The Way the Future Blogs

Vincent Bugliosi, who put Charles Manson away, is probably the world’s most successful prosecuting attorney. He knows all about bringing a charge of murder and getting a conviction, and in this book he argues that George W. Bush, along with Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and perhaps other members of the Bush administration are guilty of the crimes of murder and conspiracy to commit murder under the laws of the U.S.A. He describes how he could prosecute them if he had standing to bring an action, and points out that any district attorney in any state or county from which any soldier was shipped to Iraq and was killed there does have standing. Moreover, any one of them can bring an action at any time since there is no statute of limitations on murder.

Now, do you think there is any chance that any one of these sworn law enforcers will actually issue an arrest warrant and have the cops haul one or more of these malefactors in for the customary fingerprinting, mug shots and residence in a cell?

I don’t. And that makes me wonder what kind of a country we’re living in.

  Dick Cheney

I was never a fan of Dick Cheney, but since he has been out of office he seems to have got even worse. Some of the things he says simply can’t be defended.

In just one example, he says that the blame for al Qaeda’s bloody and brutal destruction of the World Trade Center and the death of the thousands of people it murdered belongs to one man alone, namely Dick Clarke, because Clarke had the responsibility for warning President Bush in such matters and failed to do as he was sworn to do.

But that is not simply untrue, it is the opposite of true. On several occasions Clarke sent clear and unambiguous written warnings, one of them just days before the actual attack and they were ignored. That is a matter of public record.

So there are only two possibilities. Either Cheney is flat-out lying though aware that his lies can be proven on him, or he has simply lost touch with the real world.

Either way, whatever he says, he is not to be believed.

Lefty, the Cat

Turns out that cats, like people, have handedness. Females are more likely to be southpaws, males righties, but it can go either way. If you want to know the leanings of the Felis domestica in your house watch it the next time it has a one-paw job to do, like fishing something out of a jar,

 
You’re Never Too Poor to Swindle

The bloodsuckers are up and about and their specialty now is seeking out the people who are already in terrible financial shape, to whom they promise help. Which, of course, they don’t deliver, preferring to vacuum out and appropriate whatever crumbs of cash the impoverished may have left. (Bernie Madoff was a great villain, but at least he stole from the rich.) So I went back through my files and came up with “Financial traps are flourishing: Tough times have bred five costly come-ons” in the March ’09 Consumer Reports. So if you, or someone you know, has been hit with threats of foreclosure or evaporation of your 401K or the like, you should take a look at it.

I’ll give you just one example. If all your credit cards had been taken away and nobody would give you a new one, Continental Finance Classic MasterCard was more obliging. You probably don’t want its help, though. The maximum chargeable credit line was $300, and by the time the customer got the card $250 had already been taken out of your balance to pay for the account processing fee: $50, and annual membership fee, $200. The $50 of credit that was left you could use as you liked, bearing in mind that an account management fee would have had to be paid every month, with other fees coming due later. So beware!

So long, Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Crescent, which is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, is the place in the Middle East where our planet’s civilizations were born. It was the home of the world’s greatest early cities — Sumer, Ur, Babylon and more — and it fed them from its rich and well watered soil; it is where many of the stories in the Bible took place and where they invented beer.

It is projected to become a full-fledged desert by the end of this century. There’s a brutal drought going on in the region, but the real enemy is dams — the big ones Turkey has erected along the Euphrates and the ones Iran has installed along the tributaries of the Tigris. Both countries have indicated they’ll go right on building them. Already some of the smaller rivers are running dry.

 
The Bush-Cheney Alumni Association

No, we didn’t make that up. It’s real. It’s what it says it is, an association of the people who were most closely connected with President Bush and Vice President Cheney over the last eight years, and its purpose, they say, is “dedicated to setting the record straight.”

Maybe so, but I can’t help thinking it’s more like getting their stories together so they’re all giving the same answers to the hard questions. Questions like: When you had the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden and all of Al Qaeda licked and running and it only took one more push to put them away for good, why did you pull the troops out to invade Iraq? And when you did go ahead and invade, why didn’t you immediately seize all the Iraqi explosives and weaponry instead of leaving them unguarded for the terrorists to steal and kill American soldiers with, as they’ve been doing ever since? And about forty other questions about the doings of the most wrong-headed administration this country has seen, ever.

Related post: Little Known Fun Facts

As we were departing our last Hawaiian port of call, the captain got on the horn with bad news. He said the part of the Pacific Ocean we were heading into, which was most of it, was poorly served with American TV. Therefore CNN and ESPN and all the other feeds that had supplied most of the channels in our stateroom TVs were now but a memory. They wouldn’t be back until just before we docked in San Diego at the end of the cruise, but he was happy to announce that we wouldn’t be totally deprived of a voice from home. The Fox channel (which reached the Earth’s surface not from a communications satellite, like everybody else, but through a navigation satellite, which covered everywhere) would be glad to serve us while the real news people were absent.

In the event, it wasn’t any worse than I had expected. It wasn’t any better, either. As a news source, Fox suffered from not offering very much of it, preferring to allocate its time slots to its right-wing pundits — Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich were among the ones they promised — for the purpose of explaining the true meaning of the news rather than delivering any. When big news stories broke, Fox did cover them, at least at first, on a reasonably factual basis: the crash landing of a bird-damaged jet in the Hudson River, the inauguration of President Barack Obama, the brief and not really explained in-and-out candidacy of Caroline Kennedy as appointee to Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat.

Each of these events Fox kept alive for days, perhaps so that they could explicate the moral lessons involved: the faith-based explanations for the survival of the jet’s occupants, the theory that, since she was a member of the evil Kennedy tribe, Caroline probably had a trunkful of sordid secrets a fitness hearing would expose to the world. And, in order to give Obama’s inaugural address a fair and impartial review, they engaged a person who truly did know something about inaugural addresses. He had written both of George W. Bush’s.

(Confession: I haven’t actually experienced seventeen full days of Foxiness. Along about the tenth day, I finally figured out that, if I tuned to that channel but turned the sound down to zero, I would never have to hear the crazy-making utterances of Hannity, O’Reilly, et al anymore but could get a rough idea of what was going on in the world from the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, which, relatively speaking, was only mildly toxic.)