What God Really Told Bush

---

What God Really Told Bush
Apparently, it wasn't just "invade Iraq and Afghanistan in my name." A special report
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Scene: White House private residence, night, not long ago. President Bush present in his most favoritest guns 'n' bunnies PJs. Laura asleep, knocked out by a combination of too much Good Housekeeping and excessive hair-spray fumes. Suddenly, a burst of black smoke. A deep, resonant voice speaks:

"Psst! George! God here, taking a break from supervising the well-being of eight billion troubled souls along with infinite galaxies of unimaginable vastness to speak with you directly one more time because, well, you're special, aren't you, George? Yes you are! Yes you are! OK, stop giggling. I have more commands. Get off the damn hobbyhorse, George, and get a pen and a notepad. No, not a crayon. I don't care if blue is your favori-- George! Get a pen! OK? Good. Here we go:

"As you know, I'm not quite what everyone thinks. I am not all benevolence and love and light. In fact, I have a downright dark side, mean and nasty and cunning, and I want you, George, to continue to be my special right-hand man. My special little guy. In fact, you shall help enact my wrath, Dubya. Doesn't that sound fun?

"There are three things I love, George: war, revenge, suffering. Oh, and smiting the heathens. OK, four things. And kickboxing. Five things. There are five things I love, Dubya. You with me? And you and your demon monkeys are enacting the first four admirably, George. Don't be shy, go ahead and tell those Palestinian officials you were commanded by God to 'restore peace' in the Middle East by bombing nearly defenseless, pip-squeak Iraq and Afghanistan to smithereens. They love that stuff.

"But let's put the delicious war stuff aside for a moment. I need to round out my oeuvre. Here's the plan: I'm gonna wreak some major havoc on one of your poorest, most racially mixed, underfunded cities by hurling a massive hurricane at them, flooding the place and killing hundreds of poor people you don't even know exist because you thought they all lived somewhere in Africa. It's all right, the biggest city, New Orleans, will be full of Kerry-loving Democrats. Yeah, I thought you'd like that.

"Here's where you come in, George: When those rains come, I want you to sit back for a few days, stay in the hammock in Crawford, have a lemonade, OK? Let those dead bodies float around New Orleans like it was some remote village in Nigeria. Then look completely baffled when everyone blames you for your administration's miserable response. You'll take some flak for it, but did I ever say serving me would be easy? Besides, people need to know I'm still here, still angry, getting angrier. Don't worry, I'll make it up to you. How does eternal damnati-- er, blessed sainthood sound? Good.

"OK, moving on. I have a secret, George. Here it is: I hate this me-forsaken planet. All this so-called beauty, nature and the magic of science and the poetry of cells -- you know what Earth is to me? High maintenance, that's what. A massive pain in my hallowed butt. Growing all that food, blowing the wind, churning the oceans -- it's exhausting. Plus my energy bills are skyrocketing. Heating India and Turkey cost me 87 trillion last month alone. What am I, made of money? Well yes, of course I am. But no matter. I'm sick of it.

"Here's the plan, George: I want you to despoil, OK? Rivers and air and lakes, wildlife preserves and pristine forests and salmon runs and bird sanctuaries. Screw 'em, Dubya. Screw 'em all. I want you to be the worst environmental president in 50 years, OK? Hell, make it 100. I want you to roll back more environmental protections and do more damage to the place in eight months than my bitch Ronnie Reagan did in eight years. Rape the joint clean. Sell it all off to your cronies in big industry and help me hasten Armageddon. Deal? Here's the truth, Dubya: Earth's a giant liver-flavored Kong toy and you're a rabid terrier. Now, go get it, boy!

"Damn kids these days. Who needs so many? Why not send tens of thousands of them off to fight your two brutal, unwinnable wars? Why not Vietnam 2.0? Hell yes! Because if there's one thing I love more than useless wars, George, it's thousands of mutilated soldiers coming home in body bags, all draped in the pretty American flag. Twenty-one gun salute! For God and country! Righteous.

"Speaking of uppity kids, I know my own brat Jesus came down here once and mumbled some flower-child gibberish about turning the other cheek and not killing anyone and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you and yadda-yadda-yadda. That's what happens when you give the kids the car keys and an unsupervised weekend, am I right? It's all complete bupkes, but I don't have to tell you that, now do I?

"So here's what I want you to do, George. I want your demoralized military shlubs to capture as many swarthy types as possible, whenever they raid an Iraqi home or school or Afghan farm, and throw them all straight into a military prison and let 'em rot and wait for months, years for a fair hearing. Got it?

