Got to love all that Change he's working for...

First some spot on, must see political toons about Obama's Health Care Reform plan:






And aside from Health Care, it's good to know that we're doing the same kind of crap that Bush and previous Administrations did... which of course helped stoke the fires overseas and make 9/11 happen.

Last week when there was a Christmas plane incident, practically identical to the Richard Reid shoe bomber situation, it was learned that the guy had ties to Yemen.

So what does Holy Joe Lieberman do? Call for pre-emptive strikes! Of course, murder is the ONLY solution to deal with potential murderers!

However, one has to wonder what the hell Joe is talking about since we already have been preemptively striking Yemen for OVER A YEAR.

In fact just a week before the failed "attack" (I say that loosely because one moron trying and miserably failing to do something of this scope really isn't an all out "attack"), we were killing people in Yemen. Illegally I might add. We have not declared war on Yemen.





Look, if al-Qaeda is actually plotting attacks in Yemen or anywhere else, the route to go is not military action. It's cooperating with other governments and rounding up suspects personally. Not using planes or drones and blanketing an area with bombs. What tends to happen when we do this is we kill civilians (in this case 63 of them, 28 being children). What happens when you kill those civilians? You killed mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters and you turn off those people to your cause... and worse you probably just recruited family and friends of the victims to fight with your enemy.

And then situations like last week occur.

You reap what you sow. If you always go up to someone and slap them in the face and tell them it's for their own good, you'd better expect it when they finally get tired of it and punch you in the stomach out of retaliation.

Two wrongs don't make a right. This guy needs to be tried and convicted and get a life sentence... just as Reid did. However, we're still committing wrongs in these situations too and we need to realize that we are accountable for our actions. And what we have done to people in Iraq and Afghanistan may seem hard to control today but when the kids there who suffered through the violence we brought to them grow up... we'll have a much bigger base of angry people (or "terrorists" as we'll label them) looking for revenge... revenge that we earned against us.

Rp

Political Terror

"Ooooh! See that? It's a car bomb! Muslims really are terrorists and al Qaeda MUST be behind this! They were Doctors in England? Blame Michael Moore's Sicko! Let's put this out there and scare people back to our party!" - Some ridiculous Republican Strategist Somewhere.

The sad part is it seems they actually want terror attacks to happen. The Chair of the Arkansas Republican Party, Dennis Milligan and oh yeah, whack job Rick Santorum have actually SAID they want terror attacks. They think it would be for the good of the country to bring the people back to the Bush policy.

That photo above came last week from Glasgow. Like most every plot that the Bush Administration has hyped since 9/11 to try to artificially trump up their case for an endless war on terror, this one was not a big deal either. A few agitated muslim doctors with no real connection to anyone got together with a very uneducated attempt to light their car on fire and drive it into a building. Except it didn't really blow up the way they wanted and in fact they had to push the car the last part of the distance. Clearly these were not the 9/11 masterminds at work.

As with every moment when the political heat gets really going, Bush and the Right Wing try to up the fear level. This time they are clearly under fire for breaking the law and committing a felony by ordering two White House aides to ignore subpoenas and not testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee Hearings held yesterday morning.

As usual, Bush tried to distract and deflect. When Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor either outright refused to show or gave selective testimony while claiming executive privilege on harder questions, Bush held one of his rare press conferences on Iraq. Every major network cut into their daily programming for it and the presser was pointless. It was more confirmation of exactly the same talking points he and his other White House lackeys have been spouting for quite some time. More of the same. Stay the Course. Aka, no real plan.

That generally worked but the night before another Bush Administration official decided to plant a generally larger seed with the media to throw them off the trail. Department of Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff came out with this ridiculous tripe about having a "gut feeling" about a possible terror attack in the Summer. He purposely attempted to put distance between his gut and the facts but it had the media either so bent over in laughter or so pressing for White House comment that not once in that presser did a single reporter talk about those pesky subpoenas.

Of course this is not the first time they have pulled this. It's become a very irritating pattern with this Administration that when the going gets tough, the terrorists somehow get tougher.


Countdown with Keith Olbermann did a great piece on how the Bush Administration does this late last year entitled, "The Nexus of Politics and Terror". It puts together a timeline of elevated threat levels and rhetoric versus the scandals of the moment. Crooks and Liars split it into two parts and below are links to the video of this.

WMV Part One Part Two
QT Part One Part Two


The problem with all of this is, who do we or who can we even believe anymore? Obviously not the Bush Administration. While they play the terror card to keep whatever is left of the flock of sheep in line, we are in Iraq making new terror enemies every day just by our mere presence in the region.

The man responsible for this entire war supposedly, Osama Bin Laden, is not a top priority for this Administration anyway.

Remember this? During a debate with John Kerry in 2004 Bush says that he never said he wasn't concerned about Bin Laden, even calling it an "exaggeration". Except for the video proof of the comment.



