Adapt and WIN!! err, or maybe not.

White House Photo/Eric Draper

So chimpy met with the usual cast of fools this morning at the White House and decided all those mean folks in Iraq were just trying to make him look bad. Bush: No Iraq Pull Out Until 'Mission is Complete'

President Bush met today with his top advisers and military commanders on Iraq, but he offered no indication of change in strategy in his weekly radio address where he vowed not to pull U.S. troops out until "the mission is complete" and said one of the causes of the increased violence in Iraq is the enemy's desire to break America's resolve.

"The terrorists are trying to divide America and break our will, and we must not allow them to succeed . . . ," Bush said.

He met with his council of fools and then went for a nice bike ride. Let's see, 78 soldiers dead already this month, suicide bombings, mortar attacks on civilians and a mounting toll of abducted and murdered civilians by death squads. Can't let reality get in the way of his fitness program.

Heck of a job, Bushie!!

Pay no attention to the coffins

AFP/Ali Yussef

I'd like to say that this is unbelievable, but in this era of the PR presidency, the UN is reporting that Iraq Seals Data on the Civilian Toll.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 20 — The United Nations office in Baghdad says that Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, has ordered the country’s medical authorities to stop providing the organization with monthly figures on the number of civilians killed and wounded in the conflict there, according to a confidential cable.

The cable, dated Oct. 17 and sent to United Nations officials in New York and Geneva by Ashraf Qazi, the United Nations envoy to Iraq, says the prohibition may hinder the ability of his office to give accurate accounts in its bimonthly human rights reports on the levels of violence and the effect on Iraqi society.

Concern over the numbers of civilians who have died in Iraq has risen sharply at a time when organized attacks by insurgents are swelling the numbers of victims and when a new report from a team of Iraqi and American researchers shows that more than 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion.

I have no doubt that Bush told al Maliki that he needed to do something about the bad news coming out of Iraq if he wanted continued support from the US government.

What a travesty. Pretending civilians aren't dying in droves there isn't going to make it so. And nothing Bush does in his PR offensive is going to erase the stench of this catastrophe.

American voters won't be fooled either. The pictures don't lie.

I want to take a moment to salute the Iraqi photojournalists who have continued to work in incredibly dangerous circumstances to bring the truth to the world. Regular readers may have noticed that the photographs I post here often have arabic names in the captions. These are the stringers working for the Associate Press, Agence France Press and Reuters. The fact is that it is just too dangerous for western journalists to work in Iraq unless they are embedded with a military unit. The locals have stepped into the gap, risking their lives on a daily basis to bring the story to the world. We owe them our gratitude.

BTW, in the photograph above, a family is putting the body of one of their relatives into a coffin. He was killed in what is now commonly labeled as "sectarian violence," a sanitized description if I ever heard one. Just another of the nameless victims that chimpy and his puppet al-Maliki want to hide from the world.

Appalling.

QUOI??????????????

Overheard on Eschaton:

"Mena is Way cutier than the most adorable kitty."

Simply shocking. Though Mena is awfully cute.

Happy Friday!

Lion kitty Maxx is looking for the friday news dump- it's 4:00 pm in the east, so it should be any second now.

Late night lion kitty

It's gotta be friday somewhere.

Can you say....

Reuters/Jason Reed

...petulant little pissant?? I knew you could.

Kind of blurry

The previous plushy pic was a little bit fuzzy. I apologize, and give you more plush to atone for my sin.

Aiiiii YAHHHHHH!!!

"Whatch doing, four legs?"

So many things to talk about, and so little time to post. Visit with Mr. Plushy in the meantime.

Congratulations Vicki!!!

You are a superstar.

Swamped!!

I am back in the office and swamped, so please visit some of the nice folks on my blogroll. And give Mr. Plushy a virtual scritch.

His favorite spot

Maxx is a funny little guy. He picks a spot he likes to nap in and sticks with it for weeks at a time, then for no reason that I can see, he'll abandon it for a new favorite spot.

His current one is the floor of my closet. Silly cat.

RIP Habeas Corpus

Jonathan Turley on Countdown just now:

"This congress has just handed the president despotic powers."

I wonder when the American public is going to wake up? And are republicans aware that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 applies to American citizens?

Guess what, republicans? President Hillary Clinton is going to be able to lock your cracker asses up and throw away the key. How do you like those apples?

Stupid fucks.

And Ken Mehlman, you fucking penis head, kiss my centaur ass.

Lion kitty

A nice side effect of having his centaur home is that lion kitty Maxx gets to enjoy some time outside during the daylight hours.

The Eye!! the Eye!!

The fabulous watertiger points us to this bit of insanity from little Ricky Santorum, They really don't come any dumber:

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) explains the Iraq war by citing Lord of the Rings: “As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum told a newspaper editorial board. “It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

As usual, he gets it ass backwards. We aren't the hobbits, off on a brave quest against the evil empire of Mordor. If you ask the rest of the world, we are Mordor. We are the uruk-hai. We are the evil hordes that invaded a country and devastated it.

I'd laugh at the level of teh stupid, but it just isn't funny anymore. The only consolation is that Pennsylvania voters are about to throw little Rickey out on his puppy raping ass.

A little strong? Hey, there is NO evidence that santorum doesn't rape puppies, is there? I thought not.

photo illlustration courtesy of watertiger

Monday afternoon

Once of the nice things about taking a sick day is the four hour nap I got to take with Mr. Plushy today.

