You Knew the Job Was Dangerous When You Took It

"The president carries the biggest burden, obviously. He's the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans, but we are fortunate to have a group of men and women, the all-volunteer force, who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm's way for the rest of us."

Vice President Cheney, claiming that the 4000th American death in Iraq isn't that big a deal because they all volunteered and that President Bush has it worse than people who merely had loved ones killed

Four Thousand

They came from all over the country, from New England to Southern California, from Seattle to Miami. Some joined to serve their country, others to get money for college, still others to get out of a small town. But they all have one thing in common - they all died in furtherance of George W. Bush's crusade.

Gregory Unruh, 28, of Dickinson, Texas.

Michael Elledge, 41, of Brownsburg, Indiana.

Christopher Simpson, 23, of Hampton, Virginia.

Lerando Brown, 27, of Gulfport, Mississippi.

William O'Brien, 19, of Rice, Texas.

And it just keeps going on.

Four thousand Americans have now died in this stupid, useless war. From the phantom WMDs to the mythical al Qaeda connection to the propaganda drive to convince America that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, the war was launched with lies and a careful marketing campaign. From "Mission Accomplished" to endless "turning points" to the Surge™, it was continued with wishful thinking and delusion. All along, we have been told that victory is right around the corner, that it will take just three more months, six more months, one more year. All we need is patience.

We are told that advocating withdrawal somehow "emboldens the enemy" and that leaving Iraq would make more 9/11-level attacks inevitable. We must stay in Iraq, forever if needed, until something amorphous called "victory" is achieved regardless of how many corpses continue to pile up.

With the failure of the Surge™ to bring about any real political progress, our occupation of Iraq has devolved into an endless and bloody holding pattern. And so after five years, four thousand dead Americans and untold numbers of dead Iraqis, all the excuses for keeping the war going have now boiled down to a particularly ghoulish form of human sacrifice. We must continue to kill and maim to ensure that the killing and maiming up to now was not done in vain.

There is quite simply no end in sight.

Bush and Cheney keep on living in their serene little world, secure in the knowledge that thanks to careful screening, inconvenient facts will not get through. They are even kept safely far away from grieving families who might ask such awkward questions as "Why did my child have to die?" or "Why isn't Daddy coming home?"

They do not have to deal with the consequences of their actions. They can continue making the same speeches, spouting variations on "stay the course," rejecting dissent as disloyal or merely irrelevant, but the true impact of this war will be forever lost on them.

All they are trying to do now is run out the clock. After all, come next January 20, it all becomes someone else's problem.

Once the Polls Are Closed, Shut the Hell Up

"You had input. The American people have input every four years, and that's the way our system is set up."

White House press secretary Dana Perino, defending Vice President Cheney's arrogant dismissal of American public opinion and suggesting that aside from elections, the public has no say at all in what our government does

Five Years On

Five years have now passed since President Bush ordered an unprovoked attack on Iraq, and there is still no end in sight. All the publicly-given reasons for the invasion have been proven false: no WMDs, no 9/11 role, no al Qaeda connection.

Amid the blood and chaos, the statistics are sobering. Just under four thousand American soldiers have been killed. More than fifty thousand have been wounded, many grievously. More than half a trillion dollars have been poured into the sand, with many billions going to fatten the bottom lines of war profiteers such as Halliburton, Bechtel and KBR. Many more billions have vanished into the pockets of corrupt Iraqi generals and politicians.

As for the Iraqi people, the ones for whom we supposedly embarked on this grand crusade to bring freedom and democracy, that's not going so well. The Red Cross reports that after five years of largely botched reconstruction projects, most Iraqis lack regular access to clean water and sanitation, that doctors are fleeing the country before they can be kidnapped or killed, and that electricity supplies are spotty at best. The United Nations estimates that as many as five million people - about one-fifth of the population - have fled their homes, either to other parts of Iraq or other countries altogether.

