Divided by gender

The Arnold has a way of being even more insulting to the intelligence of the voters than Shrub. “Everyone is talking about the details. Details, details, details. Sacramento is filled with warehouses of details. But the thing they are lacking is leadership. The thing that Sacramento is lacking is backbone.”

A timely quote from Robert Fisk’s latest: “"The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things are far worse than we have been told... We are today not far short of a disaster." The writer was describing the crumbling British occupation of Iraq, under guerrilla attack in 1920. His name was Lawrence of Arabia.”

Rumsfeld visits Iraq. Although Le Resistance mostly kept him well under cover, which The Times notes is a little ironic during a victory procession, he visited the house where Uday, Qusay and Mustafa Hussein were killed. First, how creepy is that? Second, I thought the house was demolished to prevent it being a shrine for terrorists? Obviously that failed.

John Bolton, the assistant secretary of state for arms control who just pissed off the North Koreans to such an extent that he couldn’t attend the arms control summit--and so has proved himself incapable of performing his job and should be fired--says that the invasion of Iraq was justified whether or not it had WMDs--that “isn’t really the issue,” he says--but that he had scientists capable of building such weapons. I trust the rest of world is noting that the man in charge of arms control policy says it doesn’t matter whether arms actually exist or not.

As a bunch of commentators are pointing out, the D presidential candidates who voted for the war are rapidly backpedaling, none more disingenuously than John Kerry, who says his vote for a blank check to wage war was actually a vote just to threaten Saddam with a war. Gephardt says of the current position in Iraq, “It is inconceivable to me that we would end up in this situation.” Getting around his incomplete grasp of verb tenses, what he means is that when he voted for the Iraq Tonkin Gulf resolution, it was inconceivable that the result would be what it is, which means he was unable to predict a fairly obvious outcome. Only Lieberman is prepared to continue pouring troops into the quagmire (give me a break, it’s the first time I’ve used the word, cliché though it is), pardon me, American troops, since Dean and someone else said we should pour foreign troops in, although the assumption that a US president can order Moroccan troops in is a proposition that Morocco might have some minor objections to. Still, it’s nice to see that the wind is blowing against the war.

Dean, sounding very 2001, complained about racial profiling, and said that he was tired of being divided by race, gender and sexual orientation.

I was divided by gender once. It was great.

Objections from the people of Hong Kong has stopped, at least for now, the proposed draconian “anti-subversion” law. 500,000 marched in protest of the bill in July. In the mainland, which does have such a law, the protests went unreported.

Israel blows up a 7-story apartment building it says Palestinian militants were using (in fact, blew it up with people still inside).