goddamn it's so very hot
supposed to rain but it's not


Sean Cassidy, 2006

* Top ten conservative idiots. excerpt:

5. Dick Cheney

"Who said this?

"'...if we'd gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off ... It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.'

"If you said Michael Moore, sorry - the answer is Dick Cheney. Cheney made these comments in a recently-unearthed interview at the American Enterprise Institute in 1994, back before he decided to completely ignore his own advice and invade Iraq, ending up in exactly the quagmire he'd already predicted. Brilliant.

"Apparently September 11 really did change everything, including the number of American soldiers Cheney was prepared to sacrifice on the altar of his own hubris.

"From the 1994 interview:

"'The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families -- (the Gulf War) wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?'

"Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

"Hmm. And now, as I write this, 3,706 Americans troops have been killed in Iraq. So how many more dead Americans is Saddam worth, Dick?"

* The map of political faith.

* "We've come to a point where every four years this national fever rises up — this hunger for the Saviour, the White Knight, the Man on Horseback — and whoever wins becomes so immensely powerful, like Nixon is now, that when you vote for President today you're talking about giving a man dictatorial power for four years. I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England — or the Queen — and have the real business of the presidency conducted by... a City Manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who's directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years. The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics." -- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail