Faith-based presidency

George W. Bush Jr. III today sent a warship to China. So now we're threatening war (that's not a "show of force" as the London Times put it; it is either an actual threat of force, or it is a completely silly totally pointless symbol, except it's not a symbol because it stands for nothing and a symbol is supposed to stand in for something, that's pretty much the definition. We need a word for a signifier without a referant--possibly we could call it a georgewbush) over a spy plane, which I understand actually had the capability of intercepting Chinese phone calls and e-mail.

Milosevic will be tried, if he is tried, by the Yugoslavs and not the International War Crimes Tribunal, for something like corruption rather than, oh, say genocide. Showing impressive chutzpah for a man who had a gun in his mouth just yesterday, he is actually planning to use genocide as his defence. He admitted today having funded the Croatian Serbs and Bosnian Serbs in their little wars. So he didn't steal money for himself, he used it to fund massacres in neighboring countries. So that's all right then.