It was necessary to destroy Fallujah in order to save it

Jon Carroll adds a corollary to my frequently made point that the Bushies cannot ever admit to having gotten something wrong: “As their time in office increases, they are spending more time fighting rear-guard actions trying to prove that they were right or cover up the fact that they were wrong.” This also means they can’t fix things they’ve broken, like the damage they’ve inflicted on relations with America’s allies, because they can’t admit anything is wrong. Carroll thinks the problem is that the Bushanistas learned the wrong lesson from Watergate, which is that Nixon didn’t stonewall *enough.*

(Later:) speaking of lessons learned from that era, lefti.blogspot.com/ comments that Kerry et al, who want to pour more troops into the quagmire, “think their job is to be better, smarter imperialists.”

I proudly use the word quagmire, making me in William Safire’s alliterative phrase a “quaking quagmirist.” Bill: eat me.

Turquoise has received an email from Dick Cheney inviting her to participate in National Party for the President Day on the 29th, which I just realized is a Thursday. The highlight of the day is a live conference call from Cheney himself, without which no really boring party is complete.

Colin Powell suggests that Ted Kennedy, who said that Iraq is Bush’s Vietnam, “should be a little more restrained and careful in his comments because we are at war”. Pathetic.

Speaking of lack of restraint, Rumsfeld today said, “U.S. forces are on the offense. The United States and our partners and free Iraqi forces are taking the battle to the terrorists.” So the US bombed a mosque. During afternoon prayers. Killing 40 or 48 or 25 or (the Pentagon says) one. Gen. Kimmitt, military moron, puts it in perspective, saying the “actual mosque structure itself” was not damaged. So that’s ok then. We’ll see if the dead-children pictures on Al Jazeera get the same distribution here as the crispy-mercenary pics did (I looked at 2 of the 16 pictures before I had to stop). Winning hearts and minds, one rocket attack on a mosque at a time. After a year of occupation, do we still not know when afternoon prayers are? In the afternoon, I’m guessing.

OK, maybe socialized medicine is evil. A deal with a private company put tv’s in hospital rooms. Only trouble is, they have no off button and run 15 hours a day. And the patients have to pay £3.20 a day. If they don’t, they get one hour free, and 14 hours of advertisements for the service and hospital announcements.

Prom season is coming up, and this year the fad is Botox injections under the arms to prevent sweating.

At a Mississippi high school, Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia says that people don’t revere the Constitution like they used to. As he was saying this, a federal marshal was forcing reporters to erase recordings of the speech.