December 29, 2006 by mugsy.

The news is currently announcing that Saddam Hussein is to be hanged within the next 36 hours. As such, I am delaying my planned “Predictions for 2007″ post until January 1st.

See you then.

(PS: As of 2007, Mugsy’s Rap Sheet will revert to a WEEKLY column, as it has become too time consuming for me to attempt multiple Op/Ed’s each week.

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December 27, 2006 by mugsy.

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A sad milestone was passed on Tuesday: The 2,980th U.S. soldier was killed in Iraq, surpassing the 2,975 Americans killed on 9/11.

I found something more than a little unsettling about that statistic… beyond the obvious nausea of lives wasted in an unnecessary war I objected to even before it began.

No, the “disconcerting” uneasiness I get from that statistic is the implication that Iraq and 9/11 are somehow connected. I mean, we don’t compare two other unrelated stats to one another anywhere else. The number of people killed by sharks in Alabama each year is equal to the number of people killed by alligators in South Carolina each year, but you never hear anyone comparing those two statistics to each other because no one perceives any link between the two. So why do we still talk about Iraq in the context of 9/11?

The implication appears to be that “attacking Iraq is… in some way… a direct result of 9/11.” Yet we have known for quite some time that the Bush Administration planned to invade Iraq from the day they entered office. So why do we continue to link Iraq and 9/11?

Because the Bush Administration does. Even to this day, they continue to suggest that “invading Iraq was necessary” before “Saddam could give (additional) support to our enemies.” They suggested he’d give them weapons… which he didn’t have. They suggested he’d give them financial assistance… though we’ve long known Osama bin Laden is an heir to the bin Laden Family construction fortune, worth anywhere from two to 200 million dollars. So they didn’t need his money. Maybe he might supply training, which has been sufficiently debunked to all but the most deep-in-denial neocons for whom “Salman Pak” has become the “grassy knoll” of the 21st century. So why don’t we take more notice when the media nonchalantly compares anything Iraq related to 9/11? Hey, EVEN I did it. I too fell victim to the Iraq/911 analogy fallacy when I first heard the latest gruesome body count. The ONLY connection between the two should be the notion that it is YET ANOTHER 3,000 DEAD AMERICANS AS A DIRECT RESULT OF THIS ADMINISTRATIONS INCOMPETENCE. Period, end of story.

The next big announcement: The Iraqi court denied Saddam Hussein’s appeal, and the war crime for which he was convicted… the massacre of 148 Shi’ite Muslims in the city of Du’jail after a failed assassination attempt, will stand, and he is to be hanged 30 days from now for that crime… just in time for Bush’s 2007 State of the Union Address (he was first convicted the day before the November election, and his appeal took just long enough so that the Bush Administration could squeeze just a *little more* juice out of that PR turnip).

The White House has been pointing to the Du’jail massacre as clear evidence why Saddam deserves all that has befallen him. Yet, back in 1983, his crime didn’t seem to bother the Reagan Administration much, sending “Special Envoy Donald Rumsfeld” to Iraq to meet with close U.S. ally Saddam Hussein a mere 18 months after that very massacre. Is it just me, or does it seem INCREDIBLY disingenuous to condemn someone for something you turned a blind eye to 25 years earlier?

And now he is to be hanged for that very same crime in time for George W. Bush to brandish it as some sort of pathetic “proof” that it’s all been worth it: the 3,000 dead soldiers (tens of thousands more permanently disabled), $455 Billion dollar pricetag and counting, Iraq embroiled in Civil War, without a “face saving” Exit Strategy in sight.

The question every American needs to be asking: “Was it worth it?” Only those deepest in denial could possibly say yes (even the NeoCon HQ, “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC) has been reduced to a voicemail box and cobweb-site that is no longer being updated).

