Why General Petraeus said, "I Don't Know."













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The Political Tool is Embarrassed at Being a Political Tool

He may be the second most powerful player in our deployed military, but General Petraeus has been made a pawn by President Bush. The recognition of -- and reaction to -- this fact is what motivated him to say he doesn't know whether the war in Iraq is making America any safer.

In response to Senator Warner's question General Petraeus could have said any number of things. And, he may have actually been considering this answer:

"I personally think so."

In fact, I bet General Petraeus was tempted to offer his opinion. Torn between "I personally think so" and "I don't know."

Whether or not the former would've been a lie was not the primary reason he chose the latter. In fact, although it might have been an honest response for him to say, "I personally believe so," General Petraeus responded "I don't know" because the spectacle of being a political device disgusted him.

I'm betting something like the following ran through his mind during those dramatic moments between Warner's question and his answer:

1. A simple "Yes" would be a blatantly political response.
2. I am not supposed to be a political figure.
3. In order to conceal the political nature of my response, I might qualify "Yes" with an "in my opinion..."
4. No, that won't work, because even if I qualify my answer as my own, personal opinion, it will be a political response, and that fact will not escape the American public.
5. As I am not supposed to be a political tool, I'll stick to the military role...

"Sir, I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq."

(Warner repeats the question)

1. I am a political pawn. This is bullshit. I can't stand by and let this miserable president ruin my legacy.

"Sir, I don't know actually."

This is not to say General Petraeus realized his role as political pawn at the moment Warner questioned him. Obviously he's no dummy.

But I don't think he knew the question was coming, and may have even, for a split second, thought, "how dare they?" In the seconds that followed the question, he undoubtedly recognized Warner's motives were much more honorable than anything pre-scripted by the Bush regime. Maybe the sight of another decent Republican before him motivated him to choose "I don't know."

Remember: "I don't know" and "I think so" are not mutually exclusive, and could both be honest answers.

Having spent so much of my life around very decent, intelligent military professionals, I tend to think the best of people like General Petraeus. Just as most people are decent, so are most military folks.

Some of us recognized it earlier, but the majority of men and women in uniform see the administration for what it really is.



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Lewd Larry and his self-loathing, denial-city homo repugnant buds.

Though the conspiracy theory that the US Government/BFEE orchestrated the events of 9/11 is not restricted to lefties, most who espouse it are liberals. And, even if a miniscule portion of us subscribes to the idiotic theory, neocons can gleefully point to it as proof we're stupid.


So thank Buddha Bill Maher said this. Yes, right wing world, most of us on the left are smarter than Rosie O'Donnell.


Too bad Bill couldn't have aired this piece last week, when brain damaged Mos Def was touting the moronic theory on the show.


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Lewd Larry in "Naughty Boy."






Not a YouTube fan? You're welcome to download a WMV of the movie here:
















Enjoy


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When the Going Gets Tough, the Conservative Resigns.




Like this guy.













And this guy.
























And these guys.










On the other hand, when the tough man is knocked down, he gets back up and faces his opponents...




"Winners never quit and quitters never win."

-Vincent Lombardi





Speaking of FOOTBALL and politics, if you're like me you often think of political cartoons, but lack the ability to draw. So keep that in mind when checking out my nifty Paintbrush.exe 'toon about the Michael Vick saga:



















And last, but certainly not least...


LARRY CRAIG NABBED IN MEN'S ROOM SOLICITING UNDERCOVER POLICEMAN!















In case you don't already know, Craig is one of those repugnant conservatives who rabidy bashes homosexuals and lobbies for the "protection" of marriage. Moreso than your typical Sean Retarditty - you know, the stuff self-loathing, totally-in-denial homosexuals do to compensate for their desperately unwanted yet totally innate "perversion." Like Matt Drudge, Michael Savage, Arthur Finkelstein, Ken Mehlman, and Rush Limbaugh.


You know, all those guys in the Homosexual Mafia.


Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha !!!!!




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Is Matt Drudge's counter-clockwise whorl significant?

Is it really a well-known fact that conservative water carrier Matt Drudge is a closet homosexual?

That is to say, is Matt Drudge a self-loathing gay man?

Isn't it cool how asking a question instead of making an assertion - like, say, asking if it's true Matt Drudge uses warming gel when he rides his favorite dildo - is a cowardly way to smear someone without actually libeling them?

Which brings me to my main question: is Matt Drudge a self-loathing, closeted homosexual?


If Drudge is not a homosexual, why does the word "gay" typically appear a dozen or more times in every article written about him? That's not even true of Tom Cruise, is it?


Do all self-hating homosexuals despise liberals, or are people like Matt Drudge, David Dreier, Ken Mehlman, Mark Foley and Ann Coulter the exception?



;)

Power Line's Pussy Hurts

John at PLB is whining because Google didn't prepare a Google Doodle for Memorial Day.

Google is an international business, and has created doodles for Korean Liberation Day, the World Cup, Persian New Year, Chinese New Year, Bastille Day, Shichi-go-san (Japan), and the Summer games in Australia. But the majority of Google's doodles focus on American holidays. I don't believe they've missed a 4th of July yet.

If crying were chocolate and bourbon, PowerLine would be a 400 pound lush.

BTW, as an alternative to Google, the PLB braintrust point to DogPile. Dogpile, as most of you probably already know, filters its scans directly through Google. LOL!



"What 'clustering'? I barely
understand search engines..."

. .. .. .. .

If you're like me, your favorite moment from the second GOP debate was Ron Paul's analysis of worldwide anti-American sentiment, and its root causes. If you're like most republicans, your favorite moment came only moments afterwards, when Rudolph Giuliani interrupted the man to express his disgust with Paul's opinion.

To most of the right, Giuliani's response reflected their personal views on 9/11 and the War in Iraq. The remainder of the world recognized Giuliani doing Giuliani.

Check out the video for a good laugh.

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Anti-immigration Conservatives Reap What Their Greed Has Sown


Is a gallon of gas worth 45 minutes of this?

Though they constantly say they loathe illegal immigration, the GOP has happily turned the other way while their corporate buddies exploit illegals for profit. But, with an election on the horizon the situation has snowballed into something ugly, and they're being forced to do something not-eactly-hawkish about it. Could the neocons have avoided this mess?

I think so. I think the GOP's habitual refusal to address the federally mandated minimum wage, along with the greed that drove their constituents to nurture illegal immigration, has brought the right wing to this.

In 1981 I got my first job. It was the summer between 10th and 11th grades, I'd just moved to a new town, and wanted to buy a car. And so, on most days of the week I slung hush puppies and North Atlantic Cod for the newly opened Captain D's on Atlantic Blvd in Jacksonville, FL. For 35 hours a week I earned $3.35 an hour - the federally mandated minimum wage of the time.

It wasn't a bad deal. At 16, I had a whopping 80-something bucks a week (post-taxes). I was a kid living at home; the money was all mine! Even with the ridiculous gas prices of the late 70s and early 80s, eighty bucks could keep a teenager pretty happy for a week.

Consider - in 1981, $3.35 bought:

• more than three gallons of gas ($1.10 average per gallon)
• twenty-two stamps (15 cents each)
• seven loaves of bread (45 cents avg)
• an hour and forty-five minutes at $3.35/hr could buy most record albums (at six dollars apiece)
• three hours of work could get you into any concert
• the average new car, at $7,600, cost (pre-tax) 2,267 hours, or 57 forty-hour weeks of minimum-wage work.

Now, as you all know, the federal minimum wage hasn't changed in ten years. Obviously, this means today's minimum wage-earner cannot buy nearly as much as I could in 1981.

