Just goober

I guess Bob Barr wasn’t “just gooder” after all.

Evidently Bush likes to make his staff go jogging in Crawford when it’s 100°. If he didn't do it himself, you'd think
it was a fraternity pledge thing. Bush says running helps him clear his mind. Of what?

Rumsfeld says Al Qaida operating inside Iraq, although refuses to offer any proof. “I just know,” he said. Magic 8-Ball, I’m guessing. Iraq confirms presence of Al Qaida, in the part of the country controlled by Rumsfeld’s allies. Admittedly they also claim that Abu Nidal killed himself by shooting himself twenty or thirty times. Well, he was a fanatic you know, they do things like that.

6 weeks before Pakistani elections, Gen./President/Dictator Musharaf declares there will be “a transition from a democratic dictatorship to an elected essence of democracy." Something like that new-car smell that comes out of an aerosol spray can, no doubt. Oh, and he also gives himself the power to dissolve the elected Parliament, and a military-dominated National Security Council the right to overrule it. Oh, and he gave himself another 5 years in office to oversee the transition to democracy.

Speaking of the essence of democracy, Thomas Friedman in the Wed. NY Times comments that the Bushies advocate democracy only in regimes that oppose America, that policy is “to punish its enemies with the threat of democracy and reward its friends with silence on democratization.” This is an old Republican policy, as Friedman does not acknowledge, dating back to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which applied only to slaves in the South, where Lincoln’s writ did not run, and not to those held throughout the Civil War in the North.

The US adds another nation to the list of nations whose leader we’re trying to overthrow: Zimbabwe. Yes, Mugabe is a bastard, but before we start renaming his country after Cecil Rhodes (don’t tell our gov that imperial powers used to be able to just do that, or Kabul will be called Rummy), we might ask how big this sort of thing will go over in Africa.

For a start, they might start asking why the scientist who almost certainly was responsible for the anthrax outbreak was employed by the Pentagon when he used to do bio warfare with the Rhodesian and South African regimes, and was involved in a little anthrax outbreak in Zimbabwe, and whether that might have anything to do with why he hasn’t been arrested yet.

Something I hadn’t heard before: Arizona makes sex offenders on probation take polygraphs.