idiots

wow, it seems like the government is full of idiots. the senate intelligence committe just voted 12-3 in favor of bush’s nominee for cia director, michael hayden. this comes after these same people openly criticized hayden prior to his nomination and said he would be the wrong choice. hypocrisy anyone? ok, so people are entitled to change their minds... so what? this dude was responsible for the program to wiretap phone calls people make with other people overseas, meaning the government actually listens to what you say sometimes if you call the wrong people overseas. and the much bigger, wider telephone surveillance program he did at the nsa was one where they didn’t really listen to what you said, they just knew who called who at what number and when the call started and ended. this much bigger program is the one that is meant to monitor ALL phone calls in the united states, using “data mining” to look for “suspicious calling patterns”, and this is the one that the qwest phone company turned down, while verizon, bellsouth, and at&t all said yes. since my phone company is verizon, i am pretty pissed off. this is supposed to be a free country, and we have the bill of rights, yet the clowns in the senate flip-flop, and after dissing general hayden and saying he’s the wrong guy for the job, now they suddenly think he is awesome. wtf? at least 3 senators on the committee managed to remember to bring their brains inside their heads, including the only senator i actually trust to do the right thing consistently, russ feingold of wisconsin. russ feingold is that rare type of politician who actually means what he says and consistently stands up for what is right and opposes what is wrong instead of looking at polls and being a flip-flopping pansy like over 90% of the politicians in washington. the rest of them are mostly idiots.

speaking of idiotic politicians in washington, there is this corrupt democratic congressman from louisiana named william jefferson (without the clinton at the end). he took bribes and stashed the cash in his freezer. what a friggen moron! that dude is gonna go to jail, so the democratic leadership had best not defend him, or else their whole campaign of openness, honesty, and anti-corruption is going to look a little shabby come november. and yesterday i was watching the idiots in congress debate a bill that would keep us from giving any aid to the palestinian authority as long as it is run by hamas (with a few silly exceptions that don’t mean anything). the chief person arguing for it is a guy i like to call “dracula”, namely congressman tom lantos of california. tom lantos is the ranking member on the house international relations committee, but what really gets me about him is that he is hungarian and has a strong hungarian accent. i am half hungarian and have many hungarian family members with strong accents, but i have always sort of thought of them as sounding like dracula, but nobody sounds more like dracula than tom lantos. the other person in the house i have a nickname for is “dr. evil”, a.k.a. bill thomas, chairman of the ways and means committee. that is because when he talks, he sounds exactly like dr. evil from the austin powers movies (although he does look completely different). oddly enough, they are both from california. anyway, this bill that dracula and his colleagues were arguing in favor of was really really dumb. see, there are these people called “muslims”, and they “dislike” this country called “the united states of america”, because of its “foreign policy”. if “the united states of america” had better “foreign policy”, the “muslims” might not “dislike” it anymore. but does dracula care? no, he and his friends are all supporting this bill that would make it illegal for the united states to help pay the salaries of people who work for the palestinian authority. the palestinian economy depends on the salaries of these public sector employees being paid (many of them are nice, harmless people such as elementary school teachers and doctors and nurses). the palestinian territories are much poorer than israel, which is a wealthy country. if we want muslims to stop hating us, we have to show that we care about them and don’t want to dominate them with imperialism. helping out the palestinians would be a nice way to do this, and another nice way would be to withdraw our troops from iraq and instead of spending so much money on the military occupation, we would just give all those billions directly to the iraqi government and to non-governmental organizations to spend on rebuilding the country. and we should stop being assholes to the iranians, who just want nuclear power plants, not nuclear bombs. they say they just want nuclear power and not bombs, and if we do not believe them, why do we not simply allow them to make power plants but use weapons inspectors to make sure they are not building the bombs? instead we want to prevent them from making nuclear power plants in the first place, or prevent them from enriching any uranium. back when the shah was in charge of iran, the united states government supported giving them nuclear power and having them enrich uranium. and we are helping india out with this, even when india never signed a non-proliferation treaty and iran did, and even though india has nukes and iran doesn’t! we are such hypocrites! this is a main reason for muslims to dislike us, because we are discriminating against iran due to its islamic government. iran has a much better human rights record than saudi arabia, but you never hear us criticize the saudis for executing innocent people; they are our allies with all the oil, so we let them do whatever the fuck they want. most of the 9/11 hijackers were from saudi arabia, yet the saudis never let us question their friends or family... and yet we are friends with the saudis and enemies of the iranians, when the iranians have not done anything bad to us since the iranian hostage crisis over 25 yeas ago! and why do we like general pervez musharraf in pakistan so much, when he is a fascist dictator? what about a. q. khan giving pakistani nuclear secrets to iran, libya, and north korea? why do we turn a blind eye to the fact that osama bin laden is alive and well and lives in pakistan? and what is the deal with our puppet leader in afghanistan, hamid karzai? he was once a part of the taliban, but he is an opportunist who changed sides when he saw which side his bread was buttered on. we need to stop trying to build an empire in the middle east with these rogues, and treat the countries there in a more consistent, less discriminatory manner. if we had a more compassionate, less imperialist, less idiotic foreign policy, we might be able to have some more success in stopping all this anti-americanism and terrorism.

but one thing i am thankful for is the re-election of mayor ray nagin in new orleans. he is one guy who will tell it like it is and not fuck around with bullshit like the other politicians. he was running against the brother of a senator and son of a former mayor, the lieutenant governor of louisiana, mitch landreiu. enough with the cronyism and family political dynasties! i have had enough of the adamses, the roosevelts, the kennedies, the bushes, the clintons, and all the other families that aspire to be american royalty. one president john adams was enough. two president roosevelts were enough. jfk and rfk were enough. the first bush was enough. bill clinton was enough. just say no to political dynasties! they are un-american. but ray nagin is the quintessential american, with his folksy dialect and no-nonsense attitude. he is the man who can rebuild the Chocolate City! his phone call to that radio station during hurricane katrina was, quite literally, a Real Wake-Up Call (cuz it really was a call, since it was a phone call). now earlier i was talking about idiots, and yes it is probably true that ray nagin is an idiot, but he is a good idiot, the kind who actually cares.

and one last idiotic thing about the middle east... our idiotic prez-o-dent is endorsing the israeli prime minister ehud olmert’s proposal to unilaterally draw the borders between israel and palestine. wow is that ever dumb. i mean, hello? that is not going to get us any brownie points with the people who are waiting for their 72 virgins in heaven after they achieve martyrdom. i mean, come on... there is a big fight, i wouldn’t call it a civil war, between the palestinian factions of fatah and hamas, but both of them have their armed wings that engage in terrorist activity. even fatah, the beloved fatah of yasser arafat and mahmoud abbas, has terrorists in it: the al aqsa martyrs brigade, to be precise. but we negotiated with them! we are still willing to talk to mahmoud abbas, even though he has terrorists under his command. so why not talk to hamas? i mean, yes, hamas does do terrorism and it does want to destroy israel, but isn’t that even more of a reason to talk to those bastards, to try and talk some sense into their crazy little heads? if we ostracize them, they will just get nuttier and nuttier, and hate us even more. if we want them to stop doing terrorism and recognize israel, why don’t we tell it to their face instead of telling them what to do from washington, d.c. and we have to recognize what terrorism really is. terrorism is not an ideology or a group of people. terrorism is a military tactic used in unconventional war. terrorists are not criminals in the law-and-order sense, although they could be considered war criminals perhaps. really what they are is soldiers in a war against us. and their tactic is to attack easy targets that are not defended, rather than well-defended military installations, and to use bombs and the element of surprise to their advantage in this war. but we must not confuse the issue of what terrorism is; it is a military tactic, and a very good one, but often it violates international law. really we are fighting a war against islamic extremists. but some of what we do in this war could probably be called “terrorism”, depending on how you define the word, which is why we should not refer to terrorism in the first place. it is better to think of hamas as an army fighting a war against israel, rather than a bunch of terrorists; terrorism is just the tactic that the army of hamas uses against the army of israel in the war the 2 armies are fighting. the army of israel uses tactics like collective punishment, but we do not call them terrorists, so why use this term in the first place, when it simply leads to confusion? if we regard this as a military conflict, then of course the leaders can meet and negotiate a peace treaty, just like robert e. lee met with ulysses s. grant to negotiate a peace treaty when their armies were fighting. let us not complicate the issue with irrelevant terms like “terrorism”. we can denounce their terrorist military tactics as violating international law, and call them war criminals, but there is no 3rd option besides law enforcement problem and military conflict. the u.s. government is trying to portray terrorism as something that is neither a law enforcement problem (so no due process or trials for terrorists) nor a military conflict (so no geneva convention for enemy combatants), but something else entirely (so terrorists have neither the protections afforded criminals nor those afforded captured enemy soldiers). this hypocrisy must end, and unless we choose the ridiculous option of calling them criminals, we must recognize them as enemy soldiers under international law. and, as enemy soldiers, once we capture them, we can keep them imprisoned until the war against them is over, without putting them on trial; all we have to do is afford them geneva convention protections while they are imprisoned. this doctrine of declaring them to be enemy soldiers could also be helpful to israel, since it could simply achieve military victory against hamas and then demand an unconditional surrender. this would be just like robert e. lee and ulysses s. grant, who was sometimes referred to as u. s. grant, with the u. s. standing for unconditional surrender, since this is what general grant demanded of the confederacy. such an unconditional surrender at the end of world war i could have possibly avoided the indignations that germany suffered that led to adolf hitler coming to power and world war ii occurring. anyway, that is all for today. adios!