Watch Dick Cheney call Iraq a quagmire

H/T to Robert Elisberg at Huffington Post.

Watch the video, done April, 1994.

“Do you think the U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad?” the unseen questioner asks.

“No,” Mr. Cheney replies, forcing even the most uninterested observes to sight up like a lightning bolt and take note. “If we would have gone into Baghdad, we would have been all alone. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq.”

“Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world. And if you take down the central government of Iraq, you can easily end up seeing parts of Iraq fly off.”

“It’s a quagmire. If you go that far, and try to take over Iraq.”

“The other thing is casualties,” … 146 American killed in action. …-

“The question for the president in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth, and our judgment was not very many. And I think we got it right.”

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yet more stupidity

This is over the line….really over the line…

Rotten Oranges in Bag, Not a Human Fetus

DALLAS (AP) – A black bag found in a middle school girls’ locker room contained rotten oranges and not a human fetus, the Dallas County medical examiner reported Friday.

A janitor doing end-of-school cleaning Thursday at Ben Franklin Middle School found what appeared to be a human fetus in a trash bag inside a locker, police said.

The janitor called the police, who found it difficult to determine the contents of the bag, Dallas police spokeswoman Sr. Cpl. Janice Crowther said.

Police then turned over the bag to the Dallas County Medical Examiner.

Karl Rove leaves the US in deep kim shee

As the US standing in national health statistics continues to tumble, and public and private indebtedness rise, the presidential campaign is dominated by politicians who want more failure: war and patchwork “private” health insurance. Financial Times reports that the US Comptroller General is worried:

The US government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country’s top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country’s future in a report that lays out what he called “chilling long-term simulations”.

These include “dramatic” tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

Drawing parallels with the end of the Roman empire, Mr Walker warned there were “striking similarities” between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including “declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government”.

The comparison between our expenditures on destruction and our flagging healthcare record is inevitable and telling. The US, alone among the world’s powers, spends a massive amount of time and money creating havoc, instead of trying to solve the problems of its citizens.  We are indeed facing the greatest crisis in this nations history, and it’s not going to be solved by doubling the size of Guantanamo or bombing Iran. It’s not going to be solved by a Congress who can’t even be bothered to read the laws it passes, and which continues to give idiots like George W. Bush, Karl Rove (thank god he’s gone) and Alberto Gonzales free rein.