Nonetheless

Serenity: shiny.

Rumsfeld, on the questionable loyalty of Iraqi police: “It’s a problem that’s faced by police forces in every major city in our country, that criminals infiltrate and sign up to join the police force.” He’s done this sort of thing before, suggesting that Baghdad is no more unsafe and violent than, say, the District of Columbia. It’s interesting how his rosy vision of Iraq and his scary image of American cities meet exactly in the middle, so that one is no worse than the other. On the subject of the Congressional hearings at which Gen. Casey admitted that the more Americans trained the Iraqi military, the fewer Iraqi battalions were combat-ready, Rummy mused on the wonders of the democratic process, suggesting that Al Qaeda terrorists wouldn’t fare any better under such questioning. It would be “awkward,” he said, “if they were called to account for the state of their strategy,” ‘cuz they’re all losing and shit. An odd place, Rummyworld.

So a brothel was raided in Birmingham, England, and some foreign sex slaves freed, but while sexual slavery is, you know, bad and wrong and icky and all, I can’t get beyond the name of the brothel: Cuddles.

Despite his denunciation of “partisan witch hunts” a couple of days ago, there DeLay was, claiming, in the best McCarthyite manner, to have proof that DA Ronnie Earle coordinated his prosecution in conjunction with Congressional Democratic leaders, but he won’t tell us what this proof is until “it’s timely.” You’d think it was timely now. Also, isn’t that some sort of crime he’s accusing Earle of? Who can this sort of slander possibly fool?
(Update: I see Think Progress has made exactly the same point, and has a more complete transcript than my original link did.)

Elections are the opiate of the media. Any elections, no matter how fraudulent, turn their brains into mush. Case in point, the Algerian referendum on whether they should just forget about all those people getting massacred a few years back and issue a blanket amnesty. The government is claiming that more than 97% voted in favor of the referendum, which seems unlikely even though various groups called for a boycott, but the turnout figure of 79% is patently false, according to anyone who watched the trickle of voters, so, and this is just me speaking, that would rather seem to call into doubt the whole thing. But on the BBC World News, they mentioned the doubts about the turnout but then in the very next sentence said that “nonetheless” President Bouteflika had a mandate to yadda yadda. Nonetheless? The figures are false but nonetheless they impart a mandate? How does that work?