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Yes. Thank you Colbert.

Yes. Thank you Colbert.

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I’ve been waiting a bit to comment on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. There are a lot of opinions out there, and I’m happy most of all that people are talking and writing and thinking about issues, humor and satire vs. criticism and insult, comedy as news, the role of a court jester, and so on.

Steve Bridges did a great imitation of Bush, and was obviously Bush’s own choice (for his own roast, he gets to choose?). I’ve heard that Bridges can do Clinton just as well. That was the light side of the dinner, although there were a couple of low-grade zings in that one, too.

But I have to say that I think Colbert’s performance was the more important. I did actually think much of it was funny, in the traditional way of a roast. As it went on, he transitioned through court jester, and went all the way to performative critique. The film clip of Colbert pretending to be the White House Spokesman forced the viewer to dwell in a fairly unpleasant space – it even made me a little anxious because of the genre of suspense, the music, the way it was drawn out. It was meant to make people squirm. It worked for that, but I could almost hear the pulse of a pounding vein in Bush’s own head by the end of it.

The video wasn’t funny – but it was performative, dramatic, and scathing in its depiction, and that was even better. Scott McClellan probably had the most right to feel attacked…. wasn’t that pretty much a depiction of him?

It focused on a single question, finally: Why did we really go to war in Iraq?

Helen Thomas herself – I swear I saw her wipe a tear. I was glad to see someone stand up for her, and for the questions she’s not been allowed to ask anymore despite her long history as the media hardnose to the President. And I was glad to see someone stand up for us, we who are being fed a bunch of hogwash propaganda day and night, straight from the White House to Fox News, etc.

Anyone who has watched the Daily Show or the Colbert Report would know what his humor was like. Remember, he was invited.

I fully expected Colbert to pull a Family von Trapp while the film clip was playing, but to my shock and admiration, he was still standing there at the end.

Thank you Stephen Colbert

The Speech Video

Stephen Colbert Musical Extravaganza

The Colbert Report

Colbert Clips on ifilm

Yes, I approve.

Why? Because I’m angry at his administration – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et. al. – as well as its bullied, corrupt, or spineless members of Congress, the controlled or cowardly media, and the American people themselves – who have allowed our country to be twisted and trampled into something it should never be. If we continue on this path, our future is dismal.

William Rivers Pitt puts it pithily (when angry, spitting and sputtering are common) – Why the anger?

Because millions of people are staggered by the idea that, yes Virginia, we have to go through this again. We have to watch soldiers slaughter and be slaughtered for reasons that bear no markings of truth. We have to watch the reputation of this great nation be savaged. We have to watch as our leaders lie to us with their bare faces hanging out.

Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children’s future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.

George W. Bush and his pals used September 11th against the American people, used perhaps the most horrific day in our collective history, deliberately and with intent, to foster a war of choice that has killed untold tens of thousands of human beings and basically bankrupted our country. They lied about the threat posed by Iraq. They destroyed the career of a CIA agent who was tasked to keep an eye on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and did so to exact petty political revenge against a critic. They tortured people, and spied on American civilians.

You cannot fathom anger arising from this?

There is at least a small amount of comfort in knowing that that the President had to hear, at least once, a few of the reasons why those approval figures are so low.

Shelving Inconvenient Evidence

Shelving Inconvenient Evidence

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The Washington Post has reported on another W deceit. Like the Wilson situation, it centers on intelligence the administration didn’t want to hear as it was preparing for war. Like the Wilson situation, it bears the mark of Cheney more than it does of Bush.

“A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons.” The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved.

“There was no connection to anything biological,” said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: “the biggest sand toilets in the world“.

When President Bush declared in 2003 that “We have found the weapons of mass destruction”—referring to two mobile “biological laboratories.” He said this despite the fact that the “evidence” had already been discredited. In fact, the leaders of a Pentagon-sponsored team had determined two days beforehand that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons, a finding they sent to Washington, where it was classified top secret. Meanwhile, for almost a year afterwards, the Bush administration continued to point to the trailers as vindication of its push to invade Iraq.

News of the team’s early impressions leaped across the Atlantic well ahead of the technical report. Over the next two days, a stream of anxious e-mails and phone calls from Washington pressed for details and clarifications.

