BUSH: STILL LYING
THE HAMMER IS BACK, at least intermittently.
Before we take up the hammer against the Bushites again, we want to thank the many well-wishers who wrote us wondering about our recent hiatus. We are all well here at THE HAMMER; changes of employment have kept us much too busy to blog for the past six weeks or so.
But now let's get back to the issue at hand: W continues to be the worst occupant of the White House in the history of our nation. Now that it seems that more than half of the American people are on to him, his handlers are about to pull out all the stops to try to ensure that he and his villanous puppet masters are not unseated by the People. Expect VERY bad things to happen between now and the election. If you want some inklings, check out this article by Mark Moford of the San Francisco Gate:
Moford: Rig My Election, Please!
Here is an excerpt:
Do you feel it? Can you smell it in the air? The sensation that the Republican Party, though various tentacles, will stop at absolutely nothing to maintain power in the White House? It's true. It's the feeling that, during the next few months, it's all about to get very shrill, and very surreal, indeed.
How about another "imminent" terrorist threat? Pretty much a given, really. Followed, of course, by another. And then another. And then another and another until every other day the newscast features a thick-necked, panicky Tom Ridge saying yes, oh my God yes, we now have definitive proof that terrorists are more or less sort of maybe planning to strike the U.S. maybe very soon and disrupt our shopping and screw with our TV reception and blot out the sun. We just don't know, you know, where, or when, or how, or what the hell to do about it. P.S.: Vote Republican.
Look, times have changed. Of course politics has always been a truly ugly business, and each party's strategy to gain or regain power as election time rolls around has always become increasingly low down and nasty and mudslinging and soul cringing and borderline illegal.
But this time it all feels, somehow, different. Uglier. More sadistic.
There is a sense of lawlessness, of desperation, among the Republican Party right now. It is no longer a question of simply which party will run the show or which platform will have the most influence on policy. Rather, it's about a radically polarized worldview: Are we going to be an aggressive macho globally disrespected isolationist nation that has burned all bridges and molested all foreign relationships and mocked all global sympathy, or are we, as the GOP wants you to believe, going to become some liberal namby-pamby country where gays can marry each other and sexually deviant women can have abortions every day and everybody speaks French?
Because there is no middle ground. This is the GOP message. You are either with us, or you are a terrorist. You are either on the side of the "patriotic," pro-war party of WMD lies and homophobia and violence toward the global community, or you're a liberal hippie 'Nam protester like that jerknose Kerry.
What else could they do to guarantee a November win? What are they capable of, in the wake of 2000's stolen election and the rigging of the Florida recounts and a sneering, despoiled Supreme Court? Just about anything, really.
How about a nice October Surprise of suddenly finding Osama somewhere in a remote cave in Afghanistan, as the news media receives an "anonymous" delivery of a big glossy photo of Dubya himself standing outside said cave in a manly flight suit and lookin' all tough in his cowboy boots and confused smirk as he waves an American flag in one hand and holds Osama by a chain in the other? What, too obvious?
Well, then, maybe something a bit more devious? How about the thousands of electronic, touch-screen voting machines now installed in the nation's polling places, most every one manufactured by corporations run by staunch Bush-supporting Republicans and many of which don't allow for recounts or paper trails or any means of double checking their completely programmable results. An obvious recipe for election rigging? Is that Katherine Harris, giggling through her Botox?
Look. This much is clear: It's not merely going to be dirty politics as usual. It's not going to be mudslinging and name calling and finger pointing and policy wonking, childish little claims of "fuzzy math" and aww-shucks dumb-guy cowboy shtick to appeal to the lower intellects.
It is not going to merely be BushCo spending millions of its enormous war chest, as it already has, to launch incredibly vicious attack ads against Kerry and Edwards that dare to question the veracity and validity of Kerry's many Vietnam War medals or of Edwards' political experience, although Bush himself is the least-qualified president in U.S. history, one who ducked military service and went AWOL and makes all military service people wince in embarrassment.
