Asleep at the switch

Bushists and neocons might have given their best efforts and still not prevented 9/11. But they didn't even try, despite many warnings:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous.

Unconscionable.

Play Cheney for me

Mitt Romney is so desperate to be President that he's willing to whore himself out as the handsome second coming of Darth Cheney.

The truth is that the Bushists pissily and irresponsibly dismissed the concern the Clinton administration had about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. (Note to wingnut trolls: Sure, Clinton could have succeeded against these enemies, and he didn't, but he at least identified the priority problem, where Mayberry Nero told his briefers that they had covered their asses.) The Bushists were focused instead on redeeming Bush I's PNAC-deplored failure to depose Saddam Hussein.

Romney's varmint-huntin' (see, really a country boy despite the $5000 suit!!!!!) is so lame he's going to need to shoot a friend to prove he's really the NRA's boy Cheney successor.

As a bonus, he's happy to defend the so-called free market's allocation of life-saving to those who can pay the most for it. Hey, works for him (and screw you).

Mitt Romney is the perfect expression of Republicanism - willing to say any bullshit, filled with rhetoric that misrepresents reality, a whore for the ruling class. He is the most obviously insincere politician since... Man, I'm having a hard time coming up with a politician who's more insincere than Mitt. Mostly, it's talk show hosts. Except John Boehner! Strom Thurmond, maybe - staunch racist shtupping the colored help but still making his black daughter come in through the back door.

I was slow to see the essential dishonesty of Romney, but I'm making up for lost time.

Empire strikes back

Darth Cheney's every statement still requires the belief that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. That alone is reason enough to discount everything he says as insane.

Cheney's excuse for the cupboard being bare is that the Bushists had to spend the money. Yet nearly all of the spending was on Iraq, not on attacking Afghanistan.

Then of course the other big contributor to the deficit was a vast tax cut for the wealthy.

Don't worry, be happy

This is tantamount to a lie:

Members of Dr. ElBaradei’s staff and outside experts cautioned that the amount of missing material remained relatively small. If all the stolen material were lumped together, it would not be enough to build even one nuclear device, they said.

Maybe the sum of what has been stolen this year, but much more is missing in the history of uranium and plutonium. Oh, they also said stolen. They're not counting unexplained losses.

Another feature of the Bushist obsession with Saddam is that they've given lower priority to the steady work of nuclear security.

I can kill an ordinary person

Sarah Palin - and it's completely undeniable that the 20-phone-call impetus came from her - believes that she can settle a personal score using the power of her office.

Wasn't Duhbya pissed at Saddam for maybe trying to kill his daddy? Now there's a good model for smart policy.

(The headline? Click the thumbnail image.)

Actionable intelligence

This CNN summary of this CBS story strikes me as the unvarnished truth.

• Saddam needed WMD to survive in a rough neighborhood.
• He wanted WMD.
• He didn't have WMD.
• He knew he couldn't stand and fight against the U.S. military, but he was caught between us and Iran.
• Duhbya is different than his father or Bill Clinton, and Saddam didn't figure that out in time.
• Saddam was a bad, violent, self-aggrandizing man.
• Interrogation works.

Hey, I'm better than Ahmadinejad

My name is Duhbya, and my stock in trade is bullshit, but at least I'm not as lunatic as yesterday's news.

Does anyone think he's really serious about this?

This is a fig leaf for the naughty bits of his legacy. He's saying, "See, it was really, really Saddam's despotism and my sympathy for the oppressed Iraqi people that made me rip their country into warring pieces." Never mind that Duhbya made many things worse, a dramatically raised death rate high on the list of bad things.

UN-diana Jones

I got a good laugh at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when the packing crate containing the deadly ark disappeared into a secure government warehouse, ever ready to renew its mischief in case Spielberg couldn't think of any better sequel scenario (not to worry). Now that a can of Saddam's old phosgene has been discovered at the UN in New York, the comic foreboding seems a lot less comic. That stuff might not melt your screaming face, but it'll definitely do a number on your lungs, since it reacts with water to form hydrochloric acid.

It would be interesting to know how potent the sample remained. Since it was in an oil suspension, I assume that it was both safer to handle and more long-lasting than had it been stored as a gas.

Update: Phosgene only on paper, it turns out.

Free market

When the free market is powerful enough to get Iraqi women to risk stoning, not to mention STDs, you know it's a powerful force. They're selling the only thing they have of value.

Oh, it's their children's hunger that drives them? Not some entrepreneurial instinct suppressed by Saddam?

Nuts.

The idiotic faith the Bushists had in the "free" market to solve all economic problems in post-invasion Iraq meant that they didn't plan to employ people at even a subsistence level. What else is new? These boneheads don't even understand that markets in the best of circumstances require time, regulation, and safety nets.

This is exactly the kind of freedom that the Bushists would like for us to have in America. Think how much better urban street corners would be if former welfare mothers would just compete with crack-head skanks to deliver better services at lower prices!

'Race to the bottom' takes on a whole 'nother connotation.

Why is bin Laden still alive?

The Bushist and neocon target was always Iraq. Their goal was always permanent bases in the Middle East but outside of Saudi Arabia. (Relocating our bases outside of bin Laden's oyster was actually a rational desire among PNAC wishful thinking.) Iraq has the perfect location, had it only been empty of those pesky and fractious Iraqis.

The purpose of invading Iraq was not to spread democracy - that was pure marketing - or to topple Saddam Hussein - beneficial ceteris paribus but also a marketing feature. The true purpose was the projection of American power into this region so essential to our economic security without any consideration of change in our policy with respect to Israel.

I still have trouble understanding why the Bushists didn't fear the voters enough to make sure they got bin Laden anyway. It would have made their GWOT cover story more credible.

I guess they thought they could manipulate opinion however they needed to. That worked for a while, too.

(On Philosoraptor.)