FIRE IMUS & TAKE RADIO REPTILES STERN, LIMBAUGH DOWN WITH HIM

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Radio snake Don Imus, who may or may not survive his having referred to student athletes as “nappy-headed ho’s” on the air, could be legitimately fired for each and every moronic episode of his show – as should perverted Howard Stern, dope-addled Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of their ilk.
These radio personalities represent the dumbing down of America to absurd levels no one could have imagined just a few years ago. They're vicious clowns of no redeeming social value who have no allegiance to truth, fairness, or any sort of moral code west of Taliban country.

America suffers from dumbed down elections, music, TV, education, morality, logic, newspapers, weekly magazines, 24-hour news, you name it. And nowhere is it more evident than talk radio, where vocal reptiles like Imus race to the noxioius bottom of the listeners’ barrel to scoop up fame and profit from an alarming deterioration of standards and taste.

Imus is the guy who once told a series of terrible jokes based on Bill Clinton’s extra-marital affairs at a black-tie dinner attended by Bill and Hillary. He got what he wanted – publicity. Where I grew up a guy like that would have been instantly dragged out to the nearest alley for justice. Such a solution is neither terribly intelligent nor always fair, because the ability to pound lumps in a guy’s head is not always in synch with the justness of the pounder’s cause. But seeing it would have been a guilty pleasure.

In that particular case a dumbed-down radio personality was relying on dumbed-down politics to increase the audience of his dumbed-down show. No low-life could have insulted Harry Truman like that because he’d have turned it all around on the perpetrator. But Imus knew his man. He knew the Clintons, who are fuzzy on morals and can’t make a serious move without a focus group to guide them, would sit there and take it, and Imus would get the headlines he so desperately craved.

Years ago friends tried to persuade me there’s actually substance to Howard Stern, that I should try him out. The second time I heard his show he and his ghastly crew of ass-kissers superimposed their own catcalls and laughter over a 911 tape of tearful Joaquin Phoenix’s call to police as his brother River died of a drug overdose on the Sunset Strip. If there was something funny to say about the death of a 23-year-old kid, these fools didn’t find it. I’ve despised Stern ever since.

Limbaugh is a scumbag who styles himself as a kind of political analyst until you catch him telling a flat-out lie, in which case he pleads he’s merely an entertainer. The ascendance of Imus, Limbaugh, Stern, and their clones was aided by the fact that most of their listeners are alone in their vehicles where they feel safer indulging in a moral decay they find appealing.

Fire Imus? Of course. But not just because of his latest racist remarks. Fire him because of what he does every day to make dumbed-down America dumber – and viler.

McCAIN SOLVES IRAQ -- ON TO OTHER PROBLEMS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

John McCain never gets the credit he deserves. The man is a creative thinker whose smallest ideas sometimes contain blockbuster solutions to problems that grow apace while our 21st century Nero fiddles at the Texas White House.
What McCain inadvertently discovered last week was a sure-fire solution to Iraq’s security issues. He demonstrated that if we provide each of its 25 million citizens with 100 U.S. troops on the ground, Apache choppers overhead and military vehicles bristling with automatic weapons to block off streets feeding into their destinations, all Iraqi citizens, providing they wear flak jackets and don't let others know their destinations, should be secure enough to conduct their everyday business with reasonable assurance they won’t be kidnapped or blown to bits. That’s a darn hot discovery and it was pretty much ignored by news media, including all those blogger Bolsheviks who lay claim to some special handle on the truth.
What it means is we can indeed meet the stated goals of the present mission in Iraq of providing a stable foundation so democracy there may flourish like it does here, where a voter in Idaho has approximately five thousand two hundred percent more clout in electing a U.S. senator than a voter in California and where all the stories lately are about how much money a candidate can raise for the 30-second attack ads that will win the electiion.
But I digress. McCain showed us that if we merely allocate proper resources to this surge we should be able to accomplish Bush’s stated goal of staying over there as long as the Iraqis want us. (even though most of them say it's okay to kill U.S. soldiers -- and those polled include Kurds, just about the only people over there who can stand us and who had already broken free of Saddam before we invaded)
Yes, Bush really said that. But it's McCain who demonstrates with such unique vision and clarity just where we're headed. And in 2008 when we ask our new President what he/she is going to do now, the new boss can exclaim with glee, "I'm going to McCainLand!"

GET OUT THE FIRE HOSE -- MAD DOG CHENEY'S AT IT AGAIN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

You have to give credit to our chicken-hawk veep for his unyielding though insufferable persistence. When he gets hold of a lie, you can train a fire hose on him and he still won't let go. Yesterday the unrepentant loon repeated his assertions of al-Qaida links to Saddam Hussein.
This flat declaration, made with the cruel impatience that only a severely impaired maniac can muster, conflicted with brand-new evidence on top of all the old evidence that no such link existed. The new evidence came in the form of the simultaneous release of a Defense Department report confirming that Saddam’s regime never cooperated with al-Qaida. Heads are gonna have to roll at the Pentagon.
As he is wont to do, Dick Cheney, a guy who appointed himself, made his goofy assertion before an audience of imbeciles -- this time listeners to the archbishop of all things hypocritical -- hard-core doper and gay-baiting gay Rush Limbaugh.

Terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Cheney said, “took up residence (in Iraq) before we ever launched into Iraq, organized the al-Qaida operations inside Iraq before we even arrived on the scene and then, of course, led the charge for Iraq until we killed him last June."
Only teeny parts of that statement are true, of course, but look carefully at Cheney’s language and how cleverly he integrates what's real with what's invented. Cheney’s a careful user of words. I particularly enjoyed his branding of Iraq as the “central front in the war against terror.” He’s very good at saying stuff that doesn’t say what you think it said.

Notice this time our tenacious Tyrant Number Two didn’t say Zarqawi received any sort of cooperation from Saddam, only that Zarqawi operated in pre-war Iraq. By these standards we should launch immediate invasions of both Spain and the United Kingdom, where al-Qaida functionaries operated and launched large-scale terror attacks. Oregon and New York should also be on the lookout for U.S. helicopter assaults, because al-Qaida wannabes were captured there as well.

Over the years I’ve come to admire the use of this administration’s rhetoric. After the invasion blew up in his face and timid reporters got around to asking Bush whether . . . well, maybe this invasion wasn’t such a good idea . . . Bush would kill his near-perpetual smirk, put on his Top Gun face and reply, “Everyone agreed Saddam was a threat.” And by God, it was true.
But no reporters followed up with something like Hey, numbnuts, the Soviet Union was a threat, but none of your predecessors was stupid enough to invade it. You don’t invade every country that dislikes you, do you, dickhead? Bush got away with this over and over, figuring, heck, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Speaking of questions that are actual questions reminds me -- where’s that credentials application for the next Rose Garden edition of the White House’s kook-encrusted explanation of the world? Oh, I remember. They turned me down in favor of a gay prostitute. (Long story)

WHITE HOUSE TRIES TO ERASE PUBLIC'S MEMORY OF 2 U.S. TROOPS CAPTURED IN IRAQ

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Our expanding casualty list from Iraq of 3,265 American dead and 26,188 wounded or med-evaced for other causes comes to us incomplete. In all U.S. wars before this, casualties included dead, wounded, and missing. This administration begrudgingly releases stats on dead and wounded but doesn’t want to remind Americans that two of our soldiers are missing, so it doesn’t, and our obliging nitwit mass media go along, making the two soldiers invisible men, trees falling in a forest uninhabited by real journalists.

