The Republican Morals

  The following post comes from Zackpunk at  Daily Kos. This hit the Republican morals straight on target.

The Right Wing is not strawberry ice cream

by Zackpunk  Wed Apr 25, 2007

Dear Mr. Sam Waterston,

Hey -- I love Law & Order. I'm a big fan. But this whole Unity '08 idea -- well, it's kind of stupid. I'm sorry, but the notion that you could run a Democrat and Republican on the same presidential ticket is about as feasible as trying to get your cat to mate with your dog.

I think I know how you arrived at this idea. You went to a Baskin Robbins and thought, "Hey, I love chocolate ice cream. And I also love strawberry ice cream. I bet if I mixed them together, they'd taste great!"

Well, I know strawberry ice cream. I've eaten strawberry ice cream. And Mr. Waterston, the Right Wing is not strawberry ice cream.

I know you spend a lot of time on the set of Law & Order. You're in makeup, you're rehearsing your lines -- so you probably don't have a lot of time to catch up on the news. So let me just fill you in on where things are at:

The Right Wing are a pack of lying, murderous thugs, whose criminal policies have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent people. They believe that they have been chosen by God, and that anything they do to maintain their power is just, and moral, and good. They believe in torture. They believe that science is the tool of the devil. They believe that women should be strapped into stretchers, slit open and left for dead, in order to save an unborn fetus that probably wouldn't make it anyway.

They have a single, unified vision: To march us back into the dark ages, where they will rule us like kings.

The Left believes in human rights, and human dignity. The Left believes that we should not be handling the war on terror as if it were a drunken bar fight. The Left believes in advancing the cause of science and reason. The Left believes that in the richest country in the world, it is wrong to let children die, simply because they had the misfortune of being born into a poor family. The Left believes in respecting the constitution. The Left believes that African Americans have the right to vote. The Left believes that we must lead the world in the fight against global warming.

I know you hate all the fighting that's going on in Washington. You complained about that on your Unity '08 website:

This Rhetoric Won't Solve Our Nation's Problems: The same day Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) introduced articles of impeachment against Vice President Cheney, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R) said that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) "are getting very, very close to treason" for opposing the Iraq war, NBC's First Read reports.

Okay. Let's take a deep breath and walk through this.

Kucinich introduced articles of impeachment against Cheney, because Cheney committed crimes. It's Kucinich's constitutional obligation to hold the administration accountable.

Tom DeLay is also a criminal. That's why you had to put the word former in front of his name. He committed crimes. And you're using him as an example of partisanship? No -- this isn't an example of partisanship. This is an example of a ruthless, power-hungry pack of fascist criminals who are trying to take over our country. Did you even read that quote? He's accusing the House leader of treason for opposing the president. That's not partisanship. That's Stalinism.

Maybe I can put this in terms you'll understand. You know how in Law & Order you have cops who try to keep the peace, and murders who kill people? Well, Kucinich is like the cop, and Cheney and DeLay are like the murderers.

Do you believe that courtrooms are too partisan? Do you believe it would be better if six of the jurors were upstanding citizens, and six of them were convicted felons?

Listen, Sam -- I know you want everyone to just get along and be happy and play nice. I sympathize with that. And I think your idea might work if we had two political parities that were working for America. But we don't -- we have one party that is working for America, and one that is working for themselves. Pairing them together is not the answer.

If you really want unity, Mr. Waterston, fight for the rights of African American voters. If you really want unity, Mr. Waterston, fight for the reproductive rights of women. If you really want unity, Mr. Waterston, fight against poverty. If you really want unity, Mr. Waterston, fight for health care. If you really want unity, Mr. Waterston, fight against global warming. If you really want unity, Mr. Waterston, vote Democrat.

Tags: Unity 08 Republicans Democrats morals

Officials Not Counting Car Bombings When Citing Drop In Iraqi Violence

    Falsified numbers? There's a surprise. Some will argue that omitting certain numbers is not falsifying them. They  may be right because it should be called lying.

 

Published on Thursday, April 26, 2007 by McClatchy Newspapers

U.S. Officials Exclude Car Bombs in Touting Drop in Iraq Violence

by Nancy A. Youssef

WASHINGTON - U.S. officials who say there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Iraq since President Bush began sending more American troops into Baghdad aren’t counting one of the main killers of Iraqi civilians.Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn’t include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

President Bush explained why in a television interview on Tuesday. “If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory,” he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose.

Others, however, say that not counting bombing victims skews the evidence of how well the Baghdad security plan is protecting the civilian population - one of the surge’s main goals.

“Since the administration keeps saying that failure is not an option, they are redefining success in a way that suits them,” said James Denselow, an Iraq specialist at London-based Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank.

Bush administration officials have pointed to a dramatic decline in one category of deaths - the bodies dumped daily in Baghdad streets, which officials call sectarian murders - as evidence that the security plan is working. Bush said this week that that number had declined by 50 percent, a number confirmed by statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers.

But the number of people killed in explosive attacks is rising, the same statistics show - up from 323 in March, the first full month of the security plan, to 365 through April 24.

Overall, statistics indicate that the number of violent deaths has declined significantly since December, when 1,391 people died in Baghdad, either executed and found dead on the street or killed by bomb blasts. That number was 796 in March and 691 through April 24.

Nearly all of that decline, however, can be attributed to a drop in executions, most of which were blamed on Shiite Muslim militias aligned with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Much of the decline occurred before the security plan began on Feb. 15, and since then radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has ordered his Mahdi Army militia to stand down.

According to the statistics, which McClatchy reporters in Baghdad compile daily from Iraqi police reports, 1,030 bodies were found in December. In January, that number declined 32 percent, to 699. It declined to 596 February and again to 473 in March.

Deaths from car bombings and improvised explosive devices, however, increased from 361 in December to a peak of 520 in February before dropping to 323 in March.

In that same period, the number of bombings has increased, as well. In December, there were 65 explosive attacks. That number was unchanged in January, but it rose to 72 in February, 74 in March and 81 through April 24.

U.S. officials blame the bombings largely on al-Qaida, which they say is hoping to provoke sectarian conflict by targeting Shiite neighborhoods with massive explosions.

Ryan Crocker, who became the U.S. ambassador in Iraq this month, said the bombings are a reaction to the surge of additional U.S. troops into Baghdad.

“The terrorists like al-Qaida would make their own surge,” Crocker said this week.

U.S. officials have said that they don’t expect the security plan to stop bombings.

“I don’t think you’re ever going to get rid of all the car bombs,” Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said this week. “Iraq is going to have to learn as did, say, Northern Ireland, to live with some degree of sensational attacks.”

But some think that approach could backfire, with Iraqis eventually blaming the Americans for failing to stop bombings.

“To win, the insurgents just have to prove they are not losing,” said Denselow, of London’s Chatham House.

Experts who have studied car bombings say it’s no surprise that U.S. officials would want to exclude their victims from any measure of success.

Car bombs are almost impossible to detect and stop, particularly in a traffic-jammed city such as Baghdad. U.S. officials in Baghdad concede that while they’ve found scores of car bomb factories in Iraq, they’ve made only a small dent in the manufacturing of these weapons.

Mike Davis, who recently wrote a history of car bombs, said that once car bombs are introduced into a conflict, they’re all but impossible to eradicate. A few people with rudimentary skills can assemble one with massive effect.

“They really don’t have to be very sophisticated; they just have to be very big,” Davis said.

Davis said checkpoints are useful in detecting car bombs “until they blow up the checkpoint,” and erecting walls is not practically feasible in communities. When U.S. officials proposed building walls around Baghdad’s most troubled neighborhoods to fend off car bomb attacks, residents balked, saying the walls would further divide the city along sectarian lines.

Bombers also have shown that they can adapt quickly. When the U.S. military blocked off markets to vehicular traffic, bombers wearing explosive vests were able to walk into the areas.

Finding a defense against car bombs has fallen to the Joint IED Defeat Organization, a Pentagon task force created in 2003 to find ways to protect U.S. troops from roadside bombs, which remain the No. 1 killer of Americans in Iraq.

But car bombs aren’t the primary killer of American service members, said Christine Devries, the task force’s spokeswoman. Roadside bombs are.

—

ABOUT IRAQI CIVILIAN CASUALTIES

There are no authoritative statistics on Iraqi civilian casualties. The Iraq Study Group in its report last year found that the Pentagon routinely underreports violence. Other groups have criticized the Iraqi government’s statistics as unreliable - a moot point since the government recently stopped releasing comprehensive totals. On Wednesday, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq chastised the Iraqi government for withholding statistics on sectarian violence.

One study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad, estimated that 78,000 Iraqis were killed by car bombings between March 2003 and June 2006.

Iraq Body Count, which keeps statistics based on news reports, finds that there have been just over 1,050 car bombs that have killed more than one person since August 2003, when a car bomb detonated in front of what was the United Nations headquarters, killing 17.

McClatchy gathers its statistics daily from police contacts, and while they’re not comprehensive, they’re collected the same way every day.

A roundup of Iraq violence is posted daily on the McClatchy Washington Bureau Web site, http://www.mcclatchydc.com. Click on Iraq War Coverage.

© 2007 McClatchy Washington Bureau and wire service sources.

Tags: U.S. officials Bush Iraq