Unrelenting Bad News

Where to start today? The "liberation" of Falluja? As survivors describe US tanks rolling over bodies in the streets, or whole families being shot by US snipers as they tried to swim across a river to safety... As I have been saying for many weeks, this is a massacre that has unfolded in slow motion before my disbelieving eyes. Will a day of reckoning ever come to those responsible?

You might think the fact that Colin Powell has finally decided to drag his sorry ass into retirement would be cause for celebration, but the favourite to replace him is the totally incompetent Condoleeza Rice. Really. As Buzzflash put it, "nothing succeeds in the Bush administration like failure."

Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood also has an ass that smells like roses to any Bush-loving fascists today, as her state canvassing board very quietly certified the "results" of the Nov. 2 general election.

"I think everyone is glad the election has come and gone," Hood said.

Not so fast, sister. In Ohio, disenfrachised voters are queueing up to tell their stories:

Harvey Wasserman of Bexley said he tried to vote absentee with the same home address he has used for 18 years but was told he couldn't because his absentee application had the wrong address.

"But the notice telling me I had the wrong address arrived at the right address," he said.

Elsewhere, Josh Marshall puts the politicization of the CIA in stark perspective:

On every significant point of conflict between the Bush administration and the country's cadre of intelligence professionals, the Bush political appointees turned out to be wrong. Often very wrong, and with disastrous consequences. Sometimes the intel folks were wrong too; but when that was so, the appointees were always more wrong...

If you think this is just a Washington squabble or political debating point you'd be mistaken. Because your lives, and those of your families and friends, may very well be on the line.

And if you think that is over-stating the dangers we now face, how about this from Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr Helen Caldicott today:

This is the most serious election that has ever occurred in the history of the human race, without a scrag of doubt. I don't know if we'll survive the next four years ...

I don't think the Americans have, on the whole, the faintest idea - and I have to say also I don't think most Australians do either. But it's not just the threat from nuclear war. It's the threat of what's happening to the environment, the global warming which is occurring rapidly now, to ozone depletion, to species extinction, to deforestation - it's the whole thing...

I don't think I've ever felt so personally, politically devastated in my life and that includes when Reagan won a second term of office - which was pretty devastating for me as I was so heavily involved in the anti-nuclear movement in those days.

But this is worse, these people are much worse than the Reagan people.

They have been able to con the American people with their extremely brilliant propaganda and brainwashing, with the help of the media ... they consistently lie. On the whole the American people don't really understand the dynamics of the right at all. They don't know that Bush et al want to go into Iran next and that they want to dominate the world militarily and that they want to put weapons in space.

I don't think they understand. It is a mandate for Bush to do absolutely anything he wants. I know people don't like me using this word but they're fascists.