I want my security first. I’ll deal with all the details after that.

Trent Lott, supporting illegal surveillance of Americans: “I don’t agree with the libertarians. I want my security first. I’ll deal with all the details after that.” As Benjamin Franklin said in his blog in 1759: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

The House voted to condition future aid to Palestine on Hamas being banned from parliamentary elections. So I suppose we won’t be hearing any more about spreading democracy throughout the Middle East. Oops, my bad, of course we will: Tom Lantos, one of the sponsors, says that Hamas “has nothing but contempt for democracy, though it is more than happy to exploit democracy for its own nefarious ends”. And Rep. Ileanna Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the House International Relations subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, accuses Hamas of trying to “hijack” the elections by, you know, being more popular than other parties and winning more votes.

On a very special episode of The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly interviews Secretary of War Rumsfeld, and tv’s all across America blow themselves up in suicidal despair. I missed seeing it myself, as I was talking my tv off a ledge at the time, but it reads like the Wimbledon of Stupid; when they get a volley of asininity going, it is a thing to behold, if you have the stomach for it.

O’REILLY: Is [Iraq] the best battlefield?

RUMSFELD: It is central front of the global war on terror.

O’REILLY: Even more than Iran?

RUMSFELD: Iran is not a battleground today. Iran is very busy financing Hezbollah and Hamas and the various terrorist groups that they fund with Syria to go in and try to — you heard what the new president...

O’REILLY: He’s a nut. All right. But I don’t know. You could make a case in Iran.

RUMSFELD: They said Hitler was a nut.

O’REILLY: I would have. And they should have stopped him in the Rhine.

Rummy on American Iranian influence in Iraq: “And what we’ve got to count on is that the Iraqi people are, even the Shia, are more Iraqi than they are Shia and that they’re not going to want Iran influencing their elections.” Rummy on the torture bill: “from the Defense Department’s standpoint, the arrangement that’s been made does not have implications, because we have had requirements for humane treatment from the beginning.” And that’s worked out just swell.

And here’s a photo from the Iraqi elections I haven’t been able to think of an excuse for using: