Gee… we seem to ‘lose’ a lot of stuff.  I wonder why?

Pretty soon we’re going to be ‘losing’ some wars. - MPG

10 May 2006

HAVE 200,000 AK47S FALLEN INTO THE HANDS OF IRAQ TERRORISTS?

FEARS OVER SECRET U.S. ARMS SHIPMENT

Web address -- http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=17055497&method=full&siteid=94762&headline=have-200-000-missing-ak47s-fallen-into-the-hands-of-iraq-terrorists---name_page.html

Here’s a funny article from VHeadline.com -- http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=56604

They seem to say the U.S. is making such a fuss about their legitimate purchase of 100,000 Ak-47’s, whereas the U.S. goes right ahead and loses 200,000 Ak-47’s… Go figure?

SOME 200,000 guns the US sent to Iraqi security forces may have been smuggled to terrorists, it was feared yesterday.

The 99-tonne cache of AK47s was to have been secretly flown out from a US base in Bosnia. But the four planeloads of arms have vanished.

Orders for the deal to go ahead were given by the US Department of Defense. But the work was contracted out via a complex web of private arms traders.

And the Moldovan airline used to transport the shipment was blasted by the UN in 2003 for smuggling arms to Liberia, human rights group Amnesty has discovered.

It follows a separate probe claiming that thousands of guns meant for Iraq's police and army instead went to al-Qaeda

Amnesty chief spokesman Mike Blakemore said: "It's unbelievable that no one can account for 200,000 assault rifles. If these weapons have gone missing it's a terrifying prospect." American defence chiefs hired a US firm to take the guns, from the 90s Bosnian war, to Iraq.

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But air traffic controllers in Baghdad have no record of the flights, which supposedly took off between July 2004 and July 2005. A coalition forces spokesman confirmed they had not received "any weapons from Bosnia" and added they were "not aware of any purchases for Iraq from Bosnia". Nato and US officials have already voiced fears that Bosnian arms - sold by US, British and Swiss firms - are being passed to insurgents. A Nato spokesman said: "There's no tracking mechanism to ensure they don't fall into the wrong hands. There are concerns that some may have been siphoned off." This year a newspaper claimed two UK firms were involved in a deal in which thousands of guns for Iraqi forces were re-routed to al-Qaeda.

One arms broker's lawyer is said to have admitted that nearly all of a shipment of 1,500 AK-47s went missing. And a US official said £270million of equipment could not be traced.

Meanwhile, Aerocom, the Moldovan air firm at the centre of the 200,000 missing AK47s, was stripped of its licence by its national authorities a day before the first shipment.

Two other companies in the complicated sale claim to have papers proving the guns were delivered in Iraq but refuse to show them.

Amnesty has now called on Britain to clamp down on the arms trade.

Spokeswoman Kate Allen said: "It's out of control and costing hundreds of thousands of lives every year. The UK has a real chance to do something about it when the UN meets in June."

Voice of the Mirror: Page 6

mirrornews@mgn.co.uk

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"Add Cuba & Venezula to the list of Countries that warned Bush of 9/11."

So Cuba and Venezula warned Bushy & co about 911.... no wonder Bushy hates them.

 Web Address -- http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

May 17, 2006 -- Add Cuba and Venezuela to the list of countries that knew of and informed the Bush administration about a "major terrorist attack" prior to 911. In addition to Russia, Jordan, France, Germany, and other nations, Venezuelan and Cuban intelligence picked up chatter about a "major terrorist attack" on the United States prior to 911. Cuban intelligence, which has an extensive network in Florida -- a home base of the hijackers and their handlers -- initially picked up reports about the attack and passed the information to both the United States and Venezuela. However, the Bush administration failed to react to this and other foreign warnings. Venezuelan intelligence, likely from its own sources in FloridaUnited States. The failure of the Bush administration to heed these warnings coupled with subsequent intelligence picked up by the Cuban and Venezuelan security services have led them to conclude that 9-11 was carried out as a result of an "inside job" within the Bush administration. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has announced plans to hold an international 9-11 commission of inquiry in Caracas that will bring together a host of international government, security, and political leaders. Already, preliminary meetings in Caracas for the conference have attracted the attention of the FBI. Recently, an FBI agent asked for the guest list of a hotel on Margarita island to check on names of guests, including Americans, associated with the preliminary planning meetings for the conference. and elsewhere, confirmed that something major would occur in the

Notice just like Mr. Reficul said, ‘Rumsfeld will gather all the reigns of power at the Pentagon’

We are definitely a banana republic.

MPG

Power-Hungry Pentagon Needs to be Reined In

by Floyd J. McKay

Web address  -- http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0517-25.htm

Some influential Republicans are upset at the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to head the Central Intelligence Agency, preferring a civilian to maintain the CIA's independence from the powerful Pentagon. Just a change of clothing isn't enough to distance Hayden from his fellow generals.

When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, backing Hayden, asserts, "There's no power play taking place in Washington," lock up the silverware, for the Big Con Game is afoot. Rummy is surpassed only by his buddy, Vice President Dick Cheney, in playing the capital's inside-power game — just ask Colin Powell.

Public fears brought on by 9/11 have given the American military unchallenged access to taxpayer funds and increased responsibilities and prestige that can only be compared to World War II. Along with the super-secret National Security Agency, which Hayden headed while it collected personal data on millions of Americans without a court warrant, Pentagon intelligence is shrouded in secrecy.

Its increased power has come largely at the expense of the State Department and the CIA. The Pentagon already controls some 80 percent of intelligence funding, and has greatly expanded the scope of its intelligence operations under Rumsfeld.

Last year, the Pentagon was forced to back away from domestic surveillance of anti-war activists and protests. Like most Pentagon actions, the surveillance was done secretly in the name of counter-terrorism, and surfaced only with an NBC News investigation. The civilian contractor that ran the Pentagon surveillance is the same firm that bribed former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

Pentagon intrusions into areas normally reserved for the CIA, "human intelligence" operations involving undercover agents and spies, have been a constant concern in the CIA and among some in Congress.

The Pentagon is also encroaching on territory traditionally reserved to state and local law agencies and the National Guard. Traditional tension between the full-time military and the Guard and Reserves has reached new highs under Rumsfeld, as the part-timers have been pressed into repeated trips to Iraq. Some 70 percent of Guard members have been in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001, and Guard or Reserve troops made up nearly half of our forces in Iraq in 2005. At the same time, the regular Army has kept the equipment of the reserve forces, cutting units back to the point where they are barely able to train and respond to domestic demands. The Louisiana National Guard was in Iraq when Katrina hit.

No other unit of government spends so much, with so little oversight. Annual Pentagon spending is now over $500 billion a year, with $1.3 trillion in planned new weapons systems. We support over 6,000 military bases worldwide, and spend money so fast that auditors are unable to track billions of dollars in equipment and contracts.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., no enemy of the military, has called it "unsustainable defense spending." By most accounts, the United States spends more money each year on its military than the rest of the developed world combined. Pentagon spending has grown 48 percent under George W. Bush.

The big winners in the militarization of America have been the defense contractors, ranging from weapons manufacturers to private contractors that provide everything from security to meals for American troops. Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, with the closest of ties to Bush and Cheney, have been the major beneficiaries of no-bid contracts in Iraq. Despite repeated findings of incompetence in their performance, they have routinely won bonuses and escaped serious penalties.

The close ties of a handful of defense contractors to the Pentagon have made it almost impossible for rivals to build up expertise to compete for defense contracts, because they lack the political muscle to get into the bidding game. No other federal agency is given this latitude to reward its friends.

There are implications both foreign and domestic.

At home, we put the war toys on our credit card and cut federal budgets for health, housing and education. The Pentagon is unaccountable and uncontrolled.

Abroad, people in all parts of the world regularly rank the United States as the greatest threat to world peace — above such "bad guys" as Iran and North Korea. From hard experience in many cases, they know that a military buildup of this scale will always tempt generals and presidents to use the weapons and the troops, to win another star on the shoulder or re-election by a frightened nation.

