Strong

In the last couple of days, Bush has several times referred to both Tony Blair and Wowie Allawi as “strong” prime ministers. What does that actually mean? In terms of ability to control events, both are Bush’s sock pockets, so that’s not it. They have strong handshakes? Strong convictions, I suppose is what he intends, although it could just be another of those phrases with no particular meaning he uses because he thinks it sounds good. The verbal equivalent of a Rorschach test.

Maureen Dowd on the Bill Maher show: “Kerry gives nuance a bad name.”

3 years ago, the Italian supreme court, a collection of elderly men which exists, as far as this blog is concerned (see here, here, here, here, here and here) to issue stupid rulings about sex, issued one which said that patting a woman’s bottom did not constitute sexual harassment. It has now reversed this in the case of a magistrate who patted the butts of three...supreme court employees.

In the few days since Putin announced his plan to appoint all 89 governors himself, at least 10 have joined his “United Party.” Can you say one-party state?

Speaking of democracy at work, the elders of an Afghan Pashtun tribe, the Terezays, rule that if anyone votes for someone other than Karzai, their houses will be burned down. This ruling was broadcast on radio.

After stone-walling for several days, the Republican Party fesses up to mailing out those leaflets in Arkansas & W. Virginia saying that the D’s would ban the Bible and promote gay marriage. Next question: how many were sent out?

In which my presidential ambitions are quashed

Bush complains that Kerry “chose to criticize the Prime Minister of Iraq. ... You can’t lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility.” I didn’t realize that America’s choice of its own president was subject to veto by the guy Bush picked to pretend to run Iraq (oops, I just questioned Comical Allawi’s credibility, I guess that means I can’t be president now either).

Matthew Yglesias of American Prospect suggests that Bush’s postponing of the military push in Iraq we all know is coming until after the US and before the Iraqi elections will make that campaign all the bloodier. “The Marines and soldiers serving in Iraq volunteered for the military, but they’ve been conscripted into the Bush campaign. Decisions, as Lieutenant General James Conway recently stated, are being made on the basis of narrow political considerations rather than military ones. It’s appropriate for generals to be subordinate to civilian politicians, but not to civilian campaign strategists.”

I may have been unduly alarmist about the security legislation before the Duma. Yesterday it rejected a bill banning reporting on hostage-taking incidents until they are over. We’ll see.

Unambiguous

There are 2 initiatives on the Cal. ballot relating to casinos. California being California, the commercials against one of them attack it for threatening to make our morals worse. Did I say morals? I meant traffic.

Turkmenistan’s president-for-life-or-until-the-men-with-the-butterfly-nets-catch-up-to-him-whichever-comes-first Saparmurat Niyazov preempted programming on all tv channels so that he could read his poetry to the nation for an hour and a half. When was the last time Bush did that?

The Russian foreign minister reassured the UN yesterday: “President Vladimir Putin has stated unambiguously that Russia will remain a democratic state.” See, and you were worried about Russia not being democratic, but Putin has decreed that it is and Putin’s word is law in Russia, to be followed absolutely. Aren’t you reassured? If not, Putin will crush you like an ant.

Nothing’s perfect in life

The first episode of the new radio series of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is available now on the BBC website. NOTE: that episode will disappear from the site a week from today, replaced by episode 2, and so on, so don’t procrastinate.

Rummy on the possibility of holding Iraqi elections in only part of the country: “Well, so be it. Nothing’s perfect in life, so you have an election that’s not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet.” National elections that cover only part of the, you know, nation aren’t “not quite perfect”--they’re not real elections. And, as I said a day or two ago, the electoral system we’ve imposed on Iraq means there won’t even be vacant seats under those circumstances, but seats will be distributed just as if the election were truly national.

Yesterday Bush asked the UN to set up a fund to foster democracy--however and by whoever that might be defined. Today, in a sort of mirror-image of that, Russia proposed the creation of a UN list of terrorism suspects--however and by whoever that might be defined--who every nation would be required to extradite. I thought it was incredible that no one noticed the revolutionary nature of the UN vote last year to demote Iraq from the status of a sovereign nation and hand control of it over to the US, a power to judge the legitimacy of its member states that I really don’t think the UN has. Now it’s supposed to decide which of its members are legitimate democracies under Bush’s plan, and eliminate political asylum under Putin’s, deferring to the labeling by member states of its internal opponents as terrorists. New world order, indeed.

We’re not going to allow the suiciders to drive us out of Iraq

I read the transcript of Bush’s press conference with “Comical Allawi”, so you don’t have to.

Addressing Zowie Allawi: “Mr. Prime Minister, America will stand with you until freedom and justice have prevailed.” Man, are his legs gonna be tired. “the vast majority of Iraqis remain committed to democracy.” Of course since there is no democracy in Iraq, it’s just guesswork what “the vast majority of Iraqis” are committed to.

Asked “Why haven’t U.S. forces been able to capture or kill al Zarqawi, who’s blamed for much of the violence?”, Bush responded: “We’re looking for him. He hides.” That explains that.

“Anybody who says that we are safer with Saddam Hussein in power is wrong.” I quote that because it bugs me that the man has less grasp of verb tenses than the average 5 year old (but then, whoever did the transcript for the White House doesn’t quite get the it’s/its distinction).

GeeDubya, naturally, flounders badly in response to several of the questions, including my second favorite question: “If General Abizaid says he needs more troops and the Prime Minister says he does not want more troops, who wins?” Bush: “Obviously, we can work this out. It’s in the -- if our commanders on the ground feels it’s in the interest of the Iraq citizens to provide more troops, we’ll talk about it. That’s -- that’s why -- they’re friends; that’s what we do about friends.”

He takes back the comment of a few days ago that the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq produced in July by the CGA (Central Guessing Agency) was just a “guess.” “I should have used ‘estimate.’” Yeah, it’s a three-syllable word, we all understand that’s beyond your comfort level. “But what’s important for the American people to hear is reality. And the reality is right here in the form of the Prime Minister.” Later, he added, “One reason I’m optimistic about our ability to get the job done is because I talk to the Iraqi Prime Minister.” Reminds me of his comment a while back that he never reads newspapers because he gets the real facts from Condi and Andy Card.

A reporter asked Bush about his comment that there was only a “handful” of people trying to disrupt the Iraqi elections. He said, “Well, it’s a handful if you happen to have several thousand fingers.” OK, he didn’t say that.

Somebody asked a really good, important question, which I’ll paraphrase: When you talk about mixed messages being bad, do you mean if Kerry is elected, or do you mean right now. Bush filibustered for a really long time and didn’t come within a mile of answering.

And there’s the quote the blogosphere likes so much: “we’re not going to allow the suiciders to drive us out of Iraq.” Yeah, you definitely don’t want suiciders driving. Remember that scene in Annie Hall with Christopher Walken driving Woody Allen?

Attack of the terrorist cats

The Moscow police have arrested more than 10,000 of the usual suspects in response to Beslan, according to the Link, but I think it'll expire tomorrow.) The “Great Terror” of 2004 begins. Proposals include: Soviet-type resident registration (which was supposedly abolished by Yeltsin, but local governments just ignored it), restrictions on media coverage of terrorist actions, restrictions on cars, the ability of the Kremlin to declare a state of war in event of a terrorist attack, thereby suspending civil rights, etc. The Duma rejected proposals to discuss the government’s Chechen policy and to ask Putin and the security chiefs to explain their actions.

In other words, just like the US, where the Republicans are planning to tighten up on identification cards, border controls, etc. Next step, no doubt: internal passports.

The Iraqi terrorist-types are just making up demands at random now. When they demanded the release of all women prisoners, did they even know there were just two? What I enjoyed, especially after the story in today’s WaPo asserting with a straight face that the Iraqis were in charge of pretty much everything now, was watching them prepare the way to meet the demands, claiming, also with a straight face, that by an amazing coincidence the two were just about to be released anyway, and then to have the Americans put their foot down.

The Telegraph’s News in Brief section today contains the following stories: “Woman Crushed by 6ft Crucifix” (in Italy); “Man Mistook Wife for a Monkey” (and shot her to death; Malaysia); “Wife Asks for Weekly Beating” (in an Iranian court; as opposed to daily: “‘I don’t want a divorce. My husband is violent. It is in his nature. I just want him to promise to beat me only once a week,’ she told the judge, who burst out laughing.”

From the Press Association, a wonderfully silly headline for an unwonderfully silly action by the FBI: “Cat Refused Entry for Hamas Support.”

Terrorist cats. Don’t tell the Duma.

The right to enrichment

President Khatami defends Iran’s uranium enrichment program: “We clearly demand that our right to enrichment be recognized by the international community”. Who says Iran’s government doesn’t believe in rights?

Kerry didn’t like Bush’s scolding speech to the UN yesterday: “The President of the United States stood before the stony-faced body and barely talked about the realities at all of Iraq.” Kerry, whose own face is less expressive than those on Mt Rushmore, then went on to accuse Al Gore of being boring, and Dukakis of being a crappy campaigner. Stony-faced, indeed.

