When Bush, et al started using the rationale of, "we are fighting terrorism in Iraq so we don't have to fight it on our own soil", I could not understand why nobody called them on it. This Pres-emperor has run around stark naked so often his danglies should be black and blue.

How more blatant could Bush be that he was using our troops to draw fire? Essentially putting them out there with bulls' eyes on their backs. Especially so as the evidence mounted at how poorly supplied they were in equipment and how wretchedly lead.

I can't think of a modern warfare situation in which using an entire military force to draw fire is rational, let alone strategically sound. And as yet another try at a workable rationale for lunacy, it sucks tank oil.

Are we on the offense against terrorism or defense? Has the Iraq war drawn fire or proliferated it? Can all those Bush supporters in the American public ever admit to themselves what they've let be done to them by this administration and its defenders?

As the Nazis arose out of the humiliations of post-WWI, Cheney, et al came out of the revelations of Watergate - vindictive, determined and NOT humbled in the least.

Will this fiasco forestall the next incarnation of Nixon sometime down the road? I don't see Right Wing psychology changing. Their Bible Thumping and just plain willfully blind supporters, as has been pointed out, are equally unable to give up their brain dead pablum.

I'm not entirely sure intelligent citizenry can beat that two-headed gorgon.

That Bush blog made me pee my pants, almost...

"If I say Jack Bauer has to take a crap on the bill of rights cuz we need to defend our freedoms from the terrorizers, then that's the way it's gonna be!"

I think the word "effects" in the Fourth Amendment would cover any personal thought, property or device, however antique or modern.

Content is king, and where my regal thoughts reside, are recorded, stored, or transmitted is an "effect."

Don't tread on me - or my effects!

Nothing with less than four wheels, though....

Honda makes lots of cars, but there's never been a four-wheeled Ducati.

I'll bite. That was an editorial from some media, probably a newspaper. And from the way you are keeping us in suspense it must be some right wing newspaper like the Washington Times, although that is hard to believe.

According to the Guiness Book of Records, this postcard (see below) by Donald McGill is the best-selling single postcard of all time -- in England anyway, and maybe in the whole world.

http://www.unc.edu/~sstaff/images/kippled.jpg

He: "Do you like Kipling?"

She: "I don't know, you naughty boy, I've never kippled!"

George Orwell wrote about such postcards, here:

http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Art_of_Donald_McGill/0.html

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, have to insist on a fairly high standard of sexual morality. A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. It has to demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it glorious to die on the battlefield and women want wear themselves out with child-bearing. The whole of what one may call official literature is founded on such assumptions.

I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of fuhrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal.

Nevertheless, the high sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that the other element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing occasionally.

The comic post cards are one expression of his point of view, a humble one, less important than the music halls, but still worthy of attention. In a society which is still basically Christian they naturally concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if they had any freedom of expression at all, they would probably concentrate on laziness or cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or another. It will not do to condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed low-ness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of 'higher' influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm's-eye view of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in hand. Their existence, the fact that people want them, is symptomatically important. Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue. They express only one tendency in the human mind, but a tendency which is always there and will find its own outlet, like water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. For:

there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself? Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time? [Ecclesiastes 7:15-17]

In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.

- - George Orwell

Her majesty's government didn't share Orwell's views:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A4350971

In the early 1950s there were several local trials, ending in a court in Lincoln on 15 July, 1954 where Donald McGill was charged with violating the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. Although McGill and his lawyers presented a commendable defence, it was not enough. McGill was found guilty, fined £50 and ordered to pay £25 court costs.

The outcome of this trial had a devastating impact on the saucy postcard industry.

- - H2G2 at the Beeb