The sign of a sick mind is one that exposes itself for the sick mind that it is. This is not rocket science, and you don't need a doctorate in psychology to see it. If it walks and quacks like a duck, then, brother, you've got a duck on your hands.

Let me be the first one to say this, out loud and for all to hear. Rudy Giuliani has a sick mind, a mind that stays on one track, like a railroad heading for a station wagon carrying a family of four stuck on the tracks. Rudy is no idiot; unlike George W. Bush, had no accomplishments to speak of before he ran for president, Rudy actually worked for a living before his super-sized ego convinced him that he and only he was qualified to serve as President of the United States.

The problem with Rudy is the problem with American politics. Americans don't vote, and when they do vote they do so thoughtlessly. If a candidate has a nice family, that helps the candidate. If the candidate is well-known, that helps, too. In fact, that's all you need. Nobody reads position papers, and the television advertisements are nothing more than propaganda pieces intended to suck in the mindless TV watchers who don't even know who's running for office.

Rudy has become closely associated with September 11, mostly because he happened to be the mayor of New York City when the terrorists struck. He got on TV that day and in the terrible aftermath and said that we can get through this shock. He didn't do much else. No matter. Our pathetic national media dubbed Rudy "America's Mayor." So when his term ended and Rudy returned to the private sector, he decided he wanted to be president. His personal life is a mess and he is now swimming in scandal, but he knows that the 9/11 card works every time.

It is well known that Rudy cannot stop talking about 9/11. He's a one-note Johnny who thinks that somehow his public image from that day establishes him as an expert on terror and security. There is very little evidenc of this, but the media does not ask him tough questions about this and, let's face it: many Americans are not sufficiently well-informed to know the truth, which is that he is actually a 9/11 failure.

The Iowa caucuses took place this week. Rudy did not campaign in this important first test of the 2008 campaign, and he got his ass kicked badly. He was asked if this was a setback. He replied that it was not, and that he's had challenges before. Listen to what this disgusting and arrogant egomanic told the New York Daily News:

"None of this worries me - Sept. 11, there were times I was worried," Giuliani said.

Even worse, take a look at this shameless advertisement intended to scare the shit out of anyone who does not want to die. There is no nuance anymore. His campaign is sagging and let's pull out all stops. Osama bin Ladin is now Giuliani's running mate.

There is something wrong with a man who profits from terror. Rudy profits from terror. I am sure he did not welcome 9/11 and we know that he lost friends in that tragedy. But the tragedy is that he is using the death and suffering of thousands of people as a springboard to the presidency. Rudy, I think I speak on behalf of everyone who still cling to a sense of decency when I tell you that you are one very sick man with a lot of emotional problems. Get yourself to a good psychiatrist and find out why, exactly, you decided to become a social degenerate.

Philip Agee, maybe the most famous whistleblower of the modern era, died the other day at the age of 72. Agee was an obscure CIA agent for 12 years before he quit the agency in the late 1960's in protest of American foreign policy, which Agee helped execute in Latin America. Agee's primary focus was the terrorism that the CIA was practicing in "promoting" American interests around the world in pursuit of our bipartisan foreign policy.

As reported by Reuters:

Agee said working as a case officer in South America opened his eyes to the CIA’s Cold War goal in the region: to prop up traditional elites against perceived leftist threats through political repression and torture.

“It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador — they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the U.S. government,” he wrote.

“That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries,” he said.

To this day, Agee's message is confused by people who freely call him a traitor for speaking out against the CIA and naming CIA agents in an effort to stop the agency's violent and lawless practices. That's because Americans continue to labor under the illusion that our goverment means well around the world and tries to promote democracy and peace and that any deviations from that objective are unintentional. It's actually the other way around: our government rarely promotes real democracy and usually tries to destroy nationalist movements that reject American dominance around the globe.

Once you recognize that our governmnet has for decades subverted democracy around the world in pursuit of creating favorable investment and labor climates for American corporations, all of the so-called deviations from our good intentions make sense. Why did we support Manuel Noregia, the Panamanian killer? Why did we support Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino dictator? The Apartheid government in South Africa? The fascists throughout Latin America? Saddam Hussein? The list goes on forever.

No one will answer the above questions in polite discourse. The New York Times won't, and neither will any "respectible" news agency in the U.S. That's why even liberals think that American foreign policy fundamentally seeks to promote democracy and freedom. The evidence does not bear that out. But the concept of "American exceptionalism," which holds that our government is the most enlightened and loving force on God's green Earth, allows us to gloss over the unjust wars, the terrorism and violence practiced by Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

I came to realize this around the time that Philip Agee spoke at my college in the late 1980's. It was a big deal to have a CIA defector speak on campus, and Agee's speech opened a lot of eyes that night, as he recounted crime after crime in the name of American foreign policy. Agee's credibility was enhanced by his career with the CIA and his detailed denunciation of our foreign policy. As I educated myself on these issues I wondered why the Democratic Party did not challenge Republican authority in highlighting the vicious crimes of the Reagan administration around the world. The answer, I came to learn, was that on foreign policy, the Democrats were not much better than the Republicans and, of course, while some Democrats knew the truth about our foreign policy, raising these questions in seeking the presidency was too risky. Too many Americans would not understand this critique because they have not intellectual foundation to understand it. Most Americans do not read honest history or critical studies of American foreign policy. A comprehensive challenge to American foreign policy while running for president would destroy any candidacy.

Twenty years later, nothing has changed. The Republican candidates may be offensive, each and every one of them, and the Democrats may not be conservative right-wing schmucks, but they sure as hell are not going to attack Bush's war in Iraq as an imperialist endeavor. It's enough to attack the war as a poorly-executed mess in which we meant well. The evidence is to the contrary, but no presidential candidate wants to set himself up as a "traitor" and "anti-American." But, as always, the true anti-Americans are the criminals who send our young men to die in a war based on lies and which never should have been started.

Some things are true. And some things are not so true. The dominant view in American political life is that the New York Times is a liberal newspaper. But that all depends on where you're standing. If you're political views are on the hard right, then the Times is a liberal paper. But if you apply some degree of skepitism, then the Times is a mainstream voice that occasionally embarasses conservatives and Republicans, if only because conservatives and Republicans are a big pinata just asking for humiliation most of the time.

When I think of the New York Times, I am reminded of how that newspaper helped sell the Iraq war by publishing rumors and falsehoods on the front page about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction which simply did not exist. Much has been written about Judith Miller's front page reporting on this issue, for which the Times eventually apologized. The next time some conservative tells you that the Times is a liberal arm of the media, just utter the name "Judith Miller" and walk away politely.

To the extent the Times is liberal, it falls into the trap that entraps many liberals, which is to appease the right wing in an effort to show that it remains open-minded. That includes jumping into bed with the enemy. The Times recently hired an opinion columnist, William Kristol, who is one of the uber-conservatives who regularly appear on TV news and opinion shows. Kristol is a die-hard right-winger who loves the Iraq war and thinks that loyal Americans should embrace the grotesque policies of the Bush administration.

When the Times hired Kristol, someone realized that Kristol actually argued that the Times should be prosecuted for investigating the Bush administration's terror policies, which include monitoring international banking transactions. It's not as if terrorists know that the United States was doing this, as any corrupt businessman or international terror financer would know that their financial shenanigans are being watched. No matter. Kristol argued that the Times should be prosecuted for doing its job as a high-profile newspaper.

As Think Progress notes, the Times shrugged off Kristol's ridiculous suggestion. This is why leftists laugh at liberals. Liberals try to show they are open-minded but remain wishy-washy. Leftists at the Times (if any exist), would have told Kristol to go screw himself.

There are deadlines, and then there are deadlines. In Texas they are one in the same. A judge in Texas is under fire even in Texas for slamming the courthouse doors shut on a man trying to appeal his death sentence. After dealing with computer problems, his lawyers were but a few minutes late, arriving at the courthouse shortly after 5:00 p.m., when the Judge closed up for the day. The death row inmate's papers were late-filed, and therefore not filed at all. A lawyer's worst nighmare! Showing up to court only a few minutes late, and the case is thrown out.

This was an even greater nightmare for the death row inmate. Since the court did not hear his appeal, he was put to death. Even worse, the U.S. Supreme Court had just agreed to deal with the very legal issue that could have saved the life of this inmate. So that if the Texas judge had allowed his lawyers to late file his papers -- an accommodation that happens all the time, especially in death row cases -- the inmate could have ultimately won his case in the event the Supreme Court resolves that issue in his favor.

The whole sorry tale is told in this extensive newspaper article which makes it clear that the Judge in this case was an ass and people think she should be removed from the bench. Here's the gist of the story:

On September 25, Keller refused to keep her clerk's office open an extra 20 minutes to receive a last-gasp pleading from the attorneys for condemned inmate Michael Richard. Richard's lawyers were having computer problems that prevented them from turning in their motion on time. The 49-year-old murderer was executed just hours after Keller locked the door.

Richard's pleading was a complicated procedural move that followed a U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier that morning that raised doubts about the constitutionality of lethal injection. That gave Richard's lawyers an opening to stay their client's execution until the Supreme Court revisited the issue.

But Keller's decision to close her court at 5 p.m.—a move that has since been blasted by even her Republican colleagues—violated the court's unwritten policies for handling executions. It also broke sharply from tradition. In Texas, it's not unusual for judges and clerks to take last-minute pleadings at their homes. On execution day, the courts don't have a strict closing time.

Keller's actions also defied the Supreme Court decision from that day, which has resulted in an unofficial nationwide moratorium on capital punishment. Maybe she didn't make an intentional end run around the highest court in the land, but that was the effect. To be more blunt, the effect was to kill a man months before his execution would have proceeded, assuming the Supreme Court would have allowed it at all. To date, Richard is the last U.S. inmate put to death.

If you're reading this from a country outside the United States, you might wonder how a country can be home to both open-minded and tolerant San Francisco and New York City and this place called Texas. It's because the United States has over 300 million people and 50 states and entire geographic regions which have nothing to do with each other and little in common other than the same language. An article by Associated Press reports, for exampe, that people in Texas the other day saw a UFO and some of them, religious zealots, think it portends the end of times. That response would never happen in New York. Here, we'd probably position ourselves right under the UFO and beg it to take us away to another world.

There is no death penalty in New York. But in Texas, the can't kill them fast enough. A politician probably can't get elected in Texas without supporting the death penalty no more than a politician can get elected in New York City who opposed abortion. People may be upset that the judge sent a man to his death without a fair shake, but they have themselves to blame. Frontier justice in the Wild West will snag the guilty and the innocent.

The lies piled up like dog doody on the streets of the city. We stepped in that poop and scraped our shoes on the curb and went on our way to work, to the Home Depot, to the deli. What we should have done was to continue walking all the way to the White House, taken off our shoe, and hurled it into the picture window at the Oval Office, where George W. Bush no doubt was reading his comic books, throwing a tennis ball against the wall and pressing the buzzer on the intercom to see how fast his secretary came running into the office.

The lies piled up like the garbage during a garbage strike. But the stink was 100 times worse. Actually, about 4,000 times worse, the number of American soldiers killed in the folly of the Iraq war. What were the lies, you ask? Here are the lies, chronicled by the Center for Public Integrity.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

Is the comprehensive study by the Center for Public Integrity unprecedented? Probably. No other Administration has lied so much, about so many consequential things. This wasn't no Monica lie. This was war and peace. As one commentator has said, someone had to do it.

Lost in the shuffle of our fiasco in Iraq and the presidential campaigns was the death of President Suharto of Indonesia. His death made news and he got the obligatory full-page obituary in the New York Times, but, once again, his death reveals quite a bit about how Americans view our foreign policy and the sleights of hand that accompany the death of a vicious dictator who once served as a close American ally.

It's an open secret that our government routinely supports the worst of the worst around the world. This topic usually surfaces when we go to war against these very same people. The list is endless, but recall in 1989 when the first President Bush invaded Panama to take out Manuel Noriega, a former CIA asset who ruled that small country with an iron fist and was the Saddam Hussein of the late 1980's, when the United States turned against him and declared Noriega public enemy number 1. No one could really explain why our government declared Noriega the enemy after he had committed his worst crimes as a close U.S. ally, but then again, no one cared. Of course, Saddam Hussein was a close American ally during the 1980's, until it was time for a new enemy in 1990, when he invaded Kuwait and the first President Bush compared Saddam to Hitler. We didn't call him Hitler, though, when Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people in 1988, though. No matter. When Son of Bush went to war in Iraq in 2003, our close relationship with Saddam was simply not an issue. War was back in style and, God-dammit, we're taking out Saddam!

President Suharto of Indonesia made Saddam look like Mary Poppins. When he took control over Indonesia in the 1960's, he orchestrated the deaths of half-million political opponents, designated "communists" back when communists were the enemy and the justification for American foreign policy. Then, in 1975, Suharto invaded nearby East Timor, killing up to one-third of the population of that small country. That invasion was comparable to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, but the comparisons were lost on 98 percent of the American people who thought that Saddam's aggressive act justified all out war.

Suharto's violent acts of mass murder were particularly compelling because they happened with the full support of the United States. Much has been written about Suharto's relationship with the United States, most of it under the radar, kept from an American public which prefers to think that our government only promotes democracy and freedom around the world and tries its best to spread the love to countries that need it. Few Americans know anything about Indonesia and its location half-way around the world makes that country even less newsworthy.

So when Suharto died a few days ago and the New York Times ran his obituary, it glossed over our government's decades-long support for this son of a bitch who killed people for fun and profit. That's the pattern. It happened when Gen. Pinochet of Chile died in 2006. Pinochet, a close ally of the United States, killed thousands with the full bi-partisan support of our government. The Times glossed over that inconvenient fact in his obituary, making Pinochet out to be a rouge leader. He was not.

Suharto's obituary certainly makes reference to his mass killing and violent leadership. But it says precious little about the American complicity in these horrible acts. Here is the extent of the U.S. relationship with Suharto in the obitiary:

Whether it was those forces or his timing, good fortune came to him. Just as the United States was becoming embroiled in Vietnam, he stood as a bulwark against Communism in Asia. The United States rewarded him with a foreign aid program that eventually amounted to more than $4 billion a year. In addition, a consortium of Western countries and Japan established an aid program that in 1994 alone totaled almost $5 billion.

In doing so, the United States, along with much of the rest of the world, showed a willingness to overlook the corruption, favoritism and violations of human rights, including the disappearance of opposition politicians, that came to characterize Mr. Suharto’s rule.

For a lengthy obituary, the above paragraphs do not do justice to our dirty hands in the widespread killing in Indonesia or East Timor. We know damned well that when Fidel Castro dies, a good portion of his obituary and commentary about his life will concern his close relationship with the former Soviet Union. Why not the same treatment when a close U.S. ally dies? The answer to that questions says quite a bit about our own hypocricy and failure to come to terms with our own crimes and duplicity.