And the civilian death toll? No one really knows, and neither the Americans nor the Iraqis seem at all interested in finding out. Estimates range from 82,000 to as many as one million, but it could be anywhere in between.

Of course, the Decider and Darth Cheney continue to live in their own world, where up is down, black is white, and Iraq is a shining beacon of freedom. "Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision," Bush continues to insist, even with all that has happened.

Depressingly, he still spews the same phony talking points which have been proved a thousand times over to be lies, wishful thinking or simply nuts:

• "Operation Iraqi Freedom was a remarkable display of military effectiveness."
  
• Reality: Any realistic post-war planning was wholly unwelcome.
• "When the Iraqi regime was removed, it did not lay down its arms and surrender. Instead, former regime elements took off their uniforms and faded into the countryside to fight the emergence of a free Iraq."
• Reality: The Iraqi army largely surrendered without a fight, then was disbanded and cut off against the advice of just about everyone, thus creating a ready-made armed and angry insurgency.
• "And then they were joined by foreign terrorists who were seeking to stop the advance of liberty in the Middle East and seeking to establish safe havens from which to plot new attacks across the world."
• Reality: All estimates insist that the insurgency consists almost entirely of Iraqis with only a few foreign fighters, the majority of them being from Saudi Arabia.
• "We have captured or killed thousands of extremists in Iraq, including hundreds of key al Qaeda leaders and operatives."
• Reality: The real al Qaeda, the one run by Osama bin Laden, was not operating in Iraq before the invasion. The group calling itself "al Qaeda in Iraq" is composed almost entirely of Iraqi nationals and is unconnected with bin Laden.
• "We sent reinforcements into the country in a dramatic policy shift that is now known as 'the surge.' General David Petraeus took command with a new mission: Work with Iraqi forces to protect the Iraqi people, pressure the enemy into strongholds, and deny the terrorists sanctuary anywhere in the country. And that is precisely what we have done."
• Reality: The stated objective of the Surge™ was to give the Iraqi government "breathing room" to achieve something resembling political progress. Even Petraeus agrees no such progress has taken place and that the Surge™ has failed miserably.
  

Once again invoking 9/11 to justify attacking a country which had nothing whatsoever to do with that terrible event, Bush said that to leave Iraq "would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and make it more likely that America would suffer another attack like the one we experienced that day."

For his part, Cheney is just as deeply in denial, blithely claiming that "it's been well worth the effort" and still darkly hinting that Iraq was behind 9/11, long after such nonsense was debunked repeatedly. Not surprisingly, he also doesn't care that the American public is demanding a pullout:

Martha Raddatz, ABC News: Two-thirds of Americans say [the Iraq war is] not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.
Cheney: So?

So much for democracy, it seems.

And the war just keeps going on.

Was the Governor Whacked?

Lurching along, the Eliot Spitzer call-girl saga is slowly but surely getting pushed into the background by other stories making the rounds lately. (The New York Post did its tawdry best to keep the story in the public eye, putting an almost-topless photo of Spitzer's latest provider on Friday's front page and getting complaints from readers for doing so.) After all, we have the the guilt-by-association attack on Barack Obama for belonging to a church with an outspoken preacher and the forced resignation of Admiral William Fallon for daring to question the White House's drive for war with Iran.

But there might, just might, be more to the Spitzer story than meets the eye. Namely, was he the victim of a political hit job?

To recap: Spitzer's patronage of the Emperor's VIP Club "escort agency" was discovered because he shuffled money around various bank accounts in an attempt to pay for services rendered while avoiding reporting rules. Federal regulations require banks to report all transactions of more than $10,000 to the IRS, and Spitzer apparently structured the transfers so as to come in just under that amount. The pattern still came to the attention of the federal government.

When the US Attorney's office in Manhattan started investigating, they apparently suspected that Spitzer was trying to hide funds gained from political corruption or pay extortion money without setting off alarm bells. The story hit the media only after it was determined that he was in fact paying for high-priced nookie - and it sure sounds like it came from the prosecutor's office. (The original New York Times story on March 10 cited "a law enforcement official and a person briefed on the investigation" as its sources.)

