Desperate

How often have we heard from American officials that increasing Resistance activity in Iraq is a sign of their desperation? Now Puppet PM “Comical” Allawi has made the same argument--“getting more desperate...last stand...we are winning...Iraq is fighting this war on behalf of the civilized nations...yadda yadda yadda.” This is an astonishingly stale piece of rhetoric, unchanged by as much as a syllable in over a year. In fact, Bush gave the same speech over a year ago; on 8/27/03 I called it a “massively silly argument”: “Yeah, it’s a sign of desperation if they attack us, a sign of boldness and resolve if we attack them, yeah yeah yeah. ... It’s the last gasp of a dying regime, it’s an all-out war for the security of the US and what Bush calls ‘civilization.’ It’s a floor wax, it’s a dessert topping.” It may or may not be the last gasp, but it’s an incredibly long one. You have to be impressed by their breath control.

Fontgate followup: An WaPo article on how CBS got the Killian memos wrong says they failed to test their authenticity adequately because the White House wasn’t challenging their authenticity. This lends credence to the “conspiracy theory” that the Mayberry Machiavellis created this trap for CBS to walk into. Yeah, it was criminally careless, but you can see why they wouldn’t spend a lot of effort checking out a piece of evidence no one was disputing.

Here in California, Gubna Ahnuuld, who must be one of the top 10 richest people in the state, has vetoed an increase in the minimum wage, because if $6.75 an hour is good enough for the guy whose job it is to lick Arnie’s Hummer clean every day...