CrimQuips
CrimQuips 6/26/03 Thursday, June 26, 2003
Commentary by Barry Crimmins
http://www.barrycrimmins.com "Stop right there. If you take a picture, I will break your camera." -- Specialist Arthur Myers, US soldier restricting the media from documenting both the damage and occupation of Uger Addib, Iraq.
Call me un-American, but so long as Specialist Arthur Meyers is pulling that duty, he is one "troop" I will not support.
Myers isn't fighting for America's freedom, he is pointing a gun at it.
The first sentence of the top story in yesterday's New York Times stated that "...the War (GWII) ended almost two months ago." I'm sure that came as a relief to the families and friends of the six British soldiers who were killed in Iraq on Tuesday.
They died so that the war could stay "over." Actually they died so the war could overstay.
Hakima Khalil, and her infant daughter, Maha, who were killed in the US assault on Uger Addib, died for another wonderful reason -- they died because US intelligence sources said Saddam Hussein might have been somewhere in the region. And we all know how infallible US intelligence on Iraq is these days.
What better way to track down such a vile human rights offender than to kill women and children who were allegedly near a trail he might have been on?
What will they tell us next? "We gave the baby a chance but she refused to talk." Yesterday's New York Times sanitized Israel's militancy with the headline "In Mideast, Taking Action While It Is an Option." After all, when peace strangles the area there will no longer be a chance to prudently employ military bulldozers and rocket attacks on neighborhoods full of families.
Consider the justifiable outrage that would ensue if the headline read "Hamas Mobilizes Suicide Bombers Before Deadline Restricts Such Activities. " So remember, when Israel rounds up, handcuffs, blindfolds and secretly interrogates young men -- ostensibly for being Palestinian -- it is only marching them down a back alley on the Road Map to Peace. Each violent action, whether a Hamas terrorist bombings or Israeli acts of state terror, makes the Road Map to Peace more and more illegible.
If Texas Rangers shortstop Alex Rodriguez were given a vote that would help determine whether or not major league baseball players could still become free agents (like he did before signing a ten-year, quarter-billion dollar contract) and he voted against continued free agency, he'd be no more of a hypocrite than Clarence Thomas is for dissenting against the Supreme Court affirmative action decision this week.
If it weren't for affirmative action, we wouldn't have Clarence Thomas. Wait a minute, I'm trying to make a case FOR affirmative action.
Last winter Bush called the peace movement a "focus group" and implied it deserved very little consideration. Considering what we now know about W's specious case for war, his disdain for focus is understandable.
From 1992 through 2000, the incomes of the 400 richest taxpayers grew while their tax bills decreased drastically. Just think-- those were the bad old days for those people!
So long as Bush remains in power the only thing that can stop the rich from further engorgement is the gout.
One shudders to consider the circumstances for jillionaires had Bush not arrived just in time to rescue them from the economic savages of the Clinton era! Federal energy regulators rejected a request by California to invalidate more than $12 billion in energy contracts that the state was swindled into by Enron-era hucksters at a time of extreme, yet prefabricated, duress. Apparently Bush has finally found regulators he can live with.
Allowing the state out of the odious contracts would have saved cash-strapped California billions of dollars but the Bush regulators understood that such a move would have undermined much more important efforts to recall Democratic Governor Gray Davis.
The only thing Republicans hate more than Democrats is elected Democrats.
The regulators angered animal rights activists by whipping the dead horse Enron when they extremely limited the all but defunct corporation's right to sell energy. Bankruptcy and scandal had long ago imposed that penalty. "OK, we are going to make an example out of this corpse so all of the living people who are pulling the exact same crimes it committed will know that their afterlife will not be pleasant."
How very court-appointed Bush Administration to punish the dead. That must please its Christian right whack-job core supporters to no end.
Enron is still manipulating things-- this time it's just the California electorate instead of energy prices. If all energy suppliers have to do is continue to profiteer from their own scandalous behavior while ignoring the suffering and hardships it causes the poor, school children, senior citizens, taxpayers and public safety, they are ready willing and able to comply with the regulators' decision. It's just that kind of sacrifice from the private sector that typifies Court-appointed Bush administration-era corporate patriotism.
Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that his office was investigating the malicious treatment of illegal immigrants held after 9/11. Fine doesn't expect much to be decided until the regulators that okayed the California energy price gouging make it to New York to oversee the inquiry.
