Our Creepy Veep on the Warpath in Bizarr-o World

It’s time for another visit to Bizarr-o World, my friends. Break out the thorazine, open a fresh party pack of chocolate-covered Prozac and enjoy the fun as America’s zaniest bunch of psychopaths try for the trifecta of World Political Disasters.

Dan Froomkin wrote an article entitled ‘Cheney on the Warpath Again?’ for the Friday, April 11, 2008 on-line edition of the Washington Post. (Imagine that; the press may actually be getting savvy to the fact that Cheney, Bush, and the gang are role-playing ‘Armegeddon’.) In the article, Froomkin quotes our curmudgeonly VP telling Sean ‘the Bean’ Hammity that Iran was filled with nasty apocalyptic zealots who might have a nuclear bomb sometime soon. (Hmm, this rings a bell.) Of course, the only appropriate action hinted at by our creepy Veep is - wait for it - showing them who’s the boss in Bizarr-o World. He started off by sowing his black magic seeds of ‘FEAR!’.

Quothe the Cheney:

"But Ahmadinejad is I think a very dangerous man. On the one hand, he has repeatedly stated that he wants to destroy Israel. … mutual assured destruction in the Soviet-U.S. relationship in the Cold War meant deterrence, but mutual assured destruction with Ahmadinejad is an incentive.”

So, let me get this straight, Dicky-doodle: the president of Iran is even crazier than you are. Is that what you’re saying?

Cuz, he doesn’t have any nuclear weapons. He doesn’t have any fissile material. And he hasn’t even had a weapons program for 5 years according to the latest report by the National Intelligence Estimate. The NIE reported "with high confidence" that Iran did have a nuclear weapons program until 2003, but that this was discovered and Iran stopped it. (Naughty Billies!) It also assessed that the earliest date by which Iran could make a nuclear weapon would be late 2009 but that this is "very unlikely" given that Iran appears "less determined" to develop nuclear weapons than US intelligence had previously thought. In other words, no nukes and nearly a zero level chance of producing one.

On the other hand, Mr C, at last count - I suspect counting them over and over is how you fall asleep in the wee hours - how many nuclear devices are there currently in the DOD inventory, cringing from your clammy touch? An estimated 5,736 active stockpile warheads scattered round the US (and elsewhere) – give or take. That’s what I’d call a very active nuclear weapons program. It’s been going on since the ’Manhattan Project’ without abatement for over 60 years.

Oh, and not to mention – and in polite, elitist intellectual company one simply doesn’t, you know – courtesy of the super sense of fair play and the hyper-sensitivity to anti-Semitism that are the hallmarks of US foreign policy - the state of Israel is the 5^th largest nuclear power in the world. It has between 200 and 300 nuclear warheads just waiting for the ‘okay’ from Washington should an Arab or Iranian dare look cross-eyed at them.

And you think that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and all of his advisors are crazy enough to try to build a nuclear bomb and use it to destroy the Zionist State precisely, explicitly, because they, the Iranians, would then be annihilated by US and Israeli retaliation, destroying 6,000 years of history, culture and tradition and subjecting the Iranian population of over 70 million to a nuclear holocaust? Even when we’re talking about apocalyptic zealots – and that’s talking way crazy – nuking Israel and assuring self-induced annihilation is straight out looney-tunes. We’re well past thorazine party favors, booby. That’s more of your Bizarr-o world up-is-down, black-is-white, thinking at work there.

What is beyond question is that Vee-Pee Dick (in the role of Iago) leads a faction of officials in the Pentagon, State Department and elsewhere, who argue that before Dubya hands over the keys to 1600 (none too soon), the US should kick some more boo-tay there in oil-rich Asia, destroy Iran's nuclear facilities, punish them for not keeping the Shah in power and thwarting U.S. aims in Iraq.

(Which are what again? Oh, yeah, the ‘democracy’ thing.)

Froomkin added that some observers suspect Cheney of encouraging Israel to attack Iran as a proxy while he was there spreading sunshine and love from an Israeli check-point two weeks ago and accusing Hamas of trying to scuttle ‘peace talks’. (Those words must curdle in the man’s mouth.)

And Twisted Dick thinks Ahmadinejad is a very dangerous man? Oh, yeah…

So, if this Mahmoud joker is actually planning to pull a nuclear weapon out of his burnoose and use it on Israel, he must be without a doubt, top-to-bottom, upside-downside, backwards and forwards a whole lot crazier than you are, Sour-Puss Dick.

