Straight Up |: August 2007 Archives

Oh happy dog day!

The ventriloquist dummy took a powder, Stephen Lee Myers reports in The New York Times.

Copy that, said MSNBC.com, which ran his report as its cover story (per the illustration, above), since replaced by the AP report.

There will be many thumbsuckers mulling the whys and wherefores of the dummy's departure, but here's ours (click the photo there or below):

It's our fave foto of El Senor Gonzales because it puts him in the proper perspective. May it long be remembered.

But here's a more important story of this dog day, reported by the AP's Deborah Hastings and published in the Navy Times:

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

That's just the beginning of the story, which details the BananaRepublic's treatment of whistleblowers in ways you won't believe.

Straight Up's Calvin Trillin offers this comment on today's White House resignation:









BODY POLITIC

Farewell to Bush's brain, Karl Rove,
Whose loss will never drain us;
Now when do we wipe away Dick Cheney,
The boss's raging anus?

-- Leon Freilich

Postscript: Now watch Bill Moyers's beautiful kiss-off, delivered on Aug. 17:

Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious draft-averse naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God's anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits.

And that's just for starters. Has anybody said it better?

The BananaRepublic has gained a new lease on life from a craven combination of mindless BananaRepublicans and feckless BananaDemocrats. The dog days of summer are upon us, too. See ya later.

Aug. 10: Oh, and before I go ... here's a postscript: Something even scarier, pointed out by mi amigo with reference to the "brown-skinned shadows" in Iraq, "whose violent demise need not touch the American realm."

The U.S. military can't find 190,000 weapons given willy-nilly to Iraqi forces when security training was run by Gen. David Petraeus.

Which raises fears, as The Washington Post delicately puts it, that the military genius who is now the top U.S. commander in Iraq has armed the insurgents fighting U.S. troops.

Makes you wonder what else besides AK-47s, pistols, body armor and helmets will have gone missing by September, when Petraeus is scheduled to report to Congress about "progress" in Iraq.

Thousands of Iraqi civilians maybe? More U.S. troops killed and wounded? Political sanity?

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Postscript: And now for a minor update.

Iraq Weapons Are a Focus of Criminal Investigations

BAGHDAD, Aug. 27 -- Several federal agencies are investigating a widening network of criminal cases involving the purchase and delivery of billions of dollars of weapons, supplies and other matériel to Iraqi and American forces, according to American officials. The officials said it amounted to the largest ring of fraud and kickbacks uncovered in the conflict here.

The inquiry has already led to several indictments of Americans, with more expected, the officials said. One of the investigations involves a senior American officer who worked closely with Gen. David H. Petraeus in setting up the logistics operation to supply the Iraqi forces when General Petraeus was in charge of training and equipping those forces in 2004 and 2005, American officials said Monday.

Wanna bet the Petraeus report will not mention American war profiteers?

Is Rupert Murdoch good or bad for The Wall Street Journal? That's the burning question. Today's WSJ editorial assures us, "No sane businessman pays a premium of 67% over the market price for an asset he intends to ruin." Well, nobody has said he intends to ruin it. To use a favorite word of the WSJ editorial board, that's a canard.

Rupe simply intends to run the Journal the way he wants. He has said so himself -- emphatically. No sane businessman pays $5 billion for an asset and does otherwise. Which is no good for the independence of the WSJ news department.

I speak from experience. Once upon a time I worked for a newspaper he took over -- the Chicago Sun-Times. He started it on its downhill slide. Downhill? Ha. He drove it over a cliff.