Secrets and Lies: Bush doesn't know which way to go...

I've complained deeply about the air of secrecy that has surrounded the Bushling world. Perhaps I should prefer it to the lies spun on behalf of its various enterprises.

In the current time the president can't face reality in Iraq, so he spins happy tales that few are falling for, except perhaps for Hugh Hewitt.

Speaking of spinning happy tales, the Pentagon has hired the Lincoln Group to plant phony stories in Iraqi papers, as if the Iraqi press is all starry-eyed about the amazing progress the U.S. is making in their country. Oh, the great American tradition of a free press.

We shouldn't be surprised that the best Bush can do is propaganda. After all, he paid a columnist to push nuclear-family-style marriage. How 'bout them family values, America?

Not long before, the Bushlings hired Armstrong Williams to push the No Child Left Behind Act. We're getting educated, you bet.

Speaking of misspent Dept. of Education money, spending tax dollars to have right-wing heavy metal bands tour the country can't be what the founding fathers had in mind.

I can't really blame W. so much as the whole clan. Governor Jeb gave paid propaganda a spin too.

The propaganda doesn't fall far from the tree, it seems. G.H.W. Bush, also known as "41," paid the Rendon Group to soften the country up for war. It's no wonder W. kept the contract going.

It's hard to know where to place Judith Miller in all of this. People of goodwill want to think she wasn't a shill for, or worse yet, a tool of the Bushlings, but her wildly inaccurate WMD stories certainly served the false buildup to war. Now she's sorry, at least. That's rich, after a seven-figure severance package from the NYT. No, wait, she's rich.

Now even two-bit players like Newark, New Jersey, want the press to spread good news and aren't afraid to pay for it.

The funny thing is, no one is falling for it anymore, certainly not insider Lawrence Wilkerson. The administration that once famously bragged, "We create our own reality," had better heed the words of The Daily Show's Jon Stewart -- "Uh, not so much..." -- and gain a little humility. Fat chance, until history humbles them.

Bushlings' strategy for victory in Iraq: ropa-dope!

Bob and weave, just keep dancing, make another speech, rebrand the war: National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. An unwinnable war doesn't get fixed by changing the name and repackaging a failed policy without changing it.

Of course, what did we expect? I doubt many people were expecting better.

The grand vision:

“The United States has no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq’s new government. That choice belongs to the Iraqi people. Yet, we will ensure that one brutal dictator is not replaced by another. All Iraqis must have a voice in the new government, and all citizens must have their rights protected.
"Rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own: we will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more.”

- President George W. Bush, February 26, 2003, quoted in the preface to today's "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq"

Question: How are we going to ensure one brutal dictator is not replaced by another? Hint: Life is just as brutal in Iraq now as under Saddam. Answer: Get out of Iraq. We can't guarantee its future.

Recommend executing children, get confirmed to the Supreme Court

I'm just waiting to hear the first report that Samuel Alito's wanting to hang on to the option of executing children "shouldn't necessarily be a deal-breaker."

I'll put that link here when it happens.

Alito was in favor of strip-searching 10-year-old girls.

Somebody might support Alito on this. Nah! Wait! The Allentown Morning Call did.

If this isn't disnormal, if this doesn't qualify for the New Normal, what does? Oh, I forgot. The current administration is entitled to nominate a conservative judge.

They're not insurgents, they're, uh, uh, anti-good guys!

Donald Rumsfeld has an "epiphany" this past weekend and decided the Iraqis who don't like what's going on in their native land don't rate the brand name "insurgents."

Let's see, uh, the last time they tried to rebrand the Iraqi War, it lasted, say, ten minutes?

Tomorrow, President Bush is going to try to redefine it again, this time as stay the course? Okay, but will he actually say something new? Maybe he'll try, "We will be the heroes of freedom until the Iraqis take over being the heroes of freedom."

Won't change a thing. Won't bring him back to life. Won't let him go out during the day.

Daily Dose of Abramoff

Abramoff Sought Bush Officials' Aid in Indian-Tribe Fee Dispute.

The Bloomberg headline says it all.

Update. North Dakota Dem Dorgan caught up in the Abramoff affair. Protests loudly of no connection.

A compendium of torture and its defense

How shameful, America. And now Condileeza Rice is dispatched to say that torture is bad, but, hey, it's good for Europe. After all, it's your war on terror, too. How shameful, Condi.

President Bush, at least, has always maintained an honest, open, position on torture and prisoner abuse that was derived directly from his born-again religious devotion, and he is a true man of conscience. It's obvious in his every statement.

The Attorney General of the United States cloaked many of his answers about torture and prisoner abuse in cloudy, non-committal language, carefully avoiding saying anything that might strip the Commander-in-Chief of his inalienable right to violate existing international treaties and international law. For shame, Mr. Gonzales.

Administration lawyers have slaved over their law books to come up with a justification for the position that the president is exempt from laws prohibiting torture. It's reassuring to know that our executive branch chooses to find ways of skirting the law. That's what makes us so happy to have the Patriot Act extended.

Finally -- or not, for I'm sure this will go on until we put a stop to it -- Vice President Cheney has made us proud and elevated us in the eyes of the world by pleading with the U.S. Senate not to tie our hands in the battle against terror. We are all ashamed. Mr. Vice President.

Late update. Porter Goss on Good Morning America weases around waterboarding. CIA doesn't torture but won't specify what that means. What does the world make of that?

OMG, Harris of Bush v. Gore fame eating at the same trough as Cunningham

Josh Marshall points to two other GOP congresspeople that could get swept up in the illegally generous donations of Mitchell Wade of MZM, Inc.

Katherine Harris of Florida is caught up.

Virgil Goode of Virginia was apparently slopped too.

GOP Congressman pleads guilty, resigns and doesn't even know Abramoff! Or does he...

U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Republican from San Diego, pleaded guilty to taking $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors.

He'll be sentenced in February when he faces up to 10 years in prison. He's already agreed to forfeit cash and property very nearly worth the original $2.4 million.

So, the Great Unraveling continues.

Wal-Mart a progressive welfare program?

Okay, sometimes I think I'm nervy when I develop a (heartfelt) talking point, but Sebastian Mallaby takes the cake arguing that by suppressing prices Wal-Mart keeps them low enough for the poor to afford them. And that's progressive because it helps the poor!

Watch in the piece where Mallaby admits that Wal-Mart's suppression of wages may extend all the way to China but that these "Chinese garment workers are mainly migrants from farms, where earnings are even worse than at Wal-Mart's subcontractors and where the labor is still more grueling."

Welcome to the New Normal, Mallaby, where it's progressive to be a little less than horrible.

Throw us a bone there, Wal-Mart, God bless ya, Wal-Mart. And a fine Christmas to you too, Wal-Mart.

Iraq Resolution was never a call to war

William Raspberry nails it in the WaPo. He makes two key points: One, the Democrats can't come up with a coherent exit strategy for Iraq and neither can the Republicans because there is no current way to get out of Iraq without risking mayhem and civil war, and two, the Iraq Resolution called for war as a last resort, so voting for it was not an a priori support for war.

Bushlings should stop referring to it as such, and media outlets should stop doing so as well.

Daily Dose of Abramoff

U.S. News and World Report fills us in on the gathering storm soon to be known as the Abramoff Scandal, or the House that DeLay Built, or the End of Days. Who knows?

Yesterday it was four lawmakers. Now it's at least a dozen. And tomorrow? Stay tuned.

A compendium of lies and deceit

Remember, people died. People are still dying. If this is a policy choice, it's one that has thousands upon thousands of people dying, many of them American, British, Polish, Unkrainian, Japanese, Bulgarian, Italian and a shameful number of dead and injured Iraqis. The thousands of horribly wounded Americans must be remembered too.

If the decision to go to war is a policy choice, one known as preemption, then we must remember the decision was based on lies, deceit, intimidation and a shameful and opportunistic use of political pressure leading up to the 2002 congressional elections.

Here, then, is a compendium of the lies and deceit:

The LA Times writes about how Curveball's revelations concerning WMDs were discredited months before they were put to use to sell the War. This led to, among other things, Colin Powell's knucklehead moment at the U.N.

National Journal's Murray Waas made clear that the Bush administration withheld key a intelligence briefing that revealed that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence of a Iraqi-Al Qaeda connection just ten days after 9/11. This document continues to be withheld from the Senate Intelligence Committee charged with investigating intelligence manipulation. Quite the smoking gun in more ways than one, don't you think?

An important reminder: While this almost daily drumbeat of revelations of the media manipulation and sexed-up non-intelligence used to phony up a war continues to pound, our President and Vice-President are calling war critics reprehensible, dishonest, shameless and corrupt. They accuse politicians and journalists of attempting to "rewrite history," the very history the Bush administration corruptly distorted. Talk about shameless. And talk about ineffective. Lies to cover lies, that's what they are doing now to justify their policy that has led to war and death.

Apparently not wanting anything that might hint that other wars were justified though fabrication, a National Security Agency study about the Gulf of Tonkin incident has been kept secret, even though it refers to events of more than 40 years ago. The gist of the study is known, that the second attack on an American destroyer never took place and that N.S.A. midlevel officers skewed the intelligence deliberately.

So much for the power of the Congress alone to wage war. Of course, there's the famous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, very much like the Iraq Resolution, both products of skewed intelligence. What power does Congress have if it's lied to?

We've already posted James Bamford's Rolling Stone article that speaks to the shady role of the Rendon Group, a PR firm in the employ of federal government, in selling war to the American public.

Let's not forget the most famous article debunking the Bushling run-up to the War: Joe Wilson's "What I Didn't Find in Africa" that led to his wife's outing as a CIA operative. George Tenet and Stephen Hadley fell over themselves trying to take the blame for Bush's famous 16 words taking us down the Yellowcake Road.

Seems rebel MPs are going after Tony Blair's own Iraqi road to war. Being a friend to W. gets more expensive every day.

Add environmental degradation to the Manifesto

There's so much going wrong with this country in such a small time frame that it's easy to forget an area of importance where we need not only to preserve the status quo, eschew the New Normal, but even advance the cause toward greater goals. That area is, indeed, the environment. So add the following text to the New Normal Manifesto:

The Continuing Assault on Environmental Protections and Attempts to Turn Public Lands Over to Private Economic Interests. The Bush administration in concert with Congress has tried since the beginning of Bush's term in office to water down existing environmental laws and regulations. Where a private interest, such as power generation or land development, can be assisted at the cost of the environment, the current government has always chosen to undercut hard-fought environmental gains. We must not turn back the clock on the environment, and we must work internationally to support a sustainable future worldwide.

Daily Dose of Abramoff

My biggest concern, reading this WaPo piece on the growing troubles of an ever-widening den of thieves -- which includes the wives of congressmen being used as conduits of bribe money for their "charitable work" -- is that the labyrinthian nature of the schemes may be too hard to sell to either juries or the American public.

Still, if any enterprise reeked of being criminal, it's this one. A pox on all their houses.

Jack Abramoff has a passel of troubles

And now some of them are in the Senate. One of the great agents of balance in American politics is hubris. With time, even the powerful forget they're not that smart.

A bunch of these characters are also former administration officials. I can't keep blaming Bush for being the Destroyer of Reputations now that other forces are at play.

It's a pity that the Great Unraveling has to happen in a year before congressional elections, but what better way to clean House. And Senate too, it seems.

As for the White House, we'll have to wait.

Blogsport: Let's not rest until Bushlings exposed

The blogs are handy for one thing: linking to every conceivable report showing the Bush administration outright deceived the American people in the build-up to the Iraqi War.

Murray Waas writes that Bush knew there were no Saddam-Osama ties within ten days of 9/11.

Don't know how much to attribute it to the blogs, but WSJ now reports 64% of the American people believe the Bushlings routinely mislead the American public in order to build support for their agenda.

Might be hard to have much of an agenda when the people think you're gaming them. Of course, Bush was elected twice. The people want to be gamed. Also, the Bushlings have, for the first time in history, a popular news outlet, Fox, to shill for them.

Then again, Fox is only creating a situation in which those that believe the Bushlings will watch. Guess they'd settle for a 35% share. Bad politics, unethical reporting, but good business.

Fox ain't in my world, except to enjoy scoping weird, disnormal antics of O'Reilly, Hannity and other strange animals. Kinda fun to observe in their native habitat.

People were on to Rove early. Didn't do any good!

Here's a Robert Reich article in The American Prospect from Feb. 1, 2003 before the Bushlings got their war on. Keypoints:

"Using techniques developed by his first mentor, dirty-tricks strategist Donald Segretti, Rove infiltrated Democratic organizations on behalf of Nixon's infamous 1972 campaign."

"Now Rove is masterminding the Bush administration's press strategy, but it's far more than a press strategy. It's the central strategy for how the public understands what George W. Bush is doing to and for America. In an important sense, it is the Bush presidency."

"But Rove has convinced the press, and therefore the American public, that this presidency is nearly invincible. He has done it with an ingenious blend of chicanery and obfuscation, aided by the Democrats' utter incapability of devising a coherent message in response."

