“Mugsy’s Rap Sheet”

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Last Thursday was the first “official” debate among the eight Democrats vying for the Presidency in ‘08 (if you missed it, you can catch most of the 90 minute broadcast here on the MSNBC website). Everyone appears to be in agreement that no one particular candidate stood out from the rest or broke out of the pack. Many praised the top two front-runners, Hillary and Obama, for “looking & sounding presidential”, but as far as praise goes, that’s about it.

I didn’t see it that way.

In what was probably the only contentious moment in what might otherwise be described as a “Love Fest” between candidates heaping praise on each other, bottom-tier candidate Dennis Kucinich took umbrage to Senator Obama’s vow that “all options would be on the table” when it comes to dealing with Iran (watch the exchange here). As former Senator Mike Gravel (pronounced “gra-VELL”) had pointed out earlier in the debate: “that’s code for “using nukes”. Kucinich apparently agreed. They continued to discuss Iran as a potential nuclear threat. Senator Obama then said something that left me cold:

“They are in the process of developing… and I don’t think that is disputed by any expert.”

Actually, that “fact” is indeed very much in dispute. I even discussed growing evidence of more “cooked intelligence” in this earlier column. And hearing Senator Obama state it in such a “matter of fact” way was too reminiscent of the entire Bush White House (most notably Dick Cheney) in the lead up to the war with Iraq. There was “no doubt” they told us that Saddam had stockpiles of chemical & biological weapons; There was “no doubt” that he was “reconstituting his nuclear weapons program”; and there was “full agreement” in the international community on these “facts”.

I’m sorry, but if the Bush Administration has taught us ANYTHING, it is to DOUBT anything they tell us about foreign threats. Making such a sweeping and absolute assertion after witnessing the lead up to the invasion of Iraq tells me that this is either a man that has learned nothing in four years, or is saying what he thinks others want to hear in order to maintain his popularity. Either way, that’s not a candidate I can support. It’s a shame too, because his pre-war opposition to the invasion of Iraq was a key selling point for me. I too opposed the invasion of Iraq before it happened. I felt it was totally unnecessary (Saddam was contained and under a microscope), and I argued that sending in “1 million international inspectors and keeping them there for 20 years” was preferable to “war“… especially in light of the fact we hadn’t gotten OBL yet. But the good Senator ruined even that for me when he explained that he opposed invading Iraq only because he was afraid of “what was to follow”, not over genuine concern regarding the need to go to war in the first place.

I’m not a Hillary fan either. She’s too much of “a politician” for me… the carefully measured words and just the slightest sense of “entitlement” that I’m not sure is deserved.

But with that being said, it doesn’t matter WHO the Democratic nominee will be, they’ve still got my vote.

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You know the old saying:

When I was a kid, around 14, one of my neighbors had to rush their 3 year old son to the hospital after he drank a half bottle of liquid ammonia. To this day, I still wonder what he was thinking. I mean, if you can’t already tell from the noxious smell, one sip should be enough to tell anyone: “Not Food!” The only rationalization I’ve been able to come up with for downing half a bottle of liquid ammonia is the absurd childlike belief that if you just keep going, eventually it’ll get better. So the child continues to drink, believing that eventually the fluid will turn into soda pop.

Lately, Conservative stupidity seems to be reaching the same level of childish stupidity as their fragile reality crumbles around them. A few cases in point:

1. “Frosty vs. Global Warming”: No, the jolly Christmas snowman isn’t taking on Al Gore, but as Comedy Central showed us, one Seattle father, “Frosty Hardison”, protested when his daughters’ school wanted to show the former VP’s documentary on Global Warming, calling it “Stalinist Propaganda”. Comedy Central then produced their own anti-”Inconvenient Truth” presentation called “The Infallible Truth” based upon Frosty’s assertions that “debunk” the Academy Award Winning film. Naturally, it doesn’t take them long to uncover that Frosty derives his contempt for the Earth from his Evangelical ideology. I recommend simply watching the clip for all the stupid details.

