JABbering Stooge

Blessed is he that watcheth, and goeth into the fallout shelter, lest he walk bald, and they see his radiation sickness.*

So a half-dozen nukes “accidentally” got shipped halfway across the country in a B-52. Now, ordinarily, I’d take the military at their word that this was an unacceptable and careless error. Except for three things.

1. Barksdale AFB, where the nukes ended up, is a staging ground for Middle East operations. As former CIA officer Larry Johnson points out, “A B-52 landing at Barksdale is a non-event. A B-52 landing with nukes. That is something else.” Which leads me to point two.

   Sidebar: When I was in ROTC in high school, Barksdale was one of the two places underclass cadets could go to for Summer Leadership School, the other being NAS Carswell.

2. The nukes couldn’t have gotten onto that B-52 without the pilots’ knowledge. Pilots, be they military or civilian, with few exceptions, have to file detailed flight plans whenever they fly somewhere. These flight plans, especially in an the post-9/11 era, must include a cargo manifest. Given the sensitive nature of nuclear weapons, they would have to be explicitly listed on the pilots’ cargo manifest, and the pilots would have to have seen that manifest before they filed it.

3. There’s been a disturbing amount of rumors among the rank-and-file military personnel that plans have already been drawn up to strike targets in Iran. Case in point, this e-mail sent to my good buddy Bartcop, as posted over at Mahablog. (Read the whole thing. It will chill you to the bone.)

Given all this, I would not rule out Bush throwing everything he’s got, militarily and politically, at Iran sometime in the next 502 days.

* In the words of Larry the Cable Guy, “Lord, I apologize.”

Keith smacks down The Boy King once again.

Amen.

Remember back during the immediate aftermath of Stephen Colbert’s most excellent performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when Martha Zoller criticized the performance, not for any perceived unfunniness, but because of the day of the week 9/11 fell on in 2001?

Well, I just checked my calendar, and guess what? This year:

9/11 IS ON A TUESDAY!!11!1!

* With apologies to John Lennon/U2 and anyone else who sang about Bloody Sunday.

Maha had a post yesterday discussing an excerpt from the new Robert Draper book Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. The excerpt bears repeating here, mainly because it provides yet another example of the Narcissist-in-Chief’s arrogance and delusions of infallibility. Okay, it also includes another instance of The Most Holy George W. Christ’s utter lack of table manners (was Babs negligent in her child-rearing of The Boy King?), but that’s just a fringe benefit.

Prelude to feces-flinging:

He had flung himself into his chair like a dirty sweatshirt and continued to pop pieces of cheese into his mouth. Stress was hammered into his face. The subject was himself—how his leadership skills had evolved over time, and how he had dealt with disappointment and defeat, going back to his loss to Senator John McCain in the New Hampshire primary of 2000 and now, once again, in 2006.

Bush, as always, bridled at the request to navel-gaze. “You’re the observer,” he said as he worked the cheese in his mouth. “I’m not. I really do not feel comfortable in the role of analyzing myself. I’ll try. But I don’t spend a lot of time. I will tell you, the primaries strip you down to your bare essence, and you get to determine whether or not you’re willing to fight through—to prevail. It’s a real test of will, I agree to that. I think the whole process was responsible for testing my will. No question getting defeated was a powerful moment.”

And now, the part where Miss Manners throws up her hands and says “I give up!”:

His hot dog arrived. Bush ate rapidly, with a sort of voracious disinterest. He was a man who required comfort and routine. Food, for him, was fuel and familiarity. It was not a thing to reflect on.

“The job of the president,” he continued, through an ample wad of bread and sausage, “is to think strategically so that you can accomplish big objectives. As opposed to playing mini-ball. You can’t play mini-ball with the influence we have and expect there to be peace. You’ve gotta think, think BIG. The Iranian issue,” he said as bread crumbs tumbled out of his mouth and onto his chin, “is the strategic threat right now facing a generation of Americans, because Iran is promoting an extreme form of religion that is competing with another extreme form of religion. Iran’s a destabilizing force. And instability in that part of the world has deeply adverse consequences, like energy falling in the hands of extremist people that would use it to blackmail the West.

Oy vey.