Let’s just kill stuff or warming up for this past weekend’s hunting.
Don’t you all feel so much safer now!
Via Pharyngula
Feb. 13, 2006 – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced today that his department would immediately implement a “Cheney Alert” system to warn Americans if an attack by the vice president is imminent.
And, to ensure that the alert system will not be needed bush has sent cheney far away.
it’s pretty simple….
If you also get rid of him there is this…
This is pretty disheartening! It might make one think that it is time to get rid of the federal government in its entirety.
Update (12/20): I see some others are beginning to figure this out.
Larry Johnson argues that cheney does not understand the real world:
I think Dick Cheney has been watching too many Hollywood flicks that glorify torture. He needs, instead, to get on the ground and talk to the folks he is ostensibly trying to empower to torture.
….
If you inflict enough pain on someone they will give you information, but, unless you kill them, they will hold a grudge. As far as the information goes there is no guarantee it will be correct.
What real CIA field officers know from their work with actual sources is that whatever short term benefit can be derived from torture will be offset by the new enemy you have created. It is better to build a relationship of trust, no matter how painstaking, rather than gain a short term benefit that puts you on par with a Nazi concentration camp guard.
Perhaps Johnson underestimates cheney who certainly doesn’t intend that his victims will walk free any time soon. No, they will best end up dead or at worst be stashed away in a secret gulag until the end of the never to end war on terror. If the latter, cheney will be long gone and will have left to our children the task of cleaning his mess.
Read the rest.
Via Talking Points Memo.
This surely must be made up:
The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons.
Hopefully The American Conservative made this up just to sell subscriptions (and Yglesias now wants a comp sub).
If this is true it damned well better be about the 10 millionth option. But, the bushies know that their credibility is pretty well shot so if they are going to take out Iran they need something big on which to base their action, something that they can pretend requires a quick response not the long brainwashing that occurred prior to the invasion of Iraq.
But, WTF, We’ve got both the chinese government and possibly now the us government talking about using nukes??? And some of you think these governments as currently constituted are good things???
Via The Alternate Brain.
In an interview at Antiwar.com author James Bamford, A Pretext for War, suggests that a war tax and a mandatory draft are a sure way to assure full public involvement in the war making process:
The key problem is massive public apathy and extremely poor press coverage. I think the only way to prevent such wars in the future would be to make every citizen an equal shareholder in the war