"Strip them naked! Stick electrodes on their genitals! Smear menstrual blood on their faces! Beat 'em senseless! I don't care if they're innocent. I sayeth unto you, innocence is overrated. Rape the boys, too. Then cover it all up and blame it all on a poor, dim-witted female soldier from Kentucky and shove her into prison for three years while all the honchos who sanctioned the torture (hi, Rummy!) merely smirk and walk away. God sayeth unto you all, rock on!

"I know, everyone says I'm made of pure love. Ha. Truth is, I'm made of aluminum chloride and coal cinders and something I'm not quite sure about but I think might be MSG. Oh yeah, and money. Fifties, mostly.

"I gotta run, George. But rest assured, I'll be back soon, with more ideas. But there's one more thing you need to know, one thing you absolutely cannot forget. Remember our Super Triple Secret, George? Pinky swear? Spit handshake? Atta boy.

"Here it is: We both know who I really am, don't we? I know you secretly admire my scaly red flesh, my shining black eyes, these bitchin' horns, the breath worse than Rove's after his morning meal of seared panda hearts. Of course you know the real God is more than a little disgusted by you and your administration, right?

"Well, screw her. Typical woman, all benevolent and chthonic and compassionate. We know who's really in charge of your nasty administration, don't we, Dubya? Damned right. And I mean that literally. Keep your hands in the fire, if you know what I mean. Now c'mere and give me a hot tongue kiss. Sorry about charring the carpet. Sweet dreams."

---

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.

As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/10/12/notes101205.DTL

dao completion

Only when the last spoke Has been fitted to the wheel, Is there completion. Ambitions, career, family, and everyday identity are like the outer wheel. All the different talents and deep aspects of the mind are like the spokes. The consciousness is the hub that holds all together. At the center of the hub is emptiness — that aspect of ourselves that is open to the universal reality. Unfortunately, we are not always whole. Perhaps it is a matter of opportunities missed when we were younger. Perhaps it is a lack of education or experience. Whatever it may be, we should, through introspection, search out what we lack and then work toward fulfilling it. Once we identify and complete some part of ourselves, it is like fitting a spoke into our wheel. when we have enough spokes, we are whole. A new wheel will have a long future of rolling. Our selves, once made whole, can then serve our spiritual aspirations until the end. completion 365 Tao daily meditations Deng Ming-Dao (author) ISBN 0-06-250223-9 duckdaotsu.org tao hub support sustain EGGSTRACT © 2005 lisbeth west http://www.cafepress.com/duckdaotsu/863070/ The Conceptual Context One source of the difficulty in characterizing the metaphysics of dao is this deep difference in the role of metaphysics. The other most important source is the wide gap between the conceptual schemes of ancient China and those of Indo-European (Buddhist, Islamic and Judeao-Christian) culture. I have discussed these differences at length in my 1992 and will only restate the conclusions here. The important points for our purposes here includes the absence of a Western representational and propositional conception of 'belief', 'knowledge', 'inference' as well as (correspondence or coherence) 'truth', 'reason', or 'inference'. The ways ancient Chinese grammar use to attribute commitments resembled de re belief ascriptions more than the de dicto ascriptions more familiar in English.[6] When ancient Chinese thinkers ascribed commitments to each other, they treated commitments as taking the form of a disposition to use a term or description of some part of the world. They seldom attributed commitments in a way that suggested "inner representations" of outer "facts" or pictures of things in the world. The writing may have been pictures, but the commitments were to use some term (written or spoken) of the given object. In theory of language, I argued that they also did not otherwise highlight the sentence as a significant unit of language. They did not have a clear notion of the syntactic sentence, which would be located conceptually between the clearly recognized mingnamesphrase (ranging from compound characters to long strings "with a yiintent") and the discourse-like daoguide. A key to my view was my hypothesis that daoguide was a linguistic unit--at the opposite end from mingnames. (paradigmatically the ideographic character), the broadly construed ci Three other features of classical Chinese grammar bear on our account of the nature of dao. First, Ancient Chinese does not have singular-plural grammatical marking, so references to dao are comparatively mass-like. To skip a lot of controversy and detail, the important points are daos can be summed (your dao and my dao make our dao) and we may individuate them in several ways. Second, Chinese lacks articles—definite or indefinite. Again, traditional translations and accounts typically supply the definite article, “the” before occurrences of dao particularly in contexts where the nature of dao is concerned. I suggest instead using it as an implicit plural (e.g. like a mass noun) or an indefinite 'some' instead. Third, dao is sometimes used as a verb in Chinese – and most famously in Daoist texts such as the first line of the Daode Jing – dao which can be dao-ed is not constant dao. Against the prevailing practice of translating the verb as "to speak”, I argued that it (a) should incorporate the normative force of the noun, i.e., something like "to guide" and (b) that the range of denotation should include both speech and writing -- as well as gesturing and so forth. I suggest treating the verbal use as "to express as guidance." Again, I will not repeat these arguments here, but want to broaden them slightly in keeping with the entry-exit transition model. The notion of ‘expression’ may restrict the range of the verb in ways that underplay how many ways one may endorse a dao. Brandom's[7] formulation of a notion close to what I am after would be "to endorse a pattern of material practical inference" whether in intention, plan, expression or recommendation to another. I have reservations about explicating ancient Chinese commitments in terms (e.g., 'inference') that suggest a commitment to sentential analysis. Still, we can rephrase Brandom's notion as expressing commitment to conform to a way (analogous to commitment to follow a practice), which leaves the reference to 'inference' implicit in the structure of the practice. Zhuangzi's helpful metaphor here gets the vague effect of 'inference' via our "shooting out" shi-feithis-not this 是非" distinctions and commitments to which we cling, as we would to "an oath or a treaty." Talk of a 'practice', rather than to a specific intent, a principle or a norm is advised because of these worries about segmenting dao sententially. Individuation of dao, as I noted above is best left vague. To dao is to undertake a commitment to correctly effecting some (bit of?) dao in behavior. The variety of ways to individuate dao stem not only from the mass-like segmentation, but also from the familiar difficulty of drawing the boundaries with a word like "community." Implicitly in ancient China, the stereotype of dao in ethical debate was a large, nearly universal human community.[8] But Daoist literature regularly draw our attention to daos of thieves, of musicians, of carpenters etc. as well as to even more global daos of all natural kinds, of the world (natural and social) of nature and so forth. The notion of dao clearly is not limited to ordinary moral discourse, but to any practical discourse--including perhaps the discourse of "natural signs." archived at http://www.duckdaotsu.org/105/completion.html a reading list of books and interpretations of the Daodejing is available at http://www.duckdaotsu.org/dao_books.html Join the daily Taoist meditations mailing list Email: email to: See new designs & be first to hear about special sales duckdaotsu RT

