The Pitfalls of Auto-Replace

The American Family Association, not known for its tolerance of non-heterosexual folks, loathes the word "gay" so much they routinely rewrite AP wire stories for its OneNewsNow website. Since they use the word "homosexual" as a they-are-different-from-us-so-we-must-hate-and-fear-them tactic, they automatically replace the word "gay" in AP stories with the word "homosexual."

Putting aside such questions as whether they can legally do that, such a practice occasionally causes problems. Hilarious problems, but problems nonetheless. You see, an American runner named Tyson Gay ran in an Olympic trial race yesterday, and the AFA's software dutifully changed the story text:

Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

The story quickly spread and caused much mirth until someone at the AFA changed the text back - but a screen capture exists for posterity.

Auto-replace can be a powerful tool, but it sometimes backfires. Like now.

I Didn't Know Caves Had Cable Service

"I can't talk to you, Al Qaeda may watch C-SPAN."

David Addington, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, trying to weasel out of discussing the White House's torture policy while testifying before a House panel

Pimp My Bus

Whatever political persuasion we may be, Democratic or Republican, liberal or conservative, I think we can all agree that few things are more pathetic than someone desperately trying to be something he or she is clearly not. Exhibit A is the new "McCain Cribs" video on YouTube, which was added last week:



As far as I can make out, this is real, like some sort of nerdy-white-guy parody of Pimp My Ride - except they're serious.

After the disasters of John McCain's "green jello" speech last month and his embarassingly obvious attempts to kiss up to the 23% of Americans who somehow still believe President Bush is doing a good job, the campaign needs a boost. With this video, they are clearly trying to reach out to the MTV generation of voters, the ones who are "hip" and "cool" and use words like "fo'shizzle" in casual conversation. But it's painfully obvious that the McCain team doesn't know the first thing about communicating with their target audience.

Give it up, guys. You're never going to get the youth vote, and every time you try something like this, you make it ever more obvious just why you're not going to get it.

Noun, Verb, 9/11 Redux

Back during the Republican primaries, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had a well-known habit of peppering virtually everything he said with some sort of reference to the 9/11 attacks. It got so ludicrous that Senator Joe Biden quipped that "there's only three things [Giuliani] mentions in a sentence - a noun, a verb, and 9/11."

Well, it now seems that John McCain is giving Rudy a run for his money in that department. When not promising endless war in Iraq or continually throwing previously held positions out the window in pursuit of votes, the presumptive GOP nominee has jumped on the all-terrorism-all-the-time bandwagon.

Fortune asked him a pretty straightforward question: "What do you see as the gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy?" McCain could have talked about skyrocketing energy or health care costs, or the rising inequality of our new Gilded Age, or the soaring national debt. Nope, he had something else in mind - eventually, as Fortune explains:

He's looking not at us but into the void. His eyes are narrowed. Nine seconds of silence, ten seconds, 11. Finally he says, "Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we're in against radical Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences."

It's like McCain is determined to bring every caricature of a fearmongering Republican to life. Lately, it seems that his answer to every question somehow involves "Islamic extremism" or the War on Terror™. Doesn't matter what the subject is - it could be energy costs, college tuition or the duck-billed platypus, he will find a way to work in a "be afraid, be very afraid" angle.

And he wonders why no one is taking him seriously.

Oil's Well That Ends Well

Back in 2002, when President Bush and his cronies rolled out their sales pitch for an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, dissidents and protesters said all this stuff about WMDs was just a smokescreen and that it was all about oil. American companies wanted access to Iraq's vast oil resources, and they had a steady friend in the White House. Indeed, Vice President Cheney's secretive "energy task force" specifically concerned itself with the Iraqi oil fields.

Well, five years after the American invasion, it appears that they've given up all pretense and are heading for the trough. The New York Times reported last week that four big oil companies - ExxonMobil, BP, Total and Shell - are getting no-bid contracts to service and run Iraq's oil industry. Companies from all other countries, including Russia, India and China, weren't even allowed to try and compete.

Not coincidentally, the companies were all partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company, the foreign consortium which originally exploited Iraq's oil fields until Saddam Hussein nationalized the industry in 1972. So they are now being allowed back in.

Does anyone really believe the Iraqi people will get any more than a pittance for their oil? It is theirs, after all, and they should share in the benefits. But it seems increasingly likely that most oil profits will be taken out of the country, with a majority of the rest reserved for bribing Iraqi government officials.

Yes, after all the WMD lies, we now have proof that it really was all about the oil.

He's Baaaack...

When former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani entered the presidential race last year, he was immediately hailed as the Hero of 9/11 who would lead the GOP to victory. But that was before people actually got a look at the man behind the mask - at the cronyism, the authoritarianism, the petty vengeance and the multiple messy divorces, not to mention his complete inability to form a sentence without throwing in a 9/11 reference or three. With voters turning away in droves, his campaign performed a swan dive of biblical proportions, spending some $50 million without picking up a single delegate.

So he has naturally been tapped to shill for John McCain on national-security issues.

The irony is just too delicious. Giuliani's claim of anything at all to do with national security is based only on the many photos of him striding manfully through the ashes on 9/11. After the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, he located the city's emergency command center at 7 WTC, ignoring all his advisers who urged him to put it someplace less of a target.

This morning, Giuliani bashed Barack Obama in a media conference call, saying the presumptive Democratic nominee's emphasis on going after accused terrorists with laws (as we did after the 1993 WTC attack) rather than bombs is somehow weak. "For Senator Obama to suggest '93 is the best example of how to deal with this is a good example of him wanting to go on defense," he said.

The Obama campaign wasted no time striking back, unearthing a quote supporting the candidate's position. Back in 1994, when the plotters of the first Trade Center attack were convicted and sent to prison, someone said that the verdict "demonstrates that New Yorkers won't meet violence with violence, but with a far greater weapon - the law."

The person who said that? None other than Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Ouch. And so every time Giuliani opens his mouth in McCain's service, people will remember just why he crashed and burned in the Republican primaries. Hopefully, they will also wonder how good a candidate McCain can possibly be if this is the guy who fronts for him.

Using Veterans as Lab Rats

We have seen far, far too many times how the Bush Administration uses "support the troops" as a mantra to ward off any criticism, then gives those same troops the shaft when no one's looking. From denying them sufficient armor in Iraq to using a pet facility for cremating soldiers' bodies to housing soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder next to a firing range, they keep finding new and increasingly terrible ways to insult and belittle the men and women who have given so much.

And they have done it again.

ABC News is reporting that the Veterans Administration enlisted returning soldiers in a clinical trial of Chantix, a new anti-smoking drug made by Pfizer. No problem with that. The problem is that the drug has been linked to such psychological problems as depression and suicide - and that the VA didn't tell the soldiers about it.

In fact, they probably would never have admitted it if not for James Elliot, an Army sniper who returned from Iraq with PTSD and signed up for the study. After several months on the drug, he snapped, left his home with a loaded gun and threatened to kill the police officers who confronted him.

Fortunately, Elliot survived - but the VA sees no reason to stop the trials. Doesn't matter that the FAA has barred pilots from taking the drug, nor that the VA warned the subjects (only after Elliot's breakdown, of course) that the drug was linked to "anxiety, nervousness, tension, depression, thoughts of suicide, and attempted and completed suicide" - onward!

"Lab rat, guinea pig, disposable hero," an understandably bitter Elliot described himself.

Supporting the troops, once again.

When the President Does It

Back in 1977, when David Frost interviewed Richard Nixon on a variety of subjects, the disgraced former chief executive made the surprising claim that when "when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."

"By definition?" Frost asked.

"Exactly," Nixon replied.

In the twilight of his failed presidency, President Bush seems to be channeling Nixon's ghost. Bush was remarkably defensive in an interview with Britain's Sky News network, perhaps because he finally realizes he has some things to be defensive about.

When interviewer Adam Boulton asked where Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib fit into Bush's much-touted "freedom agenda," the president accused him of "slander[ing] America." When Boulton mentioned how high fuel prices are hurting people economically, Bush scoffed that "you've got a bunch of people squawking about the price of gasoline."

But Bush saved the best for last. Last week, the Supreme Court overturned the part of the Military Commissions Act that denied habeas corpus rights to "war on terror" prisoners locked up in Guantanamo Bay. Many of them have been there for six years or more with no charges and no trial, something that usually happens only under a dictatorship. When Boulton asked Bush about it, the president responded with something truly extraordinary:

This was a law passed, Adam. We passed a law. Bypassing the Constitution means that we did something outside the bounds of the Constitution. We went to the Congress and got a piece of legislation passed.

Yes, after seven and a half years in office, George W. Bush is still woefully ignorant about some basic legal facts. Like how just because Congress passes a bill and the president signs it into law doesn't automatically mean it passes Constitutional muster. Like how federal courts can (and do) declare laws invalid if they fall afoul of the Constitution.

On the other hand, at least Bush didn't say something like, "This is what I wanted and the courts have no business disagreeing with me." I guess you could call that an improvement.

Change You Can't Believe In

One of the more obnoxious tenets of President Bush's M.O. has been to allow only die-hard supporters access to campaign events and even public speeches, keeping anyone who might be so churlish as to actually disagree with him as far away as possible. Not only was Bush thus kept blissfully ignorant in his bubble, but TV audiences were tricked into believing the vast majority of Americans wholeheartedly agree with Our Great Leader and that only some sort of hippie jihadist crank could possibly think otherwise. This has only deepened as Bush's poll numbers continue to plunge.

Given how John McCain has previously bragged of how he marches in lockstep with Bush, it's not surprising that he's emulating the Decider in other ways as well.

Last night, the McCain campaign held a supposedly bipartisan "town hall" meeting in New York which was carried exclusively on Fox News. Viewers may have noted the rather stark absence of blacks, Hispanics and other non-whites in what is arguably the most diverse city in the world.

Well, there's a reason for that. At the very end, Fox told its viewers that the event wasn't bipartisan at all - rather, that the McCain campaign had distributed tickets to its own supporters, along with GOP New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and supposedly independent groups. In other words, McCain once again emulated Bush: he packed the event with his own people and made it look as if he enjoyed wide support.

Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean was not amused: "Copying the Bush campaign model of stacking events with his prescreened supporters is not the transparency Americans are looking for. If that is Senator McCain's idea of straight talk, the American people are in for a long and disappointing campaign season."

McCain likes to talk about how he's an agent of change, but so far it looks like he's not changing a darn thing.

Understatement of the Year

"A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron during the segment."

Fox Senior Vice President of Programming Bill Shine, apologizing for a caption saying "Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama's Baby Mama!"

A Victory for the Rule of Law

President Bush's "war on terror" prisoners cannot be locked away indefinitely and barred from ever going to American courts to appeal their confinement. That's the short version of today's Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in the case of Boumediene v. Bush.

The Court said, in no uncertain terms, that the president and Congress do not have the power to deny habeas corpus rights to prisoners in Guantanamo and elsewhere. The Constitution clearly says, "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it," and the Court found that the current situation just doesn't rise to that level.

"The real risks, the real threats, of terrorist attacks are constant and not likely soon to abate," Anthony Kennedy said. "The ways to disrupt our life and laws are so many and unforeseen that the Court should not attempt even some general catalogue of crises that might occur. Certain principles are apparent, however. Practical considerations and exigent circumstances inform the definition and reach of the law's writs, including habeas corpus. The cases and our tradition reflect this precept."

The majority was careful to note that the opinion does not mean that prisoners can immediately demand a habeas hearing. Rather, Kennedy said quite reasonably that the Executive Branch has some leeway - just not six years of it: "Our holding with regard to exhaustion should not be read to imply that a habeas court should intervene the moment an enemy combatant steps foot in a territory where the writ runs. The Executive is entitled to a reasonable period of time to determine a detainee's status before a court entertains that detainee's habeas corpus petition."

Of course, not all of the justices agreed. Antonin Scalia penned a particularly hysterical dissent in which he supported taking our hard-won freedoms and tossing them in the trash in the name of security. "America is at war with radical Islamists," he cried, reeling off a list of terror attacks in the US and abroad culminating in 9/11. And just to be sure the message got across, he warned that the Court's decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

"The Nation," he warned darkly, "will live to regret what the Court has done today."

This is standard operating procedure: warn that any hint of dissent, any rejection of infinite presidential power, will result in American deaths. But those scare tactics don't work anymore, as polling consistently shows that people don't believe a word of it.

The rule of law has survived the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Civil War, red scares and Richard Nixon. It will survive radical Islamic terror as well. What the Supreme Court said in plain English is that it also needs to survive President Bush's "trust me or the terrorists win" approach to fighting terror.

"The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," Kennedy wrote. "Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system they are reconciled within the framework of the law. The Framers decided that habeas corpus, a right of first importance, must be a part of that framework, a part of that law."

Well put.

High Crimes and Misdemeanors

"The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 4

Impeaching President Bush and Vice President Cheney has been a hot topic for many Americans ever since it was made crystal clear just how badly they twisted the workings of government to embroil us in the Iraq War. Once the Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006, we thought we could finally get to the bottom of the many outrages coming out of the White House and get rid of this crowd once and for all. The Democratic leadership, however, has shown no interest at all; even before the midterm elections, future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CBS' 60 Minutes that impeachment was "off the table" no matter what.

But that doesn't mean individual Democrats aren't trying. Last night, Rep. Dennis Kucinich defied the leadership and took to the House floor to introduce his 35-count resolution to impeach Bush. Speaking for almost five hours on C-SPAN, he listed a wide variety of offenses, including but by no means limited to:

• Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq
• Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression
• Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War
• Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq
• Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation's Natural Resources
• Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy
• Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment
• Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements
• Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001

And so on, a torrent of criminality from exploiting the 9/11 attacks to botching the response to Hurricane Katrina to defying Congressional subpoenas to much more.

On the one hand, impeachment will obviously go nowhere without the support of the House leadership. With only seven months to go until a new president takes office, Pelosi has successfully stalled to the point where impeachment is simply impractical. The media barely noticed Kucinich's move, consigning it to tiny wire-service articles buried deep within newspapers - and so far, it hasn't been on TV at all.

So what happens now? Only time will tell.

Ducking the Hard Stuff

Last week, shortly after John McCain's universally panned "green screen" speech, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the long-awaited Phase II of its report on how the White House suckered everyone into supporting the invasion of Iraq. This phase was originally going to be released in 2004, but the Republicans refused to do so to protect President Bush's re-election campaign. Then it was supposed to be released by 2006, but the GOP again stonewalled, this time to protect the party's hopes in the midterm Congressional elections.

And so now we have Phase II in the electronic flesh. The results are pretty damning:

Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa'ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa'ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.

Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.

Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.

Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq's chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community's uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.

The Secretary of Defense's statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.

The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

But it is now apparent that the Senate ducked some of the really hard questions. It appears that back when the GOP controlled the process, they deliberately limited the scope of the probe to as not to look into the White House's inner workings. Some of the matters thus skipped were:

• "Less formal communications between intelligence agencies and other parts of the Executive Branch" (i.e., back-door White House pressure on the CIA to deliver intelligence supporting an invasion)
• Any White House records
• Interviews with President Bush, Vice President Cheney or other White House officials
• The White House Iraq Group, set up in August 2002 to propagandize the American public on the "need" for an invasion

Sounds pretty important, no? Will the Senate support a Phase III report, finally looking into what Phase II avoided? Or are we stuck with an incomplete investigation?

Iraq Now, Iraq Tomorrow, Iraq Forever

The British newspaper The Independent revealed yesterday that the White House is negotiating a secret treaty with its puppet government in Baghdad. The treaty would commit America to an indefinite military occupation of Iraq under which "US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law."

Oh yes, and it's specifically designed to avoid the need for ratification by the US Senate or the Iraqi parliament. All it requires are the signatures of the American president and the Iraqi prime minister.

The White House is doing everything it can to ram through an accord by November, thus ensuring that no matter who is elected this fall, the new president will be unable to withdraw American forces from Iraq - ever - without violating an international agreement.

Not surprisingly, Iraqi politicians are furious at this scheme to turn their country into a permanent American colony and are firing back, demanding the accord be put to a national referendum at the very least. Since the Iraqi public overwhelmingly supports an immediate American withdrawal, the White House (which loves democracy only when it gets the "right" results) is of course opposing such a vote.

Ambassador Ryan Crocker denied the plot's existence, but had no comment today on the Independent's next story:

The US is holding hostage some $50bn (£25bn) of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government into signing an agreement seen by many Iraqis as prolonging the US occupation indefinitely, according to information leaked to The Independent.

Yes, the United States is now joined the Mafia by getting into the extortion business against a supposedly popular government that we helped install. This is because our supposed puppet in Baghdad, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, has been somewhat less than obedient lately, refusing to go along with the White House's drive for war with Iran and other political obsessions. So Washington has to use tougher methods in making them follow

Will Congress investigate this latest Administration drive to concentrate authority in an all-powerful president? Or will they just sit back and do nothing?

And Here's a Bridge to Sell You, Too

One thing you can say about George W. Bush is that he knows how to spin a line of complete and total bull and hope like hell no one notices. Of course, people always notice, but he hasn't yet figured that part out.

Last Saturday, the president gave the commencement address at Furman University in South Carolina. Just once, he refrained from his usual fear-and-loathing rhetoric to give a pep talk, telling the students and faculty about "volunteerism," "the spirit of service," and "a resurgence of personal responsibility."

