Friday, October 28, 2005

WHIG of the Week -- I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby , Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney and the First Indicted WHIG on this First Day of Fitzmas


On the first day of Fitzmas, the grand jury gave to us ...
one Scooter on crutches
(why did Dick hobble him with a lead pipe?)

Isn't it bad enough that he was named after Phil Rizzuto and that this is his view in the mirror every morning, and then he has to make daily genuflections to the man who makes Mike Myers' fictional Dr. Evil look like Mother Teresa? If it weren't for the whole illegal invasion of Iraq thing, you might almost feel sorry for him.

Who's next?

Thursday, October 27, 2005

"True Pretenses", or, the measured right-wing response to the call for Congressional inquiry into the actions of the White House Iraq Group

I haven't been able to find anything written on the Right about the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), and for good reason. No publicity about the Group can be good for the Right's arguments about war aims. This blog entry is the very first thing that I've found written anywhere on the Right side of the internets about the group that gave this blog its raison d'ĂȘtre.

First, of course, is the typical Rovian ad hominem attack on your attacker as shown in the title of this blog posting: Conservatives Are Always Right :: Socialist Anti-American Pansy Demands Inquiry into "WHIG". After more obligatory name-calling about the "Socialist, anti-American, pro-bin Laden pansy who is incapable of any kind of rational thought or comprehension" (a.k.a. Dennis Kucinich), Mr/Ms Conservativesarealwaysright quotes from the Wikipedia definition of WHIG for the benefit of his/her readers ("... One example of the WHIG's functions and influence is the "escalation of rhetoric about the danger that Iraq posed to the US, including the introduction of the term 'mushroom cloud'"), and dismisses attacks on the group with this gem:
"That's it. That's the problem: A group worked to drive support for the Iraq war based on true pretenses." [emphasis added]
To which I would add a helpful quote from Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (10e):
pretense, or pretence \\ n (15c) 1: a claim made or implied; esp : one not supported by fact 2 a : mere ostentation : PRETENTIOUSNESS {confuse dignity with pomposity and ~ --Bennett Cerf} b : a pretentious act or assertion 3 : an inadequate or insincere attempt to attain a certain condition or quality 4 : professed rather than real intention or purpose : PRETEXT {was there under under false ~s} 5 : MAKE-BELIEVE, FICTION 6 : false show : SIMULATION {saw through his ~ of indifference}
Pretenses have never been truer than the pretenses of the White House Iraq Group.


crossposted from WHIGGATE UPDATE @whiggate.org

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Are you able to sleep on Fitzmas Eve?

Or do you find yourself tossing and turning with excite-
ment?

Will you be satisfied with just a turd- blossom and scooter pie under the Fitzmas tree?

Or is your little heart set on a dick and a chimp?

Shakespeare's Sister ...

... has started her daily blogging!

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

$100,000,000 spent for every American soldier killed in Iraq ...

.. and when you multiply a hundred million by 2,000, that starts adding up to real money.

The Use of The Presidential Seal in This Post Is Not Meant to Suggest Presidential Support or Endorsement of TBL

So this is what they were worried about when they should have been worried about finding the absolute best crony to sit in Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Court seat:

"Protecting the Presidential Seal. No Joke."
25 Oct 2005
New York Times:
'It has come to my attention that The Onion is using the presidential seal on its Web site,' Grant M. Dixton, associate counsel to the president, wrote to The Onion on Sept. 28. (At the time, Mr. Dixton's office was also helping Mr. Bush find a Supreme Court nominee; days later his boss, Harriet E. Miers, was nominated.)

Citing the United States Code, Mr. Dixton wrote that the seal 'is not to be used in connection with commercial ventures or products in any way that suggests presidential support or endorsement.'

Click the image to urge your Representative to co-sponsor the WHIG Resolution of Inquiry


Click the image to your right to send a message to your Representative about the Dennis Kucinich Resolution of Inquiry, or click these links to read more about the White House Iraq Group at afterdowningstreet.org or whiggate.org.

Please spread the word! Maybe even The New York Times will finally get the message that the White House Iraq Group is actually a news story, and that some of us actually still care about the fact that a war was started for base reasons with false information and is still being carried out in our names.



crossposted from WHIGGATE UPDATE @ whiggate.org

Friday, October 21, 2005

OK, Senator, it's probably good that I wouldn't be able to sue those poor harassed gunmakers if my family were gunned down with their legal product

but don't they still have the right to sue me? What am I supposed to do if the civil avenue of the courts is taken away? Respond to them in some UNcivil way? Why is this playing field now so uneven that corporations have unlimited power with no responsibilities for the crap they sell? Yet makers of poisoned cow flesh can sue Oprah Winfrey for slander and music billionaires feeding us Britney Spears can shamelessly sue high school downloaders. Wasn't there another system of government in which corporate control was the ultimate ideal? I can't remember the name (and I hate to use the F word), but I think they tried it in Italy and Germany in the first half of the last century.