Fine expressed "serious concerns" over verbal and physical abuse faced by 84 illegal immigrants at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Kaiser Ashcroft feels that the mere fact that these reports have surfaced indicates that a lack of rigidity safeguards meant to protect the Bush junta from public humiliation over its hypocrisy concerning human rights.
Canada can no longer be relied upon to provide copious amounts of natural gas to America. Our northern neighbor's resources were severely depleted last winter when the court-appointed Bush administration drained reserves nearly dry so that it could produce unprecedented amounts of hot air for use in war rhetoric.
The NYT reported Monday, "Adding yet another heavy burden on businesses, the cost of workers' compensation insurance is soaring at the highest rates in nearly a decade." The poor companies! We must stop overburdening them with responsibility for the people they maim and kill. The workers comp issue is just another reason Bush feels we must bankrupt the government with a combination of tax cuts, corporate welfare and runaway militarism and authoritarianism. If you can't fund oversight agencies then the businesses will be freed of the unfair burden of responsibility such agencies place upon them!
Otherwise we'd have to do something sane like truly regulate the criminals in the insurance industry. For all the moaning about frivolous lawsuits, there isn't a personal injury attorney --anywhere -- in possession of even a scintilla of the greed necessary to sit on board of an insurance outfit.
Bush is sending an aid package to Russia to help them learn how to deal with democracy. He figures it's better to assist the Russians now when it's cheap. Otherwise they'll end up like him, spending night after night at the fundraisers that are so essential to the subversion of democracy. If things go well in Russia, Florida is next in line for a democracy enhancement grant. Before the court-appointed Bush administration sends another nominee before congress someone should remind them that the judges are meant to serve in federal rather than feral courts.
The U.S. has announced it will create a new Iraqi army-- so in the future if America ever wants to gain attack the nation it will be able to point to its obvious martial tendencies as a premise for war.
Many Iraqis still have little food, water, fuel or electricity. Many have lost their homes. Many are without medical treatment for the "collateral damage" they suffered. The promised democracy is nowhere in sight but that doesn't matter because soon they will have a new army. Why should Iraq be any different than America, where human needs have traditionally taken a back seat to the boundless appetite of the military industrial complex?
Just what the American taxpayers need -- the bill for another army.
The new army is being sold to Iraqis as a jobs program and its ranks will fill quickly because the economic conscription of troops is effective. How many kids do you think would be volunteering to go get killed in a Humvee accident in the Middle East if there were enough decent jobs in America?
Although you'd have to figure that organizing and arming the outraged people whose country you have just raped and pillaged may not make for the best long-term strategy. No Bush strategy considers anything longer term than to figure how long it will take to transfer looted booty to an account on Grand Cayman Island. Recruiting slogan for the new Iraqi army: Join the Army and See the World Attack You. Is it me or does it seem that every time Bush drops in the polls we are hit with another round of stories about how unbeatable he is because he has raised so much money?
Coughing up fat-cat furballs after nights out romancing the over-privileged doesn't exactly endear the court-appointed prez to millions of working Americans.
The Dems need to explain to voters that the millions Bush has raised for his bid to be re-appointed are nothing more than a nominal licensing fee for the fat-cats to steal billions from honest Americans.
Is there anything more pitiful than the continued media discussion of how Democratic candidates "lack the stature" necessary to take on Bush? The man stole office, has presided over the looting of the Treasury for private interests, he has encouraged the corporate rape of the environment, he was on an extended vacation while terrorists prepared to savagely strike the nation for which he was responsible, he then went Barney Fife on 9/11 and headed for Nebraska while the East Coast burned, next he employed the assaults as justification for authoritarian destruction of civil liberties, and we now know his entire premise to engage this nation in what is now a quagmire in Iraq was based on wholesale lies and I don't care what anyone says he is still dumber than a rock -- BUT WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO PEOPLE DISCUSS THIS CRIMINAL AS IF HE POSSESSES FORMIDABLE STATURE? Who would the media geniuses have the Dems run to match up with Bush stature-wise? Tony Soprano? You know who has absolutely no stature at all? Any media wag that matter of factly implies Bush is a man of legitimate stature.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please click to sign up for the e-mail version of :CrimQuips List.