Reich goes on to explain the methodology and nails it. Check it out.

Is Rove weakened now? Can he be stopped? Does that explain why the methodology is failing now, as the voices of Cheney, Bush, Rice, McClellan, Rumsfeld and others cranking the machine ring shrill and false instead of authoritative and compelling?

Yes.

Controlling the message long ago became disnormal

I remember being impressed with how the Clinton War Room spun back so effectively in the '92 campaign, believing that the rapid-response team so adept at controlling the message had been in great part responsible for Clinton's election.

I also remember how Bill Clinton had mastered the on-camera confession, more or less owning up to Gennifer Flowers on 60 Minutes and sorta kinda admitting he had avoided the draft in Vietnam, kinda sorta on principle.

We could trust a man who was able to own up to his shortcomings. Too bad he lost that during the heady days of Monica. Oh well.

Nowadays message control has reached its Rovian zenith, making George Orwell's Newspeak appear more visionary than ever. It's easy for me to call this message maniputation disnormal rather than evil, because humor should trump hyperbole. Still, that doesn't excuse the behavior of the current adminstration and its thought police.

It's a shame that the media has been weakened at a time when we need them the most, although it seems they've stepped up, regained their voice -- and courage -- recently. It's almost as if the media dare only be as strong as the Bushlings are weak. That's a weird paradigm.

For hope to really ring out the media has to grab hold of this newly found courage and ride it until it reclaims its preeminence in the reality-based world. We need a strong, vocal, gutsy press now more than ever.

Will it come back? Will it survive the shifting sands of technology, audience taste and profit-driven corporate balance sheets?

Money talks...Not!

Fox News doesn't want money from advertizers if they're against Alito.

New Normal: If you're rich enough, moral judgments come easy. Fair and Balanced? Not so much.

Why do we have to be close to the edge of morality on our war and torture choices, and...

end up on the wrong side.

The administration has repeated that we don't torture. Pretty big clue we do. Ya think?

Wait. CIA says "We don't do torture." Porter Goss didn't have to come out of the shadows to confirm that, did he?

Of course, there's the so-called counter-intuitive answer: CIA doesn't want to do torture, but Cheney insists. Don't do us any favors, says CIA.

I'm in agreement. My contrarian view is that Cheney doesn't give a damn about the CIA at all. He wants to punish the CIA for not helping him stonewall on the deceptions leading up to the Iraq War. Plus, he gets to work towards perserving the right to torture for present and future executive branches while shifting the blame to the CIA, as punishment for the aforementioned slights. Cheneyesque, wooden ya say?

Oh, and while we're at it, why don't we quibble about whether or not white phosphorus is a chemical weapon. If it's used on personnel, and it's a chemical, and it maims or kills them, it's a chemical weapon.

Okay?

I love the smell of obfuscation in the morning.

Okay expenses are bad for business, but c'mon, Wal-Mart, take care of your people. It's American, for chrissake

As Ronald Reagon might say, "Here they go again."

Wal-Mart might eventually figure out that a healthy workforce that isn't on the edge of financial ruin will work hard, hard. Costco figured that out a long time ago. And they have Wal-Mart-level prices.

So, what gives, Wal-Mart, could it be blind greed?

What We Can Do

Though you'll notice that I burst into humor from time to time when discussing the achingly muddled misjudgments and blatantly antagonistic international misadventures our country has been forced to endure due to misguided leadership, it's mostly to enjoy irony or to make light of the foolhardiness of the prime actors in these affairs, who could and should do so much better. I do not, however, take lightly the fearsome consequences that come from such missteps. These outright violations of common and human law and ethics can haunt us as a country for years.

There is reason for hope, and there are things we can do to not only improve our country's lot but also to turn the whole truck of state around and get it pointed back in the right direction. Why can we know that? Because we've been here before, and we have turned around.

We have as a people triumphed over our own foibles and moral shortcomings. We did turn away in the '50s and '60s from nearly a century of the worst kind of racial injustice and hatred. We did succeed in granting a large measure of civil rights to our African-American citizens who had been frozen out by decades of violence and Jim Crowism. Although the strength and surety of those rights continue to ebb and flow, we've mostly moved beyond the 400 years of slavery that stained our republic's reputation as a country holding a beacon of liberty up to the rest of the world.

We also in the '60s and '70s experienced a cultural revolution that swept away many social obstacles inhibiting academic freedom, artistic expression, sexual identity and many other societal impediments, including gender equality and ageism.

