Sweet talk won't cover bullshit

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Too bad he never served his convictions. In federal prison.

Culpable but not the most culpable

Click image for full Nick Anderson/Houston Chronicle cartoon.

Fly, little ones, fly away

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Balanced on this knife edge

Like a Phoenix from the ashes of its 1980 debacle at Desert One, JSOC has risen to possess America's licence [sic] to kill:

The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command ... even existed.

This kind of elite force is not easy to create. But, once one is created, the hardest task of a democracy is to keep it restrained to uses against our enemies. Once the impossible doesn't take long at all to do, it's easy for politicians to turn elite military units into instruments of personal power instead of their intended use as instruments of national defense.

Under President George W. Bush, JSOC’s operations were rarely briefed to Congress in advance — and usually not afterward, either — because government lawyers considered them to be “traditional military activities” not requiring such notification. President Obama has taken the same legal view, but he has insisted that JSOC’s sensitive missions be briefed to select congressional leaders.

No surprise that a Democrat is better than a Republican. Also no surprise that he's not that much better.

JSOC has made brilliant use of sigint to locate targets.

The Iraqi insurgency’s reliance on modern technology also gave tech-savvy JSOC and its partners, particularly the National Security Agency, an advantage. The NSA learned to locate all electronic signals in Iraq. “We just had a field day,” said a senior JSOC commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe secret operations.

This is more than likely part of what Bob Woodward likened to the Manhattan Project three years ago.

Still, some of that technology has been in use in American cities for a decade or more. Our cell phones track our movements. Acoustic listening posts triangulate gunshots origins in high-crime areas. We seize and do forensics on alleged criminals' electronic devices (rightly so with a warrant).

It's only a matter of time before JSOC innovations get used domestically. How likely is it in the modern American surveillance state that there will be Constitutional controls? And I really don't have enough of a neo-Confederate sense of humor to laugh at one of JSOC's nicknames, "the Secret Army of Northern Virginia."

Killing the safety net

Zillions for offense, not a penny for anything else.

Or something...

Even saying fuck, fuck, fuck, which I seem to be doing a lot lately, is not cathartic enough to glide past $3.7 trillion.

Can't trust Republicans with money

The financial failures alone should have been enough to remove Darth and Duhbya from their locations, disclosed and undisclosed, to Leavenworth.  Because they abhor accountability of any kind, $6.6 billion was simply pilfered in Iraq.

Who knows how much of it was five-finger discounted by overpaid mercenaries from the likes of Blackwater (now Xe).

Maybe Ahmed Chalabi is thrilled not to have become President of Iraq.  It always seemed as though he was in the whole three card monte with the neocons in order to get rich.  Maybe it was just a failure of imagination on his part.  By now, he may realize that being President only paints a bigger bullseye on your chest.

Then there are the billions we spent putting coats of paint on rubble and calling it public works.  We could really use that money to create a few stopgap jobs right about now.

Someone else's fault

Duhbya is completely consistent in his obdurate refusal to accept responsibility for anything:

[Bush] said he ordered American forces to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with the assumption that allied forces would help make up the difference in Afghanistan.

"What happened in Afghanistan was that our NATO allies, some of them, turned out not to be willing to fight," Bush said.

Loosely translated: We weren't willing to fight, so it's their fault that they weren't.

And the wingnut blogosphere is trying to make Barack Obama out to be a narcissist. Is there even one psychological projection they have the introspection to avoid? (No, of course not.)

Return of the zombie lies

No wingnut article of faith is ever surrendered. WikiLeaks did not reveal that Duhbya was right about WMD, but that won't stop Fox from lying to its viewers and claiming that it did.

The existential danger to our country is not from al Qaeda. It's from our own schlerotic inability to break through denial and accept reality.

(h/t Atrios)

Mission accomplished

Click image for full Rob Rogers/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cartoon.

Minor combat operations have ended

It's great and all that the last combat brigade is out of Iraq a couple of weeks early, but:

Scatterings of combat troops still await departure, and some 50,000 will stay another year in what is designated as a noncombat role.

Even better than careful gradations of Pentagon bureaucratese, American casualties are waaay down in Iraq. It's still important to keep track of the fact that they were actual human beings with names and not just numbers. The most recent and surely not the last was Jamal Rhett, age 24, of Palmyra, NJ.

President Obama kept his promise, rather slowly, to finish up in Iraq. Good for him. But, like many of the better moments of his administration, it's a two cheers moment, not a three cheers moment.

In the end, the neocon Project for a New American Century got what it wanted - a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. The rest of the rationale for going in was all marketing and bullshit. Now we have permanent bases there, more outposts in the empire the PNAC explicitly wanted to proclaim.

A trillion here, a trillion there

The actual funding appropriated for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has reached $1,000,000,000,000. That's a whole shitload of zeroes. That's more than $3,000 apiece that we owe on our credit cards from China Bank. Over and above Duhbya's tax cuts for the rich.

The trillion dollar tab doesn't include any planning whatsoever for anticipated long-range costs such as health care and other earned perks for veterans. Linda Bilmes has in the past carefully estimated those as costing additional trillions. And of course, we're still running up the tab.

It's stunning that only World War II is still "ahead" in costs. It's stunning that the margin is less than a factor of four:

Since the the 9/11 terror attacks, the United States has spent an estimated $1.15 trillion. World War II cost $4.1 trillion when converted to current dollars.