For instance, in 2007 $5.15 buys:

• one and a half gallons of gas
• twelve stamps
• two loaves of bread
• 3.5 hours will buy most new albums (avg $18)
• five hours, at least, for a concert's nosebleed seats ($25 for the shitty seats)
• the average new car is $27,700 bucks; you're looking at 5,379 hours of pre-tax work, or about 135 forty-hour weeks of minimum-wage work.

So it's pretty fucking clear why many of today's teenagers aren't exactly beating down Captain D's doors (and the clueless wonder why today's youth isn't "motivated").

How does the federally-mandated minimum wage affect the current dilemma the GOP is facing on immigration reform?

Rapture-ublicans controlled Congress from 1995 until 2007, and for the past ten years remained stubbornly stagnant on the issue of increasing the minimum wage. Greed, you understand, is considered a virtue among these assholes.

Nevertheless, as time passed inflation happened, and there came a time when $5.15 an hour was insufficient. At the same time, corporations needing unskilled, low-wage labor were losing employees.

The solution? Either (1) raise wages - thereby attracting more unskilled American teenagers/young adults, or (2) find another group of people willing to work for $5.15 an hour.

Most corporations happily chose curtain two. They figured out they could get immigrant workers to bust their humps for the federally-mandated minimum wage. Teenagers and pre-college/trade school adults were no longer needed as the foundation of America's unskilled work force. Better yet, once the fat cats figured out many of their newly found immigrant workers weren't in the USA legally, the corporate-immigrant understanding became "you work for less than $5.15 an hour/we won't turn you in."

So much for conservative values, eh?

Anyway, for over a decade no one said "boo" as Minute Maid, Del Monte, and Mott's boosted their profits on the backs of illegal immigrants willing to work for next to nothing. Immigrants flocked here, illegally. Corporations' profits skyrocketed. Congressional (R)s looked the other way.

And now we are where we are. The GOP's long-standing refusal to keep the minimum wage at a competitive level snowballed into a monster they cannot now escape. With a (D)-run congress in town, a general election on the horizon, and their own rabid-right-wing a.m. radio mouthpieces fueling their base's passion, the GOP is being forced to face a gigantic problem of their own making.




Suck it up, crybabies. You've got no one but yourselves to blame.

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It'd give him the thing that keeps him so popular


Though they are in the minority, right wing extremism has built for itself an ultra-concentrated media complex. One TV news organization. One radio band with one line up. One type of popular music. And so forth.

This concentrated mediaplex is the reason they can honestly claim the most popular cable news network, the most popular radio personalities, etc. For instance, although total viewership of non-hyperconservative news channels outnumbers viewers of FOX News by a ratio of 3 to 1, the rabid right can technically claim they've got the most popular cable news channel in the country.

This tendency to clump around singularities is what defines hyperconservatism. It's a greedy mindset. Stay close to home. Stockpile your assets, and store them all in the same vault. When untouched by outside, regulating forces, it's the kind of thing whose growth is undone by its own overreaching. Without the liberal democratic base, it's dangerous (see: Hitler); in a liberal democracy it's the sort of thing that regularly self-destructs via political implosion. The Whigs, the American Civil War, isolationism, McCarthyism, Nixon.

So, ironically, when we "outsiders" successfully police (e.g., Imus) the singularity-focused type of hyperconservatism that we find alive and well today, this hyperconservatism actually strengthens. It draws its members closer together, confirming for them the world "really is out to get" them. It's as if a delusionally magnified sense of persecution oils the machine that drives these nuts towards their goals.

I think it's better if we ignore the nutcases, like those who run the Excessiveness In Buttboils network, who bait society with their "Barack the Magic Negro" type of nonsense. When they're left to their own devices, they overcram into their condensed locales, ultimately imploding. When outsiders come in and police their stupidity, they actually gain more momentum towards growth, not the overcrowding that regularly does them in.

So, the "Barack the Magic Negro" sort of stunt is more successful at propagating the right wing paranoia machine when it's shut down by mainstream society.

Why not leave them alone, leave them to their own demise?

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