Over the last 25 years we've witnessed a back and forth, a progression and regression, among the various rights we worked to secure. Many of us have lost heart in recent years that the country has slipped back toward a more dangerous and repressive time.

The country indeed has regressed, but that doesn't mean that citizens of goodwill can't reclaim the higher moral ground

that rejects torture outright without caveat;

that yearns to be more inclusive and not less;

that understands that an advanced society can successfully combine material security with spiritual reflection, religious expression in harmony with secular safeguards;

that can encourage moderate and even progressive social values in conjunction with fiscal responsibility that does not abandon the neediest of our citizens but instead reaches out to support them and rally them to join the productive and healthy;

that reaches to create a civil, compassionate society in which a multitude of voices can coexist and be heard by all.

Okay, it's a little ambitious, and a one-size-fits-all agenda likely can't exist, but we can do better as a society only when we work together. For any one side to triumph in education, commerce, politics and religion by employing strategies of devision can, in the end, only pull us apart.

We know because we've all watched it.

We can move forward, make progress and set a higher standard. The past has shown us that we're up to it.

And the Knucklehead Award go-oes to-o-o ..... Colin Powell!

In all fairness to Colin Powell, I hold as a general organizing principle that George W. Bush is a destroyer of reputations. Dare to play moth-to-the-flame of the W. and you fly away scotched or, worse, end up dead.

Keep a score card, starting in 2001. Check out the bodies. I have no pity on Condi, Rummy, Scooter, Karl, but before this is over there are going to be a lot of shattered lives or at the very least some seriously stunted careers.

So far, in the run-up to the Iraqi War, nobody looks good for falling for the party line and certainly not those who pitched it. But poor Colin Powell had to sit there at the U.N. before the world and tell tales that turned out to be gossip from a psychologically unstable sex offender codenamed Curveball, whom the German intelligence service had already dismissed as unreliable.

Bush should have kept his trap shut, with his "everybody had the same intelligence we had, Congress, Britain, France, Germany, everybody!" Now people are admitting it, only they're pointing out that the only people who served it up as the truth was Bush and his knuckleheads!

This stuff will keep coming. It's the great unravelling, and we get to see it. Will we learn from it?

Roll over, George Orwell: Here's how we got our war on

This morning on Late Edition I barely caught Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell during his stint as Secretary of State, as he referred to an article in Rolling Stone that spoke to how the Iraqi invasion was sold to the American people.

There are moments when you begin to think someone whose credibility you previously respected is beginning to become unhinged. When I tracked down the story itself, authored by James Bamford, about John Rendon and his Rendon Group and how this Rendon was hired to package and sell the takedown of Saddam Hussein, I began to feel I'd left reality and slipped Purple-Rose-of-Cairo into a movie.

Assuming, though, for the moment that Larry Wilkerson is not crazed and that James Bamford is a serious journalist. He is: a Navy veteran, lawyer, author of two bestsellers on the National Security Agency, contributor to many major publications, former Washington investigative producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and currently a distinguished visiting professor at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

He's got cred, and his latest story is here.

If it creeps you out, pass it on. This stuff has got to stop.

Wal-Mart's retail policy: We'll carry it if we think it's moral

If any of you think that it's fine to let Wal-Mart rule on the morality of its products -- it already does that, deciding Jon Stewart, numerous recording artists, etc., just don't make the grade -- then you're part of the New Normal.

Wal-Mart nixes the morning-after pill, even though it's a federally approved prescription drug.

Wal-Mart still sells guns, though.

Let me get this straight. Contraception bad, gunplay good!

To try another comparison: Wal-Mart loves to buy from China, in spite of human rights questions. Wal-Mart do's and don't's: Do buy cheap from sweatshops, don't sell federally approved contraceptives to women!

I hadn't been shopping at Wal-Mart for over two years. Now I'm going to double-not-shop there. Please don't you either.

Seriously, folks, Jack Murtha's done good

Over at AndrewSullivan.com this morning was further evidence that Jack Murtha's comments last week calling for a withdrawal of troops are doing some good. Here's Andrew:

"The next phase looks messy, but not necessarily more disastrous than what has happened up till now. (Yeah, I know that's not exactly a high standard). I'm hanging in there with David Brooks. It's not intellectually easy to continue supporting a war when you've lost faith in the honesty and competence of the president who's leading it, but what choice do we have? There are other good people struggling to make this work: Casey, Rice, Khalilzad, McCain; and the thousands of troops who are risking their lives in this project. The key is to grasp how little we know, how badly we've screwed up, but also not to throw in the towel when, in fact, there is still a chance for leveraging the current situation to our and to Iraqis' advantage."

