This crusade…this war on terrorism. — George W. Bush

Right to far-right: Serf Rove, Sir Wolfowitz, Sir Rummy, King George, Sir Darth. (click it)

Early on in the American occupation of Iraq, gruesome video of Americans being beheaded by their captors surfaced, fueling worldwide outrage against the perpetrators. A thousand years earlier, Christian crusaders, laying siege to fortified Muslim cities, used as missiles for their catapults the severed heads of Muslims.

Karma has a nasty way of rearing its ugly head that way, and in the case of crusader karma, twice this week alone.

Firstly, we have the remarkable release by GQ Magazine of the SECDEF Rumsfeld war briefing cover sheets featuring Biblical quotes that could have been used in the Middle Ages to send the Knights off to slaughter. Apparently, our messianic and deluded former Crusader in Chief, who once told Palestinian leaders that God had instructed him to smite down Saddam, was getting a bit despondent over the fiasco that his divinely ordained “liberation” had become and needed a little bucking up.

During his re-election campaign,  George the Anointed told a group of Amish in Lancaster County, PA (reported in the 7/16/04 edition  of the Lancaster New Era, original link expired):

I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.

A few months earlier, SECSTATE and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell did his part to keep alive his wartime president’s signature campaign issue,  the Iraq war (aka the front line of the war on terra), pleading:

We need you as part of this campaign, this crusade.

Secondly, there’s the additional torture photos that President Obama had promised to release, and then reneged on. During Amy Goodman’s D-Mock-racy Now show this morning, Philippe Sands, former British Queen’s counsel and author of Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, said the following:

And it includes photographs, I’m told, of people’s heads being partly shaved, so that a cross is placed on the head of a Muslim man.

And the karmic beat goes on. US forces on the ground in Afghanistan are still being encouraged to convert the heathen:

The special forces guys – they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hounds of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, Bush’s former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, General William Boykin , whom Wapo military analyst Bill Arkin described as “an intolerant extremist who has spoken openly about how his belief in Christianity has trumped Muslims and other non-Christians in battle,” while he was showing slides of Usama bin Laden, Kim Jong-il, and Saddam Hussein,  boldly proclaimed;

Our spiritual enemy [Satan] will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.

And then we have the ongoing problem of the US Air Force Academy indoctrinating its officers to become Christian warriors.

Plotting the karmic vectors from 8 years of the Bush-Cheney regime would prove a challenge to even Issac Asimov’s legendary hero, Harry Seldon. As Robin Williams might put it:

Future history— what a concept.

Genuine religion takes nothing away from human existence, but it does add new meanings to all of life; it generates new types of enthusiasm, zeal, and courage.  It may even engender the spirit of the crusader, which is more than dangerous if not controlled by spiritual insight and loyal devotion to the commonplace social obligations of human loyalties.
–The Urantia Book

Demonstrating an “enhanced interrogation technique”

In 1999, Bush’s family biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, reports that W. told him he was intent on invading Iraq, saying that his status as a war time president would give him enough political capital to push through his conservative domestic agenda.

(That would include the privatization of social security whose blood rich corpse would be served up to his Wall Street vampire buddies to feast upon. Not to mention the Oedipal angle of wanting to do his daddy one better by “finishing” the job of deposing Saddam Hussein.)

Fast forward to 9/11/01. The dust of the collapsed Trade Towers hadn’t even settled when W. ordered his terrorism Czar Richard Clarke to find a link to Saddam in the attacks. Clarke was dubious, but ordered a review anyway, producing a dry hole (something which Bush the failed oil tycoon was all too familiar with).

Meanwhile, US troops were sent to Afghanistan to hunt down Usama bin Laden. SECDEF Rumsfeld complained that there were no good targets left to bomb there and rapidly warmed to the idea of invading Iraq.  Special ops troops that were originally set to finish off Al Qaeda in Tora Bora were instead reassigned to prepare for Iraq, allowing them to escape and regroup in the hinterlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan (where they have grown even stronger and now threaten to bring down the nuclear armed government of Pakistan).

Despite efforts to provoke Saddam into providing an overt rationale for an invasion, he lay low, forcing the Bushies to explore other means around which a rationale for war could be devised— fixing the facts around the policy, as the Downing Street Memo so artfully put it.

Discussions were had with the Brits to paint a UN logo on a drone and send it flying lazily over Iraq air space where it could be shot down. Ahmed Chalabi was paid $300,000 a month to produce ex-pat informants like “Curveball” to ‘prove’ that Saddam was actively engaged in producing WMD.  Ex-military “consultants” (with monetary ties to defense contractors ready to make a killing supplying product and services to the war effort) flooded the network and cable news shows warning of dire consequences if we didn’t depose Saddam.

Neocons like Richard Perle and Bill Kristol, administration officials like Condi Rice and Darth Cheney, egged on by war mongering talking heads too numerous to mention, took to the airways wielding images of mushroom clouds and cartoons of mobile bio-weapons labs to create an aura of dread in the American people.  Homeland Security helped keep fear alive with their color coded threat charts, displayed so helpfully on the evening news.  Cable news networks ratings soared as they created “war rooms” tricked out with state of the art graphics and martial theme music, eagerly awaiting the latest nosecone videos of missiles slamming into buildings in an orchestrated spectacle of “shock and awe.”

Which brings us to the latest dot in the narrative, the so-called “torture memos.”  The lead story in today’s NY Times reveals that the methods, further detailed in a now declassified Senate Armed Services Committee report INQUIRY INTO THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES IN U.S. CUSTODY used what are euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” were originally developed by the ChiComs and North Koreans in the 1950s, and used as a training regime called SERE (Search, Evade, Rescue, Escape) by our own military to help captured troops resist interrogation.

Apparently, some genius in the Bush Administration figured that adopting those same techniques for offensive purposes would mitigate objections that they constituted torture. “Hey, we use them on our own guys, and they don’t suffer any long term effects.” Three major problems with that theory: [Read more →]

You can live with each other, you just can’t be married.

“And who knows which is which, and who is who”
—Pink Floyd

The long evolutionary heritage of religion has always been inextricably linked with the forms and functions of the evolution of government.  Long ago, the early tribal shamans were the go-to guys for all the practices of evolutionary religion, and in many groups they outranked the war chiefs;  and it was this dynamic that marked the beginning of the church domination of the state.

The early priesthoods were usually allied with the military power of the tribe, so no surprise that all primitive religions sanctioned war.  And the tribe made war at the bidding of their gods—  their chiefs or shamans.

We’re looking at the uniquely American roots of our “Judeo-Christian” heritage and how they’ve managed to grow into our government. A few people were writing stuff down way back when, and their scribbles can instruct us even today.  The early Hebrews of Palestine believed in a “God of battles.” The story of their raid on the Midianites (See Numbers 31 in your favorite interpretation of the scripture) is a typical example of the horrible cruelty of all ancient tribal wars, with the slaughter of all the males, male children, and all women who weren’t virgins;  all executed in the “name of the Lord God of Israel.”

Violence is the law of nature, and war is the natural heritage of evolving humanity.  Peace, then, should serve as the social yardstick measuring the advancement of civilization.  And one of the great peace moves of the ages has been the ongoing attempt to separate church and state.

The first strange wedding and bedding in our survey of church and state is that of the Hebrews under Roman suzerainty. For several generations, a small and decidedly unpowerful group of Jews was able maintain a considerable degree of self-government and relative independence from Syria to the north and Egypt to the south, all the while under Roman rule.

[Read more →]

Tuesday, George W. Bush held his final cabinet meeting where he said:

I tell people I leave town with a great sense of accomplishment and my head held high.

The problem with that is, well, obvious.

