Oh that's right - Bob Woodward is King! and don't you forget it.

This just in - Nora Ephron commenting on how it came to be that Bob Woodward was stupid enough to think that it just didn't matter what he knew and when he knew it.

Ephron (the former Mrs. Carl Bernstein, which was news to me) had this to say on Arianna Huffington's blog:

If you don't talk to Woodward, you'll be sorry. I mention this not because it's precisely true (look at me), but because it's an operating truth in official Washington. What's more, it's the only explanation I can come up with for why Woodward was foolish enough to trash Fitzgerald's investigation; I suspect that Fitzgerald is the only powerful figure in Washington who does not pour his heart out to Woodward on a weekly basis, and Woodward was telling him that he'd better get on the train.

So Fitzgerald wouldn't sit up like a trained animal and that's why Woodward trashed his investigation? Oh, that's just wonderful. Take down Richard Nixon and you get to Own the World. Don't just run this guy off the Post masthead - he should be banned from Washington on principal - guess what, Bob? We got rid of the monarchy about two hundred years ago, and no one should have to kiss your ass.

But wait, it gets better, as David Gergen comments that when he worked for Bill Clinton, his higher-ups told him he was "expected" to speak to Bob Woodward once a week. Isn't that marvelous? King of the liberal hill for over thirty years - I think it's time to CHOP OFF HIS HEAD.

Technorati Tags : Woodward, King, Fascist, Bootlicker

Woodward Still in the Hot Seat Rove Indictment *MAY* Still Happen

It's Monday and my day has really sucked. Change of seasons = manic dysphoria. One of those days when biploarity is No Fun at All. So, we're just going to check out where the headlines are today with "our favorite kids" inside the Beltway.

After the holiday weekend, former journalist and bestselling author Bob Woodward is still in the hotseat. It seems that over the weekend, "Meet the Press" participants were asked to comment on Big Bob and his decidedly lame excuse that he didn't tell anyone at the Post about what he knew about Plame becase "he didn't want to get subpoena'd." C'mon Bob - aren't you the college circuit hotshot who always said journalism is a contact sport? And how does that contact feel right now - when everyone's kicking you in the fanny?

David Broder's quote was repeatedly all over the Internet: "I think none of us can really understand Bob's silence for two years about his own role in the case. He's explained it by saying he did not want to become involved and did not want to face a subpoena, but he left his editor, our editor, blindsided for two years and he went out and talked disparagingly about the significance of the investigation without disclosing his role in it. Those are hard things to reconcile."

Other pundits rip on Bob:
Broder, Kurtz & Howell offer choice tidbits (in The Public Eye)

Arianna Huffington

On Sunday's edition of PBS' McLaughlin group, former Presidential candidate and
conservative journalist Pat Buchanan predicts that "Scooter will not be the last indictee," as can be viewed in this playful soundbite video clip.

The Cheney LOVES tortures - but which side of the S&M fence is he on in his own bedroom? ;-) Read all about the dichotomy of our time - Scooter Libby, innocent until proven guilty, but not so with detainees in the bullshit war on terror.


Karl Rove: Who on Earth is Viveca Novak?

No relation to Robert Novak (or so *they* say - the smoking gun of their relationship may turn up at any *moment*) Viveca Novak is now the second Time magazine reporter to be subpoenaed in the CIA leak case. Currently, it's believed that Viveca, who quoted Rove attorney Robert Luskin in several 2004 storis about the leak, learned something that will help Rove avoid indictment and prosecution. But the fact that she is being deposed isn't necessarily good news for Rove - if he needs to defend himself, it means Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is still itching to indict him.

More on that from Middle America in the Minneapolis Star Tribune


Former Rove assistant called to testify on screened calls

And when progressive pundits start rooting for you because we still love America despite how totally lame you are, it's a sad sign, Georgie, that you're *really* in trouble this time, you bad bad boy.

Why Bush is a Liar, perhaps?

Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are those who cannot or will not give themselves over to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which requires rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average.

from the "How it Works" section of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. {emphasis added}

The Reverend Andrew Greeley is shocked, shocked, to discover that maybe the Bush Administration has been lying all this time.

Is Bush Lying About His Lies?
from the November 25, 2005 edition of the Chicago Sun Times

"The buck stops in the Oval Office. If the president was not deliberately lying to the American people, he nonetheless presided over what was in effect and in truth a massive deception. He would be much wiser to admit his mistake and assume responsibility, but it is apparently not in his character to do so." - the Reverend Andrew Greeley

I have seen a scattered pile of posts across the Internet about the possibility that Bush is still drinking - that in fact, this coke-snortin' draft-dodger never stopped drinking, that his "self-made" recovery without a program of recovery is a pile of bunk bigger than Plamegate.

The Poor Man delivers an analysis of the National Enquirer story about Bush's drinking. Noting that the NE isn't the best source of anything, TPM offers an interesting analysis of all the bruises and cuts that appear on Bush's face from time to time.

On the other hand, the guy falls down alot. I don’t know what a normal amount of falling down is, an I imagine that some people have lifestyles that involve a higher risk of falling down than mine, and so that needs to be taken into account. That said, he fell off a Segway. That’s like … I don’t know what that’s like, like water flowing uphill or something. I’m not sure how you would go about doing that, falling off a state-of-the-art self-balancing transport, but I think there are instructions inside bottles of cheap Scotch.
- from the Poor Man.