© 2003 Barry Crimmins *******
http://www.barrycrimmins.com "Stop right there. If you take a picture, I will break your camera." -- Specialist Arthur Myers, US soldier restricting the media from documenting both the damage and occupation of Uger Addib, Iraq.
Call me un-American, but so long as Specialist Arthur Meyers is pulling that duty, he is one "troop" I will not support.
Myers isn't fighting for America's freedom, he is pointing a gun at it.
The first sentence of the top story in yesterday's New York Times stated that "...the War (GWII) ended almost two months ago." I'm sure that came as a relief to the families and friends of the six British soldiers who were killed in Iraq on Tuesday.
They died so that the war could stay "over." Actually they died so the war could overstay.
Hakima Khalil, and her infant daughter, Maha, who were killed in the US assault on Uger Addib, died for another wonderful reason -- they died because US intelligence sources said Saddam Hussein might have been somewhere in the region. And we all know how infallible US intelligence on Iraq is these days.
What better way to track down such a vile human rights offender than to kill women and children who were allegedly near a trail he might have been on?
What will they tell us next? "We gave the baby a chance but she refused to talk." Yesterday's New York Times sanitized Israel's militancy with the headline "In Mideast, Taking Action While It Is an Option." After all, when peace strangles the area there will no longer be a chance to prudently employ military bulldozers and rocket attacks on neighborhoods full of families.
Consider the justifiable outrage that would ensue if the headline read "Hamas Mobilizes Suicide Bombers Before Deadline Restricts Such Activities. " So remember, when Israel rounds up, handcuffs, blindfolds and secretly interrogates young men -- ostensibly for being Palestinian -- it is only marching them down a back alley on the Road Map to Peace. Each violent action, whether a Hamas terrorist bombings or Israeli acts of state terror, makes the Road Map to Peace more and more illegible.
If Texas Rangers shortstop Alex Rodriguez were given a vote that would help determine whether or not major league baseball players could still become free agents (like he did before signing a ten-year, quarter-billion dollar contract) and he voted against continued free agency, he'd be no more of a hypocrite than Clarence Thomas is for dissenting against the Supreme Court affirmative action decision this week.
If it weren't for affirmative action, we wouldn't have Clarence Thomas. Wait a minute, I'm trying to make a case FOR affirmative action.
Last winter Bush called the peace movement a "focus group" and implied it deserved very little consideration. Considering what we now know about W's specious case for war, his disdain for focus is understandable.
From 1992 through 2000, the incomes of the 400 richest taxpayers grew while their tax bills decreased drastically. Just think-- those were the bad old days for those people!
So long as Bush remains in power the only thing that can stop the rich from further engorgement is the gout.
One shudders to consider the circumstances for jillionaires had Bush not arrived just in time to rescue them from the economic savages of the Clinton era! Federal energy regulators rejected a request by California to invalidate more than $12 billion in energy contracts that the state was swindled into by Enron-era hucksters at a time of extreme, yet prefabricated, duress. Apparently Bush has finally found regulators he can live with.
Allowing the state out of the odious contracts would have saved cash-strapped California billions of dollars but the Bush regulators understood that such a move would have undermined much more important efforts to recall Democratic Governor Gray Davis.
The only thing Republicans hate more than Democrats is elected Democrats.
The regulators angered animal rights activists by whipping the dead horse Enron when they extremely limited the all but defunct corporation's right to sell energy. Bankruptcy and scandal had long ago imposed that penalty. "OK, we are going to make an example out of this corpse so all of the living people who are pulling the exact same crimes it committed will know that their afterlife will not be pleasant."
How very court-appointed Bush Administration to punish the dead. That must please its Christian right whack-job core supporters to no end.
Enron is still manipulating things-- this time it's just the California electorate instead of energy prices. If all energy suppliers have to do is continue to profiteer from their own scandalous behavior while ignoring the suffering and hardships it causes the poor, school children, senior citizens, taxpayers and public safety, they are ready willing and able to comply with the regulators' decision. It's just that kind of sacrifice from the private sector that typifies Court-appointed Bush administration-era corporate patriotism.
Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that his office was investigating the malicious treatment of illegal immigrants held after 9/11. Fine doesn't expect much to be decided until the regulators that okayed the California energy price gouging make it to New York to oversee the inquiry.
Fine expressed "serious concerns" over verbal and physical abuse faced by 84 illegal immigrants at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Kaiser Ashcroft feels that the mere fact that these reports have surfaced indicates that a lack of rigidity safeguards meant to protect the Bush junta from public humiliation over its hypocrisy concerning human rights.
Canada can no longer be relied upon to provide copious amounts of natural gas to America. Our northern neighbor's resources were severely depleted last winter when the court-appointed Bush administration drained reserves nearly dry so that it could produce unprecedented amounts of hot air for use in war rhetoric.
The NYT reported Monday, "Adding yet another heavy burden on businesses, the cost of workers' compensation insurance is soaring at the highest rates in nearly a decade." The poor companies! We must stop overburdening them with responsibility for the people they maim and kill. The workers comp issue is just another reason Bush feels we must bankrupt the government with a combination of tax cuts, corporate welfare and runaway militarism and authoritarianism. If you can't fund oversight agencies then the businesses will be freed of the unfair burden of responsibility such agencies place upon them!
Otherwise we'd have to do something sane like truly regulate the criminals in the insurance industry. For all the moaning about frivolous lawsuits, there isn't a personal injury attorney --anywhere -- in possession of even a scintilla of the greed necessary to sit on board of an insurance outfit.
Bush is sending an aid package to Russia to help them learn how to deal with democracy. He figures it's better to assist the Russians now when it's cheap. Otherwise they'll end up like him, spending night after night at the fundraisers that are so essential to the subversion of democracy. If things go well in Russia, Florida is next in line for a democracy enhancement grant. Before the court-appointed Bush administration sends another nominee before congress someone should remind them that the judges are meant to serve in federal rather than feral courts.
The U.S. has announced it will create a new Iraqi army-- so in the future if America ever wants to gain attack the nation it will be able to point to its obvious martial tendencies as a premise for war.
Many Iraqis still have little food, water, fuel or electricity. Many have lost their homes. Many are without medical treatment for the "collateral damage" they suffered. The promised democracy is nowhere in sight but that doesn't matter because soon they will have a new army. Why should Iraq be any different than America, where human needs have traditionally taken a back seat to the boundless appetite of the military industrial complex?
Just what the American taxpayers need -- the bill for another army.
The new army is being sold to Iraqis as a jobs program and its ranks will fill quickly because the economic conscription of troops is effective. How many kids do you think would be volunteering to go get killed in a Humvee accident in the Middle East if there were enough decent jobs in America?
Although you'd have to figure that organizing and arming the outraged people whose country you have just raped and pillaged may not make for the best long-term strategy. No Bush strategy considers anything longer term than to figure how long it will take to transfer looted booty to an account on Grand Cayman Island. Recruiting slogan for the new Iraqi army: Join the Army and See the World Attack You. Is it me or does it seem that every time Bush drops in the polls we are hit with another round of stories about how unbeatable he is because he has raised so much money?
Coughing up fat-cat furballs after nights out romancing the over-privileged doesn't exactly endear the court-appointed prez to millions of working Americans.
The Dems need to explain to voters that the millions Bush has raised for his bid to be re-appointed are nothing more than a nominal licensing fee for the fat-cats to steal billions from honest Americans.
Is there anything more pitiful than the continued media discussion of how Democratic candidates "lack the stature" necessary to take on Bush? The man stole office, has presided over the looting of the Treasury for private interests, he has encouraged the corporate rape of the environment, he was on an extended vacation while terrorists prepared to savagely strike the nation for which he was responsible, he then went Barney Fife on 9/11 and headed for Nebraska while the East Coast burned, next he employed the assaults as justification for authoritarian destruction of civil liberties, and we now know his entire premise to engage this nation in what is now a quagmire in Iraq was based on wholesale lies and I don't care what anyone says he is still dumber than a rock -- BUT WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO PEOPLE DISCUSS THIS CRIMINAL AS IF HE POSSESSES FORMIDABLE STATURE? Who would the media geniuses have the Dems run to match up with Bush stature-wise? Tony Soprano? You know who has absolutely no stature at all? Any media wag that matter of factly implies Bush is a man of legitimate stature.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please click to sign up for the e-mail version of :CrimQuips List.
© 2003 Barry Crimmins *******