do you feel like a remnant of something that's past


max cole, north face, 2006

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

"2. Joe Lieberman

"Now let's take a look at the final days of the doomed Lieberman campaign. Here are some clues as to why he ended up handing his nomination to a guy nobody had heard of six months ago.

"In a speech the day before election day, Lieberman blasted Lamont saying, 'That's something that separates me from my opponent - I don't hate Republicans. I know that some times the best way to get things done in the Senate for my constituents is through bipartisan cooperation. That doesn't make me a bad Democrat. It makes me a better senator.'

"Joe said this while standing next to former Senator Max Cleland. 'My opponent has done his best to distort my record,' Joe remarked, 'spending at least $4 million of his own money to mislead people into thinking that I am someone I am not - not unlike what happened to Max Cleland four years ago.'

"Lest we forget, here's what happened to Max Cleland four years ago: the triple-amputee Vietnam veteran lost his bid for re-election after Republicans ran TV ads comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and called him unpatriotic and soft on national security. Republicans did that. The same Republicans that Joe wants to shake hands with and pat on the back.

"Mind you, Lieberman wasn't above using similar 'soft on national security' charges against Ned Lamont. 'If we simply give up and pull out now, like my opponent wants to do, then it would be a disaster to Iraq and to us. We would run a high risk of allowing Iraq to become like Afghanistan when the Taliban were in charge, and Al Qaeda had safe haven from which to strike us,' he said. Perhaps that's why Joe gets on so well with Republicans - they give him such great talking points."

* Bush and Cheney's Reign of Error, an editorial. excerpt:

"These people have no shame. Their contempt for democracy is so great they will stop at nothing to undermine it. Their adherence to fundamentalist beliefs that blinds them to reality is frightening. They must be stopped.

"And that's just the Republicans.

"Let's start with Vice President Dick Cheney.

"Yesterday, Cheney bashed those who voted for Democrat Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Senate primary, claiming that these votes would encourage 'al Qaeda types' to think that 'they can break the will of the American people.'

"The idea is that since 18-year incumbent Joe Lieberman lost based on his support for Iraq, Americans opposing the war are waving a white flag of surrender to terrorists.

"This is stunningly ignorant logic, as well as annoyingly consistent with the Bush administration's fundamentalist myth that Iraq had ties to al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden - a claim by now well-discounted, most notably by a presidential commission.

"And yet the presidential fog machine has continued to belch out its Iraq-al Qaeda-link fumes to the extent that a recent poll suggests that 64 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to al Qaeda. More people than ever now believe, according to a new poll, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
...
"Cheney's comments came out a day before British intelligence officials announced they had thwarted a major terrorist attack. Surely Cheney was aware of the plot and the work to thwart it, and was no doubt aware of the timing of yesterday's announcement.

"To exploit a very real terror threat that could have led to major casualties, and to even indirectly implicate Americans who were exercising their democratic right by going to the polls and making a choice borders on the criminal, to say nothing of the insane.

"Has Cheney completely lost it?"
...
"The immoral and ridiculous claims coming out of the Bush administration's reign of error could ultimately be responsible for the kind of casualties that al Qaeda can only dream of."

--- related: London plot is political 'life preserver' for Bush.

* video for Mountain Goats' Woke Up New.

* rock stars that went back to work.