Bottle of Blog offers pictures of all those bruises, and picks up on the riff of the falls and the bruises with a generous pile of pictures, as well as commentary like, "And, as I say, for a grownup, he sure gets his face banged up a lot. In the last ten or fifteen years of my adult life, I’ve only ever shown up for work on a Monday morning once with bruises and cuts on my face, and that was after I broke my nose dancing at a Christmas party. And guess what? I was stupid drunk when it happened."

And there's that nutty weird thing where Bush requires that all state functions end by nine o'clock because "he needs his sleep". A more skeptical person might say that nine p.m. is about as late as a hardcore alcoholic can make it before he needs a damn drink. So, no, sorry Enquirer readers, Bush has not started drinking again. Bush never stopped drinking in the first place. "

- from the BottleofBlog

I don't have a thing against anyone drinking anything at almost any time of day. But I hate people who lie - about most anything, really. For the President of the United States to say that he doesn't drink anymore because Jesus won't let him or whatever and then to continue to drink is a breach of the public trust - but that's something that President Bush seems to be fairly good at doing.

Looking for richer content? There's not much in the way of links out there, even in the from-the-hip blogging community. Salon.com's Joan Walsh offers a lengthy history of Bush family alcohol issues, which describes a man who couldn't stop drinking once he started - a fairly good description of an alcoholic - but who just managed to "quit" cold-turkey without programs or therapy.

Well good for him - now, do I have to rely on his word in order to believe this? Hmm....

Tip o' the hat to my pal Guthrie T. - an AA member for a number of years - for passing on this link. Sorry I just can't seem to make those meetings, buddy...

Technorati Tags : Bush, BUSH, DRINKING, President, alcoholism, alcoholic, drunk


...

The Plamegate Cheat Sheet Why I've Become a Political Blogger (again) since the Libby indictment

Introduction: A little less than a year after 9/11, the Bush Administration abandoned its pledge to get Osama Bin Laden, got bored with re-building Afghanistan, and began to beat the drums for war in Iraq. The build-up was predictable and inevitable, perhaps, but as the Bush Administration began to present evidence, critics emerged all the world, communicating via the Internet, about the charges Bush was making against Saddam Hussein. Somehow, both Houses of Congress ignored those facts for Bush's "facts" and voted to allow the President war powers to conduct his charade on October 12, 2002.

The invasion began in March of 2003.  From October 12, 2002 until the day that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation leaked the possibility that he might indict Karl Rove in Plamegate, the mainstream press in this country has virtually ignored all but "the official story" of what the war was all about. Fitzgerald's investigation turned a "dull war" into a live news story, and since then, the mainstream press has actually begun talking about what a lot of people already knew and were talking about on the Web. The actual indictment of Scooter Libby created a crack in the fabric of reality that the White House propagated and the press mostly ate up without reflection, remorse, or regret. If ever there was a time to HAMMER at every last factoid in this scenario without fail, that time was now.

Earlier tonight, a friend wrote to ask me what I was trying to prove with the statements and links I've been sending out. Here is the cheat sheet. Read it if you're still unsure what this is all about:

The Bush administration created the "evidence" that brought us into war. That's the issue. Period.

 Without a doubt, the Dems are to blame for caving into "bad intelligence" that (I believe) the Bush administration willfully created.

I wrote about that issue here:

http://gregoryp.blogspot.com/2005/11/democrats-cant-hide-from-their_15.html

and here: (just today)

http://gregoryp.blogspot.com/2005/11/who-is-scooter-libbywhere-is-hillary.html

I don't believe that Scooter Libby is a criminal, per se - I still, however, believe that if *anyone* in the Bush White House thought that Valerie Plame was fair game over the "sins" of Joseph Wilson, then we need to know *who* made the decision to out her to Robert Novak and Bob Woodward, and *who* was the fall guy who actually did the deed. Even William F. Buckley agrees with me on that point:

  http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200511011324.asp

"The importance of the law against revealing the true professional identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted." - William F. Buckley, National Review 11/01/05

You'll note in the above links that I simply *do not* have a candidate for 2008. Clinton is out, as is Biden, Kerry, Dodd, Daschle, etc. They chose to ignore the same facts I had access to - Scott Ritter's treatise on the actual state of the Iraqi state and their weapons programs (Ritter was a UN inspector) - and go with Bush's trumped-up nonsense instead. I also believe the war should be ended, but like most sane people think an "immediate pull-out" is ill-advised. Where the war goes at this point is not the issue I'm addressing - it's how and why the war got started in the first place, and what the Administration did in a feeble attempt to silence legitimate critics of the war.

I stand by the belief that George W. Bush (or Dick Cheney) cooked up this war for reasons of revenge, oil, Halliburton contracts or some other weird nefarious reason that we haven't even uncovered yet. They knew they'd find nothing (though *perhaps* George Bush did not - I'm more than willing to believe he's a puppet in this whole charade and as clueless as everyone else as to why we're really there) and just hoped that the press and the public wouldn't notice. That issue didn't really blow up until Patrick Fitzgerald began hinting he'd be handing out indictments. Finally, after THREE YEARS this is actually NEWS - and I just want to hammer at it and hammer at it until the truth is actually known.

cheers

gregoryp(tm)

Technorati Tags : Plamegate, binladen, Fitzgerald, Novak, Woodward, Clinton, Buckley

Who is Scooter Libby?Where is Hillary Clinton?

The Center for American Progress has a whole section of "Who is" documents relating to the Bush administration. Scooter Libby's profile caught my attention, but the rest are worth skimming.

Also culled from today's news was the cover story from The New York Observer, entitled "While We Were Sleeping" about why Iraq has received so little coverage in the mainstream press. Inability to travel freely and safely through the country is one excuse - the fact that the war is a kind of dull entertainment option is another.

