Thrilled to be able to work with you to be able to spread freedom and peace over the next years

Photo-essay on the Museum of Rubble that is Fallujah.

Monday I mentioned that the Australian government had turned down a Chinese diplomat’s plea for asylum. You can read more about that on Road to Surfdom, who has many links. In one of them, we learn that Australia determined that Chen Yonglin would not face persecution if forced to return to China. How did they determine that? They asked the Chinese ambassador.

Apostate Windbag has a nice post on events in Bolivia. Also, of course, Narco News.

Yesterday Senator Jeff Sessions took Chuck Schumer to task for asking if Janice Rogers Brown, who puts her own personal views above the law, wanted to be nominated as “dictator or grand exalted ruler”. Sessions decided this was “some reference to the Ku Klux Klan” and he was shocked and appalled. In fact, the Klan’s leader is called a Grand Wizard; it’s evidently the Elks who have a “grand exalted ruler.” What makes all of this worth pointing out is that Sessions himself was rejected by the Senate in 1986 for a circuit court judgeship in large part because he had said that he used to think the Kluxers were okay, until he found out they smoked marijuana.

Although I linked to the Sunday Times story on the Downing Street Memo mere minutes after it was posted to the web, I didn’t consider the information that Bush lied us into war with Iraq to be breaking news. I knew it, you knew it, everyone who today has the faintest idea what “Downing Street Memo” refers to knew it. Still, if it will keep the story alive, I’m all for it, and will even impute importance to the Downing Street Memo by referring to it repeatedly with initial caps.

I rather enjoyed the moment in the Bush-Blair press conference yesterday when a reporter asked about the, ahem, Downing Street Memo, and Blair leaped, almost literally, in front of Bush to take the bullet, to answer the question before George could open his mouth and screw it up. Of course Chimp Boy couldn’t help himself, and followed Blair with his own incoherent denial, including an attack on the motives of the leaker and the Sunday Times. “They dropped it out in the middle of his race,” Bush said, as if we hadn’t just had a week of debate over whether Deep Throat’s motives were good and pure, a debate leading to the conclusion: who cares what his motives were as long as he was speaking the truth. Both Bush and Blair said that the DSM was written before they went to the UN to ask for a war resolution. I’m still not sure what that’s supposed to prove.

Blair’s punishment for Poodleness in the First Degree is to be stuck standing next to Bush at these events over and over, trying not to look appalled at the words coming out of Bush’s mouth. I didn’t see the expression on Blair’s face when Bush congratulated him on his election victory and said, “I’m really thrilled to be able to work with you to be able to spread freedom and peace over the next years,” but I don’t imagine he greatly resembled a child receiving a puppy for Christmas. To paraphrase Sartre, hell is other world leaders.