My bad?

German woman punched, threatened
with attack dog, because her white
asparagus was too expensive.

My bad? My bad? Does Michael Steele have any connection with reality? Can he really believe that the terrible horrors of the Bush/Cheney administration can be dismissed with the kind of cute juvenile slang a teenager might use when caught with his hand in a cookie jar? He said in his supposedly major speech today that Republican apologies are over, after having confessed only to a bit of overspending. It was a speech with no substance whatever, loaded with clichés, and apparently designed to inspire the Republican base. They gave him a standing ovation, which might indicate just how desperate they are for anything resembling leadership.

You might recall that Bush/Cheney, with the full support of the Republican Party, lied to lead us into an illegal, unconstitutional, and unnecessary “war,” the mother of all war crimes. In their pursuit of this abomination they indiscriminately killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including women and children. They engaged in massive war profiteering, employed weapons that are regarded as illegal, hid prisoners from the Red Cross, created secret prisons, tortured people, destroyed much of Iraq, including much of their illustrious history, wasted billions of dollars, sacrificed thousands of our best young people to death and permanent injuries, both mental and physical, and displaced upwards of perhaps as many as four million Iraqis. The human misery they caused is absolutely incalculable. Here at home they lied constantly, engaged in illegal wiretapping, did away with habeas corpus, ran up the national debt to previously unknown heights, stold money from the middle class to give to the obscenely wealth and corporations, and so on. Steele thinks all this can be dismissed simply as “my bad?” Unhappily, it looks like they may get away with it, the ultimate insult to morality and ethics, to say nothing of common sense and decency. Where are Obama and Holder when they are so desperately needed?

The more Republicans attack Nancy Pelosi the more it looks like she is right. It appears the CIA has no idea what they told anyone, anywhere, at any time. More people are lining up on Pelosi’s side than one might expect, and not just Bob Graham. This reminds me of my days as a Teaching Assistant for a couple of new Assistant Professors. They would lecture their classes for an hour, at the end of which students would ask me to translate, as it was obvious no one knew what they had actually meant. I would bet the same thing is often true of CIA briefings. They can get by with this because no one actually understood anything they were told, and were not permitted to mention it to anyone else. I hope Republicans keep up their demands for releasing all the memos and such, but they probably will drop them once they realize they won’t prove anything.

It appears to me that those who were involved in the terrible doings of the past eight years are more and more trying to dissociate themselves from what happened and tending to blame most of it on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. This is, I believe, probably as it should be. I should think it would be easy to make a case against either of these individuals, or both of them. I cannot understand why no one is doing so. Is it just that I am too impatient and the wheels of justice are in fact slowly turning? I saw somewhere today that Cheney is said to have become paranoid after 9/11, believing we were about to be attacked by nuclear weapons, traveling with his own doctor, gas mask, and such. Is this just the first attempts to fashion for him a temporary insanity defense? Insanity may in fact be the only way to understand his evil doings and apparent sadism. I doubt that Rumsfeld even has any defense, other than just being a doddering old fool who should never have been Secretary of Defense in the first place. The more I am learning about what happened the more I tend to feel sorry for Bush, who was clearly out of his league. I have always believed he is borderline retarded, which may explain his vulnerability to his two evil Rasputins.

LKBIQ:
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Bertrand Russell

TILT:
Jack Benny's favorite comedian was said to have been Percy Kilbride.