Also in the Observer, an interesting piece on Hillary Clinton's stand on the war and her vote on October 10, 2002.

She also said at the time, and has maintained since then, that she was voting not for war, but to give the President leverage to force tough weapons inspections.

"I had thought that we would let the inspectors continue their work, and we might very well have found out what we later discovered, which is that they did not have weapons of mass destruction,” she said in Westchester. “But, unfortunately, the President, the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense did not want the inspectors to finish their job.”

I sympathize with Mrs. Clinton on some level, but what made her think that the Bush Administration would allow inspections to continue? Surely, Hans Blix was surprised they had no interest in continuing inspections, as I've noted previously. But how is it possible that Hilary Clinton (of all people) was unaware of the dirty tricks of the Bush Administration and the real situation in Iraq? I find it implausible to believe that she thought they would use the power of force responsibly.

Did she figure that she'd look like a hard-liner if she voted yes? And that if the President was wrong they could triumph in the 2008 election? Seems like a lot of "ifs" - and a lot of lives lost - just to gain the nomination and perhaps the White House.

Technorati Tags : Scooter, Libby, Hillary, Clinton, 2008, Observer

Happy Thanksgiving, Bob Ummm...is there smallpox in those blankets?

Could we try him for war crimes?

This just in from The Human Stain: a link to a story at Media Matters on the growing perception that Bob Woodward has blood on his hands - and owed the people of America and Iraq a more critical look at the information he spoon-fed to the public in his last book.

Technorati Tags : Woodward, turkey, day, traitor, liar, opportunist

Woodward is Still a Tool

Legal experts said Wednesday that Libby's lawyers could use Woodward's disclosure to bolster their claim that Plame's identity was common knowledge among government officials and reporters.

- Uh, huh. From the Washington Post, November 17th.

Still Care About Democracy?

Almost a quaint phrase, really - read this article by The Nation's Judith Coburn, aptly titled Worse than Watergate.

Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies {Asses'n'Elephants}

The short take on the Woodward story, from a shamelessly appropriate headline off the buzzflash home-page, summing up the whole damn deal:

Woodward = Scumbag Traitor to the Nation, Who Violated Professional Journalistic Code and Basically Committed Obstruction of Justice by Withholding Information from the Special Prosecutor as He Lambasted the Same Special Prosecutor in the Media. He Might as Well be on the White House Payroll. In a Way, He is. His Pro-Bushevik Books are His Meal Ticket. He Sells His Access by Being a Player in the Bush Administration, Not a Journalist. Woodward, Long Ago, Shifted Careers from Journalism to Public Relations. 11/22

It's too early in the day to be angry - I was up til all hours reading papers by friends, one of which, Mark Pesce's The Telephone Repair Manual, will be subject a post later this week.

Now - let's talk about LIES!

According to this piece in the National Journal by Murray Waas, as far back as September 22, 2001, the President, the Vice-President, and the Secretary of Defense knew there was no tangible evidence for a link between Iraq & Al-Queda. This is based on the President's Daily Briefing of that particular day. So they lied - heh, well, we already knew that. But it gets better. The piece also maintains that because CIA wouldn't play ball and give them the information they wanted, they created a covert intelligence unit headed by a former journalist named Michael Maloof (talk about gun-for-hire) and a neo-con think tank alum named David Wurmser. Somehow, these cats with their bunker-office in the Pentagon had access to better intelligence than career spies and diplomats.

Furthermore "On November 18, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he planned to attach an amendment to the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill that would require the Bush administration to give the Senate and House intelligence committees copies of PDBs for a three-year period. After Democrats and Republicans were unable to agree on language for the amendment, Kennedy said he would delay final action on the matter until Congress returns in December." So maybe we'll get to see the President's Daily News for those three years and piece together what he actually knew when he was telling us Saddam and Al-Queda were living together and Saddam was dying for WMDs that only we have. Neat.

Bob Woodward: A case study in arrogance and self-indulgence. If the Washington Post wants to maintain its credibility even a little bit (because let's face it - they really look like star-fuckers kow-towing to the rich and famous Bob Woodward right about now) they've gotta can Bob Woodward. If you read a bit about Big Bob's day-to-day life at the Post, you know that the place really isn't his job - it's like a clubhouse where he gets to go and be Mr. Big Cheese:

"While Woodward is listed as an assistant managing editor, he has no management duties. He comes and goes as he pleases, mostly writing his best-selling books on what happens behind the doors of power, and he reports only to Executive Editor Len Downie. He is allowed to keep juicy stories to himself until his latest book is unveiled on the front page of The Post. He is the master of the anonymous source." - Deborah Howell, ombudsman, Washington Post.

So let's get clear on this whole anonymous source crap - Bob Woodward isn't a journalist anymore - he's the Kitty Kelley of politics, and I think that's being mighty generous. Bob Woodward is currently an accomplice in the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush administration - Plan of Attack shows that he knew by December of 2003 that the invading army hadn't found any WMDs by then. That was news at the time. He sat on it for his book deal, while Americans were confused about the war and Iraqis were dying. This man is a parasite, someone who uses his access to power to make friends with Republicans while shielding himself from Democrat attack because he took down Richard Nixon. Not anymore, Mr. Woodward - Your Cover is Blown. Just like Valerie Plame's - and as you said yourself, that was no big deal, remember? Let's see how you like living with blown cover, be-otch.

