Three more years

Billmon's post - Hogtied- summarizes the foreign policy bind into which Bush has tied the United States:

. . . one of the great ironies of Shrub's presidency: an administration that came to power determined to win maximum freedom of action in foreign policy by going it alone (or recruiting ad hoc coalitions that would submissively follow Washington's lead) has ended up virtually paralyzed by the consequences of its own hubris. Consider:
With the bulk of the U.S. active duty army marooned in the Iraq quagmire, pre-emptive (much less preventative) war is off the table. Syria, Iran and Hugo Chavez can all thumb their noses at the hegemon with relative impunity, secure in the knowledge that the 82nd Airborne won't come knocking on their doors any time soon.
Bush's inbred arrogance, Field Marshal Von Rumsfeld's moral cluelessness and the neocons' casual contempt for "soft power" have made the United States radioactive not just in the Islamic world but to public opinion in much of the rest of the world as well. Governments that might once have considered enlisting in Uncle Sam's army won't risk it now. . . .
Without a sensible energy policy. . . the U.S. is in no position to threaten Iran with meaningful economic sanctions . . .
Likewise, the U.S. can't risk alienating or destabilizing the House of Saud, lest the kingdom fall into the wrong hands (or none at all) sending oil to $150 a barrel. This makes any talk of "democratizing" the Middle East into a cynical joke . . .
We're not even trying to squeeze Chavez . . .
The failure of the neocons' go-it-alone attempt to isolate North Korea has left Kim Jong Il with a half dozen more nukes, and forced the administration to make a humilating U turn towards appeasement.
The Republican regime's out-of-control fiscal policies have given the People's Republic of China a senior unsubordinated claim on the U.S. Treasury and unprecedented potential influence over the U.S. financial markets. This rules out any attempt to "contain" Beijing or counter its reach into traditional U.S. fiefdoms like Latin America, and could become particularly problematic if the Chinese ever move militarily against Taiwan.
The GOP's drive to steamroll opposition to free trade -- instead of looking for practical compromises on labor and environmental standards -- could soon make it just about impossible to pass any more trade deals, unless the Republican House leadership intends to start using stress positions on party dissidents and holding votes open for three days instead of three hours . . .
the administration has marginalized the United States in the shaping of an International Criminal Court it someday will feel compelled to join . . .
[the Bush administration] virtually destroyed NATO without creating a replacement vehicle for managing relations with either the "new" or the "old" Europe. . . [and]handed out a string of security IOUs in Central Asia that it will be hard pressed to honor without Russian cooperation . . .
The unilateralist fantasy . . . has collided with global reality -- one part economic integration, one part political disintegration, shaken and stirred. And reality has won, tying the colossus down almost as tightly as the Lilliputians did Gulliver. Now the question is: What can Gulliver do about it? Or, even more importantly, what will Gulliver try to do about it?

Not to mention Guantanamo, which will be a national shame for the United States for the next several generations.
And the world has three more years of having to try to deal with these jerks and trying to keep them from causing any more trouble. We really do need to figure out some occupational therapy kind of thing, something harmless to keep the Bush administration busy and occupied and out of the way.
Maybe an expedition to build a bridge between the two peaks of the Mount Kilimanjaros . . .

Great line of the day

The Poorman refers to this post at Bottle of Blog - You Don't Need To Be A Weatherman To Know How Badly Bush Blows:

Republicans! Pick a thing and believe in it. Stop believing in people--especially these people. George W. Bush is not a political philosophy. Stop humiliating yourselves for a guy who couldn't care less how stupid he makes you look! Nobody voted for Clinton because they thought he had a great marriage. But the rubes all voted for Bush for a bunch of crap that, after five years, we all know he couldn't care less about. Cut your losses. Let's wrap this national turkey up. Eighty percent of Republican jokers keep sticking to this clown and they're going to walk away from this administration like the investors of Arbusto and Bush Exploration, and everything else Bush ever ran--broke, embarrassed, and out of business.

Emphasis mine.
I liked this piece because it spoke to the danger we all face of "believing" in a politician, and how vulnerable that makes both us and our political processes.
Of course, we won't vote for someone we don't like, no matter how much we agree with the policies he is promoting -- that's just human. But we have to be aware of the risk we are taking if we start believing that the person IS the party. This crosses the line between leadership and the cult of personality, and takes us into the territory of tyrants and fascists.
I don't get it myself, but apparently George Bush is a likeable guy, a gee-whiz charmer, someone who inspires great loyalty among otherwise intelligent people. Most of the time, the charming people you meet are also very nice people -- but every now and then, they aren't. I have known a couple of very charming people who were, at heart, not very nice. Being charming, they didn't suffer from their mistakes and tantrums and finger-pointing and selfishness -- they sincerely believed that everything that went wrong in their lives was always someone else's fault. They were great fun to spend a few hours with, but they were stunted personalities, really, because they never had to grow up.

Canadian health care doing the Colonel Bogey March

So I read this story and a little song started running through my head:

Provinces say they can't meet year-end deadline for setting medical wait times: In the federal-provincial accord, first ministers promised evidence-based benchmarks in five areas - cardiac and cancer surgery, eye operations, joint replacements and diagnostic scans . . . Alan Hudson, who heads Ontario's wait-times program, says there is evidence to support benchmarks in only two of the five areas - cardiac surgery and cancer treatment.

Bullshit, was all the band could play

"In a broad context - hips and knees and all the rest of it - there's very little evidence," said Hudson.

Bullshit, they played it night and day

Solid evidence relating wait times and health outcomes would require double-blind studies where some patients received care quickly and others received it after a delay, he said.

Bullshit, they just played bullshit, da da da dum dum, da dum dum, da da ...
Ah ha -- now, we've got plenty of Canadians who have had to wait for-goddamn-EVER for their new hips and cataract removals and MRIs, so there's no problem finding half of the study subjects, but maybe the problem is that we just don't have enough Canadians who have actually received care quickly, to compare our data to? Of course, we are right next door to a country with ten times our population, where they have lots of people who got their cataract surgery and joint replacements and MRIs quickly, so we could use THEM for comparison, couldn't we?
Well, nobody mentioned this.
Could it be, perhaps, that the provinces just don't want to create benchmarks? Because then there would be a standard that they would have to live up to?
So here's the next shoe dropping -- in response to this first story comes this next story, titled Medical groups attack government backtracking on wait time benchmarks. And this story says establishing these benchmarks isn't really that difficult:

The Wait Times Alliance, which includes six medical specialist societies and the Canadian Medical Association, has already proposed benchmarks for the five high-priority areas.
For example, it says hip and knee replacement should be done within 24 hours in emergency cases, within 90 days in urgent cases, and within nine months in routine cases. It says heart bypass surgery should be done within 48 hours in emergency cases, and within 10 working days in routine cases. The benchmarks are based on the best available evidence and on the clinical judgment of specialists in each field, says [Alliance spokesperson Normand] Laberge. He said that 80 per cent of medical practice is not based on double-blind studies.

True, of course. And here's what the feds say, in a not-so-subtle "put up or pay us back" line.

A spokesman for Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh said the minister "believes that benchmarks will be delivered because all First Ministers agreed to the December 31 deadline. "They made the pledge and accepted the $41 billion so we expect their governments to live up to their word. No government has an option not to deliver benchmarks by December 31."

Great line of the day

Nitpicker looks at recent questions about the al-Zawahiri letter: "As a 13-year veteran of the armed forces, though, I find it repulsive that veterans like myself are put in the position where we're forced to decide whether our commander-in-chief is lying or al Qaeda is--and it's actually a hard decision!"

More Plame commentary - a toxic political culture

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

War on Terror 1 -- Constitution 0

Larry Beinhart: Fog Facts notes that the main casualty so far in the War on Terror has been the US Constitution:

The War on Terror does not catch terrorists, especially the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and the people in charge don’t really seem to care. That’s with the expenditure of $200 billion in supplementary spending, over and above the normal cost of maintaining our military and intelligence operations. Let’s look at what they actually did, instead of what they spoke of. That would suggest what the real goals are.
The big, obvious thing that the War on Terror permitted was for America to make its imperial lunge. There were papers that made it clear that this was an administration goal, the most notable one posted at the Project for a New American Century, and there were statements too. Something more subtle also took place. It is quite dangerous and it is largely unremarked.
The War on Terror permitted the administration to put an end to the concept that everyone is equal before the law.
We suddenly have people who are beneath the laws. They are called terrorists and unlawful combatants. All it takes to make someone beneath the law is to denounce them. They then have no rights, no phone call, no lawyers. They cannot argue about what they’ve been called. They can be whisked off to a prison and held incommunicado and tortured. Or at least seriously abused. It appears unlikely that this could happen to you or I or your friends across the street. But with the end of equality before the law, there really is nothing to stop it. Except our belief that our leaders are all honorable men who would not abuse such power.
Along with the creation of a class that is below the law, there is also a new class that is above the law. The presidential legal staff, including Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee and John Yoo, came up with the theory that when the presidents puts on his commander-in-chief outfit, and acts in that capacity, he is not constrained by any laws. Not international law, not the laws of the United States, not by treaties and not even by the constitution. Furthermore, anyone that he commands to do things when he is wearing that costume, is also unconstrained by those limits, statutes and laws. They are all above the law.
In addition, we have created a three tier international system in which there are entire nations below the law: terrorist states, states the harbor terrorists and failed states. There is, of course, one nation that is above the law. That is the United States.

Goodbye, Carolyn

Loose cannon, yes, but she was fun and will be missed -- Parrish not seeking re-election: "Controversial MP Carolyn Parrish is telling her constituents she won't seek re-election as a federal Liberal or as an Independent, says a report on a Toronto radio station." One of the great things about Canadian politics is how we can still elect true originals. Parrish, for all her faults, was a Canadian original and never ashamed to be one.

Tweety's great line of the day

Chris Matthews demonstrates that he actually IS a journalist. Here is how he introduced his show on Monday night -- not a bad summary of what Plame is all about and why it matters, and how it all relates to the Bush administration's push for war with Iraq:

If you don't think this leak case matters, ask yourself, what was the most frightening case you heard for going to war with Iraq? Probably it was that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium yellow cake in Africa to build nuclear weapons. The president said it in his 2003 State of the Union address. The vice president repeated it with military precision, almost like a Gatling gun, Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons, Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons, again and again.
But it wasn't true. There's no evidence even now that Saddam tried to by nuclear materials in Africa. We know that now because the man the CIA sent down there to Niger to check it out, sent there after Vice President Cheney asked the CIA to check it out, wrote a New York Times article a few months after the war started that there was no deal. Worse yet, the former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, wrote that the people around the president must have known there was no deal, even when the president and his people kept telling the country there was.
How did the Bush people react to this unwelcome news? This is what the CIA leak case, which could produce indictments any day now, is all about. Did the people around the president actively try to discredit that man who came back from Africa, to say the yellow cake story was a phony? Did they try and kill the messenger? Did they use to enormous media power of the White House to discredit the ambassador, his mission and his wife at the CIA, who suggested him for the mission?
And, in doing so, did they abuse the office and the power to which the president was elected? Did they break the law? Did they conspire to punish a critic of the war, even if their weapon was the destruction of his wife's undercover career by identifying her to the public? Did they lie about their actions to government investigators to a grand jury or even to the president himself?

Since 911. Bush has often said his job is to protect the American people -- actually it isn't of course; the president's job really is to defend the Constitution. But leaving that aside for the moment and getting back to my point -- Americans need to ask the Bush administration how well Bush actually protected them when he took them to war with Iraq.

So whose going to be the new Vice President?

Crooks and Liars reports "The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are working on stories that point to Vice President Dick Cheney as the target of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's name."
So when Cheney resigns, whose going to be the new VP?
Just figure out who is the bery least-qualified Bush patriot in the world -- how about Karen Hughes?

Great line of the day

Hunter at Daily Kos takes on the right-wing bloggers who are still trying to argue that Plame wasn't really outed as an undercover CIA agent:

Dear Whoever The Hell Comes Up With These Things: . . . It takes an act of wanton dumbassitude to assert, after the case has been investigated for two years, that maybe Plame wasn't really covert, and they'll get around any day now to figuring that out. Call me an excessive believer in the powers of investigative deduction, but I'm pretty sure that before spending two years of investigation, the CIA figured out whether or not Plame was actually covert.
Yes, this is the intellectual movement that is going to take down the mainstream media with their hard-hitting news analysis. These are the New Pundits, the FactCheckers, the Socket Rientists of Journalism. From the militia members stocking up for the nuclear apocalypse to be caused by Y2K, to the network-busting power of small animated gifs, to the monkey howls of Hillary! Hiiiiiillaryyyyyyy! that accompany the slightest dull thud in the political landscape, these are the members of 'Bush's Base'. Lord help us all, we're going to die.

