Who ya gonna call? Not him for God's sake.

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I would never have believed it possible. Until today that is. I’m actually starting to feel something like sympathy for George W. Bush. Now hold on a minute, let’s be clear, I’m not in the least sympathetic to his knee-jerk, pseudo-folksy, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, islamophobic right-wing views, or his vile dynastic clan of Texan butt-monkeys. But his face last night, when he was addressing the US nation to explain why they would have to bail out the greediest, slimiest, richest bunch of evil corporate bloodsuckers since Cain’s hostile takeover of Abel Inc., well, it was tragedie of the first order. If you want to know what pathos is just take a look at the footage. By the end he looked like a depressed and senile bloodhound who’s discovered that chronic flatulence isn’t nearly the worst thing that can happen to you. And that with chronic diarrhoea no-one wants to stand next to you, even more so, in fact, than they did before.

It seems George, who was clearly out of his depth (Hooray, Harvard MBA) has finally realised that he is indeed the worst President ever. Worse by far than that devious, self-obsessed, corrupt and criminal swine and liar, tricky Dick Nixon. Worse even than previous record-holder Warren Harding who famously, honestly said “I’m not fit for this office.” George’s record is now a mountain that may be impossible for any subsequent Prez to match, ever.

It's quite a list: A disastrous Iraq war that costs $10 billion a month just to go nowhere; tax-breaks that made greedy, conniving, corporate scum even richer; deregulation of everything that kept those greedy scumbags in check; a complete failure to catch the nation’s most determined enemy – who lives in a cave; the creation of Gitmo concentration camps and torture as US policy; the greatest damage to human rights and freedoms in the nation’s history; and now a bailout of Wall Street to stave off a New Great Depression that’ll cost between $700 and $900 billion.

Oh, and a trillion dollar deficit to hand over to the next guy - I’m not even sure how many zeroes that is.

And as George stumbled through the speech, letting the American people know just how bad things will be without the bailout (“Fuck me, Toto, Kansas is gone, I mean, it’s just gone!”), I got the impression that he actually heard the words coming out of his own mouth for the first time and realised just how monumental a fuckup he’d created. The vicious, venal, mean-spirited, mendacious, pugnacious and just plain nasty little man could finally see it clear.

Yes George, with all the American people on your side, united by a common terrorist enemy, with a multi-trillion dollar (how much IS that?) budget surplus and a booming economy, you screwed it up worse than you could possibly have imagined. Worse than anyone could have imagined, you Hee-Haw, down-home, nukular Tex-mex moron. They’ll have to invent new words to describe it – 'cluster-fuck' simply isn’t big enough. You’re gonna be the lesson they teach to other Presidents on the dangers of hubris, unsubstantiated self-belief and delusions of competence.

And who’re they gonna call now?

The GOP, the Party of Guns, Oil and Paranoia, has the ever lovable John, “Bucket-mouth” McCain. Mac has gratefully cleared his campaign schedule (anything to avoid a debate with that Obama guy) and is rushing back to help the “corrupt Washington insiders” he’s been so keen to slag off put together the mother of all bailout schemes. It will be fascinating to see just what he can and will do, given his ardent belief in open-slather capitalism and a market free of any kind of government regulation.

But when it comes to big money so many seeming paradoxes, flim-flam and blatant bullshit is normal. ‘Short-selling’ is a practice ardently supported by traders, brokers and other assorted maggots, con-men and spivs outraged at the temporary ban on the practice. But there’s another term for selling something you don’t own to scare people into selling lower. It’s called ‘fraud’, and that’s a crime all around the world. Unless you have the suit, the expense account and the office on Wall Street, apparently that makes you immune from jail time and a candidate for massive government handouts.

But it has to happen, apparently. And no-one could possibly have seen it coming.

“America could slip into financial panic.” says George. And he’s clearly there to lead the charge.

So what of Obama? Well, nothing really. Nothing at all. Just a determination to smile, look good and turn up for the debates whether McCain does or not. He’s relying on his grasp of semantics to win the small-screen battle and make McCain look like the dinosaur he is (McCain thinks semantics is what the Marx Brothers got up to).

Obama met with GWB, along with the old fart and made clear his determination to solve the problems, look clean and 'presidential' and wholesome and make the glorious United States of America great/proud/safe/confident/whole-grain/sexy/low-tar/super-sized/low-cholesterol/insert any fatuous poll-tested adjective here.