Two things I think and can't prove. Either a) this whole thing is a Big Big Lie, which the Bush administration cooked up just prior to the Libby indictment to begin to make the case that Plame's identity was "all over Washington" and therefore, not a big deal; or b) maybe...just maybe they've set Woodward up on this. Either way, he totally deserves it. He slept with the enemy for the chance at an exclusive that he didn't even share with his daily paper. Why the hell does he still work there? (Really, you'd think the Post had more self-respect than that.) Pulitzer Prize winner Sidney Schanberg has three stories in the Village Voice this week about the Woodward, all of which are well-worth reading. They really show what a remarkable tool Woodward has become - a tool that the Bush Administration has been willing to exploit, and who now deserves to go down with the rest of that sinking ship.

All the Reporter's Men

http://villagevoice.com/news/0547,schanberg,70242,6.html

Woodward's Dis

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0546,schanberg,70021,6.html

Woodward's Debt to Deep Throat http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0525,schanberg,65146,6.html

Technorati Tags : Woodward, Bob, Woodward, Libby, Scooter, Libby

The Confessions of gregoryp(tm)Inspired by Julia Goldberg

This is easy - and hard at the same time. With a nod to others who were tagged:

1) I confess that even though I'm a confrontational bastard, I'm often concerned that I've hurt someone's feelings.

2) I confess that I'm honestly sorry that I freaked out one night about ten years ago and called Steve Terrell's brother and told him I'd kill him. (Or something - it's really been quite a long time.) As usual, I thought I was protecting someone I cared about and went to absurd lengths to prove it.

3) I confess that I still do stupid things like that on a fairly regular basis and I always end up feeling bad about it.

4) I confess that I tell people all the time that I think Steve's a great writer and booster for the local music community. I confess that I feel terribly unhappy that I have to tell people not to use my name if they want to meet or talk to him.

5) I confess to secretly having a crush on Julia Goldberg even though I know we can't stand each other.

6) I confess to being really upset recently when i suggested we have a drink together and she told me she didn't drink. I confess to hating it when people lie to my face.

7) I confess to feeling an awful lot of the time like I am live on the fine line between prescience and paranoia - even when my wildest ideas come true, I still feel like I live in a fantasy world of my own making.

8) I confess that I don't hate the world nearly as much as I say I do - on the contrary, I am in love with the world and it breaks my heart to see so much disharmony and greed and lying and unhappiness.

9) I confess that I wish I had a totally different image. I wish people thought well of me rather than thinking me a crackpot. I confess that despite such wishes, I keep doing the same stupid things that allow people to think I'm nuts.

10) I confess that nothing would make me happier than if Steve and I could bury the hatchet. He was very supportive of me when I was young and crazy and full of promise - now that I'm definitively washed up and absurd, it would be nice if I could call him everytime I hear a killer band and tell him about them. (And the desire to do so happens more often than you might think.)

Check Out This Happy Couple{Asses'n'Elephants}

What you can't see is GW's hand on Karl's big round bum
- and Karl's hand 'round Georgie's tiny little balls.

The SORE System: Strong Opinions, Rating Enclosed

In cyberspace, everyone can hear you scream - unless they hit 'ignore.'

- The Late {Saint} Jude Milhon

!!!Welcome to the 100th post of Lucid Dreaming !!!

Last week, I had two comments made about Lucid Dreaming that made me re-think about how the blog is presented. The first had to do with a friend, who on seeing my latest series of posts, said "How come I didn't know about these? Why aren't I on your announcement-list?"

The short answer is that up to this point, I haven't had an announcement list. I started blogging as a bit of an experiment, a replacement to the mailing list I used to do. The whole premise behind Blogging in the first place was that through RRS and RRS news readers, people who PUSHED content at their friends and such would simply post and interested people would subscribe. I'm sure this is happening amongst the technorati - but among most people I know, they want news delivered into their mailboxes, and from now on, that's what this list will do. If you're on the list, you'll receive mail with the title on the subject line and a link in the body of the e-mail. Read if you like, trash it if you don't and write to me if you want to be removed. Real simple, I hope.

The second comment I received (on the same day) was that my blog was too angry for the commentator. I thought long and hard about this, and have finally determined that while Anger is often viewed as a negative emotion, I honestly don't think there's enough of it in the world. What's been going on inside the Beltway lately, and what's been going on with Iraq since the very beginning is very very troubling. There's nothing pleasant about being lied into war - there's nothing pleasant about discovering that the establishment press (led by former heroes like Bob Woodward) really *is* little more than a mouth-piece for whomever happens to be in power.

Based on other events of the past week, I am now convinced more than ever that we are in the midst of horribly conservative, reactionary times. Were this only the case with the top tier of the society, it might be bearable - but as I've said on numerous occasions in the past year, the world is really beginning to resemble the scene of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinocerous. I'm very concerned by the way all kinds of people are forgetting that people are people and not everyone is a criminal.

And that's why I figure that in addition to writing about what's happening in "the Big News," I'm going to be writing a lot more about the stuff I see around me here in New Mexico - and I'm not always going to be pleasant about it, because too many so-called "alterna-rags" around here are too busy writing about the Personals and the dwindling entertainment options to spend too much energy on what really sucks about the Land of Enchantment.

And so, for those who want to read about the Whimsical stuff I sometimes write about, (such as the Origin Myth of Fool's Paradise, ) and don't want to read all the Angry Shit I have to say sometimes, (like my post about what a bunch of puffball cowards the Democratic Party's leadership has become,) I have developed the following five ratings that will clue you into what's being said from the safety of the subject line. To whit:

{Darkside} - Angry middle aged man stuff

{Asses'n'Elephants} - Political stuff

{Arts} - A particularly breathtaking show or CD

{Queer} - things like my post "Bisexuals Should Just Hide the in Closet" post (though since I decided to follow Genesis P'Orridge's lead and ordered breast implants over the Internet, I haven't had a whole lot of cause to complain about this stuff lately.)

