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For a few oil wells more

by Mark Gisleson

I missed a really hot show last night. Wynton Marsalis and his band were playing a tiny club in downtown St. Paul when Itzhak Perlman walked in fresh from a performance at the Ordway Center. Needless to say, the resulting jam was, by all accounts, pretty amazing.

Then my thoughts turned to Jack Kennedy's presidency. JFK was renown for routinely inviting great minds to dine with him at the White House. If you have no pretensions to being an intellectual, it may be hard to understand why talking with a great poet about Walt Whitman can help you to better understand complex issues pertaining to breaking developments in the Congo, but trust me, it's all in having your mental switches in the "on" position.

How comforting then to read a Reuters report that appears to indicate that President Bush likened Australia's role in the Asia-Pacific region to that of a "sheriff." True, it is the mark of a great mind to be able to reduce complex issues to simple equations, but somehow I don't think that's what Bush was doing. In his inimitable fashion, he was yet again creating a garbled Wild West scenario, and not a hard-scrabble one in which most settlers couldn't afford a gun, but the Hollywood kind with white hats and dark-skinned natives.

Ted Rall has a somewhat more irreverent take on a similar theme.

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Josh Marshall is looking for a smoking gun. The vast rightwing you know what is cackling that there's no money quote of George W. Bush saying, in exactly so many words, that Saddam was an "imminent threat."

im·mi·nent, adj. About to occur at any moment:IMPENDING.

"Our wingerly friends have made a lot of the rarity of occurrences in which the phrase ‘imminent threat’ was used. But they rather ignore all the instances in which administration officials told the public we had to depose Saddam right now before he could use his nuclear weapons and smallpox on us. Any quotation which conveys the imminent threat message is acceptable even it doesn't contain the phrase 'imminent threat.'"

So there you have it: Josh has a contest going. Feel free to peruse through Steve Perry's compendium of Bush's Lies to find your winning entry.

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Via Atrios, Dennis Kucinich has taken the high road and refused to appear on Hardball. Good for him.

You'll have to scroll down a ways, but if you're into the environment, be sure to read Tom Dispatch's post, "Notes from the colonial era." I know you'd rather read an excerpt, but if you follow the link, you can also read some selected quotes from General Jerry Boykin that are well worth the click.

Media Whores Online interviews Gene Lyons about Wesley Clark. Hot.

Posted by Steve Perry at October 24, 2003 11:29 AM

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