And if you think we are stupid enough to fall for that ol’ WMDs gag again, you ought to try re-doubling your dose of Prozac and start thinking how you’re going to spend your yard time in Leavenworth, Dicky-boy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/04/11/BL2008041102216_pf.html

BBC News, Tuesday, 8 April 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4031603.stm

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Weapons/Wpngall.html

Petition to Begin Impeachment Proceedings

The Never-ending War Story - the Prequel

6 months before the US invaded Iraq, Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, were building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion.

The PBS documentary ‘Private Warriors’ presented this fact in June, 2005. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/view/
(Chapter three, ‘Embedded with KBR’; at 5:10)

To repeat:

The decision to invade Iraq had been made and Halliburton had been hired to provide logistical support for an armed assault of Iraq long before the fabricated evidence re: WMDs and Saddam/Al-Qaida connections were presented by the White House to the US people and their greedy, jello-spined representatives.

It might seem beyond credibility, given what we know now, that neither the director, Tim Mangini, nor producers, Marcela Gaviria and Martin Smith thought to pursue a line of questioning pertaining to this fact in this ‘hard look at private contractors’. Too off-topic perhaps. (IMHO, the documentary quickly descends into a ‘human interest piece’. Perhaps the tragic story of ex-Navy Seal, Scotty ‘the Bod’ Helvenston and others was too alluring. Helvenston was one of the Blackwater mercenaries killed, burned and strung up from the bridge in Falluja.)

Call me naïve, but I would have thought that drilling to the core of the investigation to fathom the grand reason why we were truly at war in Iraq and in need of all these private contractors would have been the preferred tact to take. (Call it 20/20 hindsight, if you wish.)

If the reporter was correct, sometime in September, 2002, 6 months before the Bush Administration bullied the US into violating international law by invading the sovereign nation of Iraq on March 20, 2003, contracts had been signed and contractors were on the ground building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion. This presumably included the ‘permanent bases’, and quite likely improvements on what is to be the largest embassy compound in the World. A ‘Vatican City’ to serve as the base of future operations in the Middle-east. Most certainly, they were busy building some of the more than 60 sites that KBR operated in Iraq at the time of this documentary.

In his January 28, 2003, state of the Union address, Bush denounced Saddam as “the dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons” and listed vast quantities of biological and chemical weapons. What Dubya didn’t tell us is that his cabal of war-criminals had already bargained away any peaceful, diplomatic solutions in a no-bid contract to Halliburton/KBR, three months earlier.

Lest we forget, Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA’s Europe division, a 26-year veteran of the agency, revealed to CBS’ Ed Bradley on ‘60-minutes’ which aired on April 23, 2006, that in the fall of 2002, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others were told by CIA Director, George Tenet that Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri — who agreed to act as a spy for the United States and was reportedly paid more than $100,000 by the CIA — had reported that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction program.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/21/60minutes/main1527749.shtml

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0321-09.htm

Mr Drumheller went on to say that the administration didn’t care about this revelation, no matter the source. Of course not, by that time, in September, 2002, the real decisions had been made by the people who truly matter, the high mucky-mucks of corporate America, and the ink was drying on the dotted line. The gravy-train was leaving the station with a full head of steam and no red flag was going to stop it.

You can almost hear an echo from the addled, collective brain-pan of Bush’s Inner Circle, ‘We can’t renege on the deals we’ve made with our friends at Halliburton. That wouldn’t be kosher. A deal is a deal.’ One must suppose that the ‘finder’s fee’ on the estimated umpteen billion dollars in no-bid, cost-plus contracts awarded to Halliburton/KBR would be a handsome one. And if one had similar connections with other corporations that supplied materiel and services to Halliburton and KBR at inflated cost, one could wolf down the slop at both ends of the trough. Hog heaven, as they say.

That’s a mighty temptation. Mountains of cash up front and on the back end, lots of powerful friends who’d be happy to give you a corner office, a princely salary and a diamond parachute when you conclude your ‘service’ in the US government.

Beyond the dreams of avarice.

And all you have to do is undermine the Constitution, betray your solemn oath to uphold and defend the precepts of that document, lie to the US citizens you swore to serve, deceive the world with bald-faced falsehoods and steel yourself to live with the fact that the blood of thousands or even tens of thousands of human beings are on your greedy hands.

