Mondo Americano--Tales from the Crypt

I've come back around to the idea of American exceptionalism. We're exceptionally crazy.

Counterpunch, the Young Turks and Daily Kos have all reported this piece of lunacy. In 2003, President Bush spoke to France's Jacques Chirac and in trying to win his support for the Iraq war Bush talked about how Gog and Magog were in war in the Middle East and how God wanted us to defeat them. Bush told a very secular Chirac,"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins".

Jean-Claude Maurice, a journalist for La Liberte, has published a book with the account of this encounter. Apparently, Chirac was so "stupefait"that he made inquiries to Lausanne in Switzerland to prevent any leak. Biblical scholar Thomas Romer, now at the College de France, had been contacted by the Elysee in 2003 to explain the significance of "Gog and Magog". This whole exchange inspired Jocelyn Rochat to publish in Allez Savoir, the magazine of the University of Lausanne, an article entitled "George W. Bush et le Code Ezechial".

With news that Donald Rumsfeld, an Episcopalian, put biblical passages on top of the President's military briefings during the run-up to the war in Iraq, one is left with the scene of Rumsfeld and Cheney laughing like hell about manipulating Junior. They must of known Poppy Bush's nickname at Cross and Bones was Magog, alluding to his sexual prowess.

Dick Cheney, Crusader Rabbit, is Free. He talks in public now like Richard Nixon did in private after a few martinis. Yesterday, he appeared at the National Press Club to suggest that if we close Gitmo down we have no choice but to kill the detainees--"but we don't operate like that." When he started speaking out, he said he do so to defend the little people. Yesterday, he blamed 9-11 on Richard Clarke and all the intelligence that there was some Al Qaeda-Iraq connection on George Tenet. He blamed the New York Times for leaking news about the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretape program--Terrorist Surveillance Program to use the euphemism. He has played this riff several times. But he didn't mention the New York Times real crime in all this-- waiting to publish until months after 2004 election. The Times was scared they would be blamed for influencing the election.

Dick Cheney probably set the cause of gay marriage back several years by backing it.

Col. Wilkinson continues to fire away at Cheney, likening him to Aaron Burr in a recent edition of the Daily Beast. I think the Colonel is having too much fun.

While Bill O'Reilly raves about the campaign against him by the Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, and Huffington Post. com, reporters in the heartland have dug up alot about the assassin of Dr. Tiller. On the Operation Rescue comment board before it was expunged, Roeder had used language about Tiller that was taken verbatim from one of O'Reilly's 48 shows against the man. It seems that the Wichita police chief was so P.O.ed about the murder, he may have been indiscreet by saying he would follow-up the leads on the internet. The Free Republic, who had inquiries from the Secret Service over anti-Obama hate language earlier this year, quickly purged the Roeder's posts but not before he had been identitied as user 2261860. Police found inside Roeder's car the phone number of the woman who had shot Dr. Tiller in both arms in the mid-1990s and a contact number with a Operation Rescue senior policy adviser, a woman who had been convicted in 1988 of conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic. Most interesting is Roeder's connection to the Freeman movement, which dissociates itself from all things having to do with the government from paying taxes to even having license plates on cars. According to a fellow Freeman in Shawnee, Roeder was just a Good Old Boy but "he got all excited about abortion". The FBI have followed Roeder path back to a house in Merriam where neighbors said there was a revolving door of men coming and staying there and described what appeared to be religious gatherings. The whole affair has the smell of an organized hit by anti-abortion people. Already the anti-abortion news services are putting out the line that Roeder has "a history of mental illness". Yet Randall Terry and others such as the Army of God made sure the public knew a good deed had been done.

Our previous guest lunatic Fred Phelps and his " church" abandoned their anti-semitic crusade momentarily to harass the family and friends of Dr Tiller who were holding a vigil in his memory. Classy, huh.