Of the devil, the Terminator, and the choir boy

Hugo Chávez, in a speech to the UN, called Bush “the devil.” And your point is?

Wolf Blitzer interviewed the devil today. The horned one reversed his position, I guess, about whether we would send troops into Pakistan if we knew where Osama bin Laden was, without the “invitation” he said just a couple of days ago that Pakistan as a “sovereign country” would have to issue before we’d do that. Musharraf has voiced some objections. (Update: ah, Georgia10 at Daily Kos asks the question I was wondering: how is it after five years there isn’t some sort of agreement about what happens if bin Laden is found?)

Wolfie asked Chimpy if Iran would nuke Israel if it had nukes. Bush responded that he believes everything that everyone tells him without reservation, which is why he has the world’s largest collection of magic beans:

Wolf, my judgment is you’ve got to take everybody’s word seriously in this world. Again, you can’t just hope for the best. You’ve got to assume that the leader, when he says that he would like to destroy Israel means what he says. If you take -- if you say, well, gosh, maybe he doesn’t mean it, and you turn out to be wrong, you have not done your duty as a world leader.

Now you know what the duty of a world leader is.

Here in California, inept gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides is running this inept ad every 12 minutes on every channel against inept governator Ahnuuuld. Governor Terminator’s policies are almost uniformly opposed by the California voters, but the only thing Angelides is calling him out for is chanting “George W. Bush” while wearing an ugly green tie.



British Home Secretary John Reid imparted some helpful advice to Muslim parents: check your children for the “tell-tale signs” of brainwashing.

The official US response to the Thai coup is to say that coups are bad, and to ask that “democratic elections be held as soon as possible, which is a commitment military officials have made.” To call for elections but not for the return of the elected prime minister is to give de facto support to the coup. The State Dept spokesmodel kept repeating that the coup leaders should live up to their commitments to restore democracy, but this formulation suggests that they have some sort of right to make any commitment about the form of government of Thailand, that they are legitimate actors, which they are not.

The British soldier convicted of a war crime in Iraq (Corporal Payne, can’t make this shit up) punched civilians in different body parts to elicit screams and groans. He called this his “choir,” and played it for anyone who visited the detention center, including total strangers. His confidence in his impunity might have been correct, had he not beaten a prisoner to death as well.