Cos you like to hurt people

Bushie types on McNeil-Lehrer today trying to explain how they got the world terrorism report wrong. Look, even assuming this was an honest mistake, the people who are supposed to be the government experts on terrorism never questioned figures supposedly showing that deaths from terrorism had halved in 2003. They shouldn’t have needed to go back over the figures, they should have known it couldn’t have been correct. Idiots. Morons.

Then there’s another Iraq-AQ connection, where they insisted that a colonel in the Iraqi militia was the same person as an AQ “airport greeter” because they mistook the names--Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi versus Hikmat Shakir Ahmad. This is not just a mix-up, because it is precisely the same inability to understand how Arabic names work that let some of the 9/11 hijackers into the US even though they were on watch lists. So you’d think that would have focused some attention on getting it right.

Berlusconi blames his losses in the European parliamentary elections on leftist vote fraud.

Beheading: it’s the new rock ‘n roll. The South Korean, of course, and this: “Afghan troops beheaded four Taliban after guerrillas cut off the heads of an interpreter and an Afghan soldier who were separated from a patrol. "They cut off their heads with a knife, so when our forces arrested four Taliban we cut off their heads too," said a government commander in Zabul province.”

The BBC puts excerpts from Clinton’s Panorama interview online, but not the good bits, so we can’t see or hear him erupt at David Dimbleby:

“And that’s the difference in me and the people that were after me. I actually cared about what happened to those people, and I wanted to be President to help those people. And that’s what the fight was about. Now that doesn’t justify any mistake I made, but look how much time you spent asking me these questions, and this time you’ve had … that’s cos what you care about, cos that’s what you think helps you and helps this interview. I care about what happened to the people that I fought for. And that’s why people like you always help the Far Right cos you like to hurt people, and you like to talk about how bad people are and all their personal failings, and (David interjects) and that’s why you. Look, just – you made a decision to allocate your time in a certain way. You should take responsibility for that. You should say yes, I care much more about this than whether the Bosnian people were saved, and whether he bought a million people home from Kosovo, than whether twenty seven million people had jobs at the end, and whether we moved a hundred times as many people out of poverty as Regan and Bush. This is what I care about.”

(transcript at above link)