Rupert Murdoch, Condoleezza Rice, Digby, Rage Against The Machine-- Guess Who's The Odd Duck

If anyone is still wondering where Australian neo-Nazi billionaire and international media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, is coming down, set your mind to rest. Like all neo-Nazi billionaires, Australian or otherwise, Murdoch has endorsed the like-minded John W. McCain today-- his class' only hope for a continuation of the Bush agenda that has been so catastrophic for American working families... and so very, very beneficial for neo-Nazi billionaires.

Over the weekend, Condoleeza Rice was somewhat less enthusiastic about her party's choice than Murdoch was. "In a less-than-hearty endorsement, Rice declined to say anything more positive about Palin than "she gave a terrific speech" and "she’s governor of a state here in the United States.” Especially interesting in light of the fact that she was extremely enthusiastic about Joe Biden last month, enthusing that "Biden is obviously a very fine statesman.” A couple months ago she told Wolf Blitzer that she had made up her mind which candidate she would vote for in November-– but that she isn't telling. People who know her say she is extremely eager to vote against McCain-- at least in part because of an entirely unsuitable. and even dangerous, temperament-- and for Obama and that the addition of the unqualified Palin has made her even more certain that McCain is the wrong choice. I'm not sure how close Digby and Rice still are but Digby speaks for many Americans who have been watching McCain in action when she describes him as a powder keg

John McCain made a quick stop at the Capitol one day last spring to sit in on Senate negotiations on the big immigration bill, and John Cornyn was not pleased.

Cornyn, a mild-mannered Texas Republican, saw a loophole in the bill that he thought would allow felons to pursue a path to citizenship.

McCain called Cornyn's claim "chicken-shit," according to people familiar with the meeting, and charged that the Texan was looking for an excuse to scuttle the bill. Cornyn grimly told McCain he had a lot of nerve to suddenly show up and inject himself into the sensitive negotiations.

"Fuck you," McCain told Cornyn, in front of about 40 witnesses.

It was another instance of the Republican presidential candidate losing his temper, another instance in which, as POW-MIA activist Carol Hrdlicka put it, "It's his way or no way."

There's a lengthy list of similar outbursts through the years: McCain pushing a woman in a wheelchair, trying to get an Arizona Republican aide fired from three different jobs, berating a young GOP activist on the night of his own 1986 Senate election and many more.

You think Rice might think a hot headed extremist like McCain or an empty headed small town beauty queen like Palin might set back our national interests if either of them deals with leaders of other countries?

Watch:



Far less enthusiastic about the McCain ticket than Rice, let alone Murdoch, was the much-loved all-American rock band, Rage Against the Machine.

At both the Democratic and Republican conventions this year, Rage led marches, performed through megaphones when prevented from taking their stage, and generally agitated against the politics of convention and the conventions themselves.

None of this would be especially noteworthy-- cause musicians reflexively congregate around political events-- but Rage has millions of fans whose ardor has not been diminished by the band’s not putting out a record in eight years. The group’s insistent calls to action, in song and from the stage, still fall on receptive ears. Some of its hard-core fans are less prone to buying T-shirts than engaging in the kind of civil disobedience that sometimes ends in tear gas.

The Democratic convention opened with a free Rage show at the Denver Coliseum in support of Iraq Veterans Against the War, with the band’s lead singer, Zack de la Rocha, kicking into “Guerilla Radio.” “It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime,” he sang, “What better place than here?”

...Republican Party officials here and in Minneapolis this week reacted to various Rage endeavors as if a sleeper cell were in their midst. A concert sponsored by the Service Employees International Union at Harriet Island on Monday, the first day of the convention, had its permit revoked and then restored after Rage was placed first on and then off the bill.

On Tuesday a five-band protest concert was scheduled on the lawn of the State Capitol above St. Paul. Near the end of the day the four members of Rage pulled up and were immediately surrounded by the police. The band members were told that they were not going to take the stage because they were not on the bill-- but there were no bands listed on the permit. And so the four members of the band walked out into the crowd, which was chanting, “Let them play!,” and someone handed them a megaphone. With the guitarist Tom Morello vocalizing instrumental interludes, Mr. de la Rocha did two songs: “Bulls on Parade” and “Killing in the Name.” The crowd surged around the band and filled in the musical gaps.

After Mr. de la Rocha suggested that the assembled police were “not afraid of four musicians from Los Angeles, they are afraid of you!,” Mr. Morello took the megaphone.

...Later that night, Mr. Morello, who like Mr. Obama is the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother (and who went to Harvard), stood in an alley behind the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis, tuning up for a hootenanny with Billy Bragg hosted by the Minneapolis musician and writer Jim Walsh. Neither he nor the other members of the band were granting interviews, however. Mr. Morello, who performs solo as the Nightwatchman, was talking to the songwriter Ike Reilly, and said the day had been a busy one.

“When we got to the capitol, we were surrounded by cops, and they asked, ‘Are you in Rage Against the Machine?,’” Mr. Morello said. “And I didn’t know what the right answer was, so I just said, ‘I don’t know.’ They blocked us from even approaching the stage, saying they’d arrest us if we played. So we went into the middle of the crowd and began to improvise.”

The Rage show at the Target Center on Wednesday night was a commercial concert, not a protest rally, with proceeds going to benefit various antiwar causes, according to Mr. Morello. But the political backdrop had hardly disappeared. When the lights came up at the start of the set, the band was clad in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, with hands behind them, an image that seemed to shout “Guantánamo Bay” without ever saying the words. Still, the rhetoric from the stage was more nuanced than that of the previous shows.

“I hope you all leave peacefully, but you don’t have to be passive,” Mr. Morello said. “Don’t let anyone put their hands on you.”

Thousands took that advice, and a few took it a step further, refusing orders to disperse at Seventh Street and Second Avenue.

Arrests, a mainstay of the latest Rage shows, quickly ensued.

I Wonder If There Are Some McCain Supporters Thinking The Tsar's Tanks Are Approaching Atlanta And Have Devastated Macon

Saakashvili wants action. The victorious Russians want the truculent Georgian to resign-- although virtually all Georgian leaders share his nationalistic, anti-Russian fervor-- and Saakashvili seems to think McCain is going to growl and someone is going to care. One of the well-paid Georgian lobbyists on McCain's staff fed him a ridiculous and hyperbolic line: "We are all Georgians now." Unless he was just talking about the lobbyist and Neocon crowd that goaded Saakashvili into attacking South Ossetia last Thursday, McCain is on his own planet. But the Georgian president is clinging to McCain's phrase like a piece of floating driftwood after his rowboat overturned in shark infested water.

“Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now,’” Saakashvili said on CNN’s American Morning. “Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this. From words to deeds.”

It's hard to believe-- well, not too hard-- that foreign governments hire top McCain staffers and part of the deal is that McCain beats the war drums for them. Is this even legal?

It's the regular folks in Georgia who are paying the price-- heavy price-- for the little political games being played by McCain and the Neocons in Washington. McCain would rather see tens of thousands of Georgians die and the entire region destabilized than lose the election. McCain and his shills were hoping to win the election by persuading enough low-info voters that Obama is the anti-Christ. That isn't working and McCain still can't break out of the 30's in the opinion polls. So Bob Sheer, whose new book, The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America is very complimentary towards McCain, thinks McCain's camp might have actually provoked the war to help McCain's sagging campaign! He points the finger directly at Neocon war criminal/lobbyist/McCain chief foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann.

Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain's presidential campaign.

In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia's membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate's foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime it was Putin's Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill.

...McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy that McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, will be provided with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.

Stanford Provost Condi Rice was first hired by George I as a kind of combination baby-sitter and remedial tutor for his political heir, whose entire previous knowledge of foreign affairs was ascertained in a Mexico whore house in Nuevo Laredo. She didn't have much to work with but she taught him some foreign policy basics-- "Israel good," "Iraq bad," things like that. And as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State... well, no one from the right or left would tell you she's been more than mediocre-- and most would be less generous in their assessment. But, after all, the big foreign policy problems during her tenure were far afield from her area of expertise: the Soviet Union. So now that the Neocons have drummed up a new crisis in a Cold War with the Russians (heir to the Soviets), it is time for Condi to shine. The far right Wall Street Journal editorial page, basically a GOP propaganda too, describes the response to the Georgian crisis by "the Bush Administration" (i.e., Condi in this case) as stumbling. "So far the Administration has been missing in action, to put it mildly."

President Bush finally condemned Russia's actions on Monday after a weekend of Olympics tourism in Beijing while Georgia burned. Meanwhile, the State Department dispatched a mid-level official to Tbilisi, and unnamed Administration officials carped to the press that Washington had warned Georgia not to provoke Moscow. That's hardly a show of solidarity with a Eurasian democracy that has supported the U.S. in Iraq with 2,000 troops.