The fate of these two soldiers is unknown. They should be listed on any casualty toll and not forgotten, which is what the White House would like us to do.
Among the many reasons this administration wants us to forget them is its blatant disavowal of the Geneva Convention, and innumerable documented instances of Iraqi prisoners being tortured, humiliated, beaten, and killed. It knows it can’t plead for humane treatment and be taken seriously after all the world saw photos of war crimes at Abu Ghraib, for which no one above the rank of sergeant has been tried.

Bush, Cheney, et al, see our troops as inanimate chess pieces they don’t identify as actual people – you know, the kind they see around the country club or the boardroom. Neither Bush nor Cheney has attended even one funeral of the fallen -- a first in American history for people filling those offices. If you want to know how much our tyrannical team cares for our soldiers, ask any of the disabled Iraq war vets who've been waiting two years for a check.

Army Reservist Ahmed Qusai al-Taie, 42, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, was abducted October 23, 2006 when he left the Green Zone, reportedly to see his Iraqi wife. Al-Taie was born in Iraq, but moved to the U.S. as a teenager. His Military Occupational Specialty is translator. The accompanying photo of him (on the left) was released by a Shiite milita – you know, the pals our dimwitted warrior prince has allied himself with against the Sunnis. These buddies of his also killed Casey Sheehan, Cindy’s son.

Al-taie was first reported at "a relative's home when three cars pulled up to the residence," a U.S. military spokesman said. "The hostage-takers handcuffed him and forced him into one of their vehicles," Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said.

Sgt. Keith Matthew Maupin, 23, of Batavia, Ohio, pictured on the right, from footage shown on Arabic-language Al Jazeera TV, disappeared in April 2004 after his convoy was attacked near Baghdad International Airport. He was a PFC at the time. His status originally was "whereabouts unknown." The military changed that to "missing-captured" after Al-Jazeera showed a videotape of Maupin held captive by insurgents.

Two months later, Al-Jazeera said it had received a videotape and statement from insurgents who claimed they killed Maupin, but U.S. officials were unable to verify this, and his status remains "missing-captured."

Maupin and al-Taie are our sons. If you’re a taxpayer, you sent them out there to do a job. We have a responsibility to get them back. Don’t let this administration get away with erasing their existence.

THIS WHITE HOUSE IS KILLING US FOR REAL

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

If you wonder how our warrior Prince George can so callously throw more American youths into the Iraqi meatgrinder in a moronic effort to salvage his blighted legacy, just look at how casually he kills other Americans in order to fatten the wallets of his greedhead friends.

His demented, malevolence has been proved to us over and over during our six-year nightmare, but most recently in two blatant cases involving global warming and sociopathic Big Tobacco poisoning.

Only a week ago it was revealed that his administration put the fix in for death by tobacco in a blockbuster six-year mega-case. In a March 22 report by Carol Leonnig in the Washington Post, ex-Justice Department attorney Sharon Eubanks related the Bush officials’ interference. Tobacco pushers had been utterly trapped at last, with documentary evidence showing they’d lied about a product they knew was inflicting regular disease and death on Americans. The court was poised to exact a $130 billion levy, much of which would have gone toward educating young Americans against the dangers of cigarettes. Studies show these programs work. But Eubanks now tells us that on the eve of victory, the department ordered the requested levy be sliced to $10 billion. That consigned hosts of Americans to a life of disease and early death, but before they expire they'll shell out blood money to a vicious industry that must create new addicts to replace the ones it kills.

Presiding US District Judge Gladys Kessler wrote, “Over the course of more than 50 years, defendants lied, misrepresented, and deceived the American public, including smokers and the young people they avidly sought as ‘replacement smokers,’ about the devastating health effects of smoking and environmental tobacco smoke, they suppressed research, they destroyed documents, they manipulated the use of nicotine so as to increase and perpetuate addiction, they distorted the truth about low-tar and light cigarettes so as to discourage smokers from quitting, and they abused the legal system in order to achieve their goal—to make money with little, if any, regard for individual suffering, soaring health costs, or the integrity of the legal system.” These were the twisted, hateful, greedy geeks the Bush Administration chose to align itself with.

Then we saw the Justice Department go all the way to the Supreme Court to push its screwy thesis that the EPA lacked the power to monitor polluting emissions that exacerbate global warming. Here we have a power-mad administration that claims the right to read our mail and listen to our phone calls without a warrant, to suspend habeas corpus, torture suspects in the bowels of a secretive international CIA gulag, and ignore law through the stepped-up use of "signings" to legislation. Yet rather than help citizens breathe and fight against the ravages of our poaching planet, suddenly it claims it’s just a little ole toothless government with no power to exact civilized policies from Big Oil and other serial polluters.

The 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in favor of citizens versus the lunatics was encouraging, but those four votes against us were yet another wake-up call. Justice John Paul Stevens, instrumental in this and other cases defending us against the pirates who run the administration, will be 87 this month. Should Bush appoint his successor, the harsh legacy of his fiendish stewardship will follow us with greater strength for decades.

Meanwhile, more troops head for Iraq to suffer death, disfigurement, and possible capture (our inept corporate news media never, ever mention the missing when they cite casualties), dispatched by such a deeply deranged fool he has yet to re-examine any of the deluded platitudes and slogans that in the dim-witted recess of his mind pass for moral policy.

LOONY QUESTS OF POWER-MAD GIULIANI, McCAIN CLASH WITH REALITY; WHERE'S DODGEBALL HILLARY FIT IN?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

You have to wonder about the judgment and sanity of some of these no-hope presidential candidates. I don’t mean fringe players like Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who runs, apparently, without expectation of victory, but whose primary purpose is to direct attention to a cause (in his case, the cause of an aggressively liberal agenda that pays no heed to the demands of mega-corporate players).

What’s startling and almost inexplicable are the truly weird candidates out there expecting to win – Rudy Giuliani and John McCain being the most extreme examples. How could these two possibly have any expectation of success? Carrying baggage that positively reeks, they face two successive, towering hurdles – getting past the hard-core Republican zealots who vote in the primaries and then taking a sharp left turn to pick up the independents they must win over to prevail in the general election while still hanging on to the fringe-weirdo Republican vote.

Giuliani is so vulnerable to the facts of his history that in a national election he’d be in trouble against Porky Pig. Not just the fact that he married his cousin, was forced to admit marital infidelity during an ugly divorce proceeding, and is a serial cross-dresser. Not just the ugly history of his daffy, dog-torturing present wife, either. First, Giuliani put a particularly odious fix in to slide under the Vietnam-era draft (the facts, as I said, are there; one need only look). That bit of his past was overlooked in the run for NYC mayor, but it won't play in Peoria. As mayor, he got lots of publicity for the sharp reduction in New York City crime, but the real mover there was Police Commissioner William Bratton, who, using computer-mapping techniques to pinpoint crime, reduced serious offenses by more than one-third and murder by almost half in just two years. When reporters sniffed out Bratton, Giuliani got rid of him. Not the mark of a leader.

Then Rudy showed oddly wild enthusiasm for unaccomplished Detective Bernard Kerik, pulling him way up into the city bureaucracy and later getting dim-witted George Bush to nominate him to run Homeland Security. Kerik is about to be indicted for a trail of sleaze that followed him up the ladder of success, and Giuliani is stuck to him as Laurel was to Hardy.

McCain took his eye off the ball long ago. It’s nearly impossible to name an issue on which he hasn’t listed mightily from one side to the other, all in his mad pursuit of acclamation, approval, and the presidency. Now he’s unabashed leader of the wildly demented Iraq war hawks, who never saw an irrational U.S. escalation they didn’t love.

McCain is old, and like Giuliani, he’s suffered from both cancer and irrational exuberance for his blighted personal cause. Their unelectable national status is firm as the carvings on Mount Rushmore. Some other Republican will win the nomination.

The real question is whether hated, untrusted, eerie Hillary Clinton is just as crazy as Giuliani and McCain. Whereas McCain has taken every possible position on every possible issue, Hillary takes no clear position on anything. If you asked her whether she preferred cherry or apple pie she'd have to run it through a focus group before replying, and you'd still get no definitive answer. She's a phantom candidate with the beliefs of a snail. But like Giuliani and McCain, she believes in her right to prevail and to rule.

All three of those candidates have access to serious money from their elite paymasters. That won’t be enough to help Rudy and John. The story on Hillary has yet to clarify itself. Of late she's turned more and more to Bill to shore up her absence of charisma or clearcut policy. The strategy is to go after the nostalgia vote -- promising the same old dynasty with the same old Clintonite Klingons in the entourage, and a shared presidency -- a 21st century William and Mary, Ferdinand & Isabella setup. Can't America do better than this?

WHY ARE DEMENTED SLEAZE-O-CRATS LIKE CONDOLEEZA RUNNING AROUND GIVING OTHER COUNTRIES ADVICE?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

This vile gang of inept psychos that stole our government out from under us is actually surprised when countries like Egypt object to their arrogant instructions on how to achieve a more perfect society.

Here’s a coven of creepoids that steals the presidency and instantly dumbs down the government by 40 IQ points, leaving us wide open for a terrorist strike. Then they wage the wrong war against the wrong people so they can achieve their personal, financial, and pathological objectives. They establish a gulag of secret prisons whose operatives torture even unto death, smack down habeas corpus, read our mail without court approval, refuse to abide by the Geneva Convention, and drop uranium-depleted shells on civilians while ordering a second helping of apple-cranberry tarts. And after our troops using third-rate gear get their limbs blown off, they're screwed again by an administration that denies them their rightful benefits.

Meanwhile, Condoleeza Rice, fresh off the bestiality circuit, parachutes into Cairo, and get this -- she gets in a snit over proposed changes to the Egyptian constitution because they don’t meet her standards of democracy. Well, there are subjects on which Rice’s suggestions are worth listening to -- for example, if you’d like to alienate the whole world, poach the Earth over a slow flame, or learn how best to fasten electrodes to someone’s genitals. These are all subjects on which she has more than casual knowledge. But when you’re tinkering with a Constitution, you don’t want her in the same time zone.

Our country has lost the right to make suggestions on civil rights, democracy, or standards of decency. Yet demented dolts like Rice scamper around the Earth like roaches with a license to kill, telling everyone else how to live. Banana republics run better elections than we do. Even when no one’s stealing them, they’re not fair. San Jose, one of California's smaller cities, has approximately twice as many residents as all of Wyoming. Yet each state gets the same number of senators? Gimme a break. Then we pollute this shaky structure of ours further by allowing a shadowy elite to choose leaders according to how much money they can raise for their campaigns. And after they take office, these morality-challenged creatures spend the rest of their terms paying back their contributors with policies that smell like rotting flesh. A country that kills the inheritance tax on billionaires while it fails to establish a civilized health care system and cuts aid to college students is crumbling. Even Egypt can see that.

WILL GONZALEZ BE THE RAT THAT LEADS US TO THE BLOOD TRAILS?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

This Alberto Gonzalez character – a shameless wretch who perfectly fits the role of chief law enforcement officer for this administration -- would, under normal circumstances, have already been thrown into the street with his belongings in a cardboard box. After all, he’s been caught lying blatantly and fluidly to Congress, therefore drawing way too much heat on the deluded sleazeballs and sociopaths with whom he consorts. The next time he goes up the Hill to testify -- and Cabinet members can’t hide behind executive privilege -- it won’t require much labor for Democrats to compare the transcripts of his previous testimony (“I would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney position for political reasons,” blah, blah, blah) with the text of those damning emails.

So why hasn’t the White House made a patsy out of him and tossed him out? All they have to do is leak it around that Gonzalez lost his moorings and though he did so with the best of intentions, committed these atrocities all on his own. And Gonzalez, following the usual pattern, would then tell us he wants to spend more time with his family. That's that.

Yet he remains in the fold. Could it be that behind the White House gates, the chief swine are running scared? Fearful he’ll spill what he knows about the inner workings of the Dark Side? Maybe he's got so much on them they can’t afford to keep him and they can’t afford to have him out there spilling his guts.

The longer Gonzalez hangs around, the more likely that’s the case. That would mean he’s already led them to believe they can't count on him to behave like that guy who apologized to Cheney for getting shot in the face. He may be hinting that if they hang him out there alone he'll finger others – perhaps even members of the untouchable troika – Bush, Cheney, and Rove. Scooter Libby, counting on a pardon, didn’t take them down. Gonzalez might have other ideas.

The Democratic committee chairs in the Congress have barely begun sifting through the vileness and criminality of this administration. Armed with the power of subpoena, they’re going to find lots, lots more. For all we know, Gonzalez is a short cut to bigger cases, to a pattern of felonies around the globe. After all, he fired prosecutors who were exposing Republican crimes.

This could unlock the room where they keep the evidence of fixed contracts, payoffs, traded favors, war profiteering, body parts. We’re in a race to see whether these cowardly thugs who stole our country can reach January '09 before Congress finds the blood trails. At some point they'll begin turning on one another. It’s going to be an interesting couple of years, all right. Yet it’s impossible to enjoy them while people are still dying in Iraq.