Such a deal.

So, General Petraeus, Ambassador Crocker, when can we expect to bring home our troops and our contractors? When will this war end?

The answer is simple.

The war will end when Dubya, Dicky-boy, Donnie the Rum, Condi, Wolfie, and all those of their sickening ilk can force themselves from the slop of the trough.

Then again, I’m an optimist.

Post Script:
I am very sympathetic to Mr Helveston's friends and family members. I also can understand the reasoning revealed by Mrs Katy Helveston, Scotty’s mom when she told PBS,”When you’ve been in Special Forces for 13, 14 years, you’re trained to do one thing. And there’s not a whole lot of jobs out there for people trained to kill.” Being a private contractor seemed to be a solution to the deteriorating US economy for many of the 10,000 who were in Iraq in 2005.

The Red, White and Blue Surge

“The ‘Surge’ is working.”

It’s the abracadabra mantra of the Bush administration and its adherents. If they say it often enough, they expect we’ll believe them. It’s a tactic that worked well enough for them when they chanted ‘WMDs’ leading up to the war. We can’t blame them for trying. (But we can try them for lying.)

What amazes is the brazen, unabashed arrogance by which they make this specious, perfidious declamation. The most disturbing example of this comes from everybody’s favorite ‘Dick’, the vice-president, Mr Cheney. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Martha Raddatz on ABC’s Good Morning America:

Cheney: “On the security front, I think there’s a general consensus that we’ve made major progress, that the surge has worked. That’s been a major success.”

Raddatz: “Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.”

Cheney: “So?”

Raddatz: “So? You don’t care what the American people think?”

Cheney: “No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Funny, maybe I’m being naïve but I’ve been under the impression that the United States of America was a representational democratic republic; ‘of the people by the people for the people’ and all that. Here’s the VP of the nation stating on a national television broadcast that the voice of the people is not something he or the administration needs to heed.

Let’s give ol’ Dick the benefit of the doubt and check what the American people have to say.

According to the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted between March 14 and March 16, 66% of Americans oppose the war in Iraq.

During roughly the same time period, 59% of respondents in a CBS News poll said they felt the US should have stayed out of Iraq and 65% disapproved of Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll taken between Feb. 28 and March 2, 2008 found that 63% felt the war was not worth fighting.

According to the Pew Research Center survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International Feb. 20-24, 2008, 54% think the U.S. made the wrong decision in using military force against Iraq.

(There may well be polls that found substantial support for the war in Iraq - the student body at Pat Robertson’s Regent University, for instance – but I discovered none.)

Note that these polls were taken after the Bush apparatchiks had been chanting the mantra for months in news reports, press conferences, interviews and the like. Apparently, the majority of the US public polled had not been swayed.

Regardless of the polls, the VP says, “So?”

In a speech given at the Pentagon to mark the fifth anniversary of the illegal US invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq, Dub-ya proclaimed that the US is safer after its invasion of Iraq, adding that the troop 'surge' had succeeded in promoting stability there. "Because we acted the world is better and the United States of America is safer. Because of the troop surge, the level of violence is significantly down. Civilian deaths are down. Sectarian killings are down. Attacks on American forces are down.”

Pardon me, Mr Bush, but are you smoking jimson weed? What bizarro-world are you using as a benchmark if you consider the world and the United States a better, safer place since the invasion? Maybe you should ‘follow your bliss’, don a uniform and stand on the front lines before you spew such nonsense. (ref: this blog, March 17, 2008 ‘Irony #2’) Or how about taking a nice stroll outside the ‘Green Zone’ without a security detachment to discover for yourself how safe the world is for US citizens? Might I suggest Fallujah, Karbala or Tikrit?

Just as detached from reality is Dubya wanna-be, John McCain. Johnny Mac was in London trying on the ‘president’s new clothes’ and sizing up Gordon Brown for a dog collar when he offered his own syntactically fractured version of the party line.”We are now succeeding in Iraq and Americans, at least, I believe, are in significant numbers agreeing that the present strategy of the Surge is succeeding.”

Better check the polls, Mr Candidate.

100 more years. 100 more years.

To be fair, arrogant delusions about this ghastly conflict are not limited to the Neo-cons and Republicans. On the stump in Detroit, Senator Hillary Clinton, outlining her plan to draw down troop levels in Iraq said “… the Iraqi government has to take responsibility for its own future. We have given them the precious gift of freedom and it is up to them to decide whether or not they will use it." (Italics are mine.)

