Frank Rich’s New York Times op-ed column today was full of the kind of easy one-liners that repressives conservatives usually like to use against honest people progressives. I got it from my friend Joe, but because The New York Times thinks their content is golden, they won’t let me link you to the full-text. Eh, I looked it up in LexisNexis (also a paid service, but better (marginally)) and posted the good parts here:

The Downing Street memo — minutes of a Tony Blair meeting with senior advisers in July 2002, nearly eight months before the war began — has proved as accurate as “Mission Accomplished” was fantasy. Each week brings new confirmation that the White House, as the head of British intelligence put it, was determined to fix “the intelligence and facts” around its predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. Today Mr. Bush tries to pass the buck on the missing W.M.D. to “faulty intelligence,” but his alibi is springing leaks faster than the White House and the C.I.A. can clamp down on them. We now know the president knew that the intelligence he cherry-picked was faulty — and flogged it anyway to sell us the war.

[Former CIA agent] Drumheller says that until the White House “comes to grips with why it did this” and stops “propping up the original rationale” for the war, it “will never get out of Iraq.” He is right. But the White House clings to its discredited fictions even though their expiration date is fast arriving. There are new Drumhellers seeking out reporters each day. The Fitzgerald investigation continues to yield revelations of administration W.M.D. subterfuge, president-authorized leaks included. Should the Democrats retake either house of Congress in November, their subpoena power will liberate the investigation of the manipulation of prewar intelligence that the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, has stalled for almost two years.

The only person who can try to save the administration from itself in Iraq is the president. He can start telling the truth in the narrow window of time he has left and initiate a candid national conversation about our inevitable exit strategy. Or he can wait for events on the ground in Iraq and political realities at home to do it for him.

1000 days, bush, dubya, failure, falsehoods, frank rich, george bush, george w, george w bush, iraq, iraq war, lies, op-ed, political expediencies, w, war, war crimes

The are few things as joyus as the excitement of discovery, so it was a great pleasure to learn that Stay Free! Magazine has a new blog: Stay Free! Daily. The blog has a number of stories about intellectual freedom and copyright oppression that resonated with me. Take a look at Silent Disobedience, Christo’s policy of photographing The Gates, and Wizard People screening in NYC. Anybody following discussion of the FCC’s broadcast flag mandate will be amused by an old movie studio and broadcaster PSA arguing against subscription TV services.

Like TiVo, But More Prurient, however, points out the irony of how so-called “decency” groups seem to collect more indecent material than the rest of us. Back in the day, J. Edgar Hoover would have his FBI G Men confiscate porn and other “indecent” materials for his private collection. Raise your hand if you think all this fuss is just a beard for those who don’t want to admit they’re interested in the stuff.

But we’ve known Republicans have been sexually repressed since long before Jeff Gannon/James Guckert became a household name.

Shifting back to the intellectual property discussion, however: It also turns out that Stay Free! is a founder of the Illegal Art Museum, a collection of works that got hit by the copyright bus at the intersection of art and commerce. The heading to the list of video works notes:

The films and videos below appropriate intellectual property, whether through the use of found footage, unauthorized music, or shots of copyrighted or trademarked material. (Filmmakers and videographers now have to get permission for just about every concert t-shirt, store sign, or other piece of intellectual property that happens to appear onscreen).

Illegal Art’s collection of related articles is a good place to start if this is the first time you’ve considered the wrongs of copyright. And there’s more of my own thinking on this in the Copyrights & Intellectual Property thread here at MaisonBisson.

[update:] This wasn’t the real point of this post, but Cliff is begging me to link to his roundup of the Gannon/Guckert affair at Spiralbound.net. It seems like the White House wouldn’t be what it is without some sex scandal, but I think we’d all be better off with more open gays there. My concern, however, is the repression that conservatives must live with. It’s unhealthy for them, and bad for us when they’re leading our country. Funny thing: the redder the state, the greater the consumption of liquor, beer, cigarettes, and porn, and the higher the divorce rate.

tags: broadcast flag, bush, christo, dubya, fbi, fcc, gannon, guckert, james guckert, jeff gannon, laugh, movie studio, movies, prurient, psas, repression, sexual repression, stay free magazine, stayfree, subscription tv, tivo

Cliff over at Spiralbound.net posted the video of Bush flipping the bird. It’s not as exciting as I’d hoped, but it’s on video.

Then there’s the Dubya Movie. It’s a fantastic mashup of old Don Kotts movies, but that’s already giving too much away. Go watch it, you’ll laugh.

tags: bird, bush, dubya, flipping the bird, laugh, movies