Compared to this August U.S. lethargy, the French look like Winston Churchill. In Moscow yesterday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, acting as president of the European Union, got Russia to agree to a provisional cease-fire that could return both parties' troops to their positions before the conflict started. His next stop was Tbilisi, on the heels of a visit from Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

Barely concealing it loathing for Rice, the WSJ favors "expelling Russia from the G-8 group of democracies, as John McCain has suggested" and maybe "barring Russia's long desired entry into the World Trade Organization," even threatening to take away the 2014 Winter Olympics from Sochi! "A country that starts a war on the weekend the Beijing Olympics began doesn't deserve such an honor," they thunder-- before moving on to their main point:

Reshaping U.S. policy toward Russia will take longer than the months between now and January 20, when a new President takes office. But Mr. Bush can at least atone for his earlier misjudgments about Mr. Putin and steer policy in a new direction that his successor would have to deal with. If that successor is Barack Obama, this is an opportunity to shape a crucial foreign policy issue for a novice who could very well go in the wrong direction.

The alternative is ending Mr. Bush's tenure on a Carter-esque note of weakness. To paraphrase General Clay: Whether for good or bad, how the U.S. responds to Russia's aggression in Georgia has become a symbol of American credibility. By trying to Finlandize if not destroy Georgia, Moscow is sending a message that, in its part of the world, being close to Washington can be fatal. If Mr. Bush doesn't revisit his Russian failures, the rout of Georgia will stand as the embarrassing coda to his Presidency.

I think the train that's carrying the coda to this particular presidency has long left the station. Saakasvili says "my people feel let down by the West." Maybe he should have listened to Secretary of State Rice when she warned him last month not to provoke Russia, rather than to his own lobbyists playing a dual game whose purpose is not to protect Georgia but to make sure McCain and the GOP aren't wiped out in November. Condi's back on her way to Tbilisi. No sweets and flowers waiting for her.

McCain is sending his two top lieutenants, Holy Joe Lieberman (R-CT) and inveterate rug shopper and closet queen, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to represent his campaign in Tbilisi. Obama still recognizes George Bush as president of the United States and is keeping his supporters behind the official U.S. policy line in the delicate situation, rather than exploiting it to gin up votes. McCain is so utterly unfit for office that if the GOP was smart, they would dump him in the Mississippi River and pick a random person off the street in St. Paul to run. Obama on the Georgia situation today:

"I welcome President Bush's decision to send aid to the people of Georgia, and Americans stand united in support of the men and women who will carry out this humanitarian mission. As soon as possible, we must follow this aid with broader reconstruction assistance,
including emergency economic loans, to help the people of Georgia rebuild their lives and their economy.

The situation is still unstable, and Russia must back up its commitment to stop its violence and violation of Georgia's sovereignty with actions-- not just words. The United States should now join our European partners in direct, high-level diplomacy with both Georgia and Russia to seek  immediate implementation of a cease-fire, and to achieve a lasting resolution to this crisis. There must be independent monitors to verify the implementation of this cease-fire, and Russia must not use this moment to consolidate a position that violates Georgia's territorial integrity, or to violate the human rights of the people of Georgia.

As we move forward, the United States and Europe must review our multilateral and bilateral arrangements with Russia in light of its actions. The loss of life over the last few days has been tragic, and there are no winners in this conflict. Now we must rededicate ourselves to achieving a lasting peace in the  region."

McCain, worrying that he might be coming off as a bit of a warmonger again: "In the 21st century nations don't invade other nations." Good to know. Does that mean we give Iraq and Afghanistan back? Are we back to Pax Americana yet?

CONDI GOLFS WHILE IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN, IRAN AND LIEBERMAN BURN

With Afghanistan descending into chaos and with McCain's "surge" strategy crippling U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, Bush's installed Iraqi puppet is floating the idea of the U.S. military establishing a timetable for withdrawal. Is he a liberal Democrat now? Lieberman, hysterical as usual, has been throwing hissy fits and is more and more a caricature Senator Palpatine by the day: "Israel is first in the line of Iranian fire. And it represents an existential threat to Israel. But you know who is next? The Arab countries in the Middle East and they’re worried about the Iranian program and want us to ask strongly to stop it. And we’re next! Because Ahmadinejad in Tehran constantly leads the mobs in shouts of death to America. And they mean it." Didn't Palpatine make the same speech just before ending the Republic?

Today al-Maliki spoke with other Arab leaders about negotiating a short-term agreement with the U.S. to replace the UN mandate which expires December 31. The Iraqi people are impatient with the whole concept of extraterritoriality-- something that has been discredited in international affairs since the Boxer Rebellion-- that the Bush Regime has been demanding.

"The current trend is to reach an agreement on a memorandum of understanding either for the departure of the forces or a memorandum of understanding to put a timetable on their withdrawal," Maliki said, according to a statement released Monday by his office that did not specify how long a period a memorandum would cover. "In all cases, the basis for any agreement will be respect for the full sovereignty of Iraq."

The talks on the security pact have been slowed by worries over Iraq's sovereignty as well as a growing concerns in Iraq about a possible long-term American presence in the war-ravaged country.

A U.S. Embassy official, speaking on condition of anonymity, downplayed Maliki's comments, saying that he was not referring to a fixed timetable, but was speaking more generally to convey opposition to any large and long-term presence of troops or U.S. bases. The Bush administration has long said that a timetable could benefit insurgents or Iraq's neighbors.

Although the 40-50 people killed at the Indian embassy in Kabul was the big violence story today, a bombing in Baqubah killed 9 and injured another dozen, 2 more were killed near Baquhab, and 4 others died in a bombing on the eastern edge of Diyala province. "The deaths add to 16 fatalities that occurred on Sunday when a wave of attacks in Baghdad and areas north of the capital Sunday shattered a relative lull in violence. Fifteen others were injured. Just one day earlier, Maliki had declared that Iraq's government had defeated terrorism."

Thank goodness none of this has prevented the Bush Regime Secretary of State from missing much time out on the links. Even if no one can quite figure out the Bush-McCain strategy on ending the war in Iraq or how to handle Afghanistan or Iran, Condi has been crystal clear on one policy: "I have a policy on mulligans. I try for only one, and after that I count it as a stroke. One per 18. Well, except for the first hole, when we have a 'hit until you're happy' rule." Bush, you will recall, has declared that his sacrifice will be to swear off golf... until the mission is accomplished.

Quote of the day: Bye-bye, Cookie! Things just won't be the same at the State Dept.! Good luck with the I.G. thing in Amman, and say hi to Buzzy!

"Although his tenure has been defined by a myriad of poor decisions, Inspector General Howard Krongard is finally demonstrating sound judgment through his decision to step down," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. [right], who raised the issue of Krongard's brother during the hearing.
--from the AP account of the resignation of Howard "Cookie" Krongard as State Department inspector general (if you don't remember "the hearing" that involved Cookie's brother, see below)

From India Howie has already noted the resignation as State Department inspector general of Howard "Cookie" Krongard. Even by the humble investigative standards of the Bush regime ("Investigatin'? We don't do no stinkin' investigatin'!"), Cookie--the State's I.G. since 2005--was an underachiever. By the time this fall when un- or under-investigated scandals, in particular in the Middle East, started exploding all over poor Sec'y Condi Rice's face, it began to appear that this Cookie might soon be crumbling.

People in the State Department who had to deal with Cookie complained that he was "abrasive," and while abrasive can be a good thing in an investigator, somehow we don't think a Bush-regime inspector general is likely to have been that kind of abrasive. The people who complained about Cookie's abrasiveness also complained that he didn't understand his duties as I.G.

So now we won't have Cookie to kick around anymore. At least as of Jan. 15. Admirers of the job he's done rooting out departmental corruption in the Middle East will be happy to know that he's staying on to complete the establishment of a new I.G. bureau in Amman, Jordan--to forge ahead with the job he, er, doesn't seem to have been doing so much.

Back in September, ABC News's Justin Rood reported:

The State Department's chief internal watchdog has "partisan political ties," which have led him to improperly interfere with his office's work and obscure fraud allegations and security issues which might embarrass the White House, according to allegations received by a House Democratic chairman.

Some subordinates believe that State Inspector General Howard Krongard's "foremost mission" is "to support the Bush administration," wrote Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chair of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, in a letter to Krongard released Thursday.

On a more personal note, we hope Cookie will have time to patch things up with his brother Buzzy, from whom he is said to be estranged. If you've got the DVD of Great Moments in Congressional Committee Hearings, you've probably already memorized that exchange-for-the-ages when Cookie first denied that his brother Buzzy was affiliated with Blackwater, then during a break spoke to him by phone, and had to tell the committee that gosh, oops, it was true! (Buzzy insisted that Cookie knew all along. He nevertheless quit his position on the Blackwater advisory board.)

Pressed to account for the, er, discrepancy, Cookie explained, "I'm not my brother's keeper." Boys, boys, can't we all get along? Kick back, have a few beers, and think about all those hilarious Blackwater shenanigans.

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