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Berkeley Breathed, creator of the comic character "Opus":



speaking about Bush:

"Bush has given us a gift: far from not taking himself seriously, he's become the only human being on the planet that thinks he's not just uniquely competent ... but brilliant in his strategic, heavenly inspired prescience as to how the world works. This hilarious -- also arguably homicidal -- self-deception is what makes him a comical figure. Literally, it's as if -- I mean this with the utmost respect for both the office and the man -- my 5-year-old boy Milo was running the free world. Milo believes himself equally as shrewd in spotting who the bad guys are in any movie and declaring the complex strategy to deal with them: "Blast 'em all!"

But there's bad news for satirists. Bush has come full circle: His ridiculousness is approaching the sort of existential absurdity that is untouchable. Watch him try to string a sensible sentence together now. Anywhere. He's become one of those guys with the Marx Brothers in "A Night at the Opera" who tumble through the door in the stateroom scene. I can't make him funnier than when he's trying to explain himself in a town hall meeting. Any day now he will go with "I'm the decisioner" and we satirists will know that our balls have been cut off entirely by a very shrewd adversary. Reagan did this too by becoming senile.

Dick Cheney is a different matter. I'd kiss him if I could."

LINK

“Fox News has a history of inappropriate on-air mistakes that are neither fair, nor balanced. This type of disrespect for people of color should no longer be tolerated. I am personally offended by the network’s complete disregard for accuracy in reporting and lackluster on-air apology.”

--John Conyers responding to FOX News using his face when discussing the recently indicted Rep. Jefferson:

Funny bit:

TB Guy Tops Bush in New Poll

In the latest sign of erosion for President George W. Bush's job approval rating, a new poll released today reveals that Mr. Bush is now less popular among the American people than the so-called "TB Guy," Atlanta attorney Andrew Speaker.

While the president's approval numbers have been in a virtual free-fall in recent months, few political insiders expected him to be trounced by Mr. Speaker, who has been accused of exposing airline passengers to tuberculosis.

Additionally, the poll results are historic in another way, since they mark the first time that a sitting president has been deemed less popular than a quarantined disease carrier.

But at the White House today, official spokesman Tony Snow tried to put a positive spin on the numbers, saying that Mr. Speaker's poll numbers received an artificial "bounce" as a result of all of the press coverage he has received in recent days.

"If President Bush had been quarantined for spreading tuberculosis around the world, his numbers would be right up there with the TB Guy's," Mr. Snow claimed.

Perhaps in an attempt to change the subject, President Bush participated in a ceremony today in which he declared victory over peace activist Cindy Sheehan.

Posing in front of a banner reading "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, Mr. Bush said that Ms. Sheehan's departure from the peace movement means "I won't have to spend this August in Crawford hiding in the barn."

--Andy Borowitz, humorist

Huffington Post

I don't suppose Snow realized what he'd just said when he admitted the Prez would have to be quarantined for spreading TB around the world to get his ratings up. Can't we quarantine him for genocide in Iraq? That's at least as deadly as this new strain of TB.

Republican debate question: "Given what we know now, should the U.S. have started the war in the first place?"

"MITT ROMNEY, FORMER GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS: Well, the question is, kind of, a non sequitur, if you will. What I mean by that -- or a null set -- that is that if you're saying let's turn back the clock and Saddam Hussein had opening up his country to IAEA inspectors and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein therefore not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in.

But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in."

BLITZER: Governor, thank you, but the question was, knowing what you know right now -- not what you knew then, what you know right now -- was it a mistake for the United States to invade Iraq?

ROMNEY: We did the right thing based on what we knew at that time.

BEGALA responds to the clip on CNN:

"He said -- we just heard the bite -- he said that, if Saddam Hussein had allowed IAEA, International Atomic Energy Agency, inspectors into his country to ascertain whether we had weapons, we wouldn't have had this war.

He did. On September 17 of 2002, the Iraqi government, under Saddam Hussein, allowed IAEA weapons inspectors into their country. Over 250 of them went, led by Hans Blix. They searched the whole countryside and found nothing.

While they were still searching, on March 17 of 2003, George W. Bush told them to get out, because he was starting a war. And, on March 20, we started the war.

You can't get something like that wrong. I mean, that's like -- that's like saying the Mexicans bombed Pearl Harbor."

Former Arky Guv Mike Huckabuck did even better on the same question.
He side stepped by referring to Ronald Reagan, saying that today (June 5)is Reagan's birthday. It was actually the anniversary of Reagan's death.

Hypocrite of the Day:

"Judge Robert Bork, one of the fathers of the modern judicial conservative movement whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate, is seeking $1,000,000 in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages, after he slipped and fell at the Yale Club of New York City. Judge Bork was scheduled to give a speech at the club, but he fell when mounting the dais, and injured his head and left leg. He alleges that the Yale Club is liable for the $1m plus punitive damages because they "wantonly, willfully, and recklessly" failed to provide staging which he could climb safely.

Judge Bork has been a leading advocate of restricting plaintiffs' ability to recover through tort law. In a 2002 article published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy--the official journal of the Federalist Society--Bork argued that frivolous claims and excessive punitive damage awards have caused the Constitution to evolve into a document which would allow Congress to enact tort reforms that would have been unconstitutional at the framing:"

LINK

"Be honest. Who would you rather share a foxhole with: a gay soldier or Mitt Romney?

A gay soldier, of course. In a dicey situation like that, you need someone steadfast who knows who he is and what he believes, even if he's not allowed to say it out loud.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, as the gloriously gay Oscar Wilde said. And gays are the sacrifice that hypocritical Republican candidates offer to placate "values" voters - even though some candidates are not so finicky about morals regarding their own affairs and divorces.

