Honorary Doctor of Evil!

Evil Dr. Rove with Dr. Evil

Presidential Advisor Karl Rove was awarded an honorary doctorate of evil by Dr. Evil's Cruelty University this past Saturday for actions above an beyond the call of evil.
Rove told the assembled College of Evil that his career started at nine years of age:

Unfortunately the little Catholic girl down the street was a couple years and about 20 pounds on me...When she saw me on my bike...She put me on the ground, flattened me out and gave me a bloody nose.

Premodified Image: Getty Images, New Line Home Entertainment
- posted by Sean @ 10:47 PM 0 comments  

 

Stoke the fires, alert the timpanist and cue the billowing clouds of green smoke for the great and powerful man behind the curtain has ascended, after only a week or so of screaming global headlines, from his comfortable undisclosed rearguard location, to focus flying monkey outrage and the occasional RNC blastfax, as usual, on a diversion:

Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had…People ought to get off his case and let him do his job.

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen.
Dick says that Rummy’s the best and, by gosh, that should be good enough for the rest of you worthless and likely deviant drags on the global economy, so there.
Reports that I have seen did not indicate if the Vice President then crossed his eyes, stuck out his tongue or waggled fingers from his ears as his intemperate knee-jerk tone suggests.
From many years prior experience with the schoolyard bully type, I have to wonder if the bloodless chief architects of the Iraq diversion have, even yet, realized the utter futility of their present corner-painted position.
Crimes directly resulting from inept statecraft so gross as to make the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” seem inadequate are, still, easily glossed and pigeon-holed by the draft-dodging corporate elitist Dungeon Master several, for now, hidden removes from the rubber-gloved action.
The powers, as indirectly indicated by the Vice President’s late Saturday evening statement, are still furiously battling to force a handful of, I think purposefully scapegoated, enlisted to take the torture fall.
As the enlisted families are now or will soon discover, games within games, a need to know basis and plausible deniability all once guaranteed an invisibility no longer digitally tenable for politician or bureaucrat.
Was it just the poor Iraqis who were gamed or could our once proud young soldiers, too, have been sold down a river of purposely-tainted training and command?
It all seems so very Enron and a part of a standard modus operandi; innocents left holding a stinking bag.
Except, this time, the innocents had digital cameras.
I emphatically urge the families to stand their ground.

NOTE
The exciting new blog look is courtesy of the great people at Blogger.com.
Some things, like my vast archive, are currently buggy.
I am, of course, technofuddled and urge reader patience!

Modified Image: South Park, Reuters



- posted by Sean @ 11:40 AM 0 comments  

 
Where is Col. Joe Dowdy?

What really happened to the Commander of the 1st Marine Regiment at the conclusion of the first week of the Iraq war?
From April 6, 2003 to the time of this post, the Colonel has literally vanished from the face of the Earth.
Are there lessons in Dowdy's historic removal for investigators exploring the path to Abu Ghraib?

The Marine Corps relieved one of its top commanders in Iraq yesterday, an extremely unusual action, especially for a unit engaged in combat...The U.S. military was unusually guarded about discussing the reason for the battlefield removal. The Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the war, announced the action but offered no explanation for it.
--Thomas Ricks, Washington Post, April 5, 2003

Collins: Now, obviously we don't want to speculate too much here, but there has been talk of some criticism from the battlefield for Secretary Rumsfeld and the battle plan. That may have had something to do with this.
Turner: It's obviously totally and wholly inappropriate to have those kinds of discussions by active forces actively engaged in combat. And if that was the case, that would be pretty much a show-stopper. But again, we really don't know what it was, so it's really -- we shouldn't speculate on exactly what caused it.
Collins: Right, right. And that being said, I do want to make it clear, though, that it is illegal, I mean, flat-out illegal for an officer to make those sort of comments during combat, right?
Turner: That's correct. It's -- there are very clear constraints on active duty military forces and how they address, and how they refer to the civilian chain of command.
--CNN, April 5, 2003, 9:08 ET

Mr. Russert: In a very unusual move, your fellow Marine, Colonel Joe Dowdy, was relieved of his duties as a commander in the field. Why did that happen?
General Pace: It would be inappropriate for me to sit here in Washington and make judgment on that. That was a chain of command decision made in the field, and I would leave it at that.
--Meet The Press, April 6, 2003

But, as we have observed, the Iraq cheney of command was, to use a rummy word, fungible.

Photo: USMC
- posted by Sean @ 11:55 AM