Bush Spares Libby 30-Month Jail Term
By SCOTT SHANE and NEIL A. LEWIS
President Bush commuted the sentence of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was convicted of perjury in the C.I.A. leak case.
U.S. Says Iran Helped Iraqis Kill Five G.I.’s
By JOHN F. BURNS and MICHAEL R. GORDON
A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said that Iranian agents and veterans of Hezbollah helped plan a raid in Iraq in which five American soldiers were killed.
Meaning everybody's so pissed off at Bush about Libby, they're liable to let him go to war with Iran... (If some are to be believed - and I think there's reason to hear them out: The anti-Iranian press will ramp up; the "incidents" with "Iranian nationals" will increase in frequency and intensity; it's the Spanish-American War/I mean 'Nam/I mean 'Raq all over again...)
But the Libby thing is really a kick in the nards, ain't it?
This from Kenneth L. Adelman, former Defense (originally War) Department official and Libby-liker:
“This is not a man who deserves to go to jail in any sense of the word... Whatever he did wrong, he certainly paid... This is a good person who served his country very well and is a decent person.”
Yes, if a cop caught me smoking rocks on the corner and I was humiliated and talked about in the media (perhaps because I was an important public official), I would not have to go to jail; I'd have served my time via the public spotlight, as it were.
Yes, if I revealed the identity of an American spy... Fuck it, you get the point.
But enough Americans don't seem to get the point about these cheeseball Neocon warmongers. We just love thugs too much. We can't see their bad sides. We don't like em to perjure, to get caught, or say names - but Cheney et Co. can do damn well what he pleases. Who do you think is writing the official version of every incident with Iran?
Here's a little something from the NYTimes' review of T.I.'s new album:
Listeners transfixed by his entertaining interjections (“O.K.?!”) and exaggerated pronunciation might easily have overlooked the rigorous poetic construction. But that’s a neat little quatrain: four lines, six syllables apiece, each building to an trisyllabic oblique rhyme. Somehow, T. I. delivers supertechnical raps without ever sounding as boring as that last sentence.
Supertechnical my ass. He rhymes "attitude" with "dude" (more than once) and talks about beatin folks up. And not ala the Iliad or Biggie's best verses on life as a poor black American, but just in plain, pro-wrestler, prosaically-themed, overly-metered platitudes. He'll beat you up - not make you cry talking about having to beat some guy up to help his mom.
Now, all you really need to know about T.I. for the purposes of this essay is that the man is a low-down, woman-beatin, gay-bashin, drug-smugglin thug. He revels in thuggery. As Mos Def said, "Thug is the drug," and T.I. is one the best-selling rappers in mainstream hip hop, having two albums ago joined the elite pantheon of other woman-beatin, gay-bashin, crack-smokin thug-gods, recently Fifty "Silent 2nd F" Cent and The Game.
Even the Times loves T.I. and can't bring itself to bash him back for all his crack-handin-out evil.
But, worse, we Americans let thugs get into not only our music (instead of reppin real MCs like MF DOOM, LyricsBorn, most of Little Brother, Mos, &c.) but into our government. As much as we balk at Bush's commutation of Scoot's sentence, we should also balk at the Bush plan to invade frickin Persia...
Aiyaiyai, I gotta drink some ice tea and think about something calming, like how much money I owe the government... or how my cat just tried to eat the last of my toilet paper... again...
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