Oh, I don’t like to be told what I said

Everyone’s a critic: now it’s the United States Department of State that is calling the Danish cartoons “offensive to the beliefs of Muslims.” So not only is the US government (happily stoking the flames when Muslims are for once pissed off at someone other than the US) now in the business of issuing fatwas against free expression, but it’s also in the business of saying what is or is not offensive to the beliefs of Muslims. I understand the State Department also proclaims that human-animal hybrids are offensive to the beliefs of Muslims.

The Pakistani Parliament has also, unanimously, passed a resolution that the cartoons “hurt the faith and feelings of Muslims all over the world.” Hurt their feelings (the poor delicate flowers), fine, but how precisely did a few feeble cartoons hurt the Muslim faith? The Pakistani general-president-dictator (but he really wants to direct) Musharaf also condemned them, which is funny because he’s normally such a staunch supporter of human rights.

Laura Ingraham asked Dick Cheney who Bush meant when he attacked “isolationists.” He says anyone who wants to “deal with the terrorist threat... the way we dealt with it prior to 9/11” and anyone who thinks “military involvement in the Middle East” is “optional.”

Rumsfeld, in that talk at the National Press Club yesterday in which he said that Hugo Chavez is just like Hitler because they were both elected legally and then consolidated power, a talk in which Rumsfeld gestured with his finger


JUST LIKE HITLER


and in which he said the fight against terrorists could be “generational,” gave this insight into the inner workings of terrorists: “They get up in the morning, have committee meetings and think about how they’re going to manipulate the world’s press to their advantage.” Committee meetings?

And while everyone else in the Bush administration talks about the evil Muslim plan for a caliphate, Rummy has the damning proof: “They have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire.” Here there be dragons.

In the Q&A (and by the way, has anyone seen a transcript of this event?), someone quoted his pre-war statements about Iraq definitely absolutely positively having chemical and biological weapons. His response: “Oh, I don’t like to be told what I said.”