He's now Deputy Chief of Staff, and will be even more involved in White House policy decisions

Must kill self know. I think Rove and Kissinger could team up to rule the world.


*dies*

But, would newly-minted reactionary -- though, maybe, he's always been so -- Christopher Hitchens condone, nay, propagandize for, this, or would he demand Kissinger (and Rove too, maybe) be taken before the Int'l Criminal Court in The Hague?

9/11 sure did make for strange bedfellows....

CNN reported yesterday that his new duties will have him more involved in international policy stuff. Things are gonna get worse before they get better.

Hello Iran

Bump

Unfortunately for us, Iran has as close to a functioning capitalist democracy as any country in the Near East/Islamic world, save India, which is neither Near Eastern nor majority Moslem (but I think there are somewhere around two hundred million potential Arabiac terrorists [sic] there, since if I recall correctly twenty percent of the population is accounted by Moslems, and the overall population is one billion). So, if we go in there guns blazing, we're as likely to create another dictatorship, on par with Libya or Egypt (or pre-Ayatollah Iran) as a purer [sic] democracy, if for no other reason than the Iranis will be drawn to the opposite of that which we want to impose.

As it is, right now in Iran, there is separation of the sexes, but there are female professionals -- lawyers, doctors,... members of parliament? --, and women vote, plus there are modern, western-style conveniences like fast-food restaurants (one is a straight-up facsimile of McDonald's), golf-courses, and mass-circulation, somewhat-free-to-express-antigovernment-opinion newspapers.

Oh, and the Irani arts movement, namely in film.

The Ayatollah (inadvertently) made for quite a nice little westernizing jewel there, and once the under-twenty (right now) population gets a bit older and has more power in its hands, the state will enough of a problem on its hands maintaining theocracy that we won't need to be involved. Like the Minutemen, Sons of Liberty, etc., the nation itself will throw off the shackles of tyranny [sic] and become more South Korea than (South) Yemen, more Sweden than Syria.

We just need to give it time... And dropping bombs at the drop of a hat, in six months (or less), is not giving it time. In fact, it will any exacerabate the slow, steady march of secularism.

I've stayed fairly quiet about this since all the guffawing about my stance last fall, but Bush has rid his cabinet of nearly every voice of moderation and surrounded himself with the architects of his Iraq policy, many of whom have been building and formulating this form of first-strike foreign policy for decades.

We are in trouble. If we attack even one more nation, hell will break loose. The chain reaction will be horrific.

All because one group of dickwads thought they had "long-term vision for the world's freedom," as defined, formulated, orchestrated and enforced by that same group of dickwads.

I ache for our nation's soldiers, who are mostly folks who simply are serving their country. Unfortunately, those who are fabricating the crises are also expert at painting all dissent as both unpatriotic and despicable. Because how can you be against freedom, for god's sake?

"......after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship ... That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

-Hermann Goering

that's my bush!

I saw a quote in the Washinton Post yesterday that said "He pretty much runs everything anyway, so all this is just a title change"

FUCK EVERYTHING!