It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you start to plan withdrawing

Today is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. Bush put out a statement. It touches some of the bases that need to be touched: 1.5 million Armenians dead (well, he said “as many as” 1.5m), need to remember and examine the historical events, blah blah blah. And some that didn’t need to be touched: “Our Nation is grateful for Armenia’s contributions to the war on terror”. And missed one altogether: it referred to “mass killings,” but failed to characterize them as genocide or in any way acknowledge the ethnic-religious impulse towards extermination. Indeed, “mass killings” is not coupled with any mention of the mass killers: those “as many as 1.5 million Armenians” merely “lost their lives.” As I said about last year’s presidential message, Bush “calls it a ‘tragedy,’ which is a word that does not entail responsibility, especially not Turkish responsibility.” Imagine a similar statement about the Holocaust that shied away from naming the Nazis.

Speaking of ethnic-religious impulses towards extermination, Bush’s other statement this morning (which he made with a helicopter behind him)


was yet another demand for a “clean” bill funding his dirty wars. “It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you start to plan withdrawing,” he said. Speaking of making no sense, I think he was supposed to say “when you plan to start withdrawing.” That enemy, of course, is Al Qaida; Bush these days is back to ignoring the existence of a civil war in Iraq. He complains that the bills are “legislative mandates telling [US generals[ which enemies they can engage and which they cannot.” I have no idea what he’s talking about. He used the phrase “precipitous withdrawal” twice. He’s against it. He did not explain how withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2008, as opposed to 2003, could in any way be described as precipitous.

What happens in Anatolia, Las Vegas and Gitmo stays in Anatolia, Las Vegas and Gitmo

Bush issues a presidential message commemorating the Armenian genocide, while blurring it as much as possible. Guess what word he doesn’t use? Genocide. He twice calls it a “tragedy,” which is a word that does not entail responsibility, especially not Turkish responsibility. He calls it “the mass killings and forced exile of as many as 1.5 million Armenians,” which could mean that 3 people were killed and 1,497,993 were exiled or it could mean that 1,497,993 were killed and 3 people exiled.

But here’s my real beef with Bush: he went to Las freaking Vegas Monday and there’s not a single funny picture for me to use.

The Pentagon wants to put on trial a few of the Guantanamo prisoners, execute a few of them, release some of them (at some point in the future, so why is this news?), transfer others to prisons in their own countries, and declare some of them no longer combatants but continue to imprison them, like those Uighurs, because they can’t safely be sent back to their own countries. The LA Times headline for this, which is obviously inaccurate in so many ways, is “U.S. to Free 141 Terror Suspects.” And it entirely misses the other big Gitmo news: McDonald’s is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its Guantanamo store! Hurrah!