Out of Iraq bonus track …

Out of Iraq bonus track …

Posted by Joshua Holland on October 13, 2005 at 8:10 AM.

Jim McDermott (D-WA)... is one of those guys that makes you feel a bit better about that whole mess we have in government. He gets it.

I wanted to write this piece since July, when McDermott took to the House floor to read a letter signed by 126 members of the 275-member Iraqi Parliament. It said:

As the National Assembly is the legitimate representative of the Iraqi people and the guardian of its interests, and as the voice of the people, especially with regard to repeated demands for the departure of the occupation, we note that these demands have earlier been made in more than one session but have blatantly been ignored from the Chair. Worse still is the Government's request to the U.N. Security Council to extend the presence of the occupation forces, made without consultation with the people's representative in the National Assembly who hold the right to make such fateful decisions. In line with our historic responsibility, we reject the legitimation of the occupation and we repeat our demand for the departure of the occupation forces …

McDermott complained that such calls get "nothing in the American press." He added: "Everyone should know this."

His press guy, Mike DeCesare, gave me twenty minutes with the Congressman and I took 45. He's just a good and interesting person to talk to. I transcribed the whole 45 minutes - a pain in the ass - and you can read it here.

On a more serious note, I have to say that the best exit strategy I've come across so far was proposed by that great military strategist, Fafnir:

In the middle of the night while everybody in Iraq is sleepin we pack up all our stuff, tanks, bombs, guns, tents, extra buildings and everything, and stuff it into our planes and helicopters so we can get out real fast at the drop of a hat - a fast hat.

Then we will have specially trained troops sent out to each Iraqi home with cords attached to their backs and wait until sunrise and when all the Iraqi families start to wake up yawning and stretching and so on our troops jump out waving wiggly fingers and goin "It was allllll a dream… it was alllllll a dream!"

The wiggly fingers here are very crtical here and if not done correctly could spoil everything.

