Off Topic · Bush reelected :-( (page 15)

Posted by fishmike:

you guys are such pessimists. Once we conquer the middle east and control the world's oil supply the economy will pick up again. Then we can sell Hummers to everyone in China. If they dont buy them we will conquer them and hire Chaney and Bush's construction companies to rebuild them.

Quit being such liberal sissys. Bush is making the world better one evil-doer at a time.

Just in case you arent kidding

http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm

Posted by Kwazimodal:


Just in case you arent kidding

http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm

Can't argue with that (but I know my man Fish was kidding).

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IT JUST DOESN'T GET ANY MORE REAL THAN THIS...
President Bush explains his plan to save Social Security
 
After his Tampa, Florida speech promoting on February 4, 2005 a woman in the audience asked: I don't really understand. How is the new [Social Security] plan going to fix that problem?
 
Verbatim response:
PRESIDENT BUSH: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to that has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

Today Iraq and Afghanistan,tomorrow the world? Somehow I have trouble believing the "nonviolently" part.


http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/15/democracy_act/


March 15, 2005 | President Bush's "axis of evil," in targeting only Iraq, Iran and North Korea, was apparently an understatement. Saddam Hussein, the ayatollahs and "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il were just the tip of the iceberg. The backers of new legislation before Congress have a much bolder vision: to "achieve universal democracy" by 2025 by removing -- nonviolently -- approximately two dictatorships a year. President Bush's call, in his February State of the Union address, for support of "democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," must have been just what they wanted to hear.

If enacted, the new bill -- the ADVANCE (which stands for Advance Democratic Values, Address Nondemocratic Countries, and Enhance) Democracy Act of 2005, introduced into both houses on March 3 -- would bring about a fundamental change in U.S. foreign policy. To maintain a regional balance of power, ensure access to vital resources, and pursue larger national security goals such as the "war on terror," the United States has traditionally worked with dictators big and small, from the tyrants of the past (such as Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua) to current autocratic allies (such as Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan and Crown Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia). The ADVANCE Democracy Act, the foreign policy version of "Just Say No," on the other hand, would attempt to steer the United States away from engaging with tyrants under any circumstances.


Those who are skeptical of the bill, including both liberals and conservatives, say its goal of achieving democracy worldwide is hypocritical, because while the United States encourages some democracy movements in the Middle East, it continues its economic and military support of strong-arm leaders like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. What's more, some critics say, the bill ignores the tensions between democracy promotion and America's economic and security goals.



Specifically, the act would put democracy promotion at the top of the State Department's agenda. It would establish a new Office of Democratic Movements and Transitions, require the State Department to issue an annual democracy report, and set up an advisory board of nongovernmental VIPs to evaluate all democracy-promotion activities and spending.

Initially funded at $250 million for two years, the act would direct resources to pro-democracy movements worldwide. The bill proposes to turn U.S. embassies into "islands of freedom" and align U.S. diplomats with pro-democracy movements in nondemocratic countries -- linking performance pay and promotions of Foreign Service officers to their efforts to spread democracy. The bill would also authorize the president to block financial flows to states that resisted democratization.

This plan to upend the world's remaining dictatorships (there are more than 40, according to the nongovernmental organization Freedom House) began with former U.S. ambassador to Hungary Mark Palmer and his 2003 book, "Breaking the Real Axis of Evil." "Some people think a world without tyrants is utopian," Palmer says. "And they think it's more utopian to have a deadline." But, Palmer says, "we're down to a limited number of dictators, and it's entirely feasible to get the rest of them out. Most are pretty creaky and won't even live until 2025!"

Palmer's book didn't generate much of a stir in the press, but it did capture the attention of influential politicians like Frank Wolf, R-Va., and Tom Lantos, D-Calif., in the House and John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., in the Senate, the four cosponsors of the ADVANCE Democracy Act. The primary catalyst for the democracy legislation, however, was strategist Michael Horowitz of the neoconservative Hudson Institute. Fresh from his success in pushing passage of the North Korea Human Rights Act, Horowitz, along with the National Coalition for Religious Freedom and Human Rights (a below-the-radar group of evangelicals and others that came together to promote the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998), was ready to kick things up a notch.

Their efforts were aided by Bush's remarks in his State of the Union address. Palmer says that he almost wept with joy when he heard those words. Adds Horowitz: "There were heated efforts within the State Department to say that this speech was just rhetoric, but no, it was an extraordinary speech, and it changes everything."

