A very Chimpy Easter

Caption contest, White House Easter Egg Roll:



The Reuters caption for this one


says that Jenna “enacts one of the monster characters of the book ‘Where the Wild Things Are’”. I wonder who she would imitate to enact a monster character?

We are living in a dying situation

Yesterday I heard what sounded like fireworks around here. Is this some sort of Easter thing I don’t know about? Are people booby-trapping Easter eggs? Because that would be awesome, I mean terrible.

Anyway, happy Sopranos Easter! Woke up from the dead this morning, got yourself a gun. Mama always said you’d be the Chosen One...

Bush and family went to church for Easter services at Fort Hood, where “I had a chance to reflect on the great sacrifice that our military and their families are making.” Yes, the soldiers died for your sins, George.



The father, son and holy spirit

The NYT reports “Hunger Strike Breaks Out at Guantánamo.” What they actually mean is that 1) a new outbreak of hunger striking began in December that they’re just finding out about now, 2) hunger striking has been continuous for several years now, but they haven’t reported on it in a while. Since prisoners now cannot communicate with each other, hunger striking seems (from the glimpses that make it past military censorship) to be less an organized resistance tactic than the product of despair and isolation-produced insanity. Said one hunger striker to his lawyer, “My wish is to die... We are living in a dying situation.”

Non-follow-up: there is still no news out of Iraq about those policemen arrested, released and possibly re-arrested for participating in massacres in Tal Afar. Or about the policemen who allegedly gang-raped that woman back in February.

I recognize that Democrats are trying to show their current opposition to the war in Iraq

Bush’s weekly radio address segued with all the grace we’ve come to expect from the master of graceful segues from celebrating Easter and Passover (which “remind us of the presence of a loving God who delivers His people from oppression, and offers a love more powerful than death”) to celebrating the war and the people fighting it: “we give thanks for the many blessings in our lives. One of our greatest blessings as Americans is that we have brave citizens who step forward to defend us.” See how he did that?


So clearly, I mean clearly, the proper way for Congress to celebrate Passover and/or Easter is to give George all the money he wants to fight his little war. It’s what Jesus would want. “I recognize that Democrats are trying to show their current opposition to the war in Iraq.” See that little dig: “their current opposition.” “They see the emergency war spending bill as a chance to make that statement. Yet for our men and women in uniform, this emergency war spending bill is not a political statement, it is a source of critical funding that has a direct impact on their daily lives.” It’s a dessert topping, it’s a floor wax!

“We have our differences in Washington, D.C., but our troops should not be caught in the middle.” I think many of our troops would be happy to be caught in the middle between Democrats and Republicans in D.C. rather than caught in the middle between Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad.

And he ends with a sincere plea to put partisan politics aside.


Mr. Fish

The Culture of Life

Egypt announced that it would allow more than one candidate for president run in the September elections. It made this announcement after the deadline for voter registration. Subtle, huh?

Bush finally spoke about the Minnesota school massacre today, in his weekly radio address, after he spent several minutes somehow linking Easter and Christ rising from the dead with the US military. It wasn’t too bad, if a bit generic and a lot late. But what to make of this: “To keep our children safe and protected, we must continue to foster a culture that affirms life and provides love”. Ah yes, the “culture of life,” that term which covers a range of issues from abortion to Terri Schiavo and creates linkages between them, performing the same function for cultural conservatives that the “right to privacy” performs for those who oppose them on these same issues. So in Bush’s latest presentation of the culture of life, the banning of abortion would, presumably, stop future school shootings. Or something. (Actually, it would make the schools more crowded, and crowded with unwanted children at that).

Back to Terri. While some people have doubtless truly deluded themselves into believing she is other than vegetable matter, or that Jesus or Elian Gonzales will come riding in on the back of his magic dolphins and restore her to sentience, I suspect that a great many of the politicians bloviating about this case don’t really want what they say they want. If they “win,” all they’ve got is a brain-dead woman with a feeding tube, not much of a victory prize. If they lose, they’ve got an issue and an icon, poor martyred St. Terri. The fact that this proved not to be a particularly popular issue with the general public may have been a miscalculation, or it may not, because the faithful, for whom this was a crusade, will remember it long after the general public, for whom it was an entertainment, like the Michael Jackson trial, will have forgotten.