Responding to Kerry’s comments, Scotty McClellan today, and Bush yesterday, referred to him as “continuing his pattern of twisting in the wind”--are we supposed not to notice when Bush and his henchmen use identical phrasing? Also, not to get all William Safire on y’all, but they’re not even using that expression correctly.

Details matter

We talk of “democracy” and “elections” as if there was one model, as if the terms were unproblematic, but the details matter.

Charles de Gaulle knew this. When he graciously accepted the offer to become dictator of France in 1958 to save it from a military coup (Pakistan’s Musharraf cited de Gaulle this week as his role model), one of his conditions was that the electoral law be rewritten. Rather than proportional representation in which parties were given seats in accordance with their share of the votes, there would be a run-off system, favoring the right, which could sink its differences in the second round. Result at the next election: the Gaullists, with 18% of the vote, got 40% of the seats, and the Communists, with 19% of the vote, got 2% of the seats. Both the pre- and post-1958 systems were forms of representative democracy, but geared towards generating different results.

The elections in Iraq will be based on a form of proportional representation based on party lists. Something like Putin wants in Russia, actually. PR is good for the representation of minorities, which is good for countries like the Netherlands where politics are based on ideas and ideology, but in a country like Iraq, divided by ethnicity and religion, it is good in that it ensures some representation of, for example, the Kurds, but bad in that it encourages politics to remain divided on the basis of ethnicity and religion. The real point of this form of election is that voters do not select individual candidates (which should cut down on the number of assassinations), and MPs will not represent geographic constituencies. There will be no representative of, say, Fallujah; votes will be counted on a national basis. So if participation is uneven across the country, if no one at all votes in Fallujah, if--oh fuck it--WHEN the election is a failure in real-world democratic terms, this electoral system will gloss that over. There won’t be any vacant seats; rather, the system will just give more political weight to areas not in rebellion, or where more fraudulent votes are created.

It also won’t effect the system if candidates do get assassinated. Unlike Afghanistan, where if any of the presidential candidates get offed, the election would be postponed 3 months. The candidates, you’ll be surprised to hear, aren’t doing a lot of whistle-stop tours.

Made up to be seen from 30 feet away

Raymond Chandler described one of his characters this way: “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.” George Bush’s pronouncements are increasingly just a collection of words he likes, formed into things that look like sentences from 30 feet away, but which dissolve into nonsense if you look even a little more closely at them: “Iraqi citizens are seeing a determined effort by responsible citizens to lead to a more hopeful tomorrow, and I am optimistic we’ll succeed.”

Kerry’s new position on Iraq (yeah, I know, I sound like Bush when I say that, but it really is a new position) is that if Bush hadn’t cut off the UN inspections process prematurely, it would have shown that Iraq had no WMDs, and that fact being made public, by itself, would somehow have caused Saddam Hussein to fall, because his regime was based on his having WMDs. Oh, I don’t think so.

Renaissance Man

So whatever happened to those French hostages, now that the ban on headscarves has gone into effect?

And whatever happened to Saddam’s doubles?

Musharraf says that he’ll renege on his promise to step down as army chief because that would end the national “renaissance” in Pakistan. ‘Cuz you know how the quality of Florence’s paintings and sculpture declined after Cesare Borgia stopped wearing camouflage uniforms.

The US will sell Israel 500 missiles which could be used to attack Iranian nuclear facilities (the story has mysteriously vanished from the Ha’aretz website).

Beware the ides of the march of democracy

A must-read in the Guardian suggests that the NATO war on Yugoslavia was in large part about opening the country to takeover by multinational corporations, states that the bombing campaign targeted state-owned industries while leaving privately owned ones alone, and that the UN administration in Kosovo is now selling off the provinces state-owned enterprises, which are surely not the UN’s to sell.

Bush keeps talking about the “march” of democracy. The evidence is against him:

• The leading opposition candidate for president in Ukraine’s elections next month is now in the hospital with a mysterious case of poisoning.

• In Kazakhstan’s elections, the dictator Nazarbayev’s party comes in first, and the not-exactly-opposition party led by his daughter comes in second.

• Indonesia’s presidential elections are won by (retired) general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (remember when Indonesian rulers only had one name? and not silly ones like Bambang), just 6 years after the end of more than 30 years of military rule.

Of course Bush, in his response to Kerry’s speech, seemed to define Iraq as a democracy, so his standards aren’t terribly high.

Kerrycaterwauling

Why don’t you all read the transcript of Kerry’s speech, so I don’t have to?

Oh, all right. Some of it, quoted below, constitutes the best rhetoric I’ve heard yet from Kerry (actually, I’ve only read it so far, I’m sure it won’t sound nearly as good when I hear it in Kerry’s own irritating voice).

On the one hand, it’s a strong indictment of Bush’s failures and misjudgements, but on the other hand he says that he’ll fight the same crusade, but do it better. “The terrorists are beyond reason. We must destroy them. As president, I will do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to defeat our enemies.” You’ll note he never defines “the terrorists,” so it’s a little hard to tell who all these people are he plans to “destroy.”

“To win, America must be strong.” Check. “And America must be smart.” Uh oh.

“His two main rationales – weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda/September 11 connection – have been proved false… Only Vice President Cheney still insists that the earth is flat.”

“The President now admits to ‘miscalculations’ in Iraq. That is one of the greatest understatements in recent American history. His were not the equivalent of accounting errors. They were colossal failures of judgment – and judgment is what we look for in a president.” This line is almost too clever, or needed a bridging sentence; it took me a second to realize that the bit about “accounting errors” was a criticism of Bush’s use of the word “miscalculations” to minimize his own incompetence.

He quotes the Republicans (McCain, Lugar, Hagel) now criticizing Bush’s Iraq policy in order to deflect the charge that his own criticisms are partisan, without adding that McCain (not sure about the other 2) wants a massive attack on Fallujah.

And Kerry’s own ideas for Iraq are anemic: get other countries to give aid, bribe them with shares in Iraq’s oil industry in exchange for sending troops. Turn the page. A fresh start. A lot about dealing with Europeans, not a lot about how to deal with the Iraqis, except training a lot more of them to be soldiers.

Rummyrantings

I read transcripts of Secretary of War “Rummy” Rumsfeld’s “media availabilities,” so you don’t have to.

Rumsfeld: “At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed.” Didn’t we say that about the Vietnamese?

Rummy also threatens to take back the cities and regions that have become “sanctuaries” for “people who are determined to overthrow the Iraqi government, the legitimate Iraqi government.” Someone needs to get that man a dictionary, if he thinks that places which are bombed every single day are sanctuaries, and that there is a “legitimate” government in Iraq.

Rummy is asked about Seymour Hersh’s book on Abu Ghrab (which I’m now reading). Given that he never bothered reading the Taguba report, it won’t come as a surprise that he hasn’t read Hersh’s book (the DOD transcript misspell’s Hersh’s name), but shits on it anyway.

He also praises the voter registration drive in Afghanistan for registering more people than are eligible to vote, which you’d think would be embarrassing, but Rummy does not know the meaning of the word embarrassing (or sanctuary, or legitimate, etc etc), and that 41% of them are women (or one guy in a burqa who registered 4.2 million times).

More weight, more weight

Tony Blair declares war, again. “Whatever the disagreements about the first conflict in Iraq to remove Saddam, in this conflict now taking place in Iraq, this is the crucible in which the future of this global terrorism will be decided. Either it will succeed and this terrorism will grow, or we will succeed, the Iraqi people will succeed and this global terrorism will be delivered a huge defeat.” So if you didn’t like the “first conflict,” we’ll just keep rebranding it until we find one you’ll like. New Coke anyone?

German voters in the East (Saxony & Brandenburg) vote in large numbers for neo-Nazis to punish the hapless Social Democratic government’s scaling back of social programs. In Saxony, the National Democratic Party, which hadn’t had any legislative presence since 1968, almost matches the vote of the SPD. German governments of both major parties have really badly served the East Germans, so their limited commitment, 15 years after unification, to a political system that largely ignores them is understandable, but still creepy.

Desperate

How often have we heard from American officials that increasing Resistance activity in Iraq is a sign of their desperation? Now Puppet PM “Comical” Allawi has made the same argument--“getting more desperate...last stand...we are winning...Iraq is fighting this war on behalf of the civilized nations...yadda yadda yadda.” This is an astonishingly stale piece of rhetoric, unchanged by as much as a syllable in over a year. In fact, Bush gave the same speech over a year ago; on 8/27/03 I called it a “massively silly argument”: “Yeah, it’s a sign of desperation if they attack us, a sign of boldness and resolve if we attack them, yeah yeah yeah. ... It’s the last gasp of a dying regime, it’s an all-out war for the security of the US and what Bush calls ‘civilization.’ It’s a floor wax, it’s a dessert topping.” It may or may not be the last gasp, but it’s an incredibly long one. You have to be impressed by their breath control.

Fontgate followup: An WaPo article on how CBS got the Killian memos wrong says they failed to test their authenticity adequately because the White House wasn’t challenging their authenticity. This lends credence to the “conspiracy theory” that the Mayberry Machiavellis created this trap for CBS to walk into. Yeah, it was criminally careless, but you can see why they wouldn’t spend a lot of effort checking out a piece of evidence no one was disputing.

