Right on.
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“George W. Bush who talks tough and brags about making America safer has once again failed to deliver. After being warned about the danger of major stockpiles of explosives in Iraq, this administration failed to guard those stockpiles – where nearly 380 tons of highly explosive weapons were kept. Today we learned that these explosives are missing, unaccounted for and could be in the hands of terrorists.

“Terrorists could use this material to kill our troops and our people, blow up airplanes and level buildings.

“In May of this year, the administration was warned that terrorists may be helping themselves to ‘the greatest explosives bonanza in history.’ And now we know that our country and our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics. This is one of the great blunders of the Bush policy in Iraq.

“The unbelievable incompetence of this president and his administration has put our troops at risk. George W. Bush has failed the essential test of any commander in chief to keep America safe.

“Every step of the way this administration has miscalculated – miscalculated about how many troops we need. Secretary Rumsfeld cavalierly dismissed the danger of looting — and now we know the impact.

“Make no mistake: our troops are the best-trained and best-led forces in the world, and they have been doing their job honorably and bravely. The problem is the Commander-in-Chief has not being doing his.

“If President Bush can’t recognize his failures in Iraq, he can’t fix them. And he’s doomed to repeat the same mistakes there and elsewhere. We can’t afford to risk four more years of George W. Bush.

“With President Bush, we face the prospect of a war that’s spiraling out of control in Iraq. As president, I will succeed in Iraq and bring our troops home.”

First we had the flu vaccine, and now we learn that the US Defense Department has been aggressively trying to cover up the embarrassing fact that under its watch some 380 tons of incredibly powerful explosives have been stolen in Iraq and are most likely in the hands of insurgents, to whom it can provide a near-limitless cache of destruction and murder.

It took just one pound of this material to bring down Flight 103 over Lacherbie. And the enemy has 380 tons. The political bloggers will almost certainly be out in force tonight and tomorrow discussing the ramifications of this calamity.

The real story, of course, is our government’s battle to stop us from learning about this colossal fuck-up. As you read the Times story, you realize just how arrogant we were in ignoring warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency, and how cowardly we were in working overtime to keep the people from learning what happened.

Josh Marshall has been all over the story before it broke, and makes it clear the government’s motives for the coverup are purely political.

There are a number of reasons why you can imagine the White House and the civilians at the Pentagon wouldn’t want to inform the IAEA. But one pretty clear one is that letting the IAEA find out would pretty clearly mean that the American public would find out what a major league screw-up the president and his advisors had allowed to happen.

Only a couple weeks ago did the Iraqis finally report the theft to the IAEA. And from there it was only a matter of time till the yearlong cover-up started to unravel.

But it didn’t even stop there.

As I’ve noted, the White House and the Pentagon have known for more than a year that this stuff had gone missing. But the White House, according to TPM sources, has known that this story was coming for at least ten days. Again, not just the underlying facts — that the stuff had been stolen and was being used against American troops (they’ve known that for more than a year) — but the fact that this story was going to break in the not too distant future. And they’ve been going to great lengths to try to push it back until after the election.

What can you say? I guess we have to deal with the fact that we botched just about everything we touched in Iraq, and that there’s no length to which bush won’t go to make you and me believe otherwise. This is incredibly damning in light of the public warnings we were given and our inexplicable and inexcusable carelessness. At least it got out before the election; it really could be the October surprise we’ve been waiting for.

This headline was precious, as is the first sentence — thanks to the reader who saved it and sent it to me!

(Click to enlarge.)

Be sure to click through each window of this ad — it keeps going after you think it’s over, and you have to see the whole thing. Granted, there are a couple of crudely funny moments, but that doesn’t stop it from taking its place as the most loathesome example of GOP anti-gay bigotry to date.

There were a couple moments that made me think of the hilarious bush-Blair “Endless Love” video, which was truly funny and was not at all cruel. This ad, however, goes way too far, and its message is one of pure hatred and fear.

Update: Andrew Sullivan posts this email he just received in regard to the link above:

“I forwarded the anti-Kerry anti-gay ad posted on your site to my few gay Republican friends. No caption. No commentary. Today a friend who is a Bush supporter called me. Direct quote: “I’m voting for Kerry.” When I asked why she said: ‘Bush doesn’t scare me but the people who support and defend him do.”

