Let The Feeding Frenzy Begin!

Republicans Eat Their Own!

Nothing is more satisfying than watching the happy turn of events on Capitol Hill, where a divided Republican Party has finally begun to eat it's own!

For the last four years, since the Invasion of Iraq, we, on the Left, who opposed the War, have suffered countless indignations from our fellow citizens on the Right. No one though, has been disparaged more than our American Veterans who opposed the War in Iraq, most of whom, (like most of the world), supported the War In Afghanistan. No insults have cut deeper than the barrage of lies and accusations, fired unrelentingly by the Right, questioning our Patriotism and Love of Country. From the swift-boating of John Kerry to a Jr. Republican Senator publicly questioning the Courage and Commitment of John Murtha, the Chickenhawks have outdone themselves in their foolish quest to make a hero out of George W. Bush.

And now that the Country has spoken, Democrat and Republican alike, denouncing the madness of the "Fool" On The Hill, that last vestige of Neo-Con power, the most virulent and hate-filled segment of our population, the remaining 27% of Americans who still drink George W. Bush's Kool-Aid, have finally turned on their brethren with a viciously scathing attack all too familiar to those of us who have suffered at their hands for the last four years. They have begun to eat their own.

They are attacking the Patriotism of every fellow Right Wanker who dares to question His Majesty, "The Prince of Fools", judgment. And, it is good to see.

At long last, they now know how we felt. They, who have never served and never will, yet who dared to question our sincerity and love of country.

I offer you this, then, this morning. So that you can share in my joy at their discomfort.

May it bring you internal peace and the courage to stay in the game. The Tide is Turning.

d.

This video, from Scarborough Country is most revealing. It runs about 15 minutes. Watch Joe Scarbourough implode at the end as he rails against those who question his patriotism!

Scarborough Country

The meltdown occurs at about 11 minutes in. It's amazing to see the anger and betrayal these knuckleheads feel as they begin to openly verbalize what they had long ago realized - they were lied to over and over again, and made utter fools of themselves supporting the "Liar" and denigrating those of us who saw the "truth". Well, fellas, there's more than enough crow to go around! God! The strain on the power companies is going to be enormous as more and more lights go on in Republican minds!


I leave you with a column by Joe Scarborough. How does it feel, Joe? Tell us all about it.

Demise of GOP just took turn for the worse

Scarborough: Bush willing to take his party over a cliff to prove his point

The slow demise of the national Republican Party just took a turn for the worse. Hard to believe that the GOP’s prospects could actually become more bleak after two years of unrelenting bad news, but it has.

Republican senators are now turning their rhetorical guns away from Democrats and toward one another. A few conservative Republican senators, whose votes usually cheer me up during bleak political times, are actually accusing Virginia’s senior senator, John Warner, of providing comfort to terrorists.

The White House even got involved in the name calling when Tony Snow suggested Warner’s actions could embolden the likes of Osama Bin Laden.

The message from the Bush administration seems to be this: “Thanks for carrying our water on this miserable war for four years. Now we’re going accuse you of helping terrorists.”

How pathetic.

Didn’t Dick Cheney just cite Ronald Reagan’s 11^th Commandment about Republicans not attacking one another?

My how things have changed in a few days.

It’s one more reason I have grown increasingly distraught over the GOP’s direction in recent months. The president is prepared to take his administration and his party over the cliff to prove that he right about Iraq—even if most of his generals and the majority of Americans disagree.

The question now is how long will Republicans stand by this war that has cost over 3,000 lives? Is it worth the $1 trillion dollars that will be added to our national debt? Is it worth undercutting our ability to strike at Iran and North Korea? I would say “yes” to all three questions if there were the slightest chance victory was around the corner. But it is not. If you don’t believe me, ask any general to tell you about the Bush surge. They will roll their eyes.

Even if you agree with me that this war was worth fighting as long as we believed Saddam Hussein had WMD’s aimed at America, at some point you have to face the facts: the Bush administration was wrong about those weapons, wrong about the nuclear program, wrong about their refusal to quell rioting early, wrong about Bremer’s gutting of the Iraqi army and police force, wrong about refusing to kill or capture al Sadr in 2003, wrong to tell the generals not speak of the coming insurgency, wrong to stubbornly refuse to give generals the troops they needed to win this war, wrong to make the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, wrong for the VP to claim that the insurgency was in its death throes and wrong to push a surge plan that the president’s top generals opposed.

The list could continue for pages but I will be generous to the White House and leave it at that.

At some point, GOP senators and congressmen need to understand that this war is no longer a battle between Republican war heroes and Democratic 60s hippie freaks. The lines have now been blurred by Bush’s bungling war strategy. Now we find ourselves in a fight between war heroes and war heroes. Former secretaries of Navy and former Vietnam POWs. Conservative Republicans and protectors of the president.

