Carving the turkeys

The long knives are out. Hard to believe that Sarah Palin didn't understand that South Africa is a country on the continent of Africa, not a district in the country of Africa. She isn't so much younger than me that basic geography should have escaped her education. She couldn't name the countries in NAFTA, or those in North America?? WTF??



It's sad to see Bill O'Reilly almost tripping over himself to come to Palin's defense &mdash do you suppose he'd be as generous if a Democrat didn't know these things, would he say they could be “tutored” and brought up to speed on something they should have learned by the time they were in junior high? Reid Buckley has already paved that road.

Newsweek has been embedding reporters in campaigns for several election cycles now, with the promise that none of the revelations would be published until after the election. I'm thinking maybe that shouldn't happen when they have clear evidence that the person who will be second in charge of this country can't name the other two countries that share our continent. The GOP should be embarrassed and ashamed. They won't be; they'll blame the “liberal media” that has protected Shrub for eight years, or they'll somehow blame Clinton, but they won't accept responsibility for nominating a nincompoop to the second highest public office in the country.

Folks whose only news source is Fox will be stunned to see these reports, but they'll find a way to discount every one. Folks whose only news source is Rush Limbaugh won't have a thing to worry about, because they'll never hear about these reports, except in Limbaugh's twisted retelling. Too bad.

I have the audiobook of The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder by Vincent Bugliosi (of Helter Skelter fame). He makes a convincing case. The citizens of this country were lied to after 9/11, and swallowed the lies whole, in no small part because the press failed to do its job. At the time, the news was filtered to such an extent that very few people really knew what was going on. He goes a long way in exposing the media coverup for what it was and still is, along with the major players.

Whether you like John Kerry or not, and I'm not a fan, you have to be a complete GOP stooge to claim he flip-flopped on his Iraq war vote. He, like most others in Congress, chose to trust what turned out to be an untrustworthy administration. When he found out he had been lied to, he said had he known the truth, his vote would have been different. How that is a flip-flop instead of an indictment of the administration is something I never understood. I'm sure a Limburger could explain it to me. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to get it, maybe it takes a special kind of intelligence, like Palin's, to understand why conservatives are always right. Personally, I think they should pull their collective heads out of Karl Rove's ass — I wonder if Palin knows who that is.