The US Attorney's office is now looking into whether Spitzer's financial activities ran afoul of the Money Laundering Control Act - but the law comes into play only if the money involved is related to unlawful activity (drugs, embezzlement, etc). So they are trying to find any evidence that he used campaign funds or other money not belonging to him personally in order to make him indictable under the MCLA. This part of the story became public in another leak late last week.

If it turns out that Spitzer used his own money, then the only thing federal prosecutors could theoretically get him on is the Mann Act, a century-old law forbidding crossing state lines for "immoral purposes." Nobody disputes using the Mann Act against predators who entice teens to travel cross-country, or human smugglers who forcibly ship women between states to work in brothels. But if there's nothing else there, using it to go after a consenting adult who, however stupidly, paid for encounters with other consenting adults - well, we get onto thin ice here, to put it mildly.

Now the story starts to dovetail with last year's political purge of US Attorneys who were seen as insufficiently "loyal Bushies." When the story originally broke, some wondered what federal prosecutors who weren't axed did to save their jobs. We saw a prosecutor in Alabama put a Democratic governor in jail on what are widely seen as trumped-up charges. We saw a prosecutor in New Jersey loudly launch an investigation of a Democratic senator only a few weeks before the 2006 election - an investigation that went nowhere. And we saw a prosecutor in Wisconsin send a woman to prison on corruption charges in a case immediately dismissed by an appellate court as being completely baseless.

And so on.

With the rampant politicization of the Justice Department, it might not be paranoid to wonder if all this has been part of a politically-motivated prosecution by a "loyal Bushie."

Of course, there is no evidence to support such a claim. Not yet, anyway. But that is the worst part of the White House's manipulation of the federal criminal justice system for purely partisan purposes. When a prominent member of an opposition party is ensnared in a legal web, we can no longer trust that the investigation is free from political taint.

The Harlequin War

"I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you, in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger."

President Bush, who used family connections in his "slightly younger" days to avoid the Vietnam War, telling American soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan that he thinks the war is actually a John Wayne movie

The Truth Revealed

Yesterday, the Bush Administration officially buried a Pentagon report which proved that Iraq and al Qaeda did not work hand in hand. The repeated claim of such a connection was one of the biggest lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq, and its official debunking did not make the White House happy. And whenever facts go up against ideology in Bushworld, it's the facts that are always wrong and have to go.

It didn't work this time. Barely twenty-four hours after the report was squelched, it leaked and is now online for all to read.

That sure didn't take long.

The report's proverbial "money shot" puts it in plain English: "This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam [Hussein]'s Iraq and al Qaeda."

The report goes on to detail what people who happen to know something about Iraq have been saying for years. As a secular dictator, Saddam knew all too well the terrorist group saw him as an enemy of Islam and wanted very much to overthrow him. Any assistance he gave to al Qaeda was virtually guaranteed to be used against him, therefore he had no reason at all to work with them.

[Osama] bin Laden wanted - and still wants - to restore the Islamic caliphate while Saddam, despite his later Islamic rhetoric, dreamed more narrowly of being the secular ruler of a united Arab nation. These competing visions made any significant long-term compromise between them highly unlikely. After all, to the fundamentalist leadership of al Qaeda, Saddam represented the worst kind of "apostate" regime - a secular police state well practiced in suppressing internal challenges.

There will doubtless still be die-hards out there who insist the truth is still being hidden, either by some mythical "fifth column" in the government or by the media. And there will doubtless still be people who believe them.

But we know the truth.

Yeah, Forget About the People Who Want to Kill Us

"I honestly think [homosexuality is] the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam - which I think is a big threat, OK? Cause what's happening now is they are going after, in schools, two-year olds... And this stuff is deadly, and it’s spreading, and it will destroy our young people, it will destroy this nation."

Oklahoma state legislator Sally Kern (R), commenting on how gays and lesbians are the #1 threat to America, how they're "infiltrating city councils" and comparing them to cancer

Let Them Drink Cake

"You know, we've all been to Iraq several times. Everywhere you go they make it perfectly clear that you don't want to drink the water, so I'm a little surprised myself that this is an issue. As I understand it, the bottled water, which is what you're supposed to be drinking in Iraq, had no issues whatsoever in the testing that was done."

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, shrugging off reports that former Halliburton subsidiary KBR supplied American troops in Iraq with dirty water for bathing and laundry (not drinking), making them sick as a result

Making the Facts Disappear

It is by now drearily predictable: whenever indisputable facts run counter to the blind ideology at the White House, the facts are covered up and hidden away from the American people. It happened with prescription drugs, climate change, the cost of the Iraq War and key economic data. And now it's happening with one of the main selling points used to deceive the public into supporting the Iraq War: the canard that the secular dictator Saddam Hussein was bosom buddies with the theocratic terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Even years after the invasion, a considerable percentage of Americans still believe Saddam was behind 9/11. The true believers continue to rally the faithful with the promise that the truth will come out and that the secret will be revealed. Everyone who points out that Saddam and bin Laden hated each other with a passion and would never have collaborated on anything will finally be unmasked for the America-hating traitors they clearly are.

Well, the long-awaited report is finally ready. Monday afternoon, reports hit the media that the Pentagon's in-depth analysis of more than half a million captured Iraqi documents revealed that - drum roll, please - Iraq and al Qaeda never worked together, on 9/11 or anything else.

Oops.

Well, that's inconvenient. The White House and the right wing have years invested in this disinformation campaign. Why, if people are allowed to know that it was all a phony, they might be willing to question the whole war. (It's a little late for that...) They might even get mad at the pundits and media stenographers who helped the sales effort.

So the White House is burying the report.

That's right. The Pentagon canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the study results and won't put it online for reporters or anyone else. Instead, they'll make it available only by snail mail, and only to people who ask for it. What do you want to bet that actually getting it won't be as easy as it sounds?

This is typical Bush Administration behavior. Cover up, deny, hide away. Declare everything secret for as long as possible. Make people fight tooth and nail for what by all rights should be public information.

After all, there are actually poor deluded souls out there who are dumb enough to think the president represents everyone and not just his ideological soulmates.

Hypocrisy is Bipartisan

There is something about the ever-tawdrier Elliot Spitzer train wreck that comes right out of a Greek tragedy. Spitzer made a name for himself fighting corruption on Wall Street and in New York politics. So what does he go and do? Patronize a high-priced "escort agency" for years and shuffle money around to shell companies to try and hide it.

There is more than a whiff of rank hypocrisy in Spitzer's actions, considering how he so carefully cultivated his two-fisted "Mr. Clean" reformer image. He was a popular rising star in the Democratic Party, and he blows it all for some very expensive nookie.

Of course, this just goes to show that hypocrisy, not to mention testosterone-driven stupidity, is wholly bipartisan. After all, the Republicans have David Vitter, the family-values Bible-thumper who was a repeat client of the "DC Madam" agency. It should be pointed out, however, that the GOP closed ranks to protect Vitter when his indiscretions were revealed last summer. Just like they also protected Mark Foley, who preyed on male Congressional pages for years with the full knowledge of the party hierarchy, until the mess was made public shortly before the 2006 elections.

Spitzer, however, can count on precisely no support from New York's Democrats, and a poll says two-thirds of New Yorkers say he should resign. He broke the law and did it big time.

Amazingly, the only thing close to support he's getting is from right-wing radio host and professional scold Laura Schlessinger. She blames not Spitzer but his wife, saying she failed to "make him feel like a man, to make him feel like a success, to make him feel like her hero." Go figure.

After a 48-hour feeding frenzy, Spitzer resigned this morning, apparently in exchange for not facing federal charges. (Although patronizing a call girl is not illegal in New York, he is subject to indictment under the federal Mann Act because he paid for one to travel across state lines for a rendezvous.) How sad.

