Here’s the transcript of a great piece from All Things Considered the other day on the Bush Administration’s obsession with secrecy :

Today the Wall Street Journal editorial page expressed their suspicions about why the loss of 380 tons of explosives in Iraq, missing since last December, should come to light barely a week before the election. One might also express suspicion about why the missing explosives should be have been kept secret. The Administration obviously has reason to keep bad news under wraps in this tense pre-election period.

Some bad news they can’t do anything about, like higher fuel prices and lower stock prices. But it can hold its own secrets close to its chest, until that is, someone inside is motivated to blow the whistle.

Last year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in an internal memo that the Administration has no way of knowing whether it’s winning the war on terror and he predicted a “long, hard slog” in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Administration’s gloomy assessment became known only after someone leaked it to USA Today.

Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, former top commander in Iraq, wrote in a memo last winter that the supply situation was so poor that it threatened his forces’ ability to fight. Sanchez was replaced last summer. The memo leaked to the Washington Post last week.

The Administration, which has been scoffing at Senator Kerry’s talk of a long war costing $200 billion, is considering after the election asking for $70 billion more for Afghanistan and Iraq. That would raise the total to $225 billion. Somebody leaked that to the Washington Post.

Election or not, the Administration seems unable to keep the lid on all its secrets. One can only wonder what things the public should know that it doesn’t know yet.

Like I’ve said in the past, if the Bushies want people to give them the benefit of the doubt, they should stop acting in a way that makes people assume the worst.

I personally think the bin Laden tape doesn’t help either guy very much politically, but count me among those who are offended by this :

Bin Laden popping up like a malignant jack-in-the-box four days before the balloting may bolster John Kerry’s argument that Bush should have finished wiping out Al Qaeda before turning his attention to Iraq.

But it also refocused the nation on terrorism, which polls show helps Bush. And it reminds voters of their horror on Sept. 11 and Bush’s well-received response, as well as obliterating the recent flood of bad news for Bush.

“We want people to think ‘terrorism’ for the last four days,” said a Bush-Cheney campaign official. “And anything that raises the issue in people’s minds is good for us.”

A senior GOP strategist added, “anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush.”

He called it “a little gift,” saying it helps the President but doesn’t guarantee his reelection.

How fucking cynical do you have to be if you’re calling a threat from a terrorist madman a “gift”? I’ve tried to give the GOP the benefit of the doubt when people say they’ll do anything to win, but giving each other high-fives over bin Laden’s tape makes that conclusion harder and harder to avoid.

Since it’s in the news, now would be a good time for the everyone to consider the following question : What do you think about a president who has spent much more time, money, resources, and troops trying to catch this guy…

…than this guy?



Save your answer for Nov. 2nd.

I wonder how many times the Democrats can get this ad on the air in the swing states this weekend?

Just a reminder of why this mass-murdering fundamentalist psychopath is still on the loose :

Bush’s original comment came while U.S. forces in Afghanistan were searching for the Al Qaeda leader, who had eluded joint American-Afghan military operations designed to find him.

“We haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is,” Bush said during the 2002 news conference. “I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run.

“I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country,” Bush continued. “I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban. But once we set out the policy and started executing the plan, he became ? we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his Al Qaeda killers anymore.”

Pay special attention to that last part. It explains everything we need to know about how Bush judges success in the wars on terror and in Iraq.

He was concerned about bin Laden because “he had taken over a country”. Once the Taliban was overthrown, Bush was satisfied that bin Laden was declawed and no longer a threat. The same held true with Saddam. Once he had been driven from his Baghdad palaces into a spider-hole, Bush felt that the mission had been accomplished. In Bush’s view, this new threat isn’t about the man or those who support his ideals, it’s about the governmental structure from which he gains support. Once the bureacracy has been defeated, the threat isn’t there.

This all goes back to the argument Kevin Drum has been making a lot lately :

There’s all sorts of interesting stuff in Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer’s Washington Post article about the Bush record in the war on terror today, but running through it all is a thread that I’ve mentioned before: George Bush’s outmoded focus on state sponsors of terror (the “axis of evil”) vs. John Kerry’s focus on al-Qaeda and other non-state terrorist groups as the real problem of the 21st century.

Again: it’s not that they aren’t both important. But we’re not fighting World War II and we’re not fighting the Cold War. Radical Islamic terrorism is a fundamentally different problem than either of these previous enemies, and it’s not, at its core, state-centric. This is the key blind spot that prevents Bush from effectively prosecuting the war, and it’s the key piece of understanding that suggests Kerry could do better.

Damn right.

Here’s a first hand account of one of Bush’s loyalty oaths (via Josh Marshall) :

“I want you to stand, raise your right hands,” and recite “the Bush Pledge,” said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: “I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States.”

I know the Bush-Cheney campaign occasionally requires the people who attend its events to sign loyalty oaths, but this was the first time I have ever seen an audience actually stand and utter one. Maybe they’ve replaced the written oath with a verbal one.

As the old joke goes, I’m sure it sounds better in its original German. Somebody out there has to have a video of this…

This video, on the other hand, is scary as hell :

Arabic TV station al-Jazeera has broadcast a videotape apparently featuring Osama Bin Laden, in which he threatens new attacks on the US.
In his opening remarks, the al-Qaeda leader accused President George W Bush of deceiving Americans in the years since the 11 September 2001 attacks.

He compared the Bush administration to what he termed corrupt Arab regimes.

The development comes as US voters prepare to go to the polls on Tuesday in the presidential election.

Bin Laden said he first thought of attacking the US after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

He said the attacks on the US would have been less severe if President Bush had been more alert.

But he added that the security of the American people depended neither on Mr Bush nor on his challenger, John Kerry, but on US policy.

Jeez, there sure are a lot of religious people declining to endorse anybody this year, huh?

Seriously though, this is a pretty clear example of Bush’s failed leadership in the war on terror. He let Bin Laden slip away, diverted attention to Iraq, and has done nothing to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world. For this reason, Bin Laden’s standing among Arab extremists and moderates has grown considerably in the three years since 9/11. If Bush didn’t have such a boner for a war with Iraq, this asshole would be dead right now instead of threatening us from afar like he’s Cobra Commander or something.

UPDATE : More quotes from the tape are emerging :

Bin Laden suggested Bush was slow to react to the Sept. 11 attacks, giving the hijackers more time than they expected. At the time of the attacks, the president was listening to schoolchildren in Florida reading a book.

“It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the American armed forces would leave 50,000 of his citizens in the two towers to face these horrors alone,” he said, referring to the number of people who worked at the World Trade Center.

“It appeared to him (Bush) that a little girl’s talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers. That gave us three times the required time to carry out the operations, thank God,” he said.

In planning the attacks, bin Laden said he told Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers, that the strikes had to be carried out “within 20 minutes before Bush and his administration noticed.”

It looks like Giuliani wasn’t the only person thanking god that Bush was President on 9/11.

Well, this cover story in this month’s National Geographic (and the article’s first page) sums it up pretty nicely (via Waxy):

Here’s the opening paragraphs of the article :

Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life’s work of Charles Darwin, is a theory. It’s a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth’s living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it’s “just” a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is “just” a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory. Continental drift is a theory. The existence, structure, and dynamics of atoms? Atomic theory. Even electricity is a theoretical construct, involving electrons, which are tiny units of charged mass that no one has ever seen. Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact. That’s what scientists mean when they talk about a theory: not a dreamy and unreliable speculation, but an explanatory statement that fits the evidence. They embrace such an explanation confidently but provisionally?taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.

The rest of us generally agree. We plug our televisions into little wall sockets, measure a year by the length of Earth’s orbit, and in many other ways live our lives based on the trusted reality of those theories.

Evolutionary theory, though, is a bit different. It’s such a dangerously wonderful and far-reaching view of life that some people find it unacceptable, despite the vast body of supporting evidence. As applied to our own species, Homo sapiens, it can seem more threatening still. Many fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews take alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis. Their discomfort is paralleled by Islamic creationists such as Harun Yahya, author of a recent volume titled The Evolution Deceit, who points to the six-day creation story in the Koran as literal truth and calls the theory of evolution “nothing but a deception imposed on us by the dominators of the world system.” The late Srila Prabhupada, of the Hare Krishna movement, explained that God created “the 8,400,000 species of life from the very beginning,” in order to establish multiple tiers of reincarnation for rising souls. Although souls ascend, the species themselves don’t change, he insisted, dismissing “Darwin’s nonsensical theory.”

Unfortunately, all the “facts” and “evidence” about evolution are match for the persuasive power of Jack Chick :

It’s astounding to think that there are still people who think Eve was made out of one of Adam’s ribs or that Noah built a big boat and put two of every animal in it. I try to be sensitive to people’s faith here, but this is as absurd as believing in the three little pigs or something. Of course, nobody’s trying to force science classes to replace their curriculum Aesop’s fables.

Since all the cool kids are doing it, here are my final predictions for this Tuesday :

For eagle-eyed readers, you’ll notice that my prediction is slightly different than from three weeks ago. I don’t think the chatter about winning Tennessee really panned out, but the chances of winning Arizona have picked up since the debates. Also, I’ll spare you predictions for the popular vote because (a) I was pulling those numbers out of my ass anyways and (b) if the electoral process doesn’t give a shit about the popular vote, why should I?

The reasons I gave for my predictions three weeks ago are even stronger now.

The almighty incumbent rule will bite Bush in the ass. Especially when he’s below 50% in states that he has to win.

Clinton’s back! Maybe I’m being too optimistic here, but I really think his presence on the campaign trail could be enough to swing a leaner or two (Missouri and Arkansas in particular).

The polls showed Bush with a substantial lead this time four years ago and Gore ended up getting half a million more votes. Keep that in mind when you see today’s polls form the same companies that show a tie.

The polling methodology is still suspect. The main pollsters are weighing their polls under the assumption that minority turnout will be low and that Republicans will outnumber Democrats at the polls. This logic defies the exit poll numbers from 2000, clear demographic shifts, and the conventional wisdom that Democrats are more motivated than Republicans this year.

Bush’s presidency has hurt the swing states. The jerked around Pennsylvania and Ohio with his steel tariff flip-flops, he made Nevada into a nuclear dumping ground, and his commitment to union busting won’t win him many friends in worker-friendly Great Lakes region. Not to mention the state-specific unemployment numbers haven’t had much good news for Bush lately.

Kerry’s got the big MO. He’s won the news cycle every day this week. The Sunday shows will be a mix of predictions and debate on issues that hurt Bush. With four days to go, Bush probably won’t have time to turn things around.

Weapons, weapons, weapons. When confronted with evidence that they let explosives fall into the hands of terrorists, the Bushies did what they’ve been doing for the last four years; they lied and tried to change the subject. Unfortunately for them, it didn’t work this time. A story that should have been defeated on Wednesday lived on to fight another day. People will still be talking about this on Tuesday morning.

So that’s how I think it’s gonna go down. While I’m still aware that anything can happen between now and Tuesday evening, time is running out for any surprises. The GOP is still trying to work the refs, so we shouldn’t keep our eyes off the ball. Pay close attention to any potential voter fraud or intimidation, contact the media to make sure the election storyline isn’t being written exclusively by right-wingers, and do what you can to help get out the vote through donations or volunteer work. We can rest when the polls close…for a little while anyways.

They just showed the Bush photoshop ad on CNN and I noticed one other thing about the ad that’s worth mentioning :

It’s complete bullshit.

Seriously. Here’s a transcript :

Script For “Whatever It Takes”

President Bush:
These four years have brought moments I could not foresee and will not forget.
I?ve learned first hand that ordering Americans into battle is the hardest decision, even when it is right.
I have returned the salute of wounded soldiers who say they were just doing their job.
I have held the children of the fallen who are told their dad or mom is a hero but would rather just have their mom or dad.
I?ve met with the parents and wives and husbands who have received a folded flag. And in those military families, I have seen the character of a great nation.
Because of your service and sacrifice, we are defeating the terrorists where they live and plan and you?re making America safer.
I will never relent in defending America, whatever it takes.

This crybaby crap is from the same guy who criticized John Kerry for using the word “sensitive” and whose supporters use the word “French” as an insult. But apparently he deserves our vote because he elicits a basic level of compassion and kindness when he’s around people who have suffered. Is he trying to say that John Kerry wouldn’t return the salute of soldiers or hold kids whose parents have been sent away?

If George W. Bush was using this ad to run for finish-line hugger at the Special Olympics, then he’d totally have my vote. But when it comes to picking who’s gonna run the country, I need a little more than faux compassion.

By the way, don’t believe it when people describe this ad as his “final push”. At least one more ad has come out since then and it’s (surprise, surprise) an attack ad.