2023 marks the 20th anniversary of the BilgeBucket Gazette. Our first issue was on May 19, 2003 and we’ve been shoveling it to the public, just like the corporate media, ever since. We changed our format to a WordPress blog in 2011 so all of our earlier material was archived. We’ve been reposting many of those archived articles, headlines, photo-toons, BilgeBucket Lists and other content over the past twelve years. In honor of our 20th, and because we’re sick of the current state of affairs in the world, we’ll be reposting more items from 2003 through 2009 throughout this year.
John Ashcroft’s greatest accomplishment during his tenure as Attorney General was his spending $8,000 dollars to cover up the disgraceful nudity of the Spirit of Justice statue in the Hall of Justice.
2023 marks the 20th anniversary of the BilgeBucket Gazette. Our first issue was on May 19, 2003 and we’ve been shoveling it to the public, just like the corporate media, ever since. We changed our format to a WordPress blog in 2011 so all of our earlier material was archived. We’ve been reposting many of those archived articles, headlines, photo-toons, BilgeBucket Lists and other content over the past twelve years. In honor of our 20th, and because we’re sick of the current state of affairs in the world, we’ll be reposting more items from 2003 through 2009 throughout this year.
Our first post in our retrospective features our first two photo-toons from 2003. If you remember, we had just invaded and taken over Iraq. Saddam Hussein had eluded American forces and was on the run. On the legal front, the Patriot Act had been passed after 9/11 and was threatening all sorts of freedoms in the name of national security. The first toon from our June 19, 2003 issue features former Attorney General from the Bush era, authoritarian bible-thumper and Patriot Act cheerleader John Ashcroft showing off a proud purchase he made on that new website called E-bay. The second from our July 3, 2003 issue features former President and super sleuth George W. Bush boldly stating that he’ll leave no stone unturned in pursuit of Saddam Hussein, at least as long as Iraq’s leader isn’t in the same room. As you can see, our first photo-toons were simple photoshop jobbies with no word bubbles and basic, mildly humorous jabs. We’ve come a long ways since then.
Attorney General and bible thumper extraordinaire John Ashcroft shows off the Vintage 1973 Playboy he won on eBay.
President Bush vows to leave no stone unturned in his quest to find Saddam Hussein.
In celebration of TFG finally appearing to face some justice, we’ve decided to repost a photo-toon from December 8, 2019. It depicts what a possible Trump Memorial might look like showing TFG sitting on his favorite throne dictating to his followers on Twitter, explaining COVFEFE and stating that we should all get over the fact that he’s a crook. At least we know now why he was obsessed with toilets flushing – that’s where he tried to put his torn up documents. Let this be the crime that puts him in a jail cell with a guy named Bubba who’s fond of spoonin’.
Plans are being made for the Trump Memorial which will feature America’s CEO/Dictator Donald Trump sitting on his throne tweeting words of wisdom (like Covfefe) on his phone with his massive hands. The monument will be located in Washington D.C. in an alley behind a KFC next to a dumpster that frequently catches fire.
America’s Impeached CEO/Dictator Donald Trump’s revenge vendetta is still going strong following his sham acquittal during his impeachment ‘trial’ in the Senate. Now, our orange haired, megalomaniac man child in the White House is using mafioso tactics using the Department of Justice as his muscle to enforce whatever the Don wants.
Chief among the controversial, authoritarian tactics is the brow beating of prosecutors to get his pal and major conehead Roger Stone a reduced sentence for seven counts of lying to Congress and witness tampering. The original prosecutors suggested a seven to nine year sentence, but thanks to Trump’s rage tweeting and Attorney General Bill Barr’s intervention, Stone got just a forty month sentence. Trump’s also pardoned several high profile, white collar criminals such as former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, junk bond king Michael Milken, tax cheat and Rudy Giuliani pal Bernie Kerik and Medicare fraudster Judith Negron.
America’s Impeached CEO/Dictator and petulant man child, Donald Trump, shows off his new ventriloquist act with dummy Attorney General Bill Barr, as ‘concerned’ Senator Susan Collins looks on, satisfied that little Donald has learned his lesson about abusing power and destroying democracy.
The Trump impeachment inquiry grinds onward but last week, the 2nd worst president of our lifetime, George W. Bush, a.k.a. Dubya, reappeared in the national arena when a football broadcast showed talk show host Ellen DeGeneres palling around with ol’ Dub Dub, who supported at one time a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, at a Dallas Cowboy’s game in luxury seats. This has sparked much controversy, some celebrities being supportive of Ellen’s new buddy and others, like Mark Ruffalo, not so supportive. Given how much we’ve griped about Dubya since 2003, we tend to agree with Ruffalo’s statements. In fact. we say Bravo!
We’ve noted before about the recent normalization of Dubya’s clusterf*cked administration now that Trump is in office. Make no mistake, Bush was awful!His administration tried to undermine rule the law just like Trump is doing now because. . . you know . . . that’s what Republicans do.Dubya lied repeatedly to the public and his Attorney General Alberto Gonzales did for Bush what Bill Barr is doing for the orange haired, megalomaniac man child in the White House. Remember, Gonzales tried to fire federal prosecutors back in 2007 for political purposes. He also had a litany of other controversies, which eventually led to his resignation. That’s just part of the Republican’s eternal blue print to destroy government regulations (or laws!) and privatize everything for the good of the plutocrats of corporate America.
We recommend that everybody review the history of these conservative Republican con artists from the Bush era. They should be held accountable but instead people choose to forget. We like Ellen. But it’s too bad that she is so willing to look past Dubya’s war crimes, because he should be held accountable for them. But, in true conservative fashion, Bush has not apologized and will never apologize for his transgressions, because in his mind, conservatives never make mistakes and to admit a wrongdoing is a sign of weakness. Sound like anybody currently occupying the White House?
Well, in America, we guess when you’re a rich celebrity, money trumps everything else. Who cares if you tortured people and started a war on false pretenses that screwed up the entire Middle East. Let’s enjoy a football game together in luxury seats because we’re famous and wealthy. What Ellen should have done was to offer up her seat to one of the many veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who lost limbs or who are suffering from PTSD. Better yet, why don’t Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and all those other millionaires and plutocrats who profited from those wars pay all the medical costs for those veterans who are now suffering. Nope; like everything else, we the people end up paying for everything while the wealthy skate away with their money without a care in the world and without accountability.
Here’s photo-toon featuring Dubya and Fredo ‘Pinocchio’ Gonzales from our June 26, 2007 issue.
President Bush continues to support his embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, despite calls for his resignation from both Democrats and Republicans, following his dubious testimony during the Senate’s investigation into the possible politically motivated dismissals of eight federal prosecutors last year.
The mask has been removed from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and as it turns out, it doesn’t seem that he’s not all that committed to rule of law as his title may imply. Many details have come to light about how Rosenstein had to walk a political tightrope to mollify our petulant, man child CEO/Dictator, Donald Trump. And he even became angry at the press for treating Trump unfairly. Oh, boo-hoo! You’re supposed to uphold the law and instead you let Trump piss all over the constitution. As one ex-DOJ critic summarized, Rosenstein was weak. “He shouldn’t be talking to the president about an investigation into the president under any circumstances and he shouldn’t be giving him assurances about how that investigation will end and he especially shouldn’t be doing it at a time when he’s begging and pleading for his own job… The way to understand Rod is he’s weak, and he’s always been weak. He was weak at the beginning of this investigation when he signed off on the Comey firing and gave the president the excuse, despite––we now know, having read the Mueller report––that he knew why the president was firing Comey, that it was over the Russia investigation.”
We here at the Bucket noticed Mr. Rosenstein’s stone face demeanor at Bill Barr’s pre-Mueller report release con job party where the Republican obfuscator attempted Jedi mind-tricks on the American people. And we wondered to ourselves, is that Rod Rosenstein or a deer in the headlights? Many people have speculated about the thoughts running through his head as Barr misled the public. We think he was saying, “Oh oh…now everyone knows that I’m just a pro-Trump stooge.” We’re looking forward to your retirement, Mr. Rosenstein! We have no doubt you’ll get a comfy position at Fox News, a.k.a. the Republican Propaganda Network.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein bears a striking resemblance to a deer in the headlights especially during Bill Barr’s deceptive press conference before the release of the Mueller report where he seems to be thinking, “Oh oh…now everyone knows that I’m just a pro-Trump stooge.”
The redacted version of the Mueller report has been released and boy is it a doozy. While Attorney General and Republican obfuscator Bill Barr has erroneously touted that the report ‘clears’ American CEO/Dictator Donald Trump of collusion and obstruction, just reading the unredacted portions paints a decisively different picture of what happened. And if the redacted report paints a damning picture of Trump can you imagine what the complete report says?
According to this article at Vox, 7.25% of the report has been redacted. After downloading and scanning through the report, we’ve come up with a handy dandy redaction guide to try and translate what the most common redaction phrase ‘Harm to Ongoing Matter'(HOM) means to the average American. The acronym appears repeatedly throughout the document, especially in Volume I dealing with the Russian conspiracy to sway the 2016 election toward Donald Trump and from what we can gather it translates to ‘Donald Trump is guilty as hell.” Why else was his initial reaction to the appointment of the special consul, “This is the end of my presidency. I’m f*cked.” Would an innocent man say that?
In Volume II of the report, Robert Mueller cited ten cases where obstruction of justice could be applied to Trump. Why did he not just come out and say he obstructed justice? According to the Department of Justice, you can’t indict a sitting president. So basically, Mueller set up the pins on a narrow lane and gave the Democrats a bowling ball the size of a beach ball so they could mow down our corrupt, megalomaniac leader. But, in true Democratic fashion, Democrat leaders are already talking about not pursuing impeachment and concentrating on the 2020 election. You know the Republicans wouldn’t hesitate to impeach if the situation was reversed. They did so with Bill Clinton twenty years ago on much lesser charges.
So lets briefly review the low-lights of the Republican party in the last 50 years: Nixon knows about the Watergate break-ins and attempts to cover them up, Gerald Ford pardons him; the Reagan administration sold arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra affair, G.H.W. Bush and Bill Barr issue pardons for those involved; Dubya and Dick Cheney knowingly deceive America about false WMDs in Iraq prompting an invasion which cost millions of lives, trillions of dollars and destabilizes the whole region and Democrats do nothing. Donald Trump obstructs justice and continuously pisses on the rule of law and Democrats are seriously considering doing nothing…again. In short: Republicans repeatedly screw the country and repeatedly get away with it. Is it any wonder this country is so botched up and people have no faith in our democratic institutions any more.
Hopefully the Democrats will grow a spine, put justice first and impeach this lying, manipulative, con artist before he does further damage to the White House, the rule of law and the prestige of the United States. But then again, the Democrats have an uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
According to the handy dandy guide for reading the redactions of the Mueller report, the phrase ‘Harm to Ongoing Matter’ translates to ‘Proof that Donald Trump is Guilty as Hell’.
So what can we conclude from his testimony? That America’s Attorney General is quite a trolling con artist and not as just and proper as his supporters claim he is. The Mueller report lasted 2 years and cost the taxpayers almost 5 million dollars. So you no what? Americans have a right to see every bit of that report. We paid for it, we get to see every sentence, every word and every period…NO REDACTIONS!!!
We here at the Bucket also noticed that the corpulent Attorney General bears a striking resemblance to portly, cartoon troublemaker Peter Griffin from the animated sitcom Family Guy. But don’t worry folks: Bill Barr is only trolling America for fun and profit – heh-heh-heh-heh.
Attorney General, Trump obfuscator and corpulent Republican troll, Bill Barr, bears a striking resemblance to portly, cartoon numbskull Peter Griffin from Family Guy and has even developed his own Griffin-esque catchphrase: “Heh-heh-heh-heh – I’m trolling America for fun and profit.”
As we pointed out in our last post, Trump is rattled. He knows that with the Democrats gaining control of the House, investigations of his shadowy election maneuverings and his secretive finances will be brought to the forefront. So, in an authoritarian move reminiscent of Germany’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’ (without the bloodshed) or more recently, Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, he fired Attorney Confederate General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. John Dean, a veteran of those heady Watergate days, even stated that Trump’s move seems like a planned murder. Trump has replaced Sessions with a shady, sycophantic automaton, Matthew Whitaker, who has openly admitted that Robert Mueller’s investigation should be shut down. Most people inside and outside of the Justice Department proclaim Whitaker to be a ‘f*cking fool’. Trump is acting like a cornered rat, so he’s sicking his fascist meat robot to do his dirty work and eliminate Mueller before any incriminating information is released to the public.
But it looks like Mueller is close to wrapping up his investigation. Donald Trump Jr. has already indicated that he thinks he’ll probably be indicted. As the Atlantic pointed out, it’s probably too late to stop Mueller. Could this be the beginning of the end for Trumpty Dumpty? Excuse our skepticism, but we’ve been hearing that for a year and a half now. Trump is unhinged and his acolytes have shown repeatedly that they prefer party power over democracy and justice. We don’t doubt that the GOP will do anything and everything to obstruct, obfuscate and deceive the American public like they’ve been doing for the last two years…hell…the last fifty years. Buckle up, folks! Things are going to get very interesting.
America’s CEO/Dictator, Donald Trump has decided to eliminate his Attorney Confederate General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and replace him with his lackey meat robot, Fascismo, a.k.a. Matthew Whitaker.