One of Frosty’s first arguments against Global Warming caught my attention because upon first hearing it, it almost kinda/sorta makes sense… assuming you don’t have more than a high school education, and come from an environment (like Evangelicalism) where critical thinking is frowned upon. Frosty said:

“What do you do in a greenhouse? … Well, you grow things in a greenhouse. What do you think is going to happen in a greenhouse globally?”

I can answer that with just a few questions of my own:

a). “Do you keep a stocked fish pond in your greenhouse? No? Why not? What do you think might happen to the fish in that pond if you kept it in a greenhouse?”

c). “What do you do if it gets too hot in your greenhouse? If the entire planet is a greenhouse, you can’t just open a window or turn on an air conditioner.”

But poor Frosty, smug and laughing because he thinks he found obvious flaws in the Global Warming science that 1,000 peer reviewed scientific studies failed to catch. Like most Conservatives, “Frosty” can’t see beyond “Step Two”. His argument, “If plants thrive in a greenhouse, then turning the entire planet into a greenhouse could only be that much better.”

2. A new “WMD Conspiracy Theory” explains why no one will admit the Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq. The theory goes as follows: The bungled invasion of Iraq allowed all of Saddam’s stockpiles of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons to be smuggled out of Iraq into neighboring Syria. Republicans are too embarrassed to admit that they allowed what they feared most… Saddam’s weapons to get into the hands of terrorists… to occur due to the invasion of Iraq. And Democrats aren’t speaking because the revelation that the weapons really existed like Bush assured us would make them look bad. So everyone is engaging in a giant, mutually-beneficial, cover up. All of these allegations are being made by one “Dave Gaubatz”, a civilian agent who worked for The U.S. Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations that claims to have seen the weapons before they disappeared in 2003 (along with all his reports).

It is intriguing to consider the possibility of a massive, two-Party cover up that seems to have something for everyone: the neocons that just refuse to believe they were lied to and/or that Saddam had no WMD’s can now believe they were right all along; and Democrats can feel content in the knowledge that this incompetent Administration ended up causing the very disaster they sought to avoid. Once again, my questions are:

a) If the weapons disappeared in 2003, why are we only hearing this allegation now in 2007?

b) Just because the weapons themselves might have been spirited away, the labs where those weapons would of been made alone could serve as a major propaganda coup for the Bush Administration. (”He was preparing to make WMD’s right here! See! We told ya so!“)

c) No Iraqi’s or Syrians, neither with any loyalty or regard for either U.S. Party, have come forward to embarrass the United States with this information.

d) If the weapons were transported to Syria, why is the Bush Administration making a case for military action against Iran? Wouldn’t Syria be the more logical target? Not only would Syria be the greater security threat, but also the greatest potential source of embarrassment. (if you are thinking that threatening Syria might only encourage them to expose the truth and therefore protects them, remember that Syria has no closer ally than Iran right now, and are not about to let their good friends be bombed into the Stone Age just to protect their Trump Card.)

The “More” here? That all the little lies, rationalizations and excuses weren’t doing the job explaining away the Bush Administrations’ failed invasion of Iraq. Apparently, someone deided it was time to “GO BIG” and devise The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories.

3. Answer to Virgina Tech shooting: “More guns!” I’m sure you’re hearing this one a lot lately: “If only those students had been allowed to carry a gun to class…” A bunch of macho Conservative blow-hards NOT in Iraq playing Shoot-em-up in the streets of Baghdad are telling us that the answer to gun violence in our schools is… naturally… “more guns!“

A Conservative “friend of a friend” bulk emailed everyone in his political circle the following graphics while agreeing heartilly with the sentiment that the answer to gunviolence is “more guns”:

Because… as comedian Bill Maher once astutely pointed out, “When you find your child in one of these unimaginable situations, one thing you always want is, of course, crossfire.”

I wrote back stating the obvious: “You know what would of kept these kids safe? Not allowing a guy with a two-year history of mental illness to buy a gun in the first place. Or how about limiting the amount of damage he can do by making the 19-round magazines he used illegal again? (once banned under Clinton, allowed to lapse under Bush).” VA police are reporting that the VT killer fired over 100 rounds.

He actually responded by saying: “Armed, law-abiding citizens who know how to use a firearm can dispatch a perp with one shot and little chance of collateral damage.“

Because, as we all know, cops and soldiers never fire a shot and miss. That’s why they carry so few bullets. Well-trained marksmen never miss! And I forget… was the VT Killer wearing body armor?

4. Iraq occupation failing? Send more troops! Probably the most prominent example of Conservative “More is better; Damn the consequences!” stupidity that we’re all familiar with: President Bush’s decision to send 21,500 more troops into Iraq to try and do with 166,000 what 144,000 could not.

They tell us that “failure is not an option” and try to impress upon us just how important victory in Iraq is. But apparently, not so important that it would justify bringing back the Draft or rolling back those tax cuts for the top 2% to help offset the astounding cost of their war.

“No victory after 4 years? Just be patient.” Has anyone ever put spoiled milk back in the refrigerator thinking, Maybe it’ll be better tomorrow? Just give it more time!

Just a brief observation regarding today’s school shooting at Virginia Tech: Imagine this happening EVERY DAY.

Imagine for a moment something like this happening EVERY SINGLE DAY in this country. Imagine 20… 30… 50 people killed every single day for years. That might give you the tiniest taste of what it must be like living in Iraq right now.

Former CIA Weapons Inspector Larry Johnson was the first today to make the following salient point:  
 
 

The next time you hear Dick Cheney or George Bush blame the public attitude regarding Iraq on the media’s failure to report “good news”, examine carefully our reaction to the shooting at Viginia Tech. Look at our collective shock. Our horrified reaction. The public sorrow. Yet, in truth, this is an exceptional, unusual day in America. It is not our common experience. But we cannot say the same about Iraq.

Here’s something else to think about… yet another gun related massacre in mid-April. The weeks long siege on the Branch Davidians compound in Waco, Texas came to a fiery end on April 19, 1993. Two years and four days later, white supremacist Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in retalation for Waco on April 23, 1995.

The shootings at Columbine High School took place eight years ago this week on April 20, 1999, said to be timed to coincide with Hitler’s Birthday. McVeigh also cited the anniversary of the Furer’s birth for the timing of his massacre.

And now we have the devastating shooting at Virginia Tech University. Early reports seem to suggest that the shooter was distressed over the breakup with his girlfriend. But that argument doesn’t seem particularly likely when you consider how carefully planned out his actions were. The shooter wore ammunition belts, carried several guns with high-capacity clips (19 rounds each), and may have been wearing body armor. This event was deliberate and involved planning. Then there is the “second shooter” mystery of people being fired at at the opposite end of campus perhaps two hours after the first siege had ended. Was there more than one shooter? Are we looking at another Columbine/Hitler’s-Birthday deliberately themed event?

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“We have seen a steady erosion of American power, and an unsteady exercise of American influence. Our military is low on parts, pay and morale. If called on by the Commander-in-Chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report “Not ready for duty, Sir”.” - George W. Bush in his 2000 RNC acceptance speech

On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Gates announced that, in order to sustain President Bush’s “surge”, the tours of duty of all troops currently serving in Iraq have been extended an additional three months. Soldiers and their families responded to this latest stop-loss measure with “anger and frustration”. Now six+ years on, no longer can supporters of this administration blame Bill Clinton for the current state of our military or suggest “Republican leadership” is more beneficial to military readiness than with Democrats in charge. That myth has now been laid to rest.

When former covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson testified before Congress, she stated she never imagined she would be outed by her own government. Likewise, for those who believe there are currently no American military POW’s in Iraq, need to realize that today there is close to 100,000 American military POW’s currently being held against their will due to “stop loss” and extended tours of duty by their own government.

I’m always amazed by those few Republican “dead enders” that continue to make excuses and blame “everyone but” when it comes to George Bush’s disastrous presidency. It doesn’t help that their lone sources of information are partisan “water-carriers” like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh that pass off “opinion” as “news” and only present voices that confirm what their viewers/listeners already believe.

A “for instance”: one Progressive family friend found himself in a conversation with a Conservative family friend regarding the recent “Walter Reed” debacle (where recovering troops were housed in filthy, dilapidated, moldy, rat-infested out-patient quarters). Our Conservative friends’ defense was that “the building the soldiers were in were not part of the official Walter Reed medical complex” and “the building in question was scheduled to be demolished”. My like-minded Progressive friend, unaware of the exact facts, wasn’t sure how to respond. I told him that “it doesn’t matter if the building was in Timbuktu and scheduled for demolition the day after the story broke, the fact is, they were housing OUR VETERANS there and they deserve better.” He wishes he had thought of that at the time, but as so often the case, it’s often difficult to think of the right response off the top of your head when responding to someone that is simply parroting Right-Wing Talking Points.

An astounding 27% of all U.S. troops serving or served in President Bush’s “War on Terror” have served more than one tour of duty (each tour = one year). I even heard on the news last week that several of the troops involved in this “Surge” would be on their FIFTH tour of duty! That’s beyond obscene.

Those who continue to blame President Clinton for the current state of our military readiness seem to be suggesting that he should of been engaging in a “wartime level” of military growth in the midst of the longest peacetime economic expansion in history. Iraq was a war of choice. There is no disputing that. Iraq was not an imminent threat and therefore, the invasion could of at least been delayed until the level of military readiness they deemed necessary was attained. But they didn’t. They invaded Iraq with an Army they themselves had described at “not ready for duty”. There was just no justification in the 1990’s for expanding the military to the fantastic size that would of been necessary to “democratize the Middle East” without over-extending the military and depleting its resources.

And be mindful of the fact that, no matter how large our military had been, it was Donald Rumsfeld’s “Lean & Mean” strategy of military nimbleness that helped put us in the position we find ourselves in today. While he was warned that “several hundred thousand” troops would be needed to invade and control Iraq following its collapse… and those troops WERE available, so it’s not like Rumsfeld was forced to go with fewer troops than he might had preferred… they chose to go with far fewer troops than was needed and glibly ridiculed those that disagreed with them (much like McCain ridiculed CNN’s Wolf Blitzer regarding the state of security in Baghdad).

“Restore Military Morale”. Not only are they extending the tours of duty of all soldiers from 12 to 15 months, they are cutting back on downtime between redeployments as well as reducing the length of training before their first deployment. And, so desperate for recruits have they become, that the U.S. military has issued a record number of “moral waivers”, allowing recruits with histories of drug abuse and criminal backgrounds to represent the United States overseas as soldiers. No wonder a growing number of troops say that once their tours have ended, “I’m out of here.”

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Be it John McCain refusing to wear a helmet while “strolling” a Baghdad market two weeks ago, or White House officials using the RNC email system to circumvent Federal law that no White House correspondence be deleted and subject to subpoena, evidence of Republican “Consciousness of Guilt” is everywhere.

ADDENDUM: “White House Lost Over 5 MILLION EMAILS in Two Year Period.

34 years ago yesterday (April 11, 1974), Congress subpoenaed President Nixon to turn over the “secret tapes of recorded conversations inside the Oval Office”. The White House fought vigorously to protect the tapes on the grounds that conversations inside the Oval Office must be protected to ensure the President receives candid advice, but Congress challenged those claims. And when the Supreme Court agreed, Nixon erased a key 18-1/2 minutes from those taped conversations before turning them over more than two weeks later (April 29, 1974). Doing so demonstrated “consciousness of guilt”, and Nixon ended up resigning in disgrace four months later.  

After hours of searching online, I was unable to find even a mediocre definition of “consciousness of guilt”. It’s like trying to explain “left” without using the word “right” or “up” without “down”. It’s just something we all understand. But if I might take a crack at it:

The Bush Administration asks us to “Trust Them” not to lie when they refuse to let Karl Rove, Harriet Myers or Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to testify “Under Oath”, behind closed doors and with no transcript whatsoever of their testimony (can you say “plausible deniability”? I knew you could!)

Forget about “politics” for a moment and look at the Bush Administration’s behavior from the perspective of a parent listening to a four year old child clumsily trying to concoct a believable lie to exonerate themselves. They’ll insist that they truly believed you wouldn’t mind that they ate that piece of cake. But the fact that they tried to “fill in” the missing slice with frosting in order to try to conceal their crime demonstrates “Consciousness of Guilt”, proving otherwise.

Not only are all these Republicans engaging in criminal behavior, but their actions demonstrate “consciousness of guilt” that they are well aware that THEY KNOW that what they’re doing is wrong. Keep your eyes & ears peeled for more examples of this in the coming weeks. I’d love to hear your examples in the Comments.

“I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn.” - George W. Bush.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nor am I channeling my inner “Drudge“. George W. Bush, naturally, wasn’t President at the time when he said that on June 5, 1999, criticizing then President Clinton on keeping troops in Bosnia.

President Bush delivered an address from the White House Rose Garden this morning and wasted no time blasting Democrats for drawing up a $96 Billion dollar defense spending bill that also set a timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

If you haven’t noticed lately, Republicans have become more and more disconnected from reality. There was Senator McCain telling Bill Bennet and Wolf Blitzer that, thanks to the Surge, parts of Baghdad outside of the “International Zone” (once called the “Green Zone“, but have since stopped as it falsely implied a sense of safety) were now safe enough to “go for a stroll”, and that “General Patraeus goes out there [in Baghdad] almost every day in an unarmed humvee.”

When faced with reality by a long embedded reporter in Iraq, Senators’ McCain and Lindsey Graham immediately flew to Iraq and flushed their credibility down the toilet by going on that stroll “three minutes from the Green Zone, surrounded by 100 heavily armed soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache Gunships.” McCain and Graham then had the balls to tell reporters that they proved themselves right and the critics wrong.

NBC Iraq correspondent Tom Aspell put it best when he noted that with a similar level of protection, “Paris Hilton could ride a bicycle in a bikini through Anbar province” with the same level of protection Senator McCain surrounded himself with that day.

Then, almost as if to help drive home the point of their outrageous hypocrisy in the name of playing Partisan Politics, The White House came out and criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for traveling to Syria to meet with the President of Syria regarding security in Iraq a mere THREE DAYS after a Republican delegation did the same thing.

Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, along with SIXTEEN other Republican Senators, criticized the Democratic defense spending bill for containing “pork”, that had no such objecting when passing their own defense spending bill last year that included $700 Million for a “railroad to nowhere“.

Imagine for a moment it’s a time before George Bush is declared President. Two countries have taken each others citizens hostage. One of them blindfolds, tortures and generally violates the Geneva Convention rights of its prisoners, not even allowing the world to see who those prisoners are or let the families of those prisoners know they are alright and not being mistreated.

The other country does just the opposite. The prisoners are treated well and allowed to let their families and the world know they are okay.

Before George Bush, there would be little doubt the United States would be the latter of those two countries.

Who ever imagined (before President Bush), the United States being SHAMED by IRAN regarding prisoner treatment? Leave it to Monty Python alum Terry Jones to point out the obvious, that Iran’s treatment of British soldiers is FAR better than the way the United States has been treating prisoners at our POW camp at Guantanamo Bay.

Makes you proud to be an Amerikan, huh?