Cheney Coming Out Of The Closet ...

That's all folks.

Case closed.

*(Cross posted across at 'appletree')

It's Raining Money in Baghdad!

From the Associated Press:

It is a politician's dream: Handing out cold, hard cash to people on the street as they plead for help. Iraq's prime minister has been doing just that in recent weeks, doling out Iraqi dinars as an aide trails behind, keeping a tally.

The handouts by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and a handful of other top officials are authorized — as long as each goes no higher than about $8,000, and the same people don't get them twice. Aides say they are meant merely to ease the pain a bit, and are motivated by a belief that better conditions will lead to more security.

The cash handouts are just one small — if eye-catching — part of a major investment push this summer by Iraq's government. The aim is to rebuild basic services and jumpstart Iraq's damaged economy by quickly distributing as much of the country's glut of oil revenue as possible.

It's not hard to see what's going on here. Iraq has an important round of provincial elections scheduled for October 1, and the current governing coalition will almost certainly lose badly to the Sadrists in key provinces like Basra and Baghdad. Recent government assaults on the Sadrists in those provinces were repulsed, and Prime Minister Maliki wound up scrambling to negotiate a face-saving truce. Now he's walking the streets of Baghdad with sacks of money, handing out cash in amounts that more than double Iraq's per capita GDP.

Imagine George W. Bush authorizing military occupations of New York and California and handing out $100,000 bundles of cash to selected individuals during the run-up to the 2006 elections.

But neither Maliki's new carrot nor his old stick seem to be pushing the Iraqis in the direction he wants them to go. So his coalition is trying a different approach: refuse to pass a new election law, thus delaying provincial elections until at least 2009. Realistically, the law has to be in place by the end of this month in order to have elections on time. Whether or not the law will pass by then likely depends on how successful Maliki is with his latest vote-buying scheme.

If this were happening in any other country, the American press would rightly denounce Iraq as nothing more than a sham democracy. But that would mean having the courage to point out to Emperor Bush the fact that he isn't wearing any clothes, and that's a lot more courage than we can expect from our craven media.

(hat tip to Czaiye Camacho, cross posted at appletree)

Friday Baghdad (and elsewhere) Bombing Blogging ...

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Brilliant.

Absolutely, bleeding brilliant.

US launches massive Iraq air raid

US bombers and fighter jets have dropped 40,000lb (18,144kg) of bombs on suspected al-Qaeda targets on the edge of Baghdad in a 10-minute air strike.

Another bloody BushCo lame-brained, brain-wave, eh?

Stick it to 'em with some more shock & awe, eh?

Shower Baghdad with some more bombs, eh?



Sure, that'll show 'em. That'll certainly secure some hearts & minds.

Eh? Eh?

And we don't think.

Oh, by the way, lest we forget.

Bush said yesterday, in Israel, that the US should have bombed Auschwitz, too.



Well, erm, yeah, George, er, maybe. We can see where you're coming from. That would have been one solution to Hitler's Final Solution, eh?

That way, there'd be a lot less surviving Holocaust survivor stories to cause any of us so many sleepless nights, eh?

Wow. What a wonderful cure for so many guilt complexes, eh?

After all, revisionist history's something your shower of shits have a lot of special expertise and experience in. Isn't it, mister?

*(Cross posted at Appletree)

Gordon Brown's Baghdad Brickbat For Tony Blair ...

So, British prime minister in waiting Gordon Brown got to Baghdad and back without the need for a flag draped wooden box form of transport - in spite of the (nine shot) shelling of the so called, so-safe Green Zone while he was there.

Well goody-goody for you, Gordon. It's just such a shame some 150 or so of our uniformed young countrymen who went were sent to Iraq weren't so sodding lucky. Eh?

Credit where it's due though, chancellor. You must have thought long and hard before deftly delivering your (hardly hidden) brickbat, so obviously aimed at your soon to be ex boss, Tony (bloody liar) Blair.

Gordon Brown has promised to prevent the "party political" use of intelligence material so that he would never repeat Tony Blair's mistake in taking Britain to war on a flawed prospectus.

On his first visit to Baghdad, the incoming prime minister said he would learn lessons from the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when Mr Blair based his case for war on intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Brown said he had already begun discussions with Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, to ensure security and intelligence material was collected "free of the party political process" and was " fully verified" if it was to be made public.

"That is learning the lessons from things that happened in the past, and we should make sure that we can do things better in the future," he said.

And how about this?

His remarks were seen as a barely coded criticism of Mr Blair and an attempt to draw a line under a controversy which left a stain on the [Blair, New Labour] Government.

Well, we shall wait to see what we shall see - before judging Gordon Brown by his actions rather than by 'barely coded criticisms'.

Read the rest of The Independent's relevant report, right here.

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Crooked McCain's Iraq Trip Con ...

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We see McCain buggered off to Baghdad to try to prove his big fat porky point about what a peaceful place it is.

Well, we wonder whether he's had a chance to see what we've seen yet.

What John McCain Didn't Tell You

by Larry C Johnson

While John McCain was excoriating the press in Baghdad yesterday for not presenting the "full story" about how swell things are in Iraq he neglected to mention the pre-visit security sweep that made that neighborhood stroll so safe.

I am sure you have already heard about the 100 soldiers, the three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships that accompanied his entourage, but did you hear about the soldiers who swept the area before the American legislators and their security team showed up?

Who cares about those mooks? They are expendable.

John McCain and Lindsey Graham put American soldiers' lives at risk just so they could have a photo op. That's the bottom line.

Why didn't they do a ride along on a real patrol? Perhaps they could have joined the U.S. team that responded to an ambush of an American patrol yesterday? Of course a total of six U.S. soldiers died in that operation.

Read the rest of this report at 'No Quarter'.

Who the hell does this man McCain think he's kidding with this kind of crap?


And anyway, in order to find out for himself any real, everyday Iraq facts at all, he needn't have bloody bothered going anywhere.

Other than right here.

And don't just take our word for it; go see for yourself.

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