Author: rakemag

You, yeah you. After we’re done with Iraq, you’re next. I don’t care if you are the U.S. Senate.

Well, now we’ve entered the Bolton years. Imagine you are a country to which this guy has been sent to represent the United States. The first words out of his mouth are “We could cut off a chunk of your country and nobody would miss them.”

Yup, you’d welcome him with open arms…especially if you knew what was good for you.

Bolton himself aside, what’s really going on here is Bush is just serving up another big crap sandwich to anyone who gets in his way.

“Hey Frist, you defy me on stem cells! Well, eat this.”

“Hey McCain, you don’t think we should torture prisoners? Suck on this for a while, bitch.”

The problem with Bush is he doesn’t know who his friends are…other than Cheney and Rove, of course…but they just keep him around because he’s cheaper than a pony. As I see it, Bush now thinks he doesn’t need to respect the Senate at all, even one that’s 55 percent Republican. He doesn’t care if some Republicans didn’t like Bolton enough to support him. He’s got the power and he’ll use it until stopped. He doesn’t care if most of the actual military veterans in the Congress are appalled by his stance on torture, he’ll veto the military expenditure bill if it contains torture prohibitions. And he really doesn’t care if the doctor in the Senate thinks stem cell research is a good idea, (and he doesn’t seem to care either that such research will just be done elsewhere in the world anyway) he’ll veto that, too.

It’s time for the Senate to act like an equal branch of government. I sort of like the idea put forward by my friend over lunch today: you stick John Bolton up the world’s ass; we stick John Roberts up yours.

Should be a fun summer.

Liberals are all “Mr. Poopy Pants”

Thanks to Cheri Pierson Yecke for truly raising the level of political discourse on not just the local, but even the national scene, in today’s Strib.

It seems Cheri, who undoubtedly is still smarting from being called “Yucky” when she was up for the State Education Commissioner job, takes all us liberals to task for remarking that Linda Tripp, Condi Rice and our own local fave Katherine Kersten, are, shall we say, no rivals for Nicole Kidman.

Now let’s examine where these observations may have come from. Let’s pretend we haven’t heard the numerous Republican references to the girth of Hillary Clinton’s ankles, and just admit that liberals (we are people after all, despite what Republicans think) have a bias against ugly.

But I would argue that the ugly bias against Tripp, Rice and Kersten is more than skin deep.

Tripp betrayed a friend’s confidence for her own financial gain, (which, incidentally, she used to pay for plastic surgery,) and made a private act between consenting adults tabloid fodder, and gave the Republican attack dogs a bone after they’d been unable to find Clinton actually doing anything impeachable despite six years of trying.

Now, Rice. Yes she did get a Ph.D. when very young, as Yecke points out, but wasn’t it she who both ignored the intelligence memo “Bin Laden determined to attack within the U.S.” and then particpated in the lies that got us into Iraq? I wonder if all the disfigured American soldiers and Iraqi children think that’s ugly?

Then, there’s Kersten. Not much to say there, except every one knows her unfounded attacks and unreported columns set a new low for journalistic standards everytime she bleats.

What Yecke should keep in mind is that, when you shovel the prodigious quantities of horse dung that these three do, it’s inevitable that some will splatter all the way up to the face. And that’s hard not to notice.

What comes out of the south end of a north-bound whale?

The Pioneer Press (yeah we do read it occasionally, but mostly for nostalgic reasons–it used to be quite good before being taken over by the corporate creeps) had a story today about Mark Kennedy’s recent voting record. (Ok, it was from the Associated Press, but at least the PP posted it.)

At any rate, the reporter put two and two together and came up with the theory that Kennedy was burnishing his image as a compassionate conservative and environmentalist to position himself to run for Senate in 2006.

The story got it right. Kennedy is a slimy guy. You’ll notice by the vote totals that his vote would not have made any difference in the eventual outcome. It’s an old trick for the party leadership to allow “defections” by members in swing districts so they can say they actually voted for stuff…although they wouldn’t have done so without permission.

Keep a couple more things in mind about Kennedy as the time to vote nears. Don’t forget who was in town last week to raise money for his campaign. And especially don’t forget the absolute slime he threw against Patty Wetterling in the congressional race last year. If you don’t remember, he called a woman whose son was abducted and probably murdered “soft on terrorism.”

This guy is lower than whale droppings. He’d make even Bush lap dog Norm Coleman look like a great statesman. If Minnesota is stupid enough to elect him this time, I’m moving to Texas. There won’t be much difference.

“I’ll fire anyone who doesn’t lie, cheat or steal to get whatever he wants.”

There’s even more news lately from the NY Times and the Washington Post about the Rove/Plame matter. Every little bit that comes out (the Post story clearly blows one of Rove’s defenses out of the water–that Plame’s name was not secret) shows more and more the Bush administration’s disregard for truth in any of its dealings leading up to or since the start of the Iraq war.

But whether this is the liberals’ chance to get Rove over the Plame matter is completely secondary to the matter really at hand: when is the mounting evidence that these lying bastards MADE UP THE ENTIRE THING TO GET US INTO A WAR going to cause the American people to do the decent thing and impeach ’em all?

Of course, it won’t happen. After all, we’ve got the bigger issues of the gay married terrorists to worry about. And it’s not our sons and daughters that are over there. We, and every member of Congress (save a couple) and this administration are too smart to let that happen while we can raise an army be impoverishing rural America.