If you still believe, deep inside, that we are actually “winning” our War on Terror and/or that the invasion of Iraq actually moved us closer to that goal, please read this much-blogged-about article that’s surely going to become a classic for great reporting and myth smashing.

Bush has shaped his presidency, and his reelection campaign, around the threat that announced itself in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Five days after the attacks, he made it clear that he conceived a broader war. Impromptu remarks on the White House South Lawn were the first in which he named “this war on terrorism,” and he cast it as a struggle with “a new kind of evil.” Under that banner he toppled two governments, eased traditional restraints on intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and reshaped the landscape of the federal government.

As the war on terrorism enters its fourth year, its results are sufficiently diffuse — and obscured in secrecy — to resist easy measure. Interpretations of the public record are also polarized by the claims and counterclaims of the presidential campaign. Bush has staked his reelection on an argument that defense of the U.S. homeland requires unyielding resolve to take the fight to the terrorists. His opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), portrays the Bush strategy as based on false assumptions and poor choices, particularly when it came to Iraq.

The contention that the Iraq invasion was an unwise diversion in confronting terrorism has been central to Kerry’s critique of Bush’s performance. But this account — drawn largely from interviews with those who have helped manage Bush’s offensive — shows how the debate over that question has echoed within the ranks of the administration as well, even among those who support much of the president’s agenda.

Interviewing senior bush advisers, the reporter then goes on to pulverize the president’s specious claims of victory and success and freedom on the march. It’s devastating. You will simply not believe the mess we are now in as a result of our dirty little invasion of Iraq.

Most amazing in bush’s utter refusal to understand that Al Qaeda is a hydra-like creature, sprouting dozens of new heads for every one we manage to sever. He sees it as an organization with a set number of officers, and if he can just kill those officers….

It’s a depressing but important read. I truly expect a lot of Republican officials to step into the voting booth on November 2nd and pull the lever for Kerry. When you read this, you ralize that a lot of them have to know just how bad, just how dangerous our little princeling is, for us and for the world.

This is from a few days ago, but it’s worth a post. It’s good to know that somebody’s better off thanks to our dirty little war with Iraq:

Bill Conway, Carlyle founder and chief investment officer, said conditions were ripe for Carlyle to realise some of its investments. “It’s the best 18 months we ever had,” Mr Conway said. “We made money and we made it fast.”

He must be so proud, and board members GHW Bush and James Baker are no doubt slurping champagne from one another’s slipper. Brilliant, that bush managed to actually pull off the world’s stupidest war and enrich his friends and family along the way. Yes, these are unique times in which we live.

Can we really endure four more years of this shit?

This is a rather droll and must-read account of how Mao’s body ended up being embalmed a la Lenin

China’s politburo, once they were sure Mao was dead, ordered his body to lie in state for two weeks. Then, on a whim, they decided to have him preserved for all time, even though the Chairman had signed up years before to be cremated.

The Chinese doctors knew nothing of embalming and because of strained international relations they got no help from the Russians, who were the experts in the field. The Vietnamese, too, refused to divulge their trade secrets – perhaps no loss since by then Uncle Ho’s nose had rotted away and his beard had fallen out.

Mao’s personal physician sent an underling to scour the library of the medical academy for books on embalming. As a back-up he had the Institute of Arts and Crafts make a lifelike Mao effigy, just in case the embalming was botched.

It very nearly was. The library book recommended draining the body and injecting 16 litres of formaldehyde, but in their anxiety the doctors pumped in 22 litres. Mao’s face swelled like a ball and his ears stuck out at right angles. His skin turned slimy and formaldehyde oozed out of his pores like sweat.

The piece’s wry humor becomes more side-splitting with each paragraph. It concludes:

Within a minute or two, we are past the Chairman and into an anteroom where China’s new capitalist future confronts us. The crowds rush the counters which display assorted merchandise of dubious taste. There are Mao badges, Mao busts, Mao watches and Mao cigarette lighters that play The East Is Red when you flick them open. At the rear of the building, rows of stalls offer the same range plus soft drinks, stuffed toys and Fuji film.

In deference to history, we invest in a set of Chairman Mao tea caddies and a Mao wall hanging that can double as a tea towel. A set of 32 Mao badges mounted on cardboard is a bargain at only $2. Wording on the box describes the contents as “Great-Man Badge Album of Screen Style”.

