Loose Ends, Bad Ends

Loose Ends, Bad Ends

  

Loose ends:

 

‘Lying’ Downer,

the Minister for opening his mouth and seeing what comes out, denying everything on principal and making it up as he goes

”  has rejected claims of a major connection between opium production in Afghanistan and funding of the Taliban, al-Qaeda and terrorist groups in South-East Asia.”

Also, water flows uphill.

Philip Ruddock

this week opined that people are sick of opinion polls and won’t decide whom to vote for until the campaign gets under way.

”  I think people have been polled out, quite frankly…In the end, I think people do make their judgments not only on your record but on the vision you have for the future…”

What he meant to say was that coalition politicians are sick of opinion polls that keep showing Labor with a 14-point 2PP lead.

Also, according to Friday’s Burson-Marsteller survey of 1156 voters only 77% of them have firmly decided whom they’ll vote for, and only 56% of them have decided to vote for Labor.

Also, we agree that the coalition has done a good job of articulating its vision for the future: more of the same, lots more, except meaner and greyer and colder.

Howard

Despite his determination to paint every Australian as a Palestinian-style terrorist who just can’t be trusted, a delinquent intent on murder and mayhem, who deserves to be locked away from the cringingly-fearful Israeli-style power elites behind a three-metre high steel wall, Howard is proud of the opportunity to display one of the beautiful cities of the world (minus inhabitants, of course) to his powerful pals. It’s just so sad that they won’t be able to see anything of the city except for, you know, a three-metre high steel wall.

 

 

Bad End

 

Alberto Gonzalez

Bush’s nasty, slimy, footpad, redefines “American Dream”, “lead”, “public service”, “honorable”, and “noble”.

Video evidence:

Also evidence of his slimy dishonesty :

George Bush

redefines “integrity”, “decency”, “principle”, “service”, “good name”, “talented”, “honorable”

Senator Chuck Schumer (D)

covers more of the ground here.

It’s Madeleine Albright

It’s Madeleine Albright

Stop us if you’ve head this one…

 

Early in his term as Prime Minister, John Howard went to Washington for a meeting with Bill ClintonAfter a private dinner, Bill says to Howard, “Well John, I don’t know what you think of the members of your Cabinet, but mine are all bright and brilliant.”

“How do you know?” asks Howard.

“Oh well, it’s simple”, says Bill. “They all have to take special tests before they can be a minister. Wait a second”.

He calls Madeleine Albright in and says to her, “Tell me Madeleine, who is the child of your father and of your mother who is not your brother and is not your sister?”

“Ah, that’s simple Mr. President”, says Madeleine, “it’s me!”

“Well done Madeleine,” says Clinton, and Howard is very impressed indeed.

John Howard returns to Canberra somewhat concerned about the intelligence of the members of his own Cabinet.

He calls in Alexander Downer and says: “Alex, tell me, who is the child of your father and of your mother who is not your brother and is not your sister?”

Downer thinks and thinks and doesn’t know the answer. “Um, you know, um, you know that is a hypothetical question and so of course …”

Howard looks at him darkly. “You know that bullshit doesn’t wash with me, Alex. I invented it.”

Downer pauses. “Yes. You know, um, I think we need to, um…such an important question obviously deserves very serious consideration. It may take some time.”

“Take all the time you need,” says Howard. “You’ve got 24 hours.”

Downer goes away, thinks as hard as he can, calls in his team, but no-one knows the answer.

22 hours later, after a sleepless night, Downer is sick to his considerable stomach – still no answer and only 2 hours to go.

Eventually Downer says, “I’ll phone Ruddock, he’s clever, he’ll know the answer.”

“Phil,” he says, “tell me, who is the child of your father and of your mother who is not your brother and is not your sister?”

“Very simple”, says Ruddock, “it’s me!”

“Of course! Just wanted to make sure you knew,” says Downer. 

He calls John Howard.

“Prime Minister”, says Downer proudly, “I have the answer:    It’s Philip Ruddock”.

“No, you idiot!” says Howard. “It’s Madeleine Albright!”

What Cheney Really Thinks

What Cheney Really Thinks

Invading Baghdad Would Create a Quagmire

 

In this interview from April 15th, 1994 Dick Cheney reveals the reasons why invading Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein‘s regime wouldn’t be a great idea. He also stipulates that “not very many” American soldiers’ lives were worth losing to take out Saddam during the Gulf War.

Less than a decade later …… ?

Feel we need a shower to cleanse ourselves of this man’s ordure. What an immoral hypocrite he really is! And one of Howard’s “mates”.

Now with Karl Rove deserting the sinking ship on 31 August, perhaps Cheney won’t be far behind. At least he will be more isolated than ever.

Brave Role Models – Leading from Behind

Brave Role Models – Leading from Behind


Pressing Personal Reasons

 

Those who believe so strongly that Australia ought to be in Iraq and ought to stay there “until the job is done” (leaving aside the problem that no-one has ever explained exactly what “the job” is, or how we will be able to tell that it is “done”) – people such as all members of the Young Liberals and Young Nationals who barrack for the war, as well as John Winston Howard, Peter Howard Costello (fair dinkum), Alexander John Gosse Downer (no bullshit), Philip Maxwell Ruddock, Anthony Chisholm Abbott, Brendan John Nelson – ought to lead from the front.

If you truly believe in the sacred value of your cause, fight for it yourself, not by proxy – enlist, go to Iraq and fight the heathen devils over there (meanwhile taking every care to defend our oil).

It’s a mystery to us that so few of the most strident supporters of the war are prepared to serve in it, and that so many of them have such pressing personal reasons and medical conditions that regretfully force them to deprive the Iraqi people of their courageous presence in that country.