To let these schmucks pursue their madness overseas in the midst of these revelations is crazy. It’s like letting some deranged nut wearing a cape and no pants perform heart surgery on one of your family members while he's also having phone sex with a congressional page.

'SUPPORT OUR TROOPS & BY THE WAY, WHEN DID YOU STOP BEATING YOUR WIFE?'

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

“Whatever our differences in Washington, our troops and their families deserve the appreciation and the support of our entire nation.”

Those were Bush’s words in his nationwide address today. Our warrior prince asked for patience because heck, we’re just getting started. Give us a chance. If you weasels don’t like me, at least support our troops. His meaning and purpose were to perpetuate the “support our troops” device that worked so well so long. Three ghoulish words that are an accusation tangled inside a threat, pretending to exemplify sweet, positive thinking when in fact they’re an attack, an admonition, an ugly masquerade.

The three words on the stickers shitheads love to slap on their vehicles announce there are Americans out there who don’t support our troops, who wish evil things on our brave boys and girls, so maybe if the saintly, the right-minded, the true patriots all stand up and declare their loyalty, we can unmask these treasonous, terrorist-loving louts. Either you're with me, Bush tells us, or you're against the troops.

George Orwell, who predicted the next totalitarians would tell us that war is peace and freedom is slavery, would enjoy the perfect irony of “Support our troops,” a lie of demonic magnificence. It’s the Orwellian shield behind which the hard-core rockhead coalition of avid chicken hawks, pro-torture evangelicals, gun-o-maniacs, racists, anti-tax greedheads, and other disturbed geeks work out their little deals to bite off a bigger piece of the action for themselves while they feed our troops into the Iraqi trash compactor.

Today, the fourth anniversary of the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of our republic, is a good day to stand up to those words.

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS CONGRESS WILL OK NEW FUNDING FOR BUSH'S HECK OF A JOB IN IRAQ? BELIEVE IT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Monday marks four years since our self-anointed wartime leader, mounted on a stuffed pony atop the hill, raised his hand Sitting-Bull style and sent the Coalition of the Willing across the frontier into Iraq. Demonstrators will mark the anniversary on Saturday, but they won’t be numerous because there’s no military draft. The message from the public is if someone from your family loses a life or a limb or something over there, hey, you took your chances. Besides, I'm doing my part; I've got a Support Our Troops sticker on my vehicle.

What ever happened to the report from that bipartisan panel led by Daddy's consigliere James A. Baker III? The one that said start pulling out and go heavy on diplomacy? It got big play for a while, but now it's another forgotten news story, this year's Tanya Harding, only not, of course, as big as the already-forgotten death of Anna Nicole Smith. Remember the surge? It's going on right now and no one pays much attention.

Invading Iraq was a kind of neocon dream but never an actual plan. It was more like a 5-year-old kid saying he wants to be an astronaut. It’s something he might want, but he has no idea what’s involved in getting there – science, math aeronautics, that sort of stuff. He just thinks astronauts wear cool space suits.

So neocons Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith and their weak-minded convert Bush Junior didn’t concern themselves with Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis, Iran, or any of the details. They wouldn't even bother to read a State Department report warning them of the danger, and when they found out they didn't have sufficient troops to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq they pulled troops out of Afghanistan.

Their duplicity, incompetence, and endless lying has been proved so many times in so many ways, there have been so many insiders who jumped ship and ratted out their former colleagues, that at this point answering the war's supporters is like arguing with the Flat Earth Society.

When it all fell apart – no ties to Bin Laden, no WMD – the Bush-o-ramusses went into a huddle and came up with a new goal they’d send other people’s kids to die for – establishing democracy in Iraq, making it a beacon of sweetness and light for all the Muslim world to see.

In the meantime the invasion and occupation of the oilfields infused crazies all across the Mideast – in Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt – with new strength. Also, Iran and North Korea decided they better really get moving on those nuclear bombs because they figured correctly that, ironically, if Saddam really had nukes, the U.S. would never have invaded. This new guy in Washington was so crazy he attacked countries just because he didn’t like them, kind of like the character in Johnny Cash’s song who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

It’s hard to believe that after all the these failures the chicken hawks atop our government stay on-message with their loony non-policy of endless occupation. As Zbigniew Brzezinski testified in the Senate, his greatest fear about an administration secret plan "is that there is no secret plan." The dead and wounded are still piling up, for which we pay somewhere above $6 billion a month, enough to finance a seriously good universal health care system, fight systemic poverty, and do something real to stop poisoning the Earth.

Bush, just before this damnable anniversary, sent down a new Iraq appropriations bill. Amazingly, Congress will approve it. All the Democrats could muster in opposition was a bill that sets the goal of ending the war in eighteen more months and is so full of loopholes that even when September 2008 arrives, ignoring the deadline will carry no consequences. Those members, like Nancy Pelosi, for instance, who say no to the war and yes to its new funding are basically taking a stand against cannibalism while writing a check (from our account) to buy Hannibal Lector new cutlery.

WAGING 'CLASS WARFARE’ ISN’T SUCH A BAD IDEA

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

If trust-buster Theodore Roosevelt, who managed to rein in the most blatant corruption of his day, saw how politicians operate today -- touring haunts of the super-rich where they openly beg for alms and then perform huge favors for them at the expense of everyone else -- Teddy would call in federal marshals. But then he’d discover that in most instances the bribes are legal.

The bribe-takers have long since cemented legislation in place designed to keep them out of the penitentiary while their gratuities roll in. Everybody knows what’s going on, but we’ve been taught to pretend the gifts have no influence on takers. They buy only “access.” At least that’s the story the givers and takers tell. Not coincidentally, the U.S. distribution of wealth is the absolute worst in the Western World and getting worse all the time. Nearly 50 million Americans were walking around without health insurance at the same time Prince George and Congress, including many Democrats such as Diane Feinstein, killed the inheritance tax.

These crazy excesses look very much like what was going on during the years preceding Teddy’s reforms. But nowadays the lower classes aren’t offended by the conspicuous consumption of the super-rich. They just want to join the club. All across America people have taken out second mortgages to buy 8,000-pound, $90,000 SUVs to drive to the 7-Eleven for a quart of milk so they can pretend they're not desperate losers.

This new Gilded Age weirdly concides with a period of great religious awakening in America, the most religious country in the Western World. Curiously, the Christian Right, which is attempting and in many ways succeeding in putting its zombie legions in charge of schools, health, and science, is allied with conspicuous consumers like my neighbor Deepak Chopra, who's building a 20,000-square-foot home on the next hill. The church fascists provide a welcoming governmental environment for all the Fools on all the Hills. (See my March 2 LEISURE CLASS GOING BONKERS WITH EXCESS two posts below this one.)

“The politics of envy” is one of those hammers that hired hands for the super-rich start swinging whenever they run into someone who hints that lust for possessions has gone over the top, that perhaps corporate executives worth hundreds of millions who steal more hundreds of millions from their shareholders are a symptom of systemic disease. Their lackeys – authors, Supreme Court judges, senators, Fox newscasters, and the like -- are quick to batter us with slogans they apply to anyone applying rational thought to these bizarre phenomena. By using the same words, they can make their falsehoods seem more true.

For instance, they like to accuse critics of waging “class warfare.” In my case, they’re correct. I’m a proud, card-carrying warrior in the war between the classes, or at least I would be if such a war existed in this country. It can’t because whenever pollsters ask people about their status in the socio-economic structure, just about everybody says they belong to the middle class. That includes the very, very rich as well as people in trailer courts. And I’m not talking about the nice trailer courts with brave, well-tended little gardens. I mean the ones where the man of the trailer watches TV twirling a 14-shot, nine-millimeter pistol and sometimes can be seen on reality cop shows getting dragged out in an undershirt and handcuffs for cooking meth or beating his significant other.

Ask those guys being stuffed into the back seat of the patrol car if they’re middle class and they’ll probably say yes. The cop who’s doing the stuffing would tell you he’s middle-class, too – same league, but on a different team. Americans who can’t even identify their location in the economy are useless dingbats in the political world, sitting silently while politicans working for tips kick them farther down the ladder.

TO SWITCH WEIRDLY CONFIGURED POWER COUPLES, GIVE CLINTONS ANOTHER TURN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

What’s the matter, Bunky? Empty-suited President got you down? Sick of all the lying, posturing, faking, the theft of planeloads of cash, not to mention a six-figure death toll in a pointless war while the Gulf Coast remains a twisted mess of trash? Uncertain what to do about becoming in just a few short years the most hated country on Earth?

Tired of all the relentless ineptitude twinned with the most tenacious arrogance since DeGaulle tried to stare down Churchill and Roosevelt? Afraid to turn on the news because you’ll just hear about more dead and disfigured G.I.s in Iraq while Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Halliburton and all their parasitic pals romp through the oil fields? Are you bent out of shape by religious crazies who use government funds to convert new batches of religious crazies so they can attain new heights of church-statism, a Justice Department that fires people for doing their jobs, and an EPA whose goal is to wreck itself?

Well, don’t do anything real, like following the Constitution and impeaching this insufferable tyrant and his dangerously demented vice president. Don’t even stop funding the war that is not a war but really a madhouse of homicidal factions the simple-minded White House can’t even hope to understand.

Instead, step up and get not one, but two Clintons for the price of one. While they last. Not available in stores. Fresh out of the box.

Yes, starting in January 2009 you can wake up to the same tired old faces from the first eight Clinton years. Go backwards! That’s what monarchy’s all about. Comforting, isn’t it? Everybody gets it. That’s why it can work. Stop torturing yourself trying to choose leaders. Instead, just switch royal families! Give the other one a turn.

Because America doesn’t have just one set of imperial bounders. Heck no, fresh out of New York and Washington, following their previous rave engagements in the boondocks of Arkansas and straight off the cover of People, etc., we give you the Clintons! With Obama and Edwards hot on the heels of Hillary’s twisted pronouncements that don’t say what they appear to say, the desperate dynamic Clinton duo has proclaimed for all the world (at the civil rights commemoration in Selma and at various fund-raisers) that yes indeed, they’re a package!

This time you don’t get the puppet-puppeteer weirdly Oedipal kind of duo you suffered with the Bush-Cheney shared-power arrangement. Instead you get this one-time, unique opportunity to install a feuding, scheming two-headed hydra kind of president. Even Fox will be happier as it descends to record depths interviewing therapists, astrologers, feng shui experts, you name it, to speculate about the presidential sleeping arrangements, tortured decision-making processes, and who knows what else eight more years of monarchy will bring? Sleep together? Heck, we can't even guarantee the Clintons like each other. Doesn't that make it all the more exciting?

Operators are standing by.

LEISURE CLASS GOING BONKERS WITH EXCESS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

My neighbor on the next hill is building a 20,000-square-foot home. I haven't seen the blueprints, but that's big enough to house a multi-plex theater and a commercial bowling alley. The owner, Deepak Chopra, is a physician out of India who hit it big on the American self-help guru circuit.

His website says, “Dr. Chopra's work is changing the way the world views physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social wellness.” The structure Chopra is building to tune up his personal mental, emotional, spiritual and social wellness will spread over several lots, with fantastic shoreline views over the 25-mile stretch from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Malibu. Even without a telescope, Chopra will be able to pick out distant mansions of similar ilk that have been multiplying like giant rats and are now landmarks for jetliners flying in and out of Los Angeles International Airport. Among them would be the Brentwood mansion of environmental sympathizer Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his bride Maria Shriver, whose garage holds a fleet of Hummers.

Also down there are car dealers selling million-dollar Bugattis and Beverly Hills jewelry stores where you can pick up a $300,000 Patek-Philippe or order a specialty watch for over a million.
Of course this is not just a California phenomenon. All around the globe the super-rich are jumping into an arms race of purchases, but displaying obscene wealth is especially okay in America, where everybody figures he or she can be the next Donald Trump, only with a better haircut.

Ron Perelman, defined by the news media as a financier, sold his oceanfront estate in Palm Beach for over $70 million. He didn’t leave it for a bungalow. Yachts keep getting bigger and bigger. In late 2004, The Wall Street Journal, beginning to focus on the phenomenon of excess, discovered boat builders were slapping together plenty of pleasure craft longer than 200 feet on special order from buyers willing to put up $100 million or more.

All those adjoining lots purchased by my neighbor so he could spread out and be more comfortable had to be worth at least $3 million apiece. Figure in architect’s fees, gymnasium, marble floors, chandeliers, a place to store the lawn mower, and all the other what-nots and extras that go into such elephantine habitats, and we’re looking at something like $50 million for a single-family residence. For the record, my family and I live in a four-bedroom house that takes up 1,834 square feet. Years ago we lived in 3,000 square feet. To me the home seemed as big as Montana, and there I quickly discovered how inconvenient it was to live in a place where sometimes the inhabitants aren’t in shouting range of each other. I found myself wandering through too many rooms to find the damn newspaper.

In further irony, the owners of these monstrous mansions generally camouflage them with shrubbery, fences, and other architectural shields. They want the rabble to know they're in there, but don't trust them with the details. If you’re anything like me, you stand puzzled by all this grasping for stuff that has no use. I like luxury as well as the next person, but clearly at some point it crosses the line into Goofyland. “How much better can you eat?” Detective Gittes asked super-rich incest-monger Noah Cross in Robert Towne’s splendid script for Chinatown. “What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”

This culture of the absurd was examined with precision and derision in 1899 when philosopher and economist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class. In it, he coined the terms “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste” and took a piercing, wry look at what the ruling class of his time was doing with its immense wealth. He discovered that these people were infatuated with owning goods that had absolutely no use whatsoever other than to advertise to everyone else that they could afford to waste valuable resources on utterly useless stuff. They also, Veblen decided, had a secondary purpose – trying to make everyone who couldn’t afford expensive, useless stuff eat their livers. Ridiculously huge mansions filled with servants were among his many examples of such conspicuous consumption of useless stuff, along with stables full of riding horses and jeweled walking sticks. Inverse snob Veblen failed to see that some owners may have been caring souls pursuing physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and social wellness.

