It don’t work

Execution: “It don’t work.”

Which is why Somalia prefers to use children.

But you know what does work? Operation Smile, the feel-good Operation of the Iraq war. The US military, out of the goodness of its heart and modestly seeking no publicity, has flown some Iraqi children with cleft palates and such to Jordan for corrective surgery. Many had never been in a plane before, isn’t that exciting for them? (they could have been driven to Jordan, but then they’d probably have been blown up). Operation Smile. Their country may now be cleft, but not their palates. Makes it all worth while.

The nice thing about a blog as opposed to a newspaper column is that you can take as much space as an idea requires. Or as little. Today Maureen Dowd had to pad out to column length what would have been a perfectly good single-sentence blog post: “The invasion of Iraq has turned into ‘The Ransom of Red Chief.’”

George Bush says of the sentence on Zacarias Moussaoui (the George Bush of the terrorist world), “Evil will not have the final say.”

Speaking of Dick Cheney, here’s another good opening sentence, from the London Times’s Tom Baldwin: “The word ‘offensive’ has often been used to describe the activities of Dick Cheney, if rarely with the prefix of ‘charm’.” The article includes the news that Mary Cheney has a book, ahem, coming out.