January 17, 2010 archive

Late Night Karaoke

Open Thread

More “Change” From President Obama

President Obama’s track record has been stunning in its all out embrace and expansion of the corrupt Foreign Policy of the past 8 dark years (and with it, the total rejection of what people voted for) —  a darkness Obama won’t let any sunlight near.

Here’s the latest from Obama:

The Obama administration quietly announced Friday the appointment of John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, to head the internal investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Delta airliner headed for Detroit as well as the events leading to the shootings at Fort Hood in November.

With this appointment, President Barack Obama has assured that the culture of intelligence cover-up will continue. McLaughlin has participated in and sought to cover-up many of the CIA’s most egregious failures and misdeeds of the past decade. When he left the CIA, he then served as the agency’s chief apologist.

So, who is John McLaughlin? Most of official Washington and the mainstream media view McLaughlin as the mild-mannered, professorial CIA bureaucrat, who former CIA director George Tenet called the “smartest man he had ever met.”

Few people understand, however, that McLaughlin played the most important role in making sure that the Bush administration received the intelligence that would be used and misused to justify the use of force against Iraq in 2003.

Washington insiders remember that it was CIA director Tenet who told President George W. Bush, “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk,” in response to the president’s demand for stronger intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to provide to the American people. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the “slam-dunk” briefing to the president in January 2003.

McLaughlin was the “villain” behind the politicized intelligence on Iraq in the run-up to the illegal war. He perverted the intelligence process, ignored high-level briefings on the weakness of the intelligence on WMD and then tried to silence David Kay, the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, when the weapons inspectors found no evidence of strategic weapons in Iraq.

When Kay returned to CIA headquarters from Baghdad, Tenet and McLaughlin made sure that Kay was given a tiny, windowless office at the end of a distant, deserted corridor undergoing construction. It had no secure phone or classified computer. Kay called it Siberia.

Continued…

The day the Klan picked the wrong people to mess with

“You saw those cars coming, and you knew who those men were. They wanted you to see them. They wanted you to be afraid of them.”

 – Lillie McKoy, former mayor of Maxton talking about the KKK

 By the mid-1950’s the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and the KKK decided they had to fight back. Their campaign of terrorism swept through many of the southern states, but largely fell flat in North Carolina.

  James W. “Catfish” Cole, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, decided he was going to change that. Cole was an ordained minister of the Wayside Baptist Church in Summerfield, North Carolina, who regularly preached the Word of God on the radio. His rallies often drew as many as 15,000 people.  As Cole told the newspapers: “There’s about 30,000 half-breeds up in Robeson County and we are going to have some cross burnings and scare them up.”

 Cole made a critical mistake that couldn’t be avoided by a racist mind – he was completely ignorant of the people he was about to mess with.

Hollywood Confidential

Just a little musical response to those who mistake malicious gossip for political analysis, judgment, and working towards serving the public good.

My mama didn’t raise me for a fool.

I rarely gossip publicly.  But as buhdy said in Happy Pony Joy Rainbows! and spies:

Wherein I simply cannot, in the face of THIS much stupidity, keep from lowering myself to personal attack. Mea culpa. Hopefully it will serve some higher purpose, But how can one NOT respond to this level of blatant hypocritical insanity, when one is one of the targets of it?

Ta, dahlings.

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