It is past time to confront what President Dwight Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex," before it calls all the shots.

Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor emeritus at Western Washington University, is a regular contributor to Times editorial pages. E-mail to: floydmckay@yahoo.com

© 2006 The Seattle Times Company

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First you give them plans (albeit faulty ones), along with nuclear power plants & technology from people like Khan of Pakistan.  Then you endlessly threaten them and allow them to witness what happens to your country if you DON’T have nukes, a.k.a. Iraq.  Then when these ‘plans, intentions, and technologies’ are “discovered” you bomb the !@#$%^&* out of the country you gave the plans to in the first place.

Aren’t we a nice country?  Aren’t we helpful?

As I said before you would have to be a complete drooling, suicidal, idiot to do business with the U.S. - MPG

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------start article

In an extract from his explosive new book, New York Times reporter James Risen reveals the bungles and miscalculations that led to a spectacular intelligence fiasco

Thursday January 5, 2006

The Guardian

State of War, by James Risen

Web address  --  http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,1678220,00.html

She had probably done this a dozen times before. Modern digital technology had made clandestine communications with overseas agents seem routine. Back in the cold war, contacting a secret agent in Moscow or Beijing was a dangerous, labour-intensive process that could take days or even weeks. But by 2004, it was possible to send high-speed, encrypted messages directly and instantaneously from CIA headquarters to agents in the field who were equipped with small, covert personal communications devices. So the officer at CIA headquarters assigned to handle communications with the agency's spies in Iran probably didn't think twice when she began her latest download. With a few simple commands, she sent a secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA's spy network. Just as she had done so many times before.

But this time, the ease and speed of the technology betrayed her. The CIA officer had made a disastrous mistake. She had sent information to one Iranian agent that exposed an entire spy network; the data could be used to identify virtually every spy the CIA had inside Iran.

Mistake piled on mistake. As the CIA later learned, the Iranian who received the download was a double agent. The agent quickly turned the data over to Iranian security officials, and it enabled them to "roll up" the CIA's network throughout Iran. CIA sources say that several of the Iranian agents were arrested and jailed, while the fates of some of the others is still unknown.

This espionage disaster, of course, was not reported. It left the CIA virtually blind in Iran, unable to provide any significant intelligence on one of the most critical issues facing the US - whether Tehran was about to go nuclear.

In fact, just as President Bush and his aides were making the case in 2004 and 2005 that Iran was moving rapidly to develop nuclear weapons, the American intelligence community found itself unable to provide the evidence to back up the administration's public arguments. On the heels of the CIA's failure to provide accurate pre-war intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the agency was once again clueless in the Middle East. In the spring of 2005, in the wake of the CIA's Iranian disaster, Porter Goss, its new director, told President Bush in a White House briefing that the CIA really didn't know how close Iran was to becoming a nuclear power.

But it's worse than that. Deep in the bowels of the CIA, someone must be nervously, but very privately, wondering: "Whatever happened to those nuclear blueprints we gave to the Iranians?"

The story dates back to the Clinton administration and February 2000, when one frightened Russian scientist walked Vienna's winter streets. The Russian had good reason to be afraid. He was walking around Vienna with blueprints for a nuclear bomb.

To be precise, he was carrying technical designs for a TBA 480 high-voltage block, otherwise known as a "firing set", for a Russian-designed nuclear weapon. He held in his hands the knowledge needed to create a perfect implosion that could trigger a nuclear chain reaction inside a small spherical core. It was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.

The Russian, who had defected to the US years earlier, still couldn't believe the orders he had received from CIA headquarters. The CIA had given him the nuclear blueprints and then sent him to Vienna to sell them - or simply give them - to the Iranian representatives to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). With the Russian doing its bidding, the CIA appeared to be about to help Iran leapfrog one of the last remaining engineering hurdles blocking its path to a nuclear weapon. The dangerous irony was not lost on the Russian - the IAEA was an international organisation created to restrict the spread of nuclear technology.