George W. Bush in a rare moment of introspection

As the worst president in US history winds down his delusional legacy protection tour, he continues to downplay the few mistakes he’ll admit to, referring to them as “disappointments.” For example, his “disappointment” that WMDs were never found in Iraq.

(Imagine expressing “disappointment” after torching your neighbor’s home and finding out that it really didn’t contain armed gang members but rather a defenseless family.)

The one “accomplishment” that he and his enablers keep touting above all others is the fact that the US hasn’t been attacked on its own soil since 9/11. One has to wonder when one of these interviewers will ask him about the August 6, 2001 presidential briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside US.”

Let me address a point I haven’t heard discussed yet. Seems I recall that al-Qaeda statement that their post-9/11 strategy was twofold: to hurt the US where it would count the most, its economy; and, after Bush’s invasion of Iraq, to punish its allies who supported it with troops of their own.

Regarding the latter, terrorist attacks were indeed launched against two such countries on their home soil, Britain and Spain. Spanish voters dumped their president and the large Spanish military contingent was withdrawn shortly thereafter. Britain is all but gone, with the US forced to allocate additional troops to maintain their strategic base outside Basra.

Think about it: Why attack the American homeland again, when the world, including Iran, rallied around the US after the first attack? That alone would have been sufficient reason to direct its fire elsewhere. And when the Oedipally challenged Bush Jr. decide to one-up his dad and invade Iraq (a goal of W’s before he even won the presidency) using 9/11 as an excuse, ”the Qaidas“  reaped a propaganda and recruitment bonanza that continues to this day. Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006 and its current slaughter of the inhabitants of Gaza, executed with the full approval of the Bush Administration, is sure to amp their numbers up even further.

Regarding attacking the US economy, recall Bush’s exhortation to Americans to “go shopping” right after 9/11, to show them thar terrarists that they couldn’t win. Given the current US economic crisis (and the world’s by extension), no help needed there.

In other words— Mission Accomplished.

I really can’t yet determine which Bush action was worse: his decision to invade Iraq; or his destruction of the world’s economy. (Katrina, as bad as it was, has to rank a distant third though otherwise notable as the tipping point where Bush’s popularity began to plummet to the worst levels in modern polling history [CNN], never to recover.)

Said Bush at his final presser (where two of the seven rows in the White House briefing room were empty until filled at the last moment by wide-eyed White House interns.

“When I get out of here, I am getting off the stage,” he said. “I have had my time in the Klieg lights.”

Well Georgie, don’t let door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.

Then again….

Bush bids farewell

White House Employee Trampled To Death As Bush Aides Flee

Jan. 19, 2009

WASHINGTON D.C. [C.U.News] —  Long time White House doorman, Oscar Willit, who served four different presidents, died in a stampede today as aides to President Bush and Vice President Cheney fled the building in advance of the incoming Obama Administration.

“It was surreal”, said Rob Cook, a White House porter and longtime friend of Willit’s. “Worse than a Black Friday sale at Wal Mart.”

Rumor has it that incoming Attorney General, Eric Holder, is bringing with him a short list of administration officials facing potential indictments. According to one D.C. bailiff, grand jury rooms have been booked well into 2010.

When asked why the last minute panic, an anonymous Bush official replied:

“We were led to believe that the president would be issuing a blanket pardon for all his staffers. But it seems that with the collapse of the economy, his failure to secure a long term US military presence in Iraq, the worsening situation in Afghanistan, Laura Bush’s impending tell-all book, he’s reverting to type. Remember this is the guy who as a kid blew up frogs with firecrackers, branded pledges at Yale with hot wire coat hangers, and ordered the torture of hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.”

Looking around nervously, he added “We should have seen it coming. Bush has been off the wagon since Katrina, at least. Everybody’s on edge around here, even Barney. That incident of him biting that reporter? Major clue. Bush is going down and he seems intent on taking as many of us with him as possible. Recall that Pharaoh had his eunuchs entombed with him for his journey into the afterlife.”

