Monday, October 02, 2006

A Willy-Nilly Monday Post. Herein I Blah Blah Blah about Politics.

Oh blog of ancient lore! I was not prepared to deal with you this night! Not after a day of grocery shopping and laundry and dinner cooking and various other house-husbanding tasks set before me this day. Ahem. Well, here I am, and I said I'd be better about posting this week than last, so I'll just get into it and see what appears.

Has anyone been following the news about the pervy congressman? Apparently, some congressman from Florida had more than one wildly inappropriate instant message chat with a 16-year old page. Every political blog and news site has been obsessed with this thing since news broke on Friday, but not because of what happpened between Foley (the Congressman) and the page, but because the Republican House leadership may have known a year ago that inappropriate emails were going back and forth between these two. Any thing that can be used to show the Republicans in a negative light I'm all for, but I was bored with this story the moment I heard about it. The bigger and more important story today, I think, are the revelations in Woodward's new book, State of Denial. Here's a few:

1) Henry Kissinger, Nixon's now-ancient Secretary of State, is now a frequent advisor to both President Bush and Co-President Cheney. When Kissinger comes to the White House, if Bush isn't in a meeting, Henry's shown right in. At least some of Bush's mindless "stay the course" mantra comes directly from Kissinger who, according to Woodward, believes we would have won the Vietnam war if there'd been more political will.

2) Tenet and Cofer Black of the CIA had a late July meeting with Condi Rice warning her that they were very concerned about the level of chatter they were intercepting, saying, in effect, that a terrorist attack was in the offing and that the federal government should take some steps to prevent this. According to Woodward, Tenet and Black felt that during the meeting she was polite, but ultimately gave them the "brush-off". Condi has since come out and said she doesn't remember the meeting.

3) Even Laura Bush wanted her husband to fire Rumsfeld.

4) The level of violence is much higher than the White House would have us believe. Though the bloody civil war between Sunnis and Shiites is what's in the news these days, what we're not seeing or being told about is that insurgent attacks on American and Iraqi military forces are so frequent now that, on average, an attack occurs once every 15 minutes in that country.

And the worst part is we've got another 2+ years with this incurious evangelical in the top job.

Anyway, that was Monday's blog, like it or not. More tomorrow.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

more brad and angelina please

Clay McClane said...

Also pray pray pray that North Korea doesn't actually blow anything up during their upcoming nuke test, in which case Americans all get scared again, in which case they believe Bush's lies again, in which case... you get the idea.