Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Andrew Ferguson of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard writes this for Donald Graham’s newspaper:

You can’t really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, “The Assault on Reason.” It’s a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I’d love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.

Here’s p. 282 of The Assault on Reason:

Ferguson goes on to say the Lincoln quote that Gore uses is bogus, and actually dates from the 1880s. Perhaps this is true, but I don’t think I’d rely on his research skills.

(Ferguson’s flabbergasting mistake was first pointed out by Anonymous Liberal and Ron Chusid.)

The BBC reports:

A Saudi prince received secret payments from the UK’s biggest arms dealer, a BBC investigation has revealed.

BAE Systems made regular payments of hundreds of millions of pounds to Prince Bandar bin Sultan for more than a decade.

The payments were made with the full knowledge of the Ministry of Defence…

The Prince served for 20 years as Saudi ambassador to the US.

Up to £120m a year was sent by BAE from the UK into two Saudi embassy accounts in Washington for more than a decade…

According to Panorama’s sources, the payments were written into the arms deal contract in secret annexes, described as “support services”.

They were authorised on a quarterly basis by the MoD.

The SFO inquiry into the Al Yamamah deal was stopped in December 2006.

Prime Minister Tony Blair said at the time it had been dropped because of national security concerns.

So…$100 billion a year flows into Saudi Arabia’s coffers to pay for their oil. The US and UK make sure that, rather than the money staying there and being spent for the people of Saudi Arabia, it returns to us to pay for weapons Saudi Arabia doesn’t need. To make this happen, arms dealers bribe the Saudi royal family with hundreds of millions of dollars, all with the knowledge and approval of the British government.

It’s all so cozy:

…for two decades, Bandar had built an intimate personal relationship with the Bush family that went far beyond a mere political friendship…Bandar and the elder Bush had participated in the shared rituals of manhood — hunting trips, vacations together, and the like…

In charitable contributions alone, the Saudis gave at least $3.5 million to Bush charities — $1 million by Prince Bandar to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum…and a $1 million painting from Prince Bandar to George W. Bush’s White House.

And:

Two days after the 9/11 attacks, the President asked Bandar to come to the White House. Bush embraced him and escorted him to the Truman balcony. Bandar had a drink and the two men smoked cigars.

And:

Bush welcomed Prince Bandar bin Sultan to his Texas ranch after telephoning Crown Prince Abdullah, the sitting ruler of Saudi Arabia, to say that recent anti-Saudi statements coming from the United States do not reflect Bush’s desire for an “eternal friendship” with the kingdom.

And:

Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government…They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

As you may have already seen, Dr. James Holsinger, Bush’s nominee for Surgeon General, is very concerned about gay men and their “anal eroticism.” Indeed, like most extremely manly men, he spends a lot of time thinking about this. I’m guessing that, at least when he was younger, he thought about it four or five times a day.

So everyone’s getting a good laugh about this. But Bush & co. work out their peculiar psycho-sexual obsessions in ways far more serious than this.

Take Eliot Cohen, for instance. Cohen wrote the Air Force’s study of the effects of air power during the Gulf War. Later he was a founding member of Project for a New American Century. And now he works for Condoleezza Rice in one of the State Department’s most prominent positions.

And this is what Eliot Cohen wrote about bombing other countries in 1994:

Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.

Ha ha ha! Yes, killing thousands of people with high explosives is sort of like sex out of wedlock! What a witty, apt comparison!

These people are the world’s most genuine perverts.

So Libby’s been sentenced to two and a half years. Meanwhile, all the letters from Libby’s friends pleading for leniency have been released.

One particularly entertaining one is from Henry Kissinger. Here’s how Kissinger pretends to see the world, when writing to a judge:

I met Scooter early in the second Bush administration, when he served as Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney. In that capacity, he attended all my meetings with the Vice President. He also acted as a kind of liaison for me to the National Security process. I was deeply impressed by his dedication, seriousness, patriotism and essential dignity…in my observations, he pursued his objectives with integrity and a sense of responsibility.

Here’s how Henry Kissinger actually sees the world, from The Final Days:

Kissinger counseled his aides that deviousness was part of their job [on the National Security Council]. “You systems-analysis people have too much integrity,” he told one of them. “This is not an honorable business conducted by honorable men in an honorable way. Don’t assume I’m that way and you shouldn’t be.”

As surely as the sun rises in the east, those who shriek the loudest about how much they Luv America have contempt for other Americans. This appears in The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein:

Almost from the beginning, Kissinger had secretly had all his telephone calls, including those with the President, monitored and transcribed…

Nixon was often on the phone with Kissinger for fifteen minutes or longer. The President was repetitive, sometimes taking minutes to come to a point, or he might suddenly shift to another topic…

During one call, the President drunkenly related to Dr. Kissinger the Vietnam policy of his friend Bebe Robozo…

During another call, Kissinger mentioned the number of American casualties in a major battle in Vietnam. “Oh, screw ’em,” said Nixon.

An interesting thing about this is that if it were about a Democratic president, it would be famous. Every schoolchild would learn about the hatred that Democrats secretly harbor in their hearts for our Brave Men In Uniform. In every presidential debate the Democrat would be asked how they could possibly convince the country they weren’t like their damnable predecessor. But since Nixon was a Republican, it’s dropped out of history entirely. (I can find only one reference to it online.)

AND: This appears later in the book:

In Haig’s presence, Kissinger referred pointedly to military men as “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns for foreign policy.

Again, imagine a Democratic administration was getting frequent advice from a former Democratic Secretary of State who’d said this. You’d be able to hear the screaming from cable news on Neptune.