Lame Duck Laffs Last

Algeria Daily has a piece on OPEC telling Mr. Bush, who in his last year is what is considered a "lame duck" president, to go fly a spy satellite somewhere, thereby refusing to boost oil production. http://www.algeriadaily.com/ (It was actually a reprint of an article from The Australian: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23327796-12335,00.html) They seem to be under the same illusion that we were when we were told - back when oil was $25/bbl.- that invading Iraq would bring Oil Heaven to all of us...field hands. They seem to be unaware that the war has driven the price of oil to over $100/bbl. and rising. Lame duck gets laughed at. Maybe Hugo Chavez will give us a deal again? If only Mr. Ben Bernanke were the head of OPEC! Then we would see some kowtowing! ....................................... Equal Time Allotment

"Could a lame duck do this? Bin Laden, you been served!!"

BUSH The Movie: 1

Casting has begun on the film which will immortalize the Bush presidency. The first to be cast was Paul "Bet a Billion" Wolfowitz. Guess who will play him.

"It's going to cost how much !?"

Leonard Rossiter as Paul Wolfowitz.

Mr. Bush's Climate Summit

In the BBC this morning: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7019346.stm US President George W Bush infuriated his critics by professing world leadership on climate change at his meeting of the top 16 world economies - while offering no new substantive policy and implicitly rejecting binding emissions controls. ...some visiting delegates were outraged by what they said was a stream of spin running through the speech. One (who understandably asked not to be named) said: "This is a total charade. "The president has said he will lead on climate change but he won't agree binding emissions, while other nations will. "He says he will lead on technology but then he asks other countries to contribute funds, without saying how much he'll contribute himself. "It's humiliating for him - a total humiliation." Some delegates were particularly upset by the extravagant invitation by Mr Bush for other nations to follow the US lead in cutting emissions while increasing the economy. Emissions did indeed buck the upward trend by dropping a fraction of 1% in the US during 2006 - but even the American government admits this was due to a warm winter, cool summer and an oil price they considered far too high. And some said it was useful - albeit tedious - to hear American officials lecturing them with the very facts of climate change that they had been ignoring for years. Mr Bush himself says he is organising a summit of world leaders next summer. Privately, some European delegates are already saying they hope their political leaders are not invited. The leader of the Free Daft World. If we had only left him as the owner of the Texas Rangers Baseball team, we could be amused at his pixillated behavior. By teaming him up with George Steinbrenner, we could laugh at their over-the-top antics and giggle at their massacre of the English language. Not since Charley Finley, we would say, have we seen such... idiosyncratic behavior. Then we would smile and watch the October Classic.

Thrilla in New York: President A versus President B

The president of Iran and the president of the USA were both in New York. How did it come out?

Columbia's President, Lee Bollinger, invited president A. to Columbia apparently in order to have a foil to spar with verbally. Under much criticism for having president A. on campus, Mr. Bollinger caved in the best American tradition by dressing up in his uniform of suit and tie and character assassination.
It was very well done. So much so that it passed everyone's attention that Mr. Bollinger was treating president A. as if the president had been at the head of Iran's government for 30 years or so and was the prime motivator behind the return of the Ayatullah and everything since.

President A. was uninteresting, but I assume he was on the ropes and stumbling from Bollinger's diplomatic hatchet-job.

At Columbia, it was apparent that President A. has 2 approaches to the Holocaust:
(1) it did not happen, and
(2) it was not an important moral or spiritual issue to Iran.

Obviously, he should stick to (2), but he was not elected due to his intellectual smarts.

At the UN, President Bush got my very close attention. I was getting my hair cut and beard trimmed at the local tonsorial salon, Edward Scissorhands, when he mentioned that he was recommending changes in food aid programs, specifically an emphasis on buying food from local farmers in regions which are recipients of food aid programs.
"CARE...!" I said.
"I'm being careful," my barber said. "You have a difficult head."
"No," I replied. "He's implementing the recommendations of CARE...the food aid group C.A.R.E. They stopped receiving federal monies because of...FFs." (FF is an acronymous designation we use locally to indicate " Federal F...." where the last "F" is pronounced as in the word "SNAFU".)
"I listened on C-Span...there was a recommendation for this local buying of food, " I continued.
"Mmmm...?" intoned the snip-meister.
"Well, you can imagine how imported free food sort of works against the local farmers...sort of like well...if you give a guy a fish, he can feed his family for one day; if you teach him how to fish, he can feed his family forever, and if you import free fish from the USA bought by the government of the USA from your rich backers in the fishing industry, you can destroy a local economy as well as diverting a large portion of those free fish to enrich corrupt local politicians."

By this time, metal had been used to trim my eyebrows and bad luck was in the cards for an undetermined amount of time. I was upset. The barber said it was not his fault because my spiel was so-o-o interesting.
Anyhow, so President Bush actually sounded pretty good. I was amazed. Then I remembered he used to be an O.K. guy. Then he criticized somebody there about human rights violations...somebody here...everywhere a somebody who was being undemocratic and he underscored this concern by saying that nothing was said about all this at the UN, but they did criticize Israel...Israel who, by implication, was a stellar example of implementing human rights, and so on.