The main point here is that when the likes of Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks, whom I admire for their intellectually honest support for the Iraqi war (which I respectfully disagreed with), realize that the center of gravity is now changing over there, it marks a tectonic slippage away from Bush's vacuous rationale. It's also key to recognize that our options are narrowing because of the past and likely future incompetence of the Bush administration. It's this failure of planning and policy all along that has made the presence of our troops in Iraq the problem and not the solution.

That's central to Murtha's argument, which is further underpinned by the well-evidenced notion that American troops are driving the insurgency, not controlling it. The most important question may be: Will that change with time for the better?

If the answer to that question is no, then Jack Murtha's right, and we had better start thinking withdrawal sooner rather than later. If his argument prevails, withering attacks on it notwithstanding, the Bush administration will have lost the war for the war, if they haven't already.

Josh Marshall sheds light on the New Normal

Over at Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo he's been engaged in an email discussion with a friend that reminds us of a key affliction of the New Normal: the need to fight back on the quarter-hour. To quote Josh's friend, "Discrediting a critic's argument isn't enough, because it takes too much time in an environment when time is everything."

That's why it isn't enough to discredit Jack Murtha's thoughful, heartfelt call for a change in policy through well-constructed and effective counter-argument, the administration must destroy him. It's quicker.

Wasn't that tactic employed against John "Sitting Duck" Kerry back in '04 when he got swift-boated?

What is it with this administration, which almost to a man didn't serve in the armed forces, that it finds it expedient to viciously attack decorated war veterans in order to keep their war efforts on-track? (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)

Just asking.

While we're insinuating stuff, does the media with its 24/7 news cycle and the Internet with its "always-on" reality bear any blame for making politicians and their spinmeisters feel they have no choice but to lead with firepower, and damn the civility of rational debate? Is the genie out of the bottle, is this New Normal permanent, or can it be fixed?

Just asking.

The party-hardy Party: Abramoff's End of Days?

The next time the Republican Party decides to throw a huge fundraiser, maybe they won't hire Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay to cater it. But some people never learn. Some people do learn, and unfortuately for the Congress, those people work for the Justice Department. Yikes!

Michael Scanlon: A Bridge over Troubled Water

With the indictment of Michael Scanlon yesterday, the connections between Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay gets move obvious. Works for Abramoff, works for DeLay, and gets indicted. Scanlon is joining a fast-growing club. Abramoff indicted, DeLay indicted, Scanlon indicted. Oh yeah, Safavian, ex-White-Houser, indicted. Who's next?

I wonder if any high-powered law firms in Washington are adding associates to prepare for the coming bloodbath. In any event, Washington is about to throw one fabulous scandal party. What am I saying? It's been underway for years. But we're about to see a real breakout and, dare I say, achieve a New Normal?

Intelligently designed Avian flu

In a dramatic move, President Bush tried a couple of weeks back to deflect attention from the Scooter Libby indictment and its effect on the President's swooning poll numbers by addressing the Nation on the impending Avian flu pandemic.

Of course, there isn't any Avian flu pandemic currently because the virus that causes it can't be transmitted between humans. Scientists, however, believe that the virus can mutate and become capable of just that.

Now, I think I learned in Science class when I was young that mutation is a form of adaptation, a process of natural selection, that allows a species to acquire newer, more effective ways to survive. As a matter of fact, this principle is the bedrock upon which the theory of evolution has been built.

President Bush, not a big fan of science, has stressed that he'd prefer to lend credence to Intelligent Design, the belief that only the Lord can handle a job so complex as creating the heavens and the earth.

Presidental Reality Check: In his speech, Bush said, "If the virus were to develop the capacity for sustained human-to-human transmission, it could spread quickly across the globe."

All right, Mr. President, answer me this. How exactly is the virus going to develop this capacity? Through evolution or intelligent design? Why are we all going to die? Is it going to be Darwin or is it going to be God?

God's lips to Bush's ear: Spend $7.1 billion or don't. Cuz hold on, I comin'.

Doesn't sound that intelligent. But, hey, maybe we deserve it.

Start the country, I wanna get on!

See, here's the deal. Just when we finally get a solid New Normal going, it starts to unravel. Good! We never said the world had to go to hell in a handcart. It's sure invigorating to see a handful of renegade Republicans join Democrats to not body-slam the poor.

Still, the Republicans shouldn't despair too much. I'm sure Frist and Hastert, even without DeLay around to do the heavy lifting, will come up with a plan to kill food stamps or cut funding for college students.

Stop the Congress, the rats wanna get off!

As we pointed out in the Manifesto, the K Street gang, led by Jack Abramoff and his faithful sidekicks Tom DeLay and Ralph Reed, has lots of buddies, but apparently way more than we thought possible. Nearly three dozen lawmakers have received big bucks helping Abramoff put the kibash on whichever Indian gaming tribe hadn't been thoughtful enough to "hire" the extortionist to lobby on their behalf.

How much worse will this get? We'll be watching, and we doubt anyone will be disappointed, unless, of course, you feel this kind of stuff isn't that entertaining because it's so corrupt. As Huey Lewis once said, sometimes bad is bad.

New word coined; "disnormal" sheds light on situation

Since I've chosen to eschew the state I call the New Normal, I'd better be sure you understand my terms. Normal is defined, roughly speaking, as a state of being somewhere around the middle ground, whether it be in values, behavior or circumstance. My feeling is this New Normal represents a shift, too violent many would say, toward a zeitgeist, an ethos, in which we accept as "normal" what we would have viewed in more balanced, less troubled times as wildly aberrant.

To help us track this kind of violent shift away from American values, I'm going to refer to each act or set of acts as "disnormal," indicating a perversion of accepted cultural, historical and traditional ethics and mores.

Okay?

Let's try it out. In recent months the Congress passed a transportation bill that was nortorious for its pork-barrel spending, thus proving that Republicans who claim they are fiscally conservative can out-pork the best Democratic spender who ever lived. The most toasted bit of pork in the bill was the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" linking an Alaskan town to a nearby island to help 50 people get to the other side, at a cost of $223 million.

When in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita the Congress was looking at pork to trim, Repubican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska threatened to resign if funding for the bridge was pulled. It wasn't.

But now The Heritage Foundation, hardly a liberal bunch, has reported that the bridge is no more, having felt the knife in conference committee. Still, and perhaps to keep Senator Stevens quiet, the $223 million still goes to Alaska to spend as it wishes. Looks like we trimmed the fat and threw it to the wolves.

We will in the future call this sort of behavior "disnormal."

Okay?

The New Normal Manifesto

We have every reason to stand up against the New Normal.

I personally have never been that crazy about Normal in general, but that's not pertinent here.

So much of our country -- its laws, freedoms, its cultural mores, let alone its credibility and standing in the world -- has been hijacked and synthesized into a not altogether perceptible New Normal.

We are, however, beginning to witness this New Normal reach a dangerous critical mass, and we know we must take a stand against:

Torture. Forces are trying to establish the need to torture and abuse individuals in the name of patriotism. This is not American, and it is not patriotic. Heck, it's not even legal, let alone moral.

Government Secrecy. The current administration in Washington has ushered in an era in which the truth about what is occurring within our government operations is more and more secret. It has been promoted that to know what's going on and to spread it around is irresponsible and gives aid and comfort to the enemy. This is not American, and it is not patriotic.

Corruption at the White House. This takes the form of allowing corporate interests actually to formulate policy, as in the case of energy, instead of merely suggesting it. We see also the invasion of religion in the formation of policy, something our founding fathers dreaded ever happening. This is not American, and it is not patriotic.

Corruption on Capital Hill. K Street lobbyists have more than grabbed power: They've been allowed, through the creation of networks, cabals if you will, to use and be used by members of the majority party -- as an example take Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed -- to launder money from K Street clients to K Street agents to enrich the campaign coffers of current and aspiring members of the majority party. This reality is currently the subject of more investigations than you could shake a stick at. This is not American, and it is not patriotic.

Use of 9/11 to Restrict Civil Rights and Due Process. The USA Patriot Act, in the guise of hunting terrorists, has become an unwarranted attack on the privacy and personal security of U.S. citizens and has yielded next to nothing of value in the so-called War on Terror. The Act has lent itself to abuse on a number of occasions. the FBI has been caught taking advantage of the Act to surveil ordinary citzens. This has happened before, is not American and is not patriotic.