Horowitz expects easy passage for the act. "Obviously Republicans can support it because it's so in sync" with the president's address, he says. And he thinks Democrats, including some who opposed the war in Iraq, will support the bill because it promotes "peaceful means of supporting democracy."

The State Department might be expected to put up some resistance to legislative meddling in its mission. "That was [its] initial reaction toward the anti-trafficking legislation that was passed in both houses. That was also the initial reaction of the international religious freedom legislation," says Lorne Craner, head of the International Republican Institute and former assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor in the Bush administration. The State Department eventually successfully adapted to the institutional changes mandated by both pieces of legislation, he notes. "And given the president's words and his actions, I think at this point [the act] will get a more sympathetic hearing from the ... leadership than the trafficking or religious freedom legislation did."

Although a bill promoting democracy with bipartisan support might seem to be noncontroversial, conservatives have traditionally expressed skepticism toward the strain of messianic unilateralism that runs through neoconservative thought. As Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote 15 years ago in "The National Interest," "It is not the American purpose to establish 'universal dominance' in the provocative formulation of Charles Krauthammer -- not even the universal dominance of democracy."


It's not only conservatives who find fault with the strategy of putting democracy above all other considerations. "The inevitable fact is that in some places it is necessary to weigh competing American interests against one another," argues Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy and Rule of Law project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "And this bill seems to assume an 'all democracy all the time' approach to foreign policy without even seeming to acknowledge deeper tensions between a democracy goal and other economic and security goals."


It also fails to take into account pressing short-term issues such as North Korea's nuclear weapons and China's growing influence in the international arena, Carothers says. "This bill doesn't seem to acknowledge that conceiving of our relationship with China as a democracy mission is probably not going to happen and will not help integrate China into the international political and economic system in the next two to 10 years."

Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, sees the bill as an effort to give what are seen as negative U.S. policies, particularly in the Middle East, a more positive spin. (Bush's nomination of longtime advisor Karen Hughes as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy is clearly another part of that effort.) The bill uses "the power of the U.S. military occupation and military presence in the region since 9/11 to declare that a new historical moment has arrived," she says. "The problem is that all the things the Bush administration wanted to fight against turned out to be lies -- Iraq's nukes, potential weapons of mass destruction, links with al-Qaida. You can always say that you're fighting for democracy because it is such an elusive concept."

Bennis adds that the Bush administration's "claiming credit for the move to democratization is very insulting to the peoples of these countries -- the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Lebanese. These democratization attempts have been in place for the last 25 years at least, and have failed because of the efforts of the U.S. government."

The issue of U.S. hypocrisy also troubles former ambassador Palmer, a supporter of the bill. "Young Arabs see us as inconsistent, as promoting democracy but propping up the Saudi dictators. They feel that we're not credible." He believes that the ADVANCE Democracy Act will eliminate the double standards by which the U.S. government supports democracy some of the time, in some places.

Carnegie's Carothers, however, argues, "You cannot legislate the elimination of double standards in America's approach to democracy in the world, because those double standards are based on the fact that our interests don't always go together despite all the nice rhetoric in presidential speeches."

To overcome the bill's critics, Horowitz will again rely on the support of the evangelical community, which he considers to have been "the most powerful force in human rights in the last 20 years." That force was evident when the North Korea Human Rights Act seemed to be on the verge of failure last year. "I can tell you that senior officials of the Korean and Chinese embassies told me that the bill had zero chance of passing the gantlet in the Senate," Horowitz recalls. But then his coalition went into overdrive, putting pressure on Democratic leaders such as Tom Daschle, on whom the coalition threatened to unleash 300 Korean-American pastors if he didn't help remove obstacles to the bill's passage. Daschle capitulated, then lost in a close reelection race in November anyway.

If significant legislative resistance to the ADVANCE Democracy bill emerges, expect another wave of pressure from an alliance of evangelicals and neoconservatives. Having successfully shifted the debate on North Korea from security issues to human rights concerns, it is now attempting to sell a more ambitious program: the destabilization of more than 40 dictatorial regimes around the world. Whether the result is 20 years of increasing democracy (think Poland) or 20 years of devastating decline (think Russia) will depend not only on passage of the democracy act but also on the way that events affecting America's economy and national security -- which aren't always in our control -- play out on the world stage.

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Nice to see the Democrats finally show some backbone.


