I’ve alternated between calling life under the Bush administration as some Carrollian absurdity and an Orwellian nightmare. Turns out that we in the liberal blogosphere aren’t the only ones making some literary allusions.
First up in our ever-growing list of scandals is Halliburton subsidiary KBR, who will finally be subject to an investigation and hearing over 13 electrocutions deaths in their facilities in Iraq. Despite being notified that the electrical system was not grounded in the shower area way back in 2004, Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth died in January of this year from the improper grounding of the water pump in his barracks. Maseth’s family is suing KBR civilly for their negligence in maintaining the facilities for the Department of Defense.
And finally, we have Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese-born Muslim who has been detained at Guantanamo for more than six years. The heavily censored judicial review has become public and the Fed’s case against Parhat was so flimsy–citing the same source multiple times, the accusations based on “bare and unverifiable” claims that even the judicial panel was compelled to cite Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical poem, The Hunting of the Snark:
”We are not persuaded,” the panel wrote.
“Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has ’said it thrice’ does not make an allegation true.”
Then for the sake of clarity, it disclosed its source:
Through the Looking-Glass author Lewis Carroll’s 1876 poem called The Hunting of the Snark, an account of an absurd international voyage by a 10-member crew whose names all begin with `B.’
They include a baker, a beaver, a bellman and a barrister. The ruling went so far as to quote the relevant line, I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.
Despite this slapdown, the Justice Department has not decided how to move forward with Parhat.
John McCain has flip-flopped on so many subjects that he would feel quite at home in my toddler’s tumbling class. Keith Olbermann recounts McCain’s flip-floppery on
Keith Olbermann presented Barack Obama with a few options on how to handle the pending FISA legislation in a Special Comment on Monday’s Countdown.
Senator Obama had once said he was against giving immunity to telecom companies who assisted the Bush administration in illegally spying on American citizens, but more recently has said he would, in fact, vote for the FISA legislation, immunity included. As Keith points out, Obama has taken political hits from the right and the left and the right is going to attack him no matter how he votes, so he might as well do the right thing and demand telecom immunity be stripped from the bill.
You’ve already taken the political hit from the Right, for saying you’d seek to strip out, or rescind immunity. You’ve already taken the political hit from the Left, for saying you’d vote for the FISA bill even with the immunity. You’ve paid the political price in advance.
Now buy yourself — and those who have most ardently supported you — something worth more than just class action suits against Verizon.
Explain that you are standing aside on civil immunity, not just for political expediency, but for a greater and more tangible good — the holding to account, of the most-corrupt, the most dangerous, and the most anti-democracy presidential administration in our long history.
Of course, if you disagree with this interpretation — if you think the FISA bill doesn’t have the giant loophole, or if you don’t think you, as president, would be ready to support criminal prosecution of… well, criminals — then your duty is clear.
Vote against the FISA bill, if it still carries that immunity.
We regularly post segments from Countdown, and normally they deal with serious issues such as FISA, GOP hackery, McCain’s flip-floppery and such, but the #1 story on Wednesday’s show provided some much needed comic relief that was too good to pass up.
President Bush is always good for plenty of unintended humor, and recently he’s been serving up some of his best stinkers to date. VH-1’s Christian Finnegan joined Keith Olbermann to talk about Bush’s recent awkward moment with Filipino President Gloria Arroyo, the initiative in San Francisco to name a sewage treatment plant after him and an absolutely hilarious video of the president stepping off of his helicopter last Friday in North Carolina, waving desperately at two men (pictured above right) trying to get their attention — but, to no avail.
Finnegan: “What you can’t hear is that the two men in the clips are actually saying — don’t look, don’t look, don’t look, don’t — awww, I think he saw us. How do you go from being leader of the free world to the guy who THINKS he’s invited to your birthday party? You know, like hey, who invited President Bush and why is he playing a Toby Keith cd?”
How can you tell if John McCain is lying to you about how drilling in ANWR will help save American dollars and bring down the cost of oil? Phil Gramm’s lips are moving.
Keith Olbermann looks at the infamous “Enron Loophole” and how McCain Senior Advisor Phil Gramm is neck deep in policies that screwed the public for the gain of the almighty corporate dollar.
John McCain has said many a stupid thing during this general election campaign. But when he told Matt Lauer on The Today Show that bringing our troops home was just not that important, he crossed a line from stupidity to being unforgivable:
You have attested to: a fairly easy success; an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time; in which we would be welcomed as liberators; which you assured us would not require our troops stay for decades but merely for years; from which we could bring them all home, since you noted many Iraqis resent American military presence; in which all those troops coming home will also stay there, not being injured, for a hundred years; but most will be back by 2013; and the timing of their return, is… not… that… important.
Brandon Friedman of VoteVets appeared on Countdown on Wednesday to give his reaction to McCain’s comments that it wasn’t “too important” to consider bringing home the troops from Iraq. Normally, the military is a pretty safe demographic for the Republican party at election time, but if Friedman is at all representative, I think it’s safe to say all bets are off this year. The tone-deaf and callous way in which McCain refers to the sacrifices made by the troops can’t win him any votes from those stop-lossed from coming home to their families.
We’ve come to not expect a lot from George W. Bush. But when you have a veteran like John McCain, who has gone through so much in Vietnam, you really expect a lot more out of him because the way you see it, as a soldier, or Marine or Airman or whatever, is that John McCain should know better. You know, he’s been in our shoes. He’s had it worst than most of us. You know? But he should know better. And for those of us who’ve been there, who’ve lived through this, we just would expect a lot more and it really saddens us you know, to see this happen. Because there are thousands and thousands of veterans who just disagree with him on this. [..]
We’ve been in war too. And we know what it’s like. And he doesn’t get a free pass, especially from us, because we hold him to a higher standard and all I can say is, is we respect John McCain’s service, all we ask in return is that he respect ours. And for many of the people I talk to, who are on active-duty or who have just come off active-duty, who have served over there, we don’t feel we’re getting that a lot of the time.
Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley joined Keith to commend Kucinich and his impeachment bill, which is now co-sponsored by Rep. Robert Wexler. While Turley says there are numerous crimes for which Bush could easily be impeached, the President’s greatest ally has been the Democratic Congress who have skirted their constitutional duties and consistently given him a pass rather than practice any oversight. It’s clear impeachment will remain off the table for the remainder of Bush’s term, but as Keith put it, problems like this will never be solved if people like Kucinich and Wexler don’t stand up and say something.
Olbermann: “I’ve often argued here, that even if you don’t think the words aren’t lead to any actions, say the words anyway, simply to get them on the record for history and simply because, nothing has ever changed from bad to good in this country without somebody first saying, this is bad. Assess the importance of what Dennis Kucinich did last night.”
Turley: “You know, it is very important. The fact is, that this is not supposed to happen the way it’s happened in the last seven years. The framers, I think, would have been astonished by the absolute passivity, if not the collusion of the Democrats in protecting President Bush from impeachment. I mean, they created a system that was essentially idiot-proof, and God knows we’ve put that to the test in the past few years, but I don’t think they anticipated that so many members of the opposition would stand quietly in the face of clear presidential crimes.”
On a side note, major kudos go out to Keith and Countdown for beating BillO for the week in the crucial 25-45 demo!
C&L covered this segment from last Friday’s Countdown, but I thought an emphasis on Richard Clarke’s scathing remarks about the lack of, and the need for, accountability from the Bush administration for the countless lies they told their country and the world about pre-Iraq invasion intelligence, was well deserved.
I have been telling anyone who will listen, that we must watch out for these bad pennies when their names start to creep back into the political arena - names like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who both worked in the Nixon administration. Looking back, we find ourselves wondering how we didn’t see this disaster coming, or why more people didn’t speak out at the time. I fully agree with Richard Clarke’s statements; we must not allow these thugs back into civilized society — they should not be rewarded for perpetrating so many horrific and destructive crimes against their own people, and other places around the globe.
Clarke: “Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.”
“Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grievously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.”
You can rest assured, the day that names like Karl Rove, Tom Delay, Condoleeza Rice or those of anyone who served in the Bush administration creep into the public or political sphere, we, and the rest of the blogosphere, will sound the alarm to make sure none of these people are able to damage our country ever again. More from Think Progress.
More of that great “librul” bias in the media for your entertainment: The bronze award goes to AP Newswire Services for the Barry Schweid article gone out to all their outlets that basically sounds as a GOP oppo research press release. Schweid compares and contrasts the foreign policy stances of the presumptive presidential nominees, calling Obama “inexperienced” and “naive” and furthering the whole “Iran as a potential nuclear power is dangerous” meme so favored by the White House.
The silver goes to the perennial Bill O’Reilly on his derivative “Patriots & Pinheads” segment for using a Newsbusters post (you don’t really want me to link to it, do you?) blasting Brian Williams for not leading with the story that US casualties in Iraq were down in May, choosing to do instead a story on the failing infrastructure.
Surprised that you’re a blithering sociopath, cutting and pasting from Newsbusters?No, I am not.Surprised that you don’t have a clue about what’s all important or news to Americans, like any casualties are too many, Bill, and the country’s being strangled by Big Oil?No, I am not. Surprised you’re going on 59 and he’s 49, and yet you refer to him as “old”?No, I am not.
And the richly deserved gold goes to Sen. Joe Lieberman for his email to McCain supporters where he furthers the Bush administration’s favorite grade school-level insult terminology of saying that he caucuses with the Democrat Party. Shyeah right. I say we just go with the alteration Olbermann suggests to match LIE-berman’s rhetoric on his former party.
Next up is the news that the judge in the Guantanamo trial of a Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, has been replaced, for reasons “completely unrelated” to the fact that he threatened to suspend the proceedings over the government’s reluctance to release paperwork necessary to Khadr’s defense team. Right, I’m sure it is completely unrelated. Say, how successful terrorism trials can the Bush administration count?
That’s correct, by Mr. Bush’s definition, his man in Iraq, for whose government 4,100 Americans have died, is himself the equivalent of a Nazi appeaser.
Download | Play 
Download | Play (h/t Bill W)