PostScript: As I type this, the passing of former President Gerald R. Ford has just been reported. It was under Ford that Dick Cheney rose to prominence as the youngest Chief of Staff in history (age 35), brought in by his friend Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The ouster of Nixon and loss of the war in Vietnam ate away at these two, champing at the bit (yes, the correct term is “champing”, not “chomping”) for a second chance to “prove Nixon right”. President Ford deserves two big kudos in this respect: one, for not allowing Frick & Frack to hijack his domestic and foreign policy… Ford, rather than follow the road of the three Presidents’ before him, recognized the fact that Vietnam was “unwinable“, simply declared victory, and pulled the troops out of Vietnam. That took guts. His second great “achievement” requires the blessing of hindsight: his pardoning of Richard Nixon and allowing the United States to “move on” rather than endure the International spectacle of putting a former President on trial. Nixon was already gone, and (unlike Bush), his crime did not cost any lives. The country (IMHO) was better served by Ford’s pardon of Nixon than wasting the remainder of his Presidency putting the former President on trial.

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December 22, 2006 by mugsy.

Another great Mark Fiore’ cartoon:

It only goes to Seven, but promises the rest at a later date.

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December 18, 2006 by mugsy.

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One for the holidays. Pardon my indulgence.

I have my own private tradition. Laugh if you will, but every year, without fail, I watch “Scrooge“, the 1970 musical version of “A Christmas Carol“, staring British actor Albert Finney. While most people prefer the old 1951 B/W Alastair Sim version, Finney’s Scrooge is my favorite. Back when I was in Grade School, the entire school was treated to a free viewing in the school auditorium every year for three years. After I moved, my new school did not continue the tradition, so I continued it at home. No matter how many times I watch it, I still find it inspirational and Finney’s portrayal the most natural.

As many of us learned in high school, author Charles Dickens, England’s most celebrated author of the time, used his short story to “sneak in” a descriptive portrayal of the crushing poverty that was consuming London’s poor, in a book Queen Victoria was certain to read. Maybe it had some impact, because 17 years later, Queen Victoria abolished “Debtors Prison”.

Watching the movie again this year, I found myself thinking about it in a “political context” for the first time. It dawned on me that the early Ebeneezer Scrooge is the epitome of the extreme Far Right Conservative, and later his redeemed self, the epitome of the extreme Far Left Liberal. Follow me on this.

The early Scrooge described The Poor as “lazy” and “idle”. Consumed by the pursuit of wealth and openly hostile to anyone not like himself (the only person he didn’t hate was his late partner Marley, an older overweight father-figure that taught Scrooge his evil ways. Sound like anyone we know?). He is ignorant (I don’t mean “dumb”, I mean willfully uninformed), prejudiced and abusive to others. And it will take nothing short of an Act of God to redeem him. Even after a haunting by Marley and two additional ghosts, Scrooge “stays the course”, denies what he has seen with his own eyes, and doesn’t come around until faced with catastrophe.

A fact most people don’t know about the character of Ebeneezer Scrooge was that his mother died in childbirth to him. Dickens does come right out and tell us this in his story, but it is easy to figure out from the facts he gives us about his main character. His father blamed him for her death and sent him off to boarding school for most of his childhood. The sister he adored, Fran, would of had to of been his older sister, which probably became like a mother to him.

The nephew that Scrooge so despises, Harry, was Fran’s only child. Like her mother, Fran died in childbirth (”died a woman”), and like his father, Scrooge blames Harry for the death of his beloved sister.

These “facts” are only hinted at in Dickens’s famous book. It would have been completely inappropriate to describe such things in a family-type book in 1843, so Dickens only hinted at these facts, depending on readers to fill in the blanks for themselves (sadly, most don’t, and I have yet to see a movie version pick up on these crucial character-defining facts).

So we can include a dysfunctional family with abusive father-figure and a warped sense of family into the mix. Work it in however you see fit (or not at all if that suites your sensibilities).

After his redemption, Scrooge becomes the personification of the kind of Liberal that gives we Progressives a bad name. Charitable to the point of reckless disregard. Sweeter than candy to the poor and destitute among him. Trusting that the people he whipped like dogs for years will simply accept his miraculous transformation and embrace him despite the Hell he put them through for years.