Old-style socialists may feel a twinge at the whole experience but, let’s face it, the capitalist road these days leads to the very steps of Chairman Mao’s resting place. If only the Russians could embrace the market economy as efficiently, Lenin, too, would be raking in the roubles.

They don’t even tell us the author’s name, but he’s fiendishly good.

The scariest aspect of all the voter fraud being carried out by diligent Republican minions is its brazen shamelessness.

Last week we brought you the news that Larry Russell, head of the South Dakota GOP’s get-out-the-vote operation (Republican Victory Program) had resigned along with several of his staffers amidst a burgeoning vote fraud scandal.

The Bush campaign promptly brought Russell and several of his newly-resigned staffers to Ohio to run the get-out-the-vote effort there.

Now South Dakota officials have handed down indictments against six of Russell’s South Dakota staffers, including at least three he brought with him to take care of business in Ohio.

Perhaps they can push extradition back past election day.

Leave no fraudster behind (LNFB)!

It was only a few years ago that “voter fraud” was a term we rarely if ever heard in America. Bill Clinton may have brought “oral sex” into the public parlance; shrub’s contribution will be “voter fraud” (and “casual lies with lethal consequences”). It’s become part of our reality as we take for granted that Republicans will resort to blatant lawlessness to take away their citizens rights to vote. It’s quite beyond belief.

That’s the title of Frank Rich’s latest masterpiece on the hysteria over John Kerry referencing Mary Cheney’s well-known lesbianism during the third debate. This was a topic I wasn’t going to write about since it’s already been overplayed, but this article is too good to pass up.

Though the president pays “compassionate conservative” lip service to “tolerance” of homosexuality to appease suburban swing voters, his campaign has pushed a gratuitous constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, one opposed by Mary Cheney’s own father, to stir up as much fear and ugly rage as it can.

When Mrs. Cheney hyperbolically implies that even using the word lesbian in 2004 is a slur out of the McCarthy era – “a cheap and tawdry political trick,” she said – she is playing a similar game. She is positioning lesbian as a term comparable to child molester. But as Dave Cullen writes in Salon: “It is not an insult to call a proudly public lesbian a lesbian. It’s an insult to gasp when someone calls her a lesbian.” Mrs. Cheney and her surrogates are in effect doing exactly what Elizabeth Edwards had the guts to say they were doing: they are sending the message to Mr. Rove’s four million that they are ashamed of Mary Cheney. They are disowning her under the guise of “defending” her. They are exploiting her for the sake of political expediency even as they level that charge at Democrats.

The deployment of homosexuality as a nasty campaign weapon has long been second nature to Mr. Rove. In the must-read article “Karl Rove in a Corner” in the November issue of The Atlantic, the journalist Joshua Green exhaustively researches the tightest campaigns of Mr. Rove’s career and exhumes the pattern. As Mr. Green reminds us, George W. Bush’s 1994 gubernatorial race against Ann Richards “featured a rumor” that Governor Richards was a lesbian. Gay whispers have also swirled around Rove adversaries like a rival Republican campaign consultant in the 1980’s and a 1994 Alabama judicial candidate who was branded a “homosexual pedophile.”

None of these rumors were, in fact, true, but Mary Cheney is unambiguously and unapologetically gay. For a campaign that wants to pander to the fringe, that makes her presence in the Bush-Cheney family a problem – just how big a problem can be seen by its disingenuously hysterical reaction to Mr. Kerry’s use of the L word. But Mary Cheney isn’t the only problem for Mr. Rove as he plays this game. The Republican establishment is rife with gay people – just ask anyone in proximity to its convention in New York – and the campaign doesn’t want the four million to know about them, either.

(It’s true, about the gay Republicans. I’ve known several, though I never understood how they could join the camp of the enemy.)

This has been a campaign rife with irony. Here is John Kerry, always a friend to the gay community, being savaged for gay baiting by the far-right — which has redefined the very concept of gay baiting to the point of trying to write it into the Constitution. Then we have a much decorated and proven war hero derided as a coward who can’t face the enemy — by accusers who dodged the draft and never once faced real danger.

It will be an election year to remember. Will life even go on after the election? Somehow I can’t imagine it.

If so, you may want to check out this new blog created by some creative Chinese-speaking expats and repats, including Brendan O’Kane.