The Great Sucking Sound

Anyone who still thinks President Bush's secret spying program affects only bad guys should read "NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data" on the front page of this morning's Wall Street Journal. It lays out in brutal detail just how the program affects you and me.

To give an example from the article: "If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city - for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans - the government's spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city."

That means everything. E-mails. Phone calls. Financial transactions. Internet activity.

Everything.

For everyone.

Take a moment to think about that. Simply living in the same area as someone suspected of terrorist connections means that you are now a suspect as well. As a result, the government can - and does - suck up and comb through everything that you do on the phone or online, with no warrants and no accountability.

So much for probable cause. So much for individualized suspicion.

And so much for the Fourth Amendment. You know, the one that bars the government from searching your house or car or life without a warrant "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

The Torture President

George W. Bush wants to go down in history as the man who led a righteous crusade campaign to bring freedom to the Middle East. He wants to be remembered as the Hero of 9/11, the Scourge of Saddam, the Terror of Terrorists.

He will actually be remembered as the man who legalized torture, as long as it's committed by the United States of America.

He will be remembered as the Torture President.

Congress passed a bill barring the CIA from using waterboarding, beatings, and other "interrogation techniques" instantly recognized worldwide as torture. The bill would have brought the intelligence agency into line with practices used by the military, which specifically bars torture techniques up to and including mock executions, starvation and rape.

The Army Field Manual says very specifically on page 102, "Use of torture by US personnel would bring discredit upon the US and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It could also place US and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse."

Bush likes to make a big deal of how he "listens" to his military generals and does whatever they recommend - except when they disagree with him.

So he vetoed the bill, insisting on the right of the CIA to torture War on Terror™ prisoners whenever they feel like it. In his weekly radio address Saturday announcing the veto, he once again used all the same buzzwords (9/11, al Qaeda, "hardened terrorists," etc) and said that "we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists."

Including torture, it seems.

Waterboarding has been around since the Spanish Inquisition. Japanese officers during World War II were convicted of war crimes for ordering prisoners waterboarded, as were American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Everyone knows it's torture.

Bush's "logic" is that since the Army Field Manual is freely available online, suspected terror prisoners can be "trained to resist the methods outlined in the manual. And this is why we created alternative procedures to question the most dangerous al Qaida operatives, particularly those who might have knowledge of attacks planned on our homeland." You can almost hear the telescreens shouting, "Be afraid! Be afraid!"

Speaking of the Army Field Manual, White House press secretary Dana Perino actually claimed last month that the Manual "is a perfectly appropriate document that is important for young GIs, some so young that they're not even able to legally get a drink in the states where they're from." In other words, she said that America's soldiers are young and stupid and don't know any better, a statement which would bring howls of outrage from the GOP had it been uttered by a Democrat. Way to support the troops, Dana. (By an incredible coincidence, the transcript containing Perino's outrageous statement is conspicuously missing from the White House website - but it's still available elsewhere.)

If we follow Bush's supposed logic, since everyone now knows we use beatings and waterboarding, Osama bin Laden (remember him?) should now be teaching his minions how to resist them. Bush's prophecy is thus self-fulfilling - as some forms of torture become widely known, we must move on to other and more severe forms of torture.

Where does it end? Will prisoners be burned with hot coals? Hung by their arms until their shoulders dislocate? Bones broken and organs damaged? If they still don't talk, will their family members be hauled in to face the same treatment? And what happens if they are determined to be innocent? Will they be patched up (if that) and dumped on a roadside somewhere with an "oops, sorry about that" note?

The truly revolting part of this whole obscenity is that torture doesn't work, despite what the TV show 24 is teaching American soldiers. Anyone who has ever dealt with it knows it. Torture doesn't make prisoners tell the truth, it makes them tell the torturer anything he wants to hear. In fact, the supposed plots Bush mentioned in his radio address all turned out to be at best in the planning stages. Most of them turned out to be nothing at all, just kooks muttering in their beer with an FBI agent listening in.

The Army knows this very well, as it makes clear on page 97 of the Field Manual: "Use of torture is not only illegal but also it is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the HUMINT [human intelligence] collector wants to hear. Use of torture can also have many possible negative consequences at national and international levels."

And yet information gained via torture is used anyway as a political weapon, to terrorize the public into accepting the wholesale destruction of the values which have made the United States a beacon of freedom and liberty.

All this is enough to make one wonder - again - if Bush is actually bin Laden's sleeper agent in the White House. After all, everything he's done has presented al Qaeda with a gold-plated recruiting poster.

Ghouls

If there's one country in the world that knows how to handle terrorism, and handle it smartly (for the most part, anyway), it's Israel. For its entire 60-year existence, the country has been under attack by those who want to destroy it utterly. Not change it into what they want, destroy it.

Every time Israel's sons and daughters are killed on a bus, in a school, in a restaurant, the world sits silently.

And every time Israel strikes back, the world rushes to condemn.

Our TV screens are filled with images of grieving Palestinians every time Israel retaliates for a rocket attack or bombing. But how often do we see scenes like this in our living rooms?

Yes, those are crowds of Palestinians actually cheering yesterday's attack on a yeshiva (a Jewish religious school) in Jerusalem. Eight people were killed.

Two of them were just fifteen years old.

And these ghouls celebrate the slaughter. Children sing and clap happily. Candies are handed out. What kind of society so twists the minds of its young people to the point where they rejoice in the killing of fellow human beings, let alone those barely older than themselves?

Contrary to Palestinian propaganda, the vast majority of Israelis want peace with their neighbors, and they want it desperately. But how can a negotiated peace be possible when your neighbors mark the occasion of your son's brutal murder by throwing a block party?

It's enough to make one despair.

Gee, Thanks a Lot

Back during the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush unleashed his flying monkeys to carry out a truly despicable whispering campaign in still-race-sensitive South Carolina, saying Senator John McCain's dark-skinned daughter was the result of a tryst with a black prostitute.

Bridget McCain was actually adopted from Bangladesh.

Classy.

Relations between the two men have been tense ever since, to put it mildly. But what a difference eight years makes - now that McCain has clinched the Republican nomination, Bush has come off the sidelines to endorse him. And so yesterday they gritted their teeth, put aside their differences (or at least tried to) and met at the White House so Bush could pass the GOP mantle to McCain.

It didn't go well. McCain looked like he would much rather have been back in the Hanoi Hilton being tortured by the Viet Cong. For his part, Bush hogged the spotlight, rambled incoherently, and basically did all he could to push his would-be successor out of the picture. Such as when he grabbed a question about the economy and replied with a rant about "an enemy that lurks, an enemy that wants to strike us."

With the event such a disaster, McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee have been conspicuously silent about the endorsement, leaving it off their websites.

Good gravy, you'd think they didn't want anyone to know about it.

Fortunately, the Democrats are more than pleased to get the word out, displaying it prominently on their own page.

A Bush endorsement is quite simply the kiss of death. The president is so unpopular and so toxic that any endorsement by him is almost guaranteed to have the opposite effect. Independents, Democrats tempted by the nominee's "maverick" persona and disgruntled Republicans will see a McCain presidency as little more than four more years of Dubya. But as with his acceptance of wingnut televangelist John Hagee's endorsement, McCain knows he can't rally the GOP power structure to his side without the support of the current president.

With his warmongering speeches and relentless flip-flopping on positions, McCain has anchored himself firmly to Bush. And as the Decider sinks like a stone, he will drag McCain down with him. Fine by me.

So Much for the Jewish Vote

"Anti-Semitism is an oxymoron. An anti-Semite is someone who is driven by hate. A Christian is someone who's driven by love. Therefore, there's no such thing as a Christian anti-Semite."

