphasize “imminent”—threat to this country which requires the President to respond in a way that protects our immediate national security needs.

“Prime Minister Tony Blair has recognized a similar need to distinguish how we approach this. He has said that he believes we should move in concert with allies, and he has promised his own party that he will not do so otherwise. The administration may not be in the habit of building coalitions, but that is what they need to do. And it is what can be done. If we go it alone without reason, we risk inflaming an entire region, breeding a new generation of terrorists, a new cadre of anti-American zealots, and we will be less secure, not more secure, at the end of the day, even with Saddam Hussein disarmed.

“Let there be no doubt or confusion about where we stand on this. I will support a multilateral effort to disarm him by force, if we ever exhaust those other options, as the President has promised, but I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible under any circumstances.”

Not exactly an endorsement of Bush’s approach or a vote “for war.” And a good retort to those who argue that Democrats are “rewriting history.”

To borrow Samuel Johnson’s immortal words, this argument, like (false) patriotism, is the “last refuge of scoundrels.” Implying that opposing views are treasonous is the surest way to stifle dissent.

And it’s a cheap way to avoid confronting hard questions. Such as: Does anyone seriously believe that Bush’s course of action in Iraq has intimidated or deterred the enemy? Doesn’t the fact that the insurgency is as strong as ever “embolden” the enemy?

The sobering truth is that there are dozens of recent events and actions that ‘embolden the enemy’ far more than advocating a disciplined, phased redeployment. Torture of detainees, the use of white phosphorus as an offensive weapon, the curtailing of civil liberties at home, the shameful abandonment of American citizens in the aftermath of Katrina, the cynical outing of CIA agents, the smearing of war critics as traitors, these are far more encouraging to America’s enemies. If we are truly engaged in a clash of civilizations, an epic battle against “Islamofascism,” then our enemies are far more interested in the destruction of those things that are quintessentially American and that give us the moral high ground (freedom of speech, adherence to international law, upholding ethical norms and standards, respect for human rights, etc.) than strategic redeployment in Iraq.

If I learned anything from living in Beirut, it’s that predicting the outcome of sectarian divisions in the Middle East is a fool’s game. The shifting alliances, the internal pressures, the regional influences, make it next to impossible to say whether or not the removal of American forces would further destabilize Iraq.

It’s also grimly amusing that we’re expected to believe the prognostications of the very people who told us we’d be greeted as liberators.

For every foreign policy expert who says that Iraq will be worse off without U.S. troops, there’s another who will tell you the exact opposite is true. In the absence of any sound predictive capabilities, the endgame should be based on the opening: i.e. the sooner you end something that started out wrong and has had terrible consequences, the better.

For those who counter with the Pottery Barn rule (we broke it we should fix it), the question is: What’s the statute of limitations on that rule? What if we can’t fix what’s broken in Iraq? Is there a point at which we acknowledge we can’t fix it and stop trying? Is our attempt to ‘fix’ Iraq breaking it even further? Also, are there other things we’ve broken that we’re obliged to fix before we try to fix Iraq? Is there a reason our limited resources should go to fixing Iraq and not saving poor, sick, and hungry children in America?

Any talk of withdrawal, redeployment or a change in course is characterized as “cutting and running.” This word-play is so disingenuous that it hardly merits a rebuttal, but the best response to the notion that a war hero like John Kerry or John Murtha wants to “cut and run” is Murtha’s response to Cheney: “I like guys who’ve never been there that criticize us who’ve been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don’t like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done.”

A phased withdrawal is just that, a phased withdrawal. And a timetable is just that, a timetable. Using politically-charged buzzwords won’t change the fact that the present course of action is untenable. It is the height of folly to continue on a tragic and deadly path just to save face. And as we pointed out in #3, enough has been done to “embolden the enemy” that leaving Iraq will have little effect in that regard.

For those who think continuing with the current policy in Iraq is a mark of courage and changing direction the mark of cowardice, they should bear in mind that courage tempered by wisdom is noble, courage in defiance of wisdom is foolhardy.

No matter how many times reality intrudes on this fantasy, it’s still one of the favored arguments by the war’s supporters. And it was repeated more than once in the House debate.

This is yet another straw man: we all agree that it’s better to fight our enemies somewhere other than on the streets of America. The problem with the “fight them there” approach is that:

a) Iraq wasn’t “there” until AFTER the invasion. (In spite of the mental contortions of Bush apologists who insist there was a substantive Saddam-Qaeda connection.)

b) Our policy in Iraq is creating more of “them.”

c) “There” is where “them” (Bin Laden and his cohorts) are. And it ain’t Iraq.

A corollary to this argument is that Iraq is the “central front in the war on terror” and we can’t defeat the terrorists if we don’t fight them there. That’s like walking into someone’s house, breaking an expensive vase, and claiming you have to move in because your job is to clean up broken vases and as long as vases are being broken, you have to be there to clean up the mess. Arguments don’t get more circular than this…

And if remaining in Iraq is really about Bush’s resolve to defend America against our enemies by keeping them away from the mainland, let’s not forget what Katrina’s aftermath tells us about how well this administration is preparing for domestic threats. Imagine the holes in domestic security that could be plugged with the toil and treasure being spent in Iraq.

Democrats deserve legitimate criticism for their approach to Iraq, but when the Republican Party controls all branches of government, attacking Dems for conflicting positions and a confused message shouldn’t be a catch-all excuse for Republican mistakes and lies.

Saying Democrats are muddled on Iraq is a favorite media distraction. But the response is simple: if Bush’s policy is to “stay the course,” the Democratic policy - whether we accept Murtha’s approach or Feingold’s or Kerry’s - is to “change the course.” Simple enough. Changing positions in light of new evidence and new circumstances is the sign of a mature and rational mind. Stubbornly clinging to a failed course of action is not.

It’s fascinating how Democrats are always the ones held to account for their Iraq vote, but not Republicans. The question constantly put to Dems, “you voted for it, now you’re against it,” has a straightforward answer, as phrased by a Democratic senator: “we authorized Bush to put the bullet in the gun, not to shoot us in the foot.” We’ve been shot in the foot by the administration’s Iraq policy. Democrats are rightfully reacting to that. The real question - to Republicans - is this: “You voted for this war based on Saddam’s threat to America. The threat never materialized. Was your decision wrong? And does your lockstep allegiance to Bush’s failed policy make you personally responsible for further deaths beyond the 2000+ American troops who have already given their lives?”

The infinite time horizon is an easy cop out for supporters of the Iraq war. I wrote this in August: “The problem with the Bush apologists’ reasoning is that using an infinite time horizon - which they are so fond of - virtually any action, no matter how egregious, can be shown to lead to some positive results. It’s the bastardization of utilitarianism; asserting a causal relationship between a pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign nation and all future good developments in Iraq and the Middle East may swell the hawks’ breasts with pride, but it’s a dubious and dangerous way to conduct foreign policy. Which is precisely why we need to adhere so strictly to the rule of law, to basic moral precepts, and to established principles of international relations, something that this administration has failed to do, and that the administration’s supporters can dance around but can’t justify.”

This is the ultimate fall-back for supporters of this disastrous war. Somber references to mass graves, Saddam gassing his people, liberating the Iraqis from a dictator, spreading freedom, etc., are second only to flag-waving and bumper-sticker “support” for the troops when it comes to feel-good justifications for the fiasco in Iraq.

To human rights activists, this faux-bleeding heart conservatism rings hollow. Considering the unremitting suffering and killing and violence and abuse of innocents that takes place on this planet, it is intellectually dishonest to resort to a retroactive humanitarian rationalization for a war that was ostensibly defensive in nature. Especially when we callously ignore the plight of so many others who suffer in silence.

If the trump card question is “don’t you think it’s good that Saddam is gone?” then one rhetorical question can be met with another:

Isn’t it terrible that we’ve done nothing to stop the slaughter in Darfur? Isn’t it terrible that Iraq is still a killing field and now a terrorist breeding ground? Isn’t it terrible that a nuclear armed Kim Jong Il is still in power? Isn’t it terrible that the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in Iraq could have saved millions of starving children instead of killing tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis?

And so on…

===========

POSTSCRIPT: Washington is suddenly convulsed by a debate that should have taken place three years ago, and the sleeping giant known as the American public is finally awakening to the deceptions that led to war. Emotion, instinct, and other proclivities may be the driving force behind support or opposition for war, but reason and logic are the means by which we try to prove the correctness of our views. No matter how heartfelt, the arguments in favor of the Iraq war are almost always specious and riddled with fallacious reasoning. On a matter so grave, that should be unacceptable to the American people. Judging from the polls, it is.

http://daoureport.salon.com/synopsis.aspx?synopsisId=5a38ddbe-5581-43bb-bbde-cb2111fa048b

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:02 PM | Link to this

Why does this other Andy guy keep mocking me? I simply hate pinkos, gays, and war losers. I think that if you’re a liberal, you should be in gitmo.

sickof - I’m am injecting realism. You are the one living in a fantasy land. This war will crush the arabs, and create more security for us, and that’s how it should be. And Al-Jazeera should be next on our hit list.

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 12:05 PM | Link to this

GOP and Alito commercials? Incoming morter attack when turning over army base to Iraqis? 18 year old mayor?

By buff

November 22, 2005 12:05 PM | Link to this

Midori, please just post a link

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:08 PM | Link to this

Midori - just move to France. You’re un-American, like the rest of the war losers.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:12 PM | Link to this

*Why does this other Andy guy keep mocking me? I simply hate pinkos, gays, and war losers. I think that if you’re a liberal, you should be in gitmo.

sickof - I’m am injecting realism. You are the one living in a fantasy land. This war will crush the arabs, and create more security for us, and that’s how it should be. And Al-Jazeera should be next on our hit list.*

I got an idea. I can go to saying the most terrible things I can think of about you liberals, things that even this weirdo wouldn’t want to disclose. That way we know for sure that it is my post. I’ve been trying to be nice. It’s your decision. Police your children.

By getalife

November 22, 2005 12:15 PM | Link to this

It is sad when one lonely person with four different names has to take up for the President.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:16 PM | Link to this

You liberals want to start talking about the North American Man Boy Love Association? I can “watermark” my posts to verify their authenticity. Are we gonna go there?

