Our beloved Preznit has finally broken loose with the Vietnam analogy. Yes, he has said that if only we had stuck it out in Vietnam, we would have won. From Froomkin:

But Bush today tried to turn the Vietnam analogy on its head, arguing that the U.S. withdrawal led to disaster there and emboldened American enemies around the globe.
...
"There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- al-Qaeda. In an interview with a Pakistani paper after the 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden declared that 'the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. They must do the same today.' . . . . Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility -- but the terrorists see things differently."

Bush's speech was a big hit at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City.

As for the VFW, well what else do you need to know about them but that they supported a republican chickenhawk over a decorated Army officer, Tammy Duckworth for Congress last year. Of course they're going to applaud Preznit Desertion, he's their kind of asshole.

Oh, and next year when the asshole goes to the Vietnam memorial, perhaps Vets who left buddies there should form a ring around the Memorial to keep him away. He dishonors the memory of all who served and died there with his shitty logic and verbal diareha.

Okay, so it's an airplane this time. Marion Blakey, the intrepid and unflying FAA adminstrator has offered her resignation to go be the chief lobbyist for the Aerospace Industry Association.

The nation's chief defense-industry lobbying group has selected Marion C. Blakey, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, as its new chief executive.

Industry officials confirmed yesterday that Blakey will head the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), replacing John W. Douglass, 66, who is retiring. Late yesterday, the association made the announcement official.
...
In her new job, which is to start in November, Blakey will be the most prominent spokesperson to the federal government for the makers of commercial aircraft and for contractors to the Pentagon.

Here's my advice, FWIW for members of congress on our side of the aisle... when Marion Blakey comes a-knockin' in the next couple of years, don't answer the door/phone. I think it bears watching to see which members talk to an ex-FAA adminstrator whose principal response to Congress has been the same as her boss's ... a big "FU". Perhaps members who talk to her will have demonstrated a greater committment to lobbying dollars and incentives than the American People, especially when dealing with a former FAA adminstrator who tried to rule the skies and couldn't even be bothered to be a pilot.

Talk about being supremely qualified to be in the Bunnypants Administration...she's right up there with Heckuva Job Brownie and "Shaft" Stickler in both qualifications and subject matter knowledge oh, and political connections.

From an interesting piece in the Post...

This is a lesson the Democrats should take to heart. Change is headed in their direction, but a new Democratic era will emerge only if a potential Democratic administration shows successful leadership and real achievements.

Voters are getting a glimpse of the utter spineless behavior of Reid and Pelosi and other "leading lights" on a variety of issues right now. If what they're seeing is what they believe that they will be offered in terms of "leadership" after the next election cycle the current "leadership" will be primarily responsible for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Or so it seems to me...

I love ya man. I really do. I totally respect your service in the Senate; all those years having to put up with Snarlin' Arlen's shit it must have been quite trying while being second-bannana in the Judiciary Committee. It also must have affected your brain and will to do anything. Like call out Abu Gonzales for lying to your face.

Mueller's description of Ashcroft's physical condition that night contrasts with testimony last month from Gonzales, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Ashcroft was "lucid" and "did most of the talking" during the brief visit. It also confirms an account of the episode by former deputy attorney general James B. Comey, who said Ashcroft told the two men he was not well enough to make decisions in the hospital.

"Saw AG," Mueller writes in his notes for 8:10 p.m. on March 10, 2004, only minutes after Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had visited Ashcroft. "Janet Ashcroft in the room. AG in chair; is feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed."

Please get his sorry ass impeached and then indicted. You can do it, I have faith in you. Letting a sleazy weasel like him lie to you just makes you look the fool, and we all know you're not.

Love,

Jo Fish, former Vermontster

The Dean O' Wankerz looooooves him some Huckabee. Luvz him truly.

... Mike Huckabee is plotting an even bigger coup against Mitt Romney in the first presidential primary, in New Hampshire
...It has been done before.

I wonder if Broder fully appreciates the use of his opposable thumbs in the creation of his wankery? Apparently not as much as he appreciates Huckabee.

I sort of get this feeling that in true Godfather-style republican politics Fred Thompson, no matter how much he wants to be Sonny (or Michael) is really the Other Fredo. Showboaty, not much substance and has to buy his friends off with promises he can't keep or in some cases make no promises at all or even say much.

Republicans rushing to embrace Fred Thompson's would-be presidential candidacy might have trouble figuring out what he would do if he actually won the White House.

On most public policy issues, the former Tennessee senator and "Law & Order" actor has offered few, if any, specifics. Even on the dominant issue of the 2008 campaign _ the war in Iraq _ Thompson has carefully stopped short of wading into what he would do about the conflict should he inherit it, although he has generally backed President Bush.

Aside from McCain-Feingold, in his eight years in the Senate, Thompson was the primary sponsor of only four pieces of legislation, none of any significance. "I worked for the music business for years when Fred Thompson was the senator from Tennessee," Hilary Rosen, former chief lobbyist for the Recording Industry Association of America and now a Democratic strategist, said on MSNBC. "So I worked with him in his office fairly regularly, and I have to say, as nice a guy as he is, he is lazy. He was a lazy senator."

"I've been friendly with Thompson for years," Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund said on The Journal Editorial Report. In the Senate, Fund said, Thompson "had a reputation for being a little lazy."

Even Thompson's high school football coach, Garner Ezell, told the Nashville Tennessean, "He was smart, but he was lazy."