That may not be so bad for George W. Bush in the short run, but it is a disaster for Republicans in 2008 and beyond.

Conservatives had better wake up before all the gains made by Ronald Reagan and the 1994 Revolution are lost. The clock is ticking.

Catch 'Scarborough Country' each weeknight at 9 p.m. ET

© 2007 MSNBC Interactive

I'll be back

Okay, there's at least two more things I want to post on this morning, but I have to get some things done first. See ya inna bit!

Also, I hope to soon unveil what I believe will be a Blog first, I could be wrong...well, it will be a first for me...how's that? does that work? Also, I am starting to get some "comments" from spammers. I hate that word verification thingy and have just been deleting and banning as I find them. (If you suddenly find that you can't comment, I may have accidentally banned your ip so send me a line at 52hammer@gmail.com and I'll unblock you).

Now, to be proactive. Once I sign off here, and before I do the "important "things, I am going on the attack. I have the IP's of my spammers. I also have a fully functioning version of the SoBig worm quarantined in my Anti-virus software. I also have software which allows me to respond to IP's. See where I'm going with this?

Pax Tibi

d.

For Enigma4Ever!

Subject: Inner Peace

Calmness in our lives

I am passing this on to you because it definitely works, and we could all use a little more calmness in our lives.

By following simple advice I heard on the Dr. Phil show, you too can find inner peace.

Dr. Phil proclaimed, "The way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you've started and never finished."

So, I looked around my house to see all the things I started and hadn't finished, and before lea ving the house this morning, I finished off 23 wine coolers, a bottle of Jim Beam, a bucket of margaritas, a package of Oreos, the remainder of my old Prozac prescription, the rest of the cheesecake, some Doritos and a box of chocolates.

You have no idea how freaking good I feel.

Please pass this on to those you feel might be in need of inner peace.


d.

Molly Ivins

Molly Ivins is dead.

She died Wednesday, at home, at age 62 of the breast cancer she had battled since 1999.

Everyone knows how important her voice was to our way of life, the American way of life. And while death may have finally done what countless Right wing shriekers could not - silence her, nothing can extinguish the light that was this extraordinary woman's life.

I am posting her last column below in it's entirety. It is a serious column, lacking in the tongue in cheek Mollyisms we have all come to expect. Perhaps she knew her time was drawng to a close and wanted to impress us with the urgency of her message. I don't know. I do know she impressed me, everytime I read her columns, and now as I read her last words to a Country she truly loved and cared for.

And in her honor, I will be the guy at all future marches and rallies against Shrub and his destructive policies, banging my pots and pans.


Stand Up Against the Surge

The purpose of this old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war is not to make George W. Bush look like the dumbest president ever. People have done dumber things. What were they thinking when they bought into the Bay of Pigs fiasco? How dumb was the Egypt-Suez war? How massively stupid was the entire war in Vietnam? Even at that, the challenge with this misbegotten adventure is that WE simply cannot let it continue.

It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost. Gen. John P. Abizaid, until recently the senior commander in the Middle East, insists that the answer to our problems there is not military. "You have to internationalize the problem. You have to attack it diplomatically, geo-strategically," he said.

His assessment is supported by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior American commander in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who only recommend releasing forces with a clear definition of the goals for the additional troops.

Bush's call for a "surge" or "escalation" also goes against the Iraq Study Group. Talk is that the White House has planned to do anything but what the group suggested after months of investigation and proposals based on much broader strategic implications.

About the only politician out there besides Bush actively calling for a surge is Sen. John McCain. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote: "The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own — impose its rule throughout the country. ... By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis the best possible chance to succeed." But with all due respect to the senator from Arizona, that ship has long since sailed.

A surge is not acceptable to the people in this country — we have voted overwhelmingly against this war in polls (about 80 percent of the public is against escalation, and a recent Military Times poll shows only 38 percent of active military want more troops sent) and at the polls.

We know this is wrong. The people understand, the people have the right to make this decision, and the people have the obligation to make sure our will is implemented.

Congress must work for the people in the resolution of this fiasco. Ted Kennedy's proposal to control the money and tighten oversight is a welcome first step. And if Republicans want to continue to rubber-stamp this administration's idiotic "plans" and go against the will of the people, they should be thrown out as soon as possible, to join their recent colleagues.

Anyone who wants to talk knowledgably about our Iraq misadventure should pick up Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone." It's like reading a horror novel. You just want to put your face down and moan: How could we have let this happen? How could we have been so stupid?