No, it's going to be far worse. And more nauseating. Who, for example, isn't sighing in appalled disgust as the Pentagon suddenly discovers that, oh my goodness, Bush's own military-service records were "accidentally" destroyed? How amazing! And would you believe it, but the records in question just so happened to be the exact months of just those exact years that Bush was supposedly to have "served." What a crazy coincidence! Now we can never really know if he even bothered to show up for duty at all! Gosh, what a shame.
Molly Ivins is onto the Republican desperation as well in her latest column. Here's the link:
Ivins: What? What Problem?
And here is an excerpt:
Unfortunately, we are all likely to be driven batty if this presidential campaign gets any worse, which it is likely to do. Last week, I was on book tour doing one chat show after another and so got to experience first-hand the Republican orchestration of their talking points. And an impressive display it is. Truly, they speak with one voice, repeating the same thing over and over, never off-message -- just remarkable.
For the first two days I was on this media marathon, the story du jour was the Senate Intelligence Committee report that concluded the CIA was just flat wrong on its pre-war calls on Iraq. Wrong abut the weapons of mass destruction, wrong about connections to Al Qaeda, wrong about Saddam Hussein having a nuclear program and so on. All of which we already knew the government had been wrong about, but this was the Official Report.
So here's the Republican reaction: "See, the CIA was wrong, so you people owe President Bush an apology." I'm sitting there, brilliantly riposting, "Huh?" Here's the chain of logic. The CIA was wrong, therefore those on the left who say President Bush lied to us are wrong because he wasn't lying, he just believed the CIA. And you people are being rude and hateful and ugly and just mean about President Bush, and we want an apology.
What I'm worried about here is the amnesia factor. Am I the only person around who distinctly remembers an entire 18 months ago? This is what happened: The CIA was wrong, but it wasn't wrong enough for the White House, which kept pushing the spies to be much wronger. The CIA's lack of sufficient wrongness was so troubling to the anxious Iraq hawks that they kept touting their own reliable sources, such as Ahmad Chalabi and his merry crew of fabulists. The neo-cons even set up their very own little intelligence shop in the Pentagon to push us into this folly in Iraq.
Which brings us to the second talking point last week. Iraq never happened. I swear to you, this war and its disastrous aftermath never happened is the new official line. Down the memory hole. Never happened. You dreamed the whole thing. Iraq is now like Ken Lay and Chalabi. They never heard of it. Only met it once. Besides, Iraq contributed to their opponents.
According to The New York Times, "several Republicans," presumably speaking for the Bush campaign, noted that American casualties in Iraq are down from last month. Actually, that is quite untrue. Forty-two Americans were killed in Iraq in June, presumed to be an unusually bloody month because it was leading up to the big handover of sovereignty. As of July 21, 43 more Americans have been killed in Iraq, with 10 days still to go in the month.
Total number of Americans killed so far is 901, but the new line is: What War? We turned it over to the Iraqis, see? Presto, it disappears, just like magic. It's their problem now. Doesn't have anything to do with us. Bush is out campaigning by calling himself "the peace president." Honest. "He repeated the words 'peace' or 'peaceful' many times, as he had done increasingly in his recent appearances," reported The New York Times from Iowa this week.
Watch the media compliantly take up this line. Truly fascinating. We're also getting a new round of "9-11 was all Clinton's fault anyway." I don't think this one will work for the R's. It's kind of pitiful, after four years, to still go around saying, "It's all Clinton's fault."
Their first week in office, the Bushies claimed the Clintonites had taken the W's off White House computers, glued the drawers together and committed other vandalism -- all of which turned out to be a big fat lie. Why that didn't tip the media off about what kind of people they were dealing with is unclear to me.
Tell you what's not Clinton's fault, and that's the shape this country is going to be in by the time we get rid of this administration. In addition to the fiasco in Iraq, Bush's larger contributions to misgovernment include blinding a fiscal irresponsibility that has put this country deep in debt for years to come.
The lead up to our last and only chance to get rid of the most evil administration in history this November will be a long and pathetic story of powerful Republican interests doing ANYTHING--and we mean anything--to keep the Bushites in power.
THE HAMMER will be here to keep you up to date, and to hammer them relentlessly.
WE'RE BACK!
