Far be it from VanRamblings to kick a man when he’s down, but migawd, for the first time in the last four years, a beleaguered George W. is looking not only all of his 57 years, but positively weary and downright … old. Looks like the bike spill that he took while on vacation in Texas — when you pile up every other untoward event that has affected the U.S. President these past weeks and months — has really begun to take its toll.
As Talking Points Memo suggested yesterday …

I can’t help but wonder whether the spill the president took from his bicycle today won’t become iconic in the same way that the state dinner the first President Bush attended in Tokyo on January 8th 1992 in which he collapsed into the arms of, and then vomited on, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa became a symbol of his then-faltering presidency.

Matt Drudge reported an alleged uncharitable off-the-record remark made by John Kerry, quoting the Democratic Presidential hopeful as saying, “Did the training wheels fall off?” Although Kerry’s alleged intemperate remark — even if it is funny — may in the short term afford Bush an added degree of sympathy, the long-term implications of the Bush spill may be dire indeed.

Thank goodness most readers of VanRamblings live in Canada, where soft drug laws verge on the reasonable. In the United States, many of those convicted of simple possession of marijuana are languishing in prison, for periods of up to 60 years.
Of course, comedian and satirist Tommy Chong, 65, got off relatively easily when U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab sentenced him to only nine months in a federal lockup, and fined him $20,000, for distributing drug paraphernalia through his Internet-based California company, Nice Dreams Enterprises.
How much did it cost to prosecute Tommy Chong? Would you believe $12 million? Obviously, the linked article suggests, the money spent on prosecuting Chong could have been much better spent.
Adding to the furore over Chong’s conviction, the following item from a NORML Free Tommy Chong Action Alert …

Ironically, Tommy Chong was sentenced on September 11, 2003, exactly two years after the worst terrorist attacks in American history. With Osama Bin Laden still on the loose and President Bush admitting that the war on terrorism is far from over, it is preposterous that we would waste valuable law enforcement resources locking up a comedian for selling glass pipes. Can anyone here honestly say they feel safer today because Tommy Chong, a comedian and actor, has been sentenced to 9 months in federal prison for selling pipes on the Internet? Of course not. These laws do nothing except make criminals out of otherwise law abiding businessmen.

Thanks to Talk Left for reminding us of the hypocrisy and unjustness of Tommy Chong’s continued incarceration.

Perhaps the most devastating essay that VanRamblings has read, reflecting on the ‘meaning’ of the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, may be found in an essay length article published today in The New York Times.
Susan Sontag, in writing the cover story for the NY Times Magazine, seeks the answer to a number of questions, not the least of which is, Why?
The answer, in part at least, offers an indictment of the ‘either yer for us, or yer agin us’ philosophy that has very much been a part of the Bush administration’s governing raison d’être, dating back to 9/11. As such, suggests Sontag, the contrary administrative world view put forth by the Bush White House has inevitably led to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone who declares their interests as contrary to those of the U.S.

A Michael Moore scoop: video of President Bush as he prepares to declare war on March 19, 2003.

Writing in the New York Times, columnist Frank Rich suggests that Michael Moore is “detonating dynamite” with the imminent release of Fahrenheit 9/11, as he presents war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. At first, Moore’s Cannes’ award-winning film offers viewers a brief, tendentious recap of recent Bush history: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, AWOL in Alabama, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, and more.
Then, Rich reports, “the movie veers off in another direction entirely” as Moore sets about to chronicle, with wrenching impact, “the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails.” Next, the viewer is shown footage of events that are a precursor to the torture at Abu Ghraib prison …

Perhaps the most damning sequence in Fahrenheit 9/11 is the one showing American troops as they ridicule hooded detainees in a holding pen near Samara, Iraq, in December 2003. A male soldier touches the erection of a prisoner lying on a stretcher underneath a blanket, an intimation of the sexual humiliations that were happening at Abu Ghraib at that same time.

Rich concludes his powerfully written piece with the argument that: “No one would ever accuse Michael Moore of having a beautiful mind. Subtleties and fine distinctions are not his thing. That matters very little, it turns out, when you have a story this ugly and this powerful to tell.”