“We have given them the precious gift of freedom…”

Talk about arrogance. One can imagine an Iraqi widow wondering what the return policy is on such a blood-soaked gift.

"When you have at least 200 Iraqis dying every month in attacks on a per capita equivalent ... I don't know how anyone can characterise that as a success.” Hady Amr, a Middle East analyst at the Brookings Institution in Doha, Qatar, told Al Jazeera that the US-led invasion of Iraq was a strategic disaster. Mr Amr said: “The US took a country that had a lot of problems, a totalitarian state, and turned it into a haven for terrorism."

So, by what criteria is the ‘Surge’ working? Granted, the total number of fatal attacks against ‘Coalition Forces’ and sectarian violence is down from the disastrous highs of 2006 and 2007. Much of this reduction of violence, however, is due to the Mehdi Army cease-fire called by Muqtada al-Sadr last August, though that substantial fact is seldom mentioned in the corporate media and only in passing, never fully investigating the implications.

How could any rational individual call a return to the bloody, black days of 2005 ‘progress’? One must assume that the present level of slaughter, mayhem and atrocity is acceptable to the Bushites as long as they breathe deeply and keep chanting.

The ‘Surge’ is working.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/20/headlines

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/20/iraq.main/

http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm

The Daily Show video: Iraq , the First Five Years

McCain & Cheney in ‘the Zone’

The inimitable, legendary vaudeville tap-dance duo, McCain & Cheney made a surprise visit to Baghdad this week. John McCain, dubbed ‘the brash one’ quipped, “We’re here to kick up our heels to salute the troops.”Not to be out-done, ’Dick’ Cheney, the spry, younger member, waxed, “A little terpsichorean dalliance is just what the grunts need. If only Bob Hope were here.” And he wiped away a tear.

The veteran hoofers will be in the Green Zone all week. Be kind to your waitresses and try the veal.

In other news, it was revealed that Bob Hope was successfully cloned several years before he passed. It was further announced that more than 30 cloned ‘Hopes’ will be available in the next decade to begin entertaining US troops at the more than 700 US military bases in more than 90 countries around the world.
“It’s uncanny.” said the lead technician on the heretofore secret project, “Each of the clones has the same, brilliant comic delivery as the original Hope. And a golf club, besides.” The next phase of the project is the cloning of Joey Heatherton, Jill St John and Anita Ekberg.

“Thanks for the mammaries”?

In reality, Republican presidential hopeful, John McCain reportedly insisted his visit to Iraq was a fact-finding venture, not a campaign photo opportunity.

Yeah, pull the other one.

Want facts, John? Here are some to gnaw on:

The PBS documentary from 2004 ‘Private Warriors’ presented this fact: 6 months before the US invaded Iraq, former Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root, were already building bases and installations in preparation for the invasion. The commitment to an invasion of Iraq had been made and contractors hired to provide logistical support for an armed assault long before Bush and his administration got too far along in the litany of 900+ lies regarding WMDs and Al-Qaeda connections.

After searching through more than 600,000 documents Iraqi captured in 2003, the Pentagon has concluded that there was no "direct operational link" between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda.

Nevertheless, $12 billion in services were contracted from 2002 to 2005 to wage the war... uh... bring Democracy to the Iraqi people, that is.

In little more than a year, the New York Federal Reserve Bank made 21 shipments of currency to Iraq totaling $11,981,531,000. The Fed shipped 281 million individual banknotes, in bricks weighing a total of 363 tons to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Ultimately, $9 billion of the nearly $12 billion went missing.

Ooops! (Now, what’s this about a credit crisis?)

And check these killer bullet points, Johnny Mac!

• Nearly 4,000 dead Americans from hostile and non-hostile events
• 30,000 Americans wounded
• Upwards of 90,000 documented civilian Iraqis killed (or is that ‘liberated’?)
• 2 million Iraqis internally displaced (bureaucratese for ‘homeless’) due to violence
• More than two million refugees from Iraq have fled to neighboring countries
• The Iraq War is now costing US taxpayers almost $2 billion a week
• Total estimated cost of the war in Iraq? $3,000,000,000,000.00 (Yes, that’s $3 trillion.)

Enough facts for one visit, John?

How about another hundred years of facts like these?

Of course, the US will have gone broke long before it comes to that.

