SLIME TIME NEWS

NEWS WITH OOZE tm featuring RETRO REVENGE AND LONELY FANTASIES EDITION Nixon Bush is lonely in the bunker. Is God with him?  Also New Vietnam Iraqi War Will Come from Air  Plus Leaks continue to splash. Plus Just in Time Slime: Dukes Out on Bribery Charges

THE PRESIDENT TRUSTS no one.  He feels betrayed?  Nixon? Yeah, and that other dick Cheney? Yeah, and Bush too. Reason to be “optimistic?"  "The President has always been willing to make changes," the senior aide said, "but not because someone in this town tells him to - NEVER!"

I DREAMED I SAW THE BOMBERS riding shotgun in the sky  . . Sy Hersh reports Bush will do push pull.  Pull out troops and push bombers to achieve peace with honor the mission in Vietnam Iraq.  As we bomb  Iraq back into the Stone Age lead Vietnam Iraq toward peace, we will respect other countries and not widen the war in Southeast Asia the Middle East. Secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia Syria and Iran are not planned.  The great news is we have won over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and the president is tough, in that lonely kind of way.

“We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me [Hirsch] . . . He continued, “We want to draw down our forces, but the President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the polling places in 2004.” The war against the insurgency “may end up being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would still win,” he said. “As long as the Kurds and the Shiites stay on our side, we’re set to go. There’s no sense that the world is caving in. We’re in the middle of a seven-year slog in Iraq, and eighty per cent of the Iraqis are receptive to our message.” 

THE HERETIK IS MOST relieved.  He hasn't heard optimism like that since the war was a cakewalk.  And the war will pay for itself.  Somebody say oy.  And the eighty percent of people who are receptive to our message are not the Iraqis who want us out as soon as possible. Oy.

MORE ON AIR POWER Hersh and rhetoric at Body and Soul.  PLUS Blogenlust on the Cambodian Syrian angle.  VIETNAM? Who said Vietnam?  That is so like 2004. Or 1968.  Or 1972. Jed Babbin in The American Spectator: As hard as it is to think of Ted Kennedy as a political visionary, his April 2004 statement that "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam," was way before its time. 
UM, JED, THE HERETIK KNOWS lots of people who had that vision thing about Iraq before Ted (I Come from a Family of Visionaries) Kennedy.  Going into a land in Asia without a way out is an old idea, bud.  And the way you get out is by air.  Make the ground war and air war.  Less American bodies that way.  Oy.
 

HERSH AND BUSH UPDATE
WHEN THE PRESIDENT TALKS TO GOD it gets a little weird and perhaps confused as to what The Mission is and just who the mission is for.  From what Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker, the mission is for Bush and we the Americans but his instruments of God’s will.  Hersh was interviewed yesterday by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer

BLITZER: Here's what you write. You write, "Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the president remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding."
Those are incredibly strong words, that the president basically doesn't want to hear alternative analysis of what is going on.
HERSH: You know, Wolf, there is people I've been talking to -- I've been a critic of the war very early in the New Yorker, and there were people talking to me in the last few months that have talked to me for four years that are suddenly saying something much more alarming.
They're beginning to talk about some of the things the president said to him about his feelings about manifest destiny, about a higher calling that he was talking about three, four years ago.

THE HERETIK SEES people are talking finally about a president who would talk for god?  Manifest Destiny doesn’t play well with people who you destine to make things manifest upon.

ADDITIONAL RECCOMENDED READING at Democratic Daily for analysis and links: It’s hard to be encouraged when we’re told that our nation’s leader is the “paranoid in chief.”

LAND O' LEAKS BUTTER TM
IN THE PRESS Bob Woodward continues his ascent descent. Woodward who used to get the shit by the scoop now looks more like a scoop of shit. Howard Kurtz on Woodward’s home turf WaPo steps in it: Woodward, 62, has found himself under fire not just over this incident but for his very approach to journalism. His unusual relationship with The Post, and whether he hoards newsworthy material for his books, have also come under fresh scrutiny. 

THE HERETIK ASKS whether what Woodward "reports" looks like is really journalism or hagiography?  What it smells like is not in doubt.

MORE ON THE MESS that is the press.  Huffington slams Woodward and Russert priorities in PlameOut: Stunning though it may seem, Russert really believes that the main problem raised by Judy Miller's and Bob Woodward's roles in Plamegate is: how does the press repair the damage done between journalists and anonymous sources?
Talk about missing the forest for the trees. But it's not surprising since Russert's, like Woodward's, first loyalty flows upward to the unnamed "senior administration sources."

MORE ON RUSSERT, Andrea Mitchell, and "the problem" Woodward faces from Tom Maguire: the occupants of the White House are under no obligation to spend hours with a person likely to pan them in their next book.  On Mitchell Maguire says: The lady doth protest too much.

THE HERETIK BELIEVES people forget even the most thoughtful writers at some point must admit they are in business.  If people don't want to deal with them, does that put people like Woodward and Mitchell out of business.  In Washington you are only as good as your last story.  No access, no story, no good.  At least for the book "author" who used to be a "journalist" who long ago was a mere "reporter."  Oy.  And Andrea Mitchell should have learned long ago it is easier to keep your story straight if it is the straight truth initially. Oy part two.

JUST IN TIME SLIME UPDATE 
Dukes (R-California) pleads guilty to taking bribes. $2.4 million can buy you  a House Subcommittee Chairman on Intelligence and Terrorisim?  How many others are out there who were bought? Dukes says he will "atone."  Shakespeare's Sister says: Aahhh, atonement.  The magical gift . . . All Spin Zone's Great Cranium declare: it's another brick out of the wall of the GOP culture of corruption. 

CORRUPTPION? The Heretik asks.  More like business as usual.  Pesky Apostrophe agrees:. . . what I’m struck by here is the sheer number of Republicans who are being indicted, convicted, and/or investigated for ethical and criminal violations...and the boldness of their attitude, insisting that they’ve done nothing wrong in a lot of cases. 

FROM THE GET IT while the getting is good (or bad) Department: Monk at the inimitable Inflatable Dartboard says:

I'm sorry, but that Jimmy Swaggart crap just doesn't fly with me. Not on the heels of his statement in July 2005 where he claims to have committed no "wrongdoing". He didn't stop there, his bravado allowed him to quip:"If I've done anything wrong, come get me."
Well, he's been gotten. He's 65 and looking at 10 years of jail time.
Anyone else notice that this isn't getting much in the way of airtime on the major news outlets?

THE HERETIK SEES GETTING it good has gotten to the bad. Get over to the Inflatable Dartboard to see what else is blowing up.

MORE SLIME IN ITS TIME

Comments

[Neil Shakespeare]

I just knew they'd get to the carpet bombing eventually. "Just level the whole fucking place and start all over!" as I heard a Marine say on an interview on TV a while back. 1968, I think. '68 or '69.

[blogenfreude]

I like the Cunningham blithering, but I love the Rove news ... he's going to be the next thing in our Fitzmas stocking. The second day of Fitzmas is nigh!