And What About Those Other Little Firearm Laws?:
See previous post for more about President Bush's ownership of Saddam Hussein's handgun - a gift from the troops, allegedly. Exactly how may laws, federal and D.C., might the President be breaking with his possession of that firearm? Did he receive a background check for the transfer of ownership? Is Bush licensed to possess a firearm in a federal facility? The District of Columbia prohibits firearms to be gifts. How many people are implicated in Bush's firearm possession?

And, of course, ignorance of the law does not excuse the potential crimes.

It'd Only Be Cooler If Saddam's Lifeless Hand Was Attached To It:
In the realm of the "Ya gotta be fuckin' kiddin' me" is this: apparently our President keeps Saddam Hussein's gun, the one he had when he was captured from the "spider hole," in a study off the side of the Oval Office. Bush shows it to visitors; he is "proud of it" because, it seems, or so it is said, it reminds the President of how "proud" he is of the troops.

Oh, sweet castration image, Bush brandishing Saddam's gun, his trophy, his medal that he'll never toss over a wall, the unloaded cock of the dictator. Oh, how Bush must caress that burnished metal, polishing it over and over and simmering in primal vengeful bloodlust. Goddamn, Bush must think, how he he'd love to shove that pistol up Saddam's ass, smiling at Hussein, making him wonder if he's gonna fire it. "Try to kill my Daddy, shithead? Is it loaded, motherfucker? Does this feel like a weapon of mass destruction?" Yeah, it's good to be the President so you can pretend you've got heads mounted on the wall, like the great white hunter.

One does wonder if Bush is following D.C. laws in reference to the ownership of a working handgun - Does Bush get around registration laws? You know, it's illegal to own a handgun in D.C. unless it was registered prior to 1976. Licensing laws? And if he's breaking the law, isn't this like Capone and tax evasion, and we can finally, at last, jail this petty tyrant?

Some Fucked Up Things To Remember on Memorial Day Weekend:
While you're suckin' on those bun-squeezed weiners, standing around the barbecue, acting like, really, you are honoring the men and women who died for causes good and causes useless, here's a couple of quick items to keep in mind about this great and glorious sea-to-shining sea of ours.

1. It's fucked up that more people will get upset that the voting for American Idol might have been queered by the use of technology that jams up the phone lines and blocks others from voting than will get upset that we're going into a presidential election where up to one-third of the votes for the fucking president will have no verifiable trail beyond the gizmos and widgets of the electronic voting machines.

2. It's fucked up that more people will listen to and debate what a rich celebrity says in criticizing members of his race than will debate the content of what the previous Vice-President had to say about the crises of democracy facing this country.

3. Ann Coulter is still a cunt.

4. Go have a weekend, sweet middle class readers. Work hard, working class readers who make sure the middle class readers have a good weekend. Ignore the batshit insane rantings of John Ashcroft, who violated administration rules by announcing that we should all be "vigilant" because of "heightened" concerns about terrorism, and he was nearly immediately bitch-slapped back to Missouri by Tom "Hey, Where Is My Fucking Neck?" Ridge. See, seems we established dat 'ol Department of Homeland Security so they could try to scare the bejeesus out of us, not the visage of John Ashcroft, who makes Cotton Mather look like a naked, keg-drinking party animal at the DeKE house.

Suck them weenies for the troops. Gnash that corn for America and Jesus. It's summertime, not really, but still, get out that kiddie pool, you know the one, the one that says, "God Bless the USA" on the bottom, and soak in that fucker like you believe it.

Back Monday.

Now That's Some Motherfucking Freedom of Speech:
Let us pause for a moment to honor the rudeness of another. Al Gore gave an exhilirating, cathartic orgasm of a speech yesterday in New York City. Read the whole thing. Watch the video on C-SPAN. Be patient and try a few times - the server has been overloaded for a while now. Why? Because Gore articulated, succinctly, precisely, ass-kicking-ly, what many, many Americans have been thinking for months, if not years, now.

Now, the Rude Pundit has not been kind to Gore: he believes the former Vice-President "lost" the "election" in 2000 on his own. Yeah, yeah, Bush was installed, blah, blah, the media, yes, yes, Ralph Nader, yeah, go fuck yourself. All those things are true. But, bottom line, it should have been a blowout for someone running on Clinton's record, and Gore fucked it up. (And the Rude Pundit also realizes that a President Gore would not have been allowed to govern by a GOP so filled with evil and hatred that it can barely breathe because of the scarring bloat of cruelty that fills its gullet.)

What's startling about Gore's speech is not the cleansing breath of actual intellectual thought combined with a sense of history in his references to Freud, Eisenhower and others, although, goddamn, it's about time someone so public mentioned the depravities of the Marquis De Sade in relation to Abu Ghraib and not just the easy analogy to the much-maligned gay porn; it's not the stunning breadth of evidence Gore lays out in order to exonerate the motives of the "few rotten apples" while impeaching the motives of those who ordered them to treat the prisoners like so many carcasses waiting to be carved up when he says, "Private Lynndie England did not make the decision that the United States would not observe the Geneva Convention. Specialist Charles Graner was not the one who approved a policy of establishing an American Gulag of dark rooms with naked prisoners to be "stressed" and even - we must use the word - tortured - to force them to say things that legal procedures might not induce them to say. These policies were designed and insisted upon by the Bush White House;" it's not that Gore takes it all the way to the President, daring to invoke "corruption," "viciousness," "betrayal," "dishonest," and "atrocious" in relation to Bush, which one-ups Nancy Pelosi in Democratic rage towards the administration; it's not his amazing declaration that Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice, and others should resign for the good of the country, something we used to call "honorable;" it's not his recognition of the devaluing of America in the eyes of the world or even the simple recognition that the U.S. has to deal with the rest of the world, as well as the "payback" for our recklessly ignoring the Geneva Conventions; it's not his intonation of all the anti-Bush people from the military and government, like Clarke, Wilson, Zinni. While all these things are enough to make the speech vital, there's something else, at the end, that makes it something else.

Almost at his conclusion, Gore says, "In December of 2000, even though I strongly disagreed with the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to order a halt to the counting of legally cast ballots, I saw it as my duty to reaffirm my own strong belief that we are a nation of laws and not only accept the decision, but do what I could to prevent efforts to delegitimize George Bush as he took the oath of office as president. I did not at that moment imagine that Bush would, in the presidency that ensued, demonstrate utter contempt for the rule of law and work at every turn to frustrate accountability." Finally, in that moment, too little, too late, of course, but still, Gore says what we've been wanting to hear: he was honorable towards dishonorable men; he was a mensch to the putzes; he was the strong adult to the petulant children; and he was wrong.

Of course, Gore will be ignored, mostly, except for ad hominem and useless attacks that fail to address anything that he actually said. Fuck, the GOP, in its wonderfully hysterical, proto-McCarthy way, has decided to attack MoveOn.org, which sponsored the speech, saying that MoveOn's issue positions discredit Gore. And their official statement on the speech provides a litany of the terrorist attacks that happened in the Clinton Administration, saying that Gore must have "amnesia" or doesn't understand the "threat of global terror." Which, to be sure, begs the question of how much the current Adminstration understands that threat, but still, it all, all is a consciously blind refusal to answer any criticism. Just wait for the editorials, the Hannities, the O'Reillys.

And it was one sweet, sweet-assed motherfucker of a speech, so direct, so unlike anything we've been hearing for so, so long, in this democracy, this America, the place where we are supposed to be able talk and question openly, but this place where it has become an anomaly to actually do so. One can be sure that Kerry and his people had two reactions: anger at the distraction and the implicit tie to him, and jealousy that only a man with nothing left to lose can be so liberated in the so-called "Land of the Free."

Punk'd:
Oh, shit, oh, motherfuck, that's funny. Goddamn, the Rude Pundit is just doubled over in laughter. What a big fuckin' joke it all was. What a con job. It was perfect. Someone bring out the corpse of Allen Funt so he can get fucked by twenty hookers, it was that good. The United States got punk'd. The New York Times got punk'd. And you know what probably galls (or, tee-hee, should it be "gauls"?) most conservatives? The idea that the French might be sitting there, shaking their beret-topped heads at our ignorance.

The thing any good con artist knows is how to prey on people's desires. If you're greedy, a con will exploit your greed. It's an easy game: you spot a mark, a victim, and you promise that mark anything: power, pussy, cash on the barrel head. All that's required is a little investment in your ideas. It's every con from the three-card monte to the huge, complex real estate scheme. Everyone wants somethin' for nothin' in this world, and if you can give it to them, you will be showered with riches. That's the beauty of the con: the ego rush of power of convincing people that you're for real. See, a con presents a victim with the means of giving in to the corruption at the heart of one's soul. A con artist is like a dope dealer: the shit the con artist sells has no meaning unless you use it. And, son of a bitch, if Ahmed Chalabi and, possibly, Iran didn't pull the con of the young century, with Rumslove, Wolfie, Heartless Dick, and George W snorting that WMD powder through the hollowed out bones of American soldiers.

Without going through the sad, sordid history of Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress, and the U.S. government, suffice to say that it was primarily Chalabi and his cohorts who told the U.S. that the invasion would be a breeze, that there really, really, really were weapons, and that Chalabi would be welcomed back as a national hero. Chalabi, a convicted criminal embezzler in Jordan, whose wealthy family ran from Iraq forty years ago, was, as every con artist, an opportunist who saw a way to manipulate the "last superpower" to take out his longstanding hate against the Baathists.

But the extra hilarious part of this? The possible twist in the plot that makes everything else small change? The fact that there's someone out there with a bigger grudge against Iraq than Chalabi or Bush, Jr. Yeah, you can only just shake your head in pain, in whiplash when you think about the idea that Iran may have been feeding Chalabi fake intelligence so that he would convince the U.S. to take out Saddam. And the goal is what most of us suspected would happen to Iraq after Saddam was gone: an Islamic theocracy.

And then there's the New York Times, admitting that it got punk'd, too, that it believed Chalabi. Or, more accurately, that "reporter" Judith Miller got taken in by the con, so hot was she for swallowing all the semen Chalabi could ejaculate. The Times "apology" doesn't mention Miller, but its accompanying archive of stories makes it clear whose byline is on nearly every questionable and/or lie-filled story. And it's also clear whose byline is not on every story that questions the administration.

Oh, ho, ho, ho, what a funny, funny world we live in. Man, maybe Bush will make one of his so-called "speeches" where he throws up his hands and looks sheepish and says, "Oops. Looks like I got punk'd." And we can all laugh while civil war breaks out in Iraq, women are repressed, and more and more troops die. Goddamn, the Rude Pundit hopes Judith Miller is doubled over at home with such stress-induced gastrointestinal pain that she's puking blood and shitting newsprint. And he's taking bets on Chalabi: arrest, suicide, or murder, or some combination of those options. As for our own "government" (and the quotation marks are there because one generally presumes a government rules in the interests of its citizens), our own evil men must be scrambling because, like the husband who tries to explain to his wife why he gave the man on the phone his credit card number, they gotta spin this shit, this evil, on something other than their own greed and will to power.

And, just for the fuck of it, let's crucify Ashton Kutcher.

To Speak, Perchance To Dream:
Everyone always has such hope when a drug addict says he's going into rehab. It raises our expectations, it makes us think the world, in general will become a better place. But time and time again, when it's the choice between the needle in the vein or the group counseling, that junkie's gonna choose to shoot that shit into his bloodstream. Sweet, sweet oblivion. And all the faithful can only shake their heads and wonder why they even bother anymore.

So it was with Bush's "speech" last night. Make a big motherfuckin' to do about and then just say the same things all over again, just in a K-Tel album version instead of a bunch of speeches. The title may as well have been, "Aw, Fuck It, We're Out of Ideas." Of course, the conservative press was full of praise - the Murdoch-owned New York Post called Bush's plan "Osama Bin Laden's worst nightmare," but for many on the right, Bush could have slunk up to the podium, screeched and bared his teeth, masturbated, and thrown shit at an attending general, and they would have written encomiums that would make fuckin' Alexander the Great feel like a piece of toenail sludge.

To call "sovereignty" the "transfer of power" that occurs on June 30, apparently even if the city of Baghdad is on fire and the radical Shi'ites are running around with the still beating hearts of American soldiers hanging from their belts like trophies, is like saying that getting fucked by ten rapists is better than getting fucked by eleven. And the complaints of the Iraqi Governing Council, who wished they had be treated like, well, a "governing council" in planning for the transfer, is like complaining that the rapists didn't hear you when you asked them to wear condoms.

Oh, how our Bush Bitch went for the big propaganda guns late in the speech: after describing anyone who fights the U.S. military in Iraq as "terrorists" or "extremists" or "Saddam loyalists," he brought up 9/11 (which Bush mentions so often that it has lost all meaning or impact, much like gay men in Chelsea calling each other "fag"), then went through a litany of the horrifying times in which we live, invoking Madrid and Bali, all al-Qaeda related, before, in a stunningly brazen move that some may dare call "a lie," tying that directly with Iraq. Early in the speech, he said that Zarqawi "and other terrorists know that Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror," and all the Rude Pundit can think is, All that shit that Bush is mentioning, all those terrible, awful, fucked-up things that have happened in the world happened on his fuckin' watch. And then he wrapped up the let's-scare-the-yahoos part of the speech with a description of the enemy filled with violence-whipping hatred.

The President left an opening for John Kerry that if he doesn't take advantage of, he needs to fire his advisors (again): Bush said that the troops are staying, for a long time. Kerry, who was his usual muted self (c'mon, butterfly, come out of that cocoon), indicated his desire to "internationalize" the forces but, as the Rude Pundit has advised before, Kerry needs to make explicit that he can bring the troops back home. And that Bush would have a generation of poor young men exposed to gunfire, bombs, and derelict leadership.

There was one moment, one glorious moment in Bush's speech, when he declared that Abu Ghraib (or wherever he was talking about in his garbled pseudo-speak) would be levelled. Ah, Christ, what an amazing moment: taking that symbol of repression and torture and rape and tearing it to the ground. What a celebration among the dust, where all those who so, so suffered could rejoice at the cracked bricks and dessicated walls. It was Bush's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" moment. Except, like the rest of the speech, Bush was about a year too late. And, instead, it was part and parcel of the unceasing bleats of a dying lamb.

Monday Morning Metaphor:
Let's say, and why not, that you're the party guy in the office (and this presumes that, if you are a woman, you'll take the first imaginary step into, "Let's say you're a guy" without guidance). You, you're the one who everyone turns to when there's a promotion - you're single, late 20s, got a nice, big pad in the hot part of town, the one where you were part of the second wave who chased the Negroes away so you could help "gentrify" the "urban" area (and this presumes that, if you are not white, you'll take the imaginary step into "Let's say you're white" without guidance). You're the go-to guy, paw-tay central. You got the new OutKast CD before "Hey Ya" was featured on CNN. You keep your bar stocked with the premium shit - Cristal Vodka, Milagro tequila, micro-fuckin'-brewed beers. Yeah, man, you are the shit and you know it.

Let's say, and why not, that one night you're throwin' one of your getdown, funky shindigs. And tonight, Elaina, the hot junior exec from accounting, is lookin' your way. She's got the thong chain showing over the low, low waist of her Givenchy pants. Elaina is dancin' with you, Rico Suave motherfucker. And you? You're chokin'. You loose your smooth. Sure, you can nail one of the interns any time you wink in their direction. Here, though, man, you are stumblin' fast, like a hobo set on fire in an alley. The jokes aren't funny. You're spitting when you talk. Shit, what's going on? You know why: This is Elaina, oh, sweet jack-off fantasy meat Elaina.

The party's winding down. Your buds are tellin' you to give it up. Elaina will have to wait for another day. But yer engine's revved, man. Yer ready to go. You're just gonna have to take it on your self to prime the pump, pull the handle, press the go button, or whatever. You offer Elaina a drink spiked with, what?, Ecstasy? Acid? You tell yourself that all you're doing is what she really wants. And, besides, it ain't like you're usin' roofies. She'll be wide awake and able to make decisions.

And what motherfuckin' decisions she makes. Goddamn, from the time the last "guest" leaves to sometime after the sunrises, you and Elaina are one turbo-charged fuck machine. You're fuckin' everywhere in your apartment - the tub, the toilet, the couch, the bar stool, the counter, the coffee table. At one point she's hanging from your track lighting while you eat her out. Shee-it, what a time it is, what a time. And when you both wake up, sometime late that afternoon, you take Elaina out for an awkward sushi snack. You know she suspects something about that last drink. But she's too polite to say so. After the sushi, she tells you not to worry about calling her, thanks you for the good time, and heads away.

You're not a stalker. You try to get in her good graces again. But Elaina is one stone cold bitch when she wants to be. She doesn't want to hear from you. So, fuck it all, you give up. You wink, clumsily, in the hall, trying to be cute, maybe macho, like you are just so above it all. But, really, what you want is more of that sweet Elaina tang. Screw it, though. You're dedicated to your freedom. And finally you tell yourself that Elaina is better off without you.

Until Elaina calls with word that she's pregnant. Awwww, fuck. She thinks you all should talk, maybe think about how to raise the child. Awww, fuck, she's not gonna abort it, you think. So you're stuck. Party pad would have to become playroom pad. No, no, no, you think. Fuck that shit. You are not gonna lose the control here. Sure, others are tellin' you to stand up, be a dad since, you know, you knocked her up. But you are sure: You're gonna stay free. And you tell her, "Babe, I'll pay for the kid, but we are through." Yeah, you are one honorable motherfucker, you think. You have lived up to your obligations. And you have left Elaina a happier, wealthier person, you're sure, you're sure, you're so fuckin' sure.

When the President talks tonight, in a speech no one really gives a shit about, when he talks about that ironclad deadline of June 30, when he assures us about democracy in Iraq, remember that the good we do is often simply the lack of active evil.

Buzzflashers:
Scroll down, scroll down, my friends, for Hastert/McCain.

Nancy Pelosi, Dominatrix for Freedom:
Goddamn and motherfuck, Nancy Pelosi is such a tough little bitch who kicked the Republicans in the crotch so hard that they were tasting nut blood. When Pelosi met with reporters on Wednesday, she may as well have been standing there in thigh-high spike-heeled boots and a leather whip 'cause she was there to dominate. The Rude Pundit got a hard-on listening to Pelosi stomp the living shit out the whole Bush facade: "I believe that the president's leadership and the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment and experience in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the costs to our taxpayers." Partially, Pelosi's outrage was a reaction to Bush and his patronizing, imperialistic, full-of-shit statement to Republicans that it is time to "take the training wheels off" Iraq. Bush's metaphor begs the question: if this is how we've been training them, what the fuck's gonna happen when we set them free.

Oh, how the Republicans have worked themselves into a tizzy about this. Tom DeLay's never-really-contained-rage flowed over as he "demanded an apology" for her "dangerous rhetoric" and words "that are putting American lives at risk." And you just wanna look at DeLay's picture and realize he needs the slightest moustache to look like Hitler. Dennis "Pass Me More Pie, Motherfuckers" Hastert commented that the remarks "crossed the line." Which, of course, begs the question if questioning the patriotism of John McCain is right and elegant discourse. And then there's the laughably paranoid response of Ed Gillespie of the GOP, which, c'mon, what kind of goddamn sane person tries to cram that much hatred into such a short paragraph?

You know what's fucking funny about this? She accepted, for the House Democrats, more responsibility for mistakes in the war in Iraq than any administration official has. The responsibility, Pelosi said, lies with "all of us any time we vote to send our young people into harm's way."

Pelosi is not to be fucked with. She has been known to tear the jugular veins out of greater men than Tom DeLay and laugh at them while they quivered on the ground, bleeding to death. She's got that leather ready, and she's gonna hitch a big ol' dog collar around Dennis Hastert's corpulent neck and ride that blubbery motherfucker up and down the halls of the House, smackin' his ass with the bullwhip, stickin' those spiked heels into the Speaker's haunches. Yah, mule, she'll cry. 'Cause the little bitch ain't backin' down. Here she is yesterday, slapping the living piss out of the Republicans: she called their Congress a "do-nothing" body and that "they are in complete denial about the needs and aspirations of the American people."

"The emperor has no clothes," Pelosi said about the President, and the rest of us have now got to get over the scarring image, seared into our consciousness, of a naked George W., all bony, stringy dick leaning to the right, smirking at us.

To Buzzflashers:
Scroll down for the Hastert/McCain entry, but stay for all the rudeness.

Fox News Makes Life Easy For Idiots:
So the Rude Pundit was watching Fox "news" early this morning when he saw a report on Wal-Mart's efforts to win approval to build two stores in the currently Wal-Mart-free Chicago. Unlike in Englewood, CA, where a ballot initiative led voters to turn aside Wal-Mart's efforts to destroy small business like so many Godzillas in so many Tokyos, in Chicago a City Council vote has supporters on both sides: those who like their goods at a discount and their workers exploited, and those who believe that giant megacorporations shouldn't be able to rip apart communities. It's a zoning battle, you see. During the piece, the Fox "news reporter" mentioned that some of those who oppose Wal-Mart do so because of Wal-Mart's unfair labor practices, some of which involve actually breaking the law to stop unionization. However, the reporter pointed out, some of the individuals in the union organizing the effort have also broken the law. To be sure, there are some complex issues here, including bringing jobs (low-paying and benefit free, but, sure, yeah, they're jobs) to the South Side.

To Fox, the misdeeds of a few corrupt members of a large union, in this case the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, is morally equivalent with the corrupt policies of a giant corporation. Well, shit, guess that "bad apples" defense can only be trotted out when absolutely necessary, huh?

Just a quick one today - next week: Being Ahmed Chalabi and more degradation and misery in W's America.

John McCain Will Fuck Your Shit Up:
What the fuck could Dennis "No, Wait, Don't Tie Those Macy's Parade Ropes On Me" Hastert have been thinking when he decided to attack John McCain for not being able to see the "sacrifice in this country" in the war effort? McCain's crime? Saying that, obviously, during a time of war, when deficits are spiraling out of any semblance of control, it is irresponsible to keep tax cuts on the very wealthiest Americans.

Let us not merely speak of "McCain," the abstract maverick. Here's what he actually said and did: McCain spoke on "fiscal sanity" at a forum for the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist organization, on May 18. In that talk, McCain eviscerated Republican policies on domestic spending, including an attack on corporate tax breaks, pointing out that at the same time the Bushkoviks asked for $25 billion in "supplemental" funds for Iraq, the Republicans passed a $180 billion corporate tax "giveaway . . .that contained nearly $18 billion energy related provisions and tax breaks for the big oil and gas companies." You wanna know why so many Republicans are pissed beyond belief at McCain that they would actually question his patriotism? Here's McCain, sounding like a 1910s Progressive: "Thousands of miles from here young men and women are putting everything on the line so we can be free. And what have we sacrificed? Seriously, think about it carefully. Name one thing that Congress has told the special interests and their fat-cat lobbyists to do without since this war began." Goddamn, that last sentence is the kind of rhetoric we've been dying to hear for the last Christ only knows how many years. Read the whole speech. It's a kick-yer-ass barnburner. And you'll understand why, at some point, if they win, the Bushkoviks are coming after McCain.

Right now, they'll use their surrogate thugs, but McCain can bitch slap them like imported Vietnamese hookers holding out on their "sponsors." Hastert quickly retreated, like a cock head faced with a cold breeze, when his spokesman said Hastert, who had a bum shoulder and couldn't get drafted, "values Sen. McCain's military service, but he disagrees with him on tax relief."

This is what makes McCain such a throwback: he's a model politician. Fuck, the Rude Pundit doesn't believe in half of the things McCain supports, but he'll take one McCain for ten Tom Daschles any day of the week (where the fuck's Daschle been lately, anyway?). While knuckledraggers like Tom DeLay and Duncan Hunter criticize the investigation of prison torture in Iraq, McCain knows there is larger meaning to be gleaned here: one cannot claim any sort of "moral" or "military" authority if one is unwilling to face one's mistakes. Most Republicans would prefer to lift the rug and sweep away here. McCain (and others) refuse. They take their duty seriously, and that is chilling to many Republicans because that way lies Watergate and madness.

(By the way, the Rude Pundit does not support the idea of a Kerry/McCain ticket. One reason: the Senate. A Vice-President McCain would be the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. And those qualities everyone "admires" would come back to bite us in the ass when votes on things like abortion and war require his vote.)

Meanwhile, Zell Miller Really Wants To Get Fucked By the Boys in the Shower:
Senator Zell Miller shows us all why being batshit insane is no impediment to serving in Congress. He has proposed that state legislatures should choose Senators, continuously attacked fellow Democrat John Kerry (and stated that he supports Bush), and written a book bashing the Democratic Party. Goddamn, at least Strom Thurmond had the good sense to turn Republican.

But you know you've gone over the rainbow and need the thorazine and electroshock when you go on national radio and say about prison torture: "The two times I think I have been most humiliated in my life was standing in a big room, naked as a jaybird with about fifty others and they were checking us out, now that was humiliating. It was humiliating showering with sixty others in a public shower. It didn't kill us did it? No one ever died from humiliation." Now, the Rude Pundit doesn't know what was so humliating. Does Senator Miller have a tiny, limp, lifeless dick that others could point at and laugh? Or maybe Miller spent time with Jason Patric's character from the film Your Friends and Neighbors. In a locker room talk among male friends about the best sex they ever had, Patric's Cary describes the gang rape of a boy in his high school locker room. Cary was the last in the train. Maybe Miller was that lucky boy.

To the Young People - This Is What a Cover-Up Looks Like:
Oh, you innocent youngsters, under 30 and so filled with ennui. You think you've seen it all. You think you've seen cover-ups left and right in movies like Men in Black or The Insider or books like The Pelican Brief or tv shows like Alias, where some underling says to the big boss something like, "You sold me (us) out, damn you." Or you think a cover-up is "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" and the silence of a secretary or two. Oh, let the Rude Pundit enlighten you, young citizens.

