My Liberal Identity:

The draft agreement sets 2011 as the date by which all remaining U.S. troops will leave Iraq, according to Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed al-Haj Humood and other people familiar with the matter.

"The talking is done," one U.S. official said late Wednesday night. "Now the decision makers choose whether to give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down."

More proof that we live in a monarchy under an evil retard:

President George W. Bush is almost certain to accept the agreement, according to U.S. officials. The administration believes that the deal doesn't require congressional approval and won't present it to U.S. lawmakers.

Is there any power left to Congress, or have we truly set a new precedent for its lack of utility? Anyway, it remains to be seen whether Shi'a leaders can be strong-armed by the puppet PM of Iraq into accepting this sure-to-fail agreement. The administration seems to be bobarding the media with upbeat talk, thus robbing Obama of a key argument for his presidency, but I'm thinking that as we move on toawrds November, the economy will be the main issue.

How to approach the possibility of the rekindling of the Sunni-Shi'a civil war right before the US elections? Looks like our Awakening is besotted with nightmares to me:

"We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently," said one senior Iraqi commander in Baghdad, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue. "Many of them were part of al Qaida despite the fact that many of them are helping us to fight al Qaida."

He said the army was considering setting a Nov. 1 deadline for those militia members who hadn't been absorbed into the security forces or given civilian jobs to give up their weapons. After that, they'd be arrested, he said.

"If they disband us now, I will tell you that history will show we will go back to zero," said Mullah Shahab al Aafi, a former emir, or leader, of insurgents in Diyala province who's the acting commander of 24,000 Sons of Iraq there, 11,000 of whom are on the U.S. payroll. "I will not give up my weapons. I will never give them up, and I will carry my weapon again. If it is useless to talk to the government, I will be forced to carry my weapons and my pistol."

"All the Americans are doing is paying them just to be quiet," said Haider al Abadi, a leading member of Maliki's Dawa political party and the head of the economic and investment committee in the parliament. The Iraqi government, he said, can't "justify paying monthly salaries to people on the grounds that they are ex-insurgents."

Is that the plan? An October Surprise in November perhaps, to sway the chicken-ass vote? It didn't work in Spain, so we can probably ignore this insofar as the elections go- but Iraqis, as always, will soak in blood at our whim.

Well, I sorta do. A) I'm on vacation on my mother's dialup, and B) I took Noam Chomsky on the trip.

Needless to say, I'm a little more than blown away. Reading Chomsky is the kind of thing that makes you want to emigrate from the United States. Not that we are any worse than any other empire- it's just that living in it while it declines is disconcerting. People fled the Soviet Union as it trundled off into history's dustbin. Who's to say there may yet be a large wave of expats going to, perhaps Australia or Canada? New Zealand? 

Who ever thought that the United States of America would be the #1 threat to its own ideals? According to Chomsky, it's been doing it ever since the birth of the Republic. It merely achieved its present primacy after Russia and Germany duked it out in the big one.

One look at the headlines says alot; turn to CNN and there are nothing but...cute little panda bears and missing kids. Surely the portent of things to come. What they are not doing is telling us the real story about two dangerous twin phenomena: Russia's invasion of Georgia and the future deployment of a missile defense shield in Poland. Condoleeza Rice even made a rare appearence recently, telling people that this is coincidence.

Sure, Condi.

America seems to be at an unnerving place these days-the failure to turn Iraq into a harmless client state, Pakistan is REALLY not a friend anymore(never were), bombings in Algeria, Afghanistan slowly falling into the hands of jihadi rebels. Iran, flipping the bird to the US on its nuclear weapons. Add this to the two aforementioned "coincidences". Here's the message:

Hands off, America. We're tired of being manipulated because of your material needs and your capitalism. Oh, before we forget...NATO, you can bite our collective ass.

Oh, the invasion of Iraq was surely "preemptive". Just in a different way than we're accustomed to seeing it. Iraq, to planners, was a fan-fucking-tastic way to seize a countries' resources before the other influences in the region do it in a much nicer way-they being neighbors on the Asiatic continent. We had a very small window in which to act to prevent us from being partially or totally shut out from Middle eastern prospecting for oil. 9-11 provided a giant size brick that ensured the window stayed open. We've been working over Iraq for well over a decade, and surprise!-they are not happy about it. We're also using our national tragedy to go pipeline-crazy in "the 'Stans".

The amazing thing, to me, is that we have no idea that this is happening- our media sure is hell won't touch it with a ten-foot pole; or that the whole shebang is related and it ain't got a damn thing to do with terrorism. But other countries' governments know, and even a good portion of their civilians-hence the "terror" attacks. Nope. These attacks are acts of rebellion. The method is incidental-just a guerrilla method of wearing down a massive traditional army. We did it during the Revolution. The Jews did it to get rid of the British. Once again, history repeats itself as a nation is born, seeking its fortunes on the globe. The eternal recurrence- but not in a good way. Russia and China are moving in, while we remain stuck to our tar baby in Iraq. Russia doesn't give a shit how they do it. We didn't either. That George Bush can actually have the temerity to say that Russia is "bullying" another country is a jaw dropping irony that would be hyena-hilarious if it weren't for the fact that we are so fucked, and so are the people of Iraq and Georgia. But don't worry! Another season of Big Brother is on the way.

My point is, we are in more mortal danger than ever before, this generation of mine. A wounded animal is a nasty creature, striking with ferocity. Heaven only fucking knows what we will do next in order to reassert ourselves, because we have exhausted our bag of tricks. With the exception of a nasty global war, of course. With nukes.

Pleasant dreams!

Meet the new President laying waste to some anonymous poo-flinging flack for the GOP.

 Fuh. If this is a taste of what John McCain is going to get when he debates Barack, as I've said, this promises to be the funniest election season in modernity since Nixon's rubbery visage. Please note that Nixon's line of attack on Kennedy is the EXACT same "inexperience" BS that is now being executed against Obama. It didn't work back then. Why do they think it will work now?

Hah-ha...lookit the poor little Republicans shaking their tiny fists and filibustering the gallery without a quorum. This is the most pathetic group of Republicans yet.

Right after I left Roger Ailes, his blog was locked for being a spam blog. We thought it might be one of the wingnuts we pounded on, but it seems that left, right, catblogs, everything on Blogger was being raided. Roy links to spike-haired goober Confederate Yankee, who believed it was Obama supporters based on leads from other right bloggers. And we know Bob, being the investigative rottweiler he is, fact checks everything.

Well, Bob, we believe what we want to believe, don't we? You're very good at ferreting out "liberal frauds", but you seem to be a little tone deaf when vetting your own wingyding sources.

Although it says something about the British military that it admits errors- and you don't have to be retired to tell everyone:

British commanders in Iraq made an astonishing secret deal with a Shia prisoner to withdraw from Basra which left the city at the mercy of criminal gangs, one of the UK's senior military officers serving in Iraq has said. In an exclusive interview with The Independent on Sunday, Col Iron, who leads the teams mentoring the Iraqi army in central Basra, said the deal had included the release of 120 prisoners and had the effect of leaving the city in a lawless state.

"We have made some terrible mistakes in Iraq and it is only by talking about them that we will learn from them," said Col Iron, an expert on anti-insurgency. "Last autumn we made a mistake which was understandable but not excusable. A Shia prisoner, Ahmed al-Fartusi, said he could put a stop to the killings. We released 120 of their prisoners and withdrew out of town, but when we moved out, lawlessness took over. As 90 per cent of the attacks were against us, we thought if we moved out we would remove the source of the problem. But actually the Jaish al-Mahdi [the Mahdi army, known to British troops as the Jam] had been fighting us because we were the only obstacle to their total control."

Kiss that third of Iraq goodbye. Not that there was going to be a positive outcome whatever they did.

Whew! Blogging for Roger Ailes was nerve wracking. I have a completely different approach to blogging than he does, and I was constantly in fear of alienating his audience, which I did to some degree. Still, there were some who gave compliments, making it easier to soldier on. But I can't hold a candle to Roger's subtle wit. I'm more like a blog elephant, stomping around the room recklessly, destroying all of the furniture.

 There were fun moments, like when another guest blogger Anthony reeled in some dipshit from Protein Wisdom , and we both went medieval on his ass. And I got to show my kid off singing The Dead Milkmen.

However, I belong here. Alone, until I develop a more reserved style. I thought about quitting after I finished over there, but I guess that would be stupid. My writing, crappy as it may be, is what it is, and I shouldn't give up just because someone else does it with more savoir faire than I do. There are many a wingnut that deserve ridicule, and though I have many betters, I still do this for catharsis, personal, cultural and political.