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 12:20 PM | Link to this

Andy, I hope you really don’t believe that because your just fooling yourself. Whenever we leave Iraq, be it months, 5 years or 50 years from now, what next? There are terrorists thriving in Indonesia, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela…. where do we go next?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:21 PM | Link to this

Andy - Stop mocking my posts. Stop spreading your hate. I only hate pinkos, war losers, gays and a few others.

getalife - enjoy your one way ticket to gitmo, you sissy war loser.

midori - glad you took my advice and stopped posting and hopefully moved to France.

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 12:22 PM | Link to this

Are you sure that is water you marked your post with. Yes, lets go there.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:26 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons: Right now we are killing Chechens in Iraq. Chechnya is located just outside of Russia. That is our strategy, to bring the hardcore terrorist to us. The idea is working, Zarqawi has been sending his top lieutenants to die in suicide missions, he’s running out of dedicated soldiers.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:28 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons - also, every suicide bombing is actually a good thing because that’s one less Arab non-Christian in the world, don’t you think?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:29 PM | Link to this

ohnoyoudidnt: You are going to defend the North American Man Boy Love Association?

By Mike

November 22, 2005 12:31 PM | Link to this

Can you cite a source for this?

“Zarqawi has been sending his top lieutenants to die in suicide missions, he’s running out of dedicated soldiers.”

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:33 PM | Link to this

Mike - I get all my news from the Washington Times and Fox News who are NEVER wrong and NEVER biased. How dare you ask me to cite a source, you terrorist loving pinko war loser.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 12:34 PM | Link to this

He’s running out of dedicated soldiers? Where did you get that bit of intelligence from? Do you have someone on the inside. I think you meant to say “I hope his dedicated soldiers are running out” because I haven’t seen a let-up in the violence being perpetrated by his dedicated soldiers over there, you wanna now why? Because every day he recruits more dedicated soldiers to his cause. That’s what I’ve been saying all along, terorrists will never simply just go away, there will always be terrorists because we are not going to change our policies. Every place I’ve ever visited in the world , the people there say we love the American people, we hate the American government and its policies. Think about it.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:35 PM | Link to this

Mike: Zarqawi

Watermark: Ted Kennedy killed Mary Jo Kpochne, left her to drown in a creek, real great leader you war losers have.

This would be an authentic Andy post!

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:37 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons - I may not have a source to cite, but at least I support the war, you pinko hippy war loser liberal. Move to France along with Midori.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:40 PM | Link to this

Mike: did you read that one yet, genius? read it and weep, pinko. the national review sure is a balanced news source, isn’t it? My watermark system is impregnable.

Watermark: Ted Kennedy killed Mary Jo Kpochne, left her to drown in a creek, real great leader you war losers have.

This would be an authentic Andy post!

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 12:41 PM | Link to this

Andy was your 12:37 post also an authentic Andy post or was it an “other” Andy post? If it was you then F******* you, I’ve done more for this country than you ever will.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:42 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons: See the link I gave to Mike. Also see my 9:14 post, that link is from a soldier’s account.

Watermark: John Kerry shot a teenage Vietnamese villager who was running away in the back and then filed paperwork to give himself a silver star. You war losers almost elected him president.

This is an authentic Andy post!

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:45 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons: that was me, pinko. You didn’t serve, you can’t even name a MOS. I’ll use each watermark only a few times.

Watermark: John Kerry shot a teenage Vietnamese villager who was running away in the back and then filed paperwork to give himself a silver star. You war losers almost elected him president.

This is an authentic Andy post!

By buff

November 22, 2005 12:47 PM | Link to this

I see the AJC has a big article about the Great Appeaser, Jimmy Carter. I so wish he would shut up.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:47 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons: That wasn’t me at 12:37.

Watermark: Why would Vince Foster commit suicide just because Hillary dumped him for another woman? He was killed because he wouldn’t cover up Travelgate.

This is an authentic Andy post!

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:50 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons: That wasn’t ME. I do not watermark my posts. Only the other Andy does that. I capitalize, too.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 12:50 PM | Link to this

I gave you my MOS yesterday Andy and I asked if you had any other questions about my service, go back and reread yesterday’s posts. I spoke with Ricky about service this morning as well. you can go back and reread that as well. I’ll repeat: MOS - 54B, Chemical Operations Specialist, deployment: 1st Corps Support Command unit out of Fort Bragg, NC. What else do you want to know?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:51 PM | Link to this

I’ll only use the watermarks once.

Watermark: Hillary made $100,000 on cattle futures? Yeah, right. Has anybody else in the whole history of the future markets done that?

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 12:51 PM | Link to this

Andy, you belong to the North American Man Boy Love Association, you unamerican, no free speech,Bushie loving,Cheney loving, Rumsfield loving, Rove loving etc… # spit #.

By Murf

November 22, 2005 12:51 PM | Link to this

Hey Midori, I see you got the cut and paste thing down, you have any opinions of your own or do you just let someone else make them for you?

By OddsMaker

November 22, 2005 12:56 PM | Link to this

Midori asked in an earlier post if Ricky, Dusty, and Andy are the same person. Midori, it’s either that or they are the 3 Stooges. The only question then is which one is which.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:59 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons: You are fighting with a lib that obviously doesn’t have the courage or fortitude to stand on his own convictions. If you look back through my “posts” the ones that seem infantile belong to my pinko stalker. The ones that make sense are mine.

Watermark: Which Kennedy raped that woman at the mansion? I can’t keep war loser names straight.

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 01:03 PM | Link to this

sickof: Thank you for your service. Can you send some Anthrax to Andy?

By RW-(the original)

November 22, 2005 01:09 PM | Link to this

Midori,

Nice unbiased source:

WHO The Daou Report is published by Peter Daou, a blogger and political consultant specializing in online communications. In 2004, Peter directed online rapid response and blog outreach for the Kerry-Edwards campaign.

By kimberly

November 22, 2005 01:15 PM | Link to this

Andy, thanks for showing us all once again that people like you have nothing to offer a discussion beyond hate, ridicule, fecal matter, and divisiveness. While some join in to share information, clarify differing perspectives, or elucidate serious issues for the goal of better understanding or possible solutions, you’ll have none of it.

What you bring to the table is akin to climbing on top of it and urinating all over the breadcrumbs, celery, and sausage while Grandma is trying to make the stuffing. Have a Happy Holiday, Dork! And please DO try to swallow the wishbone whole. I hear it’s good luck!

By Andy

November 22, 2005 01:19 PM | Link to this

sickofneocons: Yes I got the answer on your military service, I was 13F. Here is another link concerning Al Qaeda’s fortunes in Iraq.

What are they testing?

Watermark: Do you libs know what an abortion “doctor” means when they say “extract and dialate.” Could it be pulling late term infants into the birth canal to expose the head, drilling a hole in the skull and sucking the brains out to kill the baby. All without anesthesia?

Do I need to keep this up?

By Ricky

November 22, 2005 01:21 PM | Link to this

Kimberly, you are right. People like Andy, Midori/Malachi, and This Justin bring absolutely nothing to the table. All they do is call names, hurl insults, and post links to talking points for their favorite political persuasion

By RW-(the original)

November 22, 2005 01:27 PM | Link to this

Ricky,

Do you really think what Midori is doing should be called “posting a link”?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 01:27 PM | Link to this

Ricky: Some one has been posting using my name. I had to “watermark” my posts to let everyone know they are mine. This is what I said at 12:12-

I got an idea. I can go to saying the most terrible things I can think of about you liberals, things that even this weirdo wouldn’t want to disclose. That way we know for sure that it is my post. I’ve been trying to be nice. It’s your decision. Police your children.

I would much rather just have a discussion over the issues, but as usual, libs can’t argue their ideas.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 01:36 PM | Link to this

Andy, 13F That’s cool. Which TOC were you stationed at?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 01:41 PM | Link to this

I was with the 7th Infantry Division.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 01:42 PM | Link to this

Andy, I heard some of the BFT equipment was downsized to handhelds recently. That’d be cool.

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 01:45 PM | Link to this

By Andy

November 13, 2005 05:24 PM | Link to this

I did my time in the 2nd Battalion, 8th Field Artillery, I was a forward observer. During my hitch in the service, the camel jockeys hadn’t yet come up with the idea to knock over our skyscrapers. I wish I was young enough to serve now, I would not get weak kneed and weepy like you pinko libs are doing. I would enjoy killing these savages. From what they have told us, they would enjoy me killing them too. It would be mutually satisfying experience for all involved.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 01:49 PM | Link to this

The 2nd Battalion, 8th Field Artllery is attached to the 7th ID, ohnoyoudidnt. The 7th ID would be the TOC, the tactical operations command.

sick: What are BFT?

By kimberly

November 22, 2005 01:50 PM | Link to this

Haha… pathological… Don’t eat the stuffing!

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 01:51 PM | Link to this

Yes ohnoyoudidnt, the 8th field artillery is a unit of the 7th infantry division.

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 01:52 PM | Link to this

What is a forward observer?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 01:53 PM | Link to this

Pyschopathic: What you bring to the table is akin to climbing on top of it and urinating all over the breadcrumbs, celery, and sausage while Grandma is trying to make the stuffing. Have a Happy Holiday, Dork! And please DO try to swallow the wishbone whole. I hear it’s good luck!

I know big words too, kimberly.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 01:53 PM | Link to this

Oh sorry, Andy, Blue Field Tracking equipment.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 01:55 PM | Link to this

ohnoyoudidnt: They are attached to individual infantry platoons or even squads. They direct artillery fire onto targets that are engaged by the infantry.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 01:56 PM | Link to this

to put it simply ohnoyoudidnt, Andy picks the targets that the artillery fires on.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 01:57 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons: I never used anything like that. When I was in, the lasers used to designate targets were almost brand new. There has been a bunch of upgrades done to the equipment since I got out.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 01:58 PM | Link to this

Or did, if I understand correctly, Andy as well as myself, is retired. You hold a post in a reserve unit Andy?