Then our troops will jump back an get pulled up into the sky by the cords on their backs (remember them?) and all our guys will fly out quickly into the Persian Gulf and onto our carriers which will have been cleverly disguised as a group of banana boats from the Carribbean blown off course by prevailing winds. We will have hand-painted* signs that say "Sorry no bananas Iraqis" in case Iraqis try to buy bananas from our aircraft carriers.

When the Iraqis wake up to see the wiggly fingers and the disappeared Americans they will be confused, and then they will all go "Huh! That must have been a weird dream" an then they talk to their next-door Iraqis who say "did you have that weird dream" and they say "you mean the one where the Americans come and overthrow Saddam Hussein and first we are all happy and then we get sad and then angry and blowing things and people up?" and then they say again "Yes, that dream! I had it for the last year or so it must have been a recurring one." And they will say "Whoa weird" and "What happened to Saddam Hussein" and "He seems to be gone now! I guess we had better go build our own sovereign democratic state here, perhaps aided by the United Nations" and "Wow that sounds like a great idea!"

You can't beat that.

Washington Times Editor calls Journalists "dumb bastards"

Blankley wrongly attacked “dumb bastard” journalists for reporting ‘nothing new’ in recent Bush terrorism speech

Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley attacked the "million-dollar nincompoop television news stars" for poorly covering President Bush's October 6 speech on terrorism and the Iraq war. Specifically, Blankley attacked the media for reporting that Bush's speech contained "nothing new," even though, according to Blankley, Bush "named the enemy" in the war on terror for the first time: using the terms "Islamofascist" and "radical, militant Islam." Bush, however, has used similar terminology in past speeches to describe terrorists and their ideology.

Blankley wrote in his October 12 Washington Times column:

What brings this melancholy observation to mind was the grotesque non-reporting of President Bush's arguably historic remarks last week concerning the nature of the enemy in the "War on Terror," that until last week was the enemy of which we dared not mention the name.

For the first time the president of the United States named the enemy: "Islamofascist" and "radical, militant Islam." He compared it to the Nazi and Communist ideological threat of the previous century.

[...]

But million-dollar nincompoop television news stars led with the absurdly ignorant observations that there was "nothing new" in this speech, and that the President was not likely to improve his reduced 35 percent public support for the Iraq war.

Having decided that the speech (which they manifestly did not substantively understand or report) was not going to make the president immediately more popular, their reporting trailed off into a rehash of his other current political problems.

But Bush's October 6 speech was not the first time he has described terrorists in such terms. In his September 20, 2001, address to a Joint Session of Congress, Bush remarked that "[t]he terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics -- a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam." At a September 10, 2002, press briefing, Bush said:

All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true faith -- face of Islam. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It's a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It's a faith based upon love, not hate.

As we mourn tomorrow, we must remember that our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, not a religion; that governments which support them are our enemies, not faithful Muslims who love their families, who yearn for a more peaceful and safe world for their children.

In an October 11, 2002, speech Bush said: "Our enemy don't follow the great traditions of Islam. They've hijacked a great religion. But it's important, as we lift that veil, to remember that they are nothing but a bunch of radical terrorists who distort history and the values of Islam."

Blankley ended his column by taking a broad, derogatory swipe at "mainstream journalists," writing: "One doesn't mind, so much, mainstream journalists being bastards. It's being such dumb bastards that one finds so irksome."

— S.S.M.

Copyright © 2004-2005 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.
Contact us | Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy
Subscribe to Media Matters Email Updates

Iraq has descended into anarchy, says Fisk

Most of Iraq is in a state of anarchy, with insurgents controlling parts of Baghdad just half a mile from the so-called Green Zone, an Independent debate was told last night.

Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, whose new book The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East (see below) has just been published by 4th Estate, painted a picture of deepening chaos and misery in Iraq more than two years after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

He said that the "constant, intensive involvement" in the Middle East by the West was a recurring pattern over centuries and was the reason why "so many Muslims in the Middle East hate us". He added: " We can close doors on history. They can't."

Fisk doubted the sincerity of Western leaders' commitment to bringing democracy to Iraq and said a lasting settlement in the country was impossible while foreign troops remained. "In the Middle East, they would like some of our democracy, they would like a couple of boxes off the supermarket shelves of human rights as well. But I think they would also like freedom from us."

Recalling the sight of an immense US convoy rolling into the country's capital, he said: "A superpower has a visceral need to project military power. We can go to Baghdad, so we will go to Baghdad."