It was, of course, a complete crock. He has never expected "volunteerism" from Halliburton, KBR or other well-paid war profiteers. And with his endless ducking of any accountability for what may very well be the most disastrous presidency in American history, he has no place talking about personal responsibility.

But that was not even the most laugh-out-loud moment in his speech. No, that came when he lectured the new graduates about fiscal responsibility:

You can strengthen our country by showing fiscal discipline in your lives... In the next few years, you may find it tempting to amass more debt, particularly from credit cards, on expenses that bring little long-term benefit. My advice to you is not to dig a financial hole that you can't get out of. Live within your means.

Did he really think he was fooling anyone? Since 2000, his continual borrow-and-spend orgy has increased the national debt by nearly $4 trillion. That's more than $30,000 for each and every person - man, woman and child - in America.

He has refused to raise taxes or even roll back his own tax cuts to pay for the endless maw of the Iraq War. He has generally financed government operations by borrowing, primarily from other countries. But he doesn't care about any of it because (a) he's personally rich, and (b) he'll be out of office in seven months anyway.

For him to say anything about financial discipline is just pathetic.

Holy Joe Strikes Again

Eight years ago, Senator Joseph Lieberman ran with Al Gore and almost became Vice President. Since then, however, he has made a name for himself sucking up to the Republicans to the point where his own state's Democrats rejected him in 2006. Ostensibly caucusing with Senate Democrats, Lieberman votes with the GOP most of the time, is well to the right of the Democratic mainstream, and is reportedly on the short list for a Cabinet post in a John McCain White House.

Which makes his latest actions all the more frustrating. After the media finally started noticing John Hagee's hatred of anyone not white, straight and Protestant, McCain finally dumped him from his list of endorsers. Of course, that didn't stop some people - Lieberman, for example - from continuing to get all squishy and chummy with this wingnut.

This weekend, Hagee is holding a summit of his "Christians United for Israel" group, and Lieberman is slated to give the keynote speech. The problem is that Hagee supports Israel not because it's a vibrant democracy, nor because it's an oasis of knowledge and innovation in a desert of medieval ignorance, nor because it's a firm friend of the United States.

No, Hagee supports Israel because according to his theology, the Second Coming cannot take place unless there is an independent and resurgent Israel. Once Jesus comes to Earth, all Jews and other non-Christians (including the "wrong" kind of Christians) will either convert to the "right" religion, be killed, or be cast into hell forever.

In other words, Hagee is actually praying for the eventual extinction of the Jews.

Nice guy.

Especially since Lieberman claims to be an Orthodox Jew, one would think he would stay as far away from this fruit loop as he possibly can, but no. He still insists that Hagee "devoted much of his life to fighting anti-Semitism and building bridges between Christians and Jews."

That may be a tad harder to claim after the unearthing Hagee's latest rant. Back in 2003, as the United States was about to invade Iraq, he claimed that the Antichrist will be not just "a blasphemer and a homosexual," but Jewish as well:

There's a phrase in Scripture used solely to identify the Jewish people. It suggests that this man is at least going to be partially Jewish, as was Adolf Hitler, as was Karl Marx.

So in Hagee's rather warped world view, Jews are not only destined to all go on the spiritual chopping block, but Jews are actively evil. In other words, Hagee buys into all the anti-Semitic nonsense which has been circulating for centuries, depicting Jews as evildoers who seek to undermine and destroy the world.

And this is the kind of guy with whom Lieberman wants to be associated?

George's Restaurant

Forty years ago, Arlo Guthrie wrote and performed "Alice's Restaurant," an eighteen-minute tale of his close encounters with a small town's justice system and the local draft board. In one of the song's most memorable bits, he tells how he tried to fool the draft board into thinking he was a bloodthirsty killer, only to have the plan backfire:

And I walked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604." And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." And I started jumpin up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL," and he started jumpin' up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, "KILL, KILL." And the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."

The same thing sort of happened back in 2004, right after four Blackwater mercenaries were killed and mutilated in Fallujah, when President Bush lost it. In his new book, Wiser in Battle, General Ricardo Sanchez recalls that Bush had a rather curious reaction to the news:

Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal... There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!

One wonders whether the president was frothing at the mouth when he said this. It's like something out of a bad movie, when a villain recruited from central casting seems determined to chew as much scenery as possible, just to prove that he can.

Either that, or someone is auditioning for the role of Adolf Hitler in his bunker in Berlin, raging at his generals as the Third Reich is collapsing around his ears.

Does anyone know whether Bush switched to decaf after this?

Death Wish

With Barack Obama winning the majority of elected delegates and with more and more superdelegates following the popular-vote results to support him, Hillary Clinton has once again demonstrated how pathetically frantic she is to head off his inexorable nomination.

Resisting calls to bow to the inevitable and drop out of the race, she told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader newspaper that back in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was also seen as the certain Democratic nominee - only to be killed at the height of his triumph. "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?" she asked. "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

Putting aside the fact that her memory of 1992 is somewhat faulty in that Bill Clinton actually clinched the nomination in early April, her RFK comment was like something out of a bad gangster movie. I can just see Clinton and her hired goons walking up to Barack Obama and sneering, "You wouldn't want anything bad to happen, would ya?"

It was pretty appalling, even for someone as seemingly hell-bent on political martyrdom as Clinton. She backtracked almost immediately, claiming she simply misspoke and she doesn't actually want Obama dead.

But it was no accident. She made pretty much the exact same statement to Time back in March:

We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.

She got away with it that time, so now that her only hope of winning the nomination is to convince the superdelegates to support her, she dragged it out again. The only difference is that this time around, she got caught.

In any event, she played right into the hands of all those loonies who claim she leaves a trail of corpses wherever she goes.

If this is really what she's been reduced to - raising the specter of something happening to Obama - then she's forfeited whatever support she may have once held. She used to be seen as a smart, savvy candidate who knew the ins and outs of Washington, but now she's been revealed as just another power-mad politician who is willing to do and say anything to win.

McCain's Medical Records

It sure looks like there's something in John McCain's medical records that he doesn't want people to see. After months of refusing to make them public, he will finally do so, except the circumstances do not exactly inspire confidence:

1. He will release them only to a select, handpicked group of reporters.
2. He is doing so tomorrow morning, on the Friday before a three-day weekend.
3. The invited reporters will be allowed to take notes but no photocopying will be allowed, nor will copies be distributed.

He released 1500 pages of medical and psychiatric records back in 1999 during his first presidential run, so what's different now? Does it have anything to do with his 2000 surgery to remove a malignant melanoma tumor? It is, after all, not unreasonable to expect the president to be healthy.

Will the media do their job tomorrow and adequately report on this event? Or will they allow the Straight Talk Express to run them over?

About Time

It sure took long enough, but John McCain finally realized that there is no upside to seeking out John Hagee's endorsement and publicly rejected it. With the megachurch pastor's constant sermons attacking Catholics, Jews, Muslims, gays, and indeed anyone not white and Protestant, any votes McCain won by sucking up to the Christian fundamentalist wing of the GOP were more than offset by votes lost from all the people whom Hagee offended.

The straw that finally broke the camel's back was the discovery of an audio recording in which Hagee proclaimed that Jews "specifically do not have living souls." And if that wasn't enough, he also insisted that in slaughtering the Jews of Europe, Hitler was actually following the will of God as a means of getting them to move to Israel:

"And they the hunters should hunt them," that will be the Jews. "From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks." If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the Holocaust, you can't see that.

Theodor Herzl is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said "I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel." So few went that Herzl went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the Holocaust.

Then God sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says - Jeremiah writing - "They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks," meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.

Even by his standards it was a bit much.

After the storm broke, an unapologetic Hagee claimed he was "intentionally mischaracterized" and refused to back off his earlier statements. That sure didn't work; McCain finally kicked him off the Straight Talk Express. (For his part, Hagee's PR firm sent out a press release saying he actually dumped McCain and not vice versa. You say potato, I say potahto.)

In for a penny, in for a pound: McCain also dumped Rod Parsley, who in some ways makes Hagee look like a Boy Scout:

• "America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed."
• "There are some, of course, who will say that the violence I cite is the exception and not the rule. I beg to differ. I will counter, respectfully, that what some call 'extremists' are instead mainstream believers who are drawing from the well at the very heart of Islam."
  
• Parsley's Center for Moral Clarity says adultery should be prosecuted as a felony.
• "You know who their [Planned Parenthood's] biggest fans must be, that must be the Ku Klux Klan, because the woman who founded this organization detested black people."

While jettisoning Hagee and Parsley is a welcome development, I should point out that McCain did so only after the mainstream media finally started paying attention to their raving bigotry. He was apparently just fine with it as long as it wasn't front-page news and Fox/CNN/etc were pounding on Jeremiah Wright, but once it became that, he got rid of them damn fast.

Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly put it succinctly: "[McCain] only cared when it showed up on network TV and became an embarrassment to him. So much for a different kind of politics."