{Burning Man} - Posts related to my developing theme camp or Burning Man in general.

{Rainbow} - Happy happy posts about happy happy things. You may see a lot of these on mornings after particularly enlightening psychedelic drug or radically cool sexual experiences. You may not see this category at all.

Now, given that some things can't be nailed down by one topic header, you may see multiple ratings in the same subject line. For example, if I were to write an angry post about the MANY rumors that Karl Rove is actually a hard-core closet case, you might see a Subject header like this:

"They Call Him Miss Piggy" [I'm not making this up] {Darkside-Queer-Asses'n'Elephants}

So - I'm really hoping that this system will go a long way towards pleasing everyone. Because after all - the only reason I blog is to make new friends and achieve a certain kind of meek popularity. I'd hate to actually *make a point* about anything - particularly to anyone who didn't care to have a point made.

as gregoryp(tm) sez: "In my opinion, (and yes, of course, I have one) it's peoplewho loathe strong opinions that brings us politicians with all the tepidness of John Kerry and all the viciousness of Dick Cheney. If strong opinions seem, well, too *strong* or angry, then you'd be better off sticking your head in the sand and avoiding blogs like these. Further, if art-forms like symbolic paintings which don't say "anything in particular" or lyric-less dance music tickles your fancy more than a strong opinion, then don't read my stuff. I'm sure I'll say nothing of interest to you. And I probably won't do it with pretty colors or "fat" beats either, so go find something content-free to do."

Has there ever been a bigger tool than BOB WOODWARD?

Look, we know he has unprecendented access to the White House and wrote a glowing book about the Bush Presidency. Now he says he knew Valerie Plame was a CIA operative, and that he didn't get the information from Libby. He also says the damage to Plame was 'minimal.' So why did he wait this long to tell us about it? To clear the good name of Scooter Libby? Sure, right...who's paying Bob Woodward to LIE for the Bush Administration?

Democrats Can't Hide from their Inability to INVESTIGATE the President's data

In a post last week, I wrote a bit about my outrage over the inability of the nation's top Democrats to refuse to investigate Bush's case for war in 2002/2003. How was it possible, I asked, for people like Tom Dacschle & Hilary Clinton not to know, as I did, as MoveOn did, as 250,000 protestors in the March 2003 demonstration in San Francisco against the war did, that the Bush case for war was based on lies?

The answer is simple: politics, politics, politics.

Think about it - back in the fall of 2002, a vote for war was a win-win for any Democrat - if the President was right, they'd win because they'd backed the right horse. If the President was wrong, they would get to blame his faulty intelligence and get off scot-free. Any dissent against the President on the vote might be met with challenges by the press and public. There was no political gain to be had in actually looking at the data, as people like Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Jeff Bingaman and others managed to do at the time. They figured if it came to light that the President was wrong and if they could show that maybe he and his crew manipulated the truth, they could do as they're doing now and pretend there was a never a vote on the issue, that they personally were not involved with the close to one-quarter of a trillion dollars we have squandered on this useless war, not to mention the 2000-plus US troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis who have perished because of the Democrats collective inability to USE THEIR POWER WELL to challenge the President's bullshit case.

Not so fast, Donkey's Ass:

I really wish Democrats would figure out that what we want from them is LEADERSHIP, not poll numbers. That what we want is a party that will take strong stands and make difficult decisions in the name of what is right, not what is politically expedient at the time.

I didn't vote for Al Gore - and let me tell you why. In the middle 1980s, Gore's wife Tipper made big headlines over her decidedly shrill middle-class opinion that the lyrics of predominately black artists (beginning with Prince's song "Darling Nikki" if memory serves) should have a Warning Label for parents. As recording artists like Frank Zappa and others testified extensively to at the time, such a Warning Label might (and did) result in a kind of censorship for these artists. But Tipper and her other bored friends pursued this patently racist tack for over a year, and in the end, Warning Labels became standard items for albums, CDs, and cassette tapes. Of course, children and teens quickly *swarmed* to buy records with Warning Labels, proving once and for all that the best damn way to make sure everyone says "fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck" in their lyrics is to create polices that turn such "transgressions" into an instant pathway to superstardom. Tipper looked like a minor hero to gated community liberals, and like a villain to everyone else, including ME and other members of my generation, who were incensed that Tipper's greatest problem to solve, with her position and access, in the midst of the goddamn "Reagan Revolution," became little more than a tirade designed to get black artists off the shelves of Wal-Mart.

This issue was a RED HERRING, another win-win for weak-willed liberal democrats like Gore who thought it was more important to "protect the children" than protect the Constitution. So in 1988, when Al Gore came to Santa Fe just prior to the Democratic National Convention for a meeting of top Democrats, I went to a public meet'n'greet to ask this eventual Presidential hopeful what he thought of his wife's crusade.

"I support it," he said.

"Does it concern you that voters of my generation were raised on MTV and find your wife's use of her position to promote censorship in the black community of artists quite repellent?"

He hesitated.

More or less, (I don't recall precisely) Al Gore said, "Our position has always been that parents need additional information about the kinds of music their children listen to. Next question?"

Well fuck you Al Gore. And I needed a little more information about my President's case for war, which I found on the third floor of City Lights Bookstore - and not, as I would've hoped, from the leaders of the so-called opposition party of the United States of America. None of your people deserve to be President because none of you have any goddamn balls about anything. You think if you keep out of trouble and keep following the polls, that someday, the public will let you lead because you've just been so good.