The Russian was a nuclear engineer in the pay of the CIA, which had arranged for him to become an American citizen and funded him to the tune of $5,000 a month. It seemed like easy money, with few strings attached.

Until now. The CIA was placing him on the front line of a plan that seemed to be completely at odds with the interests of the US, and it had taken a lot of persuading by his CIA case officer to convince him to go through with what appeared to be a rogue operation.

The case officer worked hard to convince him - even though he had doubts about the plan as well. As he was sweet-talking the Russian into flying to Vienna, the case officer wondered whether he was involved in an illegal covert action. Should he expect to be hauled before a congressional committee and grilled because he was the officer who helped give nuclear blueprints to Iran? The code name for this operation was Merlin; to the officer, that seemed like a wry tip-off that nothing about this programme was what it appeared to be. He did his best to hide his concerns from his Russian agent.

The Russian's assignment from the CIA was to pose as an unemployed and greedy scientist who was willing to sell his soul - and the secrets of the atomic bomb - to the highest bidder. By hook or by crook, the CIA told him, he was to get the nuclear blueprints to the Iranians. They would quickly recognise their value and rush them back to their superiors in Tehran.

The plan had been laid out for the defector during a CIA-financed trip to San Francisco, where he had meetings with CIA officers and nuclear experts mixed in with leisurely wine-tasting trips to Sonoma County. In a luxurious San Francisco hotel room, a senior CIA official involved in the operation talked the Russian through the details of the plan. He brought in experts from one of the national laboratories to go over the blueprints that he was supposed to give the Iranians.

The senior CIA officer could see that the Russian was nervous, and so he tried to downplay the significance of what they were asking him to do. He said the CIA was mounting the operation simply to find out where the Iranians were with their nuclear programme. This was just an intelligence-gathering effort, the CIA officer said, not an illegal attempt to give Iran the bomb. He suggested that the Iranians already had the technology he was going to hand over to them. It was all a game. Nothing too serious.

On paper, Merlin was supposed to stunt the development of Tehran's nuclear programme by sending Iran's weapons experts down the wrong technical path. The CIA believed that once the Iranians had the blueprints and studied them, they would believe the designs were usable and so would start to build an atom bomb based on the flawed designs. But Tehran would get a big surprise when its scientists tried to explode their new bomb. Instead of a mushroom cloud, the Iranian scientists would witness a disappointing fizzle. The Iranian nuclear programme would suffer a humiliating setback, and Tehran's goal of becoming a nuclear power would have been delayed by several years. In the meantime, the CIA, by watching Iran's reaction to the blueprints, would have gained a wealth of information about the status of Iran's weapons programme, which has been shrouded in secrecy.

The Russian studied the blueprints the CIA had given him. Within minutes of being handed the designs, he had identified a flaw. "This isn't right," he told the CIA officers gathered around the hotel room. "There is something wrong." His comments prompted stony looks, but no straight answers from the CIA men. No one in the meeting seemed surprised by the Russian's assertion that the blueprints didn't look quite right, but no one wanted to enlighten him further on the matter, either.

In fact, the CIA case officer who was the Russian's personal handler had been stunned by his statement. During a break, he took the senior CIA officer aside. "He wasn't supposed to know that," the CIA case officer told his superior. "He wasn't supposed to find a flaw."

"Don't worry," the senior CIA officer calmly replied. "It doesn't matter."

The CIA case officer couldn't believe the senior CIA officer's answer, but he managed to keep his fears from the Russian, and continued to train him for his mission.

After their trip to San Francisco, the case officer handed the Russian a sealed envelope with the nuclear blueprints inside. He was told not to open the envelope under any circumstances. He was to follow the CIA's instructions to find the Iranians and give them the envelope with the documents inside. Keep it simple, and get out of Vienna safe and alive, the Russian was told. But the defector had his own ideas about how he might play that game.

