Vox simius, vox dei

Letters to the (London) Times deny that the guy I mentioned yesterday is the first Satanist in the Royal Navy, one claiming to have filled that in on a form in 1947. He was asked what special facilities he would require for Sunday worship.

Funny and all too appropriate John Bunning picture.

I should probably be thinking about the political implications of Rehnquist’s cancer. But instead I keep picturing him in a hospital gown with stripes on the sleeves and his butt hanging out. Please make it stop.

An Indy reporter says that he’s been to Al Qa Qaa, the arms depot with the funny name, before. It was named in Tony Blair’s “dodgy dossier” as a site where chemical weapons were manufactured. The Iraqi government immediately invited reporters to check it out, and they did, and it wasn’t. IAEA inspectors also regularly visited. So by the time the war started, the US knew exactly what was in Al Qa Qaa; it wasn’t an intelligence failure, but a failure to act on intelligence. But you know what they say in the Pentagon: 350 tons of high-quality explosive here, 350 tons of high-quality explosive there, pretty soon it adds up.

The WaPo Tuesday has a truly wrong-headed editorial suggesting that the candidates should promise now to “put the national interest first” and not challenge close election results merely because they might have been, ya know, stolen. That was Scalia’s logic in Gore v. Bush. The logic that the next president’s legitimacy would be harmed by his election being put under judicial scrutiny is the logic that causes the Bushies to complain about his being fact-checked, or about Chimpy’s assertions being questioned. My favorite recently was the campaign threatening legal action against MTV’s Rock the Vote campaign for discussing the possibility of a draft, saying that Shrub’s promise that he wouldn’t start one should have been enough to put the issue beyond doubt or discussion. Thus the title of this post, which hopefully is the Latin for “the voice of the monkey is the voice of God” (there seems to be no Latin word for chimpanzee), a play on the phrase Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

If my readership drops to zero tomorrow, I’ll blame my attempt to make a joke in a dead language I don’t actually know.

Anyway, I’ve heard R campaign officials--there was one today in Ohio talking about why they were planning to put thousands of workers into polling places to challenge voters who, ahem, look ineligible; I’ve lost the quote, but he was blaming it on D voter-registration drives, which he evidently considered tantamount to a dirty trick.