Liars being honest for once

A cluster of admissions today gives us a glimpse of how much we can trust our leaders:

Republican congressmen say, "everybody thinks that Iraq was a mistake." I guess you were too busy strutting and chest-bumping to let us know that.

John McCain says he never considered himself a maverick. Sheesh, after building an entire persona around that?

Our military brass covered up two sickening incidents, just now admitting the cold-blooded murder of two pregnant women and a teenage girl, among others, then attempting to hide the evidence in an especially grisly way. The other is a 2007 video posted by Wikileaks from a helicopter gunship slaughtering 12 people, including two Reuters employees, with the crew celebrating.

Every now and then the mask slips and we see the rot underneath.

Are we looking Presidential yet?

I was going to wait until Obama's world tour was over to blog about it but there's just too much juicy stuff happening. It's already clear that this trip has been an unmitigated disaster for... John McCain. Earlier this spring McCain had belittled Obama for not going to Iraq and Afghanistan to see for himself the conditions there. So Obama went.

Obama first landed in Afghanistan, where he met with Hamid Karzai and stated that more troops were needed there to combat the resurgent Taliban. McCain, on the other hand, thinks Iraq borders Afghanistan, and didn't get the memo that Czechoslovakia is no longer a country.

In Iraq, Obama met with Maliki, who agreed with Obama that 16 months would be a good timeline for the troops to leave, deftly puncturing one of McCain's main assertions, the famous Hundred Years.

Then Obama went to Israel and met with both the Israeli government and Palestinian leaders, meanwhile, stateside, a new poll has him more popular among Jews than Joe Lieberman.

Obama now heads over to Germany where a projected million people are expected to hear him speak. Then on to France and England, where he is also wildly popular. It will take a long time to repair the damage Bush has done to America's image abroad, but if this is any indication, electing Obama will get us off to a running start.

At the same time, John "Offshore Drilling Now!" McCain had to cancel an appearance on a Gulf oil rig due to an approaching hurricane and since all the press is on Obama's plane anyway, canceled his famous press availability. McCain needs a vacation.

Nobody believes you anymore

The media and the White House are spinning frantically over former Bush spokesliar Scott McClellan's new book in which he claims that he's just an honest man given bad information by his bosses. It's pure bullshit, of course, but what surprised people is that he would turn on Bush with such venom. What's not surprising is that former Bush lackeys want to scrub off the filth of this administration that they wallowed in so long. McClellan has an inkling of how badly he's going to look in history so he wants people to think he was manipulated.

In his book he states that Bush wanted all along to attack Iraq, cherry-picked facts to suit him and had no plan for the war once we were there. This has been common knowledge for those of us on the left for, oh, six years now. The White House and what's left of its squad of apologists are in full attack mode, aided by a nervous media, desperate to conceal its complicity. The scrambling by both these groups of people over the next few weeks will be fun to watch. And this can't be good for John McCain.

Honoring the troops

Today is the day we honor the soldiers killed in our wars. How do we do that? The traditional way is with ceremonies, speeches and parades. I was never one for ceremony. Ceremonies are big symbolic displays that have very little connection with reality. Everyone is expected to join in and any questioning of meaning is considered to be in very poor taste. It's holidays like this when the questions should be asked. I think asking why we keep adding to our roll of war dead is long overdue.

I think asking why we take time to honor the dead soldiers while ignoring the living ones is long overdue. I think asking why our soldiers are overseas "fighting for our freedom" while our own government is eroding it is long overdue. I think asking why our government expects our troops to make the ultimate sacrifice in wars that they themselves profit from is long overdue.

I think a change in who runs our government is long overdue. Making that change would be a real way to honor the fallen.

You said it, not me

The Republican National Committee is honking and beeping about this ad the Democrats are running in North Carolina. The RNC claims the DNC is spreading false information and misleading the public.

Huh? How can they mislead the public? McCain does all the talking. Republicans keep claiming that McCain never said he wanted to be in Iraq a hundred years. Well, here it is.

The Bottom Line on McCain

He was tortured in Vietnam. He voted to continue torture. He sold out his own principles. It's that simple.

Speier Comes Out Swinging

Talk about hitting the ground running! Her first speech in Congress and the Republicans run for the door. More of this, please.

More Republican Math

So Bush magnanimously declared that the troops only have to stay in Iraq for 12 months instead of the 15 that they're currently sweating under. At the same time, Petraeus says that they can't bring anymore troops home from the "surge" because the Iraqi army is still not ready. Let me get this straight. We can shorten the tours but we can't decrease the amount of troops over there? How will this work? We can't get troops from anywhere else because the army is already stretched to the limit.

Oh, wait. This is The Math. You know The Math Karl Rove cited when he guaranteed a Republican win in 2006.

More McCain

From MoveOn.

Shut Um Down

This is awesome. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union is stopping work for eight hours in all west coast ports on May 1, which is International Workers' Day, to protest the Iraq war. The longshoremen have a proud history of protesting unjust wars like this one. You might remember at the start of the war, the longshoremen demonstrated at the Oakland docks, resulting in the police wading in and shooting indiscriminately with rubber bullets, wooden dowels, bean bags and tear gas.