Senate Democrats Erect Shield to Obstruct "Nuclear Option"
By Edwin Chen
Los Angeles Times

Wednesday 16 March 2005

If Republicans change rules to guarantee approval of Bush's controversial judicial nominees, the party will block chamber business.
Washington - Senate Democrats threatened Tuesday to block virtually all business in that chamber if the Republican majority carried out a plan to unilaterally impose rule changes that would ensure confirmation of President Bush's most controversial judicial nominations.

The threat, issued by Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), sharply escalated a partisan disagreement that could put the brakes on an array of legislative business in the upper chamber, where Democrats used the threat of a filibuster to block votes on 10 appellate court nominees last year.

The showdown, which could come as early as next month, looms because Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), reflecting the frustrations among most of his 54 Republican colleagues, has said he might seek to break the logjam over Bush's court appointments by abolishing the use of the filibuster to block nominations. Instead, he would force through a rule that enables a simple majority of 51 to bring nominations to a vote.

Such a ploy is considered so politically explosive within the Senate that when it was first proposed in 2003, Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), a former majority leader, described it as the "nuclear option."

Reid and his fellow Democrats, in effect, called Frist's bluff on Tuesday by issuing a preemptive strike, saying that Democrats would respond to any Frist action by continuing to work with Republicans only on matters that affected U.S. troops or that ensured the continuity of government operations.

"Beyond that, we will be reluctant to enter into any consent agreement that facilitates Senate activities, even on routine matters," Reid said in a letter to Frist. Nearly all Senate business requires unanimous consent; for example, one senator can prevent committee meetings from taking place simply by objecting.

Republicans reacted heatedly to Reid's letter, issuing a flood of statements denouncing the Democratic threat. "To shut down the Senate would be irresponsible and partisan," Frist said.

The partisan exchange marked the opening salvos in a high-stakes struggle for public opinion in what analysts said would be an acrimonious fight - mired in arcane Senate rules and procedures - that could elevate to new heights the intensely partisan atmosphere in Washington.

"I think this is very serious," said Thomas E. Mann, a congressional analyst at the Brookings Institution.

The underpinnings of the controversy are mathematical. The Senate has 55 Republicans, 44 Democrats and one independent, James M. Jeffords of Vermont, who usually sides with Democrats. It takes 60 votes to end a filibuster, a time-honored maneuver to prevent a vote. Republicans now are talking about changing the rules so that 51 senators could cut off debate and force a vote.

Although the Senate has confirmed most of Bush's judicial nominees, 10 of his most controversial appointments stalled in the chamber last year, even though it was widely acknowledged that they would have commanded a majority vote for confirmation. They have since been renominated.

Senate Republicans and the president have argued vociferously that judges deserve a simple "up-or-down" vote.

"Senators ought to have the backbone and the gumption to get off their hind quarters and vote yes or vote no and be responsible for that vote with their constituents," said Sen. George Allen (R-Va.).

Ken Mehlman, who managed the president's reelection campaign and now leads the Republican National Committee, said Reid's "unprecedented threat to shut down the Senate … would put partisan obstruction ahead of the people's business."

Reid, however, said it was the Democrats' duty to defend against efforts to weaken the constitutional system of checks and balances "so that no one person in power - so that no one political party - can hold total control over the course of our nation."

"The fact is that this president has a better record of having his judicial nominees approved than any president in the past 25 years," Reid said Tuesday afternoon. "Only 10 of 214 nominations have been turned down."

Most of his Democratic colleagues stood behind him on the wind-swept Senate steps in a show of solidarity.

Reid said the Republican plan amounted to an "arrogant abuse of power."

Democrats said that from 1995 to 2000, the GOP-controlled Congress defeated 60 of President Clinton's judicial nominations through "calculated delay," rather than up-or-down votes.

Also weighing in on Tuesday were two former Republican senators, James A. McClure of Idaho and Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming. In an opinion column in the Wall Street Journal, they urged their fellow Republicans to shun the "nuclear option," saying that it would be "too high a price to pay," in part because the rule changes, if adopted, also could be used against all executive branch nominations and "even military promotions."

Although Republicans command a Senate majority, they are far from assured of a victory on the issue, analysts said Tuesday.

"I'm still not sure [Frist] has the 50 votes to prevail," Mann said.

The two parties are "eyeball-to-eyeball, and nobody seems to be blinking," said John J. Pitney Jr., a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has been working across the aisle in hopes of producing a Social Security overhaul bill that would gain bipartisan support, said he was deeply concerned that the rules fight would derail his efforts.

"I'm worried about that," he said. "I'm also worried about unnecessarily dividing the country. This is a dark chapter in the history of the Senate."

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Haven't said it in a while but been thinking it - go MaTT!!!!

Ha, appreciate it man. Scratch another day off. 1,323

http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20050318-fri.html#anchor0



Mar 18, 2005





Global: America Smells the Coffee

Stephen Roach (from Beijing)




Tipping points are a great concept, but virtually impossible to identify ahead of time -- let alone when they are occurring. It is only with the great luxury of hindsight that we can look back and know that the proverbial bell has rung. In my view, March 16, 2005 could end up in the running as a possible tipping point for America. Suddenly, the US has taken on a very different aura in an increasingly unbalanced world: The confluence of a record current account deficit, a disaster from General Motors, and yet another new high for oil prices all speak of an increasingly precarious role for the global hegemon. World financial markets have barely begun to sniff that out.

The current account deficit probably says it all. As I have noted ad nauseum, it is an outgrowth of America’s biggest problem -- an unprecedented shortfall of national saving. The US net national saving rate -- the combined saving of individuals, businesses and the government sector (all adjusted for depreciation) -- has fallen to a record low of 1.5% since early 2002. Lacking in domestic saving, America must import foreign saving from abroad in order to keep growing at what the body politic judges to be acceptable growth rates. And so the US must then run massive and ever-widening current account deficits to attract that foreign capital. And ever-widening it is: America’s broadest measure of its external shortfall was just reported to have hit an all-time record of 6.3% of GDP in 4Q04 -- an astonishing 1.8 percentage point deterioration from the 4.5% deficit a year-earlier in 4Q03. Not only is this a record current-account deficit for the US, but it is also a record financing burden for the rest of the world. Based on the annualized current account deficit of slightly more than $750 billion in the final period of 2004, America now requires an average of $2.9 billion of capital inflows each and every business day to keep the magic going.

“What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” I realize that dates me, but I’m old enough to remember when that was the battle cry of a once mighty Smokestack America. So when GM throws in the towel on earnings (again) and its bonds trade at near-junk status, maybe there’s more to this story than a quick flicker on the screen. The ever-cynical comments on chatrooms were quick to minimize the significance of this event: “What do you want from a healthcare provider dressed up as an auto company?” Yes, Detroit is now a shadow of its former self -- US automakers currently employ only 0.8% of all workers in the US. In many respects, that’s emblematic of the fate of the factory sector as a whole, where the job share has plunged from 33% of private nonfarm payrolls in 1960 to around 13% today. The demise of US manufacturing is now taken as a given and most simply dismiss GM’s latest travails as a non-event.

I think there is a deeper meaning to all this -- especially coming on a day when the current-account deficit was reported to have taken yet another ominous leap into uncharted territory. Not surprisingly, the US trade deficit on goods accounted for fully 98% of America’s total current account deficit in 4Q04. That’s right, a once proud Smokestack America has borne the brunt of the unprecedented US saving shortfall. And just as GM led the charge in the heyday of America’s manufacturing prowess, it is now on the “bleeding edge” of its darker days. Coincidence? I doubt it. It may well be that the accelerated erosion of America’s manufacturing base in recent years is the most painful outgrowth of a record US saving shortfall. Washington, of course, wants to pin the blame on unfair foreign competition. Instead, it ought to take a look in the mirror: It is the budget deficit, of course, that has been crucial in pushing national saving to record lows in recent years. And it is the capital inflows -- and the trade deficits behind those flows -- that are required to compensate for these budget deficits and give a saving-short America the foreign aid it needs to keep on growing.

March 16 was also a day of record oil prices. No, this is not just America’s problem. But in a falling-dollar climate, other nations enjoy a cushion from this blow as their currencies rise. Not so in the US as the current account deficit keeps the greenback under pressure. The press, of course, is filled with commentary about how oil no longer matters. All I can say is -- been there, done that. My experience tells me that this is precisely the rhetoric we always hear in the midst of an oil shock. And shock it is: In real terms, $56 oil represents more than a quadrupling from the lows of late 1998 -- putting this price spike very much on a par with those devastating blows of the 1970s. The apologists will tell you not to worry -- that the real price of oil is still below record levels hit in the late 1970s. That is poor macro, to say the least. Impacts to economic growth are not about levels -- but about changes. The sharp run-up of oil prices in these past few years is the functional equivalent of a tax on household purchasing power that only puts further pressure on an already over-extended American consumer. The fact that consumers haven’t caved yet doesn’t mean the Holy Grail of a new immunity to rising oil prices has been discovered. It could mean that something else has temporarily deferred the endgame.

That “something else,” in my view, goes right back to America’s biggest hole -- the current account deficit and the capital inflows from abroad that keep funding it. Recent US Treasury data suggest this is not a problem -- net portfolio investment of $91.5 billion in January 2005 that was more than enough to cover the $58 billion trade deficit that month. The Washington spin is that foreigners can’t get enough of dollar-denominated assets and the returns they offer in an otherwise return-starved world. Don’t kid yourself. This rush of foreign capital is not about private investors plunging back into US assets. It is a conscious policy move on the part of foreign central banks. The US Treasury data do not accurately reflect the obvious -- an extraordinary build-up of dollar-denominated official foreign exchange reserves held by the world’s monetary authorities. By our estimates (based on IMF data), total reserves increased by about $700 billion from year-end 2003 to year-end 2004. Assuming that the dollar share of such holdings held steady at around 70% (an official BIS estimate as of late 2003), that implies an increase of nearly $500 billion in dollar-denominated holdings of the world’s central banks -- confirming that foreign central banks financed about 75% of America’s current account deficit last year. That policy-driven financing is a bold effort on the part of foreign central banks to keep their currencies from rising and defer what could be an otherwise painfully classic US current account adjustment -- complete with a further decline in the dollar and sharply higher US interest rates. The resulting subsidy to US interest rates -- and the asset-driven consumption that engenders -- goes a long way in cushioning the blows of stagnant real wages and surging oil prices that might have otherwise clobbered the American consumer.

But the message from overseas is that this game is just about over. One by one, Asian central banks -- America’s financiers at the margin -- have dropped the not-so-subtle hint that they are saturated with dollar-denominated assets. From Korea and Japan to China and India -- not to dismiss Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore -- there is a growing protest to massive dollar overweights in official reserve portfolios. The standard American response borders on arrogance: “What choice do they have?” The presumption is that the US has externally driven Asian economies over a barrel -- unwilling to accept a deterioration in export competitiveness that currency appreciation might bring. This misses a key cost-benefit tradeoff -- weighing the hit to exports against the fiscal cost of a portfolio loss on holdings of dollar-denominated assets. The bigger the build-up of dollar reserves, the more this tradeoff is likely to tip toward dollar diversification -- spelling the end of America’s cut-rate foreign financing.

In the end, of course, there’s far more to this story than economics. As I noted recently, history is replete with examples of leadership tests that pit a nation’s military prowess against its economic base (see my 28 February dispatch, “The Pendulum of Global Leadership”). Yale historian Paul Kennedy has long argued that great powers typically fail when military reach outstrips a nation’s economic strength. In that vein, there’s little doubt that America is extending its reach in this post-9/11 world. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the opening salvos. The Bush Administration’s recent nomination of two leading neocons to key global positions -- John Bolton as America’s ambassador to the UN and Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank (also announced on March 16) -- are more recent examples of a White House that is upping the ante on its “transformational” projection of global power. In Paul Kennedy’s historical framework, America is extending its reach at precisely the moment when its economic power base is weakening -- a classic warning sign of the fall of a Great Power.

Was March 16, 2005 America’s tipping point? Only time will tell. The optimist can hope that it was a wake-up call for a saving-short US economy to put its house back in order. For once, call me an optimist. It’s time for America to smell the coffee.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0325-32.htm

Published on Friday, March 25, 2005 by the Los Angeles Sun
The Darkness Has Come
by John Tully

Last year the oily and corrupt House leader Congressman Tom Delay personally used the Department Of Homeland Security to track down and locate members of the Texas State Legislature who had fled to Oklahoma after Mr. Delay tried to redistrict his home state into illogical shapes that were straight off of a sushi plate.

This week Mr. Delay subpoenaed a brain-dead woman to Capitol Hill to score political capital from the religious and rigid right and distract from his vast legal problems including the illegal use of campaign funds and his current successful attempt to literally change the House's ethics rules, written in secret. Texas, of course, is where they execute retarded people and adolescents.

Irving Kristol's son Bill, the neo-conservative dreamer and top propagandist for the Iraq invasion since his founding of The Project For A New American Century, had his expert say on Fox News the other day. He claimed that one of the neurologists who had examined the medically dead woman said: " She can recover substantially if she gets the proper rehabilitation. "

It almost makes you long for the days of uninterrupted Atlanta courtroom-killer news and video.

There are approximately eight point eight Billion dollars missing in Iraq, completely unaccounted for, according to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. Never one to miss an opportunity for irony, President Bush nominated yet another chief architect of the Iraq invasion, Paul Wolfowitz to run The World Bank. That's a perfect triangle of failure with a Secretary of State who did a miserable job advising the President on National Security and an Attorney General who tried to find legal loopholes in torture laws.

A recent document uncovered Halliburton's newest overcharge of 108 million for Jordanian and Turkish fuel - "The cost data did not reconcile to KBR's (Halliburton subsidiary) accounting" - and added to countless overcharges totaling close to two billion dollars. Meanwhile, Congress decides to investigate steroid use in professional baseball.

They must not know that Chandra Levy is still missing.

The media swine scoffed and smirked at veteran journalist Dan Rather's final plea for courage as they ripped apart Michael Jackson for wearing pajamas and blanketed the airwaves with coverage of Martha Stewart. It's always hard to figure out week in and week out who the biggest media weenie is. George Will and David Brooks both could hardly wait to make immediate cheeky/mealy-mouthed references to France in discussing the Syrian mess in Lebanon. Everyone in the cool kids media club was praising the President for his bold leadership, though almost two months have gone by since the Iraqi election, the many sides are still fighting and the country is a bloody mess.

Or is it the three-headed liberal weenie, The Evan Thomas/ Howard Fineman/ Chris Matthews Monster with their newest shtick, the just-so-wacky-it-might-work: " George Bush is an idiot-genius who had to lie to America to get us into a war to bring freedom to the Middle East." Subtitle: " We won't know for fifty years"

Talk about mission creeps.

In fact, all three men were performing it brilliantly last week, after about twenty minutes of adolescent discussion of Mr. Jackson's wardrobe and Ms. Stewart's homecoming, on radio legend Don Imus' program. That hardly left the them any time to discuss the brand-new appointment of America's chief diplomat to the United Nations, Mr. John Bolton. The little coverage and criticism the media did give the truly absurd nomination usually referred to a bad joke that Mr. Bolton had once told about cutting off the top floors of the UN building- and it not mattering. But the consistently undiplomatic Mr. Bolton once seriously asserted that " We (United States) are the Security Council" One of the few reporters left in D.C., Mark Shields, remarked that the nomination was " like naming Howard Stern as your Chief of Protocol or Mary Baker Eddy as your Surgeon General."

Back in the middle of 2003, before Jon Stewart was a big star, Mr. Matthews was on The Daily Show and was asked about the Presidential election and the long list of Democratic candidates. The war that Mr. Matthews had passive-aggressively cheer leaded had not been going well. The questions that he had failed to ask the politicians and leaders about the preparation and planning for the war were coming home to roost. With all his experience in "Wershington" as he calls it in his Pennsylvanian drawl, working for the late, great Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill - among others, this would be a perfect opportunity to educate the young people about the issues on a cool T.V. show and discuss the politics involved with them.

But Mr. Matthews tried to be hip and irreverent and summarized the whole field of candidates by giddily telling Stewart that Congressman Dick Gephardt had big eyebrows.

Hilarious.

Tip O'Neill was probably rolling in his grave that summer night and just about the same time out in Colorado, an old salty dog named Hunter S. Thompson was stewing about the sorry state of affairs in America.

The journalist and author fumed: " It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgivable sin in America."

"Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg."

"The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world. The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives."

He ended his diatribe by declaring " Big Darkness Come Soon"

The day after Thompson killed himself, the beat-up, piled-upon and tired-looking Mr. Rather declared simply and dramatically: "Gonzo is dead"

This fact was immediately evident upon watching the cable news channels.

CNN's Judy Woodruff introduced two young women at computers who were reading weblogs to gauge the reaction to the sad news. One of the women stated that Mr. Thompson had basically pioneered the practice of Gonzo Journalism. Mr. Imus' producer stooge Bernard McGuirk and sports stooge Sid Rosenberg just could not, for the life of them, figure out what all the fuss was about regarding Mr. Thompson's death. "What did he 'eva do" chortled the pool-ball headed producer; "Who is this guy?" laughed Mr. Rosenberg.

But their questions would soon be answered by the newsbunnies at MSNBC who were broadcasting Live from the studio with In-Depth coverage of the Top Story:

The darkness had indeed come.

© 2005 LA Sun