Yesterday's QUOTES ...

... from what I know of the Princes, I suspect he'd just love to proudly compare Blackwater to the late 1800, union skull-cracking iteration of the Pinkerton Agency

... While all of the arguments above must have played some part in the decision to go to war in Iraq, the real reason for war in iraq, I believe, has precious little to do with these. Rather, it has to do with something else.

What it has to do with is a curious Bush trait of viewing war not as a tool of foreign policy so much as a tool to manipulate domestic public sentiment. ...

[ ... ]

It is disturbing to imagine manipulation of public opinion to be the primary reason for Dubya’s support of the war; yet it is easy to see this as being so. No other theory of the crime quite explains all of the observed facts quite so well.

More disturbing than the idea that Dubya manipulated the press purely to gain popularity is the possibility that the war is used primarily to eat up news coverage attention and to distract from more nefarious activities. In other words, a nation has its literati who care about real theater. And it has its news-hounds who care about important public events. War seems like an important public event and it is theater. Therefore, if all news is focussed on the war, there is no news attention focussed on any other aspect of governance. The war, then, becomes a distraction. Highly controversial changes in law or policy take effect invisibly not because they are actually secret, but because everybody’s attention is diverted. It is government by distraction. It works the same way pickpockets, magicians, and old Mission Impossible shows work, by misdirection.
To BushCo and corporate America, all is 'Bait and Switch.'
The sad truth about the Democratic Party, what's left of it that is ... I'm tired of defending Democrats against this stuff. They seem to like looking like total assholes and having the public --- and especially the military --- see them as pathetic Charlie Browns who can't even defend themselves against a drug-addled gasbag.

They should have removed Rush Limbaugh from the taxpayer supported Armed Forces Radio before, but most especially this week when they had the chance to teach the Republicans a lesson about the perils of fucking with free speech. Taking out their flagship scumbag (something that should have been done long ago) would have been a hard shot, right in the nose, and would have put them in their place. Instead, the Dems chose to beg for their Republican friends to sign a letter asking Rush's boss to make him apologize for being mean. And what they get in return is this slander beamed directly to the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan on our dime. Wow.

I'll repeat what I wrote last week: this election apparently boils down to whether the nation can overcome its inherent revulsion for ineffectual chickenshits to vote once again for a corrupt, failed political movement that's past its prime. I'm assuming they're tired enough of Republican failure to vote the other way by simple default. But they are getting no inspiration and there will be no mandate, so don't get your hopes up. The Republicans will continue to rule the country from the minority.