Supply Your Own N.R.A. Joke February 13, 2006January 16, 2017 You SO should subscribe to Times Select, so you can read columns like this one by Maureen Dowd (emphasis added): February 11, 2006 Op-Ed Columnist Smoking Dutch Cleanser By Maureen Dowd Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company Vice President Dick Cheney bitterly complains that national security leaks are endangering America. Unless, of course, he’s doing the leaking, tapping Scooter Libby to reveal national security information to punish a political critic. President Bush says he will not talk about specific security threats to America. Unless, of course, he needs to talk about a specific threat to Los Angeles to confuse the public and gain some cheap political advantage. The White House says it has done everything possible to protect the homeland. Unless, of course, it hasn’t. Then it can lie to hide the callous portrait of Incurious George in Crawford as New Orleans drowned. The attorney general can claim that torture and warrantless wiretapping are legal, and can mislead Congress. Unless, of course, enough Republicans stand up and say, as Arlen Specter told The Washington Post, that if that lickspittle lawyer thinks all this is legal, “he’s smoking Dutch Cleanser.” The president doesn’t know the Indian Taker Jack Abramoff. Unless, of course, W. has met with him a dozen times, invited him to Crawford and joked with him about his kids. The Bushies can continue to claim that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam was a threat to our security. Unless, of course, he wasn’t, and the Cheney cabal was simply abusing the trust of Americans to push a wild-eyed political scheme. . . . Instead of just going after the 9/11 fiends, as W. promised with his bullhorn, the president and Vice President Strangelove have cynically played the terror card to accrue power and sidestep blame. They have twisted our values, mismanaged crises, fueled fundamentalist successes and violence around the world, and magnified a clash of civilizations. It used to take an Israeli incursion to inflame the Arab world. Now all it takes is a cartoon in Denmark. W. and Vice have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, turning Iraq into a terrorist training ground, leaving the 9/11 villains at large, and letting cronies and losers botch the job of homeland security. . . . In the new Foreign Affairs, Paul Pillar, who was a senior C.I.A. official overseeing Middle East intelligence assessments until October, says the obvious conclusion that should have been drawn from the intelligence on Iraq was that war was unnecessary. He says the White House “went to war without requesting – and evidently without being influenced by – any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.” . . . A final absurd junction of dysfunction was reached on Wednesday, when Republican Party leaders awarded Tom DeLay with a seat on the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Justice Department, which is investigating Jack Abramoff, including his connections to Tom DeLay. Perfect. ☞ Well, if not perfect, pretty darn close. COLLATERAL DAMAGE: SUPPLY YOUR OWN NRA JOKE HERE If Dick Cheney shoots his own friends . . . NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL GETTING A LITTLE EXERCISE Jim Brenner: ‘Miami may have Hip-Hop and Reggaeton, but Dvinsk (‘dveensk’) has ‘Le Parkour.” ☞ Click here to watch it (amazing), and here to find our what the heck it is. Tomorrow: Smart and Simple Financial Strategies for Busy People