When asked for the White House reaction to Willit’s death and reports of Bush’s deteriorating mental state, Press Secretary Dana Perino replied: “Sorry. I’ve got a plane to catch.” Asked where she was going, she crinkled her cute little nose and said: “Anywhere but here.”

Well, it looks like the Cheney Administration’s attempt to handcuff the next US president to it’s depraved Iraq agenda has, like a John McCain piloted fighter jet, gone down in flames.

McClatchy reports that:

Iraq’s prime minister won’t sign U.S. troop deal

By Roy Gutman | McClatchy Newspapers

October 24, 2008

BAGHDAD — Fearing political division in the parliament and in his country, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki won’t sign the just-completed agreement on the status of U.S. forces in Iraq [SOFA], a leading lawmaker said Friday.

The new accord’s demise would be a major setback for the Bush administration, which has been seeking to establish a legal basis for the extended presence of the 151,000 U.S. troops in this country, and for Iraq, which won notable concessions in the draft accord reached a week ago.

“No, he will not” submit the agreement to the parliament, Sheikh Jalal al Din al Sagheer, the deputy head of the Shiite Muslim Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, told McClatchy. “For this matter, we need national consensus.”      [...]

One can’t help but note that the existing 151k troop level cited is some 20k more than the number stationed there prior to the much vaunted “surge”, in reality an escalation, giving lie to the claim by McCain and his favorite senatorial cheerleaders, Joe LIEberman and Lindsay Graham, that McCain “…knows how to win wars, my friends”; and that the surge was a success.

Sorry ’bout that, butt boys…

[*sofa design by Lila Lang]

“She’s got my vote and my heart,” says Joe Dirt

LOS ANGELES — So what if it’s predictable and strains credulity— Joe Dirt loves Sarah Palin.  “She may be an airhead and what not, and she was pretty much mauled by that Bulldog Biden guy, but she’s still the pitbull who like stole my heart when she winked directly at me last night,” said Dirt, who has been struggling to get back into the media’s eye since the movie Joe Dirt fell off the charts in New Zealand.

At a hastily thrown-together press conference this morning, Dirt encouraged Palin to continue courting the “six-pack vote,” because reinforcing obtuse cultural stereotypes reaches out to “those of us who can’t balance our checkbooks and are too stupid not to over-borrow and manage household debt, register to vote, or tell shit from shinola.”

Dirt continued, “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so, because people out there in our nation don’t have enough munnies, and I believe that our country, like such as South Africa, and the Eye-raq everywhere like, such as, and, we will be able to build up our future for our children, and Sarah Palin gets that.”

Asked if he was registered to vote in the upcoming election, Dirt was circumspect: “Yeah I thought about it, and I just might. I’m not gonna make promises I may not keep.”

When asked if he and Palin had ever texted each other, Dirt was clearly offended and said that was nobody’s business, and not the kind of question you ever ask about a lady like Sarah Palin.

Lipstick.

To the apocalypse lobby, Sarah Palin is everything that they had hoped George W. Bush would be; and more.

Making what a lot of fundies consider a downpayment on the rapture, Bush told Palestinian leaders at the White House in June ‘03 that he was instructed by God to remove Saddam from power:

“God told me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq,’ and I did.”

Sarah is down with that. AP reports that last June, she told ministry students at her former church to pray for the troops being sent to Iraq:

“Our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God.”

She also asked that same group to pray for a $30 billion gas pipeline to be built in the state, saying it was “God’s will.”

Personally, if I were God, I’d sue for libel.

Finally.

We now know why we’ve lost over 4150 troops, suffered 10ks of thousands of grievously wounded, murdered a million Iraqis, created refugees out of millions more, destabilized the Middle East, squandered our remaining moral standing in the world, and saddled our children’s children’s children with trillions of dollars of crushing debt.

The neoconmen must be apoplectic.

Iraq Signs Oil Deal With China Worth Up to $3 Billion
By ERICA GOODE and RIYADH MOHAMMED, NY Times
August 29, 2008

BAGHDAD — In the first major oil deal Iraq has made with a foreign country since 2003, the Iraqi government and the China National Petroleum Corporation have signed a contract in Beijing that could be worth up to $3 billion, Iraqi officials said Thursday.
[snip]

WASHINGTON (C.U.News)  Proving that he was a maverick all along, President McCain, on the anniversary of his first week in office, has ordered the re-invasion of Iraq.

“The agreement reached by the previous US president and the current Iraqi prime minister to pull US troops out of Iraq on a timetable is not in the best interests of the country,” stated McCain’s press secretary William Kristol. “Therefore, the president has issued an executive order repealing Bush’s SOFA agreement with the Iraqi government. Additionally, he has ordered the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare an immediate regime change plan aimed at deposing Prime Minister Maliki and his Iranian quisling enablers.”

Asked about this radical departure from his predecessor’s actions, Kristol smirked: “I guess we can finally lay to rest all that pre-election blather about a third Bush term. Having suffered through decades of the post-Vietnam syndrome that so weakened America’s resolve to execute its manifest destiny, President McCain has today launched a pre-emptive attack on post-Iraq syndrome. By insuring we stay there forever, he is guaranteeing victory with honor for the American people.”

Attempts to reach former president George W. Bush for comment has been unsuccessful. Reports that he was arrested by Interpol agents and flown to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes remain unconfirmed.

A number of significant economic statistics were announced yesterday: inflation hit a 71/2 year high; consumer earning power declined 3 1/2% from last year; and home foreclosures rose 55%.

Fueling these economic fires has been the soaring cost of the Iraq war and occupation.

Using credit cards, American taxpayers bought huge amounts of stock in Corporate America’s colonization of Iraq. After 5/12 years, the stock has depreciated dramatically, the cards’ principal, interest, and penalties have been reset to infinity, and margin calls are expected shortly.

Analysts following the company say the stock’s collapse is due to a number of factors: deterioration of good will in the American brand; soaring energy and consumer prices; the devaluation of the American dollar and the attendant difficulties of securing future financing; and, looming down the road, the forced sell-off of private and national American assets.

It’s like watching an economic train wreck in slow motion. But there is a silver lining. Given the huge toll that Iraq and Afghanistan has had on the Pentagon’s military readiness and the attendant deterioration of the American dollar, there’s simply insufficient political, military or financial or resources available to support the necons’ future imperial expansion plans. (Said with fingers crossed.)

The karma principle of causality continuity is…very close to the truth of the repercussional synthesis of all time-space actions in the Deity presence of the Supreme. -The Urantia Book

At a press conference today meant to display John McSame’s superior foreign policy credentials, the Rethuglicans‘ reality challenged presidential candidate either had a senior moment, or he believes that the corporatist media is so in the tank for him that he is free to utter even the most egregious hypocritical pronouncements and escape scrutiny.

Case in point: the roiling Russia-Georgia war. Scolds the morally correct McSame:

“[I]n the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

Excuse me? Has our corporatist media sainted war hero forgotten Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of both he so throatily encouraged?

Consider also his previous pronouncement on Georgia that an editor from Wikipedia pointed out contains copious amounts of plagiarized material from the Wiki site.

Guess we know now how McSame would answer that iconic 3:00 AM phone call— frantically try to get online to access Wikipedia.

McSame improvises as an EMF burst fries D.C.’s com circuits

The response from the Obama campaign is obvious— adopt the Rovian tactic of attacking an opponent’ perceived strength. The operative word here is, of course, perceived. As this and other numerous McSame foreign policy gaffes proves, McSame’s alleged expertise is a fiction to begin with.

Should be an Obama PR slam dunk.