Hey

I'm glad somebody actually reads this crap, let alone the stuff I link to. ;-)

For the record, i don't care that Vice President Cheney accidentally shot someone while out hunting--except as it is covered by The Daily Show.

Here it is, that time every four years when we actually pretend to care about Luge. I freely admit it: I watch as much of the olympics as I can. I even paused two or three minutes on curling befor the boredom got so bad I wanted to rip my eyes out.

Skiing! Great! Watching the slalom? Not so much (but I love the downhill! One of the greatest sports of them all--strap two planks onto your feet and hurl yourself down a mountain like a bat out of Hell, as close to that edge of destruction as you can get without wiping out and possibly killing yourself. That's a sport.

So today it has come out that our government and Isreal will intentionally try to destabalize a Hamas led Palestinian authority. Fine. We are under no obligation to financially prop up our enemies. But this is the final nail in the coffin of Bush's war policy, as far as I'm concerned. First we were going to Iraq because they were behind 9/11. That proved to be wrong, so we were going to Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction. That proved to be wrong, then we were there to replace Sadaam Husein and spread democracy. Democracy was trumpeted by President Bush as the solution to all the Middle East's problems. But now we see the kind of democracy we can end up with and it's not so great any more. Apparently we only want democracies that are on our side. WIth the announced plan to destabalize and undermine a democratically elected regime, the Bush adminsitration has shown itself to be what we on the left always thought they were: a bunch of hypocrites: greeding, bullying, arogant and dictatorial.

And did you hear about this film out of Turkey, the action pic in which the bad guys are a bunch of American marines operating in Iraq, killing civilians and torturing prisoners untilt he Turkish hero can come in and save the day? Remember, these are our alies the Turks here. This isn't Iran. Aparently, it's the hottst film in Turkey and expected to break box office records. From our friends. That's it. We have become the bad guys to the rest of the world. We, the US, are collectively no longer John Wayne. We are now Eric von Stroheim, or more accurately, we're the Russians in those Rambo movies. Apparently in Turkey books in which America is the evil superpower are selling like hotcakes, along with Mein Kampf, which is believed to be our president's blue-print for success.

Yeah, we will save the Muslim world and they will love us for it.