Poli Want A Wrap Up

There's been some interesting events in the political arena recently that I wanted to touch on.

First: The First Twins party in which some loser band named Fuel opened up the show with "Welcome to the Fucking USA, the best fucking country on earth" or some such stupidity that basically turned the crowd against them in a heartbeat.

And they'd wanted Kid Rock first but since he sings about drugs and sex the powers that be thought that would be a bad idea. So they bounced him and replaced him with Fuel. Nice work.

And then Bush, showing just how with it he really is, said after they finished playing "Three Doors Down, you guys were great" or something to that effect. Basically, he screwed up their name. Nice. Now people think 3 Doors Down dropped f-bombs at the Bush inauguration.

Second: There's been an awful lot of fallout following Zephyr Teachout's disclosure that the Dean campaign hired two bloggers to blog about them in a positive light and ensuing Wall Street Journal story. And the GOP has tried to spin this tiny and privately funded mistake into the same size criminal actions as Armstrong Williams' acceptance of $240,000 to shill for "No Child Left Behind". The two are completely different scales of "crime". One actually is a crime, the payola for Williams for his shillwork to push No Child Left Behind. The other was just a badly worded, badly timed expose of some of the inner workings of the Dean campaign.

Why am I commenting on this? Because Zephyr Teachout and I grew up together, her older sister was in my class and I ran cross country with both of them. And it bothered the hell out of me to read some of the slander and hate being leveled at her.

The bloggers in question were not being paid to be Dean fan bloggers, they were paid for technical insights into setting up Dean's own Dean for America blog. Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos noted that he was consulting for Dean on his home page and the other blogger, Jerome Armstrong, put his blog on hiatus during the work for Dean.

And the fucking GOP spin machine is trying very, very hard to make the Dean bloggers and the No Child Left Behind payola scandal out to be the same thing when they are patently not the same. The Dean blogger issue might have the appearance of impropriety whereas Armstrong Williams was a bought and paid for and undisclosed GOP shill trying to shine up the turd that is No Child Left Behind. One's legal, if ethically challenged (and that's a stretch) and the other is completely illegal, unethical and paid for with tax payer dollars. Anyone not willing to see the difference isn't worth the breath to argue with.

Third, Condi Rice as the secretary of state is a fucking joke. She's a liar and has been publicly called on it. She has no qualifications to be Secretary of State but that's okay, Colin Powell had tons of credibility but no power, she's got power but no credibility.

One thing I have to give the Bush White House, they know how to keep things interesting. Its when they aren't saying anything at all that I tend to get really worried. And when Iran starts boasting about how they could rebuff a US-led attack. That shit doesn't play well with our cowboy president and I'm worried he's going to declare war on Iran next.