Ask GW
There's a website called www.sweetjesusihatebilloreilly.com. By the url, you can probably guess the theme of the site. Anyway, O'Reilly is asking viewers to send in questions they would like to see the bed-wetting host ask the President when he interviews him later this week. The website suggests these for starters:

"Here goes:

* I know you're a decent man and are concerned about the civil rights of every citizen. I mean,
you've been there. Tell us, how were you treated all those times you were arrested?

* You claim to have served in the Alabama National Guard, but no credible witness says you
were there and a few insist you weren't. Can you name a single fellow guardsman you drove
drunk with or bought cocaine from during your tenure in Alabama?

* On July 14, 2003, you said, referring to Saddam Hussein, "We gave him a chance to allow
the inspectors in and he wouldn't let them in." Are you fucking retarded or what?

* You were famously captured on film dawdling in an elementary school after you heard
confirmation from your chief of staff that the country was under attack. Later that night, you told a worried nation, "Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government's
emergency response plans." What all concerned citizens want to know, of course, is what did
happen to that pet goat?

* Where's the budget surplus? Or, if you prefer, where's the budget surplus, dickhead?"

Wish I saw it...
This is from www.wonkette.com.

"A Wonkette operative sends along this (unofficial) transcript of last night's edition of Jeopardy. We're not sure the contestant got the answer wrong. . .

Double Jeopardy
Botswana for $1200

THE INHABITANTS OF BOTSWANA CALLED THE SAN ARE ALSO KNOWN BY THIS NAME THAT COULD APPLY TO CHENEY & ASHCROFT

Contestant 'Sam': Uh, what are Dick?

(Awkward studio laughter.)

Alex: No. . . "What are Bush men?"

I think people like Donald Rumsfeld because he is insane. I mean, he says stuff that makes Dick Cheney look like Phil Donahue. Even people like me find him amusing at times because he's so nuts.

This comes from www.democraticundergound.com

"We have an exciting new standard for American foreign policy! In recent weeks various reports have been released revealing the scope of prisoner abuse and torture in Iraq. According to one, "there have been about 300 allegations of prisoners killed, raped, beaten and subjected to other mistreatment at military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay since the start of the war on terror." According to another, "commanding officers and their staffs at various levels failed in their duties and that such failure contributed directly or indirectly to detainee abuse."

But don't worry about it! See, here's what Donald Rumsfeld had to say about the torture scandals last week: "Has it been harmful to our country? Yes. Is it something that has to be corrected? Yes. Does it rank up there with chopping off someone's head off on television? It doesn't." And there you have it, folks. As long as something isn't as bad as chopping off someone's head on television, we can do it. Talk about lowering the bar..."

Perspective...
I rarely feel compelled to e-mail people who have blogs. I did e-mail this bozo, after reading his comments about the National Guard document forgery.

His name is Hugh Hewitt and he's among the great number of conservatives who think document forgery and lying is A-OK when we're going into war, but damn if it is acceptable when it has to do with President Bunnypants and his half-assed military service.

Here's what I wrote to him:

You wrote: "A great national scandal involving forgery and blasting the folks who got fooled has had the effect of alerting us all to the embarassment of getting duped..."

Are you talking about the Nigerian documents and the false WMD claims here? Oh, I guess those falsehoods aren't as important as the Rather documents.

Sorry about the confusion.

Good one
From salon.com, check out this response from Joe Lockhart.

"You may have seen the headlines this week: "Top Dem rips Kerry campaign." The "top Dem" in question is Tony Coelho, the former House majority whip who resigned early on from running Al Gore's campaign in 2000. He is also known for taking charge of the 1994 congressional midterm elections for Dems, only to suffer the worst defeat in decades. But when he says publicly that the Kerry campaign is in chaos, people listen, especially reporters.

Coelho's complaints about the Kerry campaign were frank and cutting. There's no national message. There is noone in charge. And most recently, the Kerry campaign's addition of Clintonistas like James Carville, Paul Begala, Joe Lockhart and Mike McCurry, who are at odds with campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill and strategist Bob Shrum, will only make things worse, Coelho charges. "You have these two teams that are generally not talking to each other," he said. The internal strife is fueled by money, Coelho says. "Because in the Democratic Party the consultants get paid for the creation and the placement of [advertising]. Republicans only pay you for the creation."

Needless to say, the Kerry campaign has not received Coelho's comments warmly -- and say they aren't taking them seriously, either. In a jab that sounds a lot like recent murmuring about Bob Shrum, Lockhart tells Salon: "We get a lot of advice from a lot of quarters. We tend to take it from people who won something."

Giving his father the finger...
This is from www.dailykos.com. Guess who said it?

"Had we gone into Baghdad -- we could have done it, you guys could have done it, you could have been there in 48 hours -- and then what? Which sergeant, which private, whose life would be at stake in perhaps a fruitless hunt in an urban guerilla war to find the most-secure dictator in the world? Whose life would be on my hands as the commander-in-chief because I, unilaterally, went beyond the international law, went beyond the stated mission, and said we're going to show our macho? We're going into Baghdad. We're going to be an occupying power -- America in an Arab land -- with no allies at our side. It would have been disastrous."

That would be the first President Bush, in a 1998 speech to Gulf War veterans.

Everyone's an expert
If you were drowning and there was a Democrat nearby, chances are he'd throw you a cinder block. Check out these helpful quotes about John Edwards in today's New York Times:

"He needs to put a little Tabasco in his message," said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's campaign for president in 2000. "He needs to go out, and he needs to do the attack. There needs to be some sharper contrasts, and John Edwards can make that case."

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, a friend and an adviser to Mr. Kerry, criticized the tenor of Mr. Cheney's assaults on the Democrats but said that they were "probably helping the president."

"We've got to give him hell and tell the truth," Mr. Biden said, "and that requires laying out the obvious lies of Cheney and calling him on that. Somebody should be doing that."

Asked if it should be Mr. Edwards, Mr. Biden responded, "Theoretically, yes."

And Tony Coelho, a Democratic strategist who also, early on, ran the Gore campaign in 2000, said: "The Bush camp is using Cheney in a much more aggressive way than the Kerry camp is using Edwards. What they do with Cheney is go out there and be the hammer, when necessary, but also the validator."

"It doesn't seem that Edwards is in it all the time," Mr. Coehlo said, "They use him a little bit as a hammer, but not a lot. I don't understand it. They need it."

Geez. Biden once ran a go-nowhere campaign for President, while Brazile and Coelho had their fingerprints on the failed Gore campaign. Some experts.

Paging Mr. Rove...
I don't really care much about the possibly forged National Guard documents. There's plenty of evidence elsewhere (see US News and World Reports) that shows W didn't fulfill his duty.

But where do you think those documents came from? Hmmm. Let's look at Karl Rove's history: in an earlier race he managed for the Texas governor's seat, he called a press conference the day of a crucial debate, claiming a security company he hired to sweep his office found a listening device. Rove blamed the opposing campaign. Representatives from the security company refused to go under oath to explain how they found the bug. Wonder why?

Then during the 2000 election, an unsolicited videotape of Bush debate prepping showed up on the Gore campaign doorstep. They turned it over to the FBI, but Rove cried, "Foul"!

But why would he set this whole document shebang into motion? First, he knew that several media outlets were sniffing around Bush's service and that there were real problems with his record; second, he knew he could rely on a group of right-wing media waterboys to carry the ball for him in helping to claim the documents were false and the Democrats had forged them.

Think about it: within hours of the "60 Minutes" report, a bunch of righty website were claiming the documents were forged. Were they all really experts on typography? Please.

And what's the controversy about now? Not W's service; it's about the documents. And think about who wins that debate: Rove.

Compare and contrast
Think about those sick bastards in the Pentagon and White House -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle -- living in luxury after they retire. Now think about those poor bastards who went to war and ended up with limbs blown off, eyesight gone, or debilitating traumas that will last their lifetimes.

And right-wingers call the hatred of Bush "irrational"? Say what you will about Clinton, but there aren't any poor kids learning how to walk on artificial legs because he had to prove himself by jumping into a fake war.

This is from the UPI wire service:

"Among veterans from Iraq seeking help from the VA, 5,375 have been diagnosed with a mental problem, making it the third-leading diagnosis after bone problems and digestive problems. Among the mental problems were 800 soldiers who became psychotic.
A military study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July showed that 16 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq might suffer major depression, generalized anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. Around 11 percent of soldiers returning from Afghanistan may have the same problems, according to that study."

Get ready to rumble...
Maybe now, Kerry's campaign will start chucking some elbows. This comes from Paul Waldman on www.gadflyer.com.

"Here's an excerpt from the Salon.com review of Kitty Kelly's book:

George H.W. Bush and wife Barbara dismissed Bill Clinton as a pathetic hillbilly when he challenged the incumbent in 1992. But, Kelley writes, Clinton was one of the few Bush opponents who knew how to back them down. As colorful stories from Clinton's sexual past in Arkansas began to surface during the campaign, a Clinton aide began digging into the senior Bush's own robust adultery. This included, writes Kelley, two long affairs -- one with Jennifer Fitzgerald, Bush's White House deputy chief of protocol, who, as the Washington Post once slyly put it, "has served President-elect George Bush in a variety of positions," and one with an Italian woman with whom he set up house in a New York apartment in the 1960s.

The Clinton aide told Kelley, "I took my list of Bush women, including one whom he had made an ambassador, to his campaign operatives. I said I knew we were vulnerable on women, but I wanted to make damn sure they knew they were vulnerable too."

After the eruption over Clinton's mistress Gennifer Flowers died down, sexual infidelity did in fact become a moot issue in the campaign.

This tells you a little something about why John Kerry is calling on Clinton's people. They know who they're dealing with, and they know how to play hardball."