The toddler president

President George Bush shook his head in frustration Friday over the slow pace of diplomacy, vowing to continue talks to help ease tensions with North Korea, which test-fired seven missiles earlier this week.

"The problem with diplomacy, it takes a while to get something done," said Bush, capping off a two-day Chicago visit. "If you're acting alone, you can move quickly. When you're rallying world opinion and trying to come up with the right language at the United Nations to send a clear signal, it takes a while."

Yes, George, having to get leaders of other sovereign nations (you remember what sovereign means, don't you?) to agree with you can take time. Now, the last time you did this, you just invaded, rather than waiting, and got our country into a mess, killed thousands of our soldiers, and spent what's approaching half a trillion dollars. Did you learn a lesson from that? Are you going to actually try diplomacy, even though it would be quicker and less painful to your precious cluelessness to just invade anyone you don't like?

Will we survive another 927 days?

A Classic Cartoon Revisited

After the Kennedy assassination, Bill Mauldin gave us this poignant image:



I think Mr. Lincoln, the man who described the war as a test of whether a nation "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal...can long endure, and suffered so "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" would be reacting similarly today.

The National Anthemn Redux

Here is that dreadful last verse I mentioned below:

O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation;
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust!”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Methinks THAT verse will be the one sung in the new Amerika:

Starry starry night

First of all, read THIS from Schmidlap.

Secondly, over the holiday, I was thinking about the Star-Spangled Banner. I have one comment and one question on that one.

1) Be glad at the ball game that you only have to endure the first verse. Otherwise, try this one on for size:

On the shore dimly seen thro' the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty
host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the
towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave! (editor's note--the last verse is worse)

2) Let's answer the question posed by Mr. Key in his poem (he wrote a poem originally titled "The Defense of Fort McHenry," the tune is an old English one, To Anacreon in Heaven). Is our nation still the "land of the free?"

and the "home of the brave?"

Logic that defies logic

"I'm not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain."

So of course you do that by sending more and more off to endless slaughter, a never-ending killing machine. Or perhaps it is a perverse kind of Ponzi scheme? In the classic scheme, monies from new "investors" pay off the earlier ones. Here new blood "honors" blood previously shed.

The scheme finally collapses when not enough new investors/soldiers are willing to take the sucker bet and part with their money or their life.

Everyone celebrates freedom of speech differently

Even the morons.

Schmidlap - maybe this truck's for sale!

Hey, Rousing Rabble!

Happy fucking birthday!

:-)