Bush's petulant speeches on the way out to his utterly pointless Asia junket, coupled with the near-mutinous conduct of congressional Republicans, emphasize that this is the beginning of the end for the Bushies. Nobody who's up for re-election next year wants to be caught in the same camera frame with Dear Leader. The administration disingenuously insists that it does not condone torture, even as it insists on a CIA exemption for it.
Even the morlocks who trudged to the polls last year just to keep the fags down may be starting to see the shameless duplicity here.
Then you have the revelation (at long last) that not only has Saint Bob Woodward been little more than a faithful water-carrier for the power claque, but that his admission of being told about Valerie Plame's CIA status by a third senior administration official all but proves a conspiracy to defame Joseph Wilson. (Unless, of course, you're one of the Tinkerbell faction, who dutifully claps along with Bush's Iraq speech retreads, and assumes it's all just an amazing coincidence. Anything's possible when you have the intelligence and intellectual honesty of a 4-year-old.)
And it just keeps coming. Now a memo turns up disucussing oil company CEOs meeting with Cheney and the so-called Energy Task Force to, uh, come up with an energy policy. Say, how'd that one turn out, anyway?
Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, declined to comment on the document. She said that the courts have upheld "the constitutional right of the president and vice president to obtain information in confidentiality."
Yeah, and Cheney made sure to go duck hunting with Combover Tony Scalia to make sure of just that, didn't he, Lea Anne? Fucking gutless corrupt bastards.
The executives were not under oath when they testified, so they are not vulnerable to charges of perjury; committee Democrats had protested the decision by Commerce Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) not to swear in the executives. But a person can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for making "any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation" to Congress.
You know, I'd personally consider it a bonus if an ancillary consequence of all this was that Ted Stevens got bounced. If there's a more worthless sack of shit in the US Senate than Ted Stevens....well, it's Tom Coburn. No, maybe it's John Cornyn. Rick Santorum? Bill Frist? Jim DeMint? Jesus H. Christ, are there any halfway respectable Sente Republicans besides McCain, Hagel, and the broads from Maine? It's like a big fucking practical joke or something.
Finally, in the "why sell your soul when you can just give it away?" department, we find out about the use of the incendiary white phosphorus (known as "Willy Pete" in military jargon) during last fall's offensive on the Iraqi city of Falluja. You may recall that one as the propitiously-timed (right before the election) attack, because the original one back in April 2004 didn't pan out so well. This is the sort of planning we've come to expect from the MBA Preznitency.
Army Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. military had not used the highly flammable weapons against civilians, contrary to an Italian state television report this month that stated the munitions were used against men, women and children in Falluja who were burned to the bone.
"We categorically deny that claim," Venable said.
"It's part of our conventional-weapons inventory and we use it like we use any other conventional weapon," added Bryan Whitman, another Pentagon spokesman.
Venable said white phosphorus weapons are not outlawed or banned by any convention.
However, a protocol to an accord on conventional weapons which took effect in 1983 forbids using incendiary weapons against civilians.
The protocol also forbids their use against military targets within concentrations of civilians, except when the targets are clearly separated from civilians and "all feasible precautions" are taken to avoid civilian casualties.
The United States is a party to the overall accord, but has not ratified the incendiary-weapons protocol or another involving blinding laser weapons.
....
The Italian documentary showed images of bodies recovered after the Falluja offensive, which it said proved the use of white phosphorus against civilians.
"We don't target any civilians with any of our weapons. And to suggest that U.S. forces were targeting civilians with these weapons would simply be wrong," Whitman said.
What's significant here is how quickly the story changed. Just last week, the Pentagon insisted that WP had been used in Falluja strictly for purposes of illumination.
I think the classification of WP is couched in roughly the same technical parsing that Whitman's excuses are. I doubt civilians were deliberately targeted; we just didn't give much of a fuck. Like the hapless Katrina victims, if they didn't get the fuck out after being warned, oh well. Lovely.
And the icing on the cake has to be sending Big TIme out to do the dirty work again, to rally the rapidly dwindling base. Let's see -- you got an increasingly unpopular preznit beating the long-useless Plan A into the ground, and the next wave is to send the even more unpopular VP out to do the same thing, which already isn't working anymore. Genius. Pure fucking genius.
Maybe they'll get that statue in the Baghdad square after all, of Bush royally screwing the pooch.
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