Worth it to try

Riots in Paris, again. Says the secretary of the police union, “Our colleagues will not allow themselves to be fired upon indefinitely without responding.”

Here’s the thing about our perceptions of the French: no matter how francophilic you are, your immediate response to that quote was, “By surrendering?”

The Virginia Republican Party convinced the state Board of Elections to require voters in the presidential primary to sign this pledge: “I, the undersigned, pledge that I intend to support the nominee of the Republican Party for president.” That is just so wrong in so many ways. For a start, you cannot “pledge” to “intend” something. And the state has no right to require us to make any statement about what we will do in the privacy of the polling booth, to sign our name to what some people will believe is a legally binding document (because what’s the point of requiring you to sign something in an official setting that isn’t a legally binding document?). And it suggests that the basic unit of a democracy is not the individual citizen but the political party.

But at least Virginia isn’t under martial law – yet. In an interview with AP, which annoyingly hasn’t made a transcript available, George Bush said that General Musharraf “ought to lift the emergency law... It’s hard for me to envision a free and fair election under emergency law.” As opposed to the elections held in an Iraq under military occupation and civil war.

Bush also said that the quest for Israeli-Palestinian peace is “worth it to try” and that the Annapolis Conference was “the beginning of an outline of a vision.” Or possibly an outline of a vision of a beginning. Or a vision of an outline of a beginning of a dream of a sketch of the start of a... Say, George, do you think we might be past the beginning of an outline of a vision stage if you’d done anything about this, say, seven years ago? What am I saying? if George had tried to solve the Middle East problem seven years ago, the earth would be a smoldering irregular ball of charcoal now.

Now, though, he’s completely committed to making peace: “I work the phones, I listen, I encourage, I have meetings. I do a lot of things.”


“The danger,” he said, “is for the Palestinians that unless there’s a vision described, that people can aspire to, hopeful, it is conceivable that we could lose an entire generation - or a lot of a generation - to radicals and extremists.” Or they could be bombed by the Israeli Air Force, that’s also kind of a danger for the Palestinians.

(Update: more on this interview in my next post.)


Extremists and extremism, by the way, were his words for the day, appearing seven times in his statement at the Conference: “we must not cede victory to the extremists” “the extremists are seeking to impose a dark vision on the Palestinian people” “if Palestinian reformers cannot deliver on this hopeful vision, then the forces of extremism and terror will be strengthened, a generation of Palestinians could be lost to the extremists” “The day is coming when the terrorists and extremists who threaten the Israeli and Palestinian people will be marginalized and eventually defeated.” (Isn’t that two days?)


I’ve forgotten which blog had the video, maybe someone could post the link in comments, but Bush totally screwed up Abbas’s first name. I never knew “Mahmoud” had so many syllables.