i will say this once, and once only...

mr. tenet, you can go directly to hell... along with colin powell, you were in perhaps the best position to speak out in real time on the - now - very clear fact that the bush administration was railroading the united states into an illegal war with iraq... now, you want to sell me your fracking book... screw you AND the horse you rode in in...

http://takeitpersonally.blogspot.com/

Posted at April 29, 2007 10:15 AM in response to Letter to George Tenet

take off your bow tie... cut your word count by at least 2/3... and get your nose out of the air... if it rains, you might drown...

Posted at November 3, 2006 5:12 PM in response to The 24 Houses of Borat de Sade

this is like the bank robber at the teller cage window who points the gun at his own head and says, "give me the money or i'll shoot..."

President Bush warned defiant Republican senators yesterday that he will close down a CIA interrogation program that he credited with thwarting terrorist attacks if they pass a proposal regulating detention of enemy combatants, escalating a politically charged battle that has exposed divisions within his party.

could we possibly hear a little bit about those terrorist attacks the program has supposedly "thwarted...?" and, why not have a little national discussion about how such information was obtained...? maybe we could talk about whether the methods by which such information was obtained mesh with the values and principles on which the united states was founded...? and, while we're at it, could we expand the discussion to include how such methods might impact how american military personnel might be treated in the event of capture...? and, gee, might it not also be a good idea to talk about, as colin powell rightly suggested, america's moral leadership in the world...?

oh, and before i forget to mention it... could you cool it with the tantrums, george...? they aren't working for you...

And, yes, I DO take it personally

Posted at September 16, 2006 8:12 AM in response to Mutiny in America

now, let's be really, really honest here... have labor unions become corporate bureaucracies of their own...? have they suffered from entrenched leadership anxious to perpetuate its perks and power...? have they sometimes picked battles simply for the sake of demonstrating they are still capable of looking out for workers' rights even if the case didn't have merit...? of COURSE, and the list goes on... and, reasonably and rationally, why WOULDN'T union organizations mirror the same organizational dysfunctions of the employers of the workers they are there to represent...? do unions need a different, more vital, more in-tune-with-today approach that tackles today's REAL worker issues... do we still need unions...? the answer is a resounding YES... but, in order to regain their power and their credibility, unions have to shake off the mossback union leaders and the self-serving power brokers, just like the corporations need to do, just like government needs to do, just like the republican and democratic parties need to do... (and, just in case there's any doubt here, i am a 110% supporter of unions and workers' rights, having championed them all of my life, sometimes even covertly as a member of management...)

And, yes, I DO take it personally 

Posted at September 4, 2006 4:46 PM in response to The Brilliance of Labor

to say that this wsj pseudo-intellectual doesn't get it is perhaps the understatment of the century... i believe it was the nyt that used a three-syllable word that completely sums up precisely why joe lieberman should not be returned to the senate - ENABLER... lieberman has sat by actively cheered from the sidelines while george bush and his criminal posse have trashed the united states of america... iraq is just ONE of the ways bush has pissed on everything we stand for... and it ain't the "thought-enforcers of the left" that are bringing down a "centrist..." lieberman's bringing HIMSELF down by being completely out of touch with what's REALLY happened to his own country while he's been busy sucking up to power... THAT'S why he's gotta go... and, ferchrissakes, lamont is NOT A PEACE CANDIDATE...! he's a REAL CANDIDATE, as opposed to one made out of papier-mâché...

And, yes, I DO take it personally

Posted at August 7, 2006 1:15 PM in response to PANIC IN COMMU-NETICUT

he wants his cake and he wants to eat it too... he may have the right but his ethics stink...