They may coo over the photo of Dick Cheney, whose re-election campaign demonized gays, proudly smiling with his new grandson, the first baby of his lesbian daughter, Mary.

But they'll hold the line, by jiminy, against gay Americans who are willing to die or be horribly disfigured in the cursed Bush/Cheney war in Iraq."

Outing the Out of Touch, By Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, Sunday 10 June 2007

Why Iraq Isn't Korea

Fred Kaplan of Slate waded in this way:

"In other words, in no meaningful way are these two wars, or these two countries, remotely similar. In no way does one experience, or set of lessons, shed light on the other. In Iraq, no border divides friend from foe; no clear concept defines who is friend and foe. To say that Iraq might follow ‘a Korean model' -- if the word model means anything -- is absurd."

Bush at a press conference on Saturday:

Q: And on the deadline [for Kosovo independence]?

Bush: In terms of the deadline, there needs to be one. This needs to come — this needs to happen. Now it’s time, in our judgment, to move the Ahtisaari plan.

Bush at a press conference on Sunday:

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. Yesterday you called for a deadline for U.N. action on Kosovo. When would you like that deadline set? And are you at all concerned that taking that type of a stance is going to further inflame U.S. relations with Russia? And is there any chance that you’re going to sign on to the Russian missile defense proposal?

Bush: Thanks. A couple of points on that. First of all, I don’t think I called for a deadline. I thought I said, time — I did? What exactly did I say? I said, “deadline”? Okay, yes, then I meant what I said.

At which point assembled reporters started laughing at him.

“s it really too much to ask the president of the United States to take his own policies seriously enough to actually know what they are?”

LINK

Combat Trauma Turns Top-Ranking Sergeant Into Mental Health Advocate

By the end of his tour in Iraq, Command Sergeant Major Thomas Adams was
crushed by memories. Too many memorial services for dead soldiers. Too
many visits to the wounded in hospital wards. Too many innocents - men,
women and children - blown up by insurgent bombs or killed
inadvertently by his Fort Lewis brigade. "What I'm telling you is that there's
absolute carnage out there," Adams said. "We have to be ready for the
trauma of today's battlefield."

LINK

"The real Romney is clearly an extraordinarily ambitious man with no perceivable political principle whatsover. He is the most intellectually dishonest human being in the history of politics." --Barney Frank

"Fred Thompson may have hidden depths, but ask yourself this: If he did not look like a basset hound who had just read 'Old Yeller' -- and if he did not talk like central casting's idea of the god Sincerity, would anyone think he ought to be entrusted with the nation's nuclear arsenal? He is an actor, and, as a Hollywood axiom says, 'The key to acting is sincerity -- if you can fake that, you've got it made."
--George Will

Regarding Bush's claim of "listening to the commanders in the field."

***
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 10, host Tim Russert asked Powell why his prediction of a troop drawdown by early 2007 hadn’t come to pass.

“A different choice was made by the President,” Powell answered. “The President received advice from his military advisers last fall that said, do not send more troops.

“Gen. [John] Abizaid went before the Congress, the commander of Central Command, and said he had consulted with all his division commanders in Iraq and all of the senior commanders, and none of them wanted to send additional troops.

“They thought the strategy at that point should be to put the burden on the Iraqis to resolve what I call a civil war.”
LINK

Joseph L. Galloway | The Dying Continues in Iraq

Joseph L. Galloway writes: "The war in Iraq grinds on without much
regard for an American president's pipedreams of victory, a Congressional
majority's impotent attempts to stop it and most of the American
people's wish that it would just go away. More than one student of history has
looked hard at where we, as a nation, are today and said: 'Late Rome.'"

LINK

"Do you care if another bomb went off in Tikrit? Does it mean anything? No! It doesn't mean anything." -- Bill O'Reilly

Darrel wrote:"Do you care if another bomb went off in Tikrit? Does it mean anything? No! It doesn't mean anything." -- Bill O'Reilly

Is it just Tikrit, or does he just not care about the IED's in general? A car bomb this morning in Baghdad killed 78 and wounded over 200, at last report. Bill-O just wants to minimize the violence for his FAUX NEWS audience, and showing his callousness in the process.

And these right wingers, who want to minimize the level of violence in reports, pretend to support the troops. But lying about what the troops are going through is apparently one way to 'support' them.

On the June 17 edition of Fox News' Hannity's America, host Sean Hannity cropped a December 2003 speech by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) before the Council on Foreign Relations to accuse her of "hypocrisy."

Hannity claimed that, in that speech, "when most Democrats turned their back on the president's decision to invade Iraq, Hillary maintained her support." As evidence, Hannity aired a part of her speech in which Clinton said, "I was one who supported giving President Bush the authority, if necessary, to use force against Saddam Hussein," but not her subsequent statement two sentences later in which she noted what she said were her "many disputes and disagreements with the administration over how that authority has been used."


"I've made a conscious decision
to be a lying sack of shit."

Hannity then skipped ahead 14 paragraphs to include this quote from Clinton: "We have no option but to stay involved and committed."

Hannity later accused Clinton of "quickly chang[ing] beats" after opposition to the war grew and claimed that, in June 2006, "[a]lmost out of nowhere," Clinton "started to blame the president for misleading Congress."

Read the rest here.

Dueling quotes from Tony Snow, the presidents spokesman:

“The President also has never declared it against the law to engage in embryonic stem cell research — he simply thinks it involves, as do many other people, the taking of a human life.”

Later:
“To the extent that there is embryonic stem cell research, it’s being done not because Bill Clinton made it possible, but because George W. Bush made it possible.”

C & R quips: "Bush hasn’t banned murder, he’s just blocked some funding for taxpayer-subsidized murder. Privately-funded murder is still fine, and entirely consistent with the president’s values and commitment to a culture of life."

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