Media Manipulation. Our country has seen political arms of the party in power, both within government and in conjunction with majority party political machines, attempt to control "the message" to such an overwhelming degree that the American people lose the ability to tell the difference between political spin and the truth. The party in power finds this "an effective strategy for ruling the nation." This is not American, and it is not patriotic.

Members of the Media Subservient to Political Manipulation. A country that thrives on a free press needs a free press. These days, between the blatant agenda of Fox News Network and the attempted hijacking of Public Broadcasting by Republican Party hacks, for example, it is no surprise that large segments of the American people find themselves unfamiliar with the truth, except as that truth is presented to them. This is not American, and it is not patriotic.

The Ascendancy of Religion/Politics over Science/Law. Over 200 years of American survival and success -- including the advance of trust and admiration abroad -- are threatened as our nation is driven by a shrinking minority of people to retreat from established science, constitutional precedent and respect for human rights. This is not American, and it is not patriotic.

Anti-Intellectualism. The brightest among us are being attacked, admittedly by other bright people, for our being educated, and we are being marginalized for being educated, admittedly by educated people who find it convenient to be identified as "common folk" even though they are educated and members of the wealthy, elite class. This may be politically effective, but it is not civil, it is not American, and it is not patriotic.

The Abrogation of Treaties, Agreements and International Covenants. Our nation drives the formation of NAFTA, for example, and when we don't like an arbitrated outcome of a trade dispute -- done under the rules of the treaty -- we refuse to accept the decision and refuse to honor our commitment under the treaty to a longstanding ally, in this case, Canada. We lost, but tough, Canada. Screw you. This is not American, and it is not patriotic.

The Continuing Assault on Environmental Protections and Attempts to Turn Public Lands Over to Private Economic Interests. The Bush administration in concert with Congress has tried since the beginning of Bush's term in office to water down existing environmental laws and regulations. Where a private interest, such as power generation or land development, can be assisted at the cost of the environment, the current government has always chosen to undercut hard-fought environmental gains. We must not turn back the clock on the environment, and we must work internationally to support a sustainable future worldwide.

Profligate Deficit Spending. The so-called conservatives that have captured the mainstream Republican Party have created no less than an urban myth that conservatives are fiscally responsible. More factual is the truth that celebrated conservatives Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have added more red ink to the National Debt ledger than any other players in the history of deficit spending. Currently, The Don't-Tax-and-Spend Congress is spending like drunken Democrats. This is not American (okay, it's American), but it's not smart, and it is not patriotic.

Commerce as Fascism. Wal-Mart has so much marketing power that it can dictate where producers produce their product, how much they charge for it and, in some cases, what it can contain. It can force songwriters to alter their lyrics in order to be carried at Wal-Mart stores, and it can boycott a best seller simply because it doesn't like the book's content. Target, on the other hand, can allow pharmacists to refuse service to certain people simply because they don't like the prescription offered for filling. This is not American, and it is not patriotic.

Against these and many other outrages that have destroyed our comity at home and our credibility and trust abroad, we stand. We wish to reclaim America and its heretofore strong and principled position in the world community.

Stop the country, I wanna get off

Here's a classic case of the New Normal, how the FDA ignored science to act politically.

Stop the country, I wanna get off

Slowly over the course of the Bush administration -- and, in all fairness, related movements involving his religious allies -- I've watched in disbelief as feelings of sadness, shock and revulsion overtake me.

I'm a progressive, a liberal, a democrat, and, yes, a patriot, and I can no longer tolerate certain trends in our society that roll back so much of the progress made in the second half of the 20th century.

Conservatives and liberatarians can also feel this way. Andrew Sullivan, a man I admire and often disagree with, nonetheless has led in the fight against torture and prisoner abuse, and I consider him -- Brit though he may be (has he become a citizen?) -- a fellow patriot in the larger sense and certainly an ally in the good fight.

Though I may wander off-point from time to time, the theme of this blog is meant to be the striving to reclaim our moral compass, especially as it pertains to torture policies, the erosion of rights under the Patriot Act, the endangerment of all our rights under the guise of "fighting terror," the manipulation of media for nefarious -- okay, read political -- purposes, the anti-intellectual movement and, finally, the watering-down of our Constitutional protections under a false guise of "strict constructionism" -- read "our kind of judicial activism."

Oh, and don't be surprised if I fight stores such as Wal-Mart that force artists to change the lyrics of their songs to get carried on their shelves or Target, which now places the religious beliefs of its pharmacists above the dispensing of legal, FDA-approved prescription drugs.

That's a New Normal we can't live with.