A shorter edition this week folks, but the bonehead is ramping up with Bush delivering a pathetic excuse for a State of the Union address. CBS nixes MoveOn.org's bid to run an anti-Bush advertisement during the Super Bowl. The Republicans are caught redhanded again spying on the Democrats while Government Computer News says the Dems need a lesson in IT security.

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State of the Disunion

This week George W. Bush delivered yet another partisan, oratorical yawn, once known in prouder times as the State of the Union address. To the surprise of no one, he boldly claimed how grand everything is: Iraqis are free, the economy, booming. Of course, the actual state of these matters is more like Iraqis are sort of free, though not deemed capable of voting for themselves and the economy is booming while the jobs picture continues to languish as American corporations redouble efforts in sloughing off jobs to Asia and elsewhere. Perhaps the most amusing part of this non-event is to be had in parsing some notable phrases and juxtaposing them with the SotU address from one year ago. Early in the speech, Bush says,

For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can now doubt the word of America.

Hmm, good one. "...no one can now doubt the word of America." A staggering claim, especially in light of the words in the SotU one year ago:

Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax...
Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent....
Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents...
Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program...
Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Scary stuff. None of it was, is or will be true and yet the White House, or Bush's "advisors" or whoever is writing this crap has the temerity to claim no one doubts America. Wow. With no WMD to be found, what does Bush have to say this year about the hot-button issue:

the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities

Deadly, indeed. WMD-RPA.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040120-7.html

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Can't Trouble the Public

After kowtowing to Republicans when they cried foul about the docu-drama, "The Reagans," for supposedly depicting the Gipper in an unfavourable light, the Censorious Broadcasting System (CBS) continues its suppression of the first amendment by denying MoveOn.org an advertising spot during the Super Bowl telecast. Is it possible to digest CBS's reasoning that it would not run advertisements on "controversial issues of public importance?" In keeping with current trends, we certainly wouldn't expect the mainstream media to start raising issues of public importance. And certainly not during anything as sacrosanct as the Super Bowl. The "reason" is a transparent lie since CBS is running a White House-sponsored advertisement on drug policy. Or does CBS not believe that drug policy is one of the "controversial issues of public importance"? The real motivation is money and power, as usual. CBS/Viacom has spent some $4 million over the last four years lobbying Congress to push through new media ownership limits which the White House and the FCC have been trying to advance, though Congress has seen fit to at least stall the effort. That CBS and other media conglomerates can deny a public effort to use the public airwaves which are licensed to these corporations is an affront to the first admendment of the Constitution of this country. Can we all say, "liberal media"?


http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040116/tv_nm/media_superbowl_dc_1

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Computer-gate

The Boston Globe reported this week that Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee have, for over a year, been routinely infiltrating Democratic Senators' computer files regarding judiciary nominees. That might have gone nowhere had these nimrods not seen fit to leak the purloined memos to none other than Republican spooner, Robert Novak, who promptly leaked them all over the NY Times. BHC readers will likely recall that Novak is the Times columnist who leaked CIA operative, Valerie Plame's identity all over his column some months ago.

Two things: with Republicans insisting on being as deceitful and dishonest has they have been in the past, re: Watergate, Iran-Contra, Operation Iraqi Freedom, blah, blah, blah..., the BHC just can't quite come to grips with that fact that they keeping emerging from these scandals almost always unscathed. And why is Bob Novak not in prison? Revealing the identity of a covert government agent is a federal crime, ironically made that way by none other than George H.W. Bush, so why is Bob Novak not in prison? Now, we here at the BHC are not alone in our puzzlement and we would encourage readers to have a look at the Bust Bob Novak site, an amusing and excellent summary of what this treasonous prick has done and continues to do.


http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/22/infiltration_of_files_seen_as_extensive/

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Cyber-embarrassment

Naturally, Government Computer News has something to say about the above issue. Regarding what must surely be illegal Republican staffer activity, the GCN simply says that it is the Democrats fault for not observing proper computer security. The GCN story quotes one Chris Rouland, vice president of the X-Force R&D department of Internet Security Systems Inc, "It appears to be a simple security policy issue". So there it is: this is not a matter of illegal Republican activities but just of those poor befuddled Democrats who haven't quite got the hang of those computer-thingys yet. This is the computer equivalent of someone burglarising your home and the cops telling you it's your fault because you left the house unlocked and therefore the thieves aren't really doing anything illegal at all. Yeehaa! Free stuff!


http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/24702-1.html

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Smash Mouth

NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman has not, until recently, been someone the BHC normally considers crazy. He has, unfortuanately, tripped down the path of gullibility with his seemingly impassioned belief that the US is in Iraq to help the Iraqis and win the War on Terror by fighting "Islamist totalitarianism" in a country which had been run by secular Ba'athist madman, a man most Muslims detested. The BHC can't quite get a handle on that logic but more bizarre than that is a disturbing view that intolerance can, and should be, be remonstrated by...more intolerance: "sometimes smashing someone in the face is necessary to signal others that they will be held accountable for the intolerance they incubate." Yep, nothing like a good face-smashing to bring people around to your point of view. Of course, this has always been Bush's foreign policy initiative, one so lucidly advocated by Friedman.


www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/opinion/22FRIE.html

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Make it stop!