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 01:58 PM | Link to this

Today’s army, you would have to point the laser mark?

By kimberly

November 22, 2005 01:59 PM | Link to this

Haha… That wasn’t psychopathic. It was a metaphor followed by a sincere holiday wish. What’s the matter? You don’t like Thanksgiving? Why… that’s just UN-American! Andy, why do you hate America?

By Ricky

November 22, 2005 02:01 PM | Link to this

Sick, I think you are referring to Blue Force Tracker. We had them mounted in our tanks and humvees. They also mount them in Bradleys. Those ones are the size of a laptop, I haven’t seen any that our handheld yet, but your right that would be cool.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 02:04 PM | Link to this

sick: I did but my six years of serving the country I love, kimberly, is done.

ohnoyoudidnt: You designate, or point the laser at the target and the artillery shell or guided bomb finds the laser dot.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 02:07 PM | Link to this

Did you just call me Kimberly Andy?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 02:10 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons: No, I was also replying to kimberly who questioned my love of the United States, see 1:59.

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 02:13 PM | Link to this

Mr. Murtha was upset when the President decided to give a speech to his critics on Veteren’s Day and send Cheney to Arlington cemetary. As veterens, were you upset too?

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 02:13 PM | Link to this

Oh, o.k., I did six too, fresh out of high school. Paying for college. God I love it!

By Ricky

November 22, 2005 02:19 PM | Link to this

ohnoyoudidn’t, as a veteran I am not upset that they gave speeches. And if you check the polls over 60% of veterans approve of the war effort in Iraq

By Andy

November 22, 2005 02:19 PM | Link to this

I never impugned Murtha, in fact I pointed out that Conservative cartoonists would not be drawing him as naked sitting in a throne, but I do not agree with his statements. We have invested 2000 lives, billions of dollars and I think a free democratic government in a previously hostile region is a risk worth taking. We brought freedom to those people, it will spread and the dividends will be less terrorism in the world. Zarqawi has seriously overplayed his hand; his Jordanian family is p** at him. These people want life, not the death he brings them.

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 02:37 PM | Link to this

I was waiting on sickof’s response. I never went into service because my family is rich with alot of contacts.

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 02:46 PM | Link to this

Jane Fonda was my girlfriend but now I date Cynthia McKinney.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 02:50 PM | Link to this

ohnoyoudidnt, sorry, every so often I have to do some work or it will look suspicious. The timing of the speeches did not affect me one bit, nor did the content. What bothers me is that we are still dwelling on these issues almost 4 years later. As I’ve said all along, no matter the reason we’re in Iraq, we’re there, no amount of finger pointing, ranting, or wishful thinking is going to come of it. We’re there. Period. Let’s move forward and make the best of it.

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 02:57 PM | Link to this

I think that no matter what we do, these people are going to blow themselves up to get revenge on their different ethnic groups. The history goes way back and it will be payback time between the Sunnis and Shiites. Nobody will be able to stop it.

By Al Davis

November 22, 2005 03:34 PM | Link to this

And now the CIA tells us that the insurgency consists of 90% Iraqis. What a mess.

By Dr R

November 22, 2005 03:35 PM | Link to this

Pardon me for jumping in late, but it seems like whatever the cartoon of the day is, we wind up back on the war.

As for the cartoon, it’s just silly. I don’t always agree with Luckovich, but at least he usually is relevant. This is just nonsense and a waste of ink.

I was stunned to see how many kids were in line to see the aquarium on the news. Are that many home-schooled or did their parents yank them out to go see fish?

By oh

November 22, 2005 03:36 PM | Link to this

CNN reported today that the Iraq government wants us to withdraw.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 03:36 PM | Link to this

Wow, not only are wingnuts misinformed, they have no sense of humor.

C’mon guys you voted for George Bush. That’s hilarious!

By Mike

November 22, 2005 03:41 PM | Link to this

Dr R: My wife teaches school. Attendance is about 25 - 50% in her classes today.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 03:42 PM | Link to this

Al Davis: Would that be the same CIA that gave us WMD intelligence?

By oh

November 22, 2005 03:46 PM | Link to this

Dr R, Maybe you can help me, I got this pain in my neck and his name is …

By RW-(the original)

November 22, 2005 03:47 PM | Link to this

oh,

So did the New York Times. Guess what, they want us to leave on the exact same time table and conditions that President Bush outlined.

By oh

November 22, 2005 03:50 PM | Link to this

Damn media bias.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 04:06 PM | Link to this

Al Davis: I knew you couldn’t respond to my statements. You’re a war loser pinko and you belong in gitmo with the rest of the liberals who disagree with the president. If you disagree with the president you don’t deserve freedom!

By Dr R

November 22, 2005 04:17 PM | Link to this

Can’t cure pains in the neck, but I can give you one elsewhere. …

Wow, no wonder we’re something like 52nd in education when looking at fish takes precedence over going to class. Then again, they don’t spend much time on subjects that matter anyway. At some point, we should just give up and put our kids back to work on the farms. At least they’ll learn a trade and get some exercise.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 04:20 PM | Link to this

I know Cobb County is out all week for school. Don’t know about the rest of the counties. Why do the kids need the whole week for Thanksgiving? If I have to work all week (except Thanksgiving) then so should they.

By Dr R

November 22, 2005 04:20 PM | Link to this

Here’s a thought on Iraqi withdrawal: Suppose we agree to a tentative date with the Iraqi government, even share that info with members of key Congressional committees, but avoid broadcasting it to the world. Or do we have to fax everything we intend to do directly to Zarqawi? The less they know about our intentions — withdrawal, torture, etc. — the better.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 04:28 PM | Link to this

Al Davis: I knew you couldn’t respond to my statements. You’re a war loser pinko and you belong in gitmo with the rest of the liberals who disagree with the president. If you disagree with the president you don’t deserve freedom!

I apologize for the immaturity that has obviously inflicted some of the liberals on this board. My statements from now on will be watermarked again and I also apologize for the ill will this may cause. Maybe if you pinkos knew how to raise your children…

Watermark: Betchya didn’t know that Al Franken and Air America had to steal $865,000 from a homeless childrens shelter just so they could stay on air. Seems they can’t make money with their nonsense.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 04:32 PM | Link to this

Al Davis: I knew you couldn’t respond to my statements. You’re a war loser pinko and you belong in gitmo with the rest of the liberals who disagree with the president. If you disagree with the president you don’t deserve freedom!

Sieg Heil Andy!

By oh

November 22, 2005 04:34 PM | Link to this

uh,oh.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 04:35 PM | Link to this

Al Franken - American Hero…and damn funny too.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 04:36 PM | Link to this

Is it oh or uh oh?

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 04:38 PM | Link to this

I play with myself. Alot. I wouldn’t have to do that but my neighbor keeps close watch on his farm animals. Sometimes I hurry but I always get caught.

By oh

November 22, 2005 04:39 PM | Link to this

Dave, actually its ohnoyoudidnt, but I shortened it so Andy could spell it. Did you know that I used to date Jane Fonda and now date Cynthia McKinney?

By Midori

November 22, 2005 04:45 PM | Link to this

Political Hay Desperate for Defeat By George Neumayr Published 11/22/2005 12:09:47 AM The foreign policy of the Democratic Party verges on deliberate defeatism: afraid of American “dominance” in the world, many Democrats would prefer that America tie wars than win them. Because they would like to see America put in its place — this isn’t an overstatement; just listen to the Democrats’ constant complaints about America’s lone “superpower” status — their contribution to the war effort is defined by deep ambivalence. They don’t necessarily want their country to lose, but they are not so sure if they want it to win either. They often define this ambivalence as “patriotism”: we’re henpecking and sapping American military morale for the country’s own good, they’ll say, lest it become too “arrogant.”

As they did during the Cold War, the Democrats see their role in the war on terrorism as that of harsh, inflexible monitors of their own country. “Patriotism” thus translates into endless temporizing, moral equivalence, and a campaign to place suicidal limitations on their country’s military leadership. All of this is accompanied by a gross lack of proportion and perspective and a dilettantish indifference to the consequences of a lost war.

Democrats will tell the military to fight with one arm tied behind its back from the comfortable spot of standing behind it. From this safe vantage point, they can offer up such fine sentiments as: although a “democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand.” (Al Gore, quoting someone else, used that line in a speech.) Democrats love this high-minded and windy talk, especially since someone else is doing the difficult work of preventing terrorists from cutting off their hands.

It is striking how black-and-white, how totally lacking in empathy, Democrats become when their own country’s military soldiers, who are operating under very tricky circumstances, are under discussion. The Democrats’ weakness for “situation ethics” suddenly disappears and they become know-it-alls on the moral particulars of military life. Certain acts are intrinsically wrong, they thunder, even as they argue in every other context that no such acts exist.

The Democrats warm to this discussion of human rights in direct proportion to the evil of the human being whose rights are under examination: a party that has never seen abortion as a human rights abuse is worried that terrorists are standing for too long and aren’t sleeping in properly conditioned rooms.

CIA director Porter Goss recently made a sensible distinction between tough interrogation and torture, a distinction which the Democrats dismiss with easy indignation and false piety (this is a party that considers the death penalty for mass murderers to be “cruel and unusual punishment”; there is no reason to trust its definition of “torture” ), but a distinction which is essential to military victory.

“An enemy that’s working in an amorphous network that doesn’t have to worry about a bunch of regulations, chain of command, rule of law or anything else has got a huge advantage over a stultified, slow-moving, bureaucratic, by-the-book” army, Goss has said. “So we have to, within the law and within all the requirements of our professional ethics in this profession, develop agility. And that means putting a lot of judgment in the hands of individuals overseas.”

When Democrats reject such distinctions and say the CIA interrogations are making America “like the terrorists,” they simply reveal their ignorance of America’s enemy. The Democrats’ soft definition of torture would make Al Qaeda agents laugh.