The CIA had discovered that a high-ranking Iranian official would be travelling to Vienna and visiting the Iranian mission to the IAEA, and so the agency decided to send the Russian to Vienna at the same time. It was hoped that he could make contact with either the Iranian representative to the IAEA or the visitor from Tehran.

In Vienna, however, the Russian unsealed the envelope with the nuclear blueprints and included a personal letter of his own to the Iranians. No matter what the CIA told him, he was going to hedge his bets. There was obviously something wrong with the blueprints - so he decided to mention that fact to the Iranians in his letter. They would certainly find flaws for themselves, and if he didn't tell them first, they would never want to deal with him again.

The Russian was thus warning the Iranians as carefully as he could that there was a flaw somewhere in the nuclear blueprints, and he could help them find it. At the same time, he was still going through with the CIA's operation in the only way he thought would work.

The Russian soon found 19 Heinstrasse, a five-storey office and apartment building with a flat, pale green and beige facade in a quiet, slightly down-at-heel neighbourhood in Vienna's north end. Amid the list of Austrian tenants, there was one simple line: "PM/Iran." The Iranians clearly didn't want publicity. An Austrian postman helped him. As the Russian stood by, the postman opened the building door and dropped off the mail. The Russian followed suit; he realised that he could leave his package without actually having to talk to anyone. He slipped through the front door, and hurriedly shoved his envelope through the inner-door slot at the Iranian office.

The Russian fled the mission without being seen. He was deeply relieved that he had made the hand-off without having to come face to face with a real live Iranian. He flew back to the US without being detected by either Austrian security or, more importantly, Iranian intelligence.

Just days after the Russian dropped off his package at the Iranian mission, the National Security Agency reported that an Iranian official in ViennaIran. The odds were that the nuclear blueprints were now in Tehran. abruptly changed his schedule, making airline reservations to fly home to

The Russian scientist's fears about the operation seemed well founded. He was the front man for what may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA, one that may have helped put nuclear weapons in the hands of a charter member of what President George W Bush has called the "axis of evil".

Operation Merlin has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Clinton and Bush administrations. It's not clear who originally came up with the idea, but the plan was first approved by Clinton. After the Russian scientist's fateful trip to Vienna, however, the Merlin operation was endorsed by the Bush administration, possibly with an eye toward repeating it against North Korea or other dangerous states.

Several former CIA officials say that the theory behind Merlin - handing over tainted weapon designs to confound one of America's adversaries - is a trick that has been used many times in past operations, stretching back to the cold war. But in previous cases, such Trojan horse operations involved conventional weapons; none of the former officials had ever heard of the CIA attempting to conduct this kind of high-risk operation with designs for a nuclear bomb. The former officials also said these kind of programmes must be closely monitored by senior CIA managers in order to control the flow of information to the adversary. If mishandled, they could easily help an enemy accelerate its weapons development. That may be what happened with Merlin.

Iran has spent nearly 20 years trying to develop nuclear weapons, and in the process has created a strong base of sophisticated scientists knowledgeable enough to spot flaws in nuclear blueprints. Tehran also obtained nuclear blueprints from the network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, and so already had workable blueprints against which to compare the designs obtained from the CIA. Nuclear experts say that they would thus be able to extract valuable information from the blueprints while ignoring the flaws.

"If [the flaw] is bad enough," warned a nuclear weapons expert with the IAEA, "they will find it quite quickly. That would be my fear"

© James Risen 2006

· This is an edited extract from State of War, by James Risen, published by The Free Press

End MPG

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This is absolutely hilarious.  MPG

Ed Naha: 'Great Presidential moments'

Posted on Tuesday, May 16, 2006 @ 09:49:06 EDT

From the SmirkingChimp.com

This article has been read 1882 times. Ed Naha

Web address  --  http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=26113&mode=nested&order=0

Source: http://mkanejeeves.com/?p=204

It's been just over a week since George W. Bush revealed to German reporters that his best moment as President was "when I caught a seven-and-a-half pound large mouth bass on my lake."

Well, as a news-junkie I thought: "Surely, that can't be his greatest moment as President! I mean, there are so many to choose from." So, leaping onto the internets and doing a Wrexus search, I found that, indeed, our President has given different "best moments" to different outlets over the years. Here are some of the results.

Bush revealed to "Strife Magazine," that he finest moment was very recent. "It was when I figured out how to deal with the immigration issue without dealing with it at all. If I order National Guard troops to the U.S. - Meskin border and not have them do anything but pose, it'll get a lot of people off my back. Plus, the states have to foot the bill. I call it 'Operation Pork and Beans.' A-heh-heh."

To "Guns and Whammo!" magazine, he said: "No doubt about it. The whole 'Shock and Awe' thing in Baghdad. Watching us blow the Hell out of that city just gave me goose-bumps. Ya' see, when I was growing up - on the 4th of July? Nobody allowed me to have firecrackers. All the other kids had M-80s, cherry bombs and Depth Chargers and stuff that blowed up. I got stuck with sparklers. Sparklers! You know what that tells your friends about you? How much harm can you do with a sparkler? You prance around like a fairy. For years, I was known as 'Tink.'

"Hell, you could do more damage with matches. Later, of course, I was allowed to have fire-crackers and blow up frogs. But, by then, I was thirty five."

In "Movie-Maniax," he revealed. "It was five years ago. I was relaxing and watching 'The Towering Inferno' on TV. It was on all the channels. Must've been one of those 'watch it for free and, then, sign up' cable deals. I couldn't figure out why there were two towers, tho. And I couldn't find Lorne Greene. I loved him on 'Bonanza.' Everyone around me seemed really upset. I figured that was because they couldn't find Lorne Greene, either. Not to pat my own horn, but I was the first one in the entire White House to figure out it was just a crummy re-make. Everybody was impressed. I could tell by their wide-eyed looks. Count me out on this new 'Poseidon' thing."

To "X-Ray Specks Journal," he revealed: "The best time I ever had was when General Heidi-Ho Hayden brought me down to that super-duper secret NASA spying thing we got goin'. He let me put on a headset and listen to some of the phone conversations. Very 007. I got a good recipe for pie outta that deal, too. Apparently, terrorists are into baked goods. But that whole NASA set-up? No wonder these guys could land a man on the Moon. Next year? We should try landing on the Sun! Think about all the energy we could find up there!"

In "Popular Stigmata" magazine, he opined: "I think the best moment was when Jesus first appeared to me in The White House, after my meds. At first He looked a lot like Laura, just a' shaken' me, but then, he morphed into the spitting image of Our Lord Savior, but He didn't actually spit. Then, God the Father appeared! Until I was focused, He looked a lot like my Mom. They yelled at each other, like a Father and Son do, but then, they agreed that I was put here on Earth to preach the word and spread democracy through bombing. The white bird flying around the room creeped me out, though. I was afraid Cheney was going to run into the room and blast it."

To "Bike and Crash" magazine he said: "The best time as President is when I'm on the ranch and I just go biking with really tight clothes on and a nifty Flash Gordon helmet. It's like, I'm free, ya' know? I like seeing nothing but open road in front of me. The sky and the trees and the open road. I just ignore the two hundred heavily armed people riding behind me with all those ambulances in case I fall down and scramble my face."

On the "One-Liner On-Line" web site, he said: "I'm a great fan of comedy. Not too many people know that. I love plastic vomit and whoopee cushions and depleted uranium. I'm a fan of all the greats: Dennis Miller, Gallagher, Bill O'Reilly, Himmler. I love to laugh and to make people laugh. My best moment came, two years ago, when I made that hilarious tape for the White House hacks where I'm looking for the missing WMDs. I mean, that was performance art at its best. I killed the audience. The ones I didn't kill? I maimed."

To "He-Man Magazine," he said the best moment was when: "I fought that pretzel of doom out of my mouth. No doubt about it. It was the work of terrorists. They were probably practicing the black arts. That pretzel just started choking me, ya know? But I fought it back, eventually overcoming both the pretzel and its accomplice, the coffee table. Both were arrested. That coffee-table is now at Gitmo. The Pretzel? I turned it over to the dogs at Abu-Ghraib. They love to sink their teeth into salty things."