As The Washington Post's review notes, Chandrasekaran's book "methodically documents the baffling ineptitude that dominated U.S. attempts to influence Iraq's fiendish politics, rebuild the electrical grid, privatize the economy, run the oil industry, recruit expert staff or instill a modicum of normalcy to the lives of Iraqis."

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Just Thinking...

Just thinking about things...help me out here, will ya?

Concerning the trial of "Scooter" Libby, remember when Bush said he would fire anyone in his Administration who was involved in outing Valerie Plame?

I do. Remember when he revised his position on July 19th, 2005?

Here let me refresh your memory:

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Monday that if anyone on his staff committed a crime in the CIA-leak case, that person will "no longer work in my administration." His statement represented a shift from a previous comment, when he said that he would fire anyone shown to have leaked information that exposed the identity of a CIA officer. MSNBC

Maybe this will bring it all back.



This just points up how important this trial really is. Someone committed a crime here and that someone needs to be punished as promised. So, ah, who do you think Bush will fire? Rove? Cheney?


Next case.

Seems to me the midterm elections last November were pretty much all about ending the War in Iraq, right? Anybody-else noticed how easily the Neo-cons have shifted the focus to ending the Surge in Iraq?

Come on, we all know that an additional 21,500 troops won't do much to stabilize what amounts to a Civil War! So why all the hoopla about sending them? Distraction and obfuscation! Prolong the agony until Bush is out and the next President, probably a Democrat, will be stuck un-fucking his mess!

These folks are masters of manipulation and it looks like they have succeeded again! It's time to get the message back on track. Fuck the "surge"! End the "War" and you end the "Surge", get it?

Finally, about Iran.

"My Spidey-sense" has been tingling like crazy! Anybody-else consider we may be walking blindly into an ambush, set in motion years ago by Bin Laden to get the American Army on his turf, and then cripple it, if not practically annihilate it?

Now I don't know when Iran actually became such a potent military force. Didn't they fight an 8 year war with a country we have defeated twice in a matter of weeks? I know, I know, the second time has us bogged down, but only because we remained there as occupiers. There is no doubt that we won the initial "War" with ease.

Well, while we have been tied down in Iraq, Iran has been busy building it's forces. Now it has been a stated mission of Usama Bin Fergotten to get us tied down in Iraq and then engage us there, on his "turf". Why travel here to kill Americans when you can get them to come to you?

So here's the scenario that spells "ambush" to me. We surge. We're already starting. We "discover" Iranian operatives in Iraq, (I have no doubt that they are there. Why wouldn't they be? What happens in Iraq is of tantamount importance to Iran, just as what happens in Mexico or Canada is of importance to our own "National Security". Do you think for one minute we would ignore an invasion of either nation without some interdiction on our part?)

Bush orders air strikes of Iran's Nuclear Facilities. The question here is, will we actually get the "real" ones, or just decoys constructed for this purpose? Anyway, the new Commander, who happens to be a Naval Aviator, Adm. William Fallon, carries out the President's orders and hits Iran from our carriers .

Iran considers this an outright "Act of War" and reacts with an all out invasion of Iraq. This would be timed to coincide with a massive Shia uprising in Iraq, forcing our military to fight on two fronts. Iran has missiles capable of attacking our carriers and they are launched. The whole mess escalates. We are hard pressed to protect our troops who suddenly find themselves with no safe ground from which to fight from. The Madhi Militia, some 40,000 strong is wreaking havoc as an effective fifth column. We have no ready reserves with which to counter this other than the Nuclear option, which we can't use because 1.) it would enflame every Muslim in the World to come to the Aid of Iran, and 2.) because there is no doubt in my military mind that China is secretly in bed with Iran and we would end up in a direct confrontation with them.

So, we face a Custer's Last Stand in Iraq as we engage Iraqi insurgents, Iranian Regulars and possibly Syria as well. (They know they are on Bush's list, why not join the fray and strike a debilitating blow against the military might of a country that has threatened them repeatedly? That refuses to even talk to them?) This could be a catastrophic loss that would take us years to recover from. We are not on a War footing here at home like we were in WWII, where we could gear up our factories and crank it out! Hell, do we even have any factories left?

In the end, Bin Fergotten gets what he has wanted all along - a fight to the finish on his home ground, at a time of his choosing with the odds in his favor. And if you think this is farfetched remember, these people are meticulous in their planning, waiting years at times to carry out their missions. They attacked the Word Trade Center in '93 and waited eight years to attack again! That is a hard concept for us to swallow. We are used to immediate results, instant gratification. We simply don't have the patience or attention span as a nation, to wait that long for anything, but we are making a grave mistake to assume that everyone-else is the same as we are. These people have been carrying on war for 1300 years, they believe they have all the time in the world to defeat us. Bush and the neo-cons are hurrying to comply with them, rather than strepping back and considering the final consequences of their misplaced zeal to "get the job done". It's the old "Bring 'em on" mentality. WE simply aren't strong enough any longer to "take 'em on" all at once!