Here in California, Gubna Ahnuuld, who must be one of the top 10 richest people in the state, has vetoed an increase in the minimum wage, because if $6.75 an hour is good enough for the guy whose job it is to lick Arnie’s Hummer clean every day...

If every day could be Tet

There is worry in Iraq of coordinated attacks breaching the Green Zone; the talk is of something like the Tet Offensive. And in Afghanistan too, the American ambassador has been warning of a possible, guess what, Tet Offensive in the cities in the period leading up to the Afghan presidential elections next month. It’s like having Christmas every day, only with Tet. Which is the day when an American soldier sticks his head out of his armored personnel carrier, and if he shoots at his own shadow, there’ll be another year of guerilla warfare and military quagmire. If his shadow shoots back, two years.

Older Viet Cong are complaining that Tet used to be about peace and love and smashing imperialism, but now it’s being commercialized by the greeting card industry.

The Afghan Tet fears are reported in the Indy which says that Karzai “is widely expected to be re-elected.” Of course, Karzai was never actually elected, at least not by the Afghan people. Still, this is a phrase I expect to hear and read often.

Speaking about the Baghdad branch of Tet Offensive, Inc., Under-Secretary of State Richard “The Giraffe” Armitage: “We never thought it would be easy; we do expect an increase in violence as we approach the January elections.” Never thought it would be easy. Never FUCKING thought it would be fucking easy. Sure you didn’t.

When they established a hard, inflexible deadline for the fake “hand-over of power” in Iraq in June, the Bushies left many hostages to fate. And then they repeated the mistake with inflexible timing of elections in January 2005, no matter how unprepared and chaotic the country is. So vast resources are now being diverted to those farcical elections. With daily kidnappings and car bombs, soldiers and police will now have to protect election offices and workers--“I’m gonna try and register that guy--cover me!” And new offences are being planned for Fallujah and elsewhere so that not too many areas will have to be excluded from the voting, to give a tiny amount of legitimacy to elections held during a civil war and under foreign occupation. 3 point something billion dollars was just diverted to security from projects to restore sewerage and electricity, and now security personnel are being diverted from real security to this piece of play-acting.

The NYT has a story on this, which seems to be drawn from a single anonymous source, so you know it must be true. The source, an American commander, is confident that the upcoming siege of Fallujah will go so much better than the last 3, because “this time...unlike in April, there was a sovereign Iraqi government, and one that seemed willing to absorb the political storm that such an assault was likely to set off.” A government willing to support an attack on its country’s population is a GOOD thing?

White House spokesmodel Scott McClellan implied this week that Kamp Kerry is behind the Killian documents: “It’s our position that there are orchestrated attacks going on by the Democrats and Kerry campaign to tear down the President because they are falling behind in the polls.” Speaking of orchestrated attacks: McClellan’s salary is still being paid by the American taxpayers, of all political parties, and not by the Republican Party, right?

At the whim of a tin-foil hat

The Florida Supreme Court puts Ralph Nader back on the ballot. Says a Nader spokesman, “The Democrats should stop trying to win this election in court and start competing for votes on the issues.” Yeah, at least in courts stacked with Republicans.

If there’s a phrase that right-wingers use that effectively puts their opponents instantly on the defensive, it’s “conspiracy theory.” Team Chimpy deployed this weapon Friday against Kerry’s assertion that Bush has a “secret plan” to call up more reservists and national guards after the election is safely over, and send them to Iraq. The Pentagon gave a better answer: of course we’re planning to screw those guys, it’s not a secret. Which is true, except that it is a secret which guys are going to be screwed, which makes it hard for people to plan their lives (or deaths, as the case may be).

So the “conspiracy theory” charge hangs like a Damocles sword over the heads of journalists and bloggers who write about the doings of the Mayberry Machiavellis, like the right-wing blogger named... Buckhead (yeah we’re all thinking the same thing, but we have too much class to say it) who was able to damage the credibility of the CBS documents within a suspiciously short period of time (i.e., within the same news cycle), and who turned out to be a lawyer who works for right-wing groups. Of course we don’t know for sure if this was a scheme concocted in the feverish brain of Karl Rove, but if we ask “cui bono,” we see that the issue of Bush’s draft-dodging has been effectively defused, or obscured, just as it was becoming a real threat.

Incidentally, it was becoming a threat not because we now know all that much more than we knew years ago (for example, my 1st reference to it in my proto-blog--archived on this site--was way back on 7/8/99; I reported on 9/9/99 that it was the speaker of the Texas Lege who got him into the Guard, on 6/17/00 that he missed his medical on the first year it included a drug test, etc), but because of a slight semantic shift in the way it was being presented: not just as a spoiled rich kid goofing of, but of that rich kid refusing direct orders. And what gave that semantic framing of the Guard issue its salience in 2004, as opposed to in 1999-2000, is precisely the fact that Shrub pushed us into the longest combat situation since Vietnam with an inadequate military, which he’s desperately shoring up with stop-loss orders, national guard units (fun fact: more members of the national guards have already died in Iraq than did in Vietnam).

The problem with Kerry making the “secret plan” accusations is that his plans for Iraq are equally secret, and, since he plans to continue to occupy Iraq until at least 2009 and doesn’t plan on a draft, he will also be using reservists and national guards. Secret plan, unless you possess the powers of logic and common sense.

On the march

The supposed mastermind of the Beslan hostage-taking has been heard from. One thing is explained: the hostages were to have gotten food and water by stages, as the demands for Russian withdrawal from Chechnya were met.

Bush says that “Freedom is on the march in Iraq.” There may be marching, but it ain’t freedom. Patrick Cockburn has a bleaker assessment in this Indy article detailing the many forms of violence.

Cockburn also has an op-ed piece, behind a pay barrier, which notes that the pattern of violence has changed: it’s no longer in a few geographic areas, but all over Iraq. Also, “August was the first month in which more US soldiers were killed and wounded by Shia fighters than by Sunni guerrillas.” And the US is losing even the Green Zone: “This week, the US army was reduced to using rocket firing helicopters for crowd control in Haifa Street a few hundred yards from the Green Zone, the American and Iraqi government headquarters.” Crowd...control.

At the whim of a hat

GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE.... Bushism: “Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat.”

Depends on the hat, I suppose.



The French never have this problem.

In uniform

Pakistan’s self-chosen president, the coup-leader Musharaf, insists that his decision to break his promise to give up being army chief and prez simultaneously, says it’s because most Pakistanis “want me in uniform.” So it’s all about the fetish.

The woman sterilized by the wannabe senator for Okl., Tom Coburn, comes forward to say that she did not want him to sterilize her. The question not being asked is: by what right has Dr. Coburn been revealing private details of her medical history to the press?

Sri Lanka’s national handball team vanishes in Germany after playing really badly in several tournament games, and before anyone realized that Sri Lanka doesn’t actually have a national handball team. The 23 members of the “team” are believed to have come to Europe to find work and not for the love of the game of handball.

And Wolfowitz can come back from Canada. Wait, on second thoughts...

John Edwards promises “There will be no draft when John Kerry is president.” So Bush can stop calling up Texas politicians to get him into the national guard, Cheney can stop trying to get Lynne pregnant, and Rumsfeld...well, let’s just say that if you thought Klinger looked bad in a dress...!

You would be surprised at how far a can of orange soda would go

American journalists have been given a tour of the new and improved Abu Ghraib. So improved, according to its new dungeon-keeper and grand inquisitor, Maj.-Gen. Geoffrey Miller, that the reforms are “restoring the honor of America.” So what changes have completely wiped out the stain of prisoners beaten to death, sexual humiliation, make-the-prisoners-pee contests and naked human pyramids? Actually, nothing much that I can see from the NYT article. I’d be curious to see what the other reporters have written. There is this quote:

“You would be surprised at how far a can of orange soda would go,” said Lt. Col. Mark Costello, who oversees interrogations at Abu Ghraib.

How far a can of orange soda can go... where? No, no, Col. Costello, that is the OLD Abu Ghraib. Please stop inserting soda cans into prisoners’ rectums.

If foxes could vote

The Hungarian prime-minister-presumptive Ferenc Gyurcsany says that the Socialist Party was right to replace his predecessor with a younger man (he is 43), just as “anyone whose wife is getting old deserves a younger one.” He is on his third wife and, yeah, about ten years younger.

Coincidentally, the American model of democracy was rejected twice yesterday. Responding to criticism of Putin’s plans, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said, “it is strange that, while talking about certain ‘pulling back’ on some of the democratic reforms in the Russian federation, [Powell] tried to assert yet one more time the thought that democracy can only be copied from someone else’s model.” And Chinese President Hu Jintao told a meeting of Communist Party leaders that Western-style democracy was a “dead end” (or “blind alley” depending on the translation).

A letter to the London Times says “Sir, If foxes could vote they would campaign to keep hunting”.

