Mad, Mad, Mad Bush World

I'm out of town for a few days and look what happens.

I come home, get a good night's sleep, and wake up to see MSNBC host and Bush cheer girl Monica Crowley on Imus.

Monica gushed for a time about how great a president Nixon was--she worked for him, you know--and pom-pommed a number of George W. Bush's policies. She mentioned that one American company that might look to take over the Dubai Ports deal is Halliburton, and won't the Democrats just be apoplectic over that, she said.

I hope so, Monica. I'd hope everyone would be. That's supposed to be the only choices we get, Dubai or Halliburton? Can we throw tax dollars at somebody else for a change?

Monica was downright sudsy that the Patriot Act has been renewed. There's never been a single case of abuse of individual rights under the Act, she said. She must have missed this story in yesterday's New York Times:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation found apparent violations of its own wiretapping and other intelligence-gathering procedures more than 100 times in the last two years, and problems appear to have grown more frequent in some crucial respects, a Justice Department report released Wednesday said…

…Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, characterized the report as "yet another vindication for those of us who have raised concerns about the administration's policies in the war on terror."

Mr. Conyers said that "despite the Bush administration's attempt to demonize critics of its antiterrorism policies as advancing phantom or trivial concerns, the report demonstrates that the independent Office of Inspector General has found that many of these policies indeed warrant full investigations."

Here's what scares me the most about this story. Under the relaxed rules of the Patriot Act and FISA, the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and just about every other three letter spy or law enforcement agency can do darn near anything they want--and they still can't operate without breaking the rules.

And administration polly crackers like Monica Crowley continue to insist there's nothing wrong.

On Imus, Monica said she's confident there haven't been any privacy violations because she's talked to law enforcment officers "down in the bowels." Yeah, she really said that. She said it twice, in fact.

And when you think about it, it makes sense that she would talk to people down in the bowels considering what she talks out of 90 percent of the time.

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Speaking of polly crackers, I heard about this on the radio while driving home yesterday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that no country poses a greater challenge to America now than Iran.

"We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran, whose policies are directed at developing a Middle East that would be 180 degrees different than the Middle East that we would like to see developed," she said.

No country poses a greater challenge to us than Iran, Condi? Did Iraq disappear while I was on the road? Iran may or may not be developing nuclear weapons. North Korea and India and China already have them. China owns a significant portion of our national debt and threatens to overtake us economically. India's sucking up our high tech jobs like an Oreck upright. North Korea can't feed its own people in winter and we choke every time it pulls our chain.

And Iran is our greatest challenge?

The Middle East is developing 180 degrees different than we would like to see, but it's not because of Iran. Our "democracy domino" policy has put people like Hamas, Hezbolla, and yes, president of Iran Mahmood Ahmadinejad in power, which is the opposite of what we wanted. We wanted all those Middle Easterners to elect folks who would talk to us in the bowels.

To think that Condi Rice used to teach foreign policy at Stanford, and that some people actually want her to run for president.

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More from the crony corruption files:

After a three week trial, a jury has found Custer Battles LLC of McClean, VA guilty of filing grossly inflated invoices for work the company did in Iraq. The jury slapped the company with more than $10 million in damages and penalties.

Custer Battles had little business and few employees until it won a no bid contract in 2003 to provide security at Baghdad International Airport. After that, its annual revenues exceeded $100 million. The company was founded by Scott Custer, a former Army ranger, and Mike Battles, a former CIA officer.

Battles, a Republican, ran for congress Rhode Island in 2002. The Federal Election Commission fined Battles for misrepresenting campaign contributions. In 2004, Battles contributed $10,000 to the Massachusetts Republican Congressional Committee. He also contributed to Lincoln Chaffee's (R-Rhode Island) 2004 Senate campaign.


Battles is a commentator for Fox News and is writing a book called Blood in the Streets: Seizing Opportunity in Crises.

Any guesses where this guy's head is?

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I wish I were making all this up.

Once upon a time, in the Land of Bush…