As it turns out, he wasn't lying about not being concerned. He spoke with his good friend and apologist, Fred Barnes of that Right Wing Rag, The Weekly Standard. In their conversation, Barnes says, Bush told him that capturing Bin Laden is ‘not a top priority use of american resources’. Barnes even went back to the Bush Network, er, FOX NEWS and told them as much.

They've had multiple chances to get this guy. In February 2001, the Adminstration rejected the Taliban's offer to give him up to them in exchange for a drop of sanctions. See for yourself in this brief clip from a presser where they refuse to talk about it.



Then in December 2001, they had him cornered at Tora Bora and let him get away.

Then after all these years where we know he's been in Pakistan, we find out that Bush basically outsourced the war to the Pakistanis. Giving them $1 billion a year in funding and demanding no results or accountability for that money.

He shut down the CIA unit responsible for hunting Bin Laden down. And then, after not caring about whether either Afghanistan or Iraq were sovereign countries before invading, he refused to invade Pakistan claiming... wait for it... that they were a sovereign country.

In fact when Republicans try to drum up terror for support (they have no ideas for this country anymore, their only card is to scare you into voting for their lunacy) they use the ridiculous TV show 24 as some sort of barometer of what can really happen. In their Presidential debates they actually debated to what extent torture is okay because it worked for Jack Bauer and saved a major U.S. city!

But in their arguments based off that show (produced by FOX no less), they always talk of terrorists getting nukes and setting off a dirty bomb against us.

Strange then how we take no action against Pakistan who let the one guy buying and selling these nukes on the black market to terrorists, A.Q. Khan to be free. Not to mention we allowed the Pakistan Government to order us not to question the guy. The guy is clearly able to operate again.

So from all of this what have we learned? The Bush Adminstration does not care about the war on terror. Don't let their aides, lackeys or politically bought and paid for Congressmen tell you otherwise. Terror is a political tactic, a form of control for them. Strangely enough that is exactly what terror is to the actual terrorists.

We have no interest in getting Bin Laden, we have no interest to quell terrorism at all.

So why are we in Iraq? Oil. Not how you would think. We don't want the oil for ourselves. We want it to stay in the ground.

That way big oil controls the supply and can price it where they would profit the most from it. They've established nothing but record profits since Bush got into office, why change a good thing? After all Bush is an oilman and Cheney had energy task force meetings with these people.. so secretive that he refused subpoenas for the documents in those meetings.

Since we've been in Iraq it's been easy to tell who the war profiteers have been. Here in Milwaukee gas jumped from $3.19 a gallon to $3.49 a gallon overnight. 30 cents, just like that. And on Saturday it went from $2.95 to $3.19. 54 cents in less than a week. They're making out like bandits.

Sadly it leads us to the ultimate conclusion. The war on terror was never about Bin Laden. It was about profit. We invaded the places where we could change oil policy by building big pipelines for one major oil company or keeping the oil in the ground for all of them.

Over 7,000+ Americans have died by official count in 9/11 and Iraq combined. These figures are low because they don't count the Afghanistan numbers, the civilians killed or those who died from sickness or non-mortal wounds later after the initial attack.

And Big Oil is smiling all the way to the bank thanks to Bush.

Oh and here's the kicker, it was announced today that intelligence shows that al-Qaeda is back to pre-9/11 strength.

Heckuva job Bushie.

-Rp

The Global War on Lying Idiots

It has to be rough to live with yourself knowing you lie about everything. Or at least if you have a conscience that is. I am not so sure Dick Cheney has one so the whole feeling guilty scenario may never play out.

It turns out that Dick is still spouting the same lines in trying to make a pathetic connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Even though the Pentagon released a report on Thursday that contradicts this directly after interrogations of Saddam and other Iraqi officials. Of course this is an Administration that would never let facts get in the way of a great big lie.

The whole point of this thing is to keep the connection going to keep Iraq a central point of attack in the whole unending Global War on Terror.

After all, if it's framed that way nobody will defund the War on Terror right?

Well what if we tossed out that term altogether?

After all there is a war in Iraq and a war in Afghanistan. Using the term, "Global War on Terror" is a piece of propaganda to link 9/11 to all of our military actions and continue funding whatever adventures this Administration wants to partake in. Not to mention being a direct flow of cash from taxpayers to Dick's company, Halliburton.

It seems Democrats have finally wised up to this game and are taking this trick on by requesting that the term "Global War on Terror" no longer be used in future legislation.

Cheney was apoplectic to say the least when spoke with Rush Limbaugh about it yesterday.

Personally I think they fear Democrats having the guts to stand up to even these small breaches of public trust. They know 9/11 was a tragic day that touched the lives of most Americans so they invoke it at every turn and use it as a tool to take taxpayers money and blow it on their wars of choice and their politically contributing contractors of preference.

Every single little step Democrats take to change the tactics used by this Administration is a step in the right direction for a country that has had it's reputation tarnished more than Britney Spears in the past 6 years thanks to the people in power.

-Rp