Shocking ourselves with the predictable

Anyone else notice Dick “Shot a Guy in the Face” Cheney has been invisible this week? He could certainly offer an interesting perspective on the Virginia Tech shootings.

It’s been noted that the only restriction on Seung Hui Cho in Virginia was that without a license he could only buy a single solitary gun a month. Does anyone remember how that law was finally enacted? Virginia was embarrassed into it after a Batman comic book showed Gotham City gang members driving down to VA to exchange drugs for guns.

The Guardian’s Gary Younge makes a point I also made the Virginia Tech shootings, but more eloquently: “America’s innocence is one of its few eternally renewable resources. Its ability to shock itself with the predictable is itself predictable.”

The WaPo’s Michael Fletcher, writing about Bush’s speech yesterday, notes that Bush quoted “an unnamed Middle East scholar” who said that the mood in Washington is gloomier about Iraq than is the case in Baghdad. Fletcher, dude, when I read that line I checked it out using this thing we have now called Google. You might want to look into that.

Must-reads on Iraq today: 1) the WaPo on an army report kept secret for the last 10 months on Haditha and the systematic disregard within the military of civilian Iraqi deaths, 2) quotes from the report, 3) McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef on how the US has quietly backed away from the “when they stand up, we’ll stand down” thing.

The Guardian has an extract from a book by Clive Stafford Smith, a British lawyer, about trying to act for Guantanamo prisoners. The book comes out next week in Britain, but 6 months from now in the US.