It is what it is

Peppergate has traction and resonance because it looks, sounds, feels and especially smells like a metaphor for so many policies and attitudes of the Cheney-Bush administration that we can’t pick just one. This little incident fits a certain genre, for which Echidne of the Snakes provides the Cliff’s Notes:

Picking targets that they think are easy (tame birds in this case), then finding out that the whole thing turned into a disaster (shooting yourself or someone on your side), then exhibiting a certain callousness about the whole thing (going to have the meal as planned) and then trying to keep everything a secret.

The variants are endless: blaming the victims of Katrina; the US taking aim at a guy on crutches, experiencing “target fixation,” wheeling around and shooting peppering Afghanistan/Iraq; Valerie Plame, etc etc and etc.

Or Damadola, that town in Pakistan where the US bombed peppered a house more than a month ago to kill an Al Qaeda guy who wasn’t there, killed 18 people including children, but still hasn’t admitted it. There may be consequences for Harry Whittington, but never for Damadola, such are our priorities.

(Update: the 10 ways Iraq is like Harry Whittington.)

I watched Tuesday morning’s Gaggle for a while, but Little Scottie was simply refusing to answer any questions – “It is what it is” – and it got a little tedious. Now it turns out that he knew about the heart attack before he entered the room, and failed to say anything. Good luck with the White House press corps in the future, Little Scottie.

And good luck Iran, because Dick Cheney may have to endure the next three years without going hunting again, and he needs to burn off that cold furious rage somehow.

Elsewhere in the world, the Cartoon Wars resulted in fatalities in a new country today, Pakistan. I’ve lost track of the number of deaths. 20? A Taliban commander put a price on the heads of the cartoonists.

We finally found WMDs: the Nazis released malarial mosquitos in Italy in 1943, intending to infect invading Allied soldiers (who were taking their quinine and were unaffected, not so the civilians who lived in the area).

Some more Abu Ghraib pictures have come out.