He is such a good boy.

Brits go home

Reuters/Atef Hassan

Taken in Basra on Monday, a boy throws a rock at a burning british army vehicle.

Perhaps Poodle Blair would like to reconsider his "stay chimpy's course policy." I don't think the locals want you there.

Monday Plush

I'm at home today, under the weather. It's a good thing that I've got a plushy kitty to nap with.

Pony Blow, get on the rocket

The NYTimes reports that Pony Blow is out on the fundraising trail.

In the six months since Mr. Bush enlisted him to resuscitate a White House press operation that was barely breathing, Mr. Snow, a former Fox News television and radio host and a conservative commentator, has reinvented the job with his snappy sound bites and knack for deflecting tough questions with a smile. Now, he is reinventing it yet again, by breaking away from the briefing room to raise money for Republicans, as he did here on Saturday night for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert.

Mr. Snow, who will make 16 such appearances before Election Day, acknowledged he had entered “terra incognita”; to his knowledge, no other White House press secretary has raised money for political candidates while in the job. But with his star power from television and his conservative credentials, Mr. Snow, unlike his predecessors, is in hot demand.

snip

Yet even as the Republican establishment revels in his celebrity — “It’s like Mick Jagger at a rock concert,” Mr. Rove said — Mr. Snow’s extracurricular activities are making some veteran Washington hands, including those with strong Republican ties, deeply uneasy.

“The principal job of the press secretary is to present information to reporters, not propaganda,” said David R. Gergen, who served in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and also advised President Bill Clinton. “If he is seen as wearing two hats, reporters as well as the public will inevitably wonder: is he speaking to us now as the traditional press secretary, or is he speaking to us as a political partisan?”

I'm sorry Mr. Gergen, but is there any doubt? And how is this even vaguely ethical? Pony Blow is an employee of the U.S. taxpayers, not the RNC.

Not that anyone working for chimpy has ever let ethics stop them. Really, these people are beyond appalling.

Go ahead and die already

Via TPM, reader DKM has posted a link to the Tom DeFrank article about tension between Poppy and chimpy at the christening of the SS Bushie. TPM linky here:

"Forty-three has now repudiated everything 41 stands for, and still he won't say a word," a key member of the elder Bush alumni said. "Personally, I think he's dying inside."

Well, regular readers won't be surprised by my reaction:

Go ahead and die on the outside too, you fucking old prat. You put, and continue to do so to this day, family loyalty above your loyalty to this country. It's your fault as much as anyone's that your "boy" has completely fucked this country up.

So fuck off and die already.

Lion kitty Maxx

The news is agitating me today, so I'll post a picture of a fluffy kitty cat instead.

Woodward Interviews Kerry

Okay, this is a "what the hell?" post. From the Washington Post, A Conversation With John Kerry

In the months before the 2004 presidential election, The Washington Post's Bob Woodward sought to interview Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic nominee, about how he might have conducted foreign policy in the 18 months between Sept. 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. For his book "Plan of Attack," Woodward had interviewed President Bush on how and why he made decisions during that same period. Woodward gave the Kerry campaign a list of 22 questions based on Bush's actions, asking how Kerry would have responded at each key decision point if he had been president. Kerry declined the interview at the time. More than a year later, on March 7, Kerry agreed to be interviewed by Woodward and answer the 22 questions.

Okay, Woodward interviewed John Kerry more than a year after the election. Why is the Washington Post just getting around to publishing this interview now?

Piling on? Well, okay, have at it.

Or were they afraid to publish something that so explicitly criticizes the chimperor until his polls were in the cellar?

One thing's clear, the contrast between the thoughtful way that John Kerry would approach a problem and chimpy's "I listen to my gut" nonsense is startling. What a clusterfuck the entire Bush presidency has been. As Kerry said at the end of the interview:

I think history is going to be very, very tough on not just the way the war has been managed, but on the way in which the decision to go to war was carried out. It's going to be a low moment . . . in the presidency in history.

History is going to be scathing, not just on the Iraq war, but on everything this president has touched. Everything.

Meanwhile, back in hell

46 Iraq Sunnis Killed in Revenge Rampage, via the WAPO.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Suspected Shiite militiamen killed at least 46 Sunni Arabs in a weekend rampage of revenge killing in a city north of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said Sunday, raising the toll in the latest sectarian bloodletting there to 63.

A string of bombings in the northern city of Kirkuk killed 10 people, including two girls who died when a man detonated explosives strapped to his body in front of the al-Mallimin girls high school in downtown Kirkuk, police officials said.

If you read the whole article, it's a catalog of horrors. And it's the violence report from one day. I can't imagine how Iraqi civilians feel living in the middle of this carnage.

Meanwhile, the pentagon reports 5 more Americans died there:

The U.S. military reported the deaths of a Marine and four soldiers. The Marine was killed in combat in Anbar province, the Sunni heartland west of Baghdad on Saturday.

Three soldiers died in a roadside bombing Saturday south of Baghdad, and one soldier was killed in a roadside bombing Friday night southwest of the capital.

The marine appears to have been the lucky one- he was merely shot to death (I assume.) The others were blown apart by roadside bombs.

The terrible thing is that the deaths of these soldiers didn't even merit a separate article. Just more numbers, I suppose.

A pox on everyone who wanted this war.