I need a diversion

Elvis will do nicely. Have a hat-trick.

I love the smell of napalmed wingnut in the evening!

Finally! Someone finally called neocon lickspittle and wingnut/chickenhawk/warmonger Fouad Ajami on his slavering, agenda-whoring bullshit. (Yeah, I’m a big Ajami fan – going so far as to cancel my subscription to Foreign Affairs when they started publishing his deluded rantings.)

If you have any doubt that he’s a delusional fuckwit, you need only read his man-crush pleading on behalf of Scooter “Treason” Libby. But he went a bridge too far, even for him, and finally, he got called on it.

Below are the three most nausea-inducing paragraphs from a column he wrote for The Wall Street Journal opinion page last month, in the wake of Judge Walton sending the treasonous fuck to the slam. (Yeah, it’s a fever-swamp, but know thy enemy, I always say.)

Fallen Soldier
Mr. President, do not leave this man behind.

BY FOUAD AJAMI
Friday, June 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Mr. President, some weeks ago, I wrote a letter of appeal, a character reference, to Judge Reggie B. Walton, urging leniency for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Scooter, I said, has seen the undoing of his world, but he comes before a "just court in a just and decent country." I was joined by men and women of greater acclaim in our public life, but the petitions were in vain. Now the legal process has played out, Judge Walton has issued a harsh prison term of 30 months, and what will rescue this honorable man is the power of pardon that is exclusively yours.

[Snip]

In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.

[Snip]

The prosecutor, and the jury and the judge, had before them a case that purported to stand alone, a trial of one man's memory and recollections. But you have before you what they and the rest of us don't--a memory of the passions and the panic, and the certitude, which gave rise to the war. And a sense, I am confident, of the quiet and selfless man who sat in the outer circle when your cabinet deliberated over our country's choices in Iraq, and in those burning grounds of the Arab-Islamic world. Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.

Like I said, sickening. To compare a fucking traitor who in a just world would hang by the neck till dead, to a fallen soldier, felled in an unjust war he helped to sell, is particularly wretch-worthy. It is a miracle the guy can walk, with balls that big.

Well, finally, the RNC steno-pool the mainstream media called this fascist in his bullshit. MSNBC’s David Shuster, today on Hardball, gave him quite a roughing up.

SHUSTER: “Mr. Ajami, do you really believe Mr. Libby is like the 3,600 soldiers killed in Iraq?”

AJAMI: . “I don’t need to be lectured on the soldiers killed in Iraq.” “You have to be able to handle metaphors, this really was a metaphor.”

SHUSTER: “The word ‘metaphor’ is nowhere in your column.”

But that was just the beginning! Shuster must have been studying the reporters who work for the BBC, because he called him on his bullshit, time after time. Finally, Ajami was visibly exasperated. When Shuster asked pointedly “Why did Libby lie to the FBI?” all Ajami had left was the lie… “I don’t know that he did.” (So that’s why he was charged with, tried for, and found guilty of perjury & obstruction! He didn’t lie!)

Watch the video at Crooks & Liars. (Just go pee first, because I guarantee you will laugh like a giddy schoolgirl!)

26% and Falling

Three points to go before the Ghost of Nixon turns over the “Most Despised President Ever” trophy. The numbers tell the tale:

Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?

Satisfied ……….24%

Dissatisfied ……67%

Don't Know ….....9%

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?

Approve……….…26%

Disapprove………65%

Don't Know………..9%

So – the rest of the country is catching up to me. Again. Time to find a new curve to get ahead of?

UPDATE: The idea that we ought to just impeach the mother fuckers already (ITMFA!!! h/t: Hill Country Gal) is gaining traction, and not just amongst us dirty hippie lefty bloggers, either.

Problems Commenting?

[Updated below]

If so, let me know by shooting me an email (bluegirl dot redstate at gmail dot com). Apparently there are issues with Safari and Internet Explorer, and they crash after commenting.

So far, no problems with Firefox, but Blogger says up front that their blogs look best when viewed through Firefox.

Probably just another advance in Google's conquest to take over the world...But I am going to complain to them anyway. So please, let me know if you are having difficulties. A chorus is harder to ignore than a solo...

UPDATE: According to the wizards at Blogger:

We’re still working on the compatibility issues in browsers such as Safari, Opera, etc. At this time, you’ll get best results with Firefox or Internet Explorer 6.

Friday Cat Blogging - Lazy Kitties Edition

I keep telling you all - I have the laziest and most spoiled cats on the face of the earth. They fare every bit as well as cats did in ancient Egypt.

Charlie, the lazy boy, has taken over the La-Z-Boy

And Buddy Impeachment - totally took over Zoe's bed when I walked away in the midst of
changing the linens to answer the phone. I was gone all of three minutes, tops.
It takes a can opener to budge him...but it works every time!!!

Doolittle joins Domenici in call for pullout

Just hours after Senator Pete Domenici appeared to abandon his support for aWol and his failed Iraq strategy, Representative John Doolittle, a conservative Republican congressman from California announced he is withdrawing his support for the mess in Mesopotamia.

Speaking to members of the editorial board of the Sacramento Bee, he said Americans must disengage “as soon as possible” and turn the security of the country over to the Iraqis.

A longtime supporter of the war, Doolittle called the situation in Iraq a "quagmire" on Thursday. "We've got to get off the front lines as soon as possible," Doolittle said at Rocklin City Hall, the Bee reported. "And in my mind that means something like the end of the year. We just can't continue to tolerate these kinds of losses.

"I don't want to keep having our people dying on the front lines. I am increasingly convinced that we never are going to succeed in actually ending people dying (in Iraq). I think it's going to be a constant conflict ... and if that is going to happen ... it needs to be the Iraqis dying and not the Americans."

Later he told the Bee's editorial board: "My belief is that the majority of my colleagues on the Republican side have become skeptical of all of this. And that's a big change."

Doolittle said colleagues in Congress -- including an increasing number of Republicans -- believe the war "is something different than we believed it to be. And we're gravely at risk by constantly having our troops exposed."

Doolittle has been a key supporter of the administrations Iraq (cough) “policy” thus far, as has Domenici. Losing their support almost simultaneously is significant.

Now mind you, neither one of them have cast a vote or done anything besides pay a bit of lip service. But think about it for a second: this just isn’t a political climate where equivocating is going to be tolerated by the American public. We are pissed off. We are as collectively pissed off as we have ever been. A politician who says what his constituents want to hear and then continues on his merry feckless way is a politician soon to be unemployed. Domenici, in Class II, will have to face the voters in his state in 2008 if he wants to retain his seat, and he is already in the doghouse over the firing of David Iglesias. He knows he’s in trouble there, because he hired Lee Blalack, consigliere to the powerful and connected when they think they might end up in the slammer.

Sure, it’s purely political, and somewhat craven, to abandon a position they held “on principle” right up to the moment it was no longer politically expedient to do so, but whatever route they took to arrive, they got there. It will be up to their constituents to hold them to account next November. In the meantime, it’s up to us to keep the pressure on the powerful and make certain they cast votes accordingly. Next November is coming, and accounts will certainly be settled. But in the interim, I will take all the Republican defections I can get if will get my brothers and sisters the fuck out of the sandbox.

[Cross-posted from Watching Those We Chose and OOIBC Caucus Central]