So what do you think? Anyone who thinks I'm full of shit should spend a few hours with Sun Tzu's "The Art Of War", the same treatise General Schwartzkopf used to defeat Iraq in the First Gulf War! As far as I'm concerned, we are being lured into a trap by an opponent far smarter and much more patient than the bozo's in the White House. And that is what scares the shit out of me!

d.

...and now, just to ease your troubled minds and remind us of what we fight against in the War For America, I give you...

For Annie

This is for Annie from Cozy Shack. She's a great gal with some good stuff going on, and definately a member of the "Reality Based Community". Pay her a visit!




Thought I'd add this one myself. Goes hand in hand with "Volunteers". Just can't hear it too often. Single mind, single purpose, get Bush out!



d.

Bring Them Home

This was posted by Jersey Guy at Alternate Brain. I am complying with his request. Below is what I consider an updated version by Mos Def. This video includes the word "nigger", which I personally consider vile and hateful, but considering the content, it is more than appropriate.



d.

Seems I got This Condition...

Paging Dr. Larry, Dr. Moe, Dr. Shemp!

Ever see that Television Commercial where the beautiful, svelte Movie Star exits her Limousine amidst a throng of admiring fans and camera happy paparazzi only to collapse in a heap halfway to the door?



While most of you were rallying against the Bush Crime Cartel on Saturday, I was busy entertaining a bunch of Doctors who resembled the trio in the picture. Seems I got this condition...

I woke up Saturday morning at 0400 (4:00 am) as I usually do, let the dog out, put the coffee on and jumped in the shower. Midway thru the shower I started feeling a little dizzy. Passing it off as a probable "pot hangover", I ignored it, let the dog in and got dressed. It was on my way downstairs again to get my morning "cuppa" when the shit hit the fan.

Halfway down the stairs my internal body temperature felt like I had swallowed a willy peter (white phosphorus) grenade! The heat was incredible! (Now I know what Mags means when she complains of "Hot Flashes"!) In a flash, I was drenched in sweat. The pit of my stomach felt like an enormous hole that I was collapsing into and the dizziness returned with a vengeance. I felt myself losing all strength, to the point where I could no longer support myself and as my head spun violently like an out of control washing machine, I went down.

I ended up on the landing with my head through the glass door of a curio cabinet. The sound of the crash and the breaking glass was what woke Mags up, and Mags is what "woke" me up. She freaked. She said she couldn't get me up, that I felt cold and clammy to her, while even as I opened my eyes I could still feel the inferno raging inside me. She insisted on calling 911. I insisted on making my train to DC. Problem was, I was too dam weak to even get up off the floor. We compromised with her driving me to the hospital for a "quick check" of the old metabolism. She was terrified I was having a heart attack. I told her not too worry, I don't have heart attacks. Besides, there was no chest pain, numbness or any of the other symptoms indicating one.

To make a long story short, she helped me into the truck, (which is no mean feat since it is an off-roader and normally she needs a step ladder to enter and exit it). and off we went. When we got there they put me in triage immediately. Seems they were of the same mind Mags was.

Anyway, the "quick check" was anything but. Bastards kept me until I checked myself out Saturday evening. Seems I didn't have a heart attack. Or a stroke. I'm hypoglycemic, and quite possibly diabetic. The Doctors, who as I mentioned resembled the Stooges pictured above, were freaking because my blood sugar was in the low 40's. Words like "coma" and "seizure" are not encouraging. Anyway they gave me a shot, put me on a drip and proceeded to run their beloved tests, (results of which I am awaiting with bated breath - not!), and decided to keep me for "observation". By Saturday evening I figgered they had "observed" enough, so home I came.

Actually, it's quite a relief, this hypoglycemia. All I have to do is eat cookies all day and I'll be fine. The old ticker seems to be in good shape, the bellows (lungs), eeehhh, not so good, but they're still working good enough for me to keep working good enough, and that's all I care about at this stage of the game. Shit, I've already had Last Rites three times, I ain't 'fraid of no ghost. Mags, on the other hand, has different ideas. She's gotten used to me being around, under foot, confounding her life and would like to keep me as long as possible. To that end I convinced one of the good Doctors to tell her that frequent sexual activity was a good method of conditioning the cardio-vascular system. So I should be getting laid like crazy!

And that's something I can easily live with.

d.