Friday  December 1 , 2006

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

Christy and I went into Colville and did some more shopping and bought a piece for the breathing machine Monica uses when she has an Asthma attack.

I watched Calie play two games, she played half a game in Metaline Falls with the JV team and about 5 minutes with the Varsity Girls at Selkirk High... they won the JV game easily but lost the Varsity game by one basket in a really good game against the Cusick Bulldogs.

Conservative talk show host 'punks his audience

I think the most intriguing aspect of this article is that it surprises anyone. Walk into just about any bar or VFW Post in America and you can hear some Ditto Brained pinhead espouse the same hateful solutions to the problem. That did not exist before the BWII (Bush War II)... it's pretty scary. This country has been in denial since 9/11 and before. We are the most uninformed, gullible, apathetic, ignorant nation on the planet.

Saturday  December 2 , 2006

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

Carl Jung

Christian made a date to meet a girl at the movie and then decided not to go... I told Mike to take him. Cindy and I went to the Cutter thearter and watched and listened to a group of guys called I Tromboni. They play trombones, they are really excellent, I had a good time..

 

Sunday  December 3 , 2006

I expect to pass through this world but once, any good thing, therefore, that I can do, let me do it now…for I shall not pass this way again.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last night Christian and I had to go out and fetch Mike who ran the snowmobile out of gas up on Smackout Pass (Great name isn't it) He was about 7-10 miles back in the mountains in over a foot of snow. I drove back in there with my old Chevy and got stuck pretty bad about 5 miles in and was forced to stop looking for him and start worrying about getting Christian and I out when he walked down the road. With Mike and Christian in the back of the truck I got enough traction to get turned around and back down the mountain. Mike and Christian went back in after the snowmobile today... took him 5 hours but he got it out. The kid is as dumb as an ear of corn but he is persistent.

Between taking Monica to Practice and Calie to her boyfriends house I watched as much Football as I could.

 

Bush is in denial

By Robert Fisk

12/01/06 "The Independent" -- -- More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia - and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself - as he apparently did in Amman yesterday - that the United States will stay in Iraq "until the job is complete"? The "job" - Washington's project to reshape the Middle East in its own and Israel's image - is long dead, its very neoconservative originators disavowing their hopeless political aims and blaming Bush, along with the Iraqis of course, for their disaster.

History's "deniers" are many - and all subject to the same folly: faced with overwhelming evidence of catastrophe, they take refuge in fantasy, dismissing evidence of collapse as a symptom of some short-term setback, clinging to the idea that as long as their generals promise victory - or because they have themselves so often promised victory - that fate will be kind. George W Bush - or Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara for that matter - need not feel alone. The Middle East has produced these fantasists by the bucketful over past decades.

In 1967, Egyptian president Gamel Abdul Nasser insisted his country was winning the Six Day War hours after the Israelis had destroyed the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. President Carter was extolling the Shah's Iran as "an island of stability in the region" only days before Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution brought down his regime. President Leonid Brezhnev declared a Soviet victory in Afghanistan when Russian troops were being driven from their fire bases in Nangahar and Kandahar provinces by Osama bin Laden and his fighters.

And was it not Saddam Hussein who promised the "mother of all battles" for Kuwait before the great Iraqi retreat in 1991? And was it not Saddam again who predicted a US defeat in the sands of Iraq in 2003? Saddam's loyal acolyte, Mohamed el-Sahaf, would fantasise about the number of American soldiers who would die in the desert; George W Bush let it be known that he sometimes slipped out of White House staff meetings to watch Sahaf's preposterous performance and laugh at the fantasies of Iraq's minister of information.

So who is laughing at Bush now? Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, almost as loyal a retainer to Bush as Sahaf was to Saddam, receives the same false praise from the American president that Nasser and Brezhnev once lavished upon their generals. "I appreciate the courage you show during these difficult times as you lead your country," Bush tells Maliki. "He's the right guy for Iraq," he tells us. And the Iraqi Prime Minister who hides in the US-fortified "Green Zone" - was ever a crusader fortress so aptly named? - announces that "there is no problem". Power must be more quickly transferred to Maliki, we were informed yesterday. Why? Because that will save Iraq? Or because this will allow America to claim, as it did when it decided to allow the South Vietnamese army to fight on its own against Hanoi, that Washington is not to blame for the debacle that follows? "One of his frustrations with me is that he believes that we've been slow about giving him the tools necessary to protect the Iraqi people." Or so Bush says. "He doesn't have the capacity to respond. So we want to accelerate that capacity." But how can Maliki have any "capacity" at all when he rules only a few square miles of central Baghdad and a clutch of rotting ex-Baathist palaces?

About the only truthful statement uttered in Amman yesterday was Bush's remark that "there's a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there's going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq [but] this business about a graceful exit just simply has no realism to it at all." Indeed, it has not. There can be no graceful exit from Iraq, only a terrifying, bloody collapse of military power. The withdrawal of Shia ministers from Maliki's cabinet mirror the withdrawal of Shia ministers from another American-supported administration in Beirut - where the Lebanese fear an equally appalling conflict over which Washington has, in reality, no military or political control.

Bush even appeared oblivious of the current sectarian map of Iraq. "The Prime Minister made clear that splitting his country into parts, as some have suggested, is not what the Iraqi people want, and that any partition of Iraq would only lead to an increase in sectarian violence," he said. "I agree." But Iraq is already "split into parts". The fracture of Iraq is virtually complete, its chasms sucking in corpses at the rate of up to a thousand a day.

Even Hitler must chuckle at this bloodbath, he who claimed in April 1945 that Germany would still win the Second World War, boasting that his enemy, Roosevelt, had died - much as Bush boasted of Zarqawi's killing - while demanding to know when General Wenck's mythical army would rescue the people of Berlin. How many "Wencks" are going to be summoned from the 82nd Airborne or the Marine Corps to save Bush from Iraq in the coming weeks? No, Bush is not Hitler. Like Blair, he once thought he was Winston Churchill, a man who never - ever - lied to his people about Britain's defeats in war. But fantasy knows no bounds.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited