January 14
Columnist Ruben Navarette wrote a good example of the conservative defense of Alberto Gonzales. Not a good defense mind you, just a good example. Essentially he did two things: spread the blame for torture, and play the race card.
To take the first thing first, Navarette said of Gonzales' part in the memo that said the Geneva conventions can be ignored:
Personally, I think that was a bad decision, but it hardly makes Gonzales responsible for everything that occurred from there. The memos show that there were at least five entities vying to have a say about the treatment of prisoners — the Pentagon, Justice Department, CIA, White House and State Department. President Bush was getting plenty of advice, but the final say about what would be permissible in interrogating prisoners was the president's alone.It's news to me if anyone says Gonzales has the sole responsibility. What difference does it make anyway if Gonzales wasn't the only one? It's not like there's a limited amount of blame to go around, so if it gets spread thin enough no one is really to blame. If Gonzales was part of a criminal gang that plotted to rob a bank, or set up a fraudulent telemarketing operation, the participation of other people wouldn't save Gonzales from his responsibility. What, are war crimes different?
Now let's think about that race card a moment. Like other conservatives, Navarette claims liberal opposition to Gonzales and another Latino, Miguel Estrada, proves liberals don't want minorities to succeed unless they're Democrats. Since these are the only Latinos liberals have opposed, one of two things must be true. Either other Latinos have been approved without opposition, disproving the point, or Bush has nominated only two Latinos, in which case Latinos might want to ask Bush about tokenism.
Perhaps Navarette should shift his focus from the torture and see that we have other reasons to oppose Gonzales, like his failure to include mitigating information in clemency briefs when Bush was governor. Or maybe he should consider that we are judging Gonzales as an individual, not as a member of a group, which ought to warm his conservative heart. Being liberal doesn't mean anyone gets accepted merely for being a minority, but they are judged on their merits despite being a minority. Conservatism, though conservatives hate this bit of their background, have a sad history of ignoring individual merit and refusing someone merely because of race. Their inability to understand liberal opposition to particular nominees suggests they still don't get it.
January 13
We need to be careful on our side not to make too much out of nothing, and make it look like we're twisting the words of people we don't like. In other words, act like conservatives. Specifically I'm referring to a story going around about Tom DeLay possibly blaming tsunami victims for their own fate because they aren't Christian. This guy does plenty as it is. When he falls, he may be a case study in the "give him enough rope" theory. We don't need this tsunami story.
The tsunami story involves DeLay at the 109th Congressional Prayer Service reading the passage from Matthew about building a house on sand. It's going around the blogosphere that he was indicating the victims paid the price for not being Christian because the description of the destruction of the house on sand sounds rather tsunami like. The transcript and MP3 are posted on AmericanCoprophagia. They're picked from another blog, and were referred to by columnist Mark Morford. The problem is DeLay didn't mention the tsunami. The meaning of the passage is that faith in Jesus is like a house built on stone. Since DeLay is a fundamentalist and generally nasty person, it's easy to believe he thinks the tsunami was the wrath of God upon nonbelievers --- but he didn't say that.
It's not that there aren't conservatives shown to believe that. I heard Michael Savage ranting the other day about the victims being Muslims who want to kill us. The web site of Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, the people who picket the funerals of homosexuals, says the tsunami was God's wrath on evil people, especially Swedes, who are apparently all homosexuals. I wouldn't have thought all Swedes were gay since they aren't all test tube babies, though Gustavus Adolphus was a snappy dresser. However, the fundamentalist lunatic fringe will be exonerated if claims that DeLay shares this opinion turns out to be twisting and spin. It's just like the CBS memo problem discredited the story about the acting president's non-service in the Guard. Not only did the rest of the CBS story hold up, but the Boston Globe ran the same story that week without using the memos, and it didn't matter. The story was dead, and the deserter looked better than the war hero. This is lower scale, but let's not repeat the mistake. The fundamentalists will show their need to take the red pill soon enough.
January 12
This must be bugging the Christian right who think Jesus is a Bush Republican. Mel Gibson, who they made their poster boy because he's a devout Catholic and made The Passion of the Christ, and who won Best Drama at the People's Choice Awards, said this at the post-ceremony press conference about Fahrenheit 911 and Bush's war in Iraq (this quote is compiled from clips shown on Crossfire and Inside Politics):
I saw the film, I liked it. You know, I feel a kind of strange kinship with Michael. ... They're trying to pit us against each other in the press but this is all just a hologram. We're used to some kind of divisive left/right thing. ... I didn't need to see his film to ask the question, is, what the hell are we doing in Iraq, you know? Because I just don't understand it. No one has bothered to explain to me in a reasonable manner that I can understand and accept why we're there or why we went there, why we're still there.To make things worse, here's what that other devout Catholic Michael Moore said, "I saw it twice. I thought it was a powerful piece of filmmaking. I took my dad to see it."
Wow, Mel Gibson is a Bush critic. Maybe Jesus is too.
After reading David Corn's column about meeting Armstrong Williams in the Fox News Channel green room, a thought strikes me. Is what Williams did so different from what FNC normally does? They work off official Republican party talking points and follow political directives from management, yet they pretend to be "fair and balanced". Nonetheless, on the program where Corn was a guest, host Tony Snow and commentator Linda Chavez acted shocked. It sounds like the dismay was real, which suggests to me they really don't see what they're doing.
January 11
Sometimes a small story can be indicative of the larger picture, and here's a prime example of that. Mohammad al-Jundi, a Syrian man who worked as a translator for two French journalists taken hostage in Iraq, and who was himself captured by insurgents, is suing the US. In between his rescue and the announcement that US forces had liberated a prisoner, he was tortured. The story has the whole war in it. Torture has become routine and systemic. The victim, like most detainees in Iraq, was innocent. The Fallujah story included rescued hostages, which made the offensive look successful but we wonder what else we weren't told. Doing this to a man working for French journalists who is now suing in France can only further alienate us from a country that used to be one of our closest allies until conservatives' raging bigotry made them forget that France fought with us in Afghanistan and Iraq War I.
Let's focus on the torture aspect for a moment. During the 1988 presidential campaign, Michael Dukakis caused a flap when he said, "A fish rots from the head down." Before torture got so routine at ground level, it got encouraged from above. The revelation that have come out the last several weeks have been neatly compiled by Tom Engelhardt in Mother Jones, looked at in terms of the arrogance of the neocons. His suggestion is they committed torture to show they could. Could be. Bush and the boys certainly seem to think the rules don't apply to them. Engelhardt used information available online already, but he's got it all in one place and quite a lot.
January 9
Learn a new term: "the Salvador option". According to Newsweek, Rumsfeld Co. believes the use of death squads during the war in El Salvador during the 80's was useful in defeating the insurgency. It was actually a negotiated peace, but the point is the neocons are ready to resort to death squads in Iraq. They believe the Sunnis who support the insurgency are paying no price for it, and they mean to change that. They include Sunnis who don't share information with the Americans among the supporters. By that loose definition, the only way these units can be effective is to terrorize suspected sympathizers. What form will this state sponsored terrorism take? Well, there's a reason they're called "death squads". Yes, that will win them over to our side. If 90,000 dead haven't convinced them yet, then there must not be enough dead. Besides, the arrests and torture have done so much deter support for the insurgency.
But that's not all. The recruits for these units would come from the Kurds and Shiites. So the idea is Kurdish and Shiite death squads attacking Sunnis. And by the way, we're trying to prevent a civil war. There might also be raids into Cambodia, oops, I mean Syria. Not that the war is being expanded.
Just to show I don't know everything (war supporters might be of that opinion already, but anyway) the article mentioned that Reagan's policy of arming death squads is still secret. At the time, I thought he was merely refusing to do anything to stop them. I've also heard word of mouth there's a proposal to name the Minnesota state office building after Reagan. May I ask of our legislators that before they do, they get a look at that secret policy. We don't want to name a building after a terrorist, do we?
This is just a tawdry thing, but it's illustrative. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist took a tour of areas hit by the tsunami. He and his aides took photos of each other. He told one aide, "Get some devastation in the back." Apparently he wants photographic proof he cares. I suppose one always wonders with politicians at disaster sites if it's partly about the photo ops. Frist was just being honest, which is a nice change for him. This is after all the same guy who dodged a straight question about whether AIDS can be caught from tears and sweat, as Bush administration abstinence-only curriculum taught. He used to be a doctor, but he refused to disagree. Frist is also the one who stood on the Senate floor and said Richard Clark was lying about gross negligence by Bush about terrorism, because Clark's earlier testimony, which would contradict what he told the 911 commission, was classified. Clark called his bluff by asking that it be declassified. Frist never apologized or called for declassification.
January 8
This is an outrage, and indicates that somebody somewhere in the military brass doesn't get why the battle for hearts and minds is going poorly. A house in Aitha, near Mosul, was bombed and the owner and press said 14 people were killed, including seven children. I don't believe for a second the individuals who dropped the bomb don't feel horrible about it. The cold part is the military statement which said, "Multi-National Force Iraq deeply regrets the loss of possibly innocent lives." Possibly!? What, the children might have been beheading hostages in their spare time? Or is it that attitude we've seen with the treatment of prisoners, that they're all guilty?
Speaking of the attitude towards prisoners, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee did give Gonzales stern lectures on torture, but said they would vote for him. Before they do, I wish they would ask themselves a question. Would they vote for Gonzales if the public saw the unreleased photos and videos from Abu Ghraib that were described by Seymour Hersh? If we could see the man who was naked and terrified by guard dogs in a released photo with the gash in his thigh, the female prisoners raped by US guards? If we were allowed to see Iraqi guards raping a screaming boy while US personnel do nothing but film it? I wish every senator who votes to confirm Gonzales had to listen to that boy's screams while they confirm an attorney general who should be a defendant at a war crimes trial.
January 7
It's amazing that a man who'll be among the first defendants if ever there are war crimes trials for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq can be nominated for attorney general, but there's Alberto Gonzales, and liberals are chided for focusing on his shameful record instead of celebrating an Hispanic getting the nomination. I really don't think Bush is racist, and Gonzales has been close to him for a long time so I don't believe the intention was tokenism, but that's what it amounts to if we're supposed to say OK to Gonzales just because he's Hispanic. Being liberal doesn't mean accepting an unfit person just because they're a minority. It means we don't refuse to consider them because of race, like conservatives have long done. The same is true for Condoleeza Rice, who, as nice as it is that a black woman can be nominated for secretary of state, is unfit because she's dishonest and incompetent. I would think conservatives would be glad liberals are looking at the individual instead of championing just any minority.
There are more reasons to oppose Gonzales than the torture of prisoners. He has been accused of routinely omitting mitigating evidence from the clemency briefs on capital cases he presented to Bush as governor of Texas, including when prosecutors had concluded the convicted person was innocent. Outside of human rights abuses but still tawdry, he is accused of having failed to recuse himself from cases where he had a conflict of interest, specifically cases involving Enron after he had been on the Enron payroll. This stuff is detailed by People for the American Way. If you want to do something to stop a human rights abuser and possible war criminal from becoming attorney general, contact your senators to tell them you object. You can also help MoveOn to run an ad about Gonzales.
If you need to explain your opposition to Gonzales to someone who thinks the torture scandal is overblown, Kate Zernike explained it well in the New York Times yesterday. Some people think it was just a few enlisted men acting on their own, but the abuse happened in three places indicating something systemic. The Bush administration acts like it knew nothing before the photos came out, but the newly revealed documents show it was being discussed in 2002. Despite the impression every detainee is a terrorist, military intelligence admits 70-90% of detainees in Iraq were innocent. I know of no statistics for Afghanistan and Guantanamo. I do know where I'd previously heard reports of medical personnel helping carry out the torture. It's common practice in countries where torture has been common practice. That's the company Bush is keeping.
January 6
I saw much of the House of Representatives debate on the challenge to Ohio's electoral votes. Not surprisingly, the Republican side of the aisle was somewhat less than honest. Several trotted out the assumption that Republicans accept being on the losing end of close and questionable elections. Notice however they keep fighting in Washington state. Jack Kingston of Georgia asked why Minnesota wasn't questioned when Kerry won with discrepancies. I live in Minnesota and follow this story closely and I haven't heard of these discrepancies. He also charged that "Democrat" groups were allowed into the polling places. He didn't say what he meant, but I was one of the official DFL poll watchers and can say this wasn't true. Maybe he's twisting something, like MoveOn had their own observers, but they were outside polling places. Sometimes judges asked them to move further away, and I heard of no instances where they refused. Perhaps he's referring to volunteers from organizations like ACT who offered rides to senior citizens and accompanied them into the polling places, but they didn't get to go near the voting booths. He also said an ACORN worker registered herself 25 times, implying of course she could vote 25 times. This was actually the girlfriend of an ACORN employee who was paid by the number of registrations, and she filled in the same information 25 times (note the source is a conservative group that doesn't like ACORN). She was still registered just once, and ACORN got ripped off by the employee. Perhaps Kingston was just imprecise, but there was a pattern of severe twisting of the facts.
