Quote of the Day

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

Bertrand Russell

How Many Bush Administration "-gates" Can You Count?

Let's give it a shot then shall we?


Lying about being a compassionate conservative, being against national building, being a uniter not a divider, and everything else Bush said on the campaign trail
Stealing the election
Kyoto
Stem Cell Research
Waiting 7 minutes on 9/11
Throwing out the Clinton Administrations Intelligence on Bin Laden and al qaida
The Patriot Act
Tax cuts for the rich
Record defecit
Domestic political/activist organizations spied on with Homeland Security funding
Ahmed Chalabi
General Shinseki
Lying about how much it would cost
Lying about WMDs
Lying about links to al qaida
Lying about Jessica Lynch
Lying about Pat Tillman
Botching the capture of Bin Laden at Torah Bora
Botching the capture of Bin Laden the rest of the time
Haditha, Hamdaniya, and probably several other places
Halliburton
No bid Contracts
The missing 9 billion
Blackwater!
Invading Iraq
Losing Iraq
Losing Iraq to Iran
Losing Afghanistan
Losing our credibility to the world
Losing our moral authority to our enemies
LEGALIZING TORTURE
Guntanamo
Abu Graib
Secret CIA prisons
The Canadian guy we tortured in Syria
Rendition in general
WTF is going on in Waziristan?
AQ Khan
Dubai Ports World Inc.
Jeff Gannon (remember that fucker? They guy they planted in the press core?)
Stop Loss
Extending the tours to 15 months
Deploying the National Guard to foreign wars
No body armor
Not passing Jim Webb's expanded GI Bill
Walter Reed
Fudging PTSD psych evaluations to maintain troop levels
Not properly funding severe head injury care
Broken VA System
Breaking the military
Exploiting the military
Jack Abrahmoff
Tom Delay
Harriet Myers
Terri Schaivo
Outing Valerie Plame
Lying about outing Valerie Plame
Acquitting Scooter Libby
Warrantless wiretaps
"The jury is still out on evolution."
Katrina
Billions embezzled from Katrina cleanup funds
July 2008: New Orleans still basically the same as it was 1 month after Katrina
National Security Letters
Trying to legislate unlimited Executive power for wartime.
Allow de-regulation to crash the economy
$150 a barrel oil
Bush hanging out with the likes of Ted Haggard, every week.
155 Administration officials are graduates of Pat Robertson's unaccredited "law" school
Alberto Gonzales lies about federal prosecutors
Alberto Gonzales lies about everything in the conceivable universe
George Tenet knew it was bullshit
Scott McClellan new it was bullshit
A hell of a lot of people knew it was bullshit and didn't say shit
They all didn't say shit because their careers would have been assisinated
Everything Dick Cheney has ever spoken
Everything Karl Rove has ever done
...
there's more I'm forgetting.

The DC Madame / Wolfowitz

Using Bill's closing joke there as a sedway, let's talk about the hypocrisy of who was exposed in this latest DC madame scandal. Not that I think there SHOULD be a scandal about powerful people using the services of prostitutes, but when one of those people is Randall Tobias, the staggering level of hypocrisy is a scandal. In case you don't know a woman in Washington was arrested for running a high level prostitution ring that serviced the DC and capitol hill elite, which she claims was a legal escort business. She claims the girls don't actually touch in a sexual way, they do massages or dress up and do fantasy role playing or SM or whatever, but the guys have to get themselves off. Why its the case that its perfectly legal for a guy to jerk off to a prostitute but if she jerks you off its illegal is another debate. I just wanted to highlight that this Randall Tobias, who was outed as one of her clients, was in charge of the Bush administration's program to crack down on prostitution and favors abstinence only education.

I'd also like to point out how unbelievably "ironic," as John Stewarts says, the Bush administration is. Just in recent news alone, we've got another ridiculously ironic scandal, Paul Wolfowitz. This is the scandal in which Wolfowitz's girlfriend was moved from her job at the World Bank to a job at the State Department when Wolfy took over there, so as to avoid a "conflict of interest." So after a short time in her new job in the State Department, Wolfowitz saw to it that she got a promotion and 30% raise, making her one of the highest paid officials in the State Department, earning more per year AFTER taxes than Condoleeza Rice, head of the State Department, makes before taxes, again, so as not to create a "conflict of interest."

Wolfowitz has been asked to step down. As has Alberto Gonzales. As did Donald Rumsfeld. Both of whom Bush said have done "a terrific job." Oh he said that about "Browney" too, the FEMA guy, after Katrina. In Rumsfeld's case Bush lauded Rummy's performance only days before he fired him, which was the day after the Democrats took control in the November elections. When asked why he commented in favor of Rumsfeld's perfomance to the press when he must have already known he was going to ask him to step down, Bush responded, "because I couldn't have done that right before the elections." That's right, the President openly admitted to lying to the press to influence elections. Oh yeah, and Mark Foley was in charge of the program to curtail online sexual predators, And Ted Haggard, the evangelical preacher who gave weekly sermons at the White House and who was famously outspoken about the evils of homosexuality was exposed to be a homosexual meth user by his homosexual meth dealing prostitute of five years.

Haggard in "Jesus Camp"
Haggard Still Lying
Haggard Confesses

France

I don't know enough about health care models to know if France's system could just be transplanted to the US, but I'm guessing probably not. Trying might still not be such a bad idea though. I also don't think the French turnout was high was because of the reasons Bill gave, but that was really intended as more a sedway. I actually think the reason the turnout is so high is because there is a great deal of social unrest in France; they have a raging immigration problem, their health care system is actually in the red, unemployment is high, and the poor and lower class are so pissed about the conditions they live in that they rioted all over the place last year. However the points Bill makes about France's social maturity compared to America's are right on.