Permit me to introduce myself. My name is Coyote. Wile E. Coyote, genius.

There's an almost surreal quality to the outgoing Bush administration publicly warning president-elect Obama that terrorists see transitions between governments as a good time to attack.

This is after all the administration that ignored multiple warnings about the 9/11 attacks from Clinton administration officials like Sandy Berger, Richard Clarke or George Tenet in order to focus on the important issues like renewing Star Wars missile defense program. Berger warned Condoleeza Rice months before the attacks that terrorism would "consume far more of her time than she would have imagined."

“For the next 75 days, all of us must ensure that the next president and his team can hit the ground running,” Mr. Bush said in an emotional speech to hundreds of employees of the executive branch on the South Lawn of the White House.

Dude, the next president isn't going to just hit the ground running. He's going to leave your worthless team in the dust. You're about to see what he feels like to be the Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner.

I did find this a bit annoying:

Mr. Bush has said he is determined to conduct an orderly transition. The White House wants to avoid a repeat of the kind of news reports that plagued President Bill Clinton when he left office amid questions about whether members of his staff, irked at having to turn their offices over to Republicans, removed the letter W from some computer keyboards.

How nice of the author of this article to underplay what exploded into a major vandalism scandal only a few days after Bush took office. It included accusations that the outgoing Clinton administration cut telephone wires, wrecked computers, left graffiti on the walls, stole presidential seals and even towels off of Air Force One. A General Accounting Office investigation found most of the accusations to be bunk.

"Certainly people inside the [Bush] administration fed this story," says an angry John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff. "At least they got what they wanted out of it."

A close look at the way the scandal mushroomed bolsters Podesta's view: The Bush administration helped the vandal scandal along, publicly appearing to try to douse the flames, while privately fanning them with detailed, off-the-record allegations of damage. On Tuesday, after the GAO's review was made public, Fleischer was left trying to spin himself out of a very deep hole, insisting he had tried to "knock down" the vandal story when it first emerged.

But a transcript of Fleischer's Jan. 25 briefing on the issue contradicts him. It shows the Bush spokesman coyly encouraging reporters' suspicions about the vandal scandal, while refusing to confirm or deny the reports of damage. According to one leading White House reporter, the story was also nudged along by two unnamed Bush aides.

Yesterday, Bush was referring to this "scandal" when he told his staff without any sense of irony to “conduct yourselves with the decency and professionalism that you have shown throughout my time in office.”

After 8 years of this administration we've seen decency and professionalism as something that are in short supply at this White House. Lying about their opponents and bare-knuckled politics are the way they conduct business. They have been from the start.

You know what Jack Burton always says... what the hell?

Help me with this.

First the media tells us there's not enough rice but then former president Jimmy Carter tells us there's too much Rice.

Who to believe?

Children can be nasty, don't you think?

Gee Condi, I don't really think it's up to you.

The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said she is unwilling to answer a US House of Representatives subpoena about Iraq's pre-war weapons.

A House committee wants to question Ms Rice about a White House assertion that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger to build nuclear weapons.

Maybe if she clicks her heels together three times she can wish the House subpoena away.

We didn't come here to fight monsters, we're not equipped for it.

Shortly after I started this blog I was told by a friend that he didn't enjoy reading it much because I can be "shrill."

I'm really not sure how to respond to that. A lot of people seemed to automatically tune-out of a political discussion when one of the parties becomes emotionally involved on any level. They aren't going to stick around to weigh the merits of the arguments at that point.

But in a larger sense I wonder why anyone with a functioning brain cell isn't shrill when they look at the state of our country and our government. I was upset when Bill Clinton lied to us, even though it was in response to a question he shouldn't have been asked. Today we have people at all levels of this administration who lie about everything. Repeatedly.

Wouldn't that make you a bit shrill? It did Bill Clinton during his Fox interview with Chris Wallace.

In response to Clinton's impassioned take-down of his critics within and without the administration they responded in the only way they know how: they lied.

Condoleeza Rice met with reporters yesterday and dropped this gem:

"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida," she told the newspaper, which is owned by News Corp., the same company that owns Fox News Channel.

No?

On January 21st, 2001 Richard Clarke sent a memo to Rice begging her to convene a principals meeting on terrorism attached to which was this Clinton administration document entitled "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al Qida: status and prospects." It was declassified during the 911 hearings.

The last two paragraphs of the opening summary read:

The United States' goal is to reduce the al Qida network to a point where it no longer poses a serious threat to our security or that of other governments. That goal can be achieved over a three to five year period, if adequate resources and policy attention are devoted to it.

Towardthat end, the United States has developed a comprehensive and coordinated strategy that employs a variety of tools including: diplomacy, covert action, public information and media, law enforcement, intelligence collection, foreign assistance, financial regulation enforcement, and military means to affect al Qida to its core."

I encourage you at least skim the document and ask yourself if you find it "comprehensive."

Then consider yourself shrill.

Will you tell me where you think the accident will take place and I'll make sure I'm there.

Just a little reminder as we find ourselves knee-deep in conservative 911 revisionism over the next couple of days. It may come as a shock to the Rush Limbaughs of the world but the country actually formed a commission and held *gasp* hearings in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks. The commission's final report was itself a summary of much of the testimony and investigative work that it implemented.

Some highlights from just that one day of public testimony covered in the March, 2004 Washington Post article I cite above:

President Bush's top counterterrorism adviser warned seven days before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks that hundreds of people could die in a strike by the al Qaeda network and that the administration was not doing enough to combat the threat, the commission investigating the attacks disclosed yesterday.

Richard A. Clarke, who served as a senior White House counterterrorism official under three successive presidents, wrote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 4, 2001, urging "policymakers to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier," according to a summary of the letter included in a commission staff report. Clarke also cites the same plea in his new book.

----

The CIA now says that a controversial August 2001 briefing summarizing potential attacks on the United States by al Qaeda was not requested by President Bush, as Rice and others had long claimed.

(In fact Rice held a news conference JUST to claim that the PDB was requested by Bush. Liar, liar...)

---

Commission investigators disclosed that during the Clinton administration, the president and other White House officials signed a series of secret orders for covert action that, according to the top Clinton aides, authorized the killing of bin Laden by CIA proxies.

---

In the summer of 2001, veteran counterterrorism officers privy to reports on al Qaeda threats "were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns," according to one of two staff reports issued by the commission yesterday. Senior CIA officials were also frustrated by some Bush appointees who were not familiar with surges in terrorist threat information and questioned their veracity, the report said.

And it goes on and on. Point is the producers of the ABC movie seem to want to pretend there was no 911 Commission while claiming, at the same time, that the work of the Commission supports the "truthiness" of their film.

Is that how a warped brain like yours gets its kicks? By planning the death of innocent people?

John Belushi was a comic genius. It frustrates me to no end that he threw his life away in a speedball overdose some years ago. A complete and utter waste.

If I was to try to imagine what went through Belushi's drug-addled brain in the moments before his death I see all sorts of psychedelic visions of flying ponies, talking hamburgers and, more than likely, Donald Rumsfeld talking about Iraq's "known unknowns." Listening to Rumsfeld is just about that surreal of an experience.

I can't for the life of me remember an administration appointee from ANY administration that came into office with as much hype as Rumsfeld only to fail so miserably. Rumsfeld was going to modernize the military and bring it into the 21st century. Left unspoken was that his concept of modernity was the stuff of Star Wars fantasy. Literally. A missile defense shield which fails even fixed tests that he convinced the President was ready to spend billions of dollars deploying in Alaska. No doubt he had to promise the President he'd get the first lightsaber.

Don't even get me started on his approach to the human element of the military. If there was a way to cut costs and go it on the cheap it, especially at the expense of our men and women in uniform, he'd find it. Cut down on support. Check. Cut armor for humvees. Check. Cut benefits and hazard pay. Check. The man is obviously more in love with technology, especially unproven, over the health and well being of the actual soldiers who serve under him.

In public he comes across as a sort of bespectacled Mr. Spock, more computer than man. This is supposed to demonstrate his value as Secretary of Defense. Coldly and impeccably logical. Cool in the face of danger. A slave to reason. All complete bullshit.

There has been nothing in our strategy towards the war in Iraq that has been logical. From the lack of appropriate numbers of soldiers at the start of the war, to the allowances for looting, to the disbanding of the Iraqi military because of worries about Sunni officers-- it's been one downright stupid move after another.

So I found Rumsfeld's public jabs at Condi Rice amusing on a couple of levels. The first is that Rumsfeld wants to play a semantical game. Rice referred to mistakes in Iraq as "tactical errors." Because she's talking about the bigger picture and not the actual prosecution of the fighting by our military I assume she ment to say "strategical errors." In military terms "strategy" is the planning made by generals and above before and during the war to achieve victory. "Tactics" are what the troops on the ground put together to implement the strategy. Rumsfeld is pretending he doesn't understand Rice and, in the process, is being too cute by half:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he did not know what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was talking about when she said last week that the United States had made thousands of "tactical errors" in handling the war in Iraq, a statement she later said was meant figuratively.

Speaking during a radio interview on WDAY in Fargo, N.D., on Tuesday, Rumsfeld said calling changes in military tactics during the war "errors" reflects a lack of understanding of warfare. Rumsfeld defended his war plan for Iraq but added that such plans inevitably do not survive first contact with the enemy.

"Why? Because the enemy's got a brain; the enemy watches what you do and then adjusts to that, so you have to constantly adjust and change your tactics, your techniques and your procedures," Rumsfeld told interviewer Scott Hennen, according to a Defense Department transcript. "If someone says, well, that's a tactical mistake, then I guess it's a lack of understanding, at least my understanding, of what warfare is about."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/05/AR2006040502269_pf.html

I'd just point out one final thing: Rumsfeld's entire "understanding of what warfare is about" could easily fit on one side of a post-it. But listening to him talk is quite the high.