'WHAT I HEARD ABOUT IRAQ'

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Worn out from the unceasing barrage of ineptitude, arrogance, and falsehoods, beaten-down voters look to the future like sleepers in the blistered confusion of a nightmare about to end. They know they can get screwed badly over the next two years, but after that, whatever goes wrong will go wrong under another president, and heck, we can do two years standing on our head. Why, it’s not even as long as we had to endure the O.J. coverage.

Yet the night holds more nightmares: Innocents (that includes our own sons and daughters) will keep dying in Iraq. We may drop a nuke or two on Iran. The globe will continue poaching over a low flame. The Bush regime will resist pollution controls. Fundamentalist storm troopers and plugged-in corporations will keep picking our pockets. Corrupt Iraqi plutocrats who understand his weaknesses better than Democrats in Congress ever did will keep outsmarting our dimwitted prince. Our health bills will go up. Health delivery will go down. Al Qaeda will score more victories in Afghanistan and may yet pull another Nine-Eleven on us. And Bush will lie about all of it. As Leonard Cohen tells us, "Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed."

But in order to keep the damage down in the future, we need to understand more about how, during the previous six years we got beaten to the punch time after time by an administration chock full of cowardly, posturing chicken hawks.

A writer by the name of Eliot Weinberger, in a February 3, 2005 article in the London Review of Books, did it the right way. You can find it here. Copy the link and call it up. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n03/wein01_.html

Good writer Weinberger shows, rather than tells.
The article, “What I heard in Iraq,” should have been a knockout punch to this administration. Natually it wasn't ready for prime time in the U.S. In a series of chronological statements and events Weinberger catalogs the administration’s lies and denials as he cites indisputable facts the blunder-amusses disputed anwyay. We see how the wretched Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest relied on the media’s cowardice, incompetence, and failure to do even elementary research. We watch Rice, Powell, and the other usual suspects take advantage of their natural belligerence in a format that rarely leaves room for follow-up questions. They lie, wriggle away by answering another question, and sometimes launch a verbal assault against the questioner before calling on someone else (at moments like these Bush liked to call on a male prostitute posing as a reporter who’d been planted there by the administration. I wish I were kidding)

The article was later adapted for the theater by Simon Levy. Reviewers call the result devastating. Theater-goers walk out shell-shocked, beyond anger. BBC Radio will air it in April. The play has been to Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Scotland, and elsewhere. It’s set to run on March 20 in Los Angeles again and also in Philadelphia. Theater people are trying to organize productions in other cities. Go to this link for more information: http://www.fountaintheatre.com/WHATIHEARDABOUTIRAQ-FutureProductionsEvents.htm

Here, from Weinberger’s article, is part of what happens:

I heard a reporter say to Donald Rumsfeld: ‘Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said they would welcome us with open arms.’ And I heard Rumsfeld interrupt him:
‘Never said that. Never did. You may remember it well, but you’re thinking of somebody else. You can’t find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said.’
But a little higher we already read,
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say there was ‘no question’ that American troops would be ‘welcomed’: ‘Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and al-Qaida would not let them do.’

I heard a reporter ask Donald Rumsfeld: ‘If they did not have WMDs, why did they pose an immediate threat to this country?’ I heard Rumsfeld answer: ‘You and a few other critics are the only people I’ve heard use the phrase “immediate threat”. It’s become a kind of folklore that that’s what happened. If you have any citations, I’d like to see them.’
And I heard the reporter read: ‘No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people.’
Rumsfeld replied: ‘It – my view of – of the situation was that he – he had – we – we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that – that we believed and we still do not know – we will know.’

To me, that was the high point. Tough-guy Rumsfeld counterpunched and breaking down under the weight of the facts. Truth can be ugly. But use it well and you can make lovely things happen.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, A COLUMNIST IMPERVIOUS TO REALITY

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Back when I was in the newspaper business, there was a saying repeatedly applied to the subject of idiots or tyrants at the news helm: when your ticket is punched, it's punched.

Once you reached the upper echelons of the swine-shit factory, this brought certain entitlements. So even when an editor, for example, who was only moderately talented to begin with drank six martinis for lunch, he still had the right to return to the newsroom and edit your copy. In fact, it was possible for him to talk his way into a bigger job at a bigger paper because what the heck, his ticket was punched.

Thomas L. Freidman is a newspaper guy whose ticket is punched. He’s a New York Times columnist and omnipresent talking head. As far as I know, he doesn't drink six martinis for lunch, but in his case, it couldn't hurt. This pretentious schnook gets it all wrong but looks -- and to the uninitiated -- even sounds like someone who knows what he’s talking about.

Friedman cheer-led us into a pointless war in Iraq, and when everything went wrong fast, he wrote one moronic column after another on how just a little tinkering with Bush's essentially correct policy would likely turn everything around in “the next six months.” He wrote that just about every six months without ever referring to the previous claim six months earlier. Like Bush, like Shotgun Cheney, like steel-eyed, vengeful Hillary, Friedman’s never wrong, never apologizes.

Word is out that this pudgy pissant now commands a $75,000 speaking fee. Why, one might ask, would chumps pay such a price for his opinions when they’re more likely to extract wisdom from the lady on the next stool at Denny’s? It all has to do with the punch on his ticket.

Friedman, who expounds without accuracy on the meaning of events twice a week in The Times, also writes best-selling books that relentlessly fail to perceive the situation. In The Earth is Flat, he practically giggles over all the lovely gifts this new global economy bestows on us without examining why American wages have remained stagnant for thirty years and why all those cheap electronic gadgets from China that drove out the competition with slave wages don’t actually work very well.

Here are some telling statistics gathered last year by Derrick Z. Jackson of The Boston Globe, which, ironically, is owned by Friedman's employer.

The Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, the two liberal think tanks that annually chart the gap between CEOs and workers, list the gap in 2005 at 431-to-1, or $11.8 million to $27,460. That compares with a gap of 107-to-1 in 1990. In 1980, it was only 42-to-1. If salaries of the average worker had kept up with that of a CEO, he or she would have made $110,136 last year. Had the minimum wage risen at the same pace as CEO compensation, it would have stood at $23.01. But the federal minimum wage of $5.15 hasn't risen since 1997.

I mean, aren’t these danger signals? Shouldn’t Freidman's publisher, at least, bring to his attention the fact that his pretentious blather misses the whole point of what’s going on? Shouldn't we be examining ways to make the system work better for people instead of Halliburton and Exxon-Mobil? Isn't it past time to stop listening to Friedman's advice on Iraq?

