DEMOCRACY, INTELLIGENCE, FREEDOM, ETC.

Friends, here is a touching letter I saw recently from an American child regarding his Christmas list...

Dear Baby Jesus:
I have a two-part Christmas wish. What I'd like for Christmas is for Iraq to be a strong, vibrant democracy. Then, once that's happened, I would like for Iraq to invade the United States to force democracy on it--to change the face of the region. After all, we do have WMD (no doubt at all) and we are a threat to the rest of the world, and our president wasn't elected (he was court-appointed once and had people cheating for him the second time).
We are also a haven for terrorism and many of our citizens are adherents of a violent, hostile, false sect of an otherwise peaceful, ennobling religion. They are Christo-fascists and hate freedom, just like we were told the Iraqis did before our glorious invasion that destroyed our democracy.

Isn't that just the sweetest thing ever, good friends? Ah, the innocence of a child...

Democracy

OK, so I wrote that and tried to pass it off as something else...whatever. Alterman did me a favor today and quoted from a Free Press article by those "enemies of the state" Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman. It's worth quoting, as Alterman did, because it is so motherfucking frightening:

A law that will make democracy all but moot in Ohio is about to pass the state legislature and to be signed by its Republican governor. Despite massive corruption scandals besieging the Ohio GOP, any hope that the Democratic party could win this most crucial swing state in future presidential elections, or carry its pivotal U.S. Senate seat in 2006, are about to end.

House Bill 3 has already passed the Ohio House of Representatives and is about to be approved by the Republican-dominated Senate, probably before the holiday recess. Republicans dominate the Ohio legislature thanks to a heavily gerrymandered crazy quilt of rigged districts, and to a moribund Ohio Democratic party. The GOP-drafted HB3 is designed to all but obliterate any possible future Democratic revival. Opposition from the Ohio Democratic Party, where it exists at all, is diffuse and ineffectual.

HB3's most publicized provision will require positive identification before casting a vote. But it also opens voter registration activists to partisan prosecution, exempts electronic voting machines from public scrutiny, quintuples the cost of citizen-requested statewide recounts and makes it illegal to challenge a presidential vote count or, indeed, any federal election result in Ohio. When added to the recently passed HB1, which allows campaign financing to be dominated by the wealthy and by corporations, and along with a Rovian wish list of GOP attacks on the ballot box, democracy in Ohio could be all but over.

The GOP is ramming similar bills through state legislatures around the U.S., starting with Georgia and Indiana. The ID requirements in particular have provoked widespread opposition from newspapers such as the New York Times. The Times, among others, argues that the ID requirements and the costs associated with them, constitute an unconstitutional discriminatory poll tax.

But despite significant court challenges, the Republicans are forcing changes in long-standing election laws that have allowed citizens to vote based on their signature alone. Across the U.S., GOP Jim Crow laws will eliminate millions of Democratic voters from the registration rolls. In swing states like Ohio, such ballots are almost certain to be crucial.

Oh but it can't happen here, the conservatives will shout! This is America! The land of the rich and the home of the wage slave...I mean, well you know what I mean!
Conservatives would say of this article, "this is the liberal media! And you can't believe a damn word they say! Now close your eyes, bow your heads--I don't want any eyes looking around the room... "

And then you and I, being our dutiful, cooperative selves, will bow our heads and close our eyes and when the mumbo-jumbo prayer is up, democracy will be gone.

Democracy In Iraq

I only wish that Alterman had gone on to point out that this story is coming out the day before we are ostensibly bringing "Democracy" to Iraq. I mean, what greater irony? Democracy's packing her bags, I guess. She's had enough abuse here and she's just gonna up and move to Baghdad. Is there anything we can do to change her mind?

I mean, this is fucking IN-FUCKING-SANE. It's unbelievable.

So on Hardball tonight, whenever they talked about Iraq, they titles on the screen said "Democracy In Iraq." And that phrase was onscreen a lot--Democracy in Iraq, democracy in Iraq, democracy in Iraq...and it really just seems like a sick joke.

I mean, we've sacrificed the lives of over 2,000 soldiers and killed tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in order to force democracy on them, and so today, as if they're playing straight man to Bush's terrible lounge comedian, the House renews the Patriot Act. Oh, and then it turns out that the military has been fucking spying on U.S. citizens.

How do you like your democracy now? Because it's being exported to Iraq. It's being outsourced, like all the jobs, but for a different reason. Since democracy here was just elemental, it was in the water, it was in our hearts, it was intangible and therefore no one, no corporation could profit from it. So they decided to send it to Iraq, where all the familiar faces get a big slice of the pie--Halliburton, General Electric, etc.

"Democracy" is big business in Iraq, but you can't make a dime off it here, not the way you used to, dude. It's a bummer and all, but hey, you don't stay in business if you don't turn a profit, right? You gotta go where the money is!

Intelligence

I gotta go to sleep, but I just had to point this out right quick--Bush is a prick and he takes us for fools. Today he says

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq," Bush told a foreign policy forum on the eve of elections to establish Iraq's first permanent, democratically elected government.

"And I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just that."

He states as "truth" that "much of the intelligence" was wrong, but we didn't know that until after the fact, with the "fact" being the beginning of the war. Right? Isn't that more or less what he's saying--that our intelligence lead us to certain assumptions and conclusions that turned out to be somewhat inaccurate after we actually invaded Iraq.

But that is a load of HORSESHIT. HE'S DOING IT AGAIN. He's saying the opposite of what he knows is true. He always does it. Every word out of that motherfucker's mouth is untrustworthy.

He wants us to think that the intelligence he's referring to is the intelligence regarding basically two things: 1) Iraq had WMD, 2) Iraq and al Qaeda were best friends.

But here's the kicker--Rice and Powell both said, prior to 9/11, that Saddam didn't have the ability to threaten his neighbors and that he was contained. Here are the most relevant parts of their quotes:

POWELL: "He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."

RICE: " We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

So if Bush's underlings Powell and Rice had been briefed on these things, don't you imagine the President was also?

So therefore, we had good intelligence. We knew Saddam didn't have WMD and Powell explicitly said so.

And regarding links to al Qaeda, we already know from the National Journal that Bush was briefed on Sept. 21, 2001 by his intelligence people that Iraq and al Qaeda had no ties. There's also an article about the subject in the latest issue of Newsweek that says, that as time goes on, that fact just becomes ever clearer.

So it was the intelligence that was right and it was Bush that was wrong. See how simple?