Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Blogger ate Happy Hour. Of course it did it right at the end of my lunch break, when I didn't have any chance at pulling it from Blogger's stinking maw and getting it posted on time. So we're late. So sue Blogger.

Right. Onward.

Here's another for the annals of "How Many Lies the Bush Regime Told To Get Us To War:"

Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize winning author/journalist, has been a thorn in the side of the Bush White House for a few years now, but this might be the most damning revelation yet: Suskind reports in his new book that White House officials ordered the CIA to forge a “back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.” The goal of the letter, apparently, was to “portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.”

The letter’s existence has been reported before, and it had been written about as if it were genuine. It was passed in Baghdad to a reporter for The (London) Sunday Telegraph who wrote about it on the front page of Dec. 14, 2003, under the headline, “Terrorist behind September 11 strike ‘was trained by Saddam.’”

The Telegraph story by Con Coughlin (which, coincidentally, ran the day Hussein was captured in his “spider hole”) was touted in the U.S. media by supporters of the war, and he was interviewed on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“Over the next few days, the Habbush letter continued to be featured prominently in the United States and across the globe,” Suskind writes. “Fox’s Bill O’Reilly trumpeted the story Sunday night on ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ talking breathlessly about details of the story and exhorting, ‘Now, if this is true, that blows the lid off al Qaeda—Saddam.’”

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

Back in the real world, forgery is a crime. Tampering with or falsifying evidence is a crime. Murder is a crime. These fuckers forged us into a war, fabricated all of the evidence that plead the case, and ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people. Think they're going to pay for it? Not with the wussies we've got in Congress.

Thanks so much for taking impeachment off the table, Nancy Pelosi, you shit.

Bush seems to have a severe problem understanding right, wrong, and common decency. Consider this example from a recent interview:

Abramowitz also asked Bush about the recent charges of politicization at the U.S. Justice Department: "In a report last week, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that senior department officials broke the law and improperly took political considerations into account in screening applicants for civil service jobs.

"Bush described the report as a 'very thorough and well-researched analysis' but declined to say much more. He also refused to get drawn into a discussion of whether there was 'too much politics' in administration hiring, as Democrats and others have charged.

"'I had a lot of hires in this administration, a lot of parts of it,' Bush said. 'I've read the critique. I've listened very seriously to what they said. And other than that, I have no comment.'"

Translated into layman's terms, that was Bush saying, "Fuck off and die! I got away with it, and you can't touch me! Neener neener nee-ner!"

And speaking of the terminally reality-challenged:

During today’s Pentagon daily briefing, spokesman Geoff Morrell disputed a reporter’s characterization of Afghanistan as “desperate.” Mocking the question, Morrell insisted there was nothing “urgent or precarious about the situation” there:

MORRELL: You characterize it as Afghanistan desperately needing more troops. I would take issue with the characterization that there’s anything desperate about the situation in Afghanistan, anything urgent or precarious about the situation in Afghanistan. What we have is a situation where the commanders would like additional forces, and we are working to provide them with the additional forces they would like.

Morrell didn’t just “take issue” with the reporter’s description; he was also disputing the view of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen. Just two weeks ago, in an interview with Jim Lehrer, Mullen declared that the situation in Afghanistan “is urgent“:

JIM LEHRER: With no — now, Afghanistan. Senator Obama has used the term that Afghanistan — the situation there is “precarious and urgent.” Do you share that?

ADM. MIKE MULLEN: I think it is. It is urgent. It is one where the violence is growing.

Whom to believe? Oh, what a difficult decision: the two-bit lackey blowing off pleas for more troops as if they were no more than unimportant preferences, sort of like "They'd really like steak for dinner, but the whiny bitches may have to put up with hamburger." Or should I believe the fucking admiral? Gee, it's tough, but I think I'll have to plump for the fucker who knows his shit.

How long are we supposed to endure these hack losers again?