Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Top Ten Reasons Jeb Bush Should Run for President in 2008.

10). Jeb used to clean up Dubya’s messes when they were kids, so he’ll know what to do about Iraq, the deficit, Walter Reed, FEMA, the Justice Department, New Orleans . . .

9). Jeb, like his dad, is kinder, gentler, taller, smarter, and more competent than W. An even partially successful Jeb Bush Administration is sure to add sibling rivalry to George Junior’s Oedipal Complex.

8). No need for Republicans to print up new bumper stickers, so long as they can entice Dick Cheney to stay in his secure location for another term (or two).

7). Lawyers, media, and voters in Palm Beach County have been looking forward to a rematch of Bush vs. Gore ever since 2000. Jeb will need more than the Supreme Court to best Gore after eight years of Dubya’s debacle.

6). A Bush has been on the national ticket in all but one election since 1980. It’s the next best thing to having a hereditary monarchy.

5). “A carpetbagger like Hillary vs. a Reb like Jeb. Sounds like the start of a civil war to me. Bring it on.” -- General Karl Rove

4). “Bush vs. Clinton seems like déjà vu all over again. Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to relive it” – Yogi Berra (Hall of Fame Historian).

3). It’s seems only natural that Florida – the land of Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Katherine Harris, Anna, Nicole Smith, and Elian’s relatives – would give America its next president.

2). The prospect of another decade with a Bush as president may convince liberals to flock to Canada, thus solving our immigration problem. – Bill O’Reilly (Fairly Unbalanced Blowhard)

1). If you think Jeb Bush should run for president, then you sure have clicked on the wrong site.

Sphere: Related Content

Friday, March 23, 2007

Top Ten Reasons President Bush Should NOT be Impeached

10). Ousting Bush & Cheney would be very bad for late-night comedians and political humorists.

9). Bush has another two years and a stockpile of nuclear weapons to win the war in Iraq. Lets give him a chance.

8). Bush’s first two oil companies went belly up, and now his stint at the White House is a flop. I’m afraid if we fire him now it will damage his self-esteem.

7). Removing Bush will only embolden our enemies, especially the French and the Germans.

6). Keeping the president in office is probably the best chance we have of seeing Bush trying to land the Space Shuttle on an aircraft carrier after the administration catches Osama bin Laden.

5). Impeaching Bush now would only help boost his approval rating above 30%. Let’s leave him in there and see how low his popularity can go.

4). Hey, if we impeach Bush does that mean Cheney will become president? Personally, I’d like to keep the misfiring Veep as far away from our nuclear arsenal as possible.

3). So the president started an illegal war based on false premises that has needlessly killed and maimed tens of thousands while destroying America’s image across the world. It’s not as if he had sex with an intern in the Oval Office.

2). Media sauturation of impeachment trial is sure to interfere with my favorite TV programs.

1). Impeaching Bush would be a tacit admission that Al Gore was right all along (Oops, this is no joke).

Sphere: Related Content

Friday, March 16, 2007

Top Ten Reasons Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Should Get to Keep His Job.

10). Gonzales keeps all of the administration’s “get out of jail” cards in his wallet.

9). “Those mean and nasty democrats just got Libby, and now they’re picking on another short guy. Why don’t they pick on someone their own size?” – Osama bin Laden (World’s tallest evildoer).

8). As long as Gonzales is Attorney General it would be a blatant conflict of interest for him to prosecute himself for lying under oath before Congress, condoning illegal wiretaps, or crafting torture guidelines that violate the Geneva Conventions.

7). “A truly independent Attorney General that didn’t owe his entire career to George W. Bush, now that’s a scary thought.” –Anonymous high official

6). If Bush fired Gonzales he’d break his pledge to “look out for the little guy.”

5). “First Rummy, then Libby, and now Stubby. This is beginning to look like that Agatha Christie novel, The Ten Little Indians, where someone gets bumped off one by one until there’s nobody left.” -- Anonymous high official hunkered down in a secure location

4). According to torture guidelines drawn up by top democrats, it may be more tormenting to let Gonzales twist in the wind with the rest of the administration for another 21 months.

3). “I’m not in favor of dismissing our Attorney General, but if George does have to let Alberto go I hope we can find a place for him with the Rose Garden landscaping crew.” First Lady Laura Bush

2). Very few experts in the administration are left who could draft new torture memos in case Osama is caught.

1). Hard to find someone of Gonzales’ stature to fill the job.

Sphere: Related Content

Monday, March 12, 2007

Top Ten Reasons Ann Coulter is America’s Sweetheart

With Bush & Cheney's popularity waning Ann Coulter has become the new poster child for compassionate conservatism. Here are the top-ten reasons she's become America's Sweetheart.

10). "There’s something about a female Archie Bunker that makes my head spin." -- Bill O'Reilly (Conservative crumudgeon and host of the No-Spin Zone).

9). "A woman who can talk tax cuts, firearms, and NASCAR sure puts me in the mood." -- Sean Hannity

8). Doesn’t every guy in America secretly desire a towering, tart-tongued, condescending termagant who earns 50 times what he does?

7). Coulter’s cameo as Captain Jack Sparrow’s psychopathic aunt in the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean: Revenge of the Shrew will make her as popular among today’s school children as Miss Gulch (the Wicked Witch of the East) from The Wizard of Oz was during the depression.

6). With Coulter’s killer body, personal charm, and innate diplomatic skills I’m surprised the Bush Administration hasn’t appointed her ambassador to North Korea. I’m sure Kim Jung Ill would give up his nukes to go one-on-one with Ann.

5). Ann’s innate warmth, self-effacing modesty, and abundant empathy are qualities any prospective mother-in law would appreciate.

4). "It's about time somebody had the gumption to stand up to all those victims of Hurricane Katrina that had the temerity to make Bush look bad." -- Katherine Harris

3). Scientists discover that Ann’s frigid personality single-handedly offsets the effects of global warming.

2). With Brittany Spears in rehab, Coulter remains the only bona fide female conservative intellectual we have in the U.S.

1). “Hey, give Ann a break. She’s no longer the same gal who pulled the wings off butterflies, blew up frogs with firecrackers, and tried to set the homeless on fire.” -- Childhood friend.

Sphere: Related Content

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Cheney vs. History

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake,” wrote James Joyce. The Bush Administration’s arch-pessimist, Dick Cheney, would seem to share Joyce’s dour assessment of the human condition. So it is more that a little ironic that the vice-president, a card-carrying Hobbesian if ever there was one, reportedly still believes History with a capitol “H” will vindicate the administration’s decision to invade Iraq. In other words, the gloom-monger-in-chief is counting on a happy ending in Iraq (a land with a 1,500 year history of unremitting Hobbesian strife).

I can understand that a guy who’s endured four heart attacks, a blood clot, the felony conviction of his top aide, and twenty percent approval rating has got to think positive sometime. Did I leave out the incident where the VP shot his friend in the face, the Taliban assassination attempt, and the strain of having to explain to your conservative base that your gay daughter is going to have a baby with another woman? Personally, I’d rather face Taliban assassins than explain to Focus on the Family’s James Dobson why he should read Heather Has Two Mommies.

The Veep maintains that it may be five decades before he’s vindicated. Sure, and my decision invest in lottery tickets to secure my retirement may end up being vindicated too. In the meantime, however, it’s difficult to see how the civil conflagration in Iraq, the decimation of the American military, and the fact that we’ve managed to turn Iraq into a jihadist training ground (dominated by axis-of-evil member Iran) actually furthers American interests.

Actually, the lessons of history – which us liberals supposedly didn’t learn from 9/11 – are completely lost on this administration. First of all, as anthropologist Jared Diamond notes in his book Collapse, pivotal military defeats signaling imperial decline invariably mask ecological catastrophes that are the true cause of collapse. For instance, Mayan leaders resorted to military raids against neighbors in order to maintain their lavish lifestyles and distract the masses from the ecological devastation and economic deprivations that inevitably attended slash and burn agricultural practices at home.

The U.S. faces a similar predicament as reliance on fossil fuels contributes to ecological and political backlashes (global warming and terrorism respectively). The bid to secure American hegemony over Iraq’s oil reserves was intended to address a potentially crippling vulnerability: anti-American forces in the Middle East in control of the region’s oil wealth. American efforts to alleviate this concern have increased this possibility rather than lessened it.

In the meantime, as Hurricane Katrina demonstrated, America’s aging infrastructure and under funded response systems are less resilient than anyone imagined. As historian Arnold Toynbee pointed out, societies go through life cycles: youthful vigor, middle-aged resilience, and aged senescence. Vigorous and resilient societies meet challenges and weather storms effectively, while senescent societies do not direct their energies and marshal resources appropriately.

When historians look back on America’s invasion of Iraq they are likely to ponder the billions (if not trillions) gambled away in a vain attempt to rebuild Iraq while America’s dilapidated power grids, highway system, and public health system crumbled. Whether global warming is manmade or not, or whether we can do anything about it or not, we have entered a period of global climate change that is unleashing more intense and more unpredictable weather patterns. Further, the forces of globalization are all but certain to make natural disasters, pandemics and acts of terrorism more likely. In other words, America’s resilience is likely to be tested on many fronts.

The administration’s panacea for terrorism was predicated on the notion that transforming Iraq would take the air out of the jihadist movement. Instead, just the opposite has occurred. Tellingly, most terror plots (including 9/11) have been hatched in Europe, illustrating how much the Bush/Cheney bet misses the mark. Terrorism is not the only challenge America faces; natural disasters and pandemics are all but inevitable. The prudent course to address all three – terrorism, natural disasters, and pandemics – would have been to invest in America’s infrastructure, health system, and first responders in order to bolster the nation’s resilience. A lesson Toynbee gleaned from his careful study of history is that those empires that try and change the world rather than themselves usually fail.

Sphere: Related Content

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Bush vs. Justice (in the trial of Scooter Libby)

The Bush Administration is to politics what Enron was to business – an enterprise predicated on bending the rules until the system breaks. The Bush Administration’s stock, of course, has taken another hit with the felony conviction of Lewis “Scooter” Libby (an aide so close to the vice-president he was known as “Cheney’s Cheney”). But the real crime here wasn’t Libby’s lies, but the offenses his lies were meant to cover up.

“There is a cloud over the vice-president” Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald rightly surmised before the verdict was rendered. But Cheney was not in the dock because leaking classified information, smearing critics, and misleading the public about the war are not criminal offenses if the vice-president or president does it. Lying before Congress may be impeachable, but deceiving the public is not. Fitzgerald, given his narrow mandate, never discovered that a crime was committed when covert agent Valerie Plame’s name was leaked to the media. The administration was clearly either irresponsible or vindictive in the way it casually disclosed classified information, but the law has little to say about negligence or the politics of personal destruction.

It is clear, however, that the administration was not being truthful with the public on this matter or on the war. President Bush promised the American people that anyone from his administration involved in leaking the classified information in question would be fired. If Bush were a man of his word, then Karl Rove would have cleaned out his desk after testimony proved the president’s chief political advisor was one source of the leak.

Critics of Libby’s guilty verdict claim that the administration had every right to discredit their critics, especially Joe Wilson. Prosecuting Libby, they assert, amounts to criminalizing politics. This defense hardly holds water. If no crime had been committed, then Libby’s only motive to lie – and it is now obvious that he did lie – was to protect Bush and Cheney from political damage before the 2004 election. Of course, it’s possible that Libby’s deceptions were meant to cover up activities Bush and Cheney would want to keep hidden from a special prosecutor, actions that have still not come to light.

The prosecution charged that Libby’s lies amounted to “throwing sand in a referees eyes.” This has been the Bush Administration modus operandi since Bush vs. Gore. It’s ironic that lying under oath in the absence of an underling crime can get you in jail, but deceiving the public about matter as grave as going to war isn’t even prosecutable. The jurors intuited this, asking, “Where’s Rove? Where are these other guys?” One of the other guys in question is preparing a pardon for Libby. If the script plays out Libby will stretch out his appeal as long as possible and Bush will pardon him the day he leaves office. It’s all as legal as Bush vs. Gore, but the entire farce will be devoid of justice.

The Bush Administration knows how to bend the rules, and they know how to take the refs out of the game. But they’re oblivious as to why the rules matter in the first place. When Enron bent the rules to the breaking point it cost investors their retirement savings. The Bush administration has done much of the same thing, but the costs will be far higher. Unlike Ken Lay, however, Bush has a “get out of jail free” card. In pardoning Libby he really be pardoning Dick Cheney and himself.

Sphere: Related Content

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

The Libby Verdict

“Justice is nothing more than what is in the interests of the stronger” said Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic. Certainly, the powerful never have to face Justice, though on occasion they may have to toss and underling overboard to keep the ship of state afloat. This probably explains why Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former aide to Vice-president Cheney, became the legal equivalent of shark bait (the chump cast aside to satiate the jaws of the “justice” system). In other words, Scooter ends up getting shredded so that the pirate captain and his first mate can sail away.