Megachurch pastor and McCain endorser John Hagee to CNN pundit Glenn Beck, ignoring the many, many examples of Christian anti-Semitism throughout history

Waving the White Flag, Again

President Bush's approval ratings are in the toilet, and his response to some extremely rare Congressional backbone on his secret-spying program is to throw a series of carefully scripted temper tantrums. The Republican Party and political pressure groups unveil TV ads basically accusing House Democrats of wishing everyone dead. The American public is unconvinced and roundly says no to indiscriminate snooping, urging Congress to stand firm in the cause of freedom and the Fourth Amendment.
Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats propose extending the Protect America Act while a permanent bill is worked out, but the GOP says no to any extension, apparently preferring to keep the public in mortal peril (at least, according to their hyperbolic rhetoric) rather than negotiate.

So what is Congress preparing to do? Surrender, of course. Yes, the Washington Post is today reporting that House and Senate Democrats are working on a supposed "compromise" that would give the president everything he's been so hysterically demanding.

Unrestricted power to spy on anyone? Sure.

A toothless FISA court with no real oversight authority? No problem.

Immunity for telecom companies who helped the White House break the law? You got it.

So what is this compromise? Well, it would give Congress the opportunity to vote on two bills, one legalizing the spying and the other letting AT&T etc. off the hook.

That's it. That's the entire compromise.

Part of me can't believe that Congress is once again willing to knuckle under to Mr. 19%, that these gutless cowards are actually caving in to the GOP's fear-and-terror tactics. Then the other part reminds the first part that unconditional surrender is what Congressional Democrats seem to be doing best nowadays.

Contact your Senators and Representative and tell them to hold the line on spying. No more.

With Friends Like These...

The right wing hates John McCain. I mean really hates him. He's one of those occasionally principled Republicans who rejects torture, thinks our current legalized-bribery system of campaign financing needs to be cleaned up, and tells the Falwell wing of the party to get lost. Wingnuts from Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter have said they'd rather vote for Hillary Clinton over McCain - and considering how they believe Clinton to be just short of the Antichrist, that's saying quite a lot.

Well, so much for those pesky beliefs. McCain's handlers realize that he has no chance of winning in November without the support of the wildest GOP nuts out there, so he has tossed those principles under the bus. He now embraces the use of torture, is notably silent on the wash of corrupting money in politics, and accepted John Hagee's endorsement.

Hagee, the pastor of a Texas-based megachurch, is the holder of political views which can be described politely as "Neanderthal." For example, he:

• Blamed Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans' annual Gay Pride parade and the city's "level of sin that was offensive to God"
• Held a mock "slave sale" as a fundraiser
• Calls the Vatican "the Great Whore" and is vehemently anti-Catholic
• Wants to attack Iran, the consequences be damned
  
• Calls the Harry Potter series an inducement to witchcraft and Satanism
• Says feminism is about "throwing off authority in rebellion against God's pattern for the family"
• Says Muslims are religiously required to kill all non-Muslims
  

And if all that isn't enough, he is strongly pro-Israel for all the wrong reasons. Rather than supporting Israel because it's a solid and friendly democracy, he does so because an independent Jewish state fits into his theology. According to some sects of fundamentalist Christianity, the Second Coming and the End Times cannot take place until a strong Israel exists and all Jews convert to the "correct" faith. (The Left Behind series illustrates this notion to gory extremes.)

His views about unconverted Jews aren't hard to fathom. In his book Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee blames anti-Semitism on the Jews themselves:

"It was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews, God's chosen people, to their covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God, Jehovah, that gave rise to the opposition and persecution that they experienced beginning in Canaan and continuing to this very day... How utterly repulsive, insulting, and heartbreaking to God for His chosen people to credit idols with bringing blessings He had showered upon the chosen people. Their own rebellion had birthed the seed of anti-Semitism that would arise and bring destruction to them for centuries to come...it rises from the judgment of God upon his rebellious chosen people."

So let's see now - Hagee hates women, Catholics, blacks, gays, Jews, Muslims, and pretty much everyone else who isn't white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Is this really someone McCain wants by his side?