John's Blog

Despite the secrecy of the ongoing domestic surveillance, the White House had Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Gen. Michael Hayden, the nation's No. 2 intelligence official, brief reporters:....

He and Gonzales said it was essential to bypass the legal requirements to obtain secret court warrants for such operations because they had to move quickly to stop terrorist threats. But they struggled to explain why the administration could not have relied on FISA provisions that allow surveillance to be conducted and a warrant obtained after the fact in emergencies.

(Yes, General Hayden, you remember him? The guy who said they didn't get the retroactive warrants because it involved "paperwork" and "making arguments.")

The Bush administration simply cannot answer this one question - if time was of the essence, why didn't they conduct the searches and get the warrants after the fact, something that is allowed under the FISA law? They conducted the searches alright, but they never once sought the retroactive warrants.

They have yet to answer this question, and this is the ONLY QUESTION you need to be immediately focusing on. There is no answer, short of the administration simply wanting to defy the law. It wasn't for expediency, because they could do the search immediately. And if they say it was because they were afraid the court would deny the warrant, that's absurd since the court has refused only 5 to 15 of 19,000 warrants that have been requested.

The only reason the court would refuse a warrant in post-9/11 America is if the warrant were for something outrageous, such as, oh I don't know, spying on an American elected official or an American journalist. It would have to be a pretty outrageous request if the administration were afraid the Potemkin court would turn it down. So aren't you the least bit curious what that request was, and whether it involved YOU?

Come on guys, make us proud, ask an obvious question and stick with it until you get a satisfactory answer. You have your Watergate staring you in the eyes, grab it.

Welcome to your new Eden. Welcome to Idiot America.

LET'S TAKE A TOUR, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover the last year or so. A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn. James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and snuff the democratically elected president of Venezuela.

The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis based on heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives argues against cutting-edge research into the use of human stem cells by saying that "an embryo is a person. . . . We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." Nobody laughs at him or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or whoever invented the baby-back rib....

In a bold flash of sulfur and smoke, Satan descended into the White House daily briefing and dropped some shocking intelligence: he is the father of VP Dick Cheney! Satan has been in the White House for decades, but what drove him to make such a shocking announcement?

"It was time he knew the truth," Satan told the Underground Reporter.

Cheney's mother could not be reached for comment, but sources suggest that Satan is in fact her baby's daddy.

Are you kidding me with this “There’s a war on Christmas” bullshit? FOX News wasn’t raking in enough cash already from all the Christmas commercials for Kill ‘em All Barbie and Girls Gone Wild Brand Toddler Gear? They had to start publishing books about some bogus attack on Christianity? And who did they pick to lead this particular charge? John f'ing Gibson. This guy has wiener written all over him. Bill O’Reilly gets all the credit as the biggest nutcase in FOXville, but Gibson really deserves his own special wing in the happy house...

What makes him such a dick? I mean, besides making a fortune by screaming hysterically about how oppressed Christians are by the other twenty percent? How about advocating bombing countries that don’t vote the way we want in their own elections? Way to encourage democracy, fuckhead. And maybe he was kidding when he wished, on air, that the French had gotten the 2012 Olympics instead of the Brits so the terrorists would “blow up Paris,” but it might have been just a touch over the top to call for it again on the day of the London train bombings. Classy move, asshole...

If a meteorite crashed down on the White House today, the conversation at the Pearly Gates might go something like this.

"Oh-h-h. Where am I? St. Peter?"

"Welcome, Mr. President. I just need to see if you belong here."

"Well, St. Peter, you know I'm a born-again Christian. I pray every day. I'm very religious. I brought Bible study classes to the White House."

"That's terrific. And have you helped any lepers lately?"

"Not exactly. But my cuts in the top tax rates will create wealth that will trickle down and help lepers. I'm getting there indirectly, instead of barging through the eye of a needle."

"Hmm."

"And St. Peter, I've been upstanding in defending Christian values. We made sure that we call the tree at the White House a Christmas tree, not a holiday tree. And we sent out 1.4 million White House Christmas cards!"...

"Mr. President, our checklist doesn't have anything about sending out Christmas cards, or putting up Christmas trees. It's more about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and housing the homeless."

"But St. Peter, they're just trying to put Christ back into Christmas. They see how faith is threatened by people saying 'Happy Holidays,' instead of 'Merry Christmas.' Fox News has covered 'Christmas Under Siege,' and one of its anchors has a new book called 'The War on Christmas.' The American Family Association is boycotting Target, and the Catholic League threatened a boycott against Wal-Mart. This hasn't been my issue, but these are my people, St. Peter. They're doing this to glorify Christ."

"Frankly, Mr. President, here in Heaven, I say 'Merry Christmas,' but others prefer 'Happy Holidays.' Gandhi prefers it. And a Jewish rabbi told me that his family felt more comfortable with that as well. ..."

"But St. Peter, that's one rabbi. ..."

"Whose name is Jesus."

"Oops."

"Jesus says Christmas shouldn't be about picking fights and organizing boycotts. All that legalistic nitpicking just reminds him of the Pharisees. Do you really think that if Jesus returns to Earth tomorrow, his priority is going to be organizing a boycott of Target stores? You think he's going to appear on Fox to say, 'Worry about genocide and hunger later - first, let's battle with liberals over what holiday greeting to use'?",,,

Our secretary of state's tortuous defense of supposedly nonexistent C.I.A. torture chambers in Eastern Europe was an acid flashback to Clintonian parsing.

Just as Bill Clinton pranced around questions about marijuana use at Oxford during the '92 campaign by saying he had never broken the laws of his country, so Condoleezza Rice pranced around questions about outsourcing torture by suggesting that President Bush had never broken the laws of his country.

But in Bill's case, he was only talking about smoking a little joint, while Condi is talking about snatching people off the street and throwing them into lethal joints. "The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees," she said. It all depends on what you mean by "authorize," "condone," "torture" and "detainees."

Ms. Rice also claimed that the U.S. did not transport terrorism suspects "for the purpose of interrogation using torture." But, hey, as Rummy likes to say, stuff happens.

The president said he was opposed to torture and then effectively issued regulations to allow what any normal person - and certainly a victim - would consider torture. Alberto Gonzales et al. have defined torture deviancy downward to the point where it's hard to imagine what would count as torture. Under this administration, prisoners have been hung by their wrists and had electrodes attached to their genitals; they've been waterboarded, exposed to extreme heat and cold, and threatened with death - even accidentally killed.

Does Ms. Rice think anyone is buying her loophole-riddled defense? Not with the Italians thinking of rounding up C.I.A. officers to ask them whether they abducted a cleric in Milan. And with Torquemada Cheney slouching around Capitol Hill trying to circumvent John McCain, legalizing torture at the C.I.A.'s secret prisons, by preventing Congress from requiring decent treatment for U.S. prisoners.

As The Times's Scott Shane reported today, a German man, Khaled el-Masri, says he was kidnapped, beaten and spirited away to Afghanistan by C.I.A. officers in an apparent case of mistaken identity in 2003. He is suing the former C.I.A. chief George Tenet and three companies allegedly involved in the clandestine flights....

When Ms. Rice was a Stanford professor of international relations, she would have flunked any student who dared to present her with the sort of willfully disingenuous piffle she spouted on the eve of her European trip.

Maybe she figures that if she was able to fool people once with doubletalk about W.M.D., she can fool them again with doubletalk about rendition.

As chatter spreads about Condi as a possible presidential contender, we are left wondering, once more, who this woman really is. Is she doing this willingly, or is she hemmed in by the powerful men around her? As a former national security adviser who has had the president's ear for five years, did she try to fight the appalling attempt to shred the Geneva Conventions, or did she go along with it? Is she doing Vice's nefarious bidding on torture, just as she did on ginning up the case for invading Iraq?

I'm really not trying to be Grinch McCall here. My intention isn't to ruin any of these songs for you. Well, that's not exactly true -- insofar as you've got any warm feelings about Rudolph, I'd like to be sure they curdle like month-old milk by the time you're done reading this. "Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer" is usually taught as inspirational verse and a statement against prejudice and mockery: Rudolph is visibly marked and consequently discriminated against, yet he rises above the catcalls to achieve fame and success. Sounds great, right? Let's look a little closer. Rudolph's moment of redemption comes not as the cause of any consciousness-raising, but because his difference (superficial as it is) is shown to have utility to the corporate body. He is accepted by his peers not for his own merits, but because circumstances conspired to harness his idiosyncrasy and turn it into profit for his employers. What is the real lesson we take from the fable of Rudolph, boys and girls? ***Difference will be tolerated and celebrated only if it can be put to the service of the power structure.*** Otherwise, you're just a wacko, and you can forget about those reindeer games for good. Once again, Santa Claus is portrayed here as an unfeeling, self-absorbed cad -- he makes no intervention in Rudolph's persecution until he needs to save his own ass (at least the TV special got that part right). But does Rudolph get his moment to tell the boss to screw himself; that his hypocrisy won't be tolerated? No, he's the first one tethered to the sled, happy to take the whip of his former oppressor as long as he can feel both useful to the corporation and validated by his peers. If I had a kid, this would be about the last lesson I'd want to teach her.

In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that President George W. Bush, confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent within his own party, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq next year....

A high-level Pentagon war planner told me, however, that he has seen scant indication that the President would authorize a significant pullout of American troops if he believed that it would impede the war against the insurgency....

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror....