Hung out to dry

So does anyone else think that that little incident Sunday when an American howitzer accidentally went off while they were cleaning it, or whatever the story was, and blew up several houses in Hibhib, the place where Zarqawi was just killed, wasn’t such an accident?

Molly Ivins:

I had a slightly insane discussion the other day with a winger who wanted urgently for me to understand that the Haditha massacre is the kind of thing that happens in war. Whereas I was trying to point out to him that the Haditha massacre is the kind of thing that happens in war.

Two of the British Guardsmen acquitted for the fatal “wetting” of that 15-year old Iraqi have announced that they are leaving the army in disgust at having been, and I quote, “hung out to dry.” Maybe not the most apt choice of metaphor under the circumstances.

Speaking of quitters, you might or, if you’re sane and/or not a blogger, might not want to read Tom DeLay’s farewell speech, a high-minded paean to the virtues of viciousness, liberal-bashing, and assholery: “You show me a nation without partisanship, and I’ll show you a tyranny.”; “conservatism isn’t about feeling people’s pain, it’s about curing it.”

And Maliki has an op-ed piece in the London Times you also might or might not want to read. Evidently while he uses tough-guy talk in Iraq – maximum force, iron fist, etc – when he addresses Western audiences he uses a different arsenal of clichés: national reconciliation initiative, tipping point, liberty, democracy and, over and over, national unity government (NUG). Interestingly, he describes what’s going on in Baghdad as “ethnic cleansing.”

Nascar meets Scientology: this is how the world ends.

For the hell of it, two pictures of Queen Elizabeth and some Chelsea Pensioners (it’s all about the hats).