A real cover-up, when uncovered, reveals something deep and terrible about the core of our government and/or its institutions, something that, if faced full-on, has the potential to shake our nation to its "democratic" soul. Lied about a blow job? Whether under oath or not, that's a blip, and its revelation does nothing more than say something about those who chose hyperbole over reasoned action (like, say, and why not, "censure" for Clinton instead of "impeachment). My Lai, that was a motherfucking cover-up. The massacre of over 500 Vietnamese civilians was part of a calculated effort by the military to "search and destroy" the enemy. However, it was blamed on a "few bad rotten apples," like other massacres during 'Nam.

And, oh, children and grandchildren of the 'Nam generation, Watergate was a cover-up, but for that, my dears, you may read your history. One nice tidbit: Nixon ended up accepting full responsibility for the scandal. That's right, my little darlings: Nixon was a better president than our little George W.

So look around you now. Cast your innocent eyes about at the constant flow of news. It will be whistleblowers like Sgt. Samuel Provance who may lead us the way to the truth. Provance is busy revealing that the MPs now facing court-martial were under orders from military intelligence to degrade prisoners. Or perhaps Staff Sgt. James Massey, who claims he was ordered to shoot innocent Iraqi protesters.

But, you may say, these could be random disgruntled soldiers who are doing this for personal motivations. And the Rude Pundit would laugh and pat you on the head and tousle your hair. Because, little ones, corroboration is the name of the game. And, yes, one whistleblower is easily dismissed. But we're up to a few by now, each of whom backs up the stories of the other. Some will be public and some will be anonymous tipsters, like the "senior Army officer" who says that officials at Abu Ghraib stopped the Red Cross from making suprise inspections at the prison. Oh, and then there's the documents.

Yes, yes, the documents, children. Like the memos from White House "cousel" Alberto Gonzales that discussed whether or not U.S. officials could be prosecuted for war crimes for the new and improved interrogation techniques America was using to get useless information from tortured prisoners. And the reports keep flowing that demonstrate that Rumsfeld and others higher up in the administration and military knew and approved more intense interrogations.

In his "denial" of Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article, Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said, "No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos." Sure, maybe no one could have envisioned breaking lights and pouring the chemicals over the nude bodies of prisoners, but, then again, do you think the military, during 'Nam, "intended" that "search and destroy" meant to massacre civilians? If the right wing can hold filmmakers and television shows responsible for sex and violence in American society, then perhaps they can hold their own accountable for creating an environment that allowed the Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Afghanistan, and other Iraqi prison abuses to occur. This is what a cover-up looks like: when the people involved could go to jail, they will scapegoat and scurry to place blinders on the world. Or the scapegoats will turn on those who choose to place them in the firing line without taking any wounds themselves.

But shouldn't we give the government the benefit of the doubt, you may ask. Ahh, children, you are so, so cute in your blind faith. And that is because you have bought into the Bush lie that the government is separate from the people. See, if you can vote, you are the government. And anything the government does is in your name. Now, do you want innocent civilians beaten, sodomized, and humiliated in your name? And, in your heart of hearts, who do you think is responsible? Think hard on this, children, for you are the future.

Boards of Education vs. Bush:
Do Bush's speechwriters have a bullshit detector? Do you think the proofreaders who spell things out fo-net-ick-ly for the President do a double take when they read certain phrases? 'Cause, you know, here's Bush, talking in Topeka in honor of the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas: "[W]e honor those who expose our failures, correct our course, and make us a better people." Ya gotta be fuckin' kidding, right, you must be thinking. But then you would have a sense of self-awareness or a delicious sense of irony. Kerry, realizing that it's an election year and not having the convenience of the White House picking up the tab for his trip, used the opportunity to criticize Bush's education "policies". The ever-vigilant Bush/Satan spokesman Steve Schmidt accused Kerry of playing politics.

Meanwhile, across the country, states and localities are rebelling against Bush's "policies," saying they are so much politics that have little to do with "education" in the real world.
-- Up in Wisconsin, the Attorney General of that state said, in essence, "You know how you forced all that crap about test scores and accountability and everything on us but didn't provide any money? Well, take your education 'policies' and shove 'em up yer private-school learnin' ass." 'Cause he determined that, unless the Bushkoviks dish out the cash, Wisconsin doesn't have to abide by the stupidly named "No Child Left Behind" act.
-- Over in Western Pennsylvania, superintendents of 171 county school districts are going to sign a petition asking for changes to the act. This makes over 300 superintendents in that state who have asked for changes to the act, calling it unfair to special needs and minority students.
-- In Chicago, there's only 457 spaces for the 200,000 students eligible to transfer from NCLB-designated "failing" schools. Sure, they're getting funding for the Internet from the feds, but not for more classroom space.
-- In Nevada, superintendents and educators are feeling a "defeatist" attitude toward the law. The law's insistence on 100% of students must show improvement is not unlike, say, enacting a law that says children must finish their fuckin' vegetables or there ain't gonna be any goddamn dessert.
-- And, for shits and giggles, here's the Chair of the Kansas State Board of Education: "We know that in order to fulfill No Child Left Behind, we need money to do it. The federal government is not funding it, and in order to meet requirements, we need more money."
-- This is not to mention dissatisfaction and contempt for NCLB in Indiana, North Carolina, Washington, Kentucky, and on and on. Are we sea to shining sea yet? How about this article from the Washington Times, titled, "In Southeast D.C., It's Every Child Left Behind."

Man, No Child Left Behind has lofty goals: the federal government sets 20 or so standards schools must meet, including that previously mentioned 100% student achievement - achivement that is not mitigated by any factors, including disability or viciously underfunded school district.

In essence NCLB treats parents as consumers and schools, teachers, and students as employees in an education sweatshop. Sure, dribs and drabs of money are sent to the states, as Education Secretary Rod Paige will scream at anyone who will listen to his lying ass. As overseers of the sweatshop, the Bushkoviks make sure that they keep close watch on the students through yearly testing. And the misnamed "Adequate Yearly Progress" for the 100% goal. ("Why 100 percent?" asks the Powerpoint presentation at the Department of Education website. Why the answer is self-evident: "Anything less means children will be left behind.")

Again, it's all noble and shit. But it requires a massive infusion of funds. Why do you think Ted Kennedy was so pissed after he negotiated with Bush on this? Bush calling himself the "education president" is like a pimp calling himself the "AIDS prevention pimp" without giving out condoms to his bitches. 'Cause, you know, it's kinda hard to learn when the textbooks suck, there's no toilet paper, and the roof is leaking. Pussy liberal sentiment? Tax and spend bullshit? Then send the kids copies of the over 1000 pages of regulations for NCLB to wipe their asses with.

Literally and Figuratively Fucked:
Literal - Massachusetts:
The end of civilization as we know it began this morning in Massachusetts as two people of the same sex who prefer fucking each other to fucking people of the opposite sex got married in a state-sanctioned ceremony (thus differentiating it from the Great San Francisco Nuptial Rebellion of 2003). Giddy reporters were barely able to contain themselves from reporting that the lesbian couple "kissed" after the ceremony. One may presume that they will celebrate the marriage by fucking each other later on, thus consummating the marriage. Soon, all over the state of Massachusetts, male heads will be bobbing on the cocks of other men, women will be giving the clits of other women little love bites that will drive their partners into untold ecstasy. Sorry - that will drive their spouses into untold ecstasy. Oh, the muff-diving, carpet-munching, and clam kissing that will happen in the sanctity of connubial bliss. Goddamn, the merry fudge packing, vein draining, and chowder eating that'll be part and parcel of demonstrating that spouses love each other. Remember: Jesus likes us to have sex in the marriage bed. So fist each other for Christ, young couples.

Meanwhile, fearful, repressed "straights" are cowering in the corners, masturbating furtively at the libidinous freedom that has been unleashed and which they can no longer call "sinful" because it takes place in the legal bonds of marriage. Oh, how they'll write their constitutional amendments, whip into a frenzy of hate crowds of people who have never discoverd the piercing joy of anal penetration.

However, the fucking has been unleashed, and everywhere tonight in Massachusetts the slurping you hear through the thin walls of your apartment will be the slurps of two spouses, husband and husband or wife and wife. You can either cover your head with a pillow or smile at what is sure to be a brief moment of liberty and justice for all.

Figurative - Iraq:
Where to begin the figurative fucking? Maybe with the suicide bomb that demonstrates just how fucked our little Iraqi adventure has become? Maybe the report that sarin gas was released by a roadside bomb? (Wouldn't that be the hugest fucking backstabbing irony that not only did our war of conquest make Iraq more dangerous than under Saddam, bring about torture and disappearings, invite terrorists into the country, but unwittingly unleasing leftover, forgotten WMDs?) Maybe Colin "God, I'm Just a Shell of a Man" Powell's admission that those "mobile biological weapons labs" reports were "discredited" and wrong? Not to mention the latest from Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and the story in Newsweek, two articles that confirm each other's allegations that officials at least as high as Rumsfeld, but probably higher, decided the Geneva Convention was just another toilet paper treaty, like so many the U.S. has violated. All, all, so, so fucked.

Let's just go to Massachusetts and enjoy the blooming flowers that make such pretty bouquets for brides and battle casualties.

Why Rush Limbaugh Ought To Be Force-Fed His Own Liposuctioned Fat, Part 25:
Because, as the Rude Pundit predicted a long, long time ago, back on October 16, 2003, Rush Limbaugh has not become less evil since his inability to function without drugs was made public. In fact, the bloated banshee of bellicosity has become batshit insane on the air lately in reaction to the Iraqi prisoner torture scandal. As pointed out in constantly penitent David Brock's insanely valuable new website, Media Matters, Limbaugh barked like the dogs sicced on the screaming, nude Iraqi man, and, just to prove that he cannot stop invoking things from over a decade ago and cannot find anything recent to use as an analogy, compared the new photos to the NEA's funding of Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ" and Karen Finley's performance art. (For the record, the NEA funded those things during the Bush I adminstration.) This is not to mention the strange approval of homoerotic hazing that Rush gave in his first comments on Abu Ghraib. He called it "blowing off steam."

You know, the Rude Pundit believes that Rush Limbaugh has to have the whole collection of Iraqi prisoner torture pics on CD at home for his viewing pleasure. Yeah, he’s gotta be able to call up the un-pixillated images of quivering Sunni penises and raped little boys. You know it. You know he’s sittin’ there, in his Herman Miller computer desk chair, just jackin’ off, smackin’ his cock on the keyboard, rollin’ the mouse over his shaft, gettin’ his rocks off. And you know he calls his wife, Marta, in and he stands up, nude, and tells her, “Put this cigarette in your mouth. Point at my dick like you’re shooting it. Yeah, now put this dog collar around my neck and leash me up, toots, and drag my ass around this well-appointed penthouse."

Then, bound in plastic wrist ties, leather collar around his neck, tightened to the point of autoerotic asphyxiation, he has Marta break out the big strap-on, the one with the wide vibrator that he calls "Coulter" or, when feeling extra frisky, "Steely Ann," and Marta rolls her eyes, she knows the routine at this point. Coked out of her mind, she starts fucking Rush in the ass after stomping on his scrotum with her spiked shoes. He's got the Iraqi torture pictuers on high-res projection slideshow now, and Rush is feelin' like a Senator, like a Congressman, only he can ejaculate more freely than Tom DeLay when he watches the flashes of degradation pass by him. Rush loves getting fucked in the ass 'cause it's a legal way to get high, the only way to blow off steam. No maids, no doctors, just him and his lovely bride and Steely Ann, and she sure as shit ain't gonna talk. He's gettin' fucked so hard because it's the only way he can feel anything anymore in that polluted mind of his, the nexus of American hate and depravity.

Correction:
Thanks to an astute reader, the Rude Pundit has corrected the name of the cocksucking Senator Inhofe from Oklahoma. Originally written as "Daniel," in confusion with the significantly less full of shit Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, it has now been corrected to the proper "James."

Unspinnable:
Man, that must have been quite the slide show, what with the photos of Saddam’s glorious palace mixed in with the photo of the prisoner forced to sodomize himself with a banana to the point of bleeding. Then a photo of a "family" of soldiers, smiling in front of an ill-equipped Humvee, followed by a video of a prisoner being slammed repeatedly against the bars of his cell. Now that’s some motherfucking postmodern “art” for you.

The Rude Pundit would have loved to have been in that room – not to see the pictures (unlike the sick fucks in the media, the Rude Pundit does not need to have horror slammed in his face to understand it exists). But, goddamn, it would have been fun to see the looks on the faces of all those in Congress who voted for the war realizing, en masse, “Holy motherfuck, if the public actually begins to understand what this means, I’m fucked.” Man, if Strom Thurmond had been around, his diaper would have stunk much more than usual. Hell, Dennis Hastert probably belched up last week's burrito from the House cafeteria. And then they were all left wondering how to spin it all – how to create a believable layer of lies and obfuscations and distractions.

The problem is this: what happens when a spin machine meets an unspinnable story? Oh, sure, there's all the attempts to make the abuse at Abu Ghraib and other prisons less of a story than the reporting of the story. Yep, there's Tom DeLay, picture of humanitarian goodness, saying, "Some people are overreacting . . . The people who are against the war are using this to their political ends," ignoring the idea that perhaps, in a Bushwhacked world of black and white, one can say that forced sodomy and enforced degradation are objectively bad things. Then again, a blood-soaked Tom DeLay could be standing over the semen-stained corpse of an eight year-old boy and tell the cops they were just trying to play politics by arresting him.

And what an infantile little worm man is Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma. What a specious, absurd cock-tip. You've read his loud fart of dismay at the Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing: "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment." He continued his rebel yawp of idiotic, blind patriotism on CNN later: "We are spending an awful lot of time worrying about the human rights of a bunch of murderers and terrorists, people who are in Cell Block 1A and 1B, which means they are the very worst kind. And yet we are not nearly as concerned about our own fighting troops." This was just before Inhofe said that the interrogations are for "information," not to punish criminals. In other words, Inhofe seems to say, one can be tortured if one is presumed to "know" anything.

Even as Donald Rumsfeld takes a tour of Abu Ghraib ("So, it was right here that you stacks the naked guys? Hey, take a picture of my ass here - it'll be a souvenir"), he has told Congress that he approves of the interrogation "techniques" used on detainess and prisoners, even as such techniques obviously violate the Geneva Convention, which is so much shit-ridden toilet paper to the Bush administration. Oh, they're trying to spin, spin, spin, baby, that all of this is for the good of the country. But photos, man, they don't lie. The yahoos may want us to level the whole country (hey, just like back in 'Nam), but for most of the country, forcing women at gunpoint to bare their breasts, like some sadomasochistic "Shia Girls Gone Wild," is unequivocally evil.

But here’s the question to all of these morons who seek moral equivalency and eye-for-an-eye-isms when it suits their needs: What if one of those prisoners, like the guys with the dogs, was completely innocent and had no information? Now, what if over 6 out of ten of them were? Woe to the country that cannot stand up for principles over vengeance, for ideas over men and women. This President, this administration shall pass. But the rest of us have to go on.

A Democracy of Suckers:
Nick Berg looks like he would have been cool to have a beer with. Pre-beheading, Berg was, according to those who mourn him, a hard-working, smart son of a bitch who ran his own small business. Fuck, he was even noble, traveling to Third World countries to help villages with his technological know-how. Of course, death, especially brutal, sudden, public death, ameliorates one's weaknesses in the eyes of loved ones. There will be time, there will be time to mourn the real person, in all his good and bad. But there is one unalterable, undeniable, un-sweep-under-the-rug-able aspect of Nick Berg's last couple of years: he was one of the millions of suckers to the Bush doctrine of American goodness and might and its application to Iraq.

See, forgetting about the whole WMDs and links-to-terrorism deal, beyond the "we're so goddamn magnanimous because we're spreading democracy" aspect, the Bushkoviks also promised Iraq as a bastion of capitalistic bacchanalia. And they certainly made it seem so, privatizing everything from security for aid groups to the shitcans for the soldiers, and letting corporate America loose itself with unadulterated glee. Certainly, the aggressive recruiting of Americans to head in, mercenary-style, to "support" the U.S. military has had an influence on the way American companies think about doing business.

Let's put it this way: you're the dweeby guy in high school who gets A's on all his projects, the teachers love you, and you have great, great friends. You have one problem though: in order for your teenage years to be complete, you need to have some pussy. Everyone around you is getting pussy - the football team, the student government, fuck, even the glee club is getting pussy every chance they can. You gotta wonder, "Everywhere I look, all the other guys are balls deep in pussy, pussy, pussy. What's wrong with me?" A member of the chess club who gets more pussy than you can even conceive of, tells you, "You wanna get some pussy? Here, start taking these," and he hands you a bottle of steroids. You think, "Man, it's a risk, but shit, if the end result is I finally get some pussy so everyone thinks I'm one of the big guys on campus, then fuck it." And you start downin' that shit like M&Ms. 'Course, in the end, it could give you a heart attack and kill you, or, irony of ironies, make your dick get so small it couldn't find a pussy with a pussy dowsing rod, but who the fuck cares? You might, oh, gamble of gambles, finally say you got some pussy.

