I love to make a grown man piss himself

From the WaPo: “He said that he asked Graner, a Pennsylvania prison guard in civilian life, about the photographs. Graner replied: "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'"

Who doesn’t?

The NYT bleeped out the second sentence in that quote.

That’s from an article which says it wasn’t softening up, it was just for fun.

It’s Newsday, which makes it dubious. But interesting, and plausible. It’s suggested that Chalabi has for years been the agent through which Iranian intelligence manipulated the United States, ultimately manipulating it into taking out Iran’s old enemy Saddam. The question is, who would leak this? This makes everyone involved look bad. Still, if you could come close to proving that Bush was conned by Iran, and paid for the privilege, he can start packing his bags now.

Chalabi tells Al Arabiya that the raid “showed that I was with the Iraqi people all along.” Even Chalabi is now defining Americans and Iraqis as being on opposite sides.

The Post says that the Kurds are threatening not to join any government in which they don’t have one of the top 2 positions. When you do everything at the last minute with an iron-clad deadline like Bush is insisting on, this does give any one of the parties a great deal of leverage. Another sign that Bush doesn’t know how to negotiate.

Or hold a conversation. It was a little story, but Thursday Bush held a closed-door briefing with Congressional R’s, to reassure them about things before the American elections. They were surprised that he took no questions. He’s unable to deal on an unscripted basis even with his own followers, who were supposed to be reassured simply on Bush’s say-so. Bush genuinely doesn’t understand that his word isn’t good enough. He doesn’t know how to create an argument--indeed, he doesn’t himself make decisions based on arguments. In fact, he doesn’t really know what an argument is, mistaking it for accepting at face value the assertions of one of the good guys (or Fox News). It’s not just that he gets the news from Condi or Rove rather than the newspapers because he’s lazy and doesn’t want his beliefs contradicted by inconvenient facts, he thinks it would be discourteous to the people he trusts to listen to any contradictory views, just as he thinks it’s lese-majesty for anyone to do other than believe everything he tells them.

Atrios (and every other blogger and now me) points out that Thursday Bush condescendingly said that Iraqis are ready to “take the training wheels off” and run their own country. Today, Bush fell off a mountain bike.