Meanwhile, everybody’s favorite ‘Dick’ – Cheney, that is - also dropped by the Green Zone to share the Bush administration’s delusional vision of prolonging “the campaign that liberated the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and launched them on the difficult but historic road to democracy." Cheney stated almost wistfully, “So, if you reflect back on those five years, I think it’s been a difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor and that we’ve come a long way in five years and that it’s been well worth the effort.”

No doubt he’s thinking of the billions reaped in no-bid, cost-plus contracts for his ol’ buds at Halliburton, KBR, et al.

http://ga3.org/campaign/Iraqi_refugees?gclid=CLvpktmFl5ICFQIaewodEn0R6g

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

http://www.motherjones.com/bush_war_timeline/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/

http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/09/28/cost_of_iraq_war_nearly_2b_a_week/

Detecting Baloney

Now, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I do like conspiracy theories though, so it might be said that I am a fan of conspiracy theories without being a straight out fanatic about them.

What most intrigues me about conspiracy theories is the quest for knowledge and understanding exhibited by the theorists. It could be argued (and often is) that such quests are misguided, a waste of time and effort better spent on more ‘productive’ endeavors.

Who is to say? According to Professor Joseph Campbell in his study of comparative mythology, quests are not chosen but rather quests chose their ‘questers’. Campbell’s own quest was to discover and understand the links between the various myths of the world. Admiral Perry’s was to reach the Pole. Jake and Elwood’s was to save the orphanage. Whether great or small, grand or petty, quests are not to be ignored.

The source of the incentive, the drive to research and postulate theories about conspiracy is not solely a metaphysical one. Undoubtedly, there is an intellectual impetus to discover the truth about the world we inhabit. The search for truth is inherent in the postulations of conspiracy theorists.

The question must be asked: why are the postulators of conspiracy theories not satisfied with the accepted explanations given for enormously complicated event? Here is the nub that irritates many detractors. Why can’t conspiracy theorists accept at face value explanations such as the Warren Commission Report or the 9-11 Commission Report?

The answer to that query can easily be discerned if one reads over the arguments and examines the material presented by many conspiracy theorists. Whenever the generally accepted explanation of an event or phenomenon begs the question (whether it is regarding a terra-centric universe, WMDs or a ‘magic bullet’) there are questions which beg to be asked. In a conspiracy theorist’s postulation, one invariably finds a check list of questions about the event which have either gone unanswered, ignored, glossed or are answered in a less than satisfactory manner hence raising further questions. Here we find the same motivation that has initiated all of the great scientific discoveries and uncovered all of the scandals throughout history: the search for truth amid what are perceived as falsehoods and failing that, the search for acceptable answers.

Unfortunately, too often conspiracy theorists rely on specious arguments, tautology and emotionally driven thought processes rather than finely honed critical thought. (This is hardly over-stating the general situation.) Exacerbating the effect of these general deficiencies of argument, the fans of conspiracy theories too often accept these deficient arguments at face value. The result is well-known: the theorists and fans are roundly denounced as ‘crackpots’. Quite often this denunciation is deserved.

Nevertheless, points raised by conspiracy theorists challenging accepted explanations are very often thought provoking. These should not be brusquely dismissed as spurious even if in a many cases the points raised are very emotionally charged, taboo or politically unpopular. Interesting points should be examined and weighed critically for merit, substance and validity. Too often the treasure is tossed with the trash.

Here the failure to think critically is shared by theorists, fans and detractors.

So, in an effort to rectify that situation, here is a link to a crash course on critical thinking; Carl Sagan’s ‘Baloney Detection Kit’ as it was presented in his book,’The Demon-Haunted World’.

http://www.xenu.net/archive/baloney_detection.html

For a more complete treatment of the ‘Baloney Detection Kit’ by Michael Shermer and Pat Linse, here is a link to Skeptics.com where it can be purchased in a booklet form.

https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Session_ID=32c4c614bdb2fd78c08c0c84faa4e4c4&

The ability to detect baloney will well serve us all when we are presented with dubious information and explanations from our governmental representatives, corporate leaders, their agents and functionaries. Perhaps if more members of the US Congress and the citizens of the United States had learned to think critically, the US would not have been suckered into going to war in Iraq. Or Vietnam. Or Nicaragua. Or Guatemala. Or Haiti. Or Panama. Or Grenada. Perhaps the ability to think critically may even allow us to detect the baloney that is leading us into armed conflict with Iran.