Yet, it is the Later Scrooge that we all strive to be, not the hard-nosed, parsimonious curmudgeon he was before… the guy we tell children to beware of in the dark.

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December 13, 2006 by mugsy.

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For the sake of full disclosure, I should preface this by saying I live in Texas, so I’m required by state law to have at least two Republican friends.

I’ve learned a lot about Republicans thanks to them. One thing I’ve learned is that they are all “provocateurs”… people that enjoy stirring up trouble for fun. They’ll defend positions they themselves really don’t believe in just because they know it ticks the other guy off. They’ll ridicule positions they know are true simply to score cheap political points. They’ve got this “macho” thing going on, and take great joy in characterizing Democrats and/or Liberals as “elitist girlie-men that want to allow terrorists to perform third-trimester abortions on Flag Day”.

Long ago, back when I was young and immature, I didn’t pay much attention to things like politics and the world around me, I considered myself a Conservative… maybe even a Republican. Then I started paying attention. By the time Ronald Reagan left office, the fact that he had quadrupled 204 years of National Debt to $4 TRILLION DOLLARS in just 8 short years turned me into “an Independent”, but still a Conservative that didn’t oppose George HW Bush from becoming President. But when “41″ left office with the country in a recession and an additional $1 TRILLION added to the debt, I parted ways with Conservativism entirely and fought to get Ross Perot on the ‘92 ballot. Instead, Democrat Bill Clinton won, which troubled me (it has always bugged me that more people don’t seem to understand the danger of racking up enormous debt. I blame that on Ronald Reagan, who taught an entire generation that it’s okay to live on credit).

By 1995, with a shrinking deficit, a skyrocketing stock market, plummeting unemployment, and sickened by a GOP that seemed intent on launching trivial investigation after trivial investigation trying to “get” the Clinton’s on “something/anything”, I became a proud Democrat. The first time I had ever heard someone use the word “Liberal” in positive terms instead of as a slur was after watching a documentary about the late Robert Kennedy. A clip was played of someone describing RFK as “a good Liberal candidate”. That’s when I became a Liberal. I haven’t regretted either decision ever since.

But my provocateur friends still haven’t caught up with reality.

I still receive “humorous” emails portraying Democrats as “politically correct, brain-dead, surrender monkey’s”. One video that arrived in my inbox recently… a clip from the movie “The Ghost Breakers” (1940), is but one example:

This was followed by a few other tongue-in-cheek slams of all things Democrat. Which struck me as incredibly curious… when you slam Democrats, you’re essentially declaring to the world that you are A PROUD REPUBLICAN. Considering everything that has happened this past year, I’m incredulous that anyone would still want to be associated with the Republican Party or this Administration.

We are about to begin our FIFTH year in Iraq… for a war we were told would likely take “six days, six weeks… I doubt six months”. We were assured it would be “paid for with Iraqi oil revenues”. Andrew Natsio, chairman of the Federal “USAID” program, repeatedly assured an incredulous Ted Koppel on the April 23, 2003 episode of Nightline that the ENTIRE Iraq war would cost American’s no more than $1.7 Billion dollars:

TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) And we’re back once again with ANDREW NATSIOS, administrator for the Agency for International Development. I want to be sure that I understood you correctly. You’re saying the, the top cost for the US taxpayer will be $1.7 billion. No more than that?

ANDREW NATSIOS
For the reconstruction. And then there’s 700 million in the supplemental budget for humanitarian relief, which we don’t competitively bid ’cause it’s charities that get that money.

TED KOPPEL
(Off Camera) I understand. But as far as reconstruction goes, the American taxpayer will not be hit for more than $1.7 billion no matter how long the process takes?

ANDREW NATSIOS
That is our plan and that is our intention. And these figures, outlandish figures I’ve seen, I have to say, there’s a little bit of hoopla involved in this.