But of specifics? Bugger all. Not a gnat’s arse of detail. The biggest problem he faces, in fact, is that he might win the election and face the biggest clean up job since King Kong’s corpse was stinking up New York. Whoever wins they’ll be neck-deep in shit from day one. And if Obama’s an unknown quantity McCain looks dangerously underdone in the economic, foreign policy, ‘rational approach to anything at all’ department. That’s the big problem with having ‘character’ as your primary qualification; it’s no substitute for understanding, skill, wit, wisdom, knowledge or a plan.

Thank God I’m not an American.

Thank God I’m not a Moroccan too. Because then I’d be forced to draw some fairly ghastly inferences from today’s news from that beautiful, sun-kissed, date-flavoured and camel-rich country.

The government there has closed down sixty Koranic schools run by Sheikh Mohamed Ben Abderrahman Al-Maghraoui (who I’m sure you’re all aware of) who decreed earlier this month that the marriage of nine-year-old girls is allowed by Islam. A wave of outrage at this “call to legalise paedophilia” in Morocco followed the publication of Sheikh Maghraoui’s decree. Apparently the Sheikh had logically extrapolated (which is allowed in Islam but not in Catholicism) from the marriage of the Prophet (blessings be upon him) to his favourite wife Ayshea, who was nine at the time they wed. Maghraoui’s decree was apparently based on his belief that the marriage was consummated immediately, which is emphatically NOT the general view among Islamic scholars. Perhaps they should be more outraged at what Maghraoui’s decree implies about the Prophet himself.

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Pope launders dirty linen with Jewish soap!

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It’s not well known in the English speaking world that for Germany the First World War didn’t end in 1918. While American doughboys were heading home from France, Germany was falling into chaos and revolution, with Communist ex-soldiers fighting Rightist ex-soldiers for control of the various German States. In Poland fighting went on even until the early 1920’s with British troops sent in to enforce the division of Prussia. Even before the 1918 armistice German states were collapsing. In Munich on the 7^th November 1918 Communists proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet Republic, overthrowing the Wittelsbach monarchy and ushering in a period of violent attacks on opponents and ‘anti-revolutionary elements’.

Among the few foreign diplomats to tough it out and stay in Munich was Eugenio Pacelli, the 43 year old Papal Nuncio (ambassador) to Germany. Before long a gang of armed ‘Reds’ stormed his home and he was confronted by angry, uniformed men threatening his life. In a display of cool courage, staring down the barrels of their guns, the inwardly terrified Pacelli talked the murderous crew into leaving empty-handed and without his scalp. It was a seminal moment for Pacelli who would be a staunch opponent of godless communism until he died, at 82, as Pope Pius XII.

The current Pope, German born Benedict XVI, has begun the process of canonising Pius XII, that is, making him a saint. But the process has stalled over the controversial issue of the Vatican’s notorious silence during the greatest evil of the twentieth century, the Nazi Holocaust. Benedict said Thursday that Pius XII spared no effort to save Jews from the Nazis, one of the strongest ever Vatican defences of a pontiff rightly accused of silence during the Holocaust. Benedict said that he wanted any prejudice against Pius to be overcome, praising Pius's "courageous and paternal dedication" in trying to save Jews.

"Wherever possible he spared no effort in intervening in their favor either directly or through instructions given to other individuals or to institutions of the Catholic Church" Benedict said, describing many interventions being "made secretly and silently, precisely because, given the concrete situation of that difficult historical moment, only in this way was it possible to avoid the worst and save the greatest number of Jews."

Hogwash. Pure, blathering bullshit.

Complete and utter bollocks.

Codswallop, crap and confabulation.

It’s a sickening confection of weasel words and syrupy, slimy nonsense that flies in the face of the historical record, without a shred of evidence, or fact, or testimony to support it. Prove it. I double-bloody-dare you. Prove it. Stack up the times, dates, places and people involved. Surely there’s nothing that can stand in the way of the evidence for such moral courage coming to light now, after all this time? Can anyone find a reason to keep secret the heroism of Pius XII now after 60-odd years?

The AP article says Pope Benedict said that on Nov. 29, 1945, 80 delegates of German concentration camps came to the Vatican and thanked Pius "for his generosity to them." It doesn’t say whether these delegates were Jews. Neither does it mention that Nazi war criminals were hiding in the Vatican waiting for false papers and a boat trip to Argentina or Brazil at the same time.

The Catholic Church’s history during World War II and afterwards is one of shame, complicity and mutual co-operation with the worst of Nazi excesses. Don’t believe me?