The Democrats’ tendency to hype with great melodrama the evil of their country while remaining clueless about the monstrosities of the enemy is connected to their agnostic foreign policy: Were they to see the enemy too clearly, they would have to support a more dominant role for America than they wish. Wanting to put America in its place on the international stage, with “parity” but not advantage over others, they have to portray threats to America very benignly. This explains how the Democrats could stumble into the absurd position of saying that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was terrorist-free and that he just wasn’t the sort of person to associate with Muslim terrorists. This whitewash of pre-war Iraq has become essential to the Democrats’ assertion that America could have won the war on terrorism while ignoring one of its loci — an assertion no more persuasive than the Democrats’ claim that Marxist expansionism in Central America had nothing to do with the Soviet threat.

Given the nonstop talk about what the Bush administration didn’t find in Iraq, it is high time Bush officials remind people of what they did find there: a chaotically administered, out-of-control weapons program that was easily accessible to terrorists. As inspector David Kay reported, Iraqi scientists up until the beginning of the war were “actively working to produce a biological weapon using the poison ricin”; “We know that terrorists were passing through Iraq. And now we know that there was little control over Iraq’s weapons capabilities….The country had the technology, the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing through the country — and no central control.” Iraq under Saddam Hussein was arguably more dangerous than even Bush had assumed, Kay said: “I actually think what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than, in fact, we thought it was before the war.”

The Democrats, ignoring this, and working themselves into a fever over Iraq’s perilous condition even as they simultaneously argue no such dangerous condition existed under Saddam Hussein, are rooting at best for an American tie in this front of the war on terrorism. But a tie against terrorists is a defeat, a defeat which only a twisted Democratic foreign policy that fears too much American success could pass off as a victory.

George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.

By buff

November 22, 2005 04:47 PM | Link to this

Attendance was way down at the university today too. Thanksgiving holiday begins tomorrow and a bunch of them got a head start. The attitude toward ed i sbeing destroyed by teachers unions.

By ohnoyoudidnt

November 22, 2005 04:48 PM | Link to this

Dave, Cynthia is real sweet to me, alot sweeter than Jane was. Especially when Ted was doing her, she made me take him for the second hour. I just wish Cynthia wouldn’t talk so much. She has really weird ideas almost crazy.

By oh

November 22, 2005 04:48 PM | Link to this

How about Cheney doing a fundraiser for DeLay at $4200 a ticket?

By oh

November 22, 2005 04:55 PM | Link to this

OH NO YOU DIDNT. Dave, Cynthia is real sweet to me, alot sweeter than Jane was. Especially when Ted was doing her, she made me take him for the second hour. I just wish Cynthia wouldn’t talk so much. She has really weird ideas almost crazy. NOT ME.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 04:55 PM | Link to this

I’d pay $10,000 for that. That Ronnie Earle is a loser, with a hard on for Republicans. I don’t think it is fair to conduct business like that. Just because his party got beat at the ballot box.

By buff

November 22, 2005 04:58 PM | Link to this

Dave, Ronnie Earl even goes after Democrats that are his political enemies. He should be indicted for abuse of office. I do not care for Delay, but, sheesh, that Earl is a menace.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 05:00 PM | Link to this

Buff: He’s not as bad as Fitzgerald, though. I mean really, 2 years of investigation for a crime that wasn’t committed. And then to charge someone for he said she said lying? The guy is a scum.

By buff

November 22, 2005 05:03 PM | Link to this

Dave, right, and I would not be surprised if Libby beats the rap. It is now clear that Fitzherald avoided witnesses who might help Libby.

By buff

November 22, 2005 05:05 PM | Link to this

Holy smoke! That 37 year old female teacher has sex with a 14 year old boy and gets no jail time? If the genders were reversed here the man would be heading for hard time.

By Dr R

November 22, 2005 05:05 PM | Link to this

Dave: I couldn’t have said it better. I mean it’s like we’re at war, who does this Fitzgerald punk think he is, taking up the President and Vice President’s precious time? They’ve almost got the insurgency in Iraq defeated, it’s like Fitzgerald is working for Al Qaeda.

By kimberly

November 22, 2005 05:09 PM | Link to this

I was just remembering when I was real young and my mommy and daddy would take me to the airport. We would wait there for the soldiers coming back from Vietnam to get off the plane and we would spit on them and call them baby killers and such. I miss those days. If George Bush keeps on, he will win this war and I won’t be able to have fun like I used to.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 05:14 PM | Link to this

Dave, remember that a President was impeached for he said she said lying.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 05:24 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons: Yeah, but we weren’t at war, man. Bill Clinton was busy chasing skirt in the White House. George Bush is keeping the terrorists off of our soil. There’s a big difference.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 05:29 PM | Link to this

How do you figure? Lying is lying no matter the justification.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 05:34 PM | Link to this

I apologize for being such a jackass folks. I also apologize for hijacking Dave From Woodstock’s name and being a jackass to using it.

I am such a putz.

By sickoftheneocons

November 22, 2005 05:37 PM | Link to this

Hey, this is the real Dave from Woodstock.

And the panzy has stolen my screen name and is using it to make me look like a jackass neocon, kinda like him.

That’s why I’m using your name - to show you how easy it is to steal a screen name.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 05:42 PM | Link to this

Yep, it’s reall y me. Too bad the two-year olds who can’t bear to argue like men have to pull their immature sh*t like using my name to post all that bs.

LIBERAL INDEPENDENT And I’m lovin’ watching all the inbred neocons squirm as their Republican ship sinks.

Adios losers.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 05:43 PM | Link to this

Where are you now Andy?

C’mon out you p***.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 05:45 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons: Who said that Bush or anybody at the White House was lying? Have you any proof or are you just repeating MoveOn.org slogans?

By Midori

November 22, 2005 06:00 PM | Link to this

EUROPE

The Suburbs Are Burning

Is France a failed state?

ANTHONY DANIELS

For the last two weeks, the French have been watching the numbers of cars burnt the night before in the suburbs the way New Yorkers watch the Dow Jones index. Does 463 mean that the riots are now in recession, or is the reduction compared with the previous night merely what stockbrokers call a technical correction? Could the senior policeman be right who said that the downward trend was “the beginning of a classic mobilization at the weekend�? In other words, could les jeunes be conserving their energy for a further assault on French complacency?

Certainly, the police intercepted e-mails calling on les jeunes to assemble in the Champs-Elysées and under the Eiffel Tower, which would really set the matches among the gasoline. The French Social Model would then have no choice but to swing into action, and send in the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité (the feared CRS), all batons flailing: the continuation of social work by other means.

It must be admitted that les jeunes have a strange way of trying to prove to the world that they are not what the outspoken interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, so perceptively (but unadvisedly) called scum. Having long pondered the delicately balanced question of whether it is more humiliating to be justly or unjustly accused, I suspect that les jeunes have reacted with such fury to M. Sarkozy’s epithet precisely because they knew themselves that it was accurate. For how else do you describe people who are prepared to burn the cars of 6,000 of their neighbors, and a bus with a 56-year-old handicapped woman in it who was unable to escape and was severely burned as a result; people who did not take this horrific incident as an indication to desist, and whose subculture is a transposition of that of the American underclass at its worst?

But a descriptive term is not an explanation, unless you believe — as I do not — that large numbers of people are scum by nature, by unchangeable essence (and even that essence would require explanation). Whatever reservations one might have about the culture that the parents of les jeunes brought with them to France when they immigrated there, they — the parents — were definitely a more attractive group of human beings than their offspring, brought up in the banlieues of French cities and towns. At the very least, they were hard-working, law-abiding, decent, polite, and optimistic about improving their condition and that of their future children. Things have turned out very differently, of course: Many of their children, no doubt larger and healthier than their North African counterparts, have grown into alien beings whom they have long since ceased to understand.

The French banlieues are in effect prisons, but prisons that are ruled by the prisoners who live in them — generally the worst and most brutalizing kind of prisons there are. These prisons have metaphysical walls rather than real ones, though they are geographically isolated from the towns and cities to which they are attached. The metaphysical walls are patrolled by a combination of rigid French labor laws, which make it so difficult for the young to find employment in France, and the subculture of les jeunes themselves, which is conducive to nothing except idleness punctuated by insensate rage.

As in all prisons, an us-and-them attitude develops, in which anyone who is not one of us is one of them, and with whom any decent relations are a form of treachery toward us. In prison, it is the wardens and the prisoners who are in binary opposition; in the banlieues it is les jeunes and any other member of French society who are irreconcilably opposed. I have rarely felt such immediate and reflexive hostility as when I visited the banlieues of Paris, not even in African townships at the height of apartheid.

Of course, the hostility is entirely reciprocated by the police, who suspect all of les jeunes of everything, and behave accordingly: more like an army of occupation trying to repress the discontents of the natives than a force to protect everyone equally. It is sometimes said that the hostility of les jeunes has been caused by this attitude of the police. But this does not explain the almost equal hostility toward the sapeurs-pompiers, the firemen, whose job is to put out fires and rescue people who are trapped, and even toward the crews of ambulances sent to evacuate the ill and injured to the hospital. The rage is an existential one, worsened perhaps by particular instances of humiliation, but fundamentally independent of them.

Of course, just as prisoners know themselves to be in an intrinsically less powerful position than the wardens of their prison, so les jeunes know themselves to be in an intrinsically powerless position vis-à-vis the French state. For one thing, many of them are completely dependent upon that state for everything they possess and everything they eat. Even the drug dealers, whose business is practically the only economic activity of the banlieues, know that, at base, they are dependent on the French state: If their customers, les jeunes, were not in receipt of state subventions, the dealers would have no market for their wares.

The humiliation of such dependence hardly needs emphasis; nothing is left to les jeunes but endlessly to distract themselves in their uneducated, crude, and tasteless way, and to soothe their inflamed egos with the balm of “respect,� which in practice means making others fear them, both individually and collectively.

Of course, when I talk of les jeunes, I refer only to the male of the species. There has been a marked lack of curiosity in the world’s press about the absence of women from the scenes that, for a time, have made Clichy-sous-Bois as famous as Paris itself. There has also been little attempt to canvass the opinion of the young women of the banlieues about developments in the streets. Here truly is the dog that did not bark, for many of them might have told a story of oppression by les jeunes that would make the French state seem a model of equity and compassion by comparison. Indeed, to anyone even moderately alert to social meanings, the mere difficulty of canvassing female opinion in the banlieues would have represented an important story.

The part played by Islam in the riots is bound in an age of Islamist terrorism to preoccupy us, but in my opinion it played at most a peripheral or enabling role. Young men of Islamic background are perhaps more sensitive to humiliation, and more likely to react violently, than others, since they are habituated to thinking of themselves as superior beings to women, the elect of creation. They are also determined to preserve their domination of women. This is the principal interest that Islam has for the young Muslim men of both Britain and France, and probably Holland as well, who are in all other respects almost as highly secularized as their non-Muslim counterparts. Islam also helps to keep their resentment warm, to give it shape; and resentment is, of all human emotions, by far the most dependable — but also the most counterproductive. But les jeunes are not religious fanatics: They are not religious at all. When French Islamic clerics issued a fatwa condemning the riots, it had absolutely no effect. Only a fatwa calling for riots might have had some effect, but only because there existed an inclination to riot in the first place.

This is not to say that the situation is not extremely dangerous. Les jeunes of all descriptions are often looking for supposedly complete answers to their existential problems, and an obvious one lies close at hand in the French banlieues. It would be surprising indeed if fundamentalists did not try to take advantage of the discontents to further their designs — if an impossible and primitive utopian daydream can be called a design.

Of course, the French state has been living a daydream of its own, namely that welfare can be extended indefinitely without adverse social, economic, and psychological consequences. It now finds itself with a very painful dilemma. The situation in the banlieues can be improved only by a liberalization of the French labor market; but years of propaganda from the French intelligentsia have made the majority of Frenchmen deeply hostile to economic liberalization. A recent poll conducted for the newspaper Libération showed that the word “socialism� had better connotations for Frenchmen than the word “capitalism,� and that economic liberalism was viewed with great distaste.

At a recent conference, I heard an eminent French intellectual say that the French government needed to introduce entrepreneurs into the banlieues. He was a representative of French liberalism (comparatively speaking), yet his view was still essentially Colbertian. Even he had not yet grasped that the state was the problem, not the solution, that it was the state that had enclosed les jeunes in an existential prison. Unfortunately, most of the French population benefits — or believes that it benefits — from the regulations that maintain that prison. Riots in les banlieues or marches down the Boulevard Saint-Germain: That is the choice facing the French government, and my guess is that they will prefer the former to the latter, even if in the end it means sending in the CRS, no holds barred.

Mr. Daniels is a doctor and writer in England. Among his books is Utopias Elsewhere.

By Malachi

November 22, 2005 06:09 PM | Link to this

Haqy Asaad. An explosives expert with the Iraqi interior ministry, Asaad became adept at defusing roadside bombs, at great personal risk. “I can’t just leave these bombs in all these neighborhoods. I want to live in a peaceful Iraq someday,” he explained. It will be his kind of bravery that will save Iraq. He was killed by insurgents in August. RIP.

That’s what you get for wanting to live free, may all you neocons die too.

By Dave From Woodstock

November 22, 2005 06:16 PM | Link to this

Well it looks like the kids were put to bed by mommy and daddy. You can only have so much fun in one day children.

Wingnuts: The next time you have a thought, let it go.

Like my new sig?

*Bush, Cheney, Condy, Rummy, and Rove for jailtime in 2006

Hillary for President in 2008*

By oh

November 22, 2005 06:27 PM | Link to this

Time for my meds.

Goddnight Frank, Wanda, Mr.Cuddles. Goodnight Sammy, Weasil, and big Honda!

By oh

November 22, 2005 06:31 PM | Link to this

Thanks for reminding me.

By oh

November 22, 2005 06:35 PM | Link to this

Looks like you need to take yours too!

By Midori

November 22, 2005 06:47 PM | Link to this

November 22, 2005 Zarqawi’s Bad Week By Jack Kelly

Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaida chieftain in Iraq, has had a bad week. If it turns out Zarqawi was among seven al Qaida leaders killed in Mosul Saturday, it’ll have been a really bad week. But even if Zarqawi got away again, it’s been a rotten week for him. It’s also been a bad week for antiwar Democrats, who had their bluff called in the House of Representatives.

Zarqawi’s bad week is a product of the suicide bombings he orchestrated November 9th against three hotels in Amman, Jordan. The bombings resulted in 62 deaths, mostly of Arabs attending a wedding. Because of its large Palestinian population, Jordan had been the country most supportive of al Qaida.

No longer. Last Friday, more than 200,000 Jordanians took to the streets to demonstrate against al Qaida. Zarqawi is Jordanian, but his tribe has disowned him.

This is a big deal, said Jim Robbins, who teaches at the National Defense University: “One of the reasons I thought the report of Zarqawi’s death was credible at first was that his tribe had forsaken him,” Robbins wrote.

“Extended tribal ties among groups in al Anbar province in Iraq may be what has kept him safe thus far.” It could have been a tip from a disgruntled relative that led U.S. and Iraqi troops to surround the house in Mosul where seven men and a woman died, several by blowing themselves up. More likely, they were ratted out by Iraqis who had once been friendly to al Qaida, but are turning against it.

There has been a surge in tips from Iraqis over the last month, a U.S. intelligence officer told the Washington Post. “These tend to be traditional Iraqi leaders — sheiks and imams — upset with the organization, especially its recent execution of Sunni Arabs in Ramadi,” the official said.

Ramadi, the capital of al Anbar province, is a smuggling center that long has been as lawless as Dodge City before Wyatt Earp became marshal. There have been running gun battles betweenlocal insurgents tied to the former regime of Saddam Hussein and al Qaida. There also have been gun battles between al Qaida and U.S. troops in Ramadi, which have gone badly for al Qaida.

Nearly 200 “insurgents,” most of them al Qaida members, have been killed or captured in Operation Steel Curtain, now in its second week, a joint Marine-Iraqi operation which has been cleaning out hideouts along the Syrian border.

Zarqawi has lost a number of key lieutenants in recent weeks, thanks to the increasing number and timeliness of tips. The most recent were Abu Ahmed, the “Emir” of Sadah, nabbed on day three of Steel Curtain, and Abu Ibrahim, a technology expert who manufactured triggering devices for roadside bombs, taken in Baghdad Oct. 31st. More of Zarqawi’s command network was lost in the house in Mosul, even if he himself got away.

With the walls falling in on al Qaida in Iraq, it would seem a curious time for congressional Democrats to go into preemptive surrender mode. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., introduced a resolution last week calling for “immediate redeployment” of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Murtha, a retired Marine reserve colonel and a decorated Vietnam veteran, is a substantive man. The news media described his resolution as a blow to the Bush administration. “When President Bush decided to wage war on Saddam Hussein, perhaps no Democrat was a firmer ally,” wrote Maura Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. This was untrue. Murtha had expressed doubt about going to war in 2002, and had declared Iraq “unwinnable” in May of last year.

Showing more backbone and more brains than they customarily do, House Republicans called for a vote on immediate withdrawal from Iraq. It failed, 404-3. Democrats who’d applauded the introduction of Murtha’s resolution whined it was dirty pool for Republicans to make them vote on his bottom line.

“It’s a trap,” a Democratic strategist told Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift. “If the party comes out for a unilateral six month withdrawal, that would become the issue for 06, and they (Republicans) would kill us again.” Democrats like to make antiwar noises for their moonbat base, but were unwilling to cast a vote that could hurt them with swing voters. They were too cowardly to be forthright cowards.

Jack Kelly is national security columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Blade of Toledo, Ohio.

By John in Mableton

November 22, 2005 06:55 PM | Link to this

Earliest reference in Eng. is to the liberal arts (L. artes liberales; see art (n.)), the seven attainments directed to intellectual enlargement, not immediate practical purpose, and thus deemed worthy of a free man (the word in this sense was opposed to servile or mechanical). Sense of “free in bestowing” is from 1387. With a meaning “free from restraint in speech or action” (1490) liberal was used 16c.-17c. as a term of reproach. It revived in a positive sense in the Enlightenment, with a meaning “free from prejudice, tolerant,” which emerged 1776-88. Purely in ref. to political opinion, “tending in favor of freedom and democracy” it dates from c.1801, from Fr. libéral, originally applied in Eng. by its opponents (often in Fr. form and with suggestions of foreign lawlessness) to the party favorable to individual political freedoms. But also (especially in U.S. politics) tending to mean “favorable to government action to effect social change,” which seems at times to draw more from the religious sense of “free from prejudice in favor of traditional opinions and established institutions” (and thus open to new ideas and plans of reform), which dates from 1823.

This is Democratic bedrock: we don’t let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them dying. Here on the frozen tundra of Minnesota, if your neighbor’s car won’t start, you put on your parka and get the jumper cables out and deliver the Sacred Spark that starts their car. Everybody knows this. The logical extension of this spirit is social welfare and the myriad government programs with long dry names all very uninteresting to you until you suddenly need one and then you turn into a Democrat. A liberal is a conservative who’s been through treatment. -Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat, 2004

As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality. George Washington (1732 - 1799)

Eat me Andy!

By Andy

November 22, 2005 07:10 PM | Link to this

John in Mableton: Extend those sympathies to the people of Iraq, or are you too wrapped up in your own little greedy world?

By W

November 22, 2005 07:17 PM | Link to this

Andy! Back from getting another 12 pack and a bag of pork rinds I see.

By Midori

November 22, 2005 07:20 PM | Link to this

you numbnuts love to play games.

I didn’t post that 6:47 post wasn’t made by me.

At 6:47 I was just pulling into my driveway.

The games people play.

Can’t you do better?

By Midori

November 22, 2005 07:21 PM | Link to this

you numbnuts love to play games.

that 6:47 post wasn’t made by me.

At 6:47 I was just pulling into my driveway.

The games people play.

Can’t you do better?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 07:24 PM | Link to this

All you pinkos can’t sleep? Here’s a little bedtime story-

Twas the night before Fitzmas

And all through the house

Not a pinko was stirring

Not even a mouse

Then down from the chimney

Panta Fitzgerald he came

Bearing his gifts and his services

For the name of Miss Plame

But the boxes were empty

The stockings were bare

And the libs were all shrieking

Who took the presents from there?

Up on the roof

Just out of sight

Off stole Bob Woodward

Into the night

While at the White House

The laughter was gale

For Scooter was back

Set free from jail.

By Midori

November 22, 2005 07:26 PM | Link to this

Andy — don’t quit your day job.

By Midori

November 22, 2005 07:34 PM | Link to this

US: The Man Who Sold the War

John Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. The Pentagon secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. He is a leader in the strategic field known as “perception management,” manipulating information — and, by extension, the news media.

by James Bamford, Rolling Stone November 19th, 2005

The road to war in Iraq led through many unlikely places. One of them was a chic hotel nestled among the strip bars and brothels that cater to foreigners in the town of Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand.

On December 17th, 2001, in a small room within the sound of the crashing tide, a CIA officer attached metal electrodes to the ring and index fingers of a man sitting pensively in a padded chair. The officer then stretched a black rubber tube, pleated like an accordion, around the man’s chest and another across his abdomen. Finally, he slipped a thick cuff over the man’s brachial artery, on the inside of his upper arm.

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam’s men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff — just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That’s why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn’t true didn’t mean it couldn’t be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation — part espionage, part PR campaign — that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. Two months before al-Haideri took the lie-detector test, the Pentagon had secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as “perception management,” manipulating information — and, by extension, the news media — to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help “create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power.” Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name — the Iraqi National Congress — and served as their media guru and “senior adviser” as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

“They’re very closemouthed about what they do,” says Kevin McCauley, an editor of the industry trade publication O’Dwyer’s PR Daily. “It’s all cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi — the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC — the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group’s spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task — he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC’s man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn’t hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam’s terrifying cache of WMDs.

For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “I think I’ve got something that you would be interested in,” he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon’s payroll for years in “information operations,” working with Sethna at the company’s London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.

“We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station,” Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. “The Rendon Group came to us and said, ‘We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.’ What we didn’t know — what the Rendon Group didn’t tell us — was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work.”

The INC’s choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC’s anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri’s lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed “government experts” called his information “reliable and significant” — thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. “An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer,” Miller wrote, “said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.” If verified, she noted, “his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so.”

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller’s story, they could point to “proof” of Saddam’s “nuclear threat.” The story, reinforced by Moran’s on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq — the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.

By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas — knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on “covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations.” In a “secret amendment” to Pentagon policy, the report warns, “psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies.” The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that “combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare.”

It is a belief John Rendon encapsulated in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996. “I am not a national-security strategist or a military tactician,” he declared. “I am a politician, a person who uses communication to meet public-policy or corporate-policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.” To explain his philosophy, Rendon paraphrased a journalist he knew from his days as a staffer on the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter: “This is probably best described in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when he wrote, ‘When things turn weird, the weird turn pro.’”

John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information — overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents, many of them available only to those with the highest security clearance. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized “to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS” — an extraordinarily high level of clearance granted to only a handful of defense contractors. “SCI” stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information, data classified higher than Top Secret. “SI” is Special Intelligence, very secret communications intercepted by the National Security Agency. “TK” refers to Talent/Keyhole, code names for imagery from reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites. “G” stands for Gamma (communications intercepts from extremely sensitive sources) and “HCS” means Humint Control System (information from a very sensitive human source). Taken together, the acronyms indicate that Rendon enjoys access to the most secret information from all three forms of intelligence collection: eavesdropping, imaging satellites and human spies.

Rendon lives in a multimillion-dollar home in Washington’s exclusive Kalorama neighborhood. A few doors down from Rendon is the home of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara; just around the corner lives current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. At fifty-six, Rendon wears owlish glasses and combs his thick mane of silver-gray hair to the side, Kennedy-style. He heads to work each morning clad in a custom-made shirt with his monogram on the right cuff and a sharply tailored blue blazer that hangs loose around his bulky frame. By the time he pulls up to the Rendon Group’s headquarters near Dupont Circle, he has already racked up a handsome fee for the morning’s work: According to federal records, Rendon charges the CIA and the Pentagon $311.26 an hour for his services.

Rendon is one of the most influential of the private contractors in Washington who are increasingly taking over jobs long reserved for highly trained CIA employees. In recent years, spies-for-hire have begun to replace regional desk officers, who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the agency’s twenty-four-hour crisis center; analysts, who sift through reams of intelligence data; and even counterintelligence officers in the field, who oversee meetings between agents and their recruited spies. According to one senior administration official involved in intelligence-budget decisions, half of the CIA’s work is now performed by private contractors — people completely unaccountable to Congress. Another senior budget official acknowledges privately that lawmakers have no idea how many rent-a-spies the CIA currently employs — or how much unchecked power they enjoy.

Unlike many newcomers to the field, however, Rendon is a battle-tested veteran who has been secretly involved in nearly every American shooting conflict in the past two decades. In the first interview he has granted in decades, Rendon offered a peek through the keyhole of this seldom-seen world of corporate spooks — a rarefied but growing profession. Over a dinner of lamb chops and a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape at a private Washington club, Rendon was guarded about the details of his clandestine work — but he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm’s efforts as a for-profit spy. “We’ve worked in ninety-one countries,” he said. “Going all the way back to Panama, we’ve been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia.”

It is an unusual career twist for someone who entered politics as an opponent of the Vietnam War. The son of a stockbroker, Rendon grew up in New Jersey and stumped for McGovern before graduating from Northeastern University. “I was the youngest state coordinator,” he recalls. “I had Maine. They told me that I understood politics — which was a stretch, being so young.” Rendon, who went on to serve as executive director of the Democratic National Committee, quickly mastered the combination of political skulduggery and media manipulation that would become his hallmark. In 1980, as the manager of Jimmy Carter’s troops at the national convention in New York, he was sitting alone in the bleachers at Madison Square Garden when a reporter for ABC News approached him. “They actually did a little piece about the man behind the curtain,” Rendon says. “A Wizard of Oz thing.” It was a role he would end up playing for the rest of his life.

After Carter lost the election and the hard-right Reagan revolutionaries came to power in 1981, Rendon went into business with his younger brother Rick. “Everybody started consulting,” he recalls. “We started consulting.” They helped elect John Kerry to the Senate in 1984 and worked for the AFL-CIO to mobilize the union vote for Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign. Among the items Rendon produced was a training manual for union organizers to operate as political activists on behalf of Mondale. To keep the operation quiet, Rendon stamped CONFIDENTIAL on the cover of each of the blue plastic notebooks. It was a penchant for secrecy that would soon pervade all of his consulting deals.

To a large degree, the Rendon Group is a family affair. Rendon’s wife, Sandra Libby, handles the books as chief financial officer and “senior communications strategist.” Rendon’s brother Rick serves as senior partner and runs the company’s Boston office, producing public-service announcements for the Whale Conservation Institute and coordinating Empower Peace, a campaign that brings young people in the Middle East in contact with American kids through video-conferencing technology. But the bulk of the company’s business is decidedly less liberal and peace oriented. Rendon’s first experience in the intelligence world, in fact, came courtesy of the Republicans. “Panama,” he says, “brought us into the national-security environment.”

In 1989, shortly after his election, President George H.W. Bush signed a highly secret “finding” authorizing the CIA to funnel $10 million to opposition forces in Panama to overthrow Gen. Manuel Noriega. Reluctant to involve agency personnel directly, the CIA turned to the Rendon Group. Rendon’s job was to work behind the scenes, using a variety of campaign and psychological techniques to put the CIA’s choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace. Cash from the agency, laundered through various bank accounts and front organizations, would end up in Endara’s hands, who would then pay Rendon.

A heavyset, fifty-three-year-old corporate attorney with little political experience, Endara was running against Noriega’s handpicked choice, Carlos Duque. With Rendon’s help, Endara beat Duque decisively at the polls — but Noriega simply named himself “Maximum Leader” and declared the election null and void. The Bush administration then decided to remove Noriega by force — and Rendon’s job shifted from generating local support for a national election to building international support for regime change. Within days he had found the ultimate propaganda tool.

At the end of a rally in support of Endara, a band of Noriega’s Dignity Battalion — nicknamed “Dig Bats” and called “Doberman thugs” by Bush — attacked the crowd with wooden planks, metal pipes and guns. Gang members grabbed the bodyguard of Guillermo Ford, one of Endara’s vice-presidential candidates, pushed him against a car, shoved a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. With cameras snapping, the Dig Bats turned on Ford, batting his head with a spike-tipped metal rod and pounding him with heavy clubs, turning his white guayabera bright red with blood — his own, and that of his dead bodyguard.

Within hours, Rendon made sure the photos reached every newsroom in the world. The next week an image of the violence made the cover of Time magazine with the caption POLITICS PANAMA STYLE: NORIEGA BLUDGEONS HIS OPPOSITION, AND THE U.S. TURNS UP THE HEAT. To further boost international support for Endara, Rendon escorted Ford on a tour of Europe to meet British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Italian prime minister and even the pope. In December 1989, when Bush decided to invade Panama, Rendon and several of his employees were on one of the first military jets headed to Panama City.

“I arrived fifteen minutes before it started,” Rendon recalls. “My first impression is having the pilot in the plane turn around and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, but if you look off to the left you’ll see the attack aircraft circling before they land.’ Then I remember this major saying, ‘Excuse me, sir, but do you know what the air-defense capability of Panama is at the moment?’ I leaned into the cockpit and said, ‘Look, major, I hope by now that’s no longer an issue.’”

Moments later, Rendon’s plane landed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama. “I needed to get to Fort Clayton, which was where the president was,” he says. “I was choppered over — and we took some rounds on the way.” There, on a U.S. military base surrounded by 24,000 U.S. troops, heavy tanks and Combat Talon AC-130 gunships, Rendon’s client, Endara, was at last sworn in as president of Panama.

Rendon’s involvement in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein began seven months later, in July 1990. Rendon had taken time out for a vacation — a long train ride across Scotland — when he received an urgent call. “Soldiers are massing at the border outside of Kuwait,” he was told. At the airport, he watched the beginning of the Iraqi invasion on television. Winging toward Washington in the first-class cabin of a Pan Am 747, Rendon spent the entire flight scratching an outline of his ideas in longhand on a yellow legal pad.

“I wrote a memo about what the Kuwaitis were going to face, and I based it on our experience in Panama and the experience of the Free French operation in World War II,” Rendon says. “This was something that they needed to see and hear, and that was my whole intent. Go over, tell the Kuwaitis, ‘Here’s what you’ve got — here’s some observations, here’s some recommendations, live long and prosper.’”

Back in Washington, Rendon immediately called Hamilton Jordan, the former chief of staff to President Carter and an old friend from his Democratic Party days. “He put me in touch with the Saudis, the Saudis put me in touch with the Kuwaitis and then I went over and had a meeting with the Kuwaitis,” Rendon recalls. “And by the time I landed back in the United States, I got a phone call saying, ‘Can you come back? We want you to do what’s in the memo.’”

What the Kuwaitis wanted was help in selling a war of liberation to the American government — and the American public. Rendon proposed a massive “perception management” campaign designed to convince the world of the need to join forces to rescue Kuwait. Working through an organization called Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the Kuwaiti government in exile agreed to pay Rendon $100,000 a month for his assistance.

To coordinate the operation, Rendon opened an office in London. Once the Gulf War began, he remained extremely busy trying to prevent the American press from reporting on the dark side of the Kuwaiti government, an autocratic oil-tocracy ruled by a family of wealthy sheiks. When newspapers began reporting that many Kuwaitis were actually living it up in nightclubs in Cairo as Americans were dying in the Kuwaiti sand, the Rendon Group quickly counterattacked. Almost instantly, a wave of articles began appearing telling the story of grateful Kuwaitis mailing 20,000 personally signed valentines to American troops on the front lines, all arranged by Rendon.

Rendon also set up an elaborate television and radio network, and developed programming that was beamed into Kuwait from Taif, Saudi Arabia. “It was important that the Kuwaitis in occupied Kuwait understood that the rest of the world was doing something,” he says. Each night, Rendon’s troops in London produced a script and sent it via microwave to Taif, ensuring that the “news” beamed into Kuwait reflected a sufficiently pro-American line.

When it comes to staging a war, few things are left to chance. After Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, it was Rendon’s responsibility to make the victory march look like the flag-waving liberation of France after World War II. “Did you ever stop to wonder,” he later remarked, “how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American — and, for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries?” After a pause, he added, “Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs then.”

Although his work is highly secret, Rendon insists he deals only in “timely, truthful and accurate information.” His job, he says, is to counter false perceptions that the news media perpetuate because they consider it “more important to be first than to be right.” In modern warfare, he believes, the outcome depends largely on the public’s perception of the war — whether it is winnable, whether it is worth the cost. “We are being haunted and stalked by the difference between perception and reality,” he says. “Because the lines are divergent, this difference between perception and reality is one of the greatest strategic communications challenges of war.”

By the time the Gulf War came to a close in 1991, the Rendon Group was firmly established as Washington’s leading salesman for regime change. But Rendon’s new assignment went beyond simply manipulating the media. After the war ended, the Top Secret order signed by President Bush to oust Hussein included a rare “lethal finding” — meaning deadly action could be taken if necessary. Under contract to the CIA, Rendon was charged with helping to create a dissident force with the avowed purpose of violently overthrowing the entire Iraqi government. It is an undertaking that Rendon still considers too classified to discuss. “That’s where we’re wandering into places I’m not going to talk about,” he says. “If you take an oath, it should mean something.”

Thomas Twetten, the CIA’s former deputy of operations, credits Rendon with virtually creating the INC. “The INC was clueless,” he once observed. “They needed a lot of help and didn’t know where to start. That is why Rendon was brought in.” Acting as the group’s senior adviser and aided by truckloads of CIA dollars, Rendon pulled together a wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents and sponsored a conference in Vienna to organize them into an umbrella organization, which he dubbed the Iraqi National Congress. Then, as in Panama, his assignment was to help oust a brutal dictator and replace him with someone chosen by the CIA. “The reason they got the contract was because of what they had done in Panama — so they were known,” recalls Whitley Bruner, former chief of the CIA’s station in Baghdad. This time the target was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the agency’s successor of choice was Ahmad Chalabi, a crafty, avuncular Iraqi exile beloved by Washington’s neoconservatives.

Chalabi was a curious choice to lead a rebellion. In 1992, he was convicted in Jordan of making false statements and embezzling $230 million from his own bank, for which he was sentenced in absentia to twenty-two years of hard labor. But the only credential that mattered was his politics. “From day one,” Rendon says, “Chalabi was very clear that his biggest interest was to rid Iraq of Saddam.” Bruner, who dealt with Chalabi and Rendon in London in 1991, puts it even more bluntly. “Chalabi’s primary focus,” he said later, “was to drag us into a war.”

The key element of Rendon’s INC operation was a worldwide media blitz designed to turn Hussein, a once dangerous but now contained regional leader, into the greatest threat to world peace. Each month, $326,000 was passed from the CIA to the Rendon Group and the INC via various front organizations. Rendon profited handsomely, receiving a “management fee” of ten percent above what it spent on the project. According to some reports, the company made nearly $100 million on the contract during the five years following the Gulf War.

Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group’s failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow. “The Rendon Group is not in great odor in Langley these days,” notes Bruner. “Their contracts are much more with the Defense Department.”

Rendon’s influence rose considerably in Washington after the terrorist attacks of September 11th. In a single stroke, Osama bin Laden altered the world’s perception of reality — and in an age of nonstop information, whoever controls perception wins. What Bush needed to fight the War on Terror was a skilled information warrior — and Rendon was widely acknowledged as the best. “The events of 11 September 2001 changed everything, not least of which was the administration’s outlook concerning strategic influence,” notes one Army report. “Faced with direct evidence that many people around the world actively hated the United States, Bush began taking action to more effectively explain U.S. policy overseas. Initially the White House and DoD turned to the Rendon Group.”

Three weeks after the September 11th attacks, according to documents obtained from defense sources, the Pentagon awarded a large contract to the Rendon Group. Around the same time, Pentagon officials also set up a highly secret organization called the Office of Strategic Influence. Part of the OSI’s mission was to conduct covert disinformation and deception operations — planting false news items in the media and hiding their origins. “It’s sometimes valuable from a military standpoint to be able to engage in deception with respect to future anticipated plans,” Vice President Dick Cheney said in explaining the operation. Even the military’s top brass found the clandestine unit unnerving. “When I get their briefings, it’s scary,” a senior official said at the time.

In February 2002, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon had hired Rendon “to help the new office,” a charge Rendon denies. “We had nothing to do with that,” he says. “We were not in their reporting chain. We were reporting directly to the J-3” — the head of operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Following the leak, Rumsfeld was forced to shut down the organization. But much of the office’s operations were apparently shifted to another unit, deeper in the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, called the Information Operations Task Force, and Rendon was closely connected to this group. “Greg Newbold was the J-3 at the time, and we reported to him through the IOTF,” Rendon says.

According to the Pentagon documents, the Rendon Group played a major role in the IOTF. The company was charged with creating an “Information War Room” to monitor worldwide news reports at lightning speed and respond almost instantly with counterpropaganda. A key weapon, according to the documents, was Rendon’s “proprietary state-of-the-art news-wire collection system called ‘Livewire,’ which takes real-time news-wire reports, as they are filed, before they are on the Internet, before CNN can read them on the air and twenty-four hours before they appear in the morning newspapers, and sorts them by keyword. The system provides the most current real-time access to news and information available to private or public organizations.”

The top target that the pentagon assigned to Rendon was the Al-Jazeera television network. The contract called for the Rendon Group to undertake a massive “media mapping” campaign against the news organization, which the Pentagon considered “critical to U.S. objectives in the War on Terrorism.” According to the contract, Rendon would provide a “detailed content analysis of the station’s daily broadcast … [and] identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships.”

The secret targeting of foreign journalists may have had a sinister purpose. Among the missions proposed for the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence was one to “coerce” foreign journalists and plant false information overseas. Secret briefing papers also said the office should find ways to “punish” those who convey the “wrong message.” One senior officer told CNN that the plan would “formalize government deception, dishonesty and misinformation.”

According to the Pentagon documents, Rendon would use his media analysis to conduct a worldwide propaganda campaign, deploying teams of information warriors to allied nations to assist them “in developing and delivering specific messages to the local population, combatants, front-line states, the media and the international community.” Among the places Rendon’s info-war teams would be sent were Jakarta, Indonesia; Islamabad, Pakistan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo; Ankara, Turkey; and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The teams would produce and script television news segments “built around themes and story lines supportive of U.S. policy objectives.”

Rendon was also charged with engaging in “military deception” online — an activity once assigned to the OSI. The company was contracted to monitor Internet chat rooms in both English and Arabic — and “participate in these chat rooms when/if tasked.” Rendon would also create a Web site “with regular news summaries and feature articles. Targeted at the global public, in English and at least four (4) additional languages, this activity also will include an extensive e-mail push operation.” These techniques are commonly used to plant a variety of propaganda, including false information.

Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the administration’s message on the War in Iraq. Every morning at 9:30, Rendon took part in the White House OGC conference call, where officials would discuss the theme of the day and who would deliver it. The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group, whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the American public.

Never before in history had such an extensive secret network been established to shape the entire world’s perception of a war. “It was not just bad intelligence — it was an orchestrated effort,” says Sam Gardner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College. “It began before the war, was a major effort during the war and continues as post-conflict distortions.”

In the first weeks following the September 11th attacks, Rendon operated at a frantic pitch. “In the early stages it was fielding every ground ball that was coming, because nobody was sure if we were ever going to be attacked again,” he says. “It was ‘What do you know about this, what do you know about that, what else can you get, can you talk to somebody over here?’ We functioned twenty-four hours a day. We maintained situational awareness, in military terms, on all things related to terrorism. We were doing 195 newspapers and 43 countries in fourteen or fifteen languages. If you do this correctly, I can tell you what’s on the evening news tonight in a country before it happens. I can give you, as a policymaker, a six-hour break on how you can affect what’s going to be on the news. They’ll take that in a heartbeat.”

