After five years of stonewalling on every last instance of criminality and refusing to apologize or take responsibility for even the most murderous of failures, incompetence and lies, the Bush administration has finally come up with a scapegoat: Ambien.

Apparently the entire White House, Cabinet, much of the Republican leadership and sundry GOP hit-men and made-men have such erratic sleep schedules that they pop Ambien like M&Ms and most of the time when they appear to be awake they're actually in REM cycle.

They may seem to be governing, but in fact they're "sleep-governing."

A wave of related revelations -- some even bordering on admissions -- swept across the capital today:

The Vice President's press office now says that he was "sleep-hunting" when he shot his friend Harry Whittington in the face; and also during his controversial Louisiana trip with Justice Scalia in January 2004.

Scalia (another avid fan of Ambien) further asserts that since both men were sleep-hunting on the trip they weren't responsible for colluding in an unpardonable breach of judicial ethics, nor for bagging two whooping cranes and several sooty terns -- both critically endangered species -- on what was supposed to be a duck-hunt.   more »

Three years ago, after having totally fabricated a crisis over Iraq, the Bush regime, with the support of the British government, most of the Congress, and a majority of U.S. citizens launched an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

US military forces destroyed the Iraqi state, wrecked its civilian infrastructure, mistreated its Sunni population, and set ethnic groups against one another, thus preparing the ground for the civil war that now threatens to become full-scale.

From these supremely evil U.S. acts, countless violations of international law followed: the killing and maiming of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, the wanton destruction of cities like Fallujah.

The use of banned munitions such as napalm and DU, and the torture and mistreatment (both physical and mental) of captured resistance fighters and civilian detainees who were mostly innocent bystanders.

Why do American presidents and senior military leaders so consistently lie? Why do they act so arrogantly in defiance of international law?

Why do they assume the superiority of their methods of warfare while repeatedly demonstrating their contempt for the UN Charter, the Nuremberg principles, the U.S. Constitution, and the rule of law itself?   more »

This is not good. The people running this country sound convinced that reality is whatever they say it is.

And if they've actually strayed into the realm of genuine self-delusion — if they actually believe the fantasies they're spinning about the bloody mess they've made in Iraq over the past three years — then things are even worse than I thought.

Here is self-delusion: Dick Cheney went on "Face the Nation" a few hours later and said he disagreed with Allawi — who, by the way, is a tad closer to the action than the quail-hunting veep. There's no civil war, Cheney insisted.

Move along, nothing to see here, pay no attention to those suicide bombings and death-squad murders. As an aside, Cheney insisted that his earlier forays into the Twilight Zone — U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators, the insurgents are in their "last throes" — were "basically accurate and reflect reality."   more »

Two of America's top scholars have published a searing attack on the role and power of Washington's pro-Israel lobby in a British journal, warning that its "decisive" role in fomenting the Iraq war is now being repeated with the threat of action against Iran.

And they say that the Lobby is so strong that they doubt their article would be accepted in any U.S.-based publication.

Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, author of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" and Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kenney School, and author of "Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy," are leading figures American in academic life.

They claim that the Israel lobby has distorted American policy and operates against American interests, that it has organized the funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel and "has a stranglehold" on the U.S. Congress, and its ability to raise large campaign funds gives its vast influence over Republican and Democratic administrations, while its role in Washington think tanks on the Middle East dominates the policy debate.

And they say that the Lobby works ruthlessly to suppress questioning of its role, to blacken its critics and to crush serious debate about the wisdom of supporting Israel in U.S. public life.   more »

However idealistic Blair's own motives - (though sticking close to the US has always been a deeply self-interested UK foreign policy) - whatever he did together with the Bush administration was destined to be sordidly mired in American interests and politics.

He deluded himself into thinking he ever had any influence.

Wicked liar, evil murderer, calculating rogue - as many of my e-mailers believe? No, simply deluded by the power of his own rhetoric, inflated with self-belief in his own righteous impulses, convinced he could divert US power for good purposes.

He is left floundering here, calling his critics crass anti-Americans: not so. Of course US power can be a force for good - but not under the Bush regime.

For some conspiracy theorists, here's a sinister thought: by chance as the Prime Minister was speaking, so was Dan Plesch, Strategic Analyst, warning that there are signs the US 'is poised to destroy 10,000 targets in Iran in a surprise attack using Stealth and BV52 bombers'.

This will alarm many that in this speech Tony Blair is not just begging for support to carry action in Iraq through until democracy wins - but he may be softening up for action ahead in Iran.   more »

The Radical Left must be having some effect when even nice liberals start foaming at the mouth when we criticize their cosy, bourgeois views.

Ever since the end of the cold war and the dissolution of the fixed ideological polarities that entrenched the east-west stand-off for two generations, there has been a curious merger of the hard left and the extreme right, particularly in Europe, in defence of the maverick, the authoritarian, and the plain brutal.

Some of the most unsavoury characters on the world stage find themselves being defended and supported by an unholy alliance of opportunists, controversialists, and lost souls with a grudge to bear.

Thus we find Saddam Hussein, to name but one, being defended by George Galloway on the hard left in Britain as well as by Jörg Haider on the extreme right in Austria.

It's been a good week for the apologists, eager to applaud the whopping third-term majority engineered by President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus and to cock a snook at the Americans, while the sudden death of Slobodan Milosevic, bane of the Balkans, has set in motion a concerted effort to pen his hagiography.

The common thread linking these westerners support for a varied cast of villains - from the Soviet-era authoritarianism of Lukashenko, to the mafia state created by Milosevic, to the fundamentalist theocracy and state-fuelled anti-semitism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran - is not actually sympathy for the objects of their support.   more »

Get off it. All the carping, belly-aching and complaining about George Bush's incompetence in Iraq, from both the Left and now the Right, is just dead wrong.

On the third anniversary of the tanks rolling over Iraq's border, most of the 59 million Homer Simpsons who voted for Bush are beginning to doubt if his mission was accomplished.

But don't kid yourself -- Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney, accomplished exactly what they set out to do. In case you've forgotten what their real mission was, let me remind you of White House spokesman Ari Fleisher's original announcement, three years ago, launching of what he called,

"Operation Iraqi Liberation." O.I.L.

How droll of them, how cute. Then, Karl Rove made the giggling boys in the White House change it to "OIF" -- Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the 101st Airborne wasn't sent to Basra to get its hands on Iraq's OIF.

"It's about oil," Robert Ebel told me. Who is Ebel? Formerly the CIA's top oil analyst, he was sent by the Pentagon, about a month before the invasion, to a secret confab in London with Saddam's former oil minister to finalize the plans for "liberating" Iraq's oil industry.   more »

21 MARCH

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Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus: The West Creates Another Bogeyman

Israel's Vilest Four-Letter Word

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