licentious radio

Sunday, September 14, 2003
[11:13:34 PM]

The harder they come, the harder they fall....

Ridding ourselves of Bush might require taking down a lot of the right-wing extremists who've supported him. Isn't DeLay as dirty with Enron as Bush? Cleaning house will mean throwing out the garbage, not excluding religious fanatics like DeLay.

[2:02:52 PM]
Ahnold cannot recall -- again. Now it turns out he violated his visa when he first came to the United States, and then lied on his application to get a permanent visa. An Arab doing that today could wind up in solitary confinement indefinitely.

Ahnold truly is the great Republican success story -- success by lying, cheating, crony-contacts, and felony.

Don't it make you want him for governor, not someone who happens to be a little nerdy?

[1:50:39 PM]
In The Dimwit's eyes, vandalizing a bunch of HumVees is the same as blowing up a cafe crowded with civilians?

[1:36:10 PM]
Gosh, what a surprise!

The newest neo-con-job was that dissenters should shut up because David Kay had the goods on (so-called) WMD in Iraq, and wouldn't we all look foolish when his report comes out.

Oopsy.

David Kay was mistaken when he thought he had the goods. Turns out, his new evidence was just as phony as when they trumpeted "WMD trailers" that turned out to be for weather balloons.

With the con game up, the new plan is to keep the report secret. They would look pretty stupid, after all, reporting that there were no WMD in Iraq, and no active programs. Heck, since Saddam was going to prove that just before the US pushed up the start-date of the conquest, they won't just look dumb, they'll look like international war criminals and mass murderers. What do you call someone, after all, who kills 30,000 or 40,000 civilians based on lies -- even if the lies were largely self-deception?

The Bush administration is fighting for its life. If their edge in propaganda dissipates, catastrophe looms -- starting with repealing the tax cuts and continuing to widespread prosecutions. In fact, they may soon be *hoping* to leave office before the prosecutions start. The extent of this gang's crimes will prevent their successor from pardoning them.

So expect a dirty six months, with the possibility of an early surrender. With the Republican Convention in New York City, Bush won't even be able to show up if the country widely understand how Bush's malfeasance enabled the September 11 attacks.

[1:12:50 PM]
3,000 killed in America. Does that *really* justify killing more than 40,000 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan?

[1:09:07 PM]
"The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz." --an American soldier in Iraq

[1:04:41 PM]
Iraq is a debacle for the so-called "War on Terror".

Consider Afghanistan. The fighters who were attracted there to fight the Soviets later turned into the current crop of world terrorists. The waves of people incited by our occupation to fight against us will eventually move on to other projects.

We are today providing the on-the-job training ground for the people who will bring down the corrupt Saudi monarchy, and who will destabilize Egypt and other countries that could otherwise have become more democratic and prosperous.

I fear we will still be paying the price for this debacle twenty years from now.

[12:57:21 PM]
In America, it is easy to believe that American soldiers in Iraq are *not* like Saddam's police -- that we are not terrorizing the population in the way Saddam was.

I suspect that it's a little different on the street in Iraq. Saddam left you alone unless you were politically active. Driving down the street in Iraq is more than enough to get you killed by Americans. When we raid a village, we humiliate the people, without due process.

I hope that we don't kill as many arrestees as Saddam did, but it must be hard for the victims to distinguish between what Saddam's people did and what General Sanchez's people do.

It may well be that we look back on the last four months as a "honeymoon" period of peaceful cooperation, and it's likely that most Americans will never quite understand why the Iraqis got tired of us running their country.

[12:51:38 PM]
Has "everything changed"? That's ridiculous propaganda, of course.

What *has* changed is that Bush cynically and cravenly uses endless war to justify every element of his agenda, and that we live in dread.

I don't think it's fear, exactly. Walking down the street, no one really worries about getting killed by terrorists. As a percentage of the population, the September 11 attacks killed approximately 0. Instead, we dread waking up one day and reading about another attack where lots of people are killed and the trauma is brought to the surface again.

Why the dread? A president should help us heal; point the way to living brave and free. Think of how much better we felt after Clinton's healing words about the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing. Think of the days immediately after September 11, 2001, when we basked in the support of the world. A decent man as President of the United States could have used the attacks to transform the world for good -- leading the world in the rejection of terrorism and violence, and seizing the day to solve the Israel/Palestine nightmare, and to focus on the roots of terror.

Instead, we see an endless parade of things the Bush administration has refused to do to make us safer. Yes, they put machine guns in airports, but the machine guns wouldn't have deterred the infamous September 11 attacks, and so we know we are not safer. Rather, we are more frightened. Uncountable billions for the Iraq debacle, but no money to make our ports safer, and no money for radios for the New York City police and fire departments -- the very first, most obvious thing to do.

In fact, pretty transparently, the true goal of putting the National Guard into airports was to *scare* us, not to make us safer. The Bush administration used fear to promote its agenda. For example, passing the Orwellian "PATRIOT" Act without giving Congress time to *read* it, much less hold hearings.

No, the main thing that has changed is that the administration now uses all its propaganda resources to terrorize (scare) us into giving them a blank check to pursue their agenda.

Shame on Bush, every Republican crony, and every so-called news outlet that participates in this vile propaganda.

(The true nature of fighting non-governmental terrorists is police work. Find them, prosecute them, and above all, don't make a fuss about it. Any use of military force or state terrorism -- such as assassination -- is an absolute failure on the part of authorities. The long-term damage from such state terrorism is likely to be far greater than any short-term gain. The cases where it is appropriate to kill rather than prosecute are the rare exceptions that prove the rule.)