I would suggest he not pop his head up

There’s nothing like the current Bush administration to make you regret the times you rolled your eyes while listening to a conspiracy theorist or told some reductionist Marxist that the world was really more complicated than that. Evidently, it’s not. Now, corporations are buying legislation directly; the US is turning its attention from Iraq to the next country on Israel’s enemy list and is planning a pipeline to deliver Iraqi oil to Israel; the only Iraqi government office in Baghdad that wasn’t bombed was the oil ministry, which was also the only place protected by troops from looters on day one of the occupation; and the media, well....

I hate to think the world is really this unsubtle, but Time magazine recently pulled from its website an article it published in March 1998 by George Bush the Elder and Brent Scowcroft, giving reasons they didn’t remove Saddam Hussein in the 1st Gulf War. It even airbrushed it from the Table of Contents for that issue (incidentally, that issue is “premium content,” meaning that you have to have paid them in order to access it, so the removal of the article is also a rip-off to whoever pays them for premium content). Anyway, if you want to read it (I didn’t), it’s archived here.

So possibly the conspiracists had it right all along. Maybe we should all take another look at the Trilateral Commission.

Here’s a nicely appalling anti-abortion parody.

Rumsfeld says that the US probably can’t find Iraq’s weapons without someone leading us to them. So what’s the point of having a CIA, NSA, DIA, etc? Let’s abolish them and just post a $1 billion reward every time we want information like this. Even the British Tories are saying that if Blair doesn’t produce evidence about WMDs there should be an investigation as to whether the intelligence services misled the government. No one is making such a demand in this country.

Trouble in paradise, or at least Baghdad: the #2 man in Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (which is neither Iraqi nor national nor a congress) has declared in favor of an Islamic theocracy (and named himself mayor of Baghdad and lord of all the rubble he surveys). Chalabi denies any such intentions. When the CIA was giving all that money to the INC, did it know about this? According to “Mayor” Zubaidi, he was chosen as mayor not by reverse alphabetical order as you might imagine, but by “tribal leaders and educated people, the doctors of the city and other prominent leaders.”

The US is meanwhile restoring Baathists to power, if they ever left. In fact, that general who was just captured, who had been in charge of the chemical weapons program, well, the US military just offered his brother his job back. He works at the oil ministry.

Remember the restaurant the US allegedly bombed in an attempt to assassinate Saddam? It’s reopened. This is possible because all 4 bombs missed, hitting civilian houses. The restaurant turns out to be pretty down-market too, not really Saddam’s style--$1.50 chicken, not gold toilets--so he was probably never there to begin with. Bush’s advice to Saddam today: “I would suggest he not pop his head up.” Why? It’s hard to see him being in much danger from us.

Bush spent Easter with two of the POWs, like they haven’t suffered enough. Have you noticed that our designated heroes from this war are all POWs? I think it’s a post-9/11 thing that even during a war of conquest, the US celebrates its “victims.”

Bush says that Syria has gotten the message. “I'm confident the Syrian government has heard us.” Yup, those were pretty loud explosions.

Slovakia, which is not Slovenia no matter what the Bushies think, has signed a deal with the Vatican on “freedom of conscience,” which of course means no such thing. Under it, no doctor will have to give an abortion, teacher teach sex ed, judges can throw out divorce applications on religious grounds, etc etc. Like Poland, when it joins the EU it will demand an opt-out on “cultural” issues, like giving equal rights to gays.

Have I ever mentioned the tv-parody website www.tvgoto.com? If not, now I have. In the current one, I esp like the idea of a youth-oriented news programme [the site is British] called “Now ’n Shit.”

I’m going over the links archive at dead website seethru.co.uk, since it is bound to be pulled at some point. Expect some odd links over the next little while, such as:

A concentration camp made of Legos.

Or torture devices and scenes of industrial accidents, also made of Legos.

How to cure depression. You won’t believe me if I tell you the title, so just click (make sure you scroll down to the other suggested books).

How to live forever.

Saddam and the Elvis factor

Here’s a cute story that 6 Congresscritters--Reps. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn.; Bart Stupak, D-Mich.; Jim DeMint, R-S.C.; Mike Doyle, D-Pa.; and Sens. John Ensign, R-Nev. and Sam Brownback, R-Kan.--live in Washington in housing subsidized by a secretive religious group. Isn’t that special?

Lacking a DSL line, I usually keep at least 2 windows open while web-surfing and click between them while 1 is loading an article. Sometimes you get odd juxtapositions. A NY Times story on the Daily Show in the arts section quotes a segment from a couple of weeks ago:

When Mr. Stewart asked Mr. Colbert for his take on whether Saddam was dead or alive, the correspondent answered, "One thing is certain: If Saddam is dead, it greatly reduces his ability to control Iraq." But wouldn't his death end his control entirely? asked Mr. Stewart. Not necessarily, argued Mr. Colbert: "When this man appears in public no one is sure it's actually him, and yet he's held an iron grip on power since 1979 — 24 years of brutal dictatorship, all while only maybe existing. The point is we can kill Saddam Hussein but we won't win the war until we kill the idea of Saddam Hussein. So what we need to do is develop bombs that kill ideas."

And over in the Telegraph a story says that with footage of Saddam continually popping up after the US says he’s dead, no one in Iraq will believe he’s dead even if a body is produced--the “Elvis factor,” as it is called.

As worried as I was that American imperialism would be buoyed by a victory in Iraq achieved at a low cost in American lives, and with all those POWs back and happily negotiating movie-of-the-week deals, there is some hope in the attitude of the Iraqis and in the Pentagon’s staggering ability to lose the peace. If the Iraqis ever danced, it was the minute waltz, so quickly did their attitude turn from Hey, thanks for the liberation to Why are you guys still here?, and What have you done for us lately? They’re already asking why they should have to pay for contracts they never signed with American companies that were certainly not the lowest bidders and which never contributed to the election campaign of any Iraqis. I suspect we can also whistle for those four permanent bases the US wants--no Iraqi politician can survive as a perceived American puppet: just look how fast Chalabi’s star waned. This is what happens when your motives are in doubt: even the Iraqis who see this as a liberation believe that for the Americans liberation was only a happy coincidence to their real motives, oil and empire. So they see no reason for gratitude, and they’re right (also, we didn’t ask for gratitude, which they might have been willing to give, we simply imposed Bechtel and Haliburton and Jay Garner and the permanent bases on them). And Iraqi nationalism turned out to be pretty potent.

As for losing the peace, the same power vacuum that allowed all that looting has also allowed in all sorts of Iraqi power-grabbers. Like the Shiite cleric who came from Iran, marched into the government offices in Kut, declared himself the elected governor without bothering with the formality of an election, and the Marines can’t figure out how to get him out. If they ever do figure it out, I hope they tell the rest of us, since we had the same problem in 2000.

The Israeli army assassinated an AP cameraman. This sort of thing has been increasing; they have also been deliberately targeting peace activist “human shields.”

Both the NY Times and the WashPost have stories about Rumsfeld now “standing tall.” Dunno, to me he still looks like Robert MacNamara as a gnome, shorter, wider and squintier.

Some R group I’ve never heard of is attacking R moderates in tv ads digitally inserting French flags.

Here’s a creepy WashPost headline: “Bush to Worship With U.S. Troops in Texas.” Yee ha. Creepier is what Bush said in his radio address: “As a nation, we continue to pray for all who serve in our military and those who remain in harm's way. America mourns those who have been called home, and we pray that their families will find God's comfort and God's grace.” Count me out. Also, the White House Easter Egg roll (how is that different from an Easter egg hunt? [for the purposes of a joke, I will assume no difference])(or from the thing you get in Chinese restaurants?) will be closed to the public, only military families. They are expected to find none of the eggs, but claim that the Easter Bunny smuggled them into Syria.

Oh for fuck’s sake--the US plans to build a pipeline to send Iraqi oil to Israel. That shouldn’t create any sort of backlash at all. Since this isn’t mentioned anywhere else, and the story seems reasonably well sourced, I’ll give the URL.

I haven’t mentioned SARS yet, but shouldn’t China get some sort of spanking for covering up an epidemic for 3 months?