Well, okay, it’s a given that George Bush doesn’t give a damn what Keith Olbermann says about him. Psychopaths are like that.
But Olbermann’s Special Comment on last night’s Countdown broadcast was Olbermann at his finest, spewing reasoned outrage about Bush’s sickening… oh for chrissake, just go spend the ten minutes watching it. He nails it.
Be advised there’s a ten second commercial lead-in.
The Republican Party suffered its third straight election defeat, all in districts they should have won, and are struggling to understand their sudden unpopularity.
At least one them has a glimmering of reality, from an AP story by David Espo in today’s Globe:
“We’re not going to be able to scare people into voting Republicans [sic] by being against Barack Obama. You have to have a relevant agenda and a compelling reason to vote Republican,” said Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss.
Yes, Chip, sliming your opponent with the usual Republican bag of lies, cheap shots, racial innuendo, and outright racist and religious bigotry doesn’t work so well anymore, does it?
But there’s also this from Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee:
Cole, like other Republicans mulling the results, said the voters had sent Republicans a message that said, “We want to know what you believe in, what you want to fight for.”
Well, Tommy boy, maybe, just maybe, after seeing Republicans in power since 1994, and after seeing the corruption, the lies, the deceit, the outright hatred poured on the working class, the poor, the disadvantaged; the contempt for the environment; the deliberate destruction and politicization of the legal system; the contemptuous waste of American lives in wars fought badly, fought stupidly, fought without reason and justified by a tissue of lies and corruption; and the favoritism shown to the wealthy class and their corporations, who have bought the United States Government and the Republican Party, maybe, just maybe the people have figured out what the Republicans believe in and what they want to fight for.
You can be damn sure they don’t want to fight for the American people or the rule of law in a Constitutional democracy.
John Hagee, an unabashed bigot who parades his ignorance and hatred to rake in the big bucks from the usual assortment of dumb American Christians, called the Catholic Church a ‘great whore’ while magnanimously offering his endorsement to Senator John McCain, who crawled on his knees to Hagee.
Hagee has said other nasty things, which The Lion is sure any intelligent reader can find on his own, and which Hagee supporters already know about and agree with.
However, in today’s Globe, in the Campaign Notebook, there’s a small piece about Mr. Hagee’s apology for his intemperate remarks. Well, okay, they’re not intemperate - they’re an ingrained part of who he is and who he represents. Be that as it may, the story notes:
In a letter to William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights, Hagee wrote: “Out of a desire to advance a greater unity among Catholics and evangelicals in promoting the common good, I want to express my deep regret for any comments that Catholics have found hurtful.”
Donohue, one of Hagee’s sharpest critics, said yesterday that he accepted the apology and planned to meet with Hagee tomorrow in New York. “I got what I wanted,” Donohue said. “He’s seen the light, as they like to say. So for me it’s over.”
Read it carefully.
Note how the ever clever televangelist cleverly blames the Catholics for the problem. It’s the Catholics’ fault for finding the remarks hurtful. It’s not Hagee’s fault for making the bigoted, ugly remarks, for believing them, for spreading them every chance he gets.
And if Donohue thinks the tubby televangelist has seen the light, then Donohue’s not so bright.
And John McCain, the beneficiary of Hagee’s intellectual smallesse, noted only that the apology was “very helpful”, while refusing to reject the sick bastard’s endorsement. Not surprising, since McCain has crawled on his knees to every hate-filled fundogelical ignorant bigot he could find as he panders his way to the November election.
Scott Helman writes in today’s Globe about Senator Clinton’s big win in West Virginia, a state in which The Lion notes Senator Obama didn’t do much more than play a game of pool and talk to some people at a diner.
But nowhere will the voter demographics be as conducive to a big Clinton victory as West Virginia.
According to preliminary results of exit polls, 4 in 10 West Virginia voters were over age 60, and nearly all voters were white; about 7 in 10 lacked a college degree - the highest proportion yet in any Democratic primary; and the electorate had among the lowest family incomes.
The Lion would like to avoid being snide and snotty about the Senator’s big win of 67% to 28% with the rest going to the Senator Edwards deadenders. But it’s just so hard…
Senator Clinton got her big win in what must be the whitest, dumbest, poorest state in the Union against a guy who didn’t even bother to campaign there.
And in case there’s any doubt that West Virginia Democrats must be the dumbest in the country, there’s this quote from a companion story by Sasha Issenberg.
This is a state where nearly everyone still seems to carry a party registration handed down since the New Deal - “Oh, God, Democrat! You’d get smacked around here if . . .” one woman exclaimed when asked for her party. And some of those cheering Clinton to keep on going said they did so because an Obama victory would force them to vote Republican.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but West Virginians agreed to let the coal companies, which are Republican corporate entities dedicated to screwing over the environment every chance they get to make a penny, turn their state into a refuse pit. And John McCain, while he panders to environmentalists in Oregon, doesn’t really have a clue about today’s environment and the crisis the world is doing it’s best to avoid seeing. Put him in office and West Virginia can look forward to a long, successful future as a black pit. But The Lion is sure the West Virginians will be honored to send their kids to die in the McCain Extension of George Bush’s wars of lies and deceit for the next hundred years. Of course there won’t be any land left in which to bury the bodies when they come home.
Apparently we’re not talking about the best and the brightest when we’re talking about Senator Clinton’s core supporters.
Today in the Globe Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times writes about Army Lieutenant Matt Vigeant working the streets of Sadr City in Baghdad.
A few quotes from the Lieutenant while he’s working an ineffective roadblock seeking to capture a so-called suspected militant at the edge of Sadr City:
“Some people are grateful, but the closer you get to Sadr City, the more obvious they make their feelings”…
“You try to show them you’re friendly,” he said. “You do all these things to show them we’re not here as crusaders, but it gets really frustrating. JAM just has that popular support,” he said, using the Arabic-based acronym for Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which holds sway in Sadr City.
“Sometimes I wonder if the people really appreciate what we’re trying to do,” Vigeant said as traffic zoomed by. “I risk my life every day on the street. My guys risk their lives every day.”
The Lieutenant doesn’t feel appreciated, but of course it’s not his fault, not his country’s fault, not the fault of his leaders. No, it’s that evil mullah, that guy in the black hat, that Mucky Toddy Sadder feller.
Apparently the Lieutenant missed the memo. It goes something like this:
We didn’t ask you to come here. You came here illegally, immorally. You invaded our country. You occupy our country. You destroy our country. And we had done nothing to you.
You speak of crusaders, of not being crusaders. But your own officers and leaders speak of a war between Christianity and Islam. But never mind that. What you are, you are our Nazis.
You invade and destroy. You killed my father. You killed my mother. You killed my brother. You killed my sister. You killed my son. You killed my daughter. You murdered my infant.
You arrest my neighbors and my cousins for no reason, you throw them in prison and you torture them.
You destroy our cities, you level our neighborhoods, you build walls between people who lived at peace for hundreds of years. You drop bombs and missiles in civilian neighborhoods and then say everybody who you killed was a militant or an insurrectionist or an al-Qaeda. Was my four-year-old daughter an al-Qaeda, Lieutenant?
You don’t speak our language. You don’t know our culture. You trample on our customs. You call us names.
You build bases and an embassy that speak only to you expecting to be here for a hundred years or more, but say you are creating democracy. A democracy that you will rule, Lieutenant?
No, Lieutenant Vigeant, no.
We will appreciate you lying dead in the road. We will appreciate your fellow soldiers when their blood flows into our sands.
We will appreciate you going home, all of you, now.
You do not bring democracy or freedom. You have brought bloodshed, hatred, division, murder, rape, and destruction without parallel in our land.
We are not stupid. We are not the children you and your leaders think we are. We are an old people. When history began it began here. That matters not to you. We know you came for our oil to feed the desires of an arrogant society. There was no other reason for you to come here. You had to lie to yourselves, you had to debase your own principles of government to come here.
Well, you are here. Now you can bleed to death or you can leave. We do not want you.
Whatever government we decide to have will be the one that we choose, that we bleed for, that we shed our own blood for if we find that necessary. But it will not be the government you force on us at the point of a gun.
We are an old people. In time you will leave, with nothing but your dead to show for your arrogance and stupidity and cruelty. We will survive. We will go on.
And you will have broken yourselves on the rocks of our ancient deserts.
In today’s Globe Peter Canellos has a column the editors have headlined ‘Clinton hones tough-gal, beer-and-shot persona’. It’s about our gal Hil hanging out in bars and tossing down shots to show that she’s just one of the ordinary people.
Sure she is. And The Lion is a pussycat who will lay ten to one that when she gets home after a day of hanging out with the locals she feels dirty and has to take a bath in her two hundred fifty thousand dollar bathroom.
The theory behind the Senator’s newfound willingness to slum around in bars comes from the Republican camp. You remember, the theory that says people would vote for someone they’d like to have a beer with. That one brought us George W. Bush, a drug-addled, mentally deficient drunk who kills people and destroys economies and craps on democracy at home and abroad.
Apparently the people the Senator hangs with in the bars think they’re getting the real Senator Clinton. They’re not. They’re getting a hustling hussy who’s a proven liar and has demonstrated conclusively that she will do anything for a vote. The Lion, if he were sufficiently cynical, might even suspect she’s giving blow jobs in the back room of those bars, but that might not have anything to do with votes. She might just be getting even with old Bubba Bill.
If the primary voters fall for the Senator’s act, they’ll have shown that they neither understand nor care that the world has changed, and they’ll have proven that they prefer the old style politics of lies, deceptions, and smears. Blow jobs feel great, but are they worth selling out your country?
An AP story by Ben Feller in today’s Globe pushes Laura Bush as a humanitarian.
“The first lady,” writes Feller, “has been a vocal spokeswoman for the administration about Burma…” According to the story she is making a plea to the government of Burma, a repressive and brutal military tyranny, to allow international aid groups to enter the country with relief for the victims of the hurricane that killed thousands and devastated vast areas.
Let’s see, does anyone recall this woman speaking out about Burma before yesterday? More than once?
And where in hell were she and her addlebrained husband when New Orleans and southern Mississippi drowned a couple of years ago? Oh, yeah, right, hubby was setting up photo-ops while his FEMA was screwing Americans.
But now it’s ‘Oh, poor Burma’. Why isn’t this Republican witch doing anything about the homeless in New Orleans, and around the country? About the hungry people in America? About the corruption and incompetence of the wannabe tyrants in American government - starting with her murderous husband?
Crocodile tears for Burma. Piss for America. That’s the Bush way. That’s the Republican way.
Overall contributions from gas and oil companies:
| McCain | $515, 486 |
| Clinton | $353,723 |
| Obama | $266,097 |
In the current election cycle:
From Exxon, Obama gets $23,550, second on the list. At fourth place is Clinton with $15,700.
From Chevron, Clinton stands third with $9,350, and Obama seventh with $7,263. McCain gets $5,500.
From BP, Obama is second with $10,196.
The politicians can rail against the oil companies that are screwing us and the country all they want. And the pols can blither all they want that these amounts are such a tiny percentage of contributions that they’ll have no influence. But they might want to remember that worn old adage - money talks, bullshit walks. Except that what we’ve got here is the money talking and the bullshitters taking.
Today’s paper Globe (but not the online version) carries a story by Robert Burns of the Associated Press reporting on the promotion of General David Petraeus, the beneficiary of Moqtada al Sadr’s decision to take his militia out of the fight temporarily, to chief of U.S. Central Command. That’s the command in charge of slaughtering and torturing as many Iraqis and Afghanis as they can manage. Petraeus’ position in Iraq will be taken over by his second, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno. The position of the region’s Ultimate Bad Bad Bad Evil Dirty Satanic Sonofabitch will be filled by Iran.
Consider that this is an election year in the United States. Further consider that the Republicans believe two things. One, only by making US citizens afraid of a boogey man can the Republicans win elections. Two, Iraq is no longer a boogey man, so Iran must be elevated at all costs to the 2008 Election Year Boogeyman. That job now falls squarely on the able shoulders of Petraeus, Odierno, and George Bush’s sock puppet, reputed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
At a Pentagon news conference, Gates said he did not foresee that the new lineup at Central Command and in Iraq would mean any changes in the way the U.S. is approaching the issue of Iranian influence in Iraq. Petraeus and Odierno have both accused Iran of aiding rebels opposing U.S. troops.
“It’s my belief that General Odierno and General Petraeus and Admiral Fallon were all in exactly the same position when it came to their views of Iranian interference inside Iraq,” Gates said. “And it is a hard position. Because what the Iranians are doing is killing American service men and women inside Iraq.”
And once again, the tactical decision made by these eminently political military people is to offer accusations and hope the electorate will regard them as proof.
They have offered no evidence that has withstood legitimate scrutiny that Iran is actively involved in operations against American troops.
And let us assume that what they say is true. That merits a big ‘So what?’
After all, the United States, under cover of a tissue of lies and deceit, illegally and immorally invaded and occupied Iraq, and has spent five years destroying that country, which posed no threat to the United States, and had committed no act of aggression against the United States. And the United States has done nothing but threaten Iran and act against Iran, which has committed no act of aggression against the United States, and generally let it be known that the United States would have no compunction about attacking Iran and killing millions of its citizens on the whim of the American President, currently a psychopath named George Bush.
So if Iran is indeed providing support to Iraqis fighting against the United States, Iran would be completely justified. The more American soldiers they can help put into the ground, the sooner the United States might leave the area and start negotiating rationally instead of acting like a rabid dog, or like a brain-addled drunkard and drug addict.
Petraeus will face broader aspects of the Iran issue if he is confirmed as Fallon’s replacement. A number of U.S. officials, including Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have asserted that Iran also is supplying arms or otherwise supporting the Taliban rebels in Afghanistan.
Again, a big ‘So what?’ Assertion is not evidence of action. And the same reasoning applies regarding Afghanistan and Iran as Iraq and Iran.
What’s missing from the vision of these people in Washington is that when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the United States supplied the rebels there in order to drive out the Soviets. Now the United States is the new Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and whines about Iran providing support to the rebels trying to drive out the United States. The American military is crashing on the same ancient cultural reefs as the Soviets did, in a land the American political establishment, indeed even the military establishment, cannot, will not, understand.
Earlier this week, Gates said that while war with Iran would be “disastrous on a number of levels,” the military option cannot be abandoned so long as the Iranians remain a potential nuclear threat.
Well, Robbie the Robot Gates, let’s just attack them anyway, never mind how many levels of disaster, catastrophe, and stupidity we can achieve. After all, they might, maybe, someday in the next ten years build a bomb. A bomb. Not an almighty arsenal of several hundred like Israel holds over the heads of everyone in the Middle East, but a bomb. Because they might, being threatened almost daily by the United States and Israel, build an arsenal to defend themselves with, we are morally bound to slaughter millions of them and reduce their country to rubble. Apparently that’s easier than treating them like fellow human beings and talking with them and trading with them and building a positive relationship over the years.
Especially not in an election year when the Republicans who lied the world into a useless war need once again to create a climate of fear and loathing in which their candidate, the misbegotten, sleazy, corrupt and ignorant Senator John McCain can pull off a win in November and continue the insanity of George Bush and his cronies and puppetmasters.
Congratulations on the promotions, guys. Lotsa luck on your extended tour of the asylum.
The conventional wisdom and basic math suggest that Senator Clinton can’t win the Democratic nomination for President.
That may be the shortsighted view. There are ways in which she can win.
If she wins the remaining primaries with 85 percent of the vote in each one, she should at least pull even with Obama in committed delegates. And of course she could then claim she had momentum. (The Lion would indelicately point out that a rock rolling downhill into an abyss has momentum. But The Lion is too polite to mention that.)
She should be able to win 85 percent. All she has to do is convert all the voters into white Catholic working class people. This is America. According to the Pennsylvania results they wouldn’t vote for a black man if their lives depended on it. (Which, The Lion indelicately suggests, their lives may very well.)
Assuming that even she cannot carry out either of those strategies, a third path may be open. There are about 300 so-called superdelegates (known among the cognoscenti as the Democratic Oligarchs) who just haven’t made up their minds yet. Senator Clinton could simply bribe them. Offer them posts as ambassadors to Iraq and other Middle East and Southwest Asia countries. Or no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars to run roughshod over the people in that part of the world. Or she could just threaten to denounce them secretly to the Bush government, resulting in them disappearing into the waterboard rooms at Guantanamo Bay. Senator Clinton, those people can be had, by golly! Carrots and sticks, carrots and sticks, money or torture.
Now if that doesn’t work, she can, on the sly of course, hire Karl Rove and turn him loose on Senator Obama. Sly racist ads. Sly anti-Muslim ads. Sly fear ads. Examining her campaign, The Lion must conclude she has already hired Mr. Rove and has put him to work some time ago.
Still, there remains one more path she can take. Borrow some money, hire a discreet ex-CIA fellow, and assassinate Senator Obama before the convention.
The major flaw in that plan is that it would piss off Michelle Obama. Did you ever listen to that woman give a speech? You don’t want her angry at you. She would crush Hillary Clinton like a bug.
The Lion offers these suggestions to Senator Clinton knowing full well that if anyone can pull them off, she can. The nomination is within reach, Senator. Just keep stretching your hand out, keep reaching over the abyss that separates you from the nomination, reach a little more, come on, come on, a little more. You can do it, lady…
Oops…
From the New York Times today, a story on the hypocrisy and lies of John “Bushbaby” McCain, detailing how he did political favors for a big contributor in Arizona, one Donald R. Diamond, whose respect for the Constitutional system of government reputed to be the basis of United States governance apparently knows bounds.
“I think that is what Congress people are supposed to do for constituents,” [Mr. Diamond] said. “When you have a big, significant businessman like myself, why wouldn’t you want to help move things along? What else would they do? They waste so much time with legislation.”
The Lion suspects that if one were to tot up John “Bomb Bomb Bomb” McCain’s hypocrisies, such as Mr. Diamond, and Mr. Hagee, and Mr. Falwell, and the victims of his arrogant rages against secretarial level help, one would find a much uglier picture than the press and the media present of their Republican darling.
Well, almost.
Sometime today Grumpy Lion should, with the help of a British battle royal over Winston Churchill’s courage or lack thereof, reach the magic 20,000 hit mark.
Congratulations are in order. Therefore, congratulations, Lion!
Celebratory presents of cat food and money may be sent.
Thank you very much.
