Theatrics, why one of those sailors deserves £70,000, exuberance with the holy water, a dead rat in an old guy’s mouth, and of course John McCain

The US has called the accusations of Jalal Sharafi, a functionary in Iran’s embassy in Iraq who was kidnapped by people he claims were CIA and that they interrogated him with the, you know, torture and stuff, “theatrics.” Theatrics! “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show! Joe’s uncle has a barn we can use, and I can borrow a cattle prod from my dad...”

One of the purposes of the mission those 15 British sailors were on was indeed to spy on Iranian activities. Which the Iranians knew because British television had broadcast an interview with the crew in which one of the guys who was captured a few days later said as much. The 15 are being given permission (which is irregular for serving members of the military) to sell their stories to the tabloids. The Sunday Times notes that some of them will earn more than the compensation if they had, for example, lost an arm. One of them says that he wants at least £70,000, reasoning “I am worth it because I was one of only two who didn’t crack.”

The archbishop of Chicago has been hospitalized with a hip injury after slipping on some spilled holy water. I believe that’s what is called a negative job review. A spokeswoman for the archdiocese blamed the fall on “his exuberance with the holy water.”

So a lawsuit has been filed on behalf of a 90-year old man against an old persons’ home in Mission Viejo, California, asserting that it “so literally ignored the needs of their residents ... as to allow vermin in the form of a rat to become lodged in the mouth of Sigmund Bock and die therein”. You have to go to law school for years to be able to write a sentence like that. One of the points of contention is whether the trap that killed the rat used glue or poison (since they put it in the room of a demented man known to put things in his mouth). The spokesmodel for the company, Dr. Melody Chatelle, complained that the “negative publicity” about the dead rat in the 90-year old guy’s mouth was a “disheartening affront to our professional caregivers”. It turns out, when I googled her, that Dr. Chatelle is not a medical doctor but has a doctorate in communication studies, and doesn’t actually work for that nursing home, but rather runs a PR firm operating out of Texas which handles PR for these places all over the country. Further googling shows that Chatelle (who used to work in the Texas state legislature, which readers of Molly Ivins will not be surprised to hear) turns up to do spin control like this whenever a patient dies of infected bedsores in one of these facilities, or a patient with dementia wanders away, or a patient is allowed to die because they thought she had a DNR but didn’t, or is raped by a nurse’s assistant, etc etc.

I am now going to write about John McCain’s happy talk about Iraq, and at this point I’d normally try to insert a clever segue from the last item, but I can’t decide if McCain is analogous to 1) the person putting a positive spin on the facility where a demented 90-year old guy was found with a dead rat in his mouth, or 2) the demented 90-year old guy with the dead rat in his mouth, or 3) the dead rat in the demented guy’s mouth. When you have a blog, this is the sort of choice you are faced with every single day.

Anyhoo, McCain (who will appear on 60 Minutes tonight with footage of his trip to that Baghdad market), has an op-ed piece in the WaPo, about the wonderful progress in Iraq. He’s decided that the way to deal with the criticisms of and revelations about that trip is to ignore them. What else can he do? He can’t pretend that when he said that his little shopping excursion proved that everything is now much safer he was simply unaware of the fact that he was wearing body armor and guarded by a small army (complete with air cover). So, like Bush, he just blunders grimly forward. Here’s as close as he comes to reality: “Today the market still faces occasional sniper attacks, but it is safer than it used to be.” Maybe they can make that into a banner or something.

McCain laments that “most Americans are not aware [of progress] because much of the media are [sic, but at least he recognizes that “media” is plural] not reporting it or devote far more attention to car bombs and mortar attacks that reveal little about the strategic direction of the war.” Is “down the toilet” a strategic direction?