But his employers clearly see the advantages of hiring a guy to shovel swine shit who doesn't ever seem to smell it.

AS BRITS PULL FREE OF IRAQI SWAMP PUS, ERITREA HOLDS FAST

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

As the lame-duck Great Leader and his toadies smile and wave fondly at departing British troops, they pretend not to see the inherent paradox as our own deployment into the swamp pus of Iraq -- to borrow an expression from our astute White House -- surges. You almost feel sorry for the Great Decider and his little helpers. They're like some nitwit who walks into a door and declares, "It's okay, I planned it all along."

Denmark, with hardly enough troops there to put together a game of Texas Hold’m, will be out by August, and South Korea by the end of this year. Lithuania, whose contribution to the Coalition of the Willing is down to 53 troops and perhaps a pet goat or two, is also thinking aloud about getting out entirely. Italy and Spain are gone, along with their prime ministers that said yes to the invasion that quickly morphed into an attempt to occupy hell.

The globally reviled Bush still smirks, but his deer eyes show new traces of fear and puzzlement. Yes, he sees the oncoming truck, but now what? The bullying belligerence of old has been tamed at least a little by his suspicion that there may be more to this governing stuff than Karl Rove explained back in Texas when he first pulled Junior out of the idiot box. Lately his handlers' lies are less spirited. Maybe their minds are on book contracts.

Blair’s retrenchment was of little consequence because it was clearly in the cards whether he went along or not. Unless he breaks yet another promise, he will step down by the end of summer. Heir-apparent Gordon Brown’s statements on Iraq have been mixed, vague, and elusive. But he will probably withdraw even more troops, maintaining a microscopic token force that will keep the alliance with the U.S. intact and minimize domestic damage. He’s unlikely to embrace a conflict so heartily detested by an overwhelming majority of the British public.

So unable to do anything about British retrenchment, Condoleeza Rice proclaimed that it adheres to “what is really the plan for the country as a whole.” And Shotgun Cheney sees the drawdown of approximately 25 percent of remaining British forces as “actually an affirmation.” But imagine if Blair, instead of bowing to the pressure of reason, had scrounged up another 50,000 troops for their "surge." Would Rice and Cheney complain? You decide.

Estonia has 35 troops in Iraq; Kazakhstan, 27 military engineers; Netherlands, 15 soldiers as part of a NATO training mission, and Slovenia, four military instructors. Good thing, too. If you want to win a war, don’t make a move without Slovenian military instructors. No one around the White House has mentioned the Coalition of the Willing in ages. But as far as I know, they’ve still got Eritrea.

Oh, you're probably wondering what this column has to do with the death of Anna Nicole Smith, depicted in the photo. Nothing.

ANATOMY OF AN ATROCIOUS CONGRESSMAN

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Bear with me and read this pronouncement on the threat of global warming from the Website of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif.:

"Too often, when congress [sic.] is asked to pass environmental legislation, the legislation is based on emotional junk science rather than data based on reproducable [sic.], rigorous, tested, peer-reviewed results. In no area has this been more obvious than climate change. Because the Kyoto Treaty and much of the suggested environmental legislation would decimate jobs in southern California, constituents may be interested to learn of the growing scientific consensus that global warming is not manmade, if it is in fact even occuring. [sic.] "

Even some of the most hardened adversaries of science in the Bush Administration now concede the reality of global warming, but Rohrabacher soldiers on, disseminating the same disproved ratshit. He could probably plead ignorance, except he has no interest in knowing the real truth, making him an especially grievous liar. He figures the next generations inheriting the poisons for which he crusades (this includes his own three children) will just have to look out for themselves the same way he looked out for himself.

“Soldiering” on, though, is an inappropriate term in the context of Rohrabacher, an Iraq war hawk who ducked out on the draft during Vietnam. Witnesses contend he showed up to his Selective Service physical with an x-ray of a knee he claimed was beyond salvation. Yet he also boasts he was surfing regularly.

You might expect a hypocrite like him with the mind of a sparrow, a creep who never held a job outside politics or government, to hail from some deeply atavistic hollow in the furthest reaches of Dixie, where deprived, Dust Bowl constituents don’t have the wherewithal to sort out the goods on their congressional representative.

But no, Rohrabacher represents one of the richest districts in America – California’s 46th – which hugs a sliver of the coast from Newport Beach up to Palos Verdes. He’s elected by an educated bunch whose members drive luxury SUVs, live in mansions with breathtaking Pacific views, and have their plastic surgeons on speed dial.

Rohrabacher is an example of what extreme gerrymandering gets you. His district has the shape of a flattened salamander, carved carefully by the State Legislature to ensure its congressional representative can do what he likes with those few Democrats caught inside -- ignore them, insult them, anything goes. He once met with constituents from Military Families Speak Out and spent most of fifteen minutes yelling at them. Women cried.

As long as he's not convicted of a felony and continues to screw the middle and lower classes, the man can’t lose an election. He uses campaigns as an excuse to enrich his personal treasury, which can be freely drawn upon for all sorts of expense-account dodges. Democratic opponents, who can raise only pennies, are no more than sacrifices.

I live in the 46th, and I know its people. They don’t give a damn about the environment or the war. And they're no Creationists, either. They worship material luxury. Rorhabacher can say or do what he likes on superfluous issues because they have only one issue – tax breaks. They want lots of them. Cut their taxes and they don’t mind if you send poor kids off to Iraq to be killed, crippled, or permanently traumatized. These are the people who really run the Republican Party, and of course their net worth makes them a tiny elite. The party hands out what it considers trivial, non-fiscal favors to the far more numerous religious fascists, gun nuts, and racists who make up the rest of a coalition. Thoughtful, decent Republicans still aboard this macabre train delude themselves.

The irony is that huge spender-borrower Bush is wasting $2 trillion on his optional war while he starves us of social benefits. Like Rorhabacher and the bozos that elect him, he doesn’t care what happens to the next generations that must pay the debt he’s accumulating as long as taxes are low now. Apres moi, le deluge, as Louis XV pronounced. Thanks to vicious greedheads like Rohrabacher, there's another deluge coming.

HOW TO GET US OUT OF IRAQ: PAY CONGRESS

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

What would get Congress to force Bush to pull out of Iraq? Money, of course. Washington is a bazaar, and if you want to buy something, you must pay the price. Congress has established and polished a system of legalized bribery that has most of its members spending most of their working hours raising contributions for themselves.

Members have proved repeatedly that they will vote against the interests of their constituents in favor of their paymasters and then rely on the inept media to allow them to escape consequences.

Generally, voting for what’s right doesn’t pay enough, which is why we’re saddled with a world dictated by insurance, banking, drugs, Star Wars creatures, creationists, and other industries willing to pay for what they want.

No, I’m not joking. During the seventies, in another life, I covered Congress for a daily newspaper, and during that time I convinced political operatives to give me details off the record about how their world works. They painted an ugly picture. Since then, the cost of campaigning – which means the cost of waging TV attack ads on opponents – has multiplied to staggering sums, and a corrupt system grew far more corrupt.

This week, during the Iraq debate, members of the House have been pretending to expose their political souls, with most of them prepared to vote in favor of a toothless resolution that objects to Bush’s military escalation. Only a minority is willing to stand up and use the power granted to them by the Constitution – the power of the purse – to end this pointless blunder of an occupation. In matters of foreign policy money is a lesser factor, true, but I guarantee you if we paid them enough to act decently, we’d get some decency out of them.

In the meantime, the relative lack of bribe-related motivation on this issue has members confused because it calls on them to actually scrutinize policy instead of checking their profit-and-loss ledgers.

Dead-enders consider themselves relatively safe funding Bush’s moronic war because most voters have been fooled into thinking withholding funds would be a stab in the back to troops in the field, leaving them out there on the battlefield with no bullets for their weapons. The Bush-Cheney team, though not trusted by a majority of voters, has successfully planted this lie in the public mind, just as it had a majority believing for years that Saddam Hussein knocked down the World Trade Center.

The media still do a terrible job of sorting out facts. The standard method of operation is to let both sides have their say and switch to a commercial. This works only when both sides at least try to tell the truth. Vicious liars are an odious thing to behold, and most of us, including the press, don’t know how to deal with them. First, you have to have your facts straight, then you have to challenge the lies.

During the Kerry-Bush debates in ’04, when Bush said he was an excellent steward of the environment, or words to that effect, Kerry was both flustered by the damnable, outright lie, and unable to muster the facts to prove that Bush had weakened the EPA and other key regulators in a determined and very specific pattern of abuse that dirtied air and water and defiled formerly protected land.

The most recent, reliable poll tells us 76 percent of Iraqis want us out of there within a year and think the presence of our troops exacerbates the killing. So it’s a mystery how the twisted Bush-Cheney team deludes anyone into claiming our troops are fighting for democracy.

You want more members of Congress to back off from the delusion? Pay them.

NOV. '08: ANOTHER 'BABEL' BREWING?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Did you see Babel? – an expensive, morbid malformity whose scenes veritably drip with mucus, urine, and other noxious fluids while it canvases the world to prove everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and that all this bleakness ties together in one humorless, hideous ball of twine we call Earth. It’s a load of crap designed not to entertain viewers but to impress Academy voters into assuming that anything so serious and lengthy just has to be smart.

Unfortunately the general elections of November ’08 could turn out the way Babel’s cynical, manic-depressive minstrels see everything:

Obama and Edwards split the progressive voters who want out of Iraq now, so Hillary, awash in campaign funds she uses to cripple her Democratic enemies with attack adds, wins the nomination, and of course loses the election to a shrewder batch of political assailants on the right. A repeat of 2000, with Gore and Nader destroying each other, thereby making it close enough for Bush-Cheney to steal.

We’d then get yet another President who’s a deluded nut case either belonging to the home-schooling fringe that’s itching to bring on the End of Days or somebody who peddles his ass to it daily while he hands over what’s left of the treasury to his corporate handlers.

Hard to say who the next Republican tyrant might be, but count on someone who’s not McCain or Giuliani. Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America, ably points out Bush has alienated so many voters that the far-right evangelical fruitcakes looking to kill off the last of our democracy rule Republican primaries. They despise McCain for past slights no matter how passionately he debases himself before them. Giuliani will be seen as a gay-loving abortionist with a New York accent.

Some sly, conspiratorial jerk we’re not paying attention to will nab the nomination while the rest of us watch this administration roll around in a fake panic attack over Iran. The Republican nominee will then pose as a compassionate conservative before the general election. Only after he’s safely sworn in will we learn he’s out of his mind. This scenario is not a sure thing, but it’s credible and quite possible, something we can’t label life imitating art. But we could safely call it life imitating Babel.

WAIT A MINUTE -- BUSH ACCUSES WILSON OF NEPOTISM?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
As the Libby perjury trial peels off more layers of how Bush’s administration operates, we learn that it felt called upon to Swift Boat Ambassador Joseph Wilson because – my gosh – he was suspected of nepotism. Nepotism happens to be one subject this administration actually knows something about.

So when word spread around the White House that Iraq War critic Wilson was married to Valerie Plame, a CIA operative, messengers bearing leaks from Dick Cheney went forth to warn the media that something must be done to stop this runaway fixation on family connections or who knows where it might lead?. One of these days a vicious despot whose daddy was President and whose granddaddy was a U.S. senator from Connecticut, might steal an election and take over the whole shooting match.

Actually, Plame had nothing to do with sending Wilson on a pre-invasion journey to Niger, where he learned and later revealed to New York Times readers the report that Saddam was seeking nuclear apparatus there was bullshit. Purposely revealing Plame was an agent was a treasonous act for which it appears no one will ever be charged. But as long as we’re talking about nepotism, isn’t there something very spooky and downright incestuous about the same two families trading the presidency back and forth for decades?

The first Bush took the throne in ’89, and if Hillary is elected in 2008, that could extend this bi-family monarchy of Bushes and Clintons into 2013. A second term for Clinton would extend the line all the way to 2017 and counting. Even if we were talking about exceptionally decent individuals, this would be alarming. But the fact is, these two families are extremely odd and untrustworthy.

When this nation turned away from monarchy at its founding, it evidently was unable to turn away from monarchy in the hearts of people. A royalist imperative persists. Perhaps citizens inherited this weakness from all those ancestors who were, let’s face it, groveling peasants who flocked to the castle of their lord for protection.

Our present American lord saved us from what he preached was imminent annihilation from Saddam Hussein, launching an endless war that down to the wire continues to make billions of bucks for the right corporations. He convinced the most corrupt Congress since the Gilded Age to follow its instincts and alleviate the financial suffering of America’s wealthiest citizens at the expense of everyone else, and every time he promotes a "fix" for our failed health system he throws more dollars at insurance-HMOs and pharmaceuticals. Got an energy or an environmental problem? Same fix, different corporate recipients.

He continues handing over billions of dollars to zombie zealots who believe the earth is 6,000 years old and have made their mystic beliefs the foundation for the entire federal government. He gave power and funding to pathetic, pompous, platitudinous pissants like himself, whose boundless ineptitude ensured, for instance, that while Gulf Coast citizens slammed by Katrina died of dehydration, the EPA director was agonizing over where to make dinner reservations.

But it’s preposterous to think either George II or Hillary I would be President were it not for their family ties. George, whose family has attended Yale for six generations, doesn’t have the talent to operate a tire store. [Above, next to a photo of W's grandfather Sen. Prescott Bush (R-Conn.) is a portrait of Britain's George III] Hillary’s bland exterior coupled with her refusal to say anything that wouldn’t pull in a 70-percent ratings approval from a focus group make her an ideally forgettable candidate.