My question, which the big media absolutely has refused to look into since these wars began in 2001, is why? WWII saw millions of men under arms, a huge output of materiel, a vast and expensive air- and sealift. What's different about these modern wars that make them so much more costly?

A few possibilities:

• War profiteering is worse. (Is it? There's no Harry Truman to look into it.)
• We've privatized many logistical operations that we used to do more cheaply with underpaid uniformed personnel.
• We've privatized many security operations (for more than $100,000 a man) that we used to do more cheaply with underpaid uniformed personnel.
• We're spending millions a pop in modern weaponry to atomize the tents of goatherders.

Any journalists want to look into this? Or is reprinting Pentagon press releases just too much more comfortable than real work?

Buh-bye

Honesty means more than simply not lying, but Richard Blumenthal (D-buh-bye) failed even the easy test of not lying:

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. [emphasis added]

During Vietnam would have parsed as true, but even that phrasing would have left room for deceit. During the Vietnam era would have been still better, with the word era flagging the statement for a bit more interpretive analysis.

Blumenthal could claim - and he has - that he simply misspoke. But there are too many instances of self-interested silence in the face of falsehood to credit this as the slip of his tongue.

The root problem, which should be fatal to his candidacy for Senate, is that Blumenthal has shown a life-long pattern of failure to correct the record clearly and forthrightly. He continues his deceit with this bullshit:

“I don’t know if we tried to do so or not,” he said. He added that he “can’t possibly know what is reported in all” the articles that are written about him.

Bullshit. Politicians care deeply and obsessively how they're covered in the press. They may not see every single article, but they or their staff see all the big stories, especially those in major publications. Nowadays, they all have Google alerts to keep them on top of media all the way down to the smallest blog.

The emotional impact of his reserve service and of seeing the postwar treatment of veterans from in-country could still be true. He could still tell it honestly from the perspective of a reservist. Instead, his claimed experience sounds more like echoing of urban legends than first-hand witnessing to the travails of returning vets.

Here's the principle: If you have to choose your words very carefully to permit listeners to take away a wrong impression, an impression that you want them to retain, you're lying. Never mind that advertisers do this all the time. They're lying too. It's just that your lie while seeking a Senate seat is more corrosive and damaging.

This is especially true of living a lie about being at risk of dying in the service of your country. That's just something that no one should ever fake - or acquiesce in faking.

Even Duhbya didn't try to get away with morphing his defense of Texas and Alabama against the world-wide threat of the Viet Cong Air Force into service in country in Vietnam. Like Blumenthal, he did try to get away with claiming he received no special treatment, also false but on a much smaller scale.

It was John Kerry who put aside offers of special treatment and actually served in Vietnam. That didn't win the Presidency for him, but he at least still has his honesty intact about that very important touchstone of recent American history, no matter how hard Karl Rove and the Swift Boat Liars tried to steal it from him by their own campaign of lies.

Blumenthal should go. But he's obviously too vain to give in to that inconvenient truth.

(h/t to this great post on No More Mister Nice Blog)

Update (5/19): More feet of clay on the Republican side. Lindsay Graham (R-wingy but not wingy enough for teabaggers) repeatedly and persistently claimed to be a veteran of Iraq I, despite never serving in country. (h/t Atrios)

Some logic required

Click image for full Ted Rall cartoon.

Stock in trade

Wingnuts - and even ordinary conservatives - will believe whatever Karl Rove tells them to extend the lies and the obvious bullshit that led us into Iraq. Wingnuts want to say that they were honorably motivated. They weren't. Ordinary conservatives want to salve the consciences (which wingnuts lack) about the imperial rush to a war of choice. (Aside: Are there any ordinary conservatives left?)

The truth is the Bushists wanted to invade Iraq. Duhbya was no doubt tired of hearing how his father had left Saddam Hussein in power. Darth Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld wanted to project American power into a permanent client outpost at the crossroads of the Middle East, in short to implement the neocon PNAC plan.

Republicans lie. Karl Rove lies for a living - and quite a handsome living at that. They do it to get what they want. Because all you have to do to Americans and especially Washington Democrats is wave a bloody shirt, they succeeded. That shame should be on all of us. Instead, the wingnuts revel in it.

Mercenaries

Decaying empires hire mercenaries - and pay dearly.

They pay in self-respect, not just in filthy lucre.

Oh, and of course, we should call them by their name. Contractors? Feh.

Argle-bargle

No one thinks Darth Cheney is stupid.

Click image for full Jeff Danziger cartoon.

Someone's lying

Maybe it's both of them. They are, after all, both Bushists.

My natural inclination is to believe anything plausible that casts the Bushists in a bad light. I already believed that they manipulated threat levels for baldly political purposes. They manipulated everything for baldly political purposes, right up to the stove-piped intelligence they used to manipulate the people and the Congress into the panic that put us stupidly into Iraq.

Priorities

Click image for full Adam Zyglis/Buffalo News cartoon.

His own Ron Ziegler

All those claims that we invaded Iraq because it was the "central front in the war on terror"? No longer operative.

The Bushists took office with the PNAC plan to remake the Middle East in their hip pocket.

No excuse

Click image for full Dan Wasserman/Boston Globe cartoon.