Emphasis mine.
We're heard lots of Plame talking points over the last two years, haven't we - she wasn't really covert, nobody knew who she really was, she was nobody really, nothing was actually leaked, no law was really broken, the law sets such a high standard that no one could ever be actually guilty of breaking it, maybe it was Powell's fault, maybe it was Fleisher's fault, it was the reporters who told Rove and Libby that she was CIA, when Rove and Libby talked to reporters it was about welfare reform not uranium from Africa, that guy Wilson is just a publicity hound, that prosecutor is a nutcase, that guy Wilson is a nutcase, that prosecotor is just a publicity hound -- all gradually falling by the wayside as events proved them just too ridiculous for anyone to keep trying to promote.
The republicans are trying out two new talking points now.
First is that society shouldn't "criminalize politics" -- which implies that the whole thins is somehow really just a part of the usual political game that Washingtonians play, not something anyone should find illegal or take offense at, Democrats argued that nobody cared when Clinton had that affair so wouldn't it be hypocritical to care about this, oh my word can't anyone take a joke around here? Of course, this talking point won't stand for very long. There are just too many Americans who will insist on thinking that this is NOT like having a consentual affair, that outing a covert CIA agent is actually a criminal act, and how dare anyone pretend that such behaviour is OK just because you dislike her husband, what's wrong with you people anyway.
The other new talking point now is the "Rove lied to Bush" story. This may be Bush's last line of defense, the last refuge of a scoundrel.
This fairy tale describes how Bush ASKED his good buddy Karl about the Plame leak yes indeedy he DID, but then that tricky ole Rove lied -- yes, he LIED, and so our pore ole George got tricked by ole buddy Turdblossom.
Now this self-serving piece of twaddle strikes me as about as credible as the "slam-dunk" anecdote. You remember, the Woodward anecdote that in December of 2002 -- long after all the mushroom cloud remarks and the 'fixing the intellegence around the policy' memo -- that Bush supposedly asked then-CIA-director Tenant if he was really really really sure that Saddam had WMD and Tenant said it was a slam dunk. So therefore Bush believers could be comforted that their guy had TRIED to find out the truth about the WMD, he REALLY TRIED, but his staff done him wrong, and it was all Tenant's fault. This "Rove lied to Bush" line strikes me as just another fairy story about how Bush's staff done him wrong AGAIN!
So Bush's only fault, really, was that he loved, not wisely, but too well -- or something like that.

What a suprise!

Well, well, how surprising -- ". . . with Saturday's constitutional referendum appearing more likely to divide than unify the country, some within the administration have concluded that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgency . . ." Oh, quel suprise -- so, actually, Bush can argue that they have stayed the course long enough, and it would actually enhance democracy if the US just pulls troops out before the congressional midterms next fall? Except, of course, for the 20,000 troops who will hunker down on those permanent bases.
I don't know if they can actually sell this one to the American people as peace with honour, considering that war with dishonour is the more likely scenario for the next six months regardless of how many purple fingers are waggled.

Cutest kitten ever

Just for fun, I stole this from The Poorman.
The photo is actually entitled "cutest kitten ever".

Pandemic Flu Awareness Week

This week was Pandemic Flu Awareness Week on the blogs -- I haven't had anything to contribute to this discussion, but here is some handy information about personal preparedness.
Though I find the survival articles interesting -- for example, it would not have occurred to me to stockpile brown rice as a diet staple -- I am probably not scared enough or organized enough to make disaster preparedness part of my daily life. However, I did find this post from Aetiology
How ready are we, and what can YOU do? which gives some pretty basic advice that I can follow:

. . . wash your hands . . . many of us still don’t do it correctly. It is recommended to wash with soap and running water for at least 20 seconds . . . Teach your children to do this as well: have them count to 20 or sing their ABC’s while washing their hands . . .
If you’re sick, please, please, please stay home. Adults are contagious for ~5 days and children for up to 21 days after becoming sick. Don’t go and expose others when you’re coughing, sneezing and hacking all over the place.
Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth . . . re-train yourself not to cover your mouth with your hands when you cough: use a tissue, or the crook of your arm—-something that won’t come into contact as often with surfaces, or with other people.
Get a flu shot. No, it won’t protect you from “bird” flu, but should that virus spread, it will prevent you from being co-infected with both viruses and passing along any potential recombinant viruses . . .
Get stocked up. You should always have a supply of food, water, medications, and basic household necessities on hand in the event of any kind of disaster . . .

Great line of the day

Crawl Across the Ocean writes:

. . . our 'qwerty' keyboard receives it's non-intuitive layout ad part of a scheme to slow typists sown do that they wouldn't overload the typewriters of the say. . . . it occurred to me that - in this era of spell-checkers - if I has been allocates the task of redesigning the keyboard, the best thing to so would be to come up with a layout which minimized the chanced of mid-typing something but still creating a valid word at the dame time. I wouldn't put the 's' and the 'd' beside each other, that id for sure.

Emphadid mine.

Mark A. R. Kleiman: Patrick Fitzgerald's mousetrap

Mark Kleinman's blog on Patrick Fitzgerald's mousetrap explains the latest Plame theory-of-everything pretty well, a scenario which is particularly believable in terms of the egotistical personalities involved in this story. Read the whole thing.