The pricetag on the Iraq War has already topped $320 BILLION DOLLARS. That’s $9.8 Billion a month, and the total cost to the American tax payer when you factor in long-term medical care for all those injured soldiers, replacing spent/destroyed weapons and machinery, and reconstruction, the pricetag soars to a heart-attack inducing $2 Trillion Dollars. But that hasn’t stopped the Bush Administration from giving the wealthiest 1/2 of 1% of Americans (those making $5 million dollars a year or more) 50% of their “economy growing” tax cuts. Problem is, the economy is growing at an anemic pace. The “housing bubble” that propped up the economy thanks to rock-bottom interest rates has threatened to burst in light of rising interest rates.

When George Bush was campaigning for President in 2000, he attacked the Clinton Administration for the recent rise in gas prices, saying that Clinton should be pressuring OPEC to “open up the spigots” to help bring down the price of gasoline. Truckers were threatening to go on strike because the price of diesel had topped $1.45 a gallon. The price of a barrel of oil when George Bush took office: $28 a barrel. Earlier this year, the price of oil peaked at $78.40 barrel oil back in July of this year, with the national average price of gasoline over $3 a gallon.

If you’re a Conservative, between bouts of slamming “the Liberal Media” and blogging on “Free Republic Online”, you’re almost certainly familiar with “World Net Daily”… often referred to as “World NUT Daily” for it’s outrageous Conservative spin… revealed Tuesday that “Soybeans Make you Gay”. Of course, from reading the mainstream media headlines this past few weeks, it appears more likely that “being a Conservative” makes you gay. First, we learn that Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL)… head of the GOP’s Child Predator Task Force… was making sexual advances towards underage teen male pages. But rather than remove Foley from the task force, Republican leaders buried the news and did what they could to keep it a secret, prefering to keep children subject to a child predator rather than jeopardize their hold on Congressional power.

Then came Ted Haggard, who bragged to friends that he counseled President Bush “every Monday” on issues of Faith… and now “Paul Barnes“, who confessed to his congregation via video tape Tuesday that he had been struggling with homosexuality since the age of five.

Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of the Vice President, revealed to the world last week that she is pregnant. In the state of Virginia where she and her “wife” (as Mary calls her) Heather live, Heather will have NO parental rights should anything happen to Mary, thanks to a state ban that this Administration she so stalwartly defends, widely promotes.

Back in August, I started issuing a monthly challenge to anyone that could name one single policy success to come out of the Bush Administration. Needless to say, no one ever came up with a single one. Iraq is a growing mess, where “a roaring success” now would be leaving the country in any shape EVEN CLOSE to the same condition as when we went in… at peace without civil war or sectarian violence, a working infrastructure and functioning secular government with no weapons of mass destruction, hostile to al-Qaeda and serving as a check on Iran. Instead, it is far more likely that we will leave that country with a bloody civil war, a weak government strongly allied with Iran and leaning towards radical Islam.

Our new friend, Pakistan, created a sanctuary for al-Qaeda along their Northern border with Afghanistan and forbids the U.S. from entering to go after Osama bin Laden. So much for “no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them”.

Our National Debt now tops $8 TRILLION DOLLARS. Gas an oil prices are out of control. The Middle East is exploding in violence. Our military has been streched to its breaking point while over-extended troops are stop-lossed into involentary second and third tours of duty. Four years into the war in Iraq, soldiers are STILL driving around in “Humvees”, a vehicle that was not designed for combat and is excruciatingly vulnerable to roadside bombs. Humvees retrofitted with “up-armor” kits are about as fit for combat as slapping steel plating on a GMC pickup. Meanwhile, our soldiers are now dying at a rate of nearly three men/women a day.

And I still receive heavilly passed-along bulk e-mails from Conservatives touting how much they “support our troops”… just not enough to give back that tax credit so we can buy our soldiers some better body armor or military vehicles, and you’ll notice there are no long lines of Republicans at your local military recruiters.

Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, “Duke” Cunningham, Tom Noe.

Why would ANYONE want people to know they still consider themselves a Republican anymore? It has become a badge of shame, not pride.

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December 8, 2006 by mugsy.

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The “Iraq Study Group”… organized to seek a solution to getting us out of Iraq… released it’s report on Wednesday. Among the recommendations: talking to Iran and Syria, two of Iraq’s neighbors contributing to the instability in Iraq, and convince them that it is in their best interest to have a peaceful and stable Iraq as their neighbor.

Then I heard someone state the obvious yesterday… so obvious I hadn’t considered it…

What is more in Iran’s interest:

Helping the U.S. create a stable Democratic ally next door that might side with America against them?

OR…

A United States bogged down in Iraq, wasting precious resources trying to bring it under control.

Are you feeling that someone hasn’t thought this through yet? You’re not alone. But of course, as un-thought-out as that course might seem, President Bush is always able to come up with something even dumber, saying we will not “negotiate with our enemies”… to which ISG co-chair James Baker pointed out the obvious: Of course you negotiate with your enemies. You don’t need to “negotiate with your friends“. Duh! President Bush has suggested that he has no intention of leaving Iraq until it is a stable democratic nation. That’s a problem… and not just the obvious one.

As pointed out so clearly above, “Why on Earth would Iran and Syria want to *help* us do something so clearly not in their best interests?” Which got me thinking: “What would make it within their interest?” And I came up with this enticing option: Threaten to abandon Iraq and leave it a mess. Threaten to pull out and leave a nasty civil war on their doorstep, with the potential of spilling out over its borders and destabilize their own countries… the exact reasoning we are using for why they should help us. But all they hear now is “we won’t leave until Iraq is fixed”, which gives them NO incentive to help us. But if we use this mess as LEVERAGE, threatening to leave this hot steaming pile in their backyard for THEM to clean up… thus turning the tables 180′ so that WE are the ones freed up while THEY waste precious resources to bring Iraq under control, THEN maybe they might suddenly feel the need to help us.

But as long as Chicken George (with apologies to Alex Haley) is going around telling them that we’ll never leave Iraq while it’s still a mess, the ball is completely in their court. Maybe if President Bush used his drug-addled, raisin-shriveled little brain for something other than propping up his cowboy hat, he might realize that HIS OWN POLICIES AND IDEOLOGY are why we are in this mess to begin with, and his insistence on “staying the course” are the reason WHY we suddenly need an emergency “study group”, consisting of a number of his father’s political friends/advisers, to bail his ass out now.

Speaking of his father, former President George H.W. Bush broke down in tears Tuesday while giving a speech before the Florida State Legislature in honor of his son Jeb, Governor of Florida. Several people has suggested that the former President sobbed, not so much for what his son Jeb had overcome, but in recognition of just how badly his son George W had tarnished the family name, destroyed their reputation, and likely annihilated any future political aspirations “the good son” Jeb might of had, knowing that no one would ever trust another Bush as President ever again. I’m sure for Poppy Bush, it doesn’t seem particularly fair that the son that studied hard and earned his political heights on his own talent should have his future political aspirations dashed thanks to the incompetence and stupidity of his irresponsible big brother… the son who needed Daddy to bail him out his entire life… from a succession of failed oil-drilling projects, and cashing in on the family name to become Governor, and now, bailing his Presidency out to save the nation from fiscal and military ruin. Listen to Poppy’s speech carefully and note what words bring him to tears: “he didn’t whine and didn’t complain”, “how a man handles failure” and a note on “decency”.

I’m sure to Poppy, it’s just not fair for Jeb. Their mother, Barbara, was noted as once saying that she was “surprised” that George W became President first because “they always thought it would be Jeb”. Jeb had been in politics longer and showed more promise growing up than his juvenile-delinquent brothers, George, Neil and Marvin.