In "The Orwellian Times," he confided: "My best day was probably when Karl and I came up with the idea of setting up 'Free Speech Zones' wherever I appear. Karl is a real genius. I was talking about drowning protesters like kittens in a sack and he came up with this idea that, if you move protesters a mile or so away and put 'em in a cage, you don't have to drown them. And, a big plus, you can't hear them at all. Or, see them, either. I'm still pushing the sack idea, though. Making big sacks would bring a lot of jobs to the U.S. Stay tuned."

In "The Tolstoy Tattler," he revealed: "My most exciting moment was when I met Pootie-Poot for the first time and I saw his soul. I mean, I'm looking at this big guy, (He's ex-KGB which, by the way, is different from KFC. Pootie pointed that out to me after I made some chicken jokes.) and I see his soul. It was a little-bitty thing. Kind of looked like a ball of tinfoil. I remember telling him that I peeked into his soul. He stared at me with his jaw all stiff and said: 'You are a perfect fool.' That's the kind of sense of humor he has. I tried to be modest. 'Hey,' I said, 'Nobody's perfect.'"

In "Goose-Step Gazette," Bush revealed that his best moment came "When Dick told me about Presidential authority. I mean, basically, I can change or piss on any law I want to because I'm a war-time President. I mean, all I have to do is add a line here or a line there. Here's an example. Suppose I have a law that says 'everyone's allowed a trial by his peers.' I just change it to 'no-one's allowed a trial by his peers.' Just put my name and a little smiley face sticker on it and it's all legal. I feel like Mel Brooks, when he said 'It's good to be the King,' except I'm not a short Hollywood Jew."

To the Disassociated Press he said. "Meeting Stephen Colbert was a gas. Man, I like this guy more than anyone else on Fox. He tells it like it is. I was frowning when he was talking 'cause I was listening hard as he was getting out my talking points. It was like I was listening to the voice in my head. He was that good. Like he said. Who cares about the polls? I mean, what do I care about Poland?' Plus his hair shines better than DeLay's.

"Later, Turd-Blossom told me it was a comedy routine. I said to Turd-Blossom, 'Fool me once, shame on somebody. Fool me three or four times, it's a Who song.' He shook his head and walked out. Somebody told me he was going to do a 'frog-march' soon. I've never seen a frog march, only hop and blow-up. It should be an interesting sight."

In "Spy Vs. Spy Quarterly," he bragged: "My best moment was when Valerie Flame was revealed as a subversive agent and her husband, Mr. Flame, was hung out to dry for telling the truth about lies. That will teach 'The New York Times' to let anybody but Judy Miller take steno from us. Steno is a lost art and that's a fact. But, we're trying to get it back into the mainstream. So far, it's working pretty good. And, now, we have Tony Snow. Done deal."

To Roto-Reuters, Bush waxed: "When I saw Saddam's statue get torn down by our paid protesters? I got all teary-eyed. It was like watching the end of 'Old Yeller,' but without the dog and with a whole bunch of swarthy people on the take, instead. Staged news is what makes this country great. I am proud to be part of that process. If anything topped my 'Top Gun' moment, it was the Saddam deal. Hmmm. Well, maybe bringing electricity to a powerless New Orleans for two hours so I could give a speech after Katrina was better. We've staged so many phony news events, it's hard to choose."

Finally, to "The Tin-Foil Tribune," Bush declared: "My best moment as President was when we invaded Iran, declared martial law and suspended the 2006 elections. Oh, sorry. That hasn't happened, yet. Well, the cat is out of the bag, so keep it under your hat, my friend. The news, I mean. Not the cat. Just remember, I know where you live and what kind of pie your Aunt Martha bakes. And, how's your wife? Is she out of de-tox, yet? Did you know your kids talk to strangers with candy? Have a pretzel?"

And, that's the way it seems.

Good-night and God help us.

Source: