If hucksters get into government, it might be the fault of the electorate. How could one not know? If an election is rigged, then it’s a covert coup and the question becomes how did the hucksters even become serious candidates.

Candidate Bush was asked by a BBC reporter in 2000 who the presidents or leaders of nine countries were. He knew not one. He sniped at the reporter – “Well – do you know?” To which the reporter replied, “No – but I’m not running for president.”

This is the question for history and for us right now. Why did he run for president? Why was he asked and empowered and sponsored to run for president?

The years have revealed an answer - because he was and is a huckster. At the moment he’s a tired huckster but there’s a product he was put there to sell and he’s been doing his job. But who hired him? Who said, this is the man who should be president?   more »

>Baghdad, 30 Jan 07 - Mr. Gates, the new Führer of the DoD, has issued some interesting orders, a copy of which I have seen but not copied as it is classified and intended for the brass.

Mr. Gates, at the request of the President, has ordered the Pentagon PR people to cut down “drastically” the death lists they report daily.

“Far too many reported deaths are creating a very negative public image,” is the one specific phrase I can quote.

Everybody here involved with PR knows that at least 12,000 GIs have died both here and in Afghanistan since 2003. The number of wounded is circa 40,000. Many of these later die (and are not reported on public sites) and many, too many, more are badly maimed for life.   more »

Last week Wolf Blitzer asked Dick Cheney about his pregnant lesbian daughter. The vice president looked as if his arm had made contact with that meat grinder. Mr. Blitzer was, he growled, seriously out of line.

Neither Senator Webb nor Vice President Cheney wins points for his social graces. But what Letitia Baldrige said of the Webb encounter — “It was an uncivil reply to an uncivil remark” — does not apply equally to the vice president.

Mr. Cheney has openly promoted an anti-gay agenda. His own base has called his daughter’s pregnancy unconscionable. Family values have been his calling card. And our Prohibitionist vice president can’t summon the courage to address the gin mill in the basement?

What the vice president’s nonresponse did deliver was a very cogent message: the rules apply to you, but not to us.   more »

"You don't get a good Muslim guy in a movie." Any suggestion that films such as Aladdin were never intended to be realistic portrayals was "analogous to saying similar things to the Jewish community in the early 1930s", she said.

The fact that films such as The Siege pre-dated the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers challenged any argument that negative portrayals of Muslims as potential suicide bombers are a "natural" result of atrocities such as the Madrid and London bombings, Ms Merali added.

The report says the tale of indiscriminate terrorist violence in New York "brings into focus some of the worst American fears - that is, Muslims or Arabs attacking the country, murdering men, women and children ... and 'attacking our way of life'."

Repeated juxtaposition of Islamic ritual practices such as prayer in a mosque and the call to prayer from a minaret with scenes of exploding bombs and indiscriminate killing implies that "terrorist acts are intrinsic to Islamic beliefs and practices", the study argues.   more »

In recent weeks US government and military officials, aided and abetted by the American media, have stepped up the war of words against Iran.

As they did precisely four years ago, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the political and media establishment is attempting to build up a case for military action against a country that has no designs on American territory and represents no threat to the US population.

The campaign of misinformation is proceeding as though the claims about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda had never been exposed as lies.

The Bush administration has no credibility whatsoever in its new propaganda campaign against Iran.   more »