Postscript: I feel a sense of poetic justice in the fact that two of Poppy’s friends, Sandra Day O’Connor and James A Baker III… two people INSTRUMENTAL in stopping the 2000 Florida recount and getting George W appointed President… had to be brought in as part of the Iraq Study Group to bail juniors ass out now. O’Connor was rumored to have said, “I hope Gore doesn’t become President because I plan to retire” before the case came before the Supreme Court, and Baker headed up the Florida legal team that demanded a stop to the recount. I wonder if they ever think to themselves now that if they hadn’t helped get Junior elected, we wouldn’t be in this mess they were having to bail him out of now?

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December 4, 2006 by mugsy.

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You’ve probably noticed by now that I don’t like to cover “todays big news” here. There are SO many places you can read all the latest stories, repeating them here would just be redundant. So instead, I prefer to come up with something different.

I plan on doing an *Official* “predictions” entry right after Christmas, but I wanted to throw an early one out there now while it’s fresh in my head:

Most of you know that Cheney & Rumsfeld have ties all the way back to the Nixon Administration. Cheney brought Rummy into Nixon’s “Office of Economic Opportunity“, and it was under President Gerald Ford that Cheney and Rummy staged a mini-coup, pushing Ford to fire Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, tell Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to look for another job and to remove Henry Kissinger from his post as national security adviser. Rumsfeld was then named secretary of defense (youngest ever), and Cheney became chief of staff to the president (also youngest ever).

It was Cheney that “recommended himself” for the position of Vice President after Gov. George W. Bush gave him the job of screening postential VP’s back in 2000. And it was Cheney that recommended his pal Rumsfeld for the position of Secretary of Defense in the GWB Administration (giving Rummy the distinction of being both the *youngest* and the *oldest* SecDef’s in history).

The day after the Democratic election sweep that changed control of both Houses of Congress, President Bush announced Rummy’s departure. Sources inside the White House have claimed that Cheney has been more than “out of sorts” with the dismissal of his longtime friend. And the glaringly bad advice given by Rummy that was the impetus for his dismissal goes for Cheney in spades. If Bush could fire Cheney (a bit like a puppet firing the guy with the hand up his back), he might, but since Cheney was *elected*, he can not be fired. Bush could only ask for his resignation, and we know he would never do that because that would be tantamount to an admission of failure, and Bush is physically incapable of that. The dismissal of Rumsfeld alone is almost inconceivable.

Cheney said from Day One that he would never seek the Presidency himself, that after his second term as VP, he would resign. As a result, the 2008 Presidential campaign may be the most open field in nearly 100 years. With no natural successor.

My first prediction is that sometime in 2007, Cheney will retire, citing “health problems” or some other such nonsense (he took office with at least three heart attacks under his belt to begin with), and the White House’s choice to be the next President will be made VP. This person will be John McCain.

Sen McCain sold out his friend, fellow Vietnam Vet John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential race to throw all of his support behind the man that savaged his character and questioned his loyalty to the country while a P.O.W. in Vietnam. Why would he do this? In my opinion, it is because he made a deal with the Devil, with Bush promising to endorse McCain and put the powerful Bush Election Machine at McCain’s disposal for the 2008 campain in exchange for his endorsement in 2004.

It is almost automatic now that the sitting VP at the end of a President’s second term becomes the Party’s nominee in the next election. But many of the Fundamentalist Christians and Neo-Conservative extremists that make up President Bush’s base don’t like the “pro-choice”, “government reform” John McCain, and are more closely eying potential candidates like Rudy Gulliani (also pro-choice, AND pro-gay rights as well… not to mention moved his mistress into the Mayor’s mansion with him, his wife and his children, at the end of his term in 2001), and Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (again, also “pro-gay rights”, but “pro life” and a devote Mormon), with McCain bringing up the rear. But appointing him VP in 2007 and serving out two years in that position would all but lock up the 2008 nomination for him.

So don’t be surprised if sometime very early in 2007, Dick Cheney resigns for “health reasons” and John McCain is tapped to become Vice President. To ensure McCain serves as close to two full years as possible, expect this move as early as January or February.

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