Looking Into Putin's Soul?

I wonder how The Smirking Chimp (aka George "Dubya" Bush) feels now about that rash statement he made way back when, when he said about Vladimir Putin, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country."

It seems to me that you couldn't be more wrong about someone, even if you defended Joe Stalin by saying, I don't know, that he loved his daughter (for the record, she says he didn't).

So how does Dubya feel about that now? Is he willing to admit he was wrong?

You dreamer, of course not.

We have an answer to that very question from the wingnut media. Just as they always have, they are falling all over themselves to shore up the reputation of their Second Savior (the first being St. Ronald, bless-ed be his nayummmm).

According to the Daily Caller blog, Bush now "thinks" that Putin became "a different person".

Mmmmmmm-kayyyyyy...

It's not at all clear who Putin has become in Bush's "mind". Maybe Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light, since we are sure that W. would never be taken in by an actual Agent of Darkness.

Anyway, it just goes to show you that a con man is actually the easiest one to con (see for example, Magic in the Moonlight, the latest film from Woody Allen). Bush, with his True Believer personality, was eager to see into Putin's "soul", and all it took was a couple of throwaway lines about Putin's mother and the piece of the "one true cross" (or something like that) to convince Dubya that Putin was another "man of god". Like himself.

Speaking of Dubya, he came up in a Listverse post the other day, 10 Events We Can’t Figure Out From The Vietnam War, one of which deals with his "questionable behavior" during the Vietnam War. I have expounded at length on this over the years, so we don't need to go into all that now. You all know the special kind of contempt I feel for him. (Hint: It's because he and Cheney were "chickenhawks".)

I will say, however, that my contempt is tempered -- a little -- by the knowledge that he really couldn't help being so fucked up in the head, what with all that competing-but-always-falling-short relationship with his father and the faulty toilet-training from his mother (think about it). I mean, come on.

If I were just a little more charitable towards him, I'd cut him some slack.

But I am not, and I will never be. Not after 4,491 Americans and an unknown number of Iraqis (estimated as at least 174,000 and likely many more) died as the result of a who's-got-the-biggest-dick contest between him and his dad. I will NEVER forgive him for that.

However, go take a look at the comments section for that Listverse article and see all of the rabid foaming-at-the-mouth wingnuts who are STILL defending the fucker. If you read them all, you'll see that it deteriorates quickly into a "Did not!" "Nyahh, did too!" schoolyard scuffle. Clinton! Obama! Clinton! Obama!

Fuck 'em all. I'm right, they're wrong, and that's the end of that.

That said, I kind of miss the little fucker because I don't have George Bush to kick around any more. Except I do, as evidenced by this post... So there.

"We Don't Torture People"

Back in the day, George W. "Baby Doc" Bush and especially his Dark Dick Overlord, Darth Cheney, went around saying, "we don't torture people."

Even then, most of us intuitively knew that at best it was a finely-parsed claim on a par with "that depends on what the definition of 'is' is": If you don't define "waterboarding" as torture, then you can say you didn't "torture" someone with it. You were using "enhanced interrogation techniques".

Fuck that. Everyone instinctively knew that what the CIA was doing was torture. Even the Bush maladministration knew it and all of the adept Orwellian phrasing in the world was not going to change it.

Now we can all really know the facts. The long-awaited Senate Report on Intelligence has been published, and you can read it in all its gory detail at this download link.

It may be too late to impeach the bastards, but I don't think there's a statute of limitations on war crimes.

Off to The Hague with them. Frog march. Frog march.

And maybe it's not too late to repossess that replacement heart beating away merrily in Cheney's chest. It's a good thing that organ donation is generally done anonymously. If one of my loved ones had given up his heart only for me to find it installed inside Darth Cheney's chest of darkness, I would be pissed.

Baby Doc Bush "Not Overjoyed"

And the hits just keep comin' at ya, folks.

Now Baby Doc has weighed in on Osama, saying that he was "not overjoyed" when Barack Obama interrupted his soufflé to tell him of the death of Bin Laden because the campaign to track down the Al Qaeda leader was not done "out of hatred, but to exact judgment."

Say what? But that's pretty typical, I guess, of the Rethugs. They do shit out of hatred, that's their only motivation, and that's all they understand in others.

Well, they got their wish as far as I'm concerned. I hate them.

Odd, isn't it, though, that Bush's reaction is pretty normal when it comes to showing emotion for the death of a close family friend. Let's not forget that Poppy Bush had a very close -- you can even say intimate -- business relationship with the whole Bin Laden family. Remember that the only exception to the nationwide "no fly" order in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 was a planefull of Bin Ladens who were allowed to leave the country.

And Baby Doc ought to be doing nip-ups over the fact that Bin Laden is dead, and therefore won't have to stand trial, where a lot of those nasty secret dealings between the two families were bound to come out.

So don't tell me that he's not secretly delighted over Bin Laden's death. This is a case of overcompensation in public, I think, for the fact that the entire Bush clan is tremendously relieved. "Not overjoyed" can mean that he's glad, but not "too glad".

Oh, and he was eating a soufflé? Elitist pig.