Well, that did burst my balloon. President Bush is not bad on his own. It's when he says things that so-called conservative intellects tell him to say that he stumbles. Case in point: The Jewish National Fund, founded in 1901 and an emblem of Jewish life in Israel, recently has decided or been forced into a limited trial period during which it will actually consider selling land to non-Jews. This was announced Monday, September 24, 2007, in advance of a High Court discussion on three petitions calling on the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) to stop restricting public tenders for JNF land to Jews.
I still like Israel. I really like Israelis...though not Bibi Netanyahu. However, using Israel as an EMBLEM for human rights does not have quite the effect neocon clowns seem to think it has. Israel can be a symbol for a lot of things, but it is not a great choice for a symbol of the extension of human rights to minorities within its power.
Neither are Arab countries, even though certain minorities are Dhimmii, a word which translates as " the people of (our) protection".  
If you do not believe me, ask Daniel Pipes. He has written much about the minority Arabs in Israel, referring to them as a "time bomb", thereby implying that their mere fact of existence is a terrorist threat !

If the president of Iran had said that, how would Lee Bollinger have reacted?

At the end, it seems the consensus of the limp minds that run Cable News that President A. is insane. How insightful.
Many people have said that President B. is deranged. How cogent.

So there was a meeting of mad men in New York. It was reported by Cable News and commented on by the unintelligent. As a result, the great drooling hoards momentarily interrupted their hunt, sniffed the air, then growled.
A Mr. Daniel Jackson (not the Daniel Jackson of Stargate!) was in an Eye Clinic in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan, USA when President Ahmedinajad was speaking at Columbia. During the speech, Mr. Jackson commented " Get a tie!"
Little did Mr. Jackson know that he was parroting something Tucker Carlson once said. This is the same Tucker Carlson who tried to engineer intellectual acumen by propping a bow tie on his collar. (this news article was from News of the Dim and Not-so Dim)

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Bush As Truman

 President Truman

I was sitting on the verandah with my dogs, Zoloft and Cymbalta, when my 3 nephews stopped by at tea time.

They wolfed down some Dare cookies and washed them all down with pints and pints of the Earl Grey kindly provided by the Grace Tea Company of NY. They then turned to reading what was left of the morning paper.
They chanced upon an article describing some hapless Republican wags likening George Bush to Harry Truman, ostensibly because both had low approval ratings at one time.

We wondered. Let's see.
George Bush is rich. Harry was not.
George is a Republican. Harry was a Democrat. Not much there.
Harry Truman had to fire a military genius in McArthur. George had flunkies run the war for 4 years.

My nephews mused. George Bush does indeed remind of some historical figure of that time, the 30s and 40s, but not Harry S Truman, they said. Who was it that started an illegal war? Who had intial success which soon turned to disaster? Who was it that thought he was in contact with supernatural forces, whether those forces be God or the Force of History? Who was it that thought that at the last minute when everything was falling down around him, he would be proved ultimately correct and victorious...just like his favorite Kings of Prussia??!!

 It wasn't Harry Truman. It wasn't even an American. When you open the door to historical parallels, look out!

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Neocon Rap:MC Brownie And Floodmaster G.

You will say that this is another sophomoric attempt at humor. I agree. As I have said before, it is jejune and junior high; it is " jejun-ior high " humor. Somebody, some place, is not laughing. These are both good men. Maybe I should be glad I wasn't there. Perhaps, even in my insignificance, I somehow realize that it is more than just being a good guy; it is more than just being a good administrator. We lack a moral core about which we are absolutely certain, and which is not degraded by racism, contempt for others, greed, and lust for violent actions or stories and habits of thinking which are violent.

The Buck Stops Here

I have been reading about George W. Bush (GWB), his papers, his library, and Harry S Truman (HST).The discussion about GWB and his library centers on the unusual amount of classified material, and the war in Iraq.Some articles have been written about GWB and HST, both unpopular in their time.

It is the job of the president to make decisions, whether these decisions be popular or unpopular. Both GWB and HST had to make hard decisions unpopular in their times. HST's turned out to be good and GWB believes his will be.

I almost became sympathethic to GWB. I was actually moved.However, GWB made his decisions in arrogance.I needed to remember why I thought the War in Iraq was an appallingly immoral act: the incredible and monstrous arrogance which accompanied it.

Shock and Awe Remember? It was Shock and Awe. Our killing of the guilty and the innocent was Shock and Awe.

The War was named as if it were a version of Grand Theft-Auto. It was going to be a replay of Gulf War I. It was Gulf War II. Only bigger and better.

Every Neoconservative worth his grain of salt was heard crowing about how quick the war would be, how painless the war would be, how cheap the war would be.

Yet any fool knew in his heart this was a crude deception.

Then Mission Accomplished. And GWB danced a Caligula-like jig upon the deck of an aircraft carrier. (Amazingly enough, an ex-marine member of the Greybeards Club saw this and immediately turned against the President back in 2003. He said it reminded him strikingly of a railroad car in Compiegne and a doctored newsreel. He did not mean a parallel between GWB and any other historic figure. He meant the attitudes were repugnant to him.The fighting men yell and get drunk with victory. This war was nothing for the people at home. They were not inconvenienced.Why this display? He said the display was to re-inforce and establish the equivalence between 9-11 and Iraq. We suffered nothing from the Iraq War at that time. Hence, the only reason for a victory dance was 9-11. At this point, he saw through the lie. Those guys at the Greybeards are way too smart for me.)

And then the 40 million dollar Inauguration. And they danced while the innocent were killed. No. I do not see any resemblance between HST and GWB. I had a professor once whose dad used to play poker with HST. He said HST had an odd game wherein deuces, treys, jacks and queens were wild...mainly as a way of spreading the wealth around. GWB only looked for the well-being of the rich. I see no resemblance between HST and GWB.