Bloviation.

Bloviation, originally uploaded by Wazdat!.

This year l learned a new word:
To ''bloviate''. What ''bloviate'' means l believe is to pontificate self-righteously about how evil and stupid the other side is, and how exasperated you are that they don't follow the good, solid example set by who else? Your side. All the while the truth is, you don't know a damn thing about what you're ranting. Of course my stalwart examples are Michelle Malkin and Bill O'Reilly. They think they are showing me how the Left ''bloviates'', but they are the best examples of what they think they teach.




D'awright! d'awright! So O'Reilly is honestly shocked at why the "Liberals" aren't for his ''red blooded'' response to the situation in Iraq, or how the London bombings "prove" how Bush was right in fighting the enemy there, so we won't be doing so "over here''. But maybe that's because O'Reilly, and others of his ilk don't understand that terrorism and guerilla warfare are types of battle that are as much political as they are military. And so, our response should be as much political as it is military. O'Reilly always misses that point. For heaven's sake, even something as pathetic as Marines handing out toys in Saigon was far more effective than anything we've heard from Iraq. Hence O'Reilly always consistently demonstrates top-notch "bloviating". Others are Michelle Malkin, David Limbaugh, and of course his brother Rush.

Now Rush takes bloviating to a fine art. In the matter of the Supreme Court, he would rather that the Democrats meekly ''shut up" while their wise President makes all of their choices for them. Rush should get a look something called the CONSTITUTlON! From the phrase: "Advise and Consent of the Senate", it is in the word "Consent" that democracy is manifest. To say that Democrats don't have a say in choosing a Supreme Court, just because they lost the election, is saying that half the country hasn't got that right. That right is hardwired into the Constitution! How Rush could've missed that little detail is beyond me, and anyone else who has ever watched 25 years of CNN!.

Of course the most recent example of ''bloviating" is in the Bush gang's response to the Valerie Plame affair. The Republicans consistently attempt to mischaracterize Ambassador Wilson and Mrs. Plame. Him they call a partisan hack and a liar, only because he sent in a report from Niger that contradicted the stance of the Bus gang. No Iraqi deal for Niger yellowcake.

They keep accusing him of lying about an imagined direct between him and Dick Cheney. Nowhere, in any publication has anyone implied that Cheney contacted Wilson for the Niger mission. Robert Novak himself states in the article that is the very source of the scandal:

"The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him."

lt was always agreed that the CIA contacted him on Cheneys behalf, but nobody ever said that either Cheney, or his office had EVER contacted Wilson.
Rush's little brother David Limbaugh is undaunted though, and remains hot on the trail with full blinders on:

"One such snippet was Joe Wilson's supposed revelation that President Bush lied when stating these notorious 16 words in his 2003 SOTU address: 'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'
Now, let's be clear here. President Bush's statement was true when he made it, and it remains true today. The Brits made such a claim and reiterated it emphatically (with the Butler inquiry expressly validating President Bush's SOTU claim) even after the Bush-scavenging American Left falsely accused him of inventing the story."

Ok Mr. Limbaugh, then where is that yellowcake? Such a smart man as you can find the Iraqi WMD's just by using your Frist-cam! Oh, and while you're down there, could you maybe, sniff out some of that missing 480 tons of live ordinance that we left - just lying around for anyone to pick up? And what about that missing $ 8 billion ?
According to the Wojtowycz Dictionary this is "bloviation" on steroids! Not only does Limbaugh "state a position and staunchly never budge" to quote that master bloviator, Shaw's Henry Higgins, he doesn't know a damn thing he's talking about!

And one more thing about "bloviation", you can take it to unparalleled heights! - Or depths as the case may be.

Now the Right Wingnuts wish us to think that Valerie Plame had no cover to blow!

First they wished us to think that all she did was be a desk jockey. But then we found out that she overqualified for that position by having expertise in WMD's and being a dead shot with an AK 47! No little secretary she!

In fact as I remember it, and I may be wrong, she spent many years with official cover in Europe. The secretary excuse got blown out of the water. This is beginning to look like an episode of "The Road Runner!"

Next they trot their ACME all-purpose demolition excuse: Her cover was already blown to the Russians and Castro 6 years ago!

Awrigh, awright, AWRIGHT! But let's listen CAREFULLY to the "bloviations" of one Andrew C McCarthy of the National Review:

"As the media alleged to the judges (in Footnote 7, page 8, of their brief), Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a spy in Moscow. Of course, the press and its attorneys were smart enough not to argue that such a disclosure would trigger the defense prescribed in Section 422 because it was evidently made by a foreign-intelligence operative, not by a U.S. agency as the statute literally requires.
But neither did they mention the incident idly. For if, as he has famously suggested, President Bush has peered into the soul of Vladimir Putin, what he has no doubt seen is the thriving spirit of the KGB, of which the Russian president was a hardcore agent. The Kremlin still spies on the United States. It remains in the business of compromising U.S. intelligence operations.
Thus, the media's purpose in highlighting this incident is blatant: If Plame was outed to the former Soviet Union a decade ago, there can have been little, if anything, left of actual intelligence value in her "every operation, every relationship, every network" by the time anyone spoke with Novak (or, of course, Corn)."

But listen to what he says:

'' Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a spy in Moscow.''

"a SPY in Moscow"! That meant that a COVERT Russian counterintell was in progress at the time, and they'd be just as interested in keeping things secret as we would!
She would NOT be automatically outed to a REPORTER! If l had a dollar for every spy who was uncovered by our side or Russia, Soviet or otherwise, that got the front-page treatment, l'd be - living in a cardboard box! In all the history of the CIA, KGB, MI6, or the Mossad, no counterespionage agent would have EVER revealed to the enemy that their agents were compromised on the home soil! To do so would have compromised the counterintelligence effort to uncover the whole network of spies, and any effort to run them as unknowing disinformation conduits, or double agents. In the humintel biz, it's "Better the devil you know, than the one you don't know". If Putin knew about Plame, the ex-KGB man would've still kept her secret.

But now to continue with my new star witness Mr. McCarthy:

"THE CIA OUTS PLAME TO FIDEL CASTRO
Of greater moment to the criminal investigation is the second disclosure urged by the media organizations on the court. They don't place a precise date on this one, but inform the judges that it was "more recent" than the Russian outing but "prior to Novak's publication."
And it is priceless. The press informs the judges that the CIA itself "inadvertently" compromised Plame by not taking appropriate measures to safeguard classified documents that the Agency routed to the Swiss embassy in Havana. In the Washington Times article ó you remember, the one the press hypes when it reports to the federal court but not when it reports to consumers of its news coverage ó Gertz elaborates that "[t]he documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.] intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them."
Thus, the same media now stampeding on Rove has told a federal court that, to the contrary, they believe the CIA itself blew Plame's cover before Rove or anyone else in the Bush administration ever spoke to Novak about her. Of course, they don't contend the CIA did it on purpose or with malice. But neither did Rove ó who, unlike the CIA, appears neither to have known about nor disclosed Plame's classified status. Yet, although the Times and its cohort have a bull's eye on Rove's back, they are breathtakingly silent about an apparent CIA embarrassment ó one that seems to be just the type of juicy story they routinely covet."

And here comes some more "bloviating"!

"Gertz elaborates that '[t]he documents WERE SUPPOSED TO BE SEALED from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.] intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them."'
Again the CIA still operated Plame as a covert agent this time as a NOC. And we may presume that this was so because her official cover was blown in Moscow.
But let us allow Mr. McCarthy to stick his foot further down his esophagus:
"Of course, they don't contend the CIA did it on purpose or with malice. But neither did Rove ó who, unlike the CIA, appears neither to have known about nor disclosed Plame's classified status."
First of all, l don't believe a guy like Rove wouldn't have a complete dossier on Joe Wilson and his wife on his desk after the Niger business. And certainly not after Bush had to eat the16 most embarrassing words ever spoken in a State Of The Union address.

"appears neither to have known about nor disclosed Plame's classified status."

Hmmm! Not only is it more plausible that Rove DID KNOW, it is no less plausible that a man of Rove's intelligence would not only know that Bob Novak would print what Rove said, but he'd probably have a full profile on Novak that would tell him so.
This leak reminds me of a scene from the movie "Absence of Malice":
An overzealous prosecutor in an attempt to trick Paul Newman to do some investigating for him, purposefully leaves Newman's file unattended on a desk beside reporter Sally Field's seat. This prosecutor knows Sally Fields is a reporter, yet he leaves the file on the desk and OPEN! She takes a peek, the prosecutor checks on her surreptitiously, and presto, changio, a Rovian leak is born!

How’s that for bloviatin’?



Mission To Niger By Robert Novak
Robert Novak
Valerie Plame
Joe Wilson
What I Didn't Find In Africa
Andrew C McCarthy

Bush Carnage

Bush Carnage, originally uploaded by Wazdat!.

Like a cab horse with blinders on

Like a cab horse with blinders on, Bush continued to assume in his speech at Fort Bragg, that his ideological conclusions about lraq can serve as fact. He gave us all, - the same old same old. "9-11 9-11", "Freedom on the march! Freedom on the march! ". Unfortunately, and unconscionably for our troops, he offered very little evidence to back them up.

He was forced to acknowledge that the heavy carnage and loss suffered by the people of Iraq and the troops. After all, he saw it on TV! He even acknowledged that the American people ask themselves if the war is worth it.

What he didn't tell us is that the violence is getting worse.

ln the span of 2 months, April and May, more than 270 bombings occurred. And the method of bombing has gotten deadlier. In May 381 people were killed in "multiple casualty" bombings. This is from the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index And the Iraqi allies aren't doing much better. The tally of cops and soldiers killed reached 296 in June 3 times more than in either January or February. "Acts of War" death estimates have risen as well according to Brookings.

This year there were 25% more troop fatalities and twice as many insurgent attacks per day as there were in the preceding year.

Bush spoke about how "We are improving roads and schools and health clinics and working to improve basic services like sanitation, electricity and water.” after saying that progress has been "uneven".

Yes, it has been uneven, with new schools being built, enrollment increasing, new healthcare centers.

But electricity is barely above pre-war levels. On the average, lraqis have electricity for only 12 hours a day. Ninety six percent of urban lraqis are very unhappy about this. Twenty percent still don't have water.

The most fantasy-ridden statement Bush could've made was:


"They failed to break our coalition and force a mass withdrawal by our allies. They failed to incite an lraqi civil war."
Let's see...Spain took out it's 1,300 soldiers in April last year, courtesy of the bombing in Madrid. Honduras - 370 went home. The Philippines took away 51 troops after a hostage crisis. Ukraine will finish withdrawing its troops by the end of the year. 1,650 men, close to the amount that the US has lost. The Netherlands and Italy are leaving as well. So are Bulgaria's 450 troops, and Poland, the number 3 in Iraq after Britain, only backed off of a full withdrawal because of the Iraqi elections, and a talk with Condi. Still, their next rotation will have 200 fewer soldiers.

As for a civil war? Some people say that the insurgency is already a civil war. Herein we discover the lie of Iraqi "sovereignty.” How can it not be a civil war if the insurgents are fighting the armed forces of a "sovereign" Iraqi government? According to the Times of London, an Iraqi police colonel says that Sunnis are fighting Shia. Yet Bush says there is no civil war. That can only be true if one side or the other is merely part of occupying foreign power. A power say like - the United States.

Quite serendipitously, Dubya did luck out on the terrorism question. You see, there were no terrorists in Iraq before the war. Thanks to the neocon Laurel and Hardy act, if there aren't any terrorists there yet, there will be! For the record, Saddam denied bin Laden's request to establish training camps.

For that matter, most of the insurgents are not foreigners. They only number about 1,000. There are about 16,000 insurgents fighting. In Fallujah, in 2004, Marines counted only 2% of the detainees as foreigners. Now Brookings says 70% of the bombers came from Saudi Arabia, but even so, this doesn't mean that they are coming over here soon.

Still, there is the fact that al Qaeda has gotten much stronger in Iraq after the invasion. Since the invasion, a heretofore tenuous connection between al Qaeda and Zarqawi was strengthened and "al Qaeda in Iraq" was born.

Bush was being disingenuous to men who were being sent into danger, on account of his insincere stupidity.


Iraqi Insurgency

Coalition Of The Willing

Military Occupation

Reconstruction

Iraq Index as of 7/5/2005

In Response To Fort Bragg

In Response To Fort Bragg, originally uploaded by Wazdat!.

Same Old... Same Old... Same Old...

All I can say is that I felt a great deal of shame when l beheld George W. Bush attempting to use our troops to save his coattails for Congress. When he spoke, he simply repeated the same old nonsense that he did before.

Bush is quite simply, an obstinate prisoner of his ideology - at best. He has carried out his decisions, and no one will tell him he's wrong! It's as if he were following some sinister inner agenda, and we are not privy to the info.

Fact upon fact can be shown to him, and he will simply tune you out and consider you - unimportant.