A string of lies came from, here's a shock, Tom DeLay. He repeated the charge that the Democratic Party told supporters to claim fraud whether there was or not. That charge was always a lie. He said Bush was accused of personally masterminding the fraud. No one charged that. He said the congressmen raising the objection had offered no substantive debate. This was just after several House members had specified the problems they wanted investigated, and had explained repeatedly that they thought the issue was the right to vote. When DeLay referred to the Democrats "historic defeat", he has a right to that opinion, but if he was implying the Republicans won big rather than narrowly, only in the Senate could he make that case, where they picked up four seats and firmed up their hold on the south. His caucus increased only by the gerrymandering in his state and otherwise got a draw, and Bush won a narrow victory despite being an incumbent running during a war.
I heard some of the calls on C-SPAN while the House was voting. One caller repeated the claim I heard from several Republicans today, that the electoral college tally was an inappropriate forum for bringing this up. A later caller pointed out that Democrats have been trying for two years to bring up bills addressing the problems that occurred, and not only have the Republicans blocked every attempt to bring a bill to a debate, but DeLay said he would never allow such bills to the floor. Sen. Boxer mentioned such bills have been blocked in the Senate in her statement. What other forum did the Democrats have? Sad to say, I suspect many Americans will hear about the election problems for the first time as a result of this challenge. I believe DeLay knows just what he's doing, but I ask the honest Republicans out there to look hard at their leaders' actions. Can't you see that the refusal to investigate what occurred or to debate bills that might have solved problems before the election just feeds the suspicion?
I can't let this end without praising Sen. Barbara Boxer. She was the lone senator to join the objections from the House, and the other Democrats left her hanging. Boxer is a profile in courage. The other Democratic senators have something to prove. I also single out Rep. John Conyers, who has done more than anyone else in Congress to investigate Ohio. Those who insist there's no evidence despite all that has occurred and the ample documentation need only look at Conyers' report.
It turns out I overstated the Democrats win on ethics changes Tuesday. The Republicans backed off only on dropping the prohibition on leaders who are under indictment. They did change the requirement for a majority vote instead of a tie on the ethics committee to begin an investigation. DeLay has been slapped three times in the last year. This is to prevent further slaps by means other than improving conduct. I ask Republicans, why do you accept this low standard in a leader? Why do you even let him have a seat in the House?
January 5
It looks like New Mexico had as many problems as Ohio with a fraudulent presidential election. It's been ignored however, and if for the same reason I ignored it, the reason is it had too few electoral votes to change the result and there has been so much crap in Ohio. The other state I've paid attention to is Florida, which has had plenty of problems and also could change the electoral college. This report from Help America Recount shows huge problems right where we expected them, with touchscreen machines. There are many reports of votes being switched or wiped out, benefitting Bush of course, and who knows how many voters didn't catch it. There are the common complaints of disinformation from Republicans of course, and many people, overwhelmingly Hispanics in Democratic precincts, found they were weren't on the registration rolls. Both Hispanics and Indians reported obstruction from poll workers. The core of the report is the touchscreens, which not only switched votes, but had several times the undervotes in Democratic precincts. If honest errors were the problem, the undervotes should be even in all precincts using them, but with the same machines there were huge differences. New Mexico was decided by a small margin, so maybe here's the surest instance of a state where the fraud was enough to make the difference. For the sake of honesty, I'll point out that the governor and secretary of state are Democrats. It would seem unlikely they'd want to help Bush, but no one is claiming the state government did anything. The suspicion is that the machine manufacturers mucked around with the results, with the Republican Party committing the suppression.
A win for the good guys: Augusto Pinochet will have to stand trial. Pinochet had assistance from the Nixon administration in seizing power, and last night in an interview with Dennis Miller, Christopher Hitchens said Henry Kissinger is traveling with lawyers now. Maybe he'll finally be in a prison jumpsuit too. Maybe that will make Bush and some of his yes men get nervous for themselves. No wonder they don't want to hand over Alberto Gonzales' memos to the Senate.
January 4
I found an example of the kind of lie often called a "half-truth", or it could be called a "technical truth" because technically, it's accurate. However, it leaves out a lot of context, deliberately leading to a completely erroneous conclusion. In this case, it came in a column in the Hibbing Daily Tribune which was excerpted in the Minnesota Voices section of the Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial page. The columnist, Sandy Shanks, writing about the treatment of the marine who was caught on camera shooting a wounded enemy in Fallujah, made an accusation. He said, "The incident was caught on camera, and the reporter, Kevin Sites of NBC, sent the footage to Al Jazeera as well as his host network."
What Shanks failed to tell his readers was that NBC was part of a pool, and obligated to release all footage to all members. Here's the story on MSNBC, and here is Sites side of the story in an open letter to marines. So technically it's true, Sites sent it to Al Jazeera, but only by sending it to his employer like he was obligated to do. Shanks blackens Sites' reputation by leading to the false conclusion that Sites chose Al Jazeera specifically. It would be as accurate to say Sites sent it to Fox News, which presumably wouldn't get conservatives worked up. Al Jazeera does get them worked up however, thus how Sites is slandered.
Maybe Shanks believed what he said, however, it took all of one search for "Kevin Sites" in Google to find the truth. If he thought he was telling the truth, Shanks didn't check it out. Perhaps he heard it from some conservative source. I couldn't find another accusation that Sites sent the tape to Al Jazeera, but I did find denunciations of him for being an anti-war activist. World Net Daily made the charge based on his photos appearing on anti-war web sites. Little Green Footballs declared him unsympathetic to American soldiers based on an entry on his blog where he said he reminds himself he's not part of the unit he's embedded with so he retains his objectivity. Apparently refusing to be part of the propaganda machine is disloyal. Of course, conservatives think journalism is just opinion anyway. I didn't read all of Sites' blog, but what I did see was just a record of his reporting. He's a freelancer who has worked for CNN as well as NBC, and he has worked in other war zones. Funny, conservatives have had no problems with his reporting from other war zones. Apparently they know how damning the basic facts are about Iraq War II.
It goes to show hypocrisy can be defeated. Ironically, on the first day of the new Congress and the Republicans expected righteous rampage, the Democrats won. The House GOP backed off on ethics rules changes to protect Tom Delay. They did it because we wouldn't take it quietly. Fighting back can work. Remember that as they try to gut Social Security.
January 3
If someone out there still doesn't believe there was massive fraud in Ohio's presidential election, here it is videotaped. That page has it in Windows Media Player format and a link to a big Quicktime file. Smaller Quicktime files are here. The only guesses anyone can make as to the number of people turned away by the long lines is the difference between actual and expected turnout, but no one can know the expected turnout. At one point, the producers noted that in one precinct, given the number of machines and assuming everyone took their alloted five minutes to vote, it would take 30 hours to get everyone through. Not everyone took five minutes presumably, but even if they took half that time, that's 15 hours. Given how common waits of 7-8 hours were, that could indicate half the voters were turned away. Enough to put Kerry over the top? Who knows, but it would get a lot closer. Add in the punchcards that never got counted, the discriminatory use of provisional ballots, the registrations that were fouled up by the state, and the usual suppression stuff like challengers and deliberate misinformation, Bush's win is at least in grievous doubt. It's hard to believe he really won, which means Kerry probably won a close election and the exit polls were right, and that means Kerry won the electoral college. For those who think Bush's popular vote win gives him legitimacy, remember that only Ohio has been scrutinized. Even Florida hasn't been looked at this time. None of this proves Bush's win was due to fraud, part it was partly due to fraud, and his willingness to win that disqualifies him for office. I will continue to refer to him as the "acting" president. He has no legitimacy, no right to that office. If you can make it DC, you can protest the electoral vote count and the inauguration.
Speaking of the acting president, doesn't his suddenly highly visible support of tsunami relief seem like the classic case of a politician finding a parade to get in front of?