Make no mistake the jury in the Libby case believed the defendant was a sacrificial lamb. Libby’s attorneys argued as much, implying that their client was the fall guy in a larger plot involving Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and President Bush. Mind you, if the president or vice-president leaks classified information, even to punish critics, it’s not a crime (since they have the authority to declassify material on a whim). It is a political problem, however, when the president insists he wants to get to the bottom of a leak investigation, but is simultaneously declassifying material that will be used in a campaign to smear his critics.

What did the president know, and when did he know it? We the public will probably never know. But here are some unflattering facts: First, the maligned Joe Wilson was right, the administration was hyping the case for war (and ignoring evidence that contradicted its preconceptions). Second, the administration was playing hardball to squelch, discredit, and intimidate its critics. And third, the administration was hyper anxious about any information that might derail its case for war with the public.

All of this, of course, belies the administration’s continued insistence that it relied on bad intelligence in good faith. From the beginning war in Iraq was spun from a web of lies, but its architects are still spinning deceits in the hopes they can ensnare others in a maze of deceptions rather than face the consequences. Libby, now a convicted felon, and facing jail time, may be more inclined to shed light upon the inner workings of the Bush Administration. For such circumstances president Bush has the ultimate “get out of jail free” card, the presidential pardon. In pardoning Libby he’d be pardoning himself and Dick Cheney. As Thrasymachus discerned, “Justice is nothing more than what is in the interests of the stronger.”

Sphere: Related Content

Monday, March 05, 2007

Top Ten Reasons I Still Support President Bush

10). “Pretty tough to remove the free Bush/Cheney bumper stickers I used to wallpaper every room in my house.” -- Ann Coulter

9). “Global Warming is really improving the potency of the medical marijuana crop I’m growing out back.” – Grandmother from California

8). “Bush and Cheney couldn’t track a camel caravan traveling downwind.” – Osama bin Laden

7). "I think he’s doing a heck of a job.” – Beelzebub

6). “His steadfast leadership really inspires troop morale.” -- Ali Baba (Recruitment Officer Al-Qaeda 2.0).

5). “I support him because he’s the president, even if he’s wrong.” – noted political observer Brittany Spears

4). “Message: I’m Proud. Beat Ozone Man. Swift boated Kerry. Vanquished Saddam. Read my lips: No more Axis-of-Evil. Spreading democracy, freedom, a thousand points of lights, and all that stuff throughout the Arab World. Now that’s what I call the vision thing. Kind of puts a lump in the throat don’t it? Makes you want to well up. But don’t cry for me Argentina.” -- Former President George H.W. Bush.

3). “I always knew I’d be vindicated someday.” – Andrew Johnson (recently slipped to the second spot in the worst presidents in U.S. history list).

2). “Woof. Woof. I just love the Bushes.” -- Barney (the president’s dog).

1). Sorry, but this joke slot remains empty at the present time because out of 350 million surveyed we could only find nine who still support President Bush.

Sphere: Related Content

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Top Ten Reasons to Draft Dick Cheney to Head the Republican Ticket in 2008.

10). It might be nice to have another “Tricky Dick” to kick around again.

9). Dick Cheney is the only leader with enough clout and experience to champion legislation the country desperately needs: A law allowing open season on trial lawyers.

8). Dick’s the guy we need to tell the rest of the world to f@@k off.

7). “The country is on the right track, things are going fantastic in Iraq, and it only took 13 months for FEMA to deliver my new trailer after Katrina blew my old trailer away.” – Ricky Bobby jr. (former NASCAR runner up).

6). “Dick's 4 U.S” will make great bumper sticker. -- Phylis Schaffley (Daughters of the American Revolution).

5). President Cheney will make sure we find Saddam’s missing WMD, even if we have to invade and occupy Iran, Syria, and France to find them.

4). “My shares in Halliburton are sure to quadruple.” – Jeffrey Skilling (former financial wizard at Enron).

3). Eight years of seasoning under the guidance and tutoring of George W. Bush have finally made Cheney ready for the big time.

2). The country needs a straight shooter like Dick to blast a hole in the Bush deficit.

1). Dick Cheney has already dodged the draft enough times already; let’s make sure he answers the call this time.

Sphere: Related Content