If our great leaders and courageous role models go to Iraq, they may be lucky enough not to be one of the (at least) 12.5% of Iraq war veterans who return from Iraq suffering Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

That is what Keith Olbermann is calling for Bush to do:

 

“Go to Baghdad now and fulfill, finally, your military service obligations. Go there and fight, your war. Yourself.”

Dis-Honoris Causa

Dis-Honoris Causa

 

In all its splendor and majesty

In September 2006 the US right pushed the country “a step toward totalitarianism” when the Republican Senate majority passed a bill which essentially stripped the US Constitution of the protection of habeas corpus, one of the foundational guarantees against executive injustice and abuse of power which has been an essential part the British legal tradition for hundreds and hundreds of years.

As Chicago Tribune columnist Garrison Keillor said at the time:

  Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus.

The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an “enemy combatant” is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish without any right of appeal to a court of law to examine the matter.

[…]

The Senate also decided it’s up to the president to decide whether it’s OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple of days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators….[T]hey have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal.

[…]

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

[…]

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: ‘Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.’

 

Three Republican senators made a show of opposing the bill and after they’d collected all the praise they could get, they quickly folded. Why be a hero when you can be fairly sure that the court will dispose of this piece of garbage.

 

If, however, the court does not, then our country has taken a step toward totalitarianism. If the government can round up someone and never be required to explain why, then it’s no longer the United States as you and I always understood it. Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.”

There were 65 Senators who voted in favour of the stripping of habeas corpus.

Three of them are now Republican Presidential candidates (none are Democrat candidates).

They were Brownback, Hagel and McCain. None of them now, as Keillor says, “has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal.

Indeed, such “wretched figures” surely agree with the American military that the question of whether the Guantánamo prisoners – whose Military Tribunal cases were recently dismissed – were “Enemy Combatants” or “Illegal Enemy Combatants” is mere semantics. Of course. It is merely the law, and — as we know from the way that John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, Andrew Card, George Bush and Dick Cheney (not to mention McCain, Brownback and Hagel) view the law in general — when it gets in the way of their own agenda the rule of law and basic democratic principles are of small importance and the law itself (even though passed by the same vile and obsequious Senate) merely a minor hindrance when it comes to the Machtergreifung ¹.

But the law is not nothing, and the difference between an “illegal” and an ordinary “enemy combatant” is neither trivial nor semantic, as “rmj” clearly explains at Adventus [and also here].

(These are the people and the sort of people, by the way, whom John Howard’s government – especially Billy Bunter Downer, Darth Ruddock and the man who has lost any idea of morality or democratic principles, Michael Joseph Keelty – uses as its moral, legal and ethical benchmarks.)

Garrison Keillor went on to say, “Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor.

So, speaking of universities granting honorary degrees to dishonourable people…

One-time Acting-Attorney-General James Comey “testified before both the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Judiciary subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law on the U.S. Attorney dismissal scandal…In early January 2006, the New York Times…reported that Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to “certify” the legality of central aspects of the NSA program at that time…After Comey’s refusal, the newspaper reported, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now Attorney General, made an emergency visit to the George Washington University Hospital, to attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program”.

(Ashcroft refused. See Comey’s description here).

Nevertheless, about three weeks ago, “Andy” Card got his reward from – to its eternal shame and disgrace – the University of Massachusetts. But not without the almost universal condemnation of students and faculty in perhaps the most astonishing display of opposition and dissent ever, certainly recently, in a formal academic ritual.

[See the video above]

 

 

¹ Machtergreifung is a German word meaning “seizure of power”. It is normally used specifically to refer to the Nazi takeover of power in Weimar Germany on January 30, 1933.

The term Machtergreifung was first coined by the Nazis themselves in order to portray their accession to power as an active seizure”

$20 A Barrel!

$20 A Barrel!

 

The Murdoch interview with Max Walsh

 

The way we were

On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, Max Walsh conducted an exclusive interview with Rupert Murdoch.

   Max Walsh: Let’s start with Iraq and the war because that looks like being one of those inflection points in history, with the world, financial markets and the business environment all being affected by what happens. How do you see events unfolding at this stage?

Some “inflection point”!

How about “Catastrophuck”?

Two smug, self-congratulatory bulls of the financial world, oblivious to the impending and utterly predictable suffering of millions of Iraqis discussing the carnage as if it was as moving as a financial chart.

Let us imagine for a moment that America owns the world by default and that it is theirs to give or take away parts of it as they see fit, because this is the only way you could understand Murdoch’s answer, that

   Oh, I believe Bush is right, certainly. Well, we can’t back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam…

But why does he really think Bush was acting “morally”?

   The greatest thing to come of this to the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $US20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.

Damn! if only Costello had thought of somewhere to invade, before the budget. He could have given an even bigger insult bribe to the Australian people! Maybe Howard is thinking of invading Zimbabwe before the election! The way he’s been talking about Mugabe is if anything more strident than his condemnation of Saddam, even to the point of invoking the Nazis.

Sadly, Murdoch was slightly off in his calculations.

 

In fact, if you look closely at the graph above you can just discern that the price of oil did not go “DOWN” but edged slightly in the direction of “UP”. With a bullet.

The price of oil when he spoke was around $25 a barrel.

The price of oil now is about $66 a barrel.
And Murdoch’s 2003 crystal ball reading for Bush’s Iraqi “cakewalk”?

   I’m not close enough to know what they really are planning. They’d certainly want to establish a democratic regime as soon as possible and they’d want to get out as soon as they can.

Double damn! Wrong again!