January 2
The CIA gets that it's a problem to hold prisoners secretly. It seems to think it just a PR and legal technicality problem. It's looking for a way to hold prisoners permanently when there is no more information to be gotten, but they don't think they can be released. The risk of release should be obvious. Many of these prisoners were real bad guys who wanted to kill Americans by any means available. The rest might well want to now, after being imprisoned for years in lousy conditions and subjected to coercive interrogations --- torture --- and denied communication with the outside world, including legal help and appearing before a judge. Are we defending liberty, or aren't we? A core value of America, a cause of the revolution and enshrined in the Constitution, is the right to a fair trial. The core of our justice system is that suspects have to charged or released. If there's no evidence against the individuals held by the CIA, they have to be released. Period. Yes, that means being the law abiding society we are means we risk having them turn around and attack us. Maybe you, me, or someone close to us gets killed. We can't take that lightly, but neither can we take lightly throwing away the freedom we're supposedly protecting. Pulling this crap like secret detentions is the trait of a dictatorship, and the added sense of security is probably illusory since actions like these just create more terrorists.
Also in today's Star Tribune, Linda Cullen, a photographer in Baghdad, gives another account of how dangerous daily life has become. She needs bodyguards just to go to a store. She mentioned that the reporting she saw when she got home didn't reflect what she saw in Iraq. With every western journalist and photographer saying the same thing, we have to conclude those thinking the Iraqi Sunni Arabs will ever accept the American presence is delusional. They just don't want us there, or at least enough feel that way to make the occupation and establishment of an acceptable government impossible. If ever one of Bush's toadies stops to think things through, and gets brave enough to lose his job by suggesting another policy, he might suggest partition. The Iraqis just don't seem to think of themselves as a real country, just people stuck in a border by outsiders. Maybe this brave toady will point out to Bush that only the Sunnis are fighting us. The Kurds would still prefer independence and the Shiite arabs once did. Let's consider pulling out of the Sunni areas and protecting the Kurds and Shiites while they establish their own states.
January 1
Last year was absorbed by the presidential election, and as important as the issues was the fairness of the election. The tragic part was we knew Bush would lie and cheat to win, and we even knew some of what he would try, but we still couldn't stop it. Many people, including some in Congress, did their best to make the touchscreen voting machines auditable but we couldn't overcome Republican opposition, meaning no one can know what the vote really was. Efforts to counter voter suppression efforts were successful in countering the expected tactics, but we didn't see the long lines coming. It's not proven the long lines were deliberate, but they overwhelmingly affected Democratic precincts. On the lying front, we knew there would be some smear campaign, and the Swift Boat campaign was brilliant. It was completely and provably false while beating Kerry at his strength. It was thoroughly debunked as soon as it started, yet was unstoppable. At least we learned just what the conservative propaganda machine was capable of doing in both the tactical and ethical sense. It sucks that we had to lose the election to learn it. We also learned how hard history can be to beat, especially when party leadership doesn't see it. We came close to beating an incumbent during a war, and lets face it, even if there was enough fraud to account for the winning margin, it was still close. At least this time, there's a chance a senator might join a representative in challenging the electoral vote.
In light of that, there is one of those quotes I put over on the right that sums up the year best. It was specifically about the Washington gubernatorial election, but could be about every questionable election and attempt at fraud or suppression this year. While hearing the Republican request to stop the counting of ballots there were wrongly disqualified during the first vote count, state supreme court justice Susan Owens said, "You're looking at it from the point of view of the winner or the loser - shouldn't we be looking at it from the point of view of the voter?"
Sometimes you just wish they would take the red pill. Three Islamic fundamentalist groups in Iraq have condemned democracy as unislamic. No great shock there, but get this: one of the specific problems they see with democracy is it might allow gay marriage. So they have something in common with Christian fundamentalists. I imagine both hate to think they have anything in common, but it's not surprising. Both require a jaundiced view of the world that allows an ancient book to not only be the word of God, but to be true in a literal sense, and no other interpretation is possible. Since it's literal and divine, any challenge threatens to break the whole world. A minority of fundamentalists see non-believers or non-fundamentalist believers as a threat. A minority of those are willing to resort to force. After all, when God is on your side, anything you do is all right. That's how these groups in Iraq are able to behead hostages or car bomb civilians. Fundamentalists of other religions would, I hope, resent being grouped with the Islamic fundamentalists who have resorted to terrorism. But think about how Bush's crap has smelled like roses because he's serving God. He can start wars, kill civilians, torture prisoners, loot the treasury, suppress civil liberties, and commit fraud in an election because God is on his side, so anything he does is OK. It's all of a piece.
See the archives for earlier entries.
