Flipflopper McCain, Lying GOP and more...

Flip Flopper McCain

The same John McCain who bashed religious conservatives in 2000 for not supporting his presidential bid is now sucking up to them, big time. Apparently, his so-called values aren’t as important as becoming President. So much for his vaunted integrity.

McCain has become mythologized in recent years, but when his actual presidential campaign begins, Americans will quickly remember that he is a radical conservative, way outside the mainstream. And he is really good at putting his foot in his mouth. Prediction: McCain will not become the presidential nominee of the Republican party.

Latest GOP Smear - “Amnesty”

As they have so often in the past, Republican lawmakers and spokespeople are trying to use inaccurate, deceitful language to smear Immigration legislation being proposed in the Senate.

The proposal would require lengthy procedures, penalties and strict requirements for illegal workers who wish to work legally and eventually become citizens. Amnesty means a pardon without penalty. The proposed legislation is neither a pardon nor without significant penalties. Persons entering America through proper channels do not and would not have to jump through the many hoops included in the bill.

Thus, it is a lie to call it Amnesty. Quit lying, Republicans.

Shameful Duke Lacrosse Team

Members of the Duke Lacrosse Team who refuse to co-operate with police should be ashamed. Loyalty to a sports team shouldn’t extend to matters of felony. If any of them know about illegal conduct and don’t report it, they might as well have done it themselves. There is absolutely no excuse. An American’s first allegiance is to our shared rule of law, not to felonious acquaintances. Which brings me to:

The Repulsive “Don’t Snitch” Fad

Teens and others who are popularizing t-shirts reading “Don’t Snitch" are disgusting losers. The shirt implies that when your friends break the law, you shouldn't tell anyone, and if the cops ask you, lie. It might seem cute in a “Bonnie and Clyde are cool” kind of way, until you realize we are talking about drugs, theft, molestation and who knows what else. Anyone wearing a “Don’t Snitch” shirt might as well wear one saying “I’m a scummy lowlife crook."

Antonin "Ralph Kramden" Scalia

Behind the mystique of the institution of the Supreme Court, behind the gavels, the robes and the fancy law degrees, it's fascinating to discover a Justice who turns out to be something less than what most of us imagine.

I refer, of course, to Justice Antonin Scalia. The same Justice who was taken on a hunting trip by Dick Cheney but refused to recuse himself from legal matters relating to the White House. The same fundamentalist Scalia who famously claimed that the Constitution was not a living document, but rather a static legal instrument needing no interpretation.

And the same Scalia who flew off the handle at a talk on March 8th in Switzerland. When asked about whether Iraqis detained by the U.S. were entitled to protection under the Geneva Convention or other human-rights treaties, a red-faced Scalia responded:

“…I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I'm not about to give this [combatant] who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it's crazy."

But were they all combatants? Or were many just in the wrong place at the wrong time? We may never know. According to the vengeful Scalia, it didn’t seem to matter how they got there. If some of them were innocent, that’s an acceptable price to pay for our goal of sticking Western Democracy up their you-know-whats.

Strange, but I assume Judges to be justice-seeking, not justice-denying. I think of them as merciful and gentle, not screaming for revenge. I expect them to be open-minded instead of assuming that if a person is already in prison, he must be guilty.

Detaining people indefinitely without recourse is exactly what we attribute to monsters like Saddam, Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler, but wanna-be Rambos like Scalia don’t seem to care about the hypocrisy. They’re too busy trying to be tough guys: “hunting” birds that somebody behind a knoll throws into the air for them to shoot; strutting in front of Law Students as they rage against critics of Constitutional “originalism”; banging their fists in front of Swiss audiences like Ralph Kramden--showing the wimpy Europeans who is boss.

And that’s the problem. Justice Scalia is really Ralph Kramden, minus the heart of gold. Despite the robes and a fancy education, he turns out to be a coarse, narrow-minded, angry dinosaur. Not exactly who I want deciding cases.

Should he recuse himself from future cases regarding detention facilities? Only if he has any sense of professional ethics. But like other virtues we might imagine him possessing, it’s becoming extremely difficult to picture.

AOL Defiles The Internet

This week’s New York Times op-ed piece by Esther Dyson tells us all we need to know about AOL’s nefarious plans for the future. Here are the conclusions I can't help but draw:

Currently, Internet access is sold the same way phone service is sold—by a subscription entitling payers to send and receive as many communications (emails) as they want.

But because AOL has a virtual monopoly on their customers, who don’t want to give up their affinity email addresses and instant messenger handles, AOL's executives must feel the time is right to begin changing the operational paradigm of their business.

AOL seems intent upon slowly turning their service into an electronic version of the post office, where each piece of mail is paid for by the sender. Given the ever-expanding role of spam and mass mailing, this new business model will likely make them much more money.

But it will also impair the freedom, transparency and openness that has characterized the Internet from its inception. And, it goes against other developments that are making the Internet a dynamic, user-friendly marketing space.

Is it not enough that AOL is raising their subscription rates (even though their start-up costs have been amortized long ago), flooding their space with ads of every size, shape and variety, and cutting back on original content in favor of appropriated, third-party content?

It all comes down to greed.

How can we squeeze this service for all its worth before the little people revolt? How can we maximize our short-term profit without regard to long-term consequences?

The time is now to revolt, before their greedy transformation is fully underway. Whether you’re an AOL user or not, I urge you to write AOL and voice your concerns. Their greed will affect us all, one way or another.

Dangerously Incompetent G.O.P.

With Dick Cheney still claiming that the Iraq insurgency is in its last throes, President Bush insisting that we will achieve “victory”--whatever that means--and Donald Rumsfeld continuing to ignore the advice of military brass, it's easy to forget that many of the problems and disasters America faces are the result of a dangerously incompetent party running all three branches of government.

The Grand Old Party of the Republicans cannot escape primary responsibility for messes including budgets laden with pork, scandals going uninvestigated, repressive and polarizing policy objectives, the diminution of civil liberties, the widening and broadening of government meddling and intrusion, massive debt growth, and the destruction of the environment.

Now that the GOP has thoroughly succeeded in smearing, labeling and belittling the Democrats, here are a few labels that might appropriately redefine the acronym G-O-P:

Grumpy Old Pigs
Go Oppress People
Gas, Oil, Petroleum
Greedy, Overcharging Pirates
Gang Of Pain
Gross, Objectionable, Putrid
Glum, Ominous Pinheads
Grisly, Odious, Pathetic
Greed-Orgy Politicians
Greasy, Obnoxious Pretenders
Glaring, Outrageous Propaganda
Gluttony Over Principles
Ghastly, Overbearing Pomposity
Grouchy, Overrated Partisans
Gutless, Opportunistic Prudes
Grievous, Offensive Polluters
Guilty Occupying Prison
Group Originating Problems
Gentry Organizes Plunder

GOP, the Party of Bad Ideas

This week’s big Republican lie, as relayed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

“We are the party of ideas, and the Democrats have none.”

First of all, Republicans have many abysmal, disastrous ideas, as the last five years have demonstrated.

Secondly, Democrats have plenty of excellent ideas--universal health care, putting the environment and the public ahead of corporate greed, staffing Washington with experts rather than cronies, focusing on security here at home before starting wars abroad, taxing the rich to pay for Bush's excesses--but the Republicans don’t dare address those ideas in a public forum, because their ideas are so battered. Better to smear and sloganeer, which has worked well for them in the recent past. Too bad the real world is dynamic, rather than the static fantasy many fearful conservatives wish it were.

And yet another example of Republican failure and deception--Operation Swarmer, a massive airborne assault which kicked off in Iraq today. Several conclusions can be drawn from it:

The situation in Iraq is still grave and out-of-control.

The Iraqi security forces are still pitifully unprepared to take over from U.S. troops.

The president continues to state that our goal in Iraq is “Victory,” whatever the hell that means. The early definitions of victory--an American style democracy in a safe and stable Iraq--have vanished like so many wisps of Marijuana smoke.

But Bush and the hapless Donald Rumsfeld, using a flood of harsh post-invasion rhetoric about “staying the course” instead of "cutting and running" or “timetables embolden the enemy,” have painted themselves into corner. At this point, the best course of action would be to set a deadline for withdrawal and stick to it, but Bush would look like the idiot he claimed all his opponents were when they proposed such tactics in the past.

As in so many other instances, the Bush sin is Pride. He and his team simply cannot change their course because they have been so rigid and absolutist in their rhetoric. They will do anything not to change their minds, which, in their view of the world, makes them seem weak. So “strong and resolute” has become “strong and wrong.”

We could use a lot less muscle in the White House, and a lot more brains. Time to let the party with good ideas take a turn.

Bush, Rummy & Cheney: Losers & Liars

Speaking at the Pentagon today, Secretary Rumsfeld offered his vision of a free and Democratic Iraq--a country that doesn’t use chemical weapons on its neighbors or its citizens, doesn’t provide training facilities to terrorists, and doesn’t fund terrorist groups, among other things.

Apparently, Rummy is yet another Republican smoking powerful drugs.

His Iraq hallucinations must have been the same that he and other hapless neocons were suffering before they invaded Iraq without any plan to secure the peace--before they disbanded the Iraqi army, before they left all the weapon stockpiles unguarded, and before they brought in (without competitive bidding) greedy corporations to overcharge our government while letting the Iraqi infrastructure go unrepaired.

Now, trying to imagine an Iraq without terrorist training camps is virtually impossible. Trying to imagine Iraq without civil war, without neighbor killing neighbor, is virtually impossible. The daily executions and reprisal killings are a monument to the incompetence of Rumsfeld and his peers.

But reality has never been important to Rummy or the Bush administration.

After yesterday’s bold resolution by Senator Feingold of Wisconsin to censure the president for illegally wiretapping American citizens, Vice President Cheney said that Feingold was helping terrorists by protecting their ability to communicate. Which, of course, had nothing to do with the actual content of Feingold's proposal.

Dark-hearted spinmeister Cheney constantly re-casts the words of others, and his characterization of the Feingold resolution is completely dishonest and misleading, ignoring the reality that Feingold was addressing…

Since when is the president above the laws enacted by Congress?

It is an important enough question to at least merit investigation by independent experts, but the Republicans in Congress, Cheney among them, have already suffered such a massive storm of horrible publicity, scandals, misdeeds, botched policies, etc., that they apparently can’t afford to acknowledge, let alone investigate another possible debacle.

Too bad. Protecting the Constitution is more important than protecting the president. Especially when we are talking about George W. Bush, who has screwed up just about everything he has tried. What a mess.

I’ll take the honest talk of Feingold over the lies and fantasies of the hapless, inept, dishonest Bush Administration any day.

Feingold for President

In direct oppposition to Senate Republicans, who want to re-write laws to fit the prior illegal behavior of the Bush Administration, Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin, boldly proposed a resolution today censuring President Bush for illegally wiretapping American citizens. Feingold stated in no uncertain terms that the president had broken the law must be held to account.

His indictment of Bush was clear and compelling, and formed a searing rebuttal of Bush Administration spin on the subject of wiretapping.

But some Republicans, still suffering from the un-American delusion that criticizing the President is, well, un-American, pushed back against Feingold.

Republican Senator Bill Frist, a slightly more educated version of the President, said:

"The signal that [the resolution] sends, that there is in any way a lack of support for our commander in chief who is leading us with a bold vision in a way that is making our homeland safer, is wrong."

Excuse me, but what powerful drug is Frist smoking?

The "bold vision" Frist mentions can only mean the radical Bush policy of pre-emptive war, which is in a state of utter shambles as Iraq plummets toward civil war.

And virtually everyone except the most radical neo-conservatives now agree that our nation is less safe than three years ago. Our port security is a disgrace, our borders are open, our disaster preparedness has been exposed as a sham, and our invasion of Iraq has created another Afghanistan, complete with terrorist training facilities and increased terrorist recruitment.

The Bush Presidency is an unmitigated disaster (torture, cronyism, poor planning, poor execution, hollow sloganeering, lies) yet true-believers like Radical Right Senator Frist seem incapable of understanding that supporting a failure is worse than criticizing one.

For anyone who resists the notion that Bush is a failure, one glance at the polls will be a depressing revelation. Bush has earned the disdain that the public now has for him, and patriots like Senator Russ Feingold should be proud to defy the predictable Republican smears and sloganeering that surround his censure resolution.

Bush must be held accountable for the mountain of mistakes, failures and crimes that his administration is responsible for. Senator Feingold understands this more than many of his peers, especially the shrinking number of Radical Republicans who continue to back the worst president in decades. Shame on them. And kudos to Senator Feingold.

Alberto Gonzales, Lying Again

On CNN this evening, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about prison conditions at Guantanamo Bay, specifically about a New Yorker article describing the exact treatment of certain prisoners.

When read the brutal, disgusting details of that article, Gonzales replied, "...I have no way of knowing if those allegations are true."

This was an outrageous lie. He had many ways of knowing if the allegations were true, and was simply dodging the question by lying. He didn't want to address the question directly because he is so clearly an advocate of torture, and is so obviously committed to treating our prisoners in ways that go against international law and our great nation's history. He was, after all, one of the principle architects of the policy that led to well-documented cases of torture by Americans.

Alberto Gonzales has demonstrated a consistent propensity to lie, to deceive and to evade the very questions that he, as Attorney General, should be responsible to answer. Worse, he has compromised the very values and laws that he is supposedly protecting as the highest law enforcement officer in the land.

Alberto Gonzales has shown himself to be a dismal failure, a reprehensible stain on our government and our nation's heritage.

Republican Disgrace

Shameless Republicans in Congress, who have gone from the law-and-order party to the lawbreaking party, decided not to investigate the Bush Administration's wiretapping program despite significant evidence that the program broke the law.

The Republicans have instead decided to retrofit a new law to the problem rather than hold the President accountable for breaking the old one.

Only because they hold all three branches of government can they get away with such a disgusting ploy, which goes against decades of passionate rhetoric about reforming the government.

My family's civil rights were violated by disgraced President Richard Nixon, having been placed on his infamous "enemies list" entitling list members to IRS audits and FBI wiretapping. So I'm familiar with the excesses of rogue politicians like Bush, whose arrogance and incompetence eclipse Nixon by a long shot.

But because the Republicans own Congress, the idiot President is being protected from his own lawbreaking. Meanwhile, oversight and ethics committees have become a joke, like the clowns who run them. But nobody is laughing. Republicans have betrayed their principles, and have dishonored themselves. Pure disgrace.

Gonzales, Liar

Whatever we did, just say the opposite!

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently spoke at a London think-tank:

"The U.S. abhors torture and categorically rejects its use," Gonzales said, adding that where appropriate the U.S. sought assurances from foreign governments before transporting detainees there, and did not transport anyone "to a country if we believe it more likely than not that the individual would be tortured." Beth Gardiner, AP.

Like his President, Gonzales usually limits his speeches to like-minded think-tanks, even when traveling abroad. Speaking to an unscreened audience nowadays is death to conservatives like Gonzo, who can barely protect themselves from the rotten tomatoes and pointed questions.

But despite his ambiguous, hair-splitting comments--what does "more likely than not" really mean?--it is very clear that our great nation, under the corrupt and dishonest Bush Administration, has routinely rendered terrorism suspects to foreign governments known to torture. And they have been tortured, brutally, even when they had no connection to terrorism whatsoever. Maher Arar, for example, a Canadian citizen who was seized at a US airport and shipped to Syria (known to torture--duh!) where he was tortured for months before being relased.