And, yes, I DO take it personally

Posted at July 4, 2006 9:45 AM in response to Independent Joe

as one who was quite close to accepting an arrangement brokered by my uncle to go work in british columbia rather than going to vietnam and who decided not to burn my bridges and ended up going to vietnam anyway, i am totally sympathetic to any military person who takes a principled stand on iraq... had i known then what i know now, i may very well have opted for canada, but, i can tell you, i learned a great deal in vietnam, most of it extraordinarily formative for the rest of my life... learning a lot is not sufficient reason to put your life on the line for someone's lies but, in hindsight, i'm grateful i went and extremely glad i came back in one piece...

http://takeitpersonally.blogspot.com/

Posted at June 23, 2006 4:31 PM in response to Military opposition: Bravery by another name

then we have dick cheney, who is an unscrupulous, manipulative, lying bastard...

"What the Democrats are suggesting basically you can call it withdrawal, you can call it redeployment, whatever you want to call it, basically it's -- in effect, validates the terrorist strategy," Cheney said.

it ain't even ABOUT terrorists, dead-eye, you lying sack... it's about sectarian violence, the hobgoblins of shia-sunni animosity held in check for years by saddam's rigid authoritarian rule and now set loose by a horribly ill-conceived, unbelievably poorly executed war, undertaken by the united states on the basis of lies to secure a global monopoly on energy resources... if there was such a thing as instant karma, uncle d, you would have been struck dead by lightning long ago...

And, yes, I DO take it personally

Posted at June 22, 2006 6:50 PM in response to Two More Cents for Democrats: Party of Grownups vs. Party of Whiners

hey, we're rapidly headed down the same path here at home... witness the relentless march of fascism...

The New Jersey attorney general has issued subpoenas to five telephone companies to determine whether any of them violated the state's consumer protection laws by providing records to the National Security Agency. Experts say it is the first legal move by a state to question the agency's program to compile calling records to track terrorist activities. On Wednesday, the United States filed a lawsuit to block the subpoenas, setting up a legal showdown pitting the state's authority to protect consumers' rights against the federal government's national security powers.

thus opening up a much larger can of worms...

But as a matter of government practice and legal precedent, the dispute is significant because it transforms what had primarily been a fight between the federal government and civil liberties groups into a far knottier one pitting federal authorities against state ones. Clifford Fishman, a professor at Catholic University Law School who is an expert on electronic-surveillance law, also said the actions by both state and federal government were laden with political overtones. Professor Fishman said New Jersey's subpoenas — issued by a Democratic administration — appeared to be "a political move to try to embarrass the Bush administration as well as the phone companies." But he added that "the Bush administration is responding with a howitzer instead of a sniper."

this is totally in keeping with the modus operandi of the bush administration... don't just thwart your enemies, beat them to death with heavy blunt instruments, dismember the bodies, and then burn them on a sacrificial pyre...

And, yes, I DO take it personally

Posted at June 16, 2006 6:16 PM in response to George Bush Sanctioned Rape Rooms?

thanks for the view from the ground... i can't help but say, however, that talking about how to either improve the iraq situation or disengage, misses the entire point... the system that put us in iraq in the first place is seriously diseased and, while the bush administration is certainly the most egregious example of a disease out of control, the cancer has been spreading since ww2... the overused metaphor, re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic, nevertheless captures the current dynamics fairly well...

yes, our continuing presence in iraq is fueling the sunni-shiite obsession for blowing each other up and probably is producing new zarqawis by the day... but so is our continuing support of israel and our refusal to help structure an honest settlement with the palestinians who are now being punished for exercising their democratic rights... we fuel global outrage when a corrupt mafia don like dick cheney denounces russia in vilnius and then flies on to court a barbaric despot in kazakhstan because the despot controls oil and gas reserves... we earn enmity when we torture detainees in black-site prisons and funnel them via extraordinary rendition to other countries whose interrogation methods are worse than ours... ridicule and scorn are our just due when we persist in claiming that iran is mere months away from having a nuclear weapons capability when all available intelligence says it does not...

so, yes, iraq is an immediate problem to be solved but, relatively speaking, it is only a pimple on the ass of our much bigger problem... our country is a mess, our constitution and bill of rights are being fed daily into the shredder, and what are we going to do about it...

Visit my blog: And, yes, I DO take it personally

Posted at June 8, 2006 7:32 AM in response to Strategic Disconnection