Read this Bill "Kitten Killer" Frist blog entry about the successful GOP efforts to protect the gun industry from American courts and American citizens. And then read the "moderated" blog comments that, surprisingly, are all in complete and enthusiastic agreement with the sadistic vivisectionist. Try to add a comment of your own. Mine, for some strange reason, will not show up. All I wanted to know was whether Doc Frist had any good stock tips.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Source sez Judy was a WHIG || New York Daily News has better sources on WHIG than the New American Pravda (aka the NYT)

If you want to really find out what went wrong at the New York Times, don't waste your time reading 10,000-word apologias in The Grey Lady. The New York Daily News explains it all for you in one sentence at the end of a snappy little article in yesterday's paper:
Prez Iraq team fought to squelch war critics
BY JAMES GORDON MEEK and KENNETH R. BAZINET
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - It was called the White House Iraq Group and its job was to make the case that Saddam Hussein had nuclear and biochemical weapons.
So determined was the ring of top officials to win its argument that it morphed into a virtual hit squad that took aim at critics who questioned its claims, sources told the Daily News.
One of those critics was ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked a key claim in a speech by President Bush that Iraq sought nuclear materials in Africa. His punishment was the media outing of his wife, CIA spy Valerie Plame, an affair that became a "side show" for the White House Iraq Group, the sources said.
The Plame leak is now the subject of a criminal probe that has seen presidential political guru Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, hauled before a grand jury.
Both men were members of the group, also known as WHIG. From late 2002 through mid 2003, it was locked in a feud with officials inside the CIA and State Department over claims Saddam tried to buy "yellow cake" uranium in Niger to build nukes, a former Bush administration and intelligence sources told The News.
"There were a number of occasions when White House officials or Vice President [Cheney's] staffers, or others, wanted to push the envelope on things," an ex-intelligence official said. "The agency would say, 'We just don't have the intelligence to substantiate that.'" When Wilson was sent by his wife to Africa to research the claims, he showed the documents claiming Saddam tried to buy the uranium were forgeries.
"People in the Iraq group then got very frustrated. It was a side show," said a source familiar with WHIG.
Besides Rove and Libby, the group included senior White House aides Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, Nicholas Calio, Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley. WHIG also was doing more than just public relations, said a second former intel officer.
"They were funneling information to [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller. Judy was a charter member," the source said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, The Official Newspaper of the WHIGs masquerading as the bastion of "The Liberal Media" (and that will henceforth be known as the New American Pravda), still has yet to mention the words "White House Iraq Group" or "WHIG" (in its modern context) in its news pages. Only Frank Rich's column of last Sunday broke their embargo on the name of the group that controlled their pre-invasion coverage of mythical so-called "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (a combination of words for which you will find 7,865 Times articles, not that they're trying to scare anyone, or do the WHIG's dirty work).

Crossposted from WHIGGATE UPDATE @ whiggate.org

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

The Duggar Family insures the future of the Republican Party


And they will all vote.
I can't wait to try their copyrighted recipe for "Tator Tot Casserole", which looks like it might just be the whitest food ever dreamed up by Man or God or Sheeple.

UPDATE @ 2:35: Mark Morford has the final word on Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their sixteen children.

Monday, October 17, 2005

The "W" Word finally sees print in the Paper of Record

I've had no access to a computer or a phone for the last three days, so of course it was during this time that traffic on Whiggate Update decided to jump from an average of 5-6 to an average of 200-300 visitors a day, but more importantly, it was over this weekend that the "W" word finally received its first mention in the pages of the The New York Times. And, of course, by "W" word I don't mean Dubya (which, of course, begins with a "D"), I mean White House Iraq Group and its increasingly more well-known acronym, WHIG. Frank Rich's Sunday Opinion piece, "It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby" jumped at me when I opened The Week in Review section of yesterday's paper, with the WHIG word not only prominent in the text, but in the sidebar. It was everything that their boring front page coverage of "who told Judy Miller what when" was not. Without getting bogged down in the details that sap the life and drama from these crimes, Frank Rich brought us back to the bigger story of how this is not the story of bob novak and judy miller and matt cooper, no matter how fascinating I'm sure they find themselves. This is the story of a war planned in secret and sold with false "facts" and talking points to the American public and the world through a gullible embedded press corpse. It's interesting that the two people on the Times staff who most clearly and most regularly see through the lies of our Leaders in Washington are not the embedded reporters and editors who are privileged to be on a first name basis with Scooter and Karl, but an economics professor, Paul Krugman, and a theater critic, Frank Rich (both of whom are muzzled from the vast majority of internauts by this idiotic new Times Select filter, which blocks their columns from those of us who refuse to spend a cent on internet content-- but this important column is available at truthout.org).

Thank you Frank for uttering the magic words in the Times. I hope that thousands of lesser writers are shamed into following your lead.


crossposted from Whiggate Update @ whiggate.org

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Harold Pinter comments on Donald Rumsfeld's physiognomy (21 Jan 03)

There's no space here to give justice to one of his plays, but, given the general political slant of this blog, I thought it appropriate to reprint his speech before the House of Commons on January 21, 2003, two months before the beginning of the current American war.

One of the more nauseating images of the year 2002 is that of our Prime Minister kneeling in the church on Christmas Day praying for peace on earth and good will towards all men while simultaneously preparing to assist in the murder of thousands of totally innocent people in Iraq.

bluedon

I've been taken to task recently by the American Ambassador to Britain for calling the US Administration a blood thirsty wild animal. All I can say is: take a look at Donald Rumsfeld's face and the case is made.

I believe that not only is this contemplated act criminal, malevolent and barbaric, it also contains within itself a palpable joy in destruction. Power, as has often been remarked, is the great aphrodisiac, and so, it would seem, is the death of others.

The Americans have the ostensible support of the 'international community' through various sure-fire modes of intimidation; bullying, bribery, blackmail and bullshit. The 'international community' becomes a degraded entity bludgeoned into the service of a brutal military force out of control. The most despicable position is that of course of this country which pretends to stand shoulder to shoulder with its great ally while in fact being more of a whipped dog than anyone else. We are demeaned, undermined and dishonoured by our government's contemptible subservience to the United States.

The planned war can only bring about the collapse of what remains of the Iraqi infrastructure, widespread death, mutilation and disease, an estimated one million refugees and escalation of violence throughout the world, but it will still masquerade as a 'moral crusade', a 'just war', a war waged by 'freedom loving democracies', to bring 'democracy' to Iraq.

The stink of the hypocrisy is suffocating.

This is in reality a simple tale of invasion of sovereign territory, military occupation and control of oil.

We have a clear obligation, which is to resist.

Monday, October 10, 2005

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Check out Blue Jersey dot net

Check out this newest addition to the True Blue Liberal sidebar:



Even if you're not lucky enough to live in the Garden State, please check it out. We have an important election going on this year. You don't have to wait until 2006 to take a whack at Bushism.

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

The Look of (Prezdential) Love



Does he give all his cronies the same loving look when he appoints them to positions they're not quite qualified for?

(Click on either picture for more details)

True Blue Liberal is the first to cheer good news in the American economy when he sees it!


[...] At Ford, sales of the Explorer, Expedition and Lincoln Navigator fell more than 50 percent compared with the same month a year earlier. The company also built its last Excursion in the month, ending production of its largest S.U.V.
At G.M., sales of the Chevrolet Suburban and Tahoe fell more than 50 percent, while the GMC Yukon was down 46 percent and the Cadillac Escalade fell nearly 23 percent, with the supersize Escalade ESV falling 40 percent. Sales of the Hummer H2, made by G.M., fell 32 percent. [...]
There's nothing like a little Schadenfreude (and a train commute or a very small car) to start the day.

Monday, October 03, 2005

Is loyalty the worst of George W. Bush's Seven Deadly Virtues? Is this really the right time to appoint another crony?



The New York Times
website this morning was rerunning a profile that Elisabeth Bumiller wrote about Harriet Miers on November 20, 2004 when this unknown aide was appointed White House Counsel, "A Woman Of Low Profile In a Job High-Powered":
[...]''She's the kind of person you want in your corner when all the chips are being played,'' said one friend [and longtime crony and current war profiteer], Joseph M. Allbaugh, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. ''She will give the president advice unvarnished, and that's exactly what he wants.''
Ms. Miers, 59, currently serves as deputy chief of staff for policy and assistant to the president. She has rarely, if ever, talked to reporters since arriving in Washington in 2001, and she declined a request for an interview on Friday.
But her history, and comments from friends, suggest that she is the kind of woman, like Karen P. Hughes [crony & WHIG member] and Condoleezza Rice [WHIG & war criminal], whom Mr. Bush likes on his staff: tough, direct and intensely loyal. Her appointment reflects the president's determination to promote longtime members of his inner circle to critical positions for his second term. [...]
She may be a very nice person. The Washington Post is even reporting that she gave money to Al Gore's Presidential campaign in 1988, so maybe she's even [gasp] some sort of moderate. But can it really be that hard among all the legal talent in this country to find someone for our Supreme Court who has actual judicial experience? Isn't her experience as Governor Bush's Chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission the perfect example of cronyism? If there were a National Lottery Commission, wouldn't the job of Chairman be a perfect fit for Mike "Brownie" Brown or some other political hack? Weren't Lottery Commissions (and the ambassadorships to the Vatican and Monaco) created just to provide safe harmless havens for hacks and cronies and college roommates?
If the Senate doesn't turn around and say, "Give us a real candidate!" If it actually progresses to the point where there are hearings about Harriet Miers' qualifications for one of the most important positions in our government, I hope they ask about her official Presidential nickname and secret West Wing handshake. Bill Maher may have been joking when he asked if the president only knows three people, but does he know more than three dozen? And how about friends from Yale and Harvard rather than Texas and Oklahoma? Is he allowed, by Mister Cheney and his mother, to appoint anyone to an important position who hasn't sworn a blood oath to Barbara Bush's Bouncing Baby Billionaire Boyz club?
Loyalty will be finally be a sin (or at least a crime)
when this crowd finally leaves office,
True Blue Liberal