The reason for the nervousness was soon obvious: In Washington, a CIA analyst had written a draft white paper on the trailers, an official assessment that would also reflect the views of the CIA. The white paper described the trailers as “the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.” It also explicitly rejected an explanation by Iraqi officials, described in a New York Times article a few days earlier, that the trailers might be mobile units for producing hydrogen.

But the technical team’s preliminary report, written in a tent in Baghdad and approved by each team member, reached a conclusion opposite from that of the white paper.

Team members and other sources intimately familiar with the mission declined to discuss technical details of the team’s findings because the report remains classified. But they cited the Iraqi Survey Group’s nonclassified, final report to Congress in September 2004 as reflecting the same conclusions.

That report said the trailers were “impractical for biological agent production,” lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making bioweapons. Instead, the trailers were “almost certainly designed and built for the generation of hydrogen,” the survey group reported.

The group’s report and members of the technical team also dismissed the notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.

The trailers may have been used to produce hydrogen, possibly for weather/surveillance balloons. They still bore the identification plates of the British company that manufactured the units and sold them to Iraq.

Related quotations from Think Progress:

BUSH: We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. [Bush on Polish TV, 5/29/03]

POWELL: We have already discovered mobile biological factories of the kind that I described to the Security Council on the 5th of February. We have now found them. There is no question in our mind that that’s what their purpose was. Nobody has come up with an alternate purpose that makes sense. [Powell, 6/2/03]

WOLFOWITZ: We — as the whole world knows — have in fact found some significant evidence to confirm exactly what Secretary Powell said when he spoke to the United Nations about the development of mobile biological weapons production facilities that would seem to confirm fairly precisely the information we received from several defectors, one in particular who described the program in some detail. [Wolfowitz, 6/3/03]

RICE: But let’s remember what we’ve already found. Secretary Powell on February 5th talked about a mobile, biological weapons capability. That has now been found and this is a weapons laboratory trailers capable of making a lot of agent that–dry agent, dry biological agent that can kill a lot of people. So we are finding these pieces that were described. … This was a program that was built for deceit and concealment. [CNBC, 6/3/03]

JOHN BOLTON: And I think the presentation that Secretary Powell made to the Security Council some months ago, which he worked on day and night for four or five days before going up to New York, is actually standing up very well to the test of reality as we learn more about what was going on inside Iraq. He explained to the Security Council and, indeed, showed diagrams of mobile biological weapons production facilities. We have already found two such laboratories. [Testimony before House International Relations Committee, 6/4/03]

BUSH: We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents. [Bush, 6/5/03]

POWELL: And I would put before you exhibit A, the mobile biological labs that we have found. Now, people are saying, well, are they truly mobile biological labs? Yes, they are. [Fox News Sunday, 6/8/03]

POWELL: I believe that they did have them and still have them, and I am confident that as we continue our efforts we will find these weapons, as well as the programs that supported these weapons. The mobile biological laboratories that were found and presented to the world, I think, is a further evidence of this. [Powell on al-Arabiyya, 6/23/03]

POWELL: [The State Department’s intelligence analysts’] confidence level is increasing. … And so we have been in complete open analysis with, you know, having a complete open analysis with the CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence remains confident of his judgment. And frankly, I haven’t seen anything to suggest that that judgment is wrong. [Powell, 6/26/03]

POWELL: I reviewed that presentation that I made on the 5th of February a number of times, as you might imagine, over recent weeks, and it holds up very well. It was the solid, coordinated judgment of the intelligence community. Some of the things that I talked about that day we have now seen in reality. We have found the mobile biological weapons labs that I could only show cartoons of that day. We now have them. [NBC Today Show, 6/30/03]

CHENEY: We had intelligence reporting before the war that there were at least seven of these mobile labs that he had gone out and acquired. We’ve, since the war, found two of them. They’re in our possession today, mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack. [Meet the Press, 9/14/03]

POWELL: And even though there are differences within the overall intelligence community, the Director of Central Intelligence, examining all of the material with respect to that van and examining counter-arguments as to what it might be, stands behind the judgment that what we found was positive evidence of a mobile biological weapons lab, and it has not been discounted sufficiently. [ABC This Week, 9/28/03]

Liar Liar – What more proof?

Liar Liar – What more proof?