Well, it doesn't work that way - first you have to stand for something. At least with Bush, Cheney, Rove, & Libby, I know what they stand for. They hate fags and abortion, love the Christian God and will kill in His Name, and will RUTHLESSLY pursue their agenda no matter who gets in their way. But at least it's their own fucking agenda. Do the Democrats even have one anymore?

So Hilary Clinton will give me National Health Care if I vote for her finger-in-the-wind stance on the war? Wrong-o - she failed on that score way back in 1993. Tom Dacschle will now mount an "aggressive" (hahahahahaha) Internet campaign to bring the troops home? Fuck you, Tom - and tell me - why exactly was it that led Paul Wellstone and Ted Kennedy to vote no on war whilst you and "Hill the Pill" voted YES? What data did YOU have access to that they didn't?

Lemme guess - maybe you knew Wellstone would end up dead and since Kennedy is already dead in the water outside of Massachusettes, you might as well vote for the war because your ass was covered all the way. Fuck all of you. I'll vote Republican before I vote for a Democrat who voted YES and plays duck'n'cover, playing that favorite liberal role of hapless victim in the face of a shitstorm. I'll resurrect Ralph Nader just to see you petty-ass Machiavellians play second fiddle to some ABSOLUTE MORON for four more years.

And I'll bet ten bucks on 2008 that I'M NOT ALONE.

The Origin Myth of Fool’s Paradise: the evolution of a grand idea from a simple beginning

Charlotte: The Woman Who Started it All

I remember the moment precisely (more or less) when my latest creative jag got kick-started. It began when I decided that I was really going to celebrate Halloween this year, not just Samhain, but the public celebration of costumes, candy, parties, and merry mayhem. The touchstone showed itself when I gave myself permission to walk the aisles of Walgreen’s and buy a few Halloween-related doo-dads.

A pumpkin-decorating kit with cut-out sponge-spiders caught my eye, and I remember thinking that I could cut my own sponges and use my own paint to decorate my plastic patio furniture that I bought for a buck at a garage sale in festive Halloween colors, orange and yellow and red with black’n’white trim.

As I was painting my patio furniture a half hour later, I suddenly saw myself at Burning Man again, making things festive just for the hell of it, even dragging my furniture out there with me, not as a thing made for Burning Man, but as an object from a life enhanced by the Burning Man experience, on-Playa and off. After actively not going to BM last year, (based, in part, on the essay I wrote explaining why I wanted to be there), I began to feel like the need for sudden festivity in the real world was going to lead me back to the Playa next year.

Over the course of the next few days, I added one prop after another from trips to Walgreen’s, as I went from simply being determined to get into the spirit and serve candy to children (as any righteous grown-up should want to do) to being utterly certain that I should and I would (and I did) build a righteous “Haunted Hallway” in front of my apartment, complete with candles and skulls and Halloween lanterns and spider webbing and a home-made “Hell-Mouth” formed by an unholy alliance betwixt an abandoned blanket I saw in a dumpster and some old poster-paint tossed forth on its surface with all the calculated abandon of an inspired Abstract Expressionist.

But the real prize moment of inspiration in the entire exercise was kicked off when I strolled down the aisles of Walgreen’s determined to find “the coolest damn candy,” - no Snickers or M’n’Ms for my little goblins, no sirree, I was going to find something that really spoke to the spirit of the holiday, the king of thing you’d only get once a year, the kind of candy that any really cool kid would easily trade a Snickers or three to get their hands on. And at the end of the aisle, forgotten at the bottom of the shelf, I finally found my booty buried but waiting for me - skull-pops-on-a-stick, grape and strawberry-flavored with a white chocolate face.

Kick-fucking-ass, I said to myself, aloud I think, and I immediately imagined them clustered in an orange pumpkin bucket, proffered to the children amidst their shrill little cries of “Trick or Treat.” B ut almost as quickly, the bucket disappeared, for I knew I needed a “Candy Distribution System” as cool and in spirit with the holiday. My mind quickly flashed on those styrofoam heads you see in wig shops and I knew I’d found it. I would get one of those and poke holes in its head and stick the Skull-Pops in, poking out like Skull-Hair. I’d get my cool friend Courtney to paint up the head all skull-like and scary, and I’d place the head on the wall in my yard and place a milk-crate in front of it, to make the kids step up to the head (if they dared, Bwaahaahaahaa) and pull out their precious skull-head booty, leaving each one of them with a Halloween memory to last a lifetime.

Kick-fucking-ass, I thought, and went off in search of a beauty supply store. Some days later, I had me a righteous Skull-Pop Candy Distribution System set up in my yard, painted by yours truly, and complete with a shimmering green dress and attached to a broom handle, creating a candy distro system and portable scepter out of the creature that I quickly named and came to love as “Charlotte.”

“Charlotte, you see, was my hair-dresser,” I’d intone in my best Monty Python accent, in keeping with my originally intended costume of One-Man Hair Band. “But she met with a rather unfortunate accident. We were careening about the countryside late one night in the tour bus with a case of Jack Daniels and a massive pile of cocaine, when suddenly the bus flipped over and Charlotte just lost her head. {Dramatic pause.} And so I took it - would you like a skull-pop?”

Evil and funny all at once, I took Charlotte to a party at the Mine Shaft Tavern in Madrid on the 29th and she and I were an immediate hit, the hottest couple in the place. For the event, I threaded plastic spiders and snakes in amongst the skull-pops, giving those away as well, occasionally pit-stopping in my car to re-supply Charlotte’s skull. She and I were honored with a grand award for Best Satanic Costume, no small feat in an evil little hamlet like Madrid. Together we danced the night away, delighting children and adults alike with our abilities to move so well together, as well as all the fine goodies we gave away.

