Kit Bond is retiring from the Senate.

Before torture became fashionable--and legal--Kit Bond was one of only ten Senators sick and amoral enough to endorse Dick Cheney's abominable bill that would have authorized the CIA and the President to torture terror suspects. Ten Senators. Out of a hundred. Ninety decent men and women refused to vote for that outrage.

But that was about a year BEFORE the Military Commissions Act, which eventually DID give our Pervert-in-Chief the 'legal authority' to allow waterboarding, extreme positioning, threats, etc to obtain questionable intelligence. It passed with a comfortable margin, but it accomplished the exact same goal Cheney's bill tried to earlier--legalizing torture ordered by George W. Bush.

Against every international law on the subject, including the Geneva Conventions, which is, last time I checked with a constitutional scholar, a treaty that TRUMPS any mere statutes passed by Congress. When a law contradicts another law, there are precedents long ago set that determine which has the right to overrule the other. Treaties are the highest laws in the land, yet they are routinely ignored or tossed aside if inconvenient--especially by conservative Republican Presidents.

I'd been hearing rumors for months now that Bond was going to retire. He looks ill. He probably is. I'd also heard rumors that he would resign immediately, and at the last second outgoing extreme conservative Republican MO governor Matt Blunt would appoint his own father, Roy Blunt Jr, to the remainder of Bond's term. Blunt is politically dead, so it couldn't send his image any further down the toilet if he did that.

We'll just have to wait and see, and this scenario has just an outside chance of becoming reality.

This Bush Legacy Road Tour is beginning to make me nauseated. If I hear a commentator tout Bush's "AIDS in Africa" efforts ONE MORE TIME, I'm goin' Elvis on my radio...

Little known fact: Bush's "AIDS in Africa" initiative had plutocrat fingerprints all over it, from the very start. That original $3 billion promised had strings attached that were absolutely unacceptable for most African nations. What strings?

Here in St. Louis, Monsanto Corporation is a Forbes 500 heavyweight. In the late 90s and until Bush' initiative, though, their stock price was in the tank. Organic foods and pesticide- and herbicide-free farming were becoming real factors in American diets and buying habits. And genetically-modified plants and foodstuffs were WIDELY REJECTED, not just by the American public, but EVERYWHERE. People didn't need it, want it, or trust it.

But since when has what the PEOPLE wanted EVER mattered to a true plutocrat? To a Boy King like George W. Bush?

Bush and his henchmen threatened Europe with a tariff and imports war if those nations chose to honor their own LAWS, and not allow GM foods into their ports and markets. The EU folded like a cheap suit, and complied. And Bush's "AIDS for Africa" $3 billion's strings attached?

That money, besides the ridiculous 'abstinence only' bullshit it insisted on (which killed more Africans than a sensible 'free condoms' policy would have), would not have been distributed unless the country receiving the money agreed to allow not just GM foods imported from the U.S., but FORCING farmers to use GM seeds in their crops. This information has never made national headlines, but the stories were in the St. Louis Post Dispatch and the weekly alternative rag The Riverfront Times--briefly, and then heard no more.

The sad truth is: Nearly all Africans eating that food felt it was poison. Before it was forced on them, it was anathema to them to eat GM plants. It may have been based on superstition and their traditional values, but before Monsanto got its way, very few African farmers or their customers would have allowed GM plants into their country by way of imports, let alone begin planting them in their own backyards.

We hear about the $3 billion in these propaganda circle jerks...but has the program been a success at all? Have the deaths from AIDS, and the percentages of the population acquiring the illness dropped?

Of course not. If it had, the talking heads would be screeching it from their lapel microphones. Not that they give a flying fuck at a rolling donut that Africans' lives were being saved.

And finally: When, ever, has money given to an African government actually benefited its people? Can you think of a greater waste of taxpayer money than giving billions to African governments? Trying to help its people? Building infrastructure for them? Good idea. Digging wells and building schools? Fine. Building roads and making loans directly to farmers and other small businesses? Sounds like a plan.

But giving them cash and making them promise to propagandize abstinence in order to stop AIDS? It's just more neocon wet dreams, folks. Don't be fooled. George W. Bush has succeeded, in eight long years of 'work', in about half a dozen accomplishments that actually were good decisions.

This is not one of them.

Juan Cole is an excellent writer. Calm, organized, confident, thorough, fully knowledgeable. He blasts each and every lie and propaganda volley as it comes down the media pike. His voice is acid, yet fully contained and fact-based. He is a hero of the blogosphere.

His latest article at salon.com is a short, perfect brief of the utter failure of the Bush administration's and neoconservatives' foreign policy...there is no other word for their folly but FANTASIES.

"Wet dreams" works well for me, too.

I remember the Bad Old Days, in the first term of the Bush Trainwreck...the story was something like this:

Would Bush's handling of the economy result in a net loss of jobs for his first four years? The first time ever, since Herbert Hoover?

The economy and the weekly jobs reports raced to the finish line. And, just in time for his second Inauguration, the December jobs report conveniently put him in the PLUS side, at the rate of a few hundred thousand jobs (Never mind that most of those December jobs were, as usual, part-time temporary seasonal jobs). He presided over nearly four (?) million jobs lost in the Internet bubble, and in the aftermath of 9-11. 

...what Dianne Feinstein thinks, at this point, about ANYTHING--much less whether her feelings were hurt when Obama didn't consult her or brief her about his appointment of Leon Panetta. Like I care.

This same Dianne Feinstein who provided cover for the Bush administrations' last year and a half of hijinks at the Justice Department, by 'personally' vouching for Michael Mukasey, a more mute and less spotlighted but nevertheless just as criminal Attorney General as Alberto Gonzales. Ditto for Chuck Schumer, whose ability to interpret Mukasey's personality and future performance is on par with George W. Bush's ability to read Vladimir Putin's soul by looking into his eyes.

Feh. Only two more weeks until the Inauguration, and I'm feeling LESS optimistic than I did two weeks ago. This too shall pass.

The above 'obscenities' cannot begin to describe the depth of my contempt for those who participated in the detainment, torture and wrongful accusations of innocent Muslims in the aftermath of 9-11.


To wit:


LAHORE, Pakistan -- When Muhammad Saad Iqbal arrived home here in August after more than six years in American custody, including five at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.

...

The maladies, said Mr. Iqbal, 31, a professional reader of the Koran, are the result of a gantlet of torture, imprisonment and interrogation for which his Washington lawyer plans to sue the United States government.


Of all the legacies of the Bush administration, of all the debt incurred by them, all the theft of Treasury monies towards illegal wars, the trillions of dollars thrown down the military industrial complex rathole, the money these prisoners will receive as a result of lawsuits demanding restitution for their illegal detainment is money spent on JUSTICE.

It is no exaggeration to claim that George W. Bush is the Worst President Ever. That phrase, as extreme as it sounds, leaves out so much...