The danger is that Bush's fantasy world is having dangerous repercussions in the Middle East.

I listened to Bush, and every word he spoke, trying to paint a rosy picture on lraq, and Afghanistan, and I looked at those expectant young faces, I felt the clueless cynicism of Bush's words leave those men more disturbed about their fate than before.

He lied about the beginning of the war:

"A little over a year ago, I spoke to the nation and described our coalition's goals in Iraq. I said that America's mission in Iraq is to defeat an enemy and give strength to a friend -- a free, representative government that is an ally in the war on terror, "

Weren't we supposed to have a "mushroom cloud'' for a smoking gun? In the months before the war, there was no mention of freeing the lraqi people. "Regime Change" was mentioned only in the context of ''911", and "terrorism'',

''911", and "terrorism'' are repeated a lot by Bush, as well as the phrase: "Freedom is on the march". And now, he and his cronies paper over the facts that they see we no longer ignore.

"One year ago today, we restored sovereignty to the Iraqi people."

Really? And did the Iraqi people have a chance to tell you what kind of economy, what kind of infrastructure, or the degree of security they were expecting, when Bremer shut down the Iraqi economy, and left the populace at the mercy of the "insurgents"?



We have made no "significant progress" in the area of sovereignty and government. It took the political action of Al-Sistani, to force Bush to hold elections, and to count each vote for one person. The Sunni took no part in the election.

The Parallel Universe of the Bush administration could not admit to the deteriorating military situation, the poor planning that preceded it, and refused to acknowledge the true strength of the enemy.

''They failed to break our Coalition and force a mass withdrawal by our allies. They failed to incite an Iraqi civil war.''

How many of our ''Coalition" partners have left? For the entire year in 2004, by the month a new ally left in response to terrorist kidnappings of their nationals. There was a mass withdrawal. As for a civil war, we are sitting on top of one. If we do not keep our heads, and start following a wiser course, we will have a war.

"We're working to improve basic services like sanitation, electricity, and water. And together with our allies, we'll help the new Iraqi government deliver a better life for its citizens."

Then show me the first example of such " basic services" that can be shown on CNN? Let's see how Haliburton and Kellogg, Brown & Root are handling this "rebuilding". If they are doing so the way they are handling the food distribution, I pray for the poor Iraqis! With the kind of favoritism, graft and embezzlement that is going on with KBR, how CAN they "rebuild'' the infrastructure?

And how poorly have our troops been mishandled! In response to criticisms of how poorly armed and equipped our men are what did Bush say?

"Some Americans ask me, if completing the mission is so important, why don't you send more troops? If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job. Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are, in fact, working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave."

Nineteen bases say that you intend to stay forever. When General Shinseki told you that 4 divisions were necessary, you fired him. And now, thanks to lack of manpower, hunting terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq is like squeezing toothpaste. You apply pressure in one place, and they move to another. They are still in Fallujah. Al-Sadr, SCIRI, and other Shiite militias are still around.

Now Bush gets starry-eyed:

"In this time of testing, our troops can know: The American people are behind you. Next week, our nation has an opportunity to make sure that support is felt by every soldier, sailor, airman, Coast Guardsman, and Marine at every outpost across the world. This Fourth of July, I ask you to find a way to thank the men and women defending our freedom -- by flying the flag, sending a letter to our troops in the field, or helping the military family down the street. The Department of Defense has set up a website -- AmericaSupportsYou.mil. You can go there to learn about private efforts in your own community. At this time when we celebrate our freedom, let us stand with the men and women who defend us all."

Paul Rieckoff of Operation Truth.org said:

"We don't need to be told that flak jackets and safer Humvees are on the way, because we've already learned that a phone-call home and a few hundred bucks is probably the quickest way to get body armor. Hundreds of Troops have been wounded or killed because of faulty vehicles or missing armor, but who has been held accountable?"

The Veteran's Administration sticks our boys with horridly exorbitant bills.

The truth is, there were no WMD's in lraq. There were no terrorists in Iraq until we allowed them in there. There is no Iraqi economy, and no foreign investment. There are no basic services, or any basic infrastructure. The people of Iraq want us to leave, only if we do that too soon, we will ignite that civil war we know will happen. George Bush says he is grateful to the troops, but shows no feeling toward those disabled by that war. He has lied to his people, his troops. Hundreds of thousands of lraqi civilians have died, and we are no safer now, than we were on 911.