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Yesterday I wrote a very long and detailed post on the Plame leak situation. It had quotations and it had links. It had the whole history, the timeline, and it had several compelling points. Just as I was about to publish it, a site in another window crashed my browser. Bummer. I have really got to start writing these things offline. I’m just too disheartened to reconstruct the whole blasted thing. Since you can easily look up everything to do with it, I’ll just contribute my own thoughts to the public conversation.

I believe that Plame was outed intentionally, which is a felony crime if not outright treason. Either Cheney or Bush authorized it. I actually suspect that it was Cheney (with Rove?), and that the official story is a backdated version for coverup purposes. The outing of Plame was meant to punish Plame’s husband (Wilson) for stating the truth – and it was also a message to the intelligence community that they had better give them the “intelligence” that is wanted, rather than assessing reality.

Although people within the administration knew that Bush’s claims weren’t true – and there were efforts to remove them (including by Tenet), these claims kept getting re-added to Bush’s State of the Union speech, which was delivered. It was just one of the ways in which Americans were manipulated – playing on their fears to drum up support for our illegal and unethical invasion of Iraq. This has proven to be a disaster, and all of the people who were demonized for speaking their minds at the time have been proven correct. We took over in Iraq for reasons that will become abundantly clear in future, if they aren’t clear enough to you already (hint – permanent bases on the oil pipeline, Cheney’s secret energy meetings, Enron, Halliburton, record oil profits, corruption, fraud…).

Neither American lives nor Iraqi lives (remember, we’re “rescuing” them?) matter enough to this administration for them even to answer the basic question of what cause our soldiers are fighting for. Modus operandi: when in doubt, change the subject – when in doubt, use doublespeak – when in doubt, use your media assets or run commericals as news – when in doubt, change the “reason” we’re there – when in doubt, hide everything. If they had nothing to hide, we’d be getting a lot more information instead of being under surveillance ourselves.

To claim that “declassifying” Plame and leaking her CIA status to their kiss-butt reporter friends (remember, it wasn’t a White House press release) was in the interests of national security is an outright lie.

Tell me – how does disrupting a valuable source of intelligence, undoubtedly along with others who could be tied to her, help our national security? Isn’t it obvious that it is actually a serious breach of our national security? I wonder how many people died as a direct result, and how much real intelligence has been squandered. It is a felony for good reason.

When he was asked about this leak, he stood up and said he’d get to the bottom of it, that whoever was responsible would be fired. Fire Cheney and yourself, Mr. President. Resign. If there wasn’t anything wrong with what your administration did, you would have explained yourself at the time, not years later when Libby was in court.

Oh wait, we still haven’t really gotten an explanation from the mouth of the king. His sycophant messengers have just given us some spin, that’s all.

Whatever voting machines haven’t been hijacked yet will tell you our judgment – if that matters anymore. We’ve seen what the interests of the American people mean to you – that is, nothing at all.

Take a good look around. Our land and water are being polluted. Corporate interests are all but writing our laws. Our system isn’t functioning – ask people from New Orleans, ask people who have to face new interest rates, ask people who are working part-time in more than one job, ask people trying to navigate Medicare and Medicaid, ask the children who are left behind or who graduate from our schools with a substandard education. Many people who believe they are religious have been hookwinked into following false prophets who would like to see this country turned from the land of the free into a pseudo-christian theocracy – money-grubbers of hate and corruption are even attempting to start ’em young with home schooling and bible classes in the public schools. People openly assert claims of empire and world domination. Now you’re deliberating whether we might use nukes on Iran? So what, we’re worse than Hussein now? Wasn’t that the ultimate no-no? Oh, and didn’t you just make a deal on that very topic? What was that all about?

I’m watching to see what happens in November. We know about the election fraud, the hidden programming in the voting machines. We know that even now Diebold technicians are making the rounds. With popularity in the 30-40 percent range, it would be very strange if the Republicans retained control of both houses, wouldn’t it?

So what’s on the menu? Planning to blow up a few more towers? Maybe a Bin Laden sighting in Chicago? A nuclear meltdown in Florida? A small dirty bomb in some suburban neighborhood?

Contact your congresspeople – it’s time for them to show some spine. We still – so far – have only the soft version of fascism. There is still a chance to use our democratic system the way it was intended.

Wherever you are, do whatever you can – while you still can.

How can anyone still support this President, this Vice-President, these cronies of theirs? What more proof do you need?

Vote. Vote. Vote.