The Bush administration took everything Rendon had to offer. Between 2000 and 2004, Pentagon documents show, the Rendon Group received at least thirty-five contracts with the Defense Department, worth a total of $50 million to $100 million.

The mourners genuflected, made the sign of the cross and took their seats along the hard, shiny pews of Our Lady of Victories Catholic Church. It was April 2nd, 2003 — the start of fall in the small Australian town of Glenelg, an aging beach resort of white Victorian homes and soft, blond sand on Holdback Bay. Rendon had flown halfway around the world to join nearly 600 friends and family who were gathered to say farewell to a local son and amateur football champ, Paul Moran. Three days into the invasion of Iraq, the freelance journalist and Rendon employee had become the first member of the media to be killed in the war — a war he had covertly helped to start.

Moran had lived a double life, filing reports for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. and other news organizations, while at other times operating as a clandestine agent for Rendon, enjoying what his family calls his “James Bond lifestyle.” Moran had trained Iraqi opposition forces in photographic espionage, showing them how to covertly document Iraqi military activities, and had produced pro-war announcements for the Pentagon. “He worked for the Rendon Group in London,” says his mother, Kathleen. “They just send people all over the world — where there are wars.”

Moran was covering the Iraq invasion for ABC, filming at a Kurdish-controlled checkpoint in the city of Sulaymaniyah, when a car driven by a suicide bomber blew up next to him. “I saw the car in a kind of slow-motion disintegrate,” recalls Eric Campbell, a correspondent who was filming with Moran. “A soldier handed me a passport, which was charred. That’s when I knew Paul was dead.”

As the Mass ended and Moran’s Australian-flag-draped coffin passed by the mourners, Rendon lifted his right arm and saluted. He refused to discuss Moran’s role in the company, saying only that “Paul worked for us on a number of projects.” But on the long flight back to Washington, across more than a dozen time zones, Rendon outlined his feelings in an e-mail: “The day did begin with dark and ominous clouds much befitting the emotions we all felt — sadness and anger at the senseless violence that claimed our comrade Paul Moran ten short days ago and many decades of emotion ago.”

The Rendon Group also organized a memorial service in London, where Moran first went to work for the company in 1990. Held at Home House, a private club in Portman Square where Moran often stayed while visiting the city, the event was set among photographs of Moran in various locations around the Middle East. Zaab Sethna, who organized the al-Haideri media exclusive in Thailand for Moran and Judith Miller, gave a touching tribute to his former colleague. “I think that on both a personal and professional level Paul was deeply admired and loved by the people at the Rendon Group,” Sethna later said.

Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction that he and Sethna had broadcast around the world lived on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri’s fabricated charges. In a report ironically titled “Iraq: Denial and Deception,” the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations — even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller’s article for the information.

Miller also continued to promote al-Haideri’s tale of Saddam’s villainy. In January 2003, more than a year after her first article appeared, Miller again reported that Pentagon “intelligence officials” were telling her that “some of the most valuable information has come from Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri.” His interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency, Miller added, “ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases, officials said.”

Finally, in early 2004, more than two years after he made the dramatic allegations to Miller and Moran about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, al-Haideri was taken back to Iraq by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group. On a wide-ranging trip through Baghdad and other key locations, al-Haideri was given the opportunity to point out exactly where Saddam’s stockpiles were hidden, confirming the charges that had helped to start a war.

In the end, he could not identify a single site where illegal weapons were buried.

As the war in Iraq has spiraled out of control, the Bush administration’s covert propaganda campaign has intensified. According to a secret Pentagon report personally approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003 and obtained by Rolling Stone, the Strategic Command is authorized to engage in “military deception” — defined as “presenting false information, images or statements.” The seventy-four-page document, titled “Information Operations Roadmap,” also calls for psychological operations to be launched over radio, television, cell phones and “emerging technologies” such as the Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the road map is also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared even with our allies.

As the acknowledged general of such propaganda warfare, Rendon insists that the work he does is for the good of all Americans. “For us, it’s a question of patriotism,” he says. “It’s not a question of politics, and that’s an important distinction. I feel very strongly about that personally. If brave men and women are going to be put in harm’s way, they deserve support.” But in Iraq, American troops and Iraqi civilians were put in harm’s way, in large part, by the false information spread by Rendon and the men he trained in information warfare. And given the rapid growth of what is known as the “security-intelligence complex” in Washington, covert perception managers are likely to play an increasingly influential role in the wars of the future.

Indeed, Rendon is already thinking ahead. Last year, he attended a conference on information operations in London, where he offered an assessment on the Pentagon’s efforts to manipulate the media. According to those present, Rendon applauded the practice of embedding journalists with American forces. “He said the embedded idea was great,” says an Air Force colonel who attended the talk. “It worked as they had found in the test. It was the war version of reality television, and for the most part they did not lose control of the story.” But Rendon also cautioned that individual news organizations were often able to “take control of the story,” shaping the news before the Pentagon asserted its spin on the day’s events.

“We lost control of the context,” Rendon warned. “That has to be fixed for the next war.”

James Bamford is the best-selling author of “A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies” (2004) and “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency” (2001). This is his first article for Rolling Stone.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12819

By buff

November 22, 2005 07:55 PM | Link to this

Midori, with all your cutting and pasting, are you trying shut down this site?

By RW-(the original)

November 22, 2005 08:12 PM | Link to this

buff,

With all the nic-jacking and copy and pasting entire magazines onto it, I’m afraid this blog has jumped the shark.

I guess it’s fitting that it happened when ml decided to draw the aquarium.

Too bad, though. There had been some good honest debates here.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 08:13 PM | Link to this

Sorry about the long post. I just wanted to list all of the posts that were put up in my name today that I did not write. I’ve obviously had a profound effect on one of you pinkos and have turned you into a stalker. You are predictable though, you leave here early, like your mommy comes home or maybe your favorite pornography posts the day’s new pictures. I hope you enjoy the party you started!

None of these were by Andy:

By Andy

November 22, 2005 08:25 AM | Link to this

Hey, I hate pinkos. I think everyone who is tolerant of others is a liar. pinkos, pinkos, pinkos. I have no job and I live every minute of my life for this blog, but as long as I hate pinkos, I’m going to heaven. Oh my God, I’m such a douchebag.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 08:32 AM | Link to this

I hate Africans, which is why I criticize Clinton for trying to intervene in Somalia.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 09:05 AM | Link to this

I think that because the aquarium doesn’t offer family passes, they must be anti-family, and they must support gay marriage. Therefore, I am anti-aquarium. I think that the aquarium is for sissy war losers.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 09:52 AM | Link to this

by “fake� I mean any post that doesn’t support Bush or Republicans. If you like gays, then you’re not on my side, war losers.

By Andys

November 22, 2005 10:25 AM | Link to this

Andy, you dork. You’re giving a bad name to all of the thinking Andys of the world.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 10:33 AM | Link to this

Andys: I agree. If you don’t agree with the war then in my opinion you’re a non-thinking nazi war loser who should move to San Francisco which is where O’Reilly rightly thinks should be leveled by terrorists. You sissy pinkos.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:14 AM | Link to this

I love matt drudge. He’s no pinko. He is a true genius. My idol, really. If I didn’t hate gays so much I would turn gay and stalk him.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:22 AM | Link to this

Midori - war losers and pinkos who hate america don’t deserve to breathe the air of freedom. there’s a reason we have gitmo, and it’s for traitors who hate america. if you hate us for our freedom, then welcome to gitmo.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 11:44 AM | Link to this

Mike - If you have money and can afford the best lawyers, then you should get off with a light sentence. That’s what capitalism and free markets are all about. But these pinko war losers could never understand that. For those who can’t afford expensive lawyers, it’s off the jail for you! Now, that’s evolution for you, survival of the fittest.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:02 PM | Link to this

Why does this other Andy guy keep mocking me? I simply hate pinkos, gays, and war losers. I think that if you’re a liberal, you should be in gitmo.

sickof - I’m am injecting realism. You are the one living in a fantasy land. This war will crush the arabs, and create more security for us, and that’s how it should be. And Al-Jazeera should be next on our hit list.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:08 PM | Link to this

Midori - just move to France. You’re un-American, like the rest of the war losers.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:21 PM | Link to this

Andy - Stop mocking my posts. Stop spreading your hate. I only hate pinkos, war losers, gays and a few others.

getalife - enjoy your one way ticket to gitmo, you sissy war loser.

midori - glad you took my advice and stopped posting and hopefully moved to France.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:28 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons - also, every suicide bombing is actually a good thing because that’s one less Arab non-Christian in the world, don’t you think?

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:33 PM | Link to this

Mike - I get all my news from the Washington Times and Fox News who are NEVER wrong and NEVER biased. How dare you ask me to cite a source, you terrorist loving pinko war loser.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:37 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons - I may not have a source to cite, but at least I support the war, you pinko hippy war loser liberal. Move to France along with Midori.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:37 PM | Link to this

sickoftheneocons - I may not have a source to cite, but at least I support the war, you pinko hippy war loser liberal. Move to France along with Midori.

By Andy

November 22, 2005 12:40 PM | Link to this

Mike: did you read that one yet, genius? read it and weep, pinko. the national review sure is a balanced news source, isn’t it? My watermark system is impregnable.

Watermark: Ted Kennedy killed Mary Jo Kpochne, left her to drown in a creek, real great leader you war losers have.

This would be an authentic Andy post!

By Andy

November 22, 2005 04:06 PM | Link to this

Al Davis: I knew you couldn’t respond to my statements. You’re a war loser pinko and you belong in gitmo with the rest of the liberals who disagree with the president. If you disagree with the president you don’t deserve freedom!

By Andy

November 22, 2005 05:34 PM | Link to this

I apologize for being such a jackass folks. I also apologize for hijacking Dave From Woodstock’s name and being a jackass to using it.

By Deb

November 23, 2005 03:21 PM | Link to this

Mike might be referencing the fact that the Aquarium’s computer and phone systems crashed from the increased traffic yesterday.