We shouldn’t just precipitously give this thing up and say it can’t work

Condi: “Perhaps Palestinian people want their children to be suicide bombers, and that’s the great desire of large numbers of the Palestinian population. I don’t believe it.” See, that’s why they need a referendum. For the children.

There’s been a Rushdie-lite thing in the Muslim world for several months now, with various nations denouncing Denmark for some cartoons depicting Mohammed in a bad light (Libya and Saudi Arabia have recalled their ambassadors, a boycott of Danish goods is growing, condemnations have been issued by Pakistan, Hamas, etc and a move is afoot to introduce a UN resolution banning insulting religions). Into this rising idiocy steps Bill Clinton, the man who did meet Salman Rushdie but timorously banned pictures being taken of the event (he did the same when he met Ellen DeGeneres), giving his seal of approval to the fake outrage, calling the caricatures “appalling” and “totally outrageous cartoons against Islam” (whilst in Qatar, no less) and comparing them to anti-Semitism, and, you know, “In Europe, most of the struggles we’ve had in the past 50 years have been to fight prejudices against Jews, to fight against anti-Semitism.”

Clinton also wants US troops to stay in Iraq a while, saying as he must so often have said to Hillary, “We shouldn’t just precipitously give this thing up and say it can’t work.”

Bush: “this new democracy that’s emerging in the Palestinian Territories must understand that you can’t have a political party that also has got an armed wing to it; that democracies yield peace.” Was there ever a point in time when Bush made some tiniest effort to make sense and failed, as opposed to not trying in the first place?

Some bloggers are criticizing Democrats for not having a strategy on the Alito nomination. Are you sure the strategy isn’t to lose? I’m not sure they haven’t consciously or unconsciously or, if I know Democrats, semi-consciously, decided to be a failure as an opposition party in the hopes that things will get so bad that they might, somewhere, some day, win a freaking election again.