No greater challenge

Iraq has held its first executions since it was, ahem, liberated. 13 alleged insurgents (only one of whose names was made public) were hanged. Let freedom ring wring the necks of some Sunnis.

Condi sez, “We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran”. And you know she does not like to be challenged. Condi, who in some circles is being spun as more realist, more pragmatic than others in the Bush administration we could name, has in fact been making statements that read to me as increasingly messianic and arrogant, and which amount to informing lesser nations that they are mere bit players in a story that’s all about the United States of America, that they have no right to foreign policies of their own. Which might sound not too bad when applied to the shitheads currently running Iran, but every nation on earth is treated like that now. Tony Blair, whose obsequious loyalty would make Lassie blush, can’t get the US to extradite sex offenders. Some bloggers, including myself, objected to Bush going to India and tearing up the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (although I don’t see this as worse than the continuing coddling of Pakistan, an actual known proliferater, which still refuses to provide information of its activities and is allowed the ludicrous pretense that it was all unauthorized activity by A.Q. Khan, whose “punishment” did not include taking from him all the money he earned selling nuclear technology hither and yon). But the point of the exercise wasn’t to undermine the treaty but to replace it with a higher power, namely ours: the point was that the United States claimed to have the right and the authority to grant or deny permission to a country to have nuclear weapons.

The Columbia Journalism Review Daily discovers that South Dakota’s largest newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, has decided not to have any editorial about the new abortion law because “nothing we could say on our editorial page would change anyone’s mind -- and it could well jeopardize the credibility we have worked long and hard to establish.” Cowards. Craven, sniveling cowards.