Quaking with fear, even!

They preferred bookstores or hookah bars to mosques. They stopped listening to pop music and instead surfed Web sites promoting radical Islam. They threw away their baseball caps and grew beards.

New York Police Department intelligence analysts have concluded those were some of the telltale signs of homegrown terrorists in the making -- a mounting threat as grave as that from established terror groups like al-Qaida.
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Instead of mosques, those places were more likely to be "cafes, cab driver hangouts, flop houses, prisons, student associations, non-governmental organizations, hookah bars, butcher shops and bookstores," the report says.

You know, it's strange that for some reason we seem to forget that the idea of terrorism isn't so new or unique in our society, nor in the those which make up the cultures that make up this grand experiment. You need to look no further than the fair-skinned kids whose allegiance to Ireland might have left them with the same ideas and discontent that the article/report talks about...

They "look, act, talk and walk like everyone around them," the study adds. "In the early stages of their radicalization, these individuals rarely travel, are not participating in any kind of militant activity, yet they are slowly building the mind-set, intention and commitment to conduct jihad."

Now I'm not one to call out Preznit Ever-Lying on his inability to tell the truth to anyone, you all know me. I love the man. Respect him even. But this is too much, he said that he'd have General Petraeus go to Congress and testify about the sitch in Eye-rack. He did. He really really did. Now it looks like he may be backtracking. Oh, the humanity!

Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush administration's progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the secretaries of state and defense.
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But both the White House and Congress have widely described the assessment as coming from Petraeus. Bush has repeatedly referred to the general as the one who will be delivering the report in September and has implored the public and Republicans in Congress to withhold judgment until then. In an interim assessment last month, the White House said that significant progress has been shown in fewer than half of the 18 political and security benchmarks outlined in the legislation.

I have it on good authority that after GEN Petraeus testifies, there will be a "Mission Accomplished" ceremony on the White House Lawn in the shadow of the White House AAA installed by His Excellency Dick to keep himself and his kinky brood safe while visiting his puppet and plaything, Our Beloved Preznit.

Yeah, Mitt. Ever wanting to be the daddy figure for the authoritarian cargo cultists whom he hope will propel him, his hair and his runway-like shoulders (that's so goddamn funny, I had to include it) into the Oval Office (isn't that sort of, you know, sexual imagery Mitt?) Now it's Mitt against the intertubes and the sexual predators he fears that lurk everywhere. I'm sure that he's fearful of the ones that BillO tell him infest the air at Kos.

Mitt Romney worries that the nation's children are swimming in filthy water, a "cesspool of violence, sex and drugs and indolence and perversions." To clean things up, the Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor has proposed increased punishment for those who prey on children online -- stringent mandatory prison sentences, followed by lifetime tracking by Global Positioning System for first-time offenders who "use the Internet to sexually assault children." He calls it "One Strike, You're Ours."

Maybe we ought to call it the Mountain Meadows Foundation

Approximately seventeen children were deliberately spared because of their young ages. In the hours following the massacre Lee directed Philip Klingensmith, Samuel McMurdy, and possibly J. Willis and Samuel Knight to take the children (a few of whom were wounded) to the nearby farm of Jacob Hamblin, a local Indian agent. From there, the children were taken to Cedar City, where foster parents were found among local Mormon families.

Certainly if the more dedicated BoSox fans were to find out it might cost him a few votes from those in the Bay State....sssssh... there's an article in the WaPoo about it.

Mitt, the man who bought Iowa, has disclosed that his "blind trusts" are rife with the kind of good, solid, capitalist investments that will make both the slightly left-wing Marx and Lenin and Big Daddy Dobson cringe.

Now that the assets of his blind trusts are public, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney is facing lots of questions about where he made his recent millions--on companies that perform stem cell research, run casinos and do business in Sudan, for instance. The die-hard Boston Red Sox fan even ended up with an investment in the reviled New York Yankees' cable network.
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Romney's trusts also recently unloaded numerous stocks--valued at between $150,000 and $1,165,000--in casino operators MGM-Mirage and Harrah's and gambling equipment companies such as Boyd's Gaming Corp. Many Christian conservatives--as well as leaders of Romney's Mormon faith--oppose gambling as a moral blight.

Oh hell, maybe they're blind in the same way that his kids are soldiers serving in Southwest Asia.

Yeah, that's it...

But with a decidedly different spin...I'm wondering if this will be making into PPV at the Marriott hotels worldwide.

Betting that it won't be required viewing by Helmet-Hair Mitt* and his five trust funds.

*aka, the man who bought Ames, Iowa.

OK. I know that I've been awaaaaay for waaaay too long. I've been busy training. [note to self, find clip of Bill Murray in "Stripes" doing the "Army Training, Sir!" spiel ... too funny].

Priceless.

Anyhow, I hope you'll forgive me and let me back into your daily internet time-wasting coterie.

I'll try not to be gone so much. *Yes* I have said that before.

1. Preznit Quagmire
   
2. Another rat deserts the ship
   
3. A novel idea...
   
4. Dear Pat Leahy,
   
5. Broder's Boy
   
6. The Other Fredo
   
7. Oh no! I'm Terror-fied!
   
8. Uh-huh. Yeah, sure. Bet on it. Etc....
   
9. One last bit of Mittenfreude
   
10. And also in a "blind trust"... his manhood?