When the curtain closes on the inept, incompetent and dishonest Bush Administration, history will look back at Gonzales and see a liar. Nothing that I have heard or read has come close to persuading me otherwise.

Oscar Picks

When it comes to the Academy Awards, it's important to differentiate between who I want to win and who probably will win, especially if I'm voting in a pool with money on the line! As I've discovered the hard way, following my heart tends to empty my wallet.

So here are my choices for most of the big categories, reflecting my best guess of the industry buzz (Will Win) and my favorites (Should Win). One big winner will almost certainly be Jon Stewart, who has earned his chance at Oscar Host greatness. Enjoy the show...

Best Picture
Will Win--Brokeback Mountain
Should Win--Munich

Best Director
Will Win--Ang Lee
Should Win--Paul Haggis

Best Actor
Will Win--Philip Seymour Hoffman
Should Win--Philip Seymour Hoffman

Best Actress
Will Win--Reese Witherspoon
Should Win--Reese Witherspoon

Best Supporting Actor
Will Win--Matt Dillon
Should Win--Matt Dillon

Best Supporting Actress
Will Win--Rachel Weisz
Should Win--Catherine Keener

Adapted Screenplay
Will Win--Brokeback Mountain
Should Win--Munich

Original Screenplay
Will Win--Crash
Should Win--Crash

Best Documentary
Will Win--Murderball
Should Win--Murderball

Best Foreign Film
Will Win--Tsotsi
Should Win--Paradise Now

Best Visual Effects
Will Win--King Kong
Should Win--King Kong

The Pinocchio Presidency

Yesterday's release of footage from a secure tele-conference between FEMA director Brown, Secretary Chertoff, President Bush and others, held as hurricane Katrina approached the Gulf Coast, is a chilling and disgusting reminder of how tragically the Feds mismanaged the disaster. Among other things, all three were clearly warned of the certainty of the destruction and the likelihood of the levees breaking.

It also adds yet more damning weight to the assertion that the President is a bold-faced liar. When interviewed after the hurricane, he famously responded “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” Which we know now to be a dishonest, brazen deception. When he said it, nothing in his body-language or demeanor suggested any hesitation or confusion about this forceful assertion, and later attempts to re-spin it seem nothing more than ridiculous, demeaning attempts to get out of a lie.

There’s more.

The President stated in January 2005 that “Torture is never acceptable nor do we hand people over to countries that do torture.” Yet as subsequent evidence demonstrated, the Bush Administration made “rendition” a regular part of its terrorism playbook long before 2005--facts that remain uncontested. At a minimum, dozens of suspects were turned over to various brutal third-world governments for the express purpose of gaining intelligence through torture. So his January statement was another clear and bold-faced lie. It sounded virtuous and made for excellent public relations, but it could only have been a cold, calculated lie.

And when the President spoke in April of 2004 about wiretapping, stating that “a wiretap requires a court order” and thus implying that the legal procedure had not been circumvented by him, he knew that his own administration had already been wiretapping Americans without court oversight. His statement was boldly disingenuous and misleading, he surely must have known it was false, and thus, another instance of a lying President.

When pundits ask why the President’s approval ratings have dropped to an all-time low of 34%, perhaps it is because the public no longer sees Bush as an earnest, warm-hearted straight-talker, but rather as a cold, calculating liar. The media use words like dissembling, partisan and half-truth because they are afraid to accurately describe what the American people recognize in their hearts--that Bush and his bunch have been clearly and constantly lying. No, they are not the first politicians to lie. But from the start, they spewed so much rhetoric about their morals, their virtues, their values, that the hypocrisy is that much more intense, that much more a betrayal.

Bush is a liar. His Presidency is full of lies. And that’s the straight truth.