God Save the Hunting

James Wolcott comments that the cable news channels have been attacking every detail of Kitty Kelley’s book when interviewing her, showing a sudden concern with, ya know, journalism, previously lacking. “For years they’ve been hyping and peddling every variety of fishy speculation and brazen assertion about the Clintons, Vince Foster, Monica, Gary Condit-Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, this rape case, that abduction case; they’ve rolled out the ratty carpet for every Swift Boat slob; and now, now, they decide to get loftily anal.”

I just wanted to repeat the phrase “loftily anal.”

Bush finally responds to Putin’s plan to make himself tsar by saying it “could undermine democracy.” Ya think? He added, “As governments fight the enemies of democracy, they must uphold the principles of democracy.” In what sense are the Chechen rebels “enemies of democracy”? They couldn’t care less about how Russia is ruled, they just want to stop being a colony of Russia.

One thing that bothers me about Putin’s tsarization plan is that he can achieve it by a simple vote of the Duma.

North Ossetia’s leader, who fired his ministers after the Beslan siege, has appointed a new one, promoting to Minister for Culture and Mass Communications the press secretary who lied about the number of hostages there were.

Pakistan’s Pervaiz Musharraf goes back on his promise to stop being army chief at the same time as president.

Another security breach in Britain, as 5 supporters of fox-murder invade the House of Commons while it is debating banning fox-murder (which it does). A subtle hint as to how this happened is to be found in the Guardian: “In the Commons, the man in charge of security is the Serjeant at Arms, Sir Michael Cummins, who wears breeches, stockings, and a tunic, carries a sword, and sits in a special box in the chamber.” Sadly, Sir Michael did not use his sword on the toffs, who were wearing t-shirts depicting Tony Blair in horns, and the words “FCUK your ban. I’ll keep hunting” on the front, and Cherie Blair as the queen with “God Save The Hunting” on the back. (Pictures here.) Outside, protestors fought the police, some of whom were on horseback, but I think such irony is lost on the hunt protesters, who regard the fox-hunting issue with the same fanaticism as anti-abortion activists in the US.

Last week the House passed a provision preventing state, federal or local authorities requiring hospitals or doctors to provide abortions, even for rape or medical emergencies, or to give referrals to someone who will.

Kofi Annan says the Iraq war was illegal under the UN Charter, and not sanctioned by the Security Council. Might have been nice if he’d said something before.

Ariel Sharon, who again issued a veiled threat to assassinate Arafat yesterday, today said he plans to tear up the US “road map” and keep troops in military occupation of Palestine.

Stockpiles, stockpiles, stockpiles. Isn’t that a funny-sounding word? Stockpiles.

Last week, Dick “Mr. Sensitive” Cheney said that if Kerry is elected, the terrorists will strike America again. Yesterday he threatened the entire world with the consequences of not lining up behind Flight Suit Boy, using Beslan as a cautionary tale. He told a “town hall meeting” in Ottumwa, Iowa, Radar’s home town:

“I think a lot of our European friends have been somewhat ambivalent about this whole proposition with respect to how we deal with these terrorist attacks. I think some have hoped that if they kept their heads down and stayed out of the line of fire, they wouldn’t get hit. I think what happened in Russia now demonstrates pretty conclusively that everybody is a target, that Russia, of course, did not support us in Iraq. They did not get involved in sending troops there. They’ve gotten hit anyway. And I think people are back sort of reassessing now, in terms of what the motives may be of the people who are launching these attacks or using these kinds of tactics against our people.”

“Batman,” the guy who scaled Buckingham Palace to protest his inadequate access to his first 2 children, has been released on bail, only to find out that his current girlfriend is leaving him (and selling her story to the tabloids) because he spends all his time on fathers’ rights campaigns and not much with his 7-month-old daughter. Asked to comment, Bats refused on the grounds that it was a private matter, which is an odd comment from the man who dressed up as a rodent to show what an excellent father he is...well, maybe not that odd after all.

Japan has 23,000 centenarians, 18 per 100,000, compared to 10 in the US.

We all know that one of the weapons the Bushies use in their War on Truth is repetition. (Previous post. Other previous post. I can use repetition too.) But Colin Powell put repetition to innovative use today, in testimony before the Senate Government Affairs Committee, hoping that if he said the word “stockpiles” over and over, it would eventually become meaningless. Usually they avoid congressional oversight by distracting committee members with bright shiny objects, but I’m sure this works just as well:

“There was every reason to believe there were stockpiles. There was a question about the size of stockpiles, but we all believed there were stockpiles.”

However, Powell said in response to questions from Sen. Susan Collins R-Maine, “it turned out that we have not found any stockpiles.”

Moreover, Powell said, “I think it is unlikely that we will find any stockpiles.”

Headline of the day (AP): “Trial Begins for Farmer in Manure Deaths.”

The Telegraph misses the real news: “Energy-efficient pedestrian crossing lights that Los Angeles bought for £6 million will have to be replaced because the symbols are too dim to read.” The real news: pedestrians? in LA?

Woke up this morning, got yourself a WMD

Kitty Kelley tells Salon that “You start out looking at the Bush family like it’s ‘The Donna Reed Show’ and then you see it’s ‘The Sopranos.’”

OK, Barbara Bush is Livia, Poppy is Uncle Junior, Shrub is A.J. (or Christopher, but I really have to go with A.J.), Condoleezza is Dr. Melfi, Rummy is Silvio, Ashcroft is Paulie Walnuts, and for those playing along at home, I’m taking nominations for Big Pussie. (I am immune on this to the criticism that I have too much time on my hands: I’ve just seen a website with the Internationale translated into Klingon.)
Update: Colin Powell is Artie Bucco, Dick Cheney is...I dunno, Janice? Ralphie?

Mama always said you’d be
The Chosen One:
Salon: “In one of the creepier passages of the book, a family gathering from hell at Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara is shown mercilessly baiting her dry-drunk son, then governor of Texas, as a teetotaling ‘Chosen One’”.

Precision

A word about the latest US bombing of Fallujah: you don’t get to call it “precision bombing” unless you’re admitting that you intended to blow up that ambulance.

David Corn describes Colin Powell as “a boxer who has taken one too many dives.”

The World's Shortest Blog, which uses the same template I do, which is slightly disconcerting to me, offers a bounty to whoever publicly asks Chimpy how many times he’s been arrested.

I knew if I procrastinated long enough about doing the research to write again about Tom Coburn, R candidate for Senate in Oklahoma and loon, someone would do it for me. In addition to the homophobia (Bush appointed him to the AIDS commission), Schindler’s List, death penalty for abortion doctors and whatnot, Salon has discovered that he once sterilized a young woman without her consent, and illegally charged Medicare for the procedure.

Putin looks at Chechen insurrection and decides that the appropriate response is to destroy what little regional autonomy and democracy remains, and take more power into his own ice-cold hands. The 89 regional governors, currently elected, would be appointed, by him. And Duma elections would be entirely by proportional representation (currently it’s chosen half by PR, half by first-past-the-post), but with the same 7% threshold for a party to enter the Duma, making it in practice less democratic, and of course more pliable. Under Putin’s plan, voters would choose from among parties, not individual candidates, a system in place only in Israel and I think Japan (and remember that many Russian mafia types have bought their way onto party lists in order to get parliamentary immunity from prosecution). Putin is playing on a mythical conspiracy to break up Russia, the answer to which is “unity,” by which he means dictatorship. Or the terrorists win.

And he wants “a single organisation capable of not only dealing with terror attacks but also working to avert them, destroy criminals in their hideouts, and if necessary, abroad.” The Guardian suggests that this is a version of the American Department of Homeland Security; I’d suggest a comparison closer to home, f’r instance the KGB or the Okhranka.

I'm Batman

In Britain, an organization of divorced fathers who claim they have inadequate access to their children has pulled off a series of stunts. Today, a man in a Batman costume climbed over the fence at Buckingham Palace, and stood on the ledge next to the balcony the queen (who can in no way be mistaken for Catwoman) usually uses to wave at the peasants. What I liked in the BBC report was the changing of the guards going on below just as normal.

This is to show you how decent I am

The North Koreans say they weren’t testing a nuke, just blowing up a mountain. I’m not reassured (reassurance is a motif in this post, by the way), although the argument that they wouldn’t conduct a nuclear test that near to the Chinese border carries a bit more weight, although most of NK is near China. I’ve already dismissed the US gov’s denials of a nuke test because it’s just not a subject I trust this admin to tell the truth about. What’s really worrisome is that I don’t know who I would trust to tell the truth about this. So on to the next scary would-be nuclear power....

...NYT headline: “Iran Says It Will Reject Limits On Its Mastery of Atomic Science.” That’s very tv-movie, very after-school-special: plucky little Iran’s can-do spirit inspires it to surmount all obstacles and limitations in a heart-warming story...

Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, pointing out that the Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa banning nukes. Only Iran would think that any statement containing the word “fatwa” would be reassuring.

Comical Allawi, interviewed by the London Times, says that it was his decision to dissolve the Fallujah Brigades. He also told them an anecdote to show his soft, cuddly side:

Speaking in near-fluent English after years in exile, Dr Allawi displayed an ability to laugh at himself, rueing a moment of temper at an aide which left him with a broken bone in his wrist from slamming his fist down on a table.

He turned the injury to PR advantage, laughing: “This is to show you how decent I am. He (the aide) told me afterwards ‘You should have hit me’ and I said ‘No, we don’t do this’.”

Only an Iraqi would think that this story would reassure anyone.

From the Sunday Times of London: “Bidders on the eBay internet auction site have offered $10 for bits of wind from Hurricane Frances, which devastated parts of Florida last weekend. Photographs on the site show collectors scooping up the wind in four Tupperware containers.”

I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed

In one of many instances today of US forces in Iraq killing civilians, after a Bradley Fighting Vehicle was destroyed (and well after its soldiers had been evacuated), a US helicopter gunship fired in pique on a crowd celebrating around the burning vehicle, kills 13 and managing to shoot an Al-Arabiya reporter--as he was broadcasting. He shouted, “I’m dying, I’m dying,” and then he did.

The US has used 2 different excuses for the incident, I’m not sure in what order: 1) shots were fired at the helicopter, so it was self-defense. This is disputed by witnesses, and anyway I’m pretty sure a helicopter could, you know, fly away, without having to fire into a crowd that included children. 2) To stop the Bradley being looted. Again, you don’t fire on a crowd for that; even without the fire damage, a Bradley isn’t worth 13 dead Iraqis, unless of course you place a really, really low valuation on Iraqi lives.

Juan Cole is particularly good today on the violence in Iraq, and don’t miss the letter to him from Erik Gustafson about the US’s under-counting of American casualties.

Seymour Hersh’s book, out tomorrow, says that in February 2002 Bush signed a secret order that “I determine that none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al-Qaida in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world.”

Using bizarre logic, a WaPo editorial says that the fact that the Guantanamo review tribunals have ruled 1 detainee not to be an “enemy combatant” proves that they aren’t a mere rubber stamp. That’s 1 out of 30. Oh yes, the system works.

There hasn’t been much examination of the failed Fallujah Brigade experiment (which I discussed 2 days ago). However, Marine Corps Gen. James Conway is publicly distancing himself from the strategy pursued in Fallujah when he was in charge of the region, blaming his superiors for the failure to pacify the city. “When we were told to attack Fallujah, I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed.” Ya think? He claims the Marines had a more subtle plan, but were overruled after those mercenaries were burned; like the helicopter today, the desire for revenge overcame common sense and humanity.

Season of hope

9/11 nostalgia has spread to the Democratic Party: A WaPo headline and sub-head: “Edwards Recalls Unity After Sept. 11 Attacks” “‘We Want That One America, Senator Tells Black Caucus.” And inside that story, Edwards is quoted as saying, “This season of hope should not and does not have to end tomorrow. We do not have to wait for yet another anniversary to come and go.” It’s supposed to be Christmas that you want every day to be like, doofus, not September 11! Season of hope, he called it!!! Like, we hope we’re not in a plane that’s hijacked and flown into a building, and we hope we’re not in the building, is that what you mean? Cuz it sounds like you just said you wouldn’t mind another terrorist attack, just for the feel-good factor.

If it’s the unity that comes from being scared shitless that you want so badly, North Korea successfully testing a nuclear bomb should do the trick.

Speaking of the feel-good factor, Tom DeLay dismisses the about-to-expire ban on assault weapons as “a feel-good piece of legislation.” Yeah, cause it feels so good when ten bullets from an automatic rifle don’t rip into your body.

Back to North Korea: while not unexpected, this is something the Bushies seem to have done nothing to prevent. It’s another Bush-sees-a-report-titled-“Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States”-and-goes-on-a-month’s-vacation-anyway moment. Not to be crude, but this incredible threat to the world’s safety should be a perfect stick for Kerry to beat Flight Suit Boy with. But he won’t.

(Later): the US is claiming the 2-mile wide mushroom cloud was probably from a forest fire, and certainly not from a nuke. Because NK would celebrate its national founding day by setting a forest fire, not by testing a nuclear weapon.

Speaking of dangerous clouds, the one from the Twin Towers on 9/11 was spectacularly toxic, it was breathed in by hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, and its effects were not studied by the Bush admin, and/or were actively covered up. The death toll from those effects may ultimately match those on 9/11.

Everyone I shot deserved it

The BBC’s James Naughtie has a book out this week which will claim that Colin Powell called the neo-cons “fucking crazies” while speaking to the British foreign minister.

An Observer article on American snipers in Iraq. Key quote: “Everyone I shot deserved it.”

British vocabulary word of the day: “dogging” = having sex in public with strangers, in view of others. Evidently it’s all the rage in English parks, which are named in the article. Plan your vacations accordingly.

Flip flop in Fallujah

California bans necrophilia. Plan your vacations accordingly.

The attempt at the Vietnamization of Fallujah is declared a failure, and the “Fallujah Brigade” dissolved. This was the body created to provide the thinnest of cover for the US’s failure to subdue the city. The US gave a motley group of insurgents, members of Saddam Hussein’s military weapons and vehicles, which they funnily enough don’t seem to be giving back now that they’ve been fired, and put them under the command of a whole series of former generals. It was always unlikely that such a body would serve the interests of the US rather than those of the Resistance, and they haven’t. If they had, the residents of Fallujah would have torn them to pieces. Since Western reporters haven’t been able to get near Fallujah, little has been written about this experiment.

I’ve lost track of the generals appointed to lead the brigade; the LA Times refers to a General Wael as “the brigade’s latest leader,” without mentioning his predecessors, the first of whom was evidently appointed without anyone looking at his file and who then showed up in a Republican Guard uniform and was quickly fired, to be replaced by another of Saddam’s 11,000 generals, who they thought had been an exile, but really wasn’t... for all I know, since then they’ve been replaced once a week, like No. 2’s on “The Prisoner.”

The LAT says the decision to dissolve the brigade was “agreed to by the interim Iraqi government and the Marines,” which makes the decision sound immaculately conceived. Basically, the US just repeated the error it made in dissolving the Iraqi army, only this time the weapons the cashiered troops are bringing with them into the resistance were provided by the American taxpayers. The US has returned to the time-honored method of winning the hearts and minds of Fallujans, bombing the shit out of them.

Does it rank up there with chopping someone’s head off on television?

It sounded too bad-spy-novel to be true, but reporters (2 of them)[the WaPo editorial I hadn’t yet read when I wrote that doesn’t know of the second one] headed towards Beslan to cover the hostage-taking were really and truly slipped tranquilizers.

AP: “Rumsfeld, responding to allegations that he fostered a climate that led to the prisoner-abuse scandal, said yesterday that the military’s mistreatment of detainees was not as bad as what terrorists have done. ‘Does it rank up there with chopping someone’s head off on television?’ he asked. ‘It doesn’t.’”

Are those really the only choices on offer? Naked human pyramids or decapitation? That’s almost as bad a choice as Bush or Kerry.
[Update: Slate’s Today’s Papers terms this “the lowest common abomination.”]

The proof is complete, If only I’ve stated it thrice

It’s that time again, another September 11, and doesn’t it seem that the events of 9/11/01 have been transmuted into Republican Party property, so that it becomes increasingly hard for the rest of us to commemorate the loss of life without being in some way on the defensive? (Kerry, with his unerring populism, will be honoring the dead at the... Boston Opera House). Robert Fisk notes that the oddness of the path by which the US is commemorating by bombing Fallujah, a place very few of us had heard of 3 years ago, in what seems to have become the “war on terror,” which used to be the “war on terrorism,” but in a twist Orwell did not predict, we are gradually dropping from political discourse every word, like terrorism, that George Bush cannot pronounce. In a second Bush term (heaven forfend), people who pronounce the word nuclear correctly will be flogged in the town square.

What Fisk ignores is the indubitable fact that Dick Cheney has said that Iraq was a sanctuary for Al Qaida. It is indubitable because Dick Cheney keeps repeating it, which is all the proof needed by the Bushies:

“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”

(WaPo: “Five times in his speech in West Virginia, Bush spoke of making the country and the world ‘safer.’”)

The unicorn is a mythical beast

The Sudanese are responding that there is no genocide--just like there were no WMDs in Iraq, their foreign minister says. Or alligators in the sewers. Or unicorns in the garden. (I guess the Thurber “fable for our time” isn’t directly relevant, but I like it).

Actually, while Powell acknowledged the existence of genocide, he said that “No new action is dictated by this determination.” Genocide is still, like, bad, isn’t it?

Possibly, but our politicians’ focus is elsewhere. Imagine if the energy and political firepower currently being focused on the height of podiums and the temperature of the room in the presidential debates (the NYT reports that the negotiating teams put forth by the Kerry and Bush camps include 3 governors--current governors, mind you--and a former secretary of state. Just show up and debate the issues, how bloody hard could that be?) were focused on the Sudan. Or, with the assault-rifle ban due to expire Monday, there was Sen. Larry Craig on McNeil-Lehrer, explaining how the Senate was too busy to debate loser bills and had more important things to do. Like voting on a flag-burning amendment to the constitution, gay marriage, etc etc. The awesome disproportion in attention and resources--the Bush & Kerry campaign budgets must be larger than the budgets of some African countries--and the laser-like focus on the utterly trivial does not speak especially well for the democratic representative system.

Not just random violence

A New Statesman editorial (link goes to this story for the next week only) on the fact that the Beslan hostage-takers, like the Abu Ghraib guards, took pictures of their victims:

Once, the instincts of people who did terrible things were to destroy the evidence; even the Nazis tried to cover up the Holocaust. Now, depravity shows its face proudly to the world, partly as a kind of existential statement, partly as another branch of the public relations industry. My grievance must be greater than yours, people seem to say, because I will go to greater lengths in pursuit of it. Just as other sections of the media industry resort to ever greater sensation to command attention - bigger newspaper headlines, more violent films, more pornographic advertisements, more intimate reality TV - so now do terrorists.

Colin Powell declares Darfur to be genocide. This might be a good time to point out, as I like to do every so often, that in 1969 Powell did the first “investigation” of My Lai, and declared that no massacre had taken place, and that the relations between US troops and local Vietnamese were excellent. Just sayin’. This time, though, he actually investigated before issuing his findings.

Sudan is not happy, and says foreigners should not “put oil on the fire.” Oil, you say... Now you’re speaking the Bush administration’s language.

Powell says, “This was a coordinated effort, not just random violence.” Just? JUST?!?

Treasury Secretary John Snow was in Florida today, talking about all the sanctions we’ve got on Cuba, and the new ones they’re adding. I’m pretty sure they’re more rigorous than the sanctions Powell is talking about putting on Sudan for, you know, genocide.

Naomi Klein writes that after 9/11, Bush looked for a political philosophy (stick with me, it gets more plausible), and found it in Sharon’s Likud party:

In the three years since, the Bush White House has applied this logic with chilling consistency to its global war on terror - complete with the pathologising of the “Muslim mind”. It was the guiding philosophy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and may well extend to Iran and Syria. It’s not simply that Bush sees America’s role as protecting Israel from a hostile Arab world. It’s that he has cast the US in the same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the same threat. In this narrative, the US is fighting a never-ending battle for its survival against irrational forces that seek its total extermination.

And now, she adds, Russia is also adopting the “Likudization narrative.”

Now go away before I taunt you a second time

Tom Ridge will today declare September National Preparedness Month. Today. The ninth. Preparedness. Can’t make this shit up.

A gazillion dollars in military spending every year, and this is what it comes down to: “The loudspeakers atop the Humvee crackled to life: ‘The Taliban are women! They're bitches! If they were real men, they'd stop hiding under their burkas and they'd come out and fight! I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.’” OK, I may have tampered with the quote slightly.

Catastrophic

Kerry says that Bush made “catastrophic choices” in Iraq, where Bush says there was a “catastrophic success.” Who could have guessed that the common ground between those two would be a four-syllable word?

Salon has an exhaustive piece about Chimpy’s National Guard service, or lack thereof. If you’ve gotten tired of the story, like I had, this will revitalize your interest. This is not just about the distant past: the lies are ongoing. As new information comes out, the Bushies have had to revise their story again and again. Also, the idea that GeeDubya just wandered off one day and never bothered coming back to base--lazy and irresponsible Bush--is untenable. He actively disregarded orders, falsified paperwork, and got powerful friends to pressure his superiors.

Serbian schools drop the teaching of evolution.

Washington, Adams, Jefferson .... Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush. Maybe the Serbs have a point there.

Otherwise occupied

Russia says it is prepared to take preemptive military action against “terrorist bases” anywhere in the world, and will do so with the same level of competence shown in the Beslan crisis. OK, they didn’t say the last part, but they did reassure us that these military strikes would not involve nuclear weapons, something we weren’t even worried about right up until the second they said that.

The GAO says that Thomas Scully should repay all the salary he received as head of Medicare after he illegally ordered that actuary not to report the true cost of Bush’s drug proposals to Congress. That’s actually in the law governing the civil service. The Bush admin is refusing, citing its “executive privilege” to lie to Congress. I’m simplifying their language, but not exaggerating. If only Congress defended congressional oversight with half the energy presidents use in asserting executive privilege, an exceedingly vague and expansive term which is not in the constitution. The DHS investigation of this incident insisted in July that Scully had “the final authority to determine the flow of information to Congress.”


The ONION:

Bush Campaign More Thought Out Than Iraq War

WASHINGTON, DC—Military and political strategists agreed Monday that President Bush's re-election campaign has been executed with greater precision than the war in Iraq. "Judging from the initial misrepresentation of intelligence data and the ongoing crisis in Najaf, I assumed the president didn't know his ass from his elbow," said Col. Dale Henderson, a military advisor during the Reagan Administration. "But on the campaign trail, he's proven himself a master of long-term planning and unflinching determination. How else can you explain his strength in the polls given this economy?" Henderson said he regrets having characterized Bush's handling of the war as "incompetent," now that he knows the president's mind was simply otherwise occupied.

We’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating

Dick “Mr. Sensitive” Cheney said today [yesterday, actually; posting to Blogspot was down for half a day; did you miss me?] that if Kerry is elected, “then the danger is that we’ll get hit again [by terrorists] and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.” So instead we should elect the man who claimed to be president the last time there was a devastating terrorist attack? Anyway, this is so far beyond the pale of civilized political discourse that I expect a national uproar to force Cheney to resign from office and leave political life by the end of the week, starting any... minute... now....

Seriously, this is not acceptable, it’s shameful, and it occurs to me that there’s no one with the independence and stature to say that without being dismissed as partisan, at least not with the Daily Show in reruns this week (McCain doesn’t count: he only complained about the Swift Boat stuff because of his own Vietnam War background, and he made it clear that Bush’s despicable refusal to denounce the ads would not affect McCain’s support for him one iota).

1,000 dead, and the Bushies are busy claiming that since Iraq is just a part of the great big never-ending war on terror, we actually reached 1,000 some time ago. Evidently that’s supposed to make us feel better about it. Or feel nothing about it, like they seem to. So I’m sure they can tell us who #1,000 was, and how they marked his death.

Bush supporters and Bush-supporting states have substantially higher fertility rates than (in Bush states in 2000, the rate is 2.11 children/woman, Gore states 1.89), according to a WaPo story I missed last week, giving what the article calls an “evolutionary advantage” to those who don’t believe in evolution.

Rumsfeld says that the thousands of Iraqis killed by “Iraqi forces and the coalition forces” (translation: Americans) isn’t “a lot out of 25 million people in a country.” How many dead people do you suppose he considers to be “a lot”? He also puts American deaths in perspective: sure, there 2 or 3 US soldiers are killed every day, but “if you think about the fact that we have thousands of patrols every day...and look at the number of incidents, they’re relatively small.” So that’s all right then.

All 9/11, All the Time

The Bush admin calls for a political settlement over Chechnya or, in other words, a more sensitive war on terrorism.

In a NYT story on how Congressional R’s plan to force a lot of votes on defense issues, Bill Frist’s spokesmodel says “It will be all 9/11, all the time.” A new slogan: “Vote Republican: All 9/11, All the Time.”

The front-page picture that got the Izvestia editor fired.

What's the Russian for tit for tat?

During the Beslan crisis, the LA Times reports, Russian troops took their own hostages, 40 or so relations--including children--of Chechen rebel leaders. The Russians claim that it was protective custody, because those leaders planned to kill their relatives and blame it on Russian security forces. It all makes sense now.

Let’s not feel too superior: the US has done exactly the same thing in Iraq (not sure about Afghanistan), including the wife of the Saddam Hussein aide who was just reported as captured, and then not captured. His wife was seized in December, and the stories I saw that mentioned that fact didn’t say if she was ever released. Does anyone know?

From the Ironic Times: “CORRECTION: Last week, due to a production error, we quoted President Bush describing his Iraq policy as a “successful catastrophe.” In fact, he described it as a “catastrophic success.” We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.”

Ugly processes which have their own logic

Press Association headline: “Bitterness Mounts in Russia.” This is news?

Putin, the Bitter-Guy-in-Chief, berates Western countries for calling Chechen rebels “rebels” rather than “terrorists.” Of course, when Russia was downplaying the Chechen uprising, it liked to call them “bandits.” He denied that there is any relationship between Russian policies in Chechnya and the Beslan incident. Well, except that the latter justifies the former: “Just imagine that people who shoot children in the back came to power anywhere on our planet. Just ask yourself that, and you will have no more questions about our policy in Chechnya.” So genocide doesn’t justify terrorism, but terrorism justifies genocide, is that right?

Asked about human rights violations by Russian forces in Chechnya, he said that the lower-level people responsible for them are always punished, but “Compare the torture of Iraqi prisoners. This hasn’t happened on the direction of the top US leaders, but because of how individual people behaved in these circumstances. Those who are to blame must be punished.” “In war there are ugly processes which have their own logic.”

The Russian media has begun to do its job, criticizing the government’s actions and analyzing its lies, and some, including the editor of Izvestia, have been fired for it. They’re asking where some of the dead bodies have disappeared to, saying that the rebels/terrorists/bandits/actress/models were in fact willing to negotiate, that no foreigners were present, and that the bloodbath was not caused by explosives going off but by locals with guns trying to prevent the school being stormed.

Putin refuses to hold a public inquiry.

Kerry says Iraq is “the wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time,” and he plans to pull out within four years of taking office. Five, tops. Six, at the outside....

A month after being charged with murder, Salem Chalabi has been removed as head of the Saddam Hussein tribunal.

Mission inedible

From the Sunday Times: “A bucket of manure from an Olympic-gold-winning horse has fetched £760 in an internet auction. Leslie Law, who won individual gold on Shear L’Eau in Athens, put the bucket up for sale on eBay. It attracted 35 bids before being won by a sports memorabilia store in Southport, Merseyside.”

The Anglican church in Uganda is sending a missionary to Britain. You know, it’s Labor Day, so why don’t you all make up your own joke here, utilizing the elements: 1) missionaries being eaten, and 2) lousy English cuisine.

That story is actually about African evangelicals hating the liberalism (i.e., women and gay priests) of the mother church.

I’ve been referring, like everyone else, to the TWO kidnapped French journalists, whose kidnappers demanded the lifting of the headscarf ban. Evidently we’ve forgotten someone: their driver/interpreter/fixer, a Syrian refugee, was kidnapped with them, but, typically, none of the media reports have mentioned him. Oops.

Carefree Russians

If you’re looking for a voice on the web supportive of the Beslan kidnappers, this is probably the closest, at least in (broken) English: Kavkaz Center, evidently located in Turkey, a site supposedly close to the guy behind Beslan. It’s nutty, but oddly hard to refute. It’s focused on Putin personally as the enemy, but Putin indeed originally came to power on anti-Chechen rhetoric. The site points out that thousands of Chechen schoolchildren have been killed in the invasion of Chechnya, which explains, while of course not excusing, their inhumanity to the Beslan children. Would you care to explain to Chechens why this incident was so horrible but the world has largely ignored a decade of wholesale murder and rape by Russian troops in their country? The website is full of conspiracy theories, but Russia is, in fact, full of conspiracies and lies and unanswered questions about terrorist acts: the mysterious apartment bombings, the Moscow theater siege, etc.

2 reporters who have negotiated with Chechens in the past were prevented reaching Beslan. One may have been poisoned, the other was first stopped at the airport for suspicion of carrying explosives, then when he was released, 2 airport parking attendants came up to him and picked a fight, all 3 were arrested, and he was imprisoned for 5 days for “hooliganism,” not the first time he’s been seized while trying to cover Chechnya for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Russia is claiming that 10 of the rebels were from Arab countries, but this is almost certainly a fabrication. The implication isn’t that these Arabs are wandering jihadists, but mercenaries paid for by dark forces trying to dismember Russia. Putin’s speech to the nation yesterday thus made no mention of “Chechnya,” and it sounds from the WaPo like the Russian people still haven’t been told that the rebels’ demand was for an end to the war in Chechnya. Pay no attention to the genocide behind the curtain.

Putin told Russians that they can’t “live in as carefree a manner as before.” Yes...Russians...carefree. Beslan is being described as “Russia’s 9/11.” It’s certainly being used as an excuse for Putin to make his already authoritarian government authoritarianer, just as the Bushies used 9/11 to enact the FBI’s wish list in the Patriot Act, take out Saddam, and silence domestic critics.

Israel is trying to get the EU and other foreign donors to pay for an apartheid road system in the West Bank. Given the settlements and the Wall, Palestinians are banned from roads the settlers use, so Israel wants someone else to pay for separate but equal roads for Palestinians.

Iraq: Going Pretty Much According to Plan

After the Iraqi puppet gov’s one-month ban on Al Jazeera raised no particular objections internationally, or indeed from their American overlords, they have, predictably, followed it with an indefinite ban.

It’s still not clear exactly how many people the Iraqi National Council actually has, and whether Chalabi is a member or not. Anyhow, it just elected 4 VPs, described by Juan Cole as showing that “the US invaded Iraq to install in power a coalition of Communists, Islamists and ex-Baathist nationalists.” Mission accomplished, then.

It’s getting so you can’t tell the hostages without a scorecard. The French journalists haven’t been released, but US-installed PM “Comical” Allawi decided that this was the perfect time to taunt the French, informing them that their anti-war stance had not protected their nationals from terrorist acts. And yes, it’s always a good time to taunt the French, but if Allawi had a diplomatic bone in his body, he might have realized that you don’t give what sounds an awful lot like tacit approval for attacks on French people, especially if you give it at the same time as the terrorists are deciding whether to kill or release the hostages.

Some want to tear a juicy bit of flesh off us (Russia tastes just like chicken)

Subtle this ain’t: the Pentagon is going to investigate Kerry’s medals.

Nor this: Putin in his address to the nation: “Some want to tear a juicy bit of flesh off us ... others are helping them, assuming that Russia ... still represents a threat to them. And that the threat needs to be eliminated. Terrorism is an instrument for achieving these aims.” In other words, this has nothing to do with Chechen independence, but is part of a Sinister Plot to dismember Russia. Rather like pretending that Iraq was behind 9/11, but rather more nebulous. “The terrorists believe they are stronger than us, that they will intimidate us with their cruelty”. Funny, didn’t you try to intimidate Chechens with your cruelty?

It’s not clear whether they’ll lie about the number of dead hostages at Beslan. It won’t be as easy to get away with that as after the Moscow theater siege. But they are claiming to have killed all the hostage-takers, which is simply not true.

The civil trial in Fresno over the assassination of Archbishop Romero (which I discussed here has finished, with Alvaro Rafael Saravia, still a fugitive, ordered to pay $10 million.

We demonstrated our weakness

The print NYT has a somewhat unfortunate jump. Quoting Hillary Clinton: “‘My husband is doing very well,’ she said, noting that he had beaten her” (continued on page A13)

at cards.

By the way, did you know that Bill Clinton is younger than George Bush?

The people who took over the school in Beslan, North Ossetia, loaded with explosives, depriving little children of food and water and threatened them with 15 people being killed if they moved or cried, have obviously reached an unimaginable level of inhumanity. But... Bush said--I can’t find the exact quote, but it was on the BBC World News--something about the lengths “they” will go to attack civilization. A Chechen might ask, what civilization? Stalin forcibly removed the entire Chechen population, Yeltsin and Putin have waged wars of extermination and atrocity.

Putin, of course, takes from this incident the lesson that Russia has been too civilized towards Chechnya: “we failed to react to them adequately. We demonstrated our weakness, and the weak are beaten.” And he will go after those who “foment interethnic hatred.” Have you heard the way Russians speak about Chechens as a group? A combination of the way Hitler spoke about the Jews and Europeans still speak about the Roma.

In this incident, Russia exhibited an impressive level of incompetence, failing to do things as simple and obvious as securing the area and making sure there were ambulances. None of which is what Putin means by failing to react adequately.

Escape train

The London Times says, “Mr Bush had an escape train waiting at Penn Station, underneath Madison Square Garden, in case he had to flee during his speech”

China has been putting censorship viruses on computers without their owners’ knowledge (the “Great Firewall of China”), rendering those computers incapable of googling for certain terms, or using them in instant messages, including liberty, the Tiananmen square massacre, human rights, democracy, truth, sex, brassiere.... I know this site has been accessed from China, although maybe not after this post.

Here a nation rose

Let’s return to the Bush line, “for as long as our country stands, people will look to the resurrection of New York City and they will say: Here buildings fell, here a nation rose.” When composing my last post, that line, which I had scribbled down assuming I would be making a joke about, was just too disquieting. Chris Suellentrop’s subsequent Slate dispatch, which doesn’t mention the line, suggests the reason: the R convention was full of sepia-toned nostalgia for those days after 9/11 when the nation supposedly united as it did after Pearl Harbor. Good times, good times.

The R’s are busily constructing a new vision of American nationhood based on victimhood. This is why the passengers who brought down Pennsylvania flight 93 and saved whatever target Al Qaida planned to fly it into (can you imagine how much worse the American backlash would have been had it hit the White House or Capitol Building? or Three Mile Island, which some early reports suggested was its target?) have gone unmythologized, and why the only soldier whose name you’re likely to know from either war of “liberation” (excluding relatives, friends, etc) wasn’t someone who, for instance, pulled a buddy out of the line of fire, like Kerry did in Vietnam, or performed some other act of bravery, but another victim, Private Jessica Lynch.

Nations that rise out of tragedy and victimization are not lovely things. You do not endear yourself to the world by constantly insisting that you are fighting wars to save their lazy, ungrateful asses, and indeed Western Civilization itself, from the heathen barbarians, alone and indeed vilified by them for doing the hard work that must be done. I’m not referring to the US now; I’m describing Serbia.

A calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom

Immediately after the Moscow theater siege in October 2002, the authorities claimed 127 people had died. This suspiciously low figure became more suspicious when they never changed it, although obviously some must have died of their injuries in the subsequent days, and many were listed as “missing.” So it’s a bit worrying that they’re claiming there are only 354 hostages in that school in Beslan, North Ossetia, when locals are saying it’s a lot more.
(Update: the shits stormed the school. They said they wouldn't, I always knew they would. As I write, still pretty confused.)

The convention was a race from competence and from content. It’s not just that we heard few details about Bush’s agenda, if any, for a second term; the details of the last 3½ years were also discarded as irrelevant. What mattered, they told us over and over, was Bush’s determination and vision (or vision thing, as his father used to phrase it). He “sees world terrorism for the evil that it is,” as Giuliani put it; he knew we were at war; he knew Saddam was a threat, etc etc. No one defended the way he actually conducted the “war on terror” or the war in Iraq, just his convictions. Likewise, no one talked about his policies in the future, except in the vaguest of terms. Thus, all the talk about a “hopeful America” and optimism. Hope for what? Doesn’t matter.

(Later:) ok, there were a few semi-specifics in Bush’s speech, but nothing we’ll ever hear about again. Rural health centers will go in the filing cabinet next to the mission to Mars.

Repeatedly heard during the Convention: that Saddam Hussein was a “weapon of mass destruction.” Only the most facile mind would take that pathetic rhetorical trick as an answer to the charge that Bush lied about WMDs.

By the way, the use of the presidential seal on that platform--is he supposed to be using a national symbol at a partisan event? That was one of many violations of the rules of political decency, usually to portray the D’s as un-American in the sense of being somehow not authentic Americans. Another was Cheney’s claim that Kerry was “unfit” for office. Not that his policies or qualifications are inferior to Bush’s, but that he is an illegitimate candidate.
(Later: Kerry has responded to the word unfit with what passes for outrage for him [I'm reminded of the parody John Major diary Private Eye used to run during his premiership, in which Major frequently described himself as "not inconsiderably incandescent with rage."])

Wed. night’s brilliant Daily Show mock-RNC film, "George W. Bush: Words Speak Louder Than Actions," is available here. And there’s a Lewis Black video blog, and other web-only Daily Show material (some played audio only, probably not intentionally).

The Bush speech:

He actually cites the 10 million registered voters in Afghanistan, which should be an embarrassing mockery, as if it were a triumph. Yay for ballot stuffing! Huzzah and kudos for electoral fraud! Why don’t we make Katherine Harris ambassador to Afghanistan?

The terrorists are afraid because “freedom is on the march.” Freedom does not march. It may walk, hop, skip, traipse, mosey, even flounce, but it does not march.

Also, funny to be talking about bringing freedom to Afghanistan and Iraq, when the NYPD were illegally holding hundreds of demonstrators without charge, possibly in naked human pyramids.

“Here buildings fell, here a nation rose.” Yick.

“a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom” Is he getting messages from outer space on his fillings again?

“we will extend the frontiers of freedom”. Hear that Canada? We’re coming after you, like you always knew we would. Yeah, there’s nothing like using the language of imperialist expansionism to convey your attachment to freedom.

Holy monkeys

Headline you don’t see every day: “Menaced by Holy Monkeys, Indian Villagers Call in the Contract Killers.”

Speaking of holy monkeys, Zell Miller, the Last Democrat, followed his cranky old man speech with interviews I did not see, because I have a reception problem with cable news channels. Well, not so much a reception problem, more that after a minute I start loudly bemoaning the state of American democracy and journalism, which makes it hard to hear, with all the bemoaning. So I missed seeing Zell-boy threaten to punch out Chris Matthews.

After 18 days, the Palestinian hunger strike ends as it began, with both sides calling each other liars. The Palestinians say that concessions were granted, Israel denies there were even negotiations.

Wherein I discuss the Republican Convention, somehow mentioning fascist Italy twice

Today we were exposed to that most odious of all sights in American politics: Dick Cheney looking pleased with himself after uttering an attack line. It was like watching a Mussolini speech, where he’d fold his arms and tilt his head back while the crowd cheered. The delegates loved Cheney, just loved him, and I think it was their reaction that will make this speech so harmful to the R’s. First, the constant applause made it long and tedious. Second, it gave the uncommitted voters at home time to think about the speech, and the relationship of thought to a Cheney speech is that of salt to a slug. Third, if any viewer at home was inclined to react favorably to a line, the cult-like over-reaction of the delegates will turn them right off again, like they’re all laughing at a joke you don’t get, and don’t want to get. And then they did that “flip flop” wave thing, which they should have practiced first.

Earlier, there was another repugnant sight: Republicans trying to be humorous. There was a little film about Barney the dog, which featured him debating Kerry’s dog, which was, oh my sides are splitting, a French poodle.

Good Toles cartoon.

William Saletan of Slate points out that even Rick “I’m not holier than thou, I’m holier than YOU” Santorum didn’t mention gays while talking about marriage, although he obviously wouldn’t have been talking about marriage at all if not for the gay marriage issue. So they’ve got even the Pennsylvania bully boy to abstain, for once, from overt gay-bashing, in favor of coded gay-bashing. Try to think of it as progress. The R’s are attempting to put a smiley face on it by talking about heterosexual marriage, which is evidently the basis of society, “the most fundamental institution of civilization.” Where does that leave gays? Un-persons, excluded by definition from society and civilization. Although they still have “selfish hedonism,” as Alan Keyes puts it, which is a pretty good compensation.

And Mel Martinez just won the R primary for US Senate after accusing Bill McCollum, of all people, of being a secret fag-lover for supporting an anti-hate-crimes bill.

Zell Miller is introduced as “the conscience of the Democratic party.” So who would that make the conscience of the Republican party, John Wilkes Booth?

T-shirt at anti-Bush rally: “Think. It’s patriotic.”

All the comparisons between Bush and Churchill. A reminder to the R’s: before World War II was even over, the voters booted Churchill out, in one of the finest moments for the principle of democracy. Also, the comparison is about how Churchill kept warning against the dangers of fascism in the 1930s, holding to his convictions while being ostracized from mainstream politics, while Bush recognized the dangers of terrorism...after several rather large buildings were damaged or destroyed and the dangers of terrorism were pretty fucking obvious. Yes, his breadth of vision is astonishing. Although, since I’m told that Osama bin Laden’s name hasn’t been mentioned once during the convention, you’d have to think that if Shrub had been around in the 1930s, he’d have recognized the dangers of fascism and tried to launch a pre-emptive attack on...Italy.

"Only" the global war on terrorism?

Tom DeLay to the Republican Jewish Coalition: “My friends, there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There is only the global war on terrorism.”

French Muslims have condemned the taking of hostages to force a reversal of the headscarf ban, but went too far in asking Muslim schoolgirls to adhere to the ban instead of resisting it, as had been planned before the hostage-taking (Thursday is the first day of school). If the state is right not to give up its (despicable) policies to appease the terrorists, neither should the other side give up their legitimate resistance. Yadda yadda yadda, or the terrorists win. It’s like a teenage girl dating that guy with the piercings and the motorcycle not because she likes him, but to piss off her parents. Speaking of teenage girls, it’s nice to see the French government taking on that dangerous segment of the population. And putting the burden of having to choose between their principles and their futures on teenage girls.

Similarly, Russia wants the UN to condemn terrorism by Chechens and declare it part of the world-wide war on terrorism, but doesn’t want the outside world to condemn its vicious and bloody crushing of the Chechen people and its imposition of a fake president through an even faker election. Well, fuck that.

Comical Allawi, and not for the first time, has unilaterally halted peace talks just at the point of agreement, this time in Sadr City. Sure, since he’s planning to fight using American troops. In fact, the sticking point on this one was whether American troops could conduct military operations in the Baghdad suburb without Allawi’s permission; Allawi wanted them to be able to kill Iraqis without his permission.

It looks like the charges against Achmed and Salem Chalabi will be dropped (some stories are saying that they have already been, but this is wrong).

GUEST POST: Bush's Upcoming Post-Convention Drop

I've heard that "ABBA, The Movie" is rather entertaining to watch -- if you're stoned. But if you watch it again, this time with a clear head, the general reaction is considerably less positive. In New York now, the Republicans are busily replaying "The Great Unflinching Bush," a production that got great reviews during its out-of-town tryouts in the wake of the attack on the twin towers. But it's been three years, and our minds have cleared from the state of altered consciousness induced by 9/11. It's not just that we know Bush's first response to news of the attacks was to re-read his favorite passages from My Pet Goat. Nor is it just that we know he ignored the Presidential Daily Briefing, warning of such attacks. It isn't even that we as a nation have become quite disenchanted with his war in Iraq -- the fictitious WMDs, the lost lives, the dubious links to bin Laden. It's simply that we're no longer in the attack-induced stupor. "The Great Unflinching Bush" isn't much to watch if one isn't scared shitless and blindly jingoistic. So my prediction is that the replaying of this production is going make many viewers wonder, "Why did I think this was so good when I saw it a few years ago?" Watch his approval rating drop.