Back at the house on Halloween night proper, as we sat waiting for the children and listening to my ACID 2.0 remix of spooky noises and drum’n’bass {right-click for MP3}, I gazed at Charlotte on the wall and I suddenly had a vision. Armed with little more than a $2 styrofoam prop, I had built a person, my own little own Frankensteinian date, a manifestation of an idea made real. And in that clear beautiful moment beneath the starry night of Samhain, I saw Charlotte leading the pack of a great wall of heads, lined up in the spectacular sunlight of the Playa, each one representing an archetype chosen by its maker, resplendent in its own symbology and meaning, imbued with intention, standing tall, together.

Thus was the inspiration for Fool’s Paradise, a Burning Man theme camp which will feature 22 art installations, each one representing a Tarot card from the Major Arcana, a “Stations of the Trumps” writ large against the tabula rasa of the Playa.

I’ve long been a believer in the power of the Burning Man festival, not the Man, mind you, but the participants who come from all edges of the subcultural universe to illustrate the symbological representations of their own personal Collective Unconscious. As I wrote at my first Burning Man, “If you raise a generation of people on crazy technology and Dungeons’n’Dragons, it’s just a matter of time before they build their own goddamn Disneyland.” But as any of you who have been there are acutely aware, words like these are but glib attempts to capture the power of this festival through the weak tool of the written language. To grasp what it is and what it means, Burning Man must be gone to, if for no other reason than that much of the work which is created only exists there - with many pieces burned when the festival is over, or even if carted away, losing much of their contextual meaning because Black Rock City is the only gallery where it makes any sense to show it at all.

If it truer to say that Burning Man is the Collective Unconscious writ large, than I want to write large the symbol set of Western Hermetic Magick as represented by the Major Arcana Cards of the Tarot, in a massive, 22-installation project called “Stations of the Trumps,” - but I certainly can’t do it alone. In total, we’ll need at least 22 artists or artist-teams to build the Stations of the Trumps inside the Fool’s Paradise theme camp. Invitations are going out soon - if you’ve stumbled across this page somehow by “accident,” and you’re interested, then contact me. Perhaps you are meant to be involved.

Hans Blix Remembered: Scheer Calls a Spade a Spade

What did they know and when did they know it? We already know they lied. Robert Scheer discusses a document de-classified over the weekend that Bush's Al-Queda source was lying too - and that *everyone * (democrats too) should've known better.

It should be remembered that while Bush and his gang were successfully scaring the wits out of us about the alleged Iraq-Al Qaida alliance, U.N. weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq. Weapons inspectors Hans Blix and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei promised they could finish scouring the country if given a few more months. But instead, they were abruptly chased out by an invasion necessitated by what the president told us was a "unique and urgent threat."

Bush exploited the worldwide horror felt over the 9-11 attacks to justify the Iraq invasion. His outrageous claim, repeated over and over before and after he dragged the nation into an unnecessary war, was never supported by a single piece of credible evidence.

I still want to know what the hell Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle were reading in October of 2002.

Scooter Libby & Lil' Kim:Separated at Birth?

Ever noticed that both Lil' Kim and Scooter Libby both have names that sound like prison nicknames? Toby Barlow of the Huffington Post has noticed, in this delightful bit of blog-pinion:

CLICK THE LINK HERE!

The SHAME of the Herd: Why Did I Know the Truth...& John Kerry, Tom Daschle, & Hillary Clinton Didn't?

When you hear another politician or commentator say that “we were all fooled” by the “bad intelligence” circulating before the invasion, or that no one could have predicted that the WMDs would be gone, make a mental note: that person is full of shit. No matter how smart or honest they may have appeared to be in the past, there’s no way anyone knowledgeable about the matter didn’t smell the dung coming miles away.

- From The Beast blog

So now it can be told. We now know that we were lied into war. It's been reported on CNN, so now it must be true. Sadly, I've known since the winter of 2003. Let me tell you how.

In the winter of 2003, I was living in a four-story SRO hotel in San Francisco, in a room slightly larger than a broom closet, paying $150 a week for the priveledge. My neighbors were junkies, speed freaks, and prostitutes. There was one shower for the entire building that only sprayed cold water. I didn't own a television set, and my Internet access consisted of $2 for twenty-minutes at a cafe across the street every other day, so I could check e-mail from friends and family.

I earned a meager living driving a cab - in fact, one of my biggest takes came on the day of the celebrated San Francisco anti-war protest, organized by ANSWER and MoveOn.org and a bunch of other lefty groups, and attended by approximately 250,000 people. On that day, I was one of two hundred cabs on the streets of San Francisco, and though I sustained a few damages to my cab from flying debris, I spent most of the day driving kids to the protest, then driving over to the makeshift jail on the Embarcadero to take sprung kids back to the protest - or home to their lofts in Oakland. It was a damn good day for me.

When I wasn't driving, I was doing something that few people - including, it would seem, the heads of the "opposition" party, those wacky Democrats - do anymore. I was reading. Mostly on the third floor of City Lights bookstore in North Beach or on the couch at Adobe Books in the Mission. And mostly what I was reading was stuff about Iraq, stuff about war, stuff about 9/11, and stuff about the kind of democracy and free-thinking people that America mgiht have had, once upon a time.

