A Knight in Dragonland

On the 67th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, President-Elect Barack Obama named General Eric Shinseki as his selection for United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
For those who have forgotten, the Bush administration dishonorably railroaded this decorated veteran out of the service in 2003 because of his very correct analysis that the pacification of Iraq would require [...]

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A “culture of ethical failure” pervades the Bush administration. This time those words were used to describe the atmosphere at the Interior Department, where the departmental inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, recently reported astonishing levels of corruption. A section of the department in charge of collecting oil & gas royalties indulged in a [...]

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From the New York Times:

I agree, kid. I totally agree.

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George W. Bush now embraces the concept of a “general time horizon” for troop withdrawal from Iraq.
{SNORT}
Isn’t that the same thing as a timetable? Doesn’t timetable = treason & surrender according to White House propaganda?

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As Scott Horton says … Worst. President. Ever.
In an informal poll answered by 109 historians, including Pulitzer and Bancroft prize winners, 61% rated George W. Bush as, quite literally, the worst President ever. Most (96%) placed him in the bottom 10. 98% described his presidency as a “failure.”
His competition for the bottom [...]

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Scott Horton provides us with examples of the “aggressive interrogation techniques” condoned and authorized by the Bush administration. An excellent but disturbing piece about the woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker provided many of the details. Here’s a summary:
Enforced nudity. This technique is adopted for purposes of degrading [...]

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The Commission on the National Guard and Reserves released its most recent report on January 31. The observations found in this report are concerning, to say the least. From the San Francisco Examiner article summarizing the report:
The commission’s 400-page report concludes that the nation “does not have sufficient trained, ready forces available” to [...]

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We find God together as a people and Barack [Obama] brings that faith perspective in finding God in the community. {…} Barack has articulated this better than any candidate in recent history, especially coming from an administration that has demonized their opponents and has divided people. I think that is so fundamentally anti-Christian I [...]

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The level of mental retardation, immorality and supreme arrogance permeating the Bush administration has hit a new low.  I don’t know how anyone … even someone as slavishly lickspittle in their adoration of the Bushies as the troll Vonster … could defend this:
To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to [...]

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Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner] … I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a [...]

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. . . all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily (and) adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, [...]

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A commenter with the user-name lj629 at the TPM Cafe simply and eloquently summarizes justice under the reign of Bush / Cheney:
Under Bush, some people are imprisoned forever without due process of law while others who receive due process of law and are found guilty are set free.
Do I have that right?
Frighteningly, he does.
Hat Tip: [...]

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I haven’t quoted Andrew Sullivan in a while, but I find his words regarding the travesty of justice perpetrated by President Bush on July 2 quite compelling:
The Republican party impeached the last president for perjury over sexual harassment. But they commute the sentence of a man who perjured himself in part because he leaked a [...]

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The United States State Department released the 2006 terrorism statistics today. No big surprise … there’s been another massive increase in terrorism deaths since 2005.
The graph below was created using the Terrorism Knowledge Base from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism. They have an incident analysis wizard that can generate all [...]

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Many centuries ago, during the disastrous reign of the corrupt Roman Emperor Domitian, Decimus Junius Juvenalis asked a famous question:
Quis custodiet custodes ipsos?

Translated: Who will watch the watchers?
In the modern era in America, we have the good fortune to have a free press (although corporate interests certainly intrude) and a potent blogosphere. In this [...]

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