Nick Berg went to Iraq for noble and not-so-noble reasons: he wanted to help in the great cause his President seemed to call people to (at least those who had donated large sums to his campaign), but he also wanted to cash in on some of that post-Baathist lucre. His President had called him to that cause, too - Iraq as the great enabler of American profit. If nothing else, at least Berg put his own ass where his conscience was, unlike so many others who send surrogate asses to be torn to bits for . . . what reason, again?

What happened to Nick Berg was a goddamn nightmare. His father, Michael, forcefully opposed the war his son supported. "I think a lot of people are fed up with the lack of civil rights this thing has caused," he said of Bush's Great Iraqi Adventure. "I don't think this administration is committed to democracy." Father knows best, you know. He knows we have been played for suckers, like so many losers at three-card monte. He knows his son was a victim to the hate that hatred bred.

You Wanna Play Politics? Let's Play Some Politics:
Like customers at a strip club where the DJ promises the titties of the next girl will be even bigger, we all wait anxiously, with pornographic glee, for the release of the reallllly bad photos from Abu Ghraib, the ones that show American soldiers fucking an Iraqi woman (although none have called it rape yet), the ones that show Iraqi guards fucking young boys in the ass - the rewards for a society that oppresses the sexuality of women, the ones that show the realllly bad beatings. Goddamn, those are gonna be cool photos and videos - our government funded snuff films.

So what happens? Does anyone actually hang their heads in shame and behave as if something wrong has happened, that something big in the system has gotten fucked up beyond all recognition? Nope. This administration/campaign (and, really, they're one and the same) goes on the attack.

There's two possible reads for that "What the fuck" moment of Bush standing out there with his evil and/or beleaguered cabinet in order to give a public hand job to Donald Rumsfeld. Wiping the cum from his hand with Colin Powell's hankie, Bush rhapsodized, "You're doing a superb job," cooing the sweet nothings about Rumsfeld as the call for the Defense Secretary's nuts on a platter grows louder. Option One: this is a public propping-up of the rep of a disgraced official before he "offers" his resignation. Option Two (and the more likely one): Bush honestly believes Rumsfeld should stay, which is not unakin to a baby refusing to give up playing with his own shit. One might even accuse Bush of playing politics by giving his unmitigated support to Rumsfeld before, as they say, "all the facts are in."

Rummy already threw down the gauntlet of politics in his hearing - saying, in essence, that those who believe that incompetent criminals should be forced out of an office where they are responsible for the lives of thousands of people are just being political. And that's been followed up by the loyal Bushkoviks, who now accuse John Kerry of "playing politics" with the abuse scandal (and it's nice to see the mainstream media refer to this as a full-fledged "scandal"). Bob Novak, combed-over, leering, traitorous bastard that he is, made it the center of a "discussion" on Crossfire last week.

But no one tops Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt in his ability to see politics everywhere, like a junkie sees roaches everywhere when he goes cold turkey. It is Schmidt's mantra, his raison d'etre, in the campaign. When Kerry pointed out that Bush was underfunding chemical plant security, Schmidt said that the Senator was "playing politics with homeland security." When Kerry said that America was behaving as occupiers in Iraq, Schmidt called it "playing politics with the war on terror." When Kerry said that Bush used "terror" as a means of covering his administration's ass on every issue, Schmidt said it was an "example of him playing politics with the most serious issue of our time: winning the war on terror." When Kerry questioned the Bushkoviks' policy of military base closures, Schmidt said, "This is another example of John Kerry playing politics with national security issues." When Kerry criticized Bush for not backing the elected president of Haiti, Schmidt opined, "Kerry was playing 'politics' in his critique of the administration’s Haiti policy." Now, when Kerry has been called muted and low-key on the abuse scandal, Schmidt is using the PP phrase again. Said the weasel-like Schmidt, Kerry has a "consistent pattern of inserting politics and playing politics with the war on terror and serious national security issues."

You know, one might imagine a political campaign is going on. One might imagine that the record of the incumbent might be open to criticism in that political campaign. One might imagine that if the incumbent candidate makes his record on said "War on Terror" the centerpiece of his re-election, especially if the previously mentioned incumbent mentions the "War on Terror" and the events around it at campaign events where he is raising money in order to run the previously mentioned campaign, like Bush did here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, that record might be ripe for discussion by the opposing candidate.

Ahh, but then you'd be playing politics.

Picture of a City on a Hill, Crumbling:
Remember the moral high ground? Do you think Donald Rumsfeld does? Here he was, way back in March 2003, after Iraqi television dared to show five captured Americans: "It is against the Geneva Convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them." It was ballsy even then to say this, what with hundreds of captured Afghanis and others cooking on the concrete at Guantanamo, enduring "humiliation" in order to get them "softened" for "interrogation." But it's extra ballsy now, to think that Rumsfeld was implying that those responsible for the Iraqi broadcast, surely including the leadership of the nation, were war criminals under international law.

Goddamn, it was great when we were so fucking right about everything. In late 2002, Paul "No, Really, It's Not About Israel" Wolfowitz dared to invoke former weapons inspector Scott Ritter even as the administration was setting about to discredit him in that darling way the Bushkoviks have perfected. Said Wolfman Paul of Abu Ghraib, "It was a scene more horrible than [Ritter] was willing to say, but what he did say was bad enough. He described a prison in Baghdad whose stench was unreal. It was an amalgam of 'urine, feces, vomit and sweat,' a hellhole where prisoners were, as he reports it, 'howling and dying of thirst.' The oldest prisoners were 12 years old, the youngest, toddlers. Their crime: being children of political enemies of the Iraqi regime. It’s hard to imagine a more grim symbol of a regime that rules by terror and which embraces terror as a policy against those who oppose it than a children’s prison." Damn, they're good at attribution when it suits their purposes. Oh, then, irony of ironies, Wolfie added, "That regime poses a particular danger to the Iraqi people."

And, holy shit and motherfuck, remember absolutism? When, in September 2002, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the same committee he has bullied up to last Friday, Rumsfeld said as "facts" (his word) about Saddam Hussein: "He's amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons, including Anthrax, botulism, toxins and possibly smallpox. He's amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX, Sarin and mustard gas. His regime has an active program to acquire nuclear weapons. His regime has dozens of ballistic missiles and is working to extend their ranges in violation of UN restrictions." Christ, imagine if you were the CEO of a corporation and you overstated earnings, used shell companies, and hid debt from investors, all the while stating as "facts" lies about the solid earnings so that your stock would soar. Imagine what might happen . . . oh, never mind.

Rumsfeld resign? You got to be fuckin’ kidding. The Rude Pundit wants that narrow-eyed, cap-toothed bastard to stay and watch as, on his watch, the whole Iraq “dream” crumbles into a pool of hubris and stupidity. He wants to see Donald Rumsfeld stand on the smoldering ruins of American credibility, wearing tatters and holding the pseudo-Israeli Iraqi flag tight, like a rosary, praying for what was lost, for what could never be.

The Rude Pundit wants Donald Rumsfeld to be stripped naked and put on display at the Smithsonian, right next to the Enola Gay. There, men, women and children can point to his shriveled cock and marble-ized balls and laugh. And every couple of hours, just as he’s getting weary, cold blood will be dumped on Rumsfeld, blood from 10,000 or more civilians dead because of him. There’ll be a broomstick there to poke him with and maybe some lucky citizen will get to sodomize him with it. And if he dares cry, if a tear deigns to fall from his squint, we’ll shove a cattle prod under his scrotum to make him twitch, thrash like a trout in a pail, all the while asking him, cold, blood-covered, electrified, “Is this torture, motherfucker, or is it just abuse?” And if he doesn’t answer, we’ll make him try to lift his lifeless dick and jack off for us. We’ll have it on live pay-per-view 'cause Fox sure as shit ain't gonna show it.

We’ll drag in Wolfman Paul, nude, we’ll drag him by on a leash, make him lick our shoes. We’ll make Rumsfeld watch as we shove a light bulb up Wolfie’s ass and then sic the dogs on him. And we’ll tell Rummy that worse waits for him. Goddamn, isn’t the Smithsonian a great place for the revelation of our national shame? And our cause will be just because we know that Rumsfeld is not innocent.

And when he is softened up, after a day, a week, a month of this, we’ll dress him in rags, keep him some distance from us because of the smell of shit and blood and rot coming from him, and seat him back in that Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room, and get John McCain, who knows from torture, and Hillary Clinton, who knows from partisanship, to ask him, “Now, Mr. Secretary, what did you know, when did you know it, and why the fuck did you do nothing about it?”

'Cause, you see, we know from Rumsfeld's own words, there are known knowns, things we know we know. There are known unknowns - things we know we do not know. We're fucked though, because there are still the unknown unknowns, things we have no idea about.

No, Really, He Was Sorry:
President Bush seems like the character Squidward from Spongebob Squarepants when he talks about his apology to the King of Jordan. Remember the episode when Squidward degrades Spongebob in public through an April Fool's Day prank? And then our bulbous headed Paul Lynde stand-in must apologize to Spongebob? But, see, he can't say it, not in person. He tries a bunch of ways of doing it, and then tells Spongebob, "I said I was sorry." However, he can't bring himself to say it, in the present tense, to Spongebob's face. (Yeah, we could have gone with Fonzie for this reference, but let's stay au courant.)

So it is with the "apology" for the abuse at Abu Ghraib. Bush said of his conversation with King Abdullah, "I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families. I told him I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America." But, see, he didn't actually apologize to the prisoners or the Iraqi people. It's sort of like after you get liquored up at your employee's house and puke all over his teenaged daughter after feeling up her tits and then stomp the shit of his dog, and you tell your employee, "Sorry if I spoiled your daughter's dress." Bush only said he was sorry that the prisoners felt humiliation - not that the actions were done. Bush only said he was sorry that people seeing the photos didn't love America enough. And, really, not to get all conspiratorial here, we never saw Bush apologize. He reported on the apology. He claimed he apologized. But, then again, he claimed Saddam had WMDs, so, really, what the fuck can we believe, huh?

More later, including this week's trip down the superhighway.

Addendum: Why, Twice in One Day, Bill O'Reilly Ought To Be Sodomized With a Microphone, Part 10:
Because O'Reilly, Fox "news" spooge bucket, may actually be as much of a fucking idiot as he seems. It's one thing to carry the jockstrap of the right wing and suck them off every time they command you to break out the kneepads. At least there's an active mind in the head that's getting smacked every time it stops bobbing. But, in his interview with New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh last night, O'Reilly was either brilliantly playing the "everyman" or he's just a 'tard and a half. Pick your own quote, but for the Rude Pundit, O'Reilly goes over the rainbow and reveals that he exists in conservative fantasyland when he actually says to Hersh, in response to Hersh saying that the Pentagon's own report says that 60 percent of the people held at Abu Ghraid prison were innocent, "How do you wind up in a prison if you're just innocent and didn't do anything?" And O'Reilly also says he disputes the number - the Pentagon's number - in favor of the "reporters in the field."

It's a Sad, Sad Situation, and It's Gettin' More and More Absurd:
Dude, only chicks say, "I'm sorry." Yup, there he was, our fearless leader, blank as a beagle stare with those too-narrow eyes that tell you the family's taken one too many laps around the patrician gene pool. He was on Arab television, completely misunderstanding the situation once again, failing once again in a relatively unscripted situation,able to use every "a" word he remembered from the Big Book of Vocab'lery, including "abhorrent" and "appalling," but somehow, someone scratched "apologize" out. Nope, that was left to Condi, and then, in the stupidest fucking exchange possible, Scott McClellan apologized for the President, seemingly dismissing the notion that it might seem more sincere coming from Bush himself.

Ya know, "sorry for the sodomizin'" might seem small in context. Indeed, at this point, Bush apologizing would just be an empty gesture from an empty man. It's like back in high school when, after the football team has run a train on a passed out cheerleader at the victory party, they get the water boy to tell the victim that the team sincerely regrets any harm all that fucking might have done. It's nice to hear the words, but it doesn't make the bruises go away. Really, the only thing that makes sense at this point is to stand before Congress with the head of Donald Rumsfeld on a platter as an offering to appease the public. Even Lou Dobbs is aware of the damage, as he said on CNN yesterday: "An apology is in order to the Iraqis and the 130,000 men and women who serve this country in Iraq.

Instead, though, we get the reactionary bloviators ready to head to Iraq and fuck some Sunni ass themselves:
Take Bill O'Reilly, who really does need to be sodomized with a microphone. First, a week ago, when the torture pictures broke on CBS, O'Reilly got his face into a red-splotchy uproar by suggesting that CBS was actually harming America by putting the photos out there: "So 17 fools exposed by CBS News have damaged America's reputation worldwide," he actually said. And then, last night, in his daily flatulence known as "Talking Points Memo," he uses the torture photos as a way to beat up on France some more. Really. Why? Because France would dare question the motivations of the U.S. Goddamn, how many times does this jack-off have to be wrong without consequences before someone actually drags his sorry, saggy ass out of his cushiony chair and subjects him to hours upon hours of his own stinking, screaming breath of hate before he's shrieking for mercy and curled up fetal under Roger Ailes' desk, begging for morphine to put him into a coma because he can't take the hideous visage of his viscous, vacuous vileness.

Take Rush Limbaugh, who barrels on through his life without shame or regret and who, really, needs to be force-fed his own liposuctioned fat. On his "show" a couple of days ago, Limbaugh continued the myth of the "fraternity prank" torture. He actually said, "We're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time . . . I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?" Other than the truly frightening thought of a nude Rush Limbaugh, tiny cock a-shivering, dragged around on a leash and being "forced" to fellate another naked guy, let's just state the obvious: Limbaugh does not think of Iraqis as full human beings. And ya gotta wonder how many of his listeners and others on the right feel the same way.

Because Bush took the same approach, speaking to the Arab world as if it was filled with simpletons and subhumans who can't fathom the complexities of Western goodwill. On Alhurra Television, Bush said no less than four times that "the Iraqi people must understand" (or some variation of it). It was the mantra of his brief interview. But isn't the real point that they do understand? And that the Bushkoviks don't like the fact that the Iraqi people understand all too well what's happening to them?

Frat Boys at War:
The Rude Pundit is no neophyte to the ways of groupthink among boys (and depraved girls, but let’s focus here, people). He has played grab-ass, had his balls popped by towels in the shower, and circle jerked on more than one occasion. One particularly bad pants-down spanking comes to mind, in the middle of an undergraduate game of Truth or Dare, but at least the pay off was Crazy Carla, the sophomore from the next dorm, dancing naked, stoned out of her mind, on the balcony. Here’s the deal: all of us volunteered to be degraded. If, perhaps, we had ripped off Carla’s clothes with a knife while she screamed and begged us to stop, and then we made her dance spread-eagled for our pleasure at gunpoint, under pain of death to her and her family, slapping her when she paused, would that be close to, say, sexual assault? Maybe something not unakin to torture? Would we be culpable in a crime? If you answered, “No, shit, you vile fucks should become the toilets at the county lock-up,” then you got it right.

So perhaps, maybe, all those apologists on the right who poo-poo the depraved acts of sexual violence against Iraqi prisoners ought to be forced to spread their ass cheeks for the cameras with electrodes attached to their scrotums. ‘Cause, see, unlike "interrogation instructor" Tony Robinson on Hannity and Colmes, who actually, actually compared this to frat boy hazing, the rest of us live in a real world where there ought to be consequences for all those brutal bastards who feel free to destroy the lives of others. Of course, those who would actually believe, in some way, shape or form, that forcing prisoners to act like they're fucking each other is just this side of horseplay might just be the perpetrators of the disgusting bullshit that passes for "initiation" in America's wonderful youth organizations. Like those Long Island football players who held down and sodomized three of their freshman with broomsticks and pine cones. And, fuck, ya gotta imagine that the coaches, who created the culture where their players felt they could actually sublimate their homosexual urges for getting sucked off by the QB in the clutch through gay torture, are not that far removed from the Bush Administration, for whom "accountability" is just another censored word. Jesus Christ, Rumsfeld couldn't even bring himself to use the word "torture" when talking about this. (C'mon, gang, can't you even find a scapegoat to fire? Or are you so afraid of what that person would reveal that you'd rather act like no one's ever responsible for anything?)

Hazing? God, you gotta think that those Iraqis would have loved to drink themselves to death after what they’d been through. And just like every frat insists that it’s okay to gang rape co-eds and force pledges to drink their own piss because the fraternity hosts blood drives for the Red Cross, we have the sad, sad sight of the administration and the military scrambling to say that this is an isolated incident even as more and more incidents become public, even as those in charge, like Rumsfeld and Richard Myers, claimed that they had not read a weeks-old report from the Pentagon on the abuse allegations. As Aaron Brown said on Newsnight last evening, "Fair or not, it leaves an impression that it only was a big deal when it became a public deal." And Bush, when he puts his dopey, blank slate face on Arab television, better unequivocally apologize. Even then, he's only gonna place a butterfly bandage on an open, bleeding shiv gash.

We're a country run by privileged frat boy bullies who are busy hazing us all. Bend over in November and get yer picture taken.

Brief Note On Michael Moore:
So Disney won't distribute Michael Moore's new Miramax film because of the political content? God, isn't it great when a five-buck-a-blow crack whore decides she won't let you piss on her? Everyone loves a diseased slut with a moral code. But, please, really, and, c'mon, she'll still bob on your crank for that five dollars, baby.

Advice to John Kerry:
Look, dude, you became the nominee almost by default. If Edwards had had a house to mortgage for 6 mill, you’d be history. If the press hadn’t gotten so scared of Dean, you’d be toast. And if Gore – oh, let’s just not go there. It’s just so goddamn tragic. So you are the man. And you’re being perceived as hemorrhaging. Now is the critical time. You can’t let people go into the summer thinking certain things about you. It’s time to change the rules. It's time to get ahead of the game. It's time to start fucking with them.

1. Stop nuancing your arguments. No one gives a good goddamn if you voted for the military spending and then voted against it because an amendment was not passed. Take a stand and stick with it. That’s why people admire Bush – that's politics in the post-Rove era: it’s about style, not substance. Say you voted against the $87 billion because the President was being dishonest about the spending on Iraq and he refused to find a way to pay for the war without driving the country deeper into debt. People will understand that.

Remember: don't overestimate the attention span of Americans. It's all about black and white, good vs. evil. Clarity, even less-than-completely-honest clarity, is preferrable to trying to think.

2. It’s time to trot out the “l” word. Not “liberal,” you stupid fuckers. “Liar.” It’s time to start calling things “lies.” People don’t hear when you are saying everything but “lie.” "Mislead,""prevaricate,""misinterpret," whatever - too many syllables. It’s like Condoleeza Rice insisting that she wasn’t given a “plan” for dealing with al-Qaeda, just a “series of actionable suggestions” or whatever the fuck she said.

Start calling Bush a “liar” and demonstrate it in the easiest way possible: use his own words against him. Use hardcore facts, things not open to interpretation, like pledging $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa and then requesting only a couple hundred million from Congress. Force Bush to respond. Don’t fuck with Cheney. Don’t fuck with Rumsfeld. Don’t fuck with any of the surrogates he sends out to attack you. The press has given Bush a free pass on the lies, and they will continue to do so until someone with your stature and recognition and place in the news cycle comes along and starts to say the words “lie,” “lying,” and “liar.” Then maybe, just maybe, the press will be forced to do its job and fact check. It’s very simple: Bush has given you tons of material. Make him have to use nuance to defend himself - that'll only make your allegations stronger.

Don’t say, “Here’s a President who says one thing and does another” or “Here’s a President who takes photo ops with schoolchildren and then doesn’t fund the programs that affect them.” Say, “Here’s a President who lies. Do you want a President who lies and then lies about lying?” Make the ad: “George Bush: Liar.” No one ever started a bar fight over a "prevarication" or an "exaggeration."

Remember: they will do it to you. “Flip-flopper” is just the foundation for an eventual leap to “liar.” It’s what they did to Gore. It’s what they’ll do to you. So jump on that carousel horse before Bush can.

3. Go on the attack about Iraq. Make it black and white clear how you would be different from Bush. Don’t just make it about “internationalizing” the mission. Black and white, bitch, black and white. Under Bush, more American soldiers will be in and stay in Iraq. Under Kerry, American soldiers will return by the tens of thousands. See how simple that is? It poses an almost sublimely easy question: “Do you want your loved ones to be sent to and stay in Iraq or do you want them to come home?” Stop using your Vietnam experience, in-country and back in the U.S., as a reason you are some kind of natural leader of the military. Use your Vietnam experience as a reason why you know when to bring the boys (and girls) back home. (And, by the way, stop running from the anti-war position. You took it. You believed it. Stand there firm and let them run into you and bounce off.)

4. Two words: John Edwards. Repeat it as a mantra. Tom Vilsack looks like a dweeb and has a name as instantly mockable as “Lieberman.” Dick Gephardt would not gain you any votes - the unions are going your way. Bill Richardson might be good because he taps into that growing Hispanic population and that American waistline consciousness, but one risks the reverse in reminding everyone just what fat fucks we’ve become. And all of these are immensely qualified, significantly less-evil-than-Cheney people.

Nope. It’s gotta be Edwards – the exuberance to balance your severe gravitas. In fact, having Edwards out there would allow you the freedom to be yourself: serious, thoughtful, considered. In the last generation, we've learned that a good Prez/VP combo is a yin and yang thing. Clinton was all party guy and Gore was the fused spine. Bush and Cheney are a natural combo. Gore/Lieberman lost because, rightly or wrongly, it was impossible to perceive them as anything other than a couple of stiffs. Bush Sr. was, ironically, the smart, experienced one to the facade of Ronald Reagan. Putting Edwards on the ticket is only a positive. It gives you a chance in a couple of Southern states. It makes everyone look forward to the Edwards presidency. And an Edwards/Cheney debate would just be more joy than one should be allowed in a lifetime. Edwards puts you over the top. Edwards makes people leave Nader behind. Edwards makes you hip. He makes you win the college girl vote by gettin' their panties all wet and sticky. And you win the college guys because they love drinkin' with a redneck. Fuck, just put him on the goddamn ticket and don’t listen to the wonks.

5. Why the fuck didn’t you counter “Mission Accomplished” with “Mission Impossible”? What a great fucking ad that would have made, with the music, a fuse lit, images of Iraq, a voice saying, “this country will explode in five seconds,” whatever. Who the fuck is working for you? If no one on your campaign thought of this, fire them and hire the Rude Pundit. You know where to find him: rudepundit@yahoo.com.

Context Is a Cruel Bastard:
Ahh, truth, that tricky little bitch. Goddamn, how we love her when she nods our way, but how we hate that vicious cunt when she spurns us. When the motherfuck did it become “unpatriotic” to report the truth? ‘Cause, see, there really are objective, provable truths out there. Reading the names of the dead, unaccompanied by anything but photos of said dead, is not a political act. One can turn it into a political act by naming it such. But to simply read the names is merely to state a fact: here’s your neighbors who died in this war. It’s not saying, “Here’s the young innocents who gave their lives to the lies of an oligarchy bent on world domination.” It’s simply saying they died. You provide the context. Weep for those who must continue to die to “secure peace and democracy” in the Middle East, if you’re that friggin’ out of touch with reality. But you provide the context. By the way, the Rude Pundit watched about five minutes of the Nightline broadcast, realized that it was going to be incredibly repetitious, and fell asleep. It’s got nothing to do with apathy toward the dead and everything to do with the lullaby-like tenor of Ted Koppel’s voice. (In regards to Sinclair Broadcasting, someone smack the living shit out of Michael Powell the next time he says something so fucking stupid like “the people’s airwaves.”)

And then there's the torture pictures and our soldiers' apparent love of watching nude men huddle together.

Are Americans that fucking sexually repressed that the only way they can get their limp cocks and dry cunts to react with anything akin to pleasure is to act like they're fucking prisoners in the ass? Have we become a nation of Oz (TV prison show, not happy little place with Munchkins, although one assumes there's lots of ass fucking in both places)? 'Cause what ever else we can glean from the images of naked Iraqis stacked like cheerleaders at Hell's soccer game, we can assume that the soldiers who did the stacking and posing and whoever took the photos of asses and anuses loves the sodomy. Check out the grinning bitch standing behind the Iraqi asses here, lookin' like a happy dyke with a stap-on, ready to punish men for her lack of a cock. Not to mention that faggoty looking motherfucker behind her with the Village People moustache, givin' the thumbs up like he's asking for a fisting at a Chelsea bar. Christ, all of the pics have such a gay orgy at a Klan rally bent that you have to wonder if the Americans involved didn't go back to the barracks and masturbate furiously at the photos ("Yeah, Saddam, I got yer rape room," they scream as they look at the spread ass cheeks of some Sunni guy, "I got yer motherfuckin' rape room right here"). Time for the Najaf leather parlor to open - that'll win hearts and minds.

Remember today’s lesson, gang. Everything is defined by context. What if we got pictures of American soldiers held in a cave in Afghanistan, captured by the Taliban, and we saw pictures of them being tortured and forced to perform or pretend to perform gay sex acts while stripped nude in front of burqa-covered women? What if those pictures had smiling Taliban fighters in the frame, pointing at American dicks with their guns and laughing? Would the majority of Americans simply sigh and say, “God, a few bad apples spoil the honor and intentions of the Taliban”? Or would many of us want to bomb the whole fucking country again, leveling the fucking mountains and dancing with the entrails of the enemy? And what if the Taliban leadership decried this torture and degradation as “anti-Islam”? Would that outraged American majority give a damn? Or would we instead see the Taliban leaders as liars and want them just as dead?

“We” are no different than “them.” We all hate the same. And that’s a truth you better get fucking used to if you’re gonna survive in this world.

Tomorrow: The Rude Pundit’s advice to John Kerry.