if only…
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Overheard on Facebook (and embellished)
President Bush was sitting in the Oval Office talking about something serious when he was interrupted by an aide and told there was a highly sensitive call he needed to answer. Being the dutiful President, he took the call and listened intently to all the news brought to him.
After less than a minute, his face turned ashen and sullen, then he hung up the phone. He turn to Cheney and said, “Three Brazillian soldiers were killed in Baghdad yesterday.”
Shaking his head….he started to cry a little….
Cheney, growing impatient, says “Yeah, so?”
Amidst the tears he looked up and asked, “Just how many is a Brazillian?”
— tip ‘o’ the hat to a friend of a Facebook friend.
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In May 2009, just a few months into the Obama administration, President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney gave dueling speeches on national security in Washington, with Cheney accusing the president of making Americans less safe.
20 months later, Guantanamo is still open, the CIA agents accused of Bush-era torture are still free, and Obama is conducting covert air wars in at least two countries. And an ailing Cheney has now changed his tune and is actually praising Obama on foreign and national security policy.
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Justin Elliott, “The latest Obama cheerleader is … Dick Cheney?” - War Room - Salon.com 1/17/11 It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to widen the rift between Obama and progressives which was somewhat narrowed by the Tucson speech and all the good feeling surrounding the King holiday. |
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The massive industrial conglomerate Halliburton has reportedly offered to pay $250 million to settle charges against its former chief executive, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney, in a multi-million dollar bribery case.
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John Byrne, “Halliburton reportedly agrees to pay Nigeria $250 million to drop bribery charges against Cheney, firm | Raw Story” The Raw Story, 12/14/10 Doesn’t this strike anyone as the least bit ironic, as if the solution compounds the original problem? |
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It is kind of an upside-down world which rewards liars and punishes those who publish the truth.
Sigh. Julian Assange has been doing the investigative yeoman’s work for the major media of the world for a while now, providing primary source material including video of US military murdering unarmed journalists and shooting children. He should get a Nobel, a Pulitzer, a Congressional Medal of Freedom, and an Academy Award. He should certainly have the gratitude of the media, who got this all for free when they failed to turn up much at all with their for-profit operations. Instead, the Swedes are now charging him not with rape but with “sex by surprise.” Whatever that is. Evidently, in Sweden, you not only must wear a condom but you must file plans to have sex ahead of time or face an international manhunt.
While the mainstream media has parroted the fiction of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other lethal liars for a long time, it would be overtaxing our imagination and suspension of disbelief to even attempt to write fiction this bizarre.
We owe Assange a great debt and we owe the world some apologies and reparations for the real, actual, lethal and costly crimes he has uncovered.
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Wait, what? I thought he was the decider? Maybe it’s true what people said back then, that he was a heartbeat away from the Presidency. But today in my Sociology of War and Peace class we were talking about civilian casualties of the Iraq war, and on Friday we will be hearing veterans’ testimony, so you’ll excuse me if I don’t feel much like laughing.
Former President George W. Bush considers himself “a dissenting voice” in the decision to go to war with Iraq.
In the first interview of the publicity tour for his new book, Decision Points, Bush told Matt Lauer that he didn’t want to use force.
“Not everybody thought you should go to war, though,” Lauer said. “There were dissenting voices.”
“I was a dissenting voice. I didn’t want to use force,” Bush said. “I mean force is the last option for a President. And I think it’s clear in the book that I gave diplomacy every chance to work. And I will also tell you the world’s better off without Saddam in power. And so are 25 million Iraqis.”
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Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they’re out for revenge.
No, I’m not talking about the Tea Partiers. I’m talking about the rich.
These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can’t find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they’ll never work again.
Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
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Paul Krugma,n, Op-Ed Columnist - “The Angry Rich and Taxes” - NYTimes.com 9/19/10 Yes, civility is for us “small people,” not for people like Dick Cheney, who on the Senate floor told Patrick Leahy to perform an anatomical impossibility when the latter demanded accountability for the public funds spent on the former’s former company. |
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