Seattle P.I. Caption: A Seahawks fan, refusing to let go of the season, lies in front of the team's charter bus at Boeing Field after the team's return from Chicago. Police removed the fan. (January 14, 2007)
Also LYING in front of the bus, which has already driven over them -- OH HELL! WITH THEIR PANTS ON FIRE, LYING, LYING EVERY DAY!: George H.W. Bush and Condi and John McCain and Joe LIEberman and the rest of the self-deluded, glory-obsessed, ego-motivated, personally craven bastards running the game even though the SEASON IS OVER!
First, there are the ENABLERS of lying -- and, in the last paragraph, the pathetic proof for just how hungrily, greedily the ENABLED scarf up the lies:
Our glorious leader (from the Times of London ...)
Few neoconservatives can claim to have had as much influence on the course of the Iraq war as the trio of scholars in the Kagan family, writes Sarah Baxter.
Frederick Kagan, 36, is the author of Choosing Victory, a blueprint for the surge adopted by President George W Bush. Just as everybody had begun writing off the influence of the neocons at the White House, genial, chubby-faced Frederick gave the muscular intellectuals a lease of life.
It was at Camp David last June that Kagan, a military historian and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, outlined his plans for pouring more troops into Iraq to Bush and his war cabinet.
Donald Rumsfeld, the then defence secretary, was unimpressed, but Kagan’s views got another hearing when Bush was searching for ways to ditch the seemingly defeatist recommendations of James Baker’s Iraq Study Group. “Wow, you mean we can still win this war?” a grateful Bush reportedly said.
-- Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, January 14, 2007
Hey, Fred, why don't you just hand him a bottle?!
Then there's THE PANTS ON FIRE PART, "Administration leaving out important details on Iraq" from McClatchy Newspapers today, via Atrios and Howie In Seattle. Please note, as you read the opening paragraph, that this is NOT an op-ed piece:
President Bush and his aides, explaining their reasons for sending more American troops to Iraq, are offering an incomplete, oversimplified and possibly untrue version of events there that raises new questions about the accuracy of the administration's statements about Iraq.
President Bush unveiled the new version on Wednesday during his nationally televised speech announcing his new Iraq policy.
"When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation," he said. "We thought that these elections would bring Iraqis together - and that as we trained Iraqi security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.
"But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq - particularly in Baghdad - overwhelmed the political gains Iraqis had made. Al-Qaida terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq's election posed for their cause. And they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis.
"They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam - the Golden Mosque of Samarra - in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq's Shia population to retaliate," Bush said. "Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today."
That version of events helps to justify Bush's "new way forward" in Iraq, in which U.S. forces will largely target Sunni insurgents and leave it to Iraq's U.S.-backed Shiite government to - perhaps - disarm its allies in Shiite militias and death squads.
But the president's account understates by at least 15 months when Shiite death squads began targeting Sunni politicians and clerics. It also ignores the role that Iranian-backed Shiite groups had in death squad activities prior to the Samarra bombing.
Blaming the start of sectarian violence in Iraq on the Golden Dome bombing risks policy errors because it underestimates the depth of sectarian hatred in Iraq and overlooks the conflict's root causes. The Bush account also fails to acknowledge that Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite groups stoked the conflict.
President Bush met at the White House in November with the head of one of those groups: Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI's Badr Organization militia is widely reported to have infiltrated Iraq's security forces and to be involved in death squad activities.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recited Bush's history of events on Thursday in fending off angry questioning from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., about why Rice had offered optimistic testimony about Iraq during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in October 2005.
[...]
She cited the version again in an appearance later that day before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "This is a direct result of al-Qaida activity," she said, asking House members not to consider Iraq's sectarian violence as evidence that Iraqis cannot live together.
Bush's national security adviser Stephen Hadley used the same version of events in an appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Much like the administration's pre-war claims about Saddam's alleged ties to al-Qaida and purported nuclear weapons program, the claims about the bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra ignore inconvenient facts and highlight questionable but politically useful assumptions.
No one disagrees that the February bombing of the Golden Dome shrine was a pivotal moment. In the days following the attack, armed Shiites stormed Sunni mosques and neighborhoods, killing hundreds. Baghdad's Sunni residents responded by arming themselves, and Sunni insurgents set off car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods. By October, the monthly death toll was reaching into the thousands.
U.S. diplomats, reporters and military and intelligence officers began reporting that Shiite death squads were targeting Sunni clerics and former officials of Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime at least 15 months before the Samarra bombing.
Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell urged a U.S. offensive against radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia in 2004. But he was overruled by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, then-defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. They argued against fighting a two-front war against Sunni insurgents and Shiite militants.
The concerns about Shiite militias grew after the Jan. 30, 2005, elections that brought the Shiite-led government of then-Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to power. Journalists in Iraq, the CIA station, the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. military all reported throughout 2005 that evidence was mounting that Jaafari's government was incorporating Shiite militias and death squads into the Iraqi army and police.
A year before the Samarra bombing, Hannah Allam, writing for what was then Knight Ridder Newspapers, reported that Iraq could be headed toward civil war. Knight Ridder was purchased by The McClatchy Co. last June. ... READ ALL.
These bastards don't even know that they're lying in the street -- flat as a pancake -- and the season is really, really over. Ask Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren. Or ask Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE). Atrios links to Connecticut Blog's "Chuck Hagel bitchslaps Lieberman over scare comments" on yesterday's Meet The Press:
[...]
Good ol' Holy Joe went back to the "Dick Cheney well of scare tactics" by ONCE AGAIN linking 9/11 and Iraq (who's STILL buying that line), criticizing anyone who disagrees with the President (which would be a majority of the public), and claiming the other Iraq proposals "retreat" and "defeat" (a.k.a. cut and run).
VIDEO
I checked Meet The Press's transcript, and here's what Hagel told Tim Russert and LIEberman:
SEN. HAGEL: First, as I said before, I am not, nor any member of Congress that I’m aware of, Tim, is advocating defeat. That’s ridiculous, and I’m offended that any responsible member of Congress or anyone else would even suggest such a thing. Senator Lieberman talks about his children and grandchildren. We all have children and grandchildren. He doesn’t have a market on that, nor do any of my colleagues. We’re all concerned about the future of this country. But we have an honest disagreement here, and that’s what democracies are about.
Now, the fact is we can talk all we want, and we can go to all the specialists in the world, the fact is, the Iraqi people will determine the fate of Iraq. The people of the Middle East will determine their fate. Now, when we continue to interject ourselves in a situation that we never have understood, we’ve never comprehended, and I think after four years it’s becoming quite clear of that, that tells us something very, very clearly. And we now have to devise a way to find some political consensus with our allies, especially the people in the Middle East, that is going to require to find a political framework for some progress with the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It’s going to require listening to our allies in the Middle East.
You know, Tim, I hear this talk about generals and military involvement. The two top American generals in Iraq in November and December, the last 60 days, both in open testimony and interviews took exactly the opposite approach of what President Bush was talking about on Wednesday night. Now, someone is, is not listening here. There is a major disconnect. And we talk about the future for our country. The future of the Middle East as a region is in play now at a very, very defining time. That’s what we should be thinking about. We need to get out of the bog of where we are of tactical thinking. Of course 50,000 troops in Baghdad are not going to turn that around. That is a tribal sectarian civil war, and we need to do everything we can with some smart thinking.
Let’s just take one thing. Why not take American troops, put them on the border? I hear a lot from this administration about this border being porous, all the terrorists leaking in there. The terrorist problem isn’t the biggest problem today in, in Iraq. Are terrorists there? Yes. It is Iraqis killing Iraqis, Tim. It’s Shias killing Shias. That’s the biggest problem, that’s not going to be solved by the American military.
I don't know if Chuck Hagel is, as Atrios called him, "the last honest man," but he's in sync with the vast majority of Americans.
Then there's "[m]ore bullshit from St. McCain, the patron saint of liars," with Atrios linking to this Horse's Mouth blog post:
MCCAIN'S LATEST RUSE: IF BUSH "SURGE" PLAN FAILS, REMEMBER THAT I WANTED EVEN MORE TROOPS SENT!
[...]
So now we have McCain being "equivocal" about whether he thinks the President's "surge" is adequate. And McCain's so worried that it may not constitute enough troops that he's spoken about it to Patraeus, who's "assured" him that if worst comes to worst, he can "ask for more."
But hang on a second. McCain in the past has said unequivocally that he thought the right number of troops would be 20,000 -- which by the way is slightly less than what Bush has proposed sending. And not only that, but McCain has volunteered this number as being the right amount.
Proof after the jump. ...
Some teams KNOW they lost. Sure, some blame gets passed around, but they know the season's over and all they can do is do better next time out.
The Seahawks played well enough to win Sunday against the Chicago Bears. But in the end, they didn't.
[...]
"It's disappointing," Peterson said. "We wanted to go back to the Super Bowl. We're the defending NFC champs. We played like it. We just didn't get it done when we had to."
They didn't get it done. Refreshing. Honest. It's OVER, and the professional football team members know it. And they're able to admit it.
The lies and reshuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic by the Bush team are too numerous to list in this one post. Add your own, and don't hold back.
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An early version of this was posted at No Quarter blog.