One of the books I read during that period was War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know by Williams Rivers Pitt and Scott Ritter. Now granted, I did read this book on the third floor of City Lights in San Francisco - clearly a central spot on the lefty-hipster-wacko circuit - but Scott Ritter was and is hardly the sort of person I'd tend to agree with on much. A former UN Weapons Inspector, he'd actually spent a bit of time in Iraq, had actually seen a bit of what the US Intelligence machine looks like, and as far as I could tell, he had probably spent most of his life pretty far away from the Fuck-the-World lefty enclaves where I spend mine. So I was more inclined to trust his word on this shit than most, because unlike me, he actually had something to lose in telling the world what he thought about what was going on.

By the time I was finished, I was so well-informed about the situation in Iraq that I got to watch Hans Blix slowly come to the realization that he was being used by the Bush administration and that they were going to to war no matter what he found. I knew the endgame before Hans did, and it was kinda fun to watch him struggle in disbelief and twist on the vine as the Bush Administation ignored his reports and killed thousands of people anyway. But unfortunately for me, (and the Iraqis as well) I was just a cab driver living in poverty in San Francisco, and while that's a certain kind of soapbox all it's own, it really doesn't begin to compare with the kind of access to both information - and news forums - that people like John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Tom Daschle, & Hillary Clinton had access to at the time.

In the wake of the Scooter Libby indictments and the speculation on the fate of Karl Rove, many people are asking the question, "What did the Vice-President know and when did he know it?" and I think this is a wonderful question to ask. I want Karl Rove's head on a platter as much as anyone, and I'd really enjoy seeing a sitting vice-president subpoenaed in a federal criminal trial.

But what I really want to know is what has happened to the thinking, reading, and speaking capabilities of the leaders of the so-called "opposition party." I want to know why an estranged, alienated, under-medicated lunatic like me could walk the streets of San Francisco and drive protestors to Union Square and KNOW that the Bush Administration was lying based on my very meager access to information - and yet somehow, people like Tom Harkin, Joe Lieberman, and David Rockefeller, as well as the ones above - could somehow could manage not to know and speak up THEN, and yet are still eager to trounce on the truth NOW for the sake of their own political gain.

I hated voting for John Kerry last year - he voted for the war when it was politically expedient for him to do so, then tried to rescind his position somewhat to please everyone. I voted for him because the alternative was so odious, and yet I wasn't really at all surprised that he lost. If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for everything, and I'd almost rather have a zealot who lies than a dishtowel who can't LOOK AT THE FACTS and make a realistic decision about what's really going on.

The vote for the war resolution was passed on October 11, 2002. Here is a list of the Democratic Senators who voted for it. The names in bold are of those Senators who are practically household names as leaders of the Democratic Party and really should've known better. There were no weapons of mass destruction and the Bush Administration never cared if they found them. They had other reasons for going to war that had nothing to do with WMD, including revenge, oil, and Halliburton. Our people didn't look into it. Will someone please tell me why we should actually consider these people as heroes of "our side" anymore? Will someone please tell me why I should even go to the polls if the people on "my side" will do whatever the White House spin machine tells them?

THE SHAME OF THE HERD (roll-call on October 11, 2002, yea votes, Democratic party.)


Baucus, D-Montana
Bayh, D-Indiana
Joseph *fucking* Biden, D-Delaware
Breaux, D-Louisiana
Cantwell, D-Washington
Carnahan, D-Missouri
Carper, D-Delaware
Cleland, C-Georgia
Hilary *fucking* Clinton, D-New York
Tom *fucking* Daschle, D-South Dakota
Dayton, D-Minnesota
Chris *fucking* Dodd, D-Connecticut
Dorgan, D-North Dakota
John *fucking* Edwards, D-North Carolina
Diane *fucking* Feinstein, D-california
Tom *fucking* Harkin, D-Iowa
Hollings, D-South Carolina
Johnson, D-South Dakota
John *fucking* Kerry, D-Mass
Kohl, D-Wisconsin
Landrieu, D-Louisiana
Joseph *fucking* Lieberman, D-Connecticut
Lincoln, D-Arkansas
Miller, D-Georgia
Nelson, D-Florida
Nelson, D-Nebraska
Reid, D-Nevada
David *fucking* Rockefeller, D-West Virginia
Schumer, D-New York
Toricelli, D-New Jersey

By the way - there are thirty-three names in here. Had just 28 of these cowards managed to read something other than White House spin, this resolution would have failed. Kerry, Daschle, Clinton, and Dodd ought to be ashamed of themselves. All of them owe the people of the United States & Iraq an apology.

ps: I think it's important to also say which Democrats had balls enough not to vote for this piece of shit. I think it's interesting to note that most are not on any short list to be Presidential candidates. I think someone should tell the ones who did vote for it that we're not interested in letting their slip-shod investigative skills qualify them for the White House anymore, despite whatever consequences that might mean in 2008. My source for this information was the Senate Roll Call.

Senator Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii
Senator Jeff Bingaman, D-New Mexico
Senator Barbara Boxer, D-California
Senator Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia
Senator Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota
Senator Jon S. Corzine, D-New Jersey
Senator Mark Dayton, D-Minnesota
Senator Richard J. Durbin, D-Illinois
Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin
Senator Bob Graham, D-Florida
Senator Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, D-Massachusettes
Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont
Senator Carl Levin, D-Michigan
Senator Barbara Mikulski, D-Maryland
Senator Patty Murray, D-Washington
Senator Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island
Senator Paul Sarbanes, D-Maryland
Senator Debbie Stabenow, D-Michigan
Senator Paul Wellstone, D-Minnesota
Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon

National ID Flash Animation

If this doesn't freak you out, you're a total dumb-ass.

What a terrible thing to say - better record it in my profile.