Keystone Chumps

Chimpie and the boys are having a hard time lately, their incompetence has come home to roost. The formerly solid support they could count on from the dunderhead Rethuglican acolytes in Congress is disappearing. There doesn't appear to be anything they can do reliably – except do things wrong:

The White House's new press secretary, Tony Snow, says Bush believes English should be the national language. Attorney General Gonzales says Bush doesn't believe that. Oops – anyone know what's going on?

“In the latest indication of the crushing hardships weighing on the lives of Iraqis, increasing portions of the middle class seem to be doing everything they can to leave the country. In the last 10 months, the state has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and a quarter of the country’s estimated middle class.”

Chimpie believes his dismal polling numbers are a result of people being “unsettled” because of the war in Iraq. Apparently it has nothing to do with his overall incompetence and his solid record of lying to the citizens, or his violations of their rights under the Constitution, or his following the same pattern of lies to fabricate a crisis with Iran.

“The head of a group of Federal Air Marshals says the service is badly broken”......it “cannot protect the public.” Apparently the management of the Air Marshal Service has “retaliat[ed] against him, with four separate investigations, including one for misuse of his business card.”

The past week, Afghanistan has had some of the “deadliest violence since the Taliban was supposedly driven from power in late 2001.” Up to 105 people were reportedly killed. Weren't we told they were defeated?

The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a report last week calling for the U.S. to “close any secret ‘war on terror’ detention facilities abroad and the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba.”

The Travel Industry Association of America recently stated that high gas prices will add “$30 and $50 to the gasoline cost of a typical trip this summer.”

Friends in the drug industry are up to no good: “The Justice Department is accusing Abbott Laboratories of vastly inflating prices of its drugs as part of a fraudulent billing scheme alleged to have cost government health programs more than $175 million over 10 years.” But let's give more subsidies and tax breaks to them.

Wind up toy Gen Michael Hayden, who Bush says is “the right man to lead the CIA at this critical moment in our nation's history” admits knowing NSA spying actions were illegal: During hearings, Hayden uncovered new information on the creation of NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, “noting that he was asked by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet to provide a list of NSA’s capabilities after the al-Qaeda attacks, even those that Hayden believed would not be permissible under the law. Hayden suggested the scope of the program may go beyond what is publicly known.” Hayden also slammed the former head of the CIA who Chimpie also said was “the right man to lead the CIA at this critical moment in our nation's history” - “You get a lot more authority when the workforce doesn’t think it’s amateur hour on the top floor,” Hayden also said yesterday in a “not-so-veiled reference to since-disappeared CIA chief Porter Goss.”

Makes the mind reel.
Posted on The Human Stain