In 1933 Pacelli/Pius was the architect of the Reichskonkordat, a treaty between Nazi Germany and the Vatican which traded silence by the Vatican on all political matters in Germany for the freedom of the Church to collect it’s own taxes and practice the faith without hindrance. The treaty is still in force today. As Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich put it in a sermon in 1937,

"At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with cool reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat expressed its confidence in the new (Nazi) German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad."

Later, when anti-Semitic persecution was ramped up in Germany Faulhaber wrote to Pacelli,

“We bishops are being asked why the Catholic Church … does not intervene on behalf of the Jews. This is not possible at this time because the struggle against the Jews would then, at the same time, become a struggle against the Catholics, and because the Jews can help themselves..”

This was the attitude that the Church adopted throughout the War: Stuff you, Jews, we’re looking out for ourselves. Not very nice is it? Not quite the noble and high-minded picture the Church would have you believe. Sleazy, slimy realpolitik - the cool calculation of self-interest and the complete abandoning of principle, in fact, which is fine if you’re a soulless thug, but it’s definitively not fine for a Pope.

Faulhaber, incidentally, ordained the young Jozeph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) as a priest in 1951. The picture at right shows Ratzinger as a seminary student in the 1940s giving the Nazi salute.

What’s more, the Catholic Church actively assisted the Nazis and their fellow fascists. In Ukraine in 1943 Catholic priests actively recruited soldiers for the 14th ‘Galician’ Waffen SS, and even blessed mass formations of a unit notorious for its brutality and murderous activities. In Croatia the appallingly brutal regime of catholic Ante Pavelic horrified even the Nazis, but Pavelic was given a private audience in April 1941 by Pius XII and praised for creating a “bastion against Bolshevism”.

Pavelic also funnelled money to the Vatican and later benefited from the policy of protecting and hiding vicious war criminals through the infamous ‘ratlines’ when the war ended in defeat. He made his escape disguised as a Catholic priest.

Throughout World War II Pope Pius XII remained almost entirely mute on the horrors of the Holocaust, despite mounting evidence and continual requests to speak out. As the attempt to beatify him continues more and more evidence of the Vatican’s sordid involvement in protecting Nazi war criminals surfaces.

A generous view would be that fear of “godless Communism” and his own personal confrontation with it pushed Pius XII to the political right and blinded him to the equally godless evils of fascism, Nazism in particular. It’s a Christian act to forgive him for his half-hearted condemnations of Nazi mass-murder during the war. It’s possible even for a generous spirit to forgive him for turning a blind eye to the Vatican ratlines that spirited the vilest of war criminals to South America. But is it possible to see anything good in his appeals for mercy for mass-murderers like the Catholic Einsatzgruppen leader Otto Ohlendorf when he refused to intercede for millions of victims of Nazism?

Either way, it’s not possible, given any fair examination of the facts, to think of this man as a hero, someone who stood up against the greatest evil of his time, a man who proved the worth of his office and his religion. He simply didn’t do so.

Pius XII a saint? You must be bloody joking.

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All-American Wonder Woman becomes America’s Sweetheart Hockey Milf

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Q: How can you tell if a Republican is humping your leg?

A: Reach down and wipe off the lipstick.

- If it’s a pitbull you’d better let it finish.

- If it’s a Republican you’re probably screwed for at least four years.

Governor Sarah Palin has thrown the US Presidential election on it’s ear, energising the Republican base and radically changing the odds of John McCain becoming the 44th President.

Her hugely popular acceptance speech at the Republican convention blew out the cobwebs from a relatively stale contest, and rocked the Democratic team on its heels.

Their confusion, and squeamishness in attacking her echoes an infantilised electorate’s own knee-jerk “mustn’t be mean to mommy” prejudice. As a result they’ve looked weak and ineffectual while a right-wing Republican pin-up girl has usurped their “reformer” credentials with little more than a cutesy-pie line about pitbulls and lipstick and a whitewashed resume.

The Republicans have had no qualms at all in exploiting this, decrying every less than laudatory piece of media coverage as sexist girly-bashing, and touting her selection as proof that the Grand Old Party is the true face of feminine emancipation. A truly breathtaking piece of cynicism from the Hillary-bashing ogres of the hard-right. But the real question is who the hell is Sarah Palin, and should she be put one heart-attack away from control of an over-sensitive superpower with too many guns and not enough self-control or moral credibility.

Time's on her side, and God help us all.

One thing shone through above all in her speech. Sarah Palin believes in her product, and that product is Sarah Palin. Any examination of her short political career shows that she believes with all the fervour and self-righteous self-regard of the right-wing Evangelical Christianity that informs her views. Her first TV interview with Charles Gibson was short on genuine understandings, but long on belief in herself and her mission. Which is fine if you’re the Governor of Alaska. But she shows even less capacity to tolerate facts that don’t fit faith than George W Bush, and hasn’t he been a breath of foetid air in the pursuit of international understanding and co-operation.

Sarah Barracuda’s belief in aggression and personal charm is one borne of her success, meteoric and as yet unchecked by the sobering effects of frustration, failure and critical self-examination. Time and circumstance supply these in ample measure to the well-rounded political leader, but she’s running for the White House now, and we’ll all have to live with the consequence. The wilful blindness to nuance and subtlety that so characterises the Bush tragedy is strongly evident in her self-aggrandizing, “don’t blink” approach to America’s war in Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else they decide to give a kicking. And her personal stake in having her eldest son in uniform does not bode well for this combative, gun-toting woman who flaunts her status as mother so blatantly in her political life.

Palin’s short time as Alaska’s Governor betrays her personal fanaticism, her close personal identification with God’s plan for the world. She’s shown a strong streak of vengeful, spiteful parochialism that would be disastrous played out on a world stage. Those who don’t identify with her, or whom she doesn’t identify with have been sacked summarily. Their replacements almost invariably drawn from her own tiny world of Wasilia, Alaska, generally all short on qualifications and experience but strong on personal loyalty.

Those who have had the temerity to publicly disagree, or to even privately suggest that her decisions and judgement might be anything other than perfect have been labelled “haters”. A paranoid projection so easy to throw at anyone whose opinion you don’t like, so self-reassuring and insulating from thought, analysis and sober reflection. The world is full of people who won’t agree with Ms Palin, many of them violently, many of them leaders of other nations, religions and cultures.

Her inability to draw a reasonable conclusion when facts and personal belief collide is a serious issue too. And this is a flaw that has nothing to do with gender. When you fight the good fight against the evils of abortion, contraception and sex education in high schools and then find your teenage daughter is pregnant you should be able to spot the flaw in your own reasoning: that banning sex-ed and contraception advice leads to unwanted teen pregnancies. That Ms Palin could stand up and declare that she was proud that her ill-informed and heavily pregnant daughter was going to have the child and marry the father says quite clearly that she doesn’t think worth shit.


Public policy demands a higher standard of reasoning than this. You have to be able to look beyond your own family, your own tiny patch of God’s country and think hard about the consequences of your beliefs, your principles, your much-touted values when applied to the wider world and recognise that this isn’t the happy outcome for every pregnant teen; that poverty goes hand-in-hand with unwanted pregnancy, as does child abuse, neglect and social misery that flows from generation to generation.

Tits on a bull, lipstick on a pitbull.

I had a conversation with my daughter about Sarah Palin recently. She was shocked that otherwise intelligent women could give their vote to the Hockey Mom simply because she was a woman, and that even Hillary Clinton supporters could contemplate the switch. I explained to her as best I could that in modern politics rhetoric has triumphed over reality. That spin and crafted perceptions were more important than substance in most circumstances. I told her,

“If you can come up with a statement or argument that holds true rhetorically regardless of the facts you can generally stymie any opposition. If you can craft the rhetoric, the spin, and articulate it consistently then the words are all that matter. You can prevent anyone forcing you to behave honestly or deal honestly with the facts.”

“Putin's peacekeepers in Georgia, for example, are plainly are an army of occupation. But because he calls them peacekeepers and because he can keep repeating the lie that Russia has no interest in occupying Georgia he can forestall any attempt by the West to organise against him.”

“Sell the sizzle and stuff the sausage any way you like.”

Thus Palin, for whom any convenient bending of the truth is merely a tool to promote her own advancement, which is so clearly the right thing, the best thing, the only thing that matters. The Bridge To Nowhere was a classic case of pork-barrel politics, doling out federal money to buy votes. Palin championed it until it became clear that the State would have to fund some of the cost. She dumped the project but kept $422 million of federal funds to use in her own pork-barrelling. In the big speech this becomes the “Thanks, but no thanks.” line that sent the faithful into raptures.

The lies are backed up by a culture of secrecy and deliberate deceit with the facts jealously guarded from outsiders. She and many of her people use personal email accounts to conduct State business beyond the scrutiny of public accountability. A simple request for information can be blocked by administration charges in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But she looks good. And if you don’t listen too critically she sounds good too. And she’ll win votes for McCain, which will be a problem for us all if he wins. The US economy is already staring recession in the face. McCain’s policies are indistinguishable from Bush’s. Haliburton, The S & L fiasco, the sub-prime mortgage disaster, they affect us all. An American economy in crisis means a world economy in crisis.

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