The week was full, folks and beginning in the most American of ways, at the Super Bowl. Bush releases a fatal blow, known also as his budget, upon an unsuspecting public and continues to claim he was abused by intelligence. We all now know intelligence has never been kind to George Bush. The CIA's Tenet finally speaks out, Halliburton keeps on bilking and Georgia's school system backslide's into the primal goo.

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The Vast Right Breast Conspiracy

Within milliseconds of broadcasting Janet Jackson's bared breast to tens of millions of Americans during the Super Bowl half-time show, CBS expressed disappointment with...themselves. Unbeknownst to most folks, the producer of the studded-star spectacular, MTV, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBS/Viacom. Justin Timberlake, also a wholly-owned subsidiary of CBS/Viacom, apologised for the "wardrobe malfunction," a phrase now quickly insinuating itself into the modern lexicon. Demonstrating an amazing and gifted prescience, Timberlake had no sooner uttered the words, "I'm gonna have you naked by the end of this song", when the boob burst forth from it's dark and leathery confines.

Perhaps the more interesting aspect of this incident to the BHC is the rapidity with which this "event" swallowed the attention of the media so completely that it proved to overshadow the continued pounding Bush has been taking on subjects ranging from the WMD scandal to lackadaisical job creation to the ferocious deficit spending of the White House budget released this week. Michael Powell, chairman of the FCC, called for an "investigation," though just what that might entail remains unclear. Considering that CBS/Viacom has a strong lobby in Washington (see the BHC, Vol 10, Can't Trouble the Public), we at the BHC really don't expect much to come of any such disingenuous posturing but we cannot help but delight in the karmic retribution being doled out to CBS after denying MoveOn.org a 30 spot for an anti-Bush television advertisement, proclaiming a need to spare the public from "controversial issues."


http://www.salon.com/ent/wire/2004/02/02/breast_malfunction/index.html

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I Have a Dream

Bush loosed his "budget" on an unsuspecting American public this week. A 2.4 trillion dollar whopper in which no account of the Iraq quagmire is made. The BHC presents a few highlights and some guest commentary:

..."the largest increase in the defense budget since the Reagan administration."

...the deficit was a "legitimate matter of concern."...But by trimming domestic spending...

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967


http://www.washingtonpost.com

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A Known Unknown

The UK paper, The Observer, reported this week that American officials concluded last May that no weapons of mass destruction, or even those of middling destruction, would be found in Iraq. Yes, folks, a British paper published what we at the BHC might rightly consider a significant story while mainstream US media fiercely engaged in serious discussions of the meaning of Super Bowl Sunday's most horrific event.

Intelligence sources, policy makers and weapons inspectors...[said]it was widely known that Iraq had no WMD within three weeks of Baghdad falling

Not only was this known, but now it is evident that Bush engaged in yet more chicanery with the deployment of the Iraq Survery Group (ISG) while fully knowing that nothing would be found. This bogus hunt cost US taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, but compared to Bush's other dangerous and capricious endevours, that amount is peanuts. We at the BHC can't quite imaging what members of the ISG would actually be trying to do, knowing full well that their "job" was pointless.


http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1136314,00.html

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Abused by Intelligence

The title of this item is a phrase making the rounds in the White House and the mainstream media these days. But our phalanx of researchers at the BHC can't quite understand how almost everyone seems to have forgotten all reports and all the White House fulminations of just a couple of years ago. Bush's mendacious claim that he was abused by intelligence delivered by the CIA is truly astounding and that the media is letting this claim slide, nay, even supporting it is, to paraphrase Roosevelt, not only servile but practically treasonous. Two years ago, the CIA was being scewered by neocon hawks because it was unwilling to sound the alarm about Iraq's WMD. Now a commission has been appointed to investigate why it's warnings were overcooked. But...they...weren't...but they're being investiga...it's all madness. Does the media not recall its own reports of Cheney, his unprecedented visits to the CIA and his subsequent "encouragements" of agency staff regarding playing up the WMD scare? And what of Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon, established to shriek about WMD and discount the CIA's more reasonable and sound position? We at the BHC were wondering about all of this and then we saw Paul Krugman's recent column and it allayed our fears that we were somehow hallucinating it all.

Let us all now review the recent histories of the senior administration themselves, shall we:

Cheney, Sep, 2001: "Saddam Hussein's bottled up."
Cheney, Jan, 2003: "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

Rice, July, 2001: "We are able to keep arms from [Saddam]. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
Rice, Nov, 2002: "[Iraq is] armed with weapons of mass destruction."

Rumsfeld, 1998: the whole Iraq WMD program was smoke-and-mirrors*
Rumsfeld, Jan, 2003: "Saddam Hussein possesses chemical and biological weapons"

Powell, Feb, 2001: Iraq is "contained" and "threatens not the United States."
Powell, Feb, 2003: Iraq's WMD pose a "real and present danger to the region and to the world."

It is apparent from the above, that the quickest flip-flopper is National Security Advisor Rice. It took her a mere 17 months for her to think no one would remember what she had said about Hussein and Iraq.


* To be fair, Rummy never said this. He was on a panel which made such a conclusion. Find the tale of the flip-flop hawks at the Center for American Progress.

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Tenet-ive

Finally, with his agency under attack by the media and the White House, CIA chief George Tenet comes forth and defends, sort of, his agency and the intelligence they provided:

"Let me be clear: Analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs, and those debates were spelled out in the estimate," he said. "They never said there was an imminent threat."

Unfortunately, instead of just standing by this position, he feels some weasly need to equivocate:

"[Hussein] had the intent and the capability to quickly convert civilian industry to chemical weapons production."

Huh? Hell, East Timor can do this if they really wanted to. What kind of a threat is this supposed to be? Why, George, why? Your people deserve better than this and we'd all cheer if you let loose on Bush. And we know you want to.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17286-2004Feb5.html

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WMD is now TUMI

Tony Blair is certainly maintaining par on this column's course these days. Despite his being cleared by Great Lord Bloody Hutton in David Kelly's death, he continues his flailing in that monstrous sand trap of Iraq and the WMD fiasco. Of course, to dear Tony, the weapons were not really the problem but that Saddam Hussein possessed “total, unrepentant, malignant intent”. That's right gentle readers, TUMI can get one into a whole lotta trouble these days. And it's evil stuff, too.


http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040204.wbrit0204/BNStory/Front/

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Wrong in Law

While Alistair Campbell would like everyone to accept Lord Bloody Great Hutton's decision that the British government is populated by dummys and that the BBC viciously published untruths that they are not, the BBC appears to be standing up to the judge's decision and is producing more evidence that, indeed, the Andrew Gilligan story that Blair's cabinet "sex-up" the dossier on Iraq WMD is true and supportable. A report produced by the BBC demonstrates that Hutton ignored key testimony and other evidence in the inquiry into David Kelly's suicide and further asserts that Hutton's decision is "wrong in law." Readers will recall that Kelly, a UN weapons inspector, was exposed as the source of Gilligan's report and then promptly killed himself rather than face the ignominy of being prooved correct.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/hutton/story/0,13845,1136307,00.html

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Halliburton...AGAIN

Fresh off fleecing US taxpayers by overcharging for fuel from Kuwait, the Pentagon is now investigating Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, for allegedly overcharging $16M for food services for troops who were never served or even existed. At one camp in Kuwait, Camp Arifjan, billing charged for 42,042 meals a day when only 14,053 meals were actually served. In an hilarious statement, KBR says that in will pay back the money until it can show its billing practices are "appropriate." Of course, when your intent is to cheat the US taxpayer and you do, those practices would seem to be perfectly appropriate. How is it that these clowns are still over there on these contracts? Oh, that's right, we're all thinking about Janet's boob: the shame, the shame!


money.cnn.com/2004/02/02/news/companies/halliburton.reut/

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Science-Free Zone

Georgia "educators" took an astounding leap back in time by proposing removal of the word "evolution" from science classes and called for scaling back all that crazy talk about how old the Earth is and natural selection. Georgia clearly doesn't want it's residents troubled by such astounding new ideas. We here at the BHC would wish state superintedent, Kathy Cox, just slip back into the primordial muck whence she so obviously and recently emerged.


query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html

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Interview with the Vampire

It was a much anticipated event. George Bush's appearance on Meet the Press was expected to be as much of a show for Tim Russert to shine as it was for Bush to simply say all the crap he always says. We at the BHC certainly didn't anticipate any great new things coming out of the president's mendacious mouth but we certainly were hoping Russert would ask the tough questions. Russert, sadly, has let down America by allowing Bush to spew all usual White House lines despite their inability to withstand the slightest scrutiny. The president claims he was "surprised" by the lack of weapons in Iraq. As a gauge of unexpectedness, that doesn't carry much weight with us. The BHC imagines George Bush is also surprised by the sun in the morning.

Now, admittedly, Russert did ask about that whole being AWOL from the National Guard during Vietnam but didn't really push it. Bush blithely claimed he had put in his time and then said he would release his records. Of course, he also claimed that he would do so during the 2000 campaign. Bush has never released any of his service records. With all the administration's blague about the Iraq debacle, soaring deficits, poor job recovery, that Russert chose to hammer away on this piddling detail seemed odd...and annoying.

We can't finish this off without a few juicy burps. Displaying not only an grotesque disconnect from reality, Bush continues to just plain lie:

- Asked about the loss of 2.2 million jobs during his presidency, he said, "There is good momentum when it comes to the creation of new jobs."

He can't get through this without taking a shot at Clinton, even if it is a canard:

- "If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch,in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have [sic] steadily declined," he said.

The Post graciously points out this boner: "Federal discretionary spending has grown by more than 25 percent in the past two fiscal years, following average annual increases of 2.4 percent in discretionary spending in the 1990s".

Russert could have and should have nailed him on this. The apposite response to Bush's clearly incorrect statement would have been to point out the facts. Pathetically, Russert sits there like a pudding, seemingly unaware of the facts himself.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23494-2004Feb8_2.html

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it's a madhouse...a madhouse....