Blog updates may be even more sporadic than usual for a while, as my computer has reached the advanced age of four, and now appears to be in its death throes. It has suffered in recent months, no doubt due to the demands I have placed on it, and when I installed Easy Media Creator 10, that was the last straw. It is crashing and losing its internet connection far too often, so I have ordered one of those new quad-core beasts, and it should be here in a week or so. In the meanwhile, I am spending most of my time burning DVDs to get everything off the hard drive.
I would much rather spend my time reading Scott McClellan's new book, What Happened. He was Bush's press secretary, and a White House insider, who just told us that all those horrible lies told by all of those horrible liberals about the Bush administration...well, they were all true.
When something like this happened in the past, the standard response from the White House was to go into attack mode, deny everything, and call the miscreant a liberal, which is even worse than being a miscreant. The problem is that no way can the Bushies say McClellan is a liberal. He was one of their own, going all the way back to Texas. And they can't dispute the facts, so instead they're just hoping the story will die well before the elections. Here's what David Galland of Casey Research had to say, along with a link to a video of Ari Fleischer.
Egg-Sucking Polecats
I am not a big fan of broadcast news, other than as a rare source of entertainment.
But I thought it would be informative to tune into the Bush administration’s quick counter-attack on Scott McClellan’s new book in which he basically accuses the president and his men of being, to use a colorful Southern term, a bunch of “egg-sucking polecats.”
Now I’d have to find more time in the day than presently available to do the full research required to better understand the law around such things, but if the Monica Lewinsky affair – which, as far as I could tell was an act between two consenting adults – was cause for impeachment, then what might be proscribed for deliberately starting a war on false pretenses?
Now, before those conservatives among you start jumping up and down, please understand, I am only reporting what is now being told by one of the president’s closest confidants of many years.
Might McClellan also be a polecat, just looking to sell a lot of books? No doubt. But the charges he levels are not without substantiation from other quarters. As such, one could take his revelations as being confirmatory.
But back to the broadcast news. Perhaps stung by McClellan's accusation that the media had been too soft in the run-up to the war, the CBS Evening News’ Katie Couric actually did a fairly tough interview with Ari Fleischer, McClellan’s former boss.
Thanks to YouTube, you can view her interview and I would highly recommend you do, as it is a masterful lesson in political spin. You can see the specific talking points unfurling (that somehow McClellan’s words were taken over by some liberal editor and that Scottie could have never really meant those)… and you will love the part when Mr. Fleischer says something to the effect of “I don’t want to pre-judge Scott, but will wait to hear his defense.”
I had to finger my ear on that one, just to assure that a buildup of wax wasn't somehow skewing sound.
We are talking here about a deception (to use McClellan’s term) that has cost tens of thousands of lives, ruined our military, cost on the order of $2.5 trillion, destroyed America’s prestige around the world and spawned a whole new global reordering of alliances… and… and… but it is McClellan who needs to defend himself?
Call me old fashioned, but I think it is time to call a polecat a polecat. And President Bush and his cronies are, at least in my book, polecats. Here’s the video.
Video: Eye To Eye: Ari Fleischer (CBS News)
Last and least, if anyone out there wants to find out what a liberal is (as opposed to what the right-wingers say) here is a web site with a test you can take. At the end it gives you a result based on your left/right and libertarian/authoritarian scores.
Mine were left/right -2.50 and libertarian/authoritarian -3.95. Basically that means I believe in freedom, but I don't have my head up my butt.
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