He told the debate in London: "The Americans must leave Iraq and they will leave Iraq, but they can't leave Iraq and that is the equation that turns sand to blood. At some point, they will have to talk to the insurgents.

"But I don't know how, because those people who might be negotiators ­ the United Nations, the Red Cross ­ their headquarters have been blown up. The reality now in Iraq is the project is finished. Most of Iraq, except Kurdistan, is in a state of anarchy."

He said that the portrayal of Iraq by Western leaders ­ of efforts to introduce democracy, including Saturday's national vote on the country's proposed constitution ­ was "unreal" to most of its citizens. In Baghdad, children and women were kept at home to prevent them from being kidnapped for money or sold into slavery. They faced a desperate struggle to find the money to keep generators running to provide themselves with electricity. "They aren't sitting in their front rooms discussing the referendum on the constitution."

With insurgents half a mile from Baghdad's Green Zone, Fisk said the danger to reporters from a brutal insurgency that did not respect journalists was increasing. "Every time I go to Baghdad it's worse, every time I ask myself how we can keep going. Because the real question is ­ is the story worth the risk?"

He attacked television reporters for flinching from depicting the everyday bloodshed on the streets of Iraq. "You can go and see Saving Private Ryan or Kingdom of Heaven ­ people have their heads cut off. When it comes to real heads being cut off, you can't. I think television connives with governments at war." He added: "Newspapers can tell you as closely as they can what these horrors are like."

Asked if the "anger and passion" he felt over the events he witnessed had affected his objectivity, he said: "When you are at the scene of a massacre, you are entitled to feel immense anger and I do."

He rejected suggestions that graphic pictures of the dead in newspapers took away their dignity. He said: "My view is the people who are dead would want us to record what happened to them."

By Nigel Morris Home Affairs Correspondent
Published: 13 October 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article319160.ece

Most of Iraq is in a state of anarchy, with insurgents controlling parts of Baghdad just half a mile from the so-called Green Zone, an Independent debate was told last night.

Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, whose new book The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East has just been published by 4th Estate, painted a picture of deepening chaos and misery in Iraq more than two years after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

He said that the "constant, intensive involvement" in the Middle East by the West was a recurring pattern over centuries and was the reason why "so many Muslims in the Middle East hate us". He added: " We can close doors on history. They can't."

Fisk doubted the sincerity of Western leaders' commitment to bringing democracy to Iraq and said a lasting settlement in the country was impossible while foreign troops remained. "In the Middle East, they would like some of our democracy, they would like a couple of boxes off the supermarket shelves of human rights as well. But I think they would also like freedom from us."

Recalling the sight of an immense US convoy rolling into the country's capital, he said: "A superpower has a visceral need to project military power. We can go to Baghdad, so we will go to Baghdad."

He told the debate in London: "The Americans must leave Iraq and they will leave Iraq, but they can't leave Iraq and that is the equation that turns sand to blood. At some point, they will have to talk to the insurgents.

"But I don't know how, because those people who might be negotiators ­ the United Nations, the Red Cross ­ their headquarters have been blown up. The reality now in Iraq is the project is finished. Most of Iraq, except Kurdistan, is in a state of anarchy."

He said that the portrayal of Iraq by Western leaders ­ of efforts to introduce democracy, including Saturday's national vote on the country's proposed constitution ­ was "unreal" to most of its citizens. In Baghdad, children and women were kept at home to prevent them from being kidnapped for money or sold into slavery. They faced a desperate struggle to find the money to keep generators running to provide themselves with electricity. "They aren't sitting in their front rooms discussing the referendum on the constitution."

With insurgents half a mile from Baghdad's Green Zone, Fisk said the danger to reporters from a brutal insurgency that did not respect journalists was increasing. "Every time I go to Baghdad it's worse, every time I ask myself how we can keep going. Because the real question is ­ is the story worth the risk?"

He attacked television reporters for flinching from depicting the everyday bloodshed on the streets of Iraq. "You can go and see Saving Private Ryan or Kingdom of Heaven ­ people have their heads cut off. When it comes to real heads being cut off, you can't. I think television connives with governments at war." He added: "Newspapers can tell you as closely as they can what these horrors are like."

Asked if the "anger and passion" he felt over the events he witnessed had affected his objectivity, he said: "When you are at the scene of a massacre, you are entitled to feel immense anger and I do."

He rejected suggestions that graphic pictures of the dead in newspapers took away their dignity. He said: "My view is the people who are dead would want us to record what happened to them."