Analyzing their poo

Chester Trent Lott in an AP interview: “A lot of people in Washington have been trying to nail me for a long time. When you're from Mississippi, when you're conservative and when you're a Christian, there are a lot of people that don't like that. But I fell into their trap and so I have only myself to blame.” Ah, so the whole 100th-birthday-party-for-Strom-Thurmond thing was actually a cunning Liberal trap, going back to 1902, to nail Trent Lott.

Lott spread the blame a bit: he also attributed his fall from grace to a plot against the great state of Mississippi and of course to God. “God has put this burden on me and I believe that he'll show me a way to turn this into a good.”

The Lott thing has finally made one news source, the New Republic, write about the racism of Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, as I have in the past on several occasions, but somehow the man rejected by the Senate for a district court judgeship under Reagan for his racist actions and words slipped past the media into the Senate in 1996 by the clever expedient of shortening his name to Jeff Sessions. And now he’s on the judiciary committee.

Lott has of course been replaced by Bill Frist. Am I the only person who imagines the R Senators singing “If I only had a heart doctor”? I’m telling you, the irony of this thing is ridiculous. Here’s an extremely disturbing comment on Frist’s qualifications by Lamar Alexander on today’s McNeil-Lehrer: Well, let me tell you a very short story to answer your question. Imagine ten years ago, a 40-year-old young physician having dinner with his family here in Nashville, gets an emergency telephone call, goes out to the airport, gets in his own plane, flies to Duke, to the medical center, cuts the heart and lungs out of a dying person, puts it in a plastic bag full of ice, puts it back in his plane, flies back to the Vanderbilt University heart transplant center, which he founded, and goes into an eight-hour surgery procedure to place that heart and lungs back into another dying person who then lives. Now, if you understand that, and a man who then gets back to his young family the next morning about 12 hours after he left, you understand about 75 or 80 percent of who Bill Frist is.”

And Rep. Cass Ballenger (R-Way Down South in the Land of Cotton), the guy who made the comments about Cynthia McKinney giving him segregationist feelings, has repainted his lawn jockey white.

Iraq invites the CIA to send agents--openly--into the country to check on arms. Where’s the fun in that?

The US has dismissed the offer as a “stunt.” No, juggling chainsaws is a stunt. GeeDubya trying to speak a coherent sentence is a stunt.

Iraq has also welcomed the first international group of voluntary human shields. Sadly, they do not include Sean Penn.

Speaking of omissions in the Iraqi arms dossier, the US cut 8,000 pages out before handing it on to the non-permanent members of the Security Council. The US did that, not anyone working for the UN.

The AP yesterday became the first media source I’ve seen actually to question the laughable claim by the US that Saddam intends a “scorched earth” policy, noting that no evidence for this assertion has been given. The article also says that US radio broadcasts into Iraq, currently trying to get soldiers to desert, says that when Iraqi POWs were returned after previous wars, Saddam ordered their ears be cut off. This is a lie.

Remember when the US accidentally bombed some Canadians in Afghanistan in April? It turns out that the pilots were on amphetamines. Why? Because the Air Force told them to. Evidently this is standard.

There is no room at the Bethlehem Inn. It has been commandeered by the Israeli Army. Another paper reports that every Palestinian living under constant curfew in Bethlehem has but one dream: a visa to the US. Talk about no room at the inn!

The Catholic Church in Boston demands that all sex abuse cases be dropped on First Amendment grounds. I really must go over the New Testament again.

Best headline of the week, about Kenya’s elections, in the Guardian: Après Moi, the Delusion.