Vox simius, vox dei

Letters to the (London) Times deny that the guy I mentioned yesterday is the first Satanist in the Royal Navy, one claiming to have filled that in on a form in 1947. He was asked what special facilities he would require for Sunday worship.

Funny and all too appropriate John Bunning picture.

I should probably be thinking about the political implications of Rehnquist’s cancer. But instead I keep picturing him in a hospital gown with stripes on the sleeves and his butt hanging out. Please make it stop.

An Indy reporter says that he’s been to Al Qa Qaa, the arms depot with the funny name, before. It was named in Tony Blair’s “dodgy dossier” as a site where chemical weapons were manufactured. The Iraqi government immediately invited reporters to check it out, and they did, and it wasn’t. IAEA inspectors also regularly visited. So by the time the war started, the US knew exactly what was in Al Qa Qaa; it wasn’t an intelligence failure, but a failure to act on intelligence. But you know what they say in the Pentagon: 350 tons of high-quality explosive here, 350 tons of high-quality explosive there, pretty soon it adds up.

The WaPo Tuesday has a truly wrong-headed editorial suggesting that the candidates should promise now to “put the national interest first” and not challenge close election results merely because they might have been, ya know, stolen. That was Scalia’s logic in Gore v. Bush. The logic that the next president’s legitimacy would be harmed by his election being put under judicial scrutiny is the logic that causes the Bushies to complain about his being fact-checked, or about Chimpy’s assertions being questioned. My favorite recently was the campaign threatening legal action against MTV’s Rock the Vote campaign for discussing the possibility of a draft, saying that Shrub’s promise that he wouldn’t start one should have been enough to put the issue beyond doubt or discussion. Thus the title of this post, which hopefully is the Latin for “the voice of the monkey is the voice of God” (there seems to be no Latin word for chimpanzee), a play on the phrase Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

If my readership drops to zero tomorrow, I’ll blame my attempt to make a joke in a dead language I don’t actually know.

Anyway, I’ve heard R campaign officials--there was one today in Ohio talking about why they were planning to put thousands of workers into polling places to challenge voters who, ahem, look ineligible; I’ve lost the quote, but he was blaming it on D voter-registration drives, which he evidently considered tantamount to a dirty trick.

Good for...

The Bush campaign sent another email to my cat. Who is still not impressed.



This one cleverly appeals to her as a Californian, with a link to a webpage that shows “President Bush is Good for California.” Actually, it looks like no one even bothered to customize these pages for each state, just inserted the state name every sentence or two, like a piece of junk mail. There are no pages for Guam, Puerto Rico or the District of Columbia. Each page has pictures, and some of those are pretty generic, too, campaign events, people waving signs. Some are not. See if you can guess which state’s website this picture is from (all pictures are from the Bush website):



That’s right, Texas. Looks kinda naked without the hat.



Ah, that’s....better?

One of the California pictures shows typical young Republicans, at least in California.



And here’s Bush with a typical older Republican. After this picture was taken, he couldn’t color in his coloring books for a week.



After that, he decided it was safer to send a stand-in to California. No one noticed the difference.



He also sent a stand-in to Alaska, because he’s afraid of polar bears.



Arctic Warriors? Um, are we at war with the Eskimos or something? I think we should be told.

Legitimately targeted, regrettably harmed, shit out of luck

In talking about the historical amnesia over Fallujah, I missed a quote, from British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who after the 4 contractors were killed said that it “was not the Americans who cast the first stone...in Fallujah.” My own historical amnesia was pointed out to me (by email) by blogger ManicNetPreacher, who noted that in the 1st Gulf War, the market in Fallujah was bombed twice (by the British).
(Update: he's written his own post on the subject, with more details.)

The Dayton Daily News used the FOIA to get hold of Iraqi compensation records, and found that most Iraqis were turned down, with such comments as “Coalition forces dropped ordnance during Operation Iraqi Freedom on legitimate targets. Your family was in an area that was being legitimately targeted and therefore regrettably harmed.”

Al Qaqaa Cock-Up

So we let 380 tons of explosives get stolen from the Al Qaqaa military base in Iraq. As Rummy likes to say, freedom is messy.

My contribution to the discussion of this fiasco is to give it a name, that in the title of this post. Please use it widely.

Triumph of the W

A member of the crew of the Royal Navy frigate Cumberland (his rank is “Leading Hand”) has been allowed to practice Satanism aboard the ship. When Churchill was First Sea Lord, an admiral complained that one of his proposed reforms went against naval traditions. Churchill replied that the only traditions the Royal Navy had were “rum, sodomy, and the lash.” No, I didn’t write a segue between those 2 items--does there always have to be a segue?
(Update: a reader informs me that the quote is apocryphal, pointing me towards the “Churchill didn’t say that, dummy” page of The Churchill Centre website.)

Although ethnic Serbs in Kosovo boycotted the elections, they are guaranteed 1/12 of the seats in the Kosovan parliament.

Lithuanian parliamentary elections are likely to produce a prime minister who made his millions from pickles. Should have a lot to talk about with Teresa Heinz-Kerry.

ANGRY BLACK FLORIDIANS FOR KERRY. Amusing AP headline: “Gore Urges Angry Black Floridians to Vote.” He told them, “If anybody ever tells you that one vote doesn’t count, you tell them to come talk to me,” adding, “really, come talk to me, I’m lonely. So very, very lonely.”

Another AP story describes a Bush rally: “And if the helicopter arrivals weren’t showy enough, Bush had Air Force One fly over the NFL football stadium in Jacksonville where tens of thousands of people were waiting to hear him speak.” Am I the only one reminded of the beginning sequence in “Triumph of the Will,” when Hitler arrived by plane for the Nuremberg rally? Just saying.



Really, just saying.

Fallujah, again & again

Kerry, according to the LA Times, is “framing the White House contest as a choice between hope and fear”. Guess which one is which.

Zarqawi has changed the name of his organization from Jamaat al Tawhid wal Jihad to Tanzim Qaedat al Jihad fi Bilad al Rafidain (Qaeda Organization for Jihad in Iraq).

How many of you were thinking “People’s Front of Judea?”

A few days ago I wrote a post which I called “Fallujah, again,” my point being that long before Fallujah became a symbol of Iraqi intransigence in the minds of American political and military rulers (a role it also took on for the Iraqi resistance), the crushing of which was central to the US mission, indeed long before most Americans had heard of the place, military ham-handedness had ensured that Americans would always be hated in Fallujah. I was trying to remind y’all of how in April 2003 US soldiers shot up two crowds of protesters, and any positive mission was irretrievably lost, leaving only conquest and subjugation.

I didn’t realize how necessary my reminder was until I read this LA Times article, quite a long one entitled “Why America Has Waged a Losing Battle on Fallouja.” Actually, before you read that (or if you don’t intend to), look at this sidebar timeline. Everything before the 4 US contractors were killed is ignored, giving the impression that Americans are the victims in all this and that the Fallujans brought on themselves the onslaught that is coming. The article isn’t quite as bad as the timeline, and is worth reading, but it glances over the school protest in 2 sentences in an 8,000-word article, and this near-amnesia about the events of 2003 allow it to buy into the demonization of Zarqawi and talk about the need to “root out insurgents,” as if it’s just “outside agitators” behind the Sunni uprising.

These are the most significant posts in this blog from the “lost year” of American operations in Fallujah:
4/29/03
5/3/03
6/8/03
6/15/03
9/14/03

Every vote counts--I mean, zero’s a number, right?

40% of Albanians live on streets which don’t have names.

The motto of the dark comedy that is Election 2004 is “Now, We’re All Florida!” To ratchet up our embarrassment for our nation one more notch, read about it in a British newspaper. I like the description of Florida’s plan to deal with the manual recounts required by law as “staggeringly devious”:

The state will now permit analysis of the computerised machines’ internal audit logs in the event of a close race, she said, but if there is any discrepancy the county supervisors are to go with the original count. In other words: we will do recounts, but if the recounts change the outcome we will disregard them.

And the article presents a “nightmare scenario” in which the Supreme Court turns the election back to state legislatures, which technically have the right to appoint electors irrespective of how the electors actually voted. One update: the 6th Circuit is allowing Ohio not to count provisional ballots cast at the wrong precinct (which is a bad ruling based on a bad reading of the law, as I understand it). The number of people accidentally disfranchised will certainly be surpassed by the number deliberately disfranchised. People should not be prevented by petty loopholes and technicalities from voting for the people who will create future petty loopholes and technicalities.

On this subject, see also this NYT editorial.

Speaking of crappy elections, the Serbs in Kosovo boycotted today’s elections, almost unanimously.

Dick Cheney was inspired, evidently by the sign pictured behind him, to conjure up a world in which Kerry had always been president: the US would have “ceded our right to defend ourselves to the United Nations,” Saddam would have taken over the whole Persian Gulf, the Soviet Union would still be intact, and the Grinch would have stolen Christmas. Enchantment, indeed.

With the same energy I put into going after that goose...

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court quietly destroyed the 1st Amendment, ruling that a newspaper is not protected when it neutrally reports something defamatory said by one person, in this case a borough councilman, about another.

The Polish parliament fails to reintroduce the death penalty, 198-194. Yay!

After watching Kerry’s 1971 testimony in “Stolen Honor,” it is a weird contrast to see Kerry today trying to use the Vietnamese War to bolster his image. “With the same energy ... I put into going after the Viet Cong and trying to win for our country, I pledge to you I will hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists before they harm us.” “I can wage a better war on terror than George Bush has.” A better war on terror, for chrissake.

What is his current position on the justice of the Vietnam war? Here he’s equating the Viet Cong, whose goals were confined to Vietnam, with terrorists who plan to harm us. The “win for our country” phrase suggests that Vietnam was a just war, in American interests to fight. The “before they harm us” suggests he’s swallowed the Bush Doctrine of preemption hook, line and sinker, and claiming the ability to read people’s thoughts and kill them before they act on those thoughts.

Kerry went on, “And we will wage a war on terror that makes America proud and brings the world to our side.” Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I’m ever going to be proud of a war on terror(ism). If you support the “war,” you should consider it a necessary evil, if you don’t, it’s an unnecessary evil. Pride doesn’t enter into it.

I watch “Stolen Honor” so you don’t have to

Although if you want to, you can find it here. This is the original, not the version that just aired. And I’m using a not-completely-accurate “rush transcript” from Daily Kos to check quotes against my own notes, but I went into it fresh.

Before I forget: every anti-Kerry former POW interviewed in the film is white. I assume because we only sent white people to fight in Vietnam.

The argument, if one can distinguish it with that word, is that Kerry’s 1971 testimony was a stab in the back (Dolchstoß, in the original German version of this theme),



which resulted in the US losing the Vietnam war (“a cause lost more at home than on the battlefield”), and POWs being kept by the Vietnamese longer than they would otherwise have been (“the anti-war crowd...owe us two years”) (I know how he feels: the makers of this film owe me 42 minutes of my life back).

I’m a little unsure of the causality of all this, but John Kerry in 1971 was evidently the most powerful person in the country--who knew? Because Kerry called some American soldiers “war criminals,” the North Vietnamese thought that the POWs they held must be war criminals and... no, sorry, the logic escapes me.

The existence of actual war crimes is rejected out of hand, Kerry accused of knowingly lying about them. My Lai is mentioned in order to dismiss it, in the fashion of Rumsfeld talking about Abu Ghraib, as an isolated incident, and anyway wasn’t Lt. Calley punished? (With about a year of rather luxurious house arrest, as I recall). There is some talk, mostly from wives of former POWs, of the US military being over there just to help the Vietnamese people.

It should be pointed out that Kerry’s crime consisted of talking (oh, and he went to North Vietnam too) and being believed. He “wrote the first draft of history,” creating the image of the American soldier in Vietnam that has dominated media portrayals (they really don’t like Apocalypse Now, which oddly enough they hold Kerry responsible for).

They don’t like him having talked about Vietnam in 1971, and they don’t like him talking about Vietnam now. “By making his actions during and after the war the corner-stone of his political career, he forces us to feel again the old agonies and regurgitate old doubts.” At this point, the film just sounds whiny.

So the themes are 1) Kerry is a big ol’ liar, 2) criticizing a war while it’s going on, or even 30 years later, is bad, and 3) we don’t want to have to regurgitate old doubts. In fact, doubt is bad, period. And Jane Fonda also sucks.

Tremulous with anticipation

An Ohio case shows one Bush strategy for “winning” the election in the courts by stopping challenges to election-rigging dead. The Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, has already shown his willingness to use petty rules (the thickness of the paper used in voter registrations) to deprive people of the right to vote. Now he’s decided that voters can’t cast provisional ballots except at their own polling places. Let’s pass over the rights and wrongs of this case and focus on the US Justice Dept. position, which is that individuals and the Democratic party have no standing to challenge such rules, and that only Ashcroft’s merry minions may sue to enforce election laws.

Bush says Kerry “does not understand the enemy we face and has no idea how to keep America secure.” Yes, George W. Bush is accusing someone of knowing less about something than he does.

By the way, note Bush’s newest rhetorical trick: strategic non-use of contractions. This is also on display in “He can run, but he cannot hide.”

The London Times has the correction to end all corrections: “In our leading article of Tuesday, November 14, 1854, we described the Charge of the Light Brigade as a disaster...” Evidently it wasn’t that bad. Also, their correspondent’s sentence “This melancholy day, in which the Light Brigade was annihilated by their own rashness” has bad pronoun-verb agreement.

Not that I would ever condone such behaviour, but some advice to the next people trying to hit Ann Coulter with a pie: study the methods used in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

The Welfare State: A British consultant psychiatrist writes in the British Medical Journal about discussions over whether to find a prostitute for a resident of an old age home in his 80s whose regular one had stopped coming around. The staff refused to help him find a new one (he was hard of sight and hearing, making it difficult for him to do so), so he started asking female staff members. They hired a male orderly to follow him around, full time, to prevent him propositioning the women, before eventually finding a prostitute for him. “Mr Cooper had been tremulous with anticipation, and the cab had already been summoned, when the liaison was called off by social services. There had been a second change of plan. Social services now took the view that the prostitute was a sort of therapy, and they would only continue the ‘therapy’ if it was initiated in an NHS hospital and was shown to have a beneficial effect on his behaviour in an inpatient setting.” Eventually he died unfulfilled. It’s a funny story, of course, but you can read it as human interest or for what it says about the treatment of the elderly in institutional settings.

My, what big teeth you have, grandmother

Seen the Bush “Wolves” ad yet? Others have dealt with the ongoing slander on wolves and the fact that the intelligence cut Kerry supported was a Republican plan. I want to highlight two words: “In an increasingly dangerous world, even after the first terrorist attack on America ... John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America’s intelligence operations.” What was the first terrorist attack on America? The assassination of McKinley? The bomb-thrower at the Haymarket riot? I presume they mean the first attack on the World Trade Center, but if the casual viewer understands it to mean 9/11, that’s just fine with the RNC.
(Update: and what do the wolves have to say, you ask.)

A reader wrote to ask, “How long do you think it will take to have a decision on the presidency? I mean assuming the Republicans don’t steal it outright.” As I thought about all the factors involved--the inevitable court challenges in close states, voting-machine meltdowns, dirty tricks, felon purges, voter suppression, incomplete voter lists, etc--it became clear how much the legitimacy of the electoral process has been damaged (good Orcinus post, with lots of links, on these issues). When you think of Bush or Kerry or Nader or Pelletier “winning the election,” do you think that he will have 1) won the most votes, 2) won the most electoral votes, 3) won the most Supreme Court justices, 4) won the most state Supreme Court cases? The link between votes cast and outcome seems to be more and more attenuated. We won’t really believe the final vote count. We will know that many who wanted to vote were disenfranchised, one way or another. I really don’t want to spend another 4 years putting the word president inside quotation marks.

The same reader has brought my attention to Ohio’s Issue I. 11 states have anti-gay marriage measures on the November ballot. Ohio, which already bans gay marriage, will vote on whether “This state and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.” This is a roll-back of rights going far beyond marriage. Civil unions, which exist in some localities, would go, but the phrasing is so vague that it might also ban gay adoption, domestic violence provisions for unmarried couples, insurance coverage, etc etc.

Elephant man

“Left I” has 2 Cuban stories. State Dept spokesmodel Richard Boucher, asked about Castro’s broken knee, said of the 78-year old man, “You’d have to check with the Cubans to find out what’s broken about Mr Castro” and refused to wish him a speedy recovery. Class, pure class.

Also, in a story I can’t believe got so little attention, the Bush admin argued in the Supreme Court last week that the 917 Mariels (shipped by Cuba to the US in 1980) still in American detention have no right to be freed, ever. John Paul Stevens asked whether, if they have no rights at all, they could just be summarily shot. The gov lawyer said no, but couldn’t explain why not.

The Washington Post (finally) checks up on one of Bush’s oft-repeated claims: “Townsend, Bush’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, said ‘three-quarters’ of ‘the known al Qaeda leaders on 9/11’ were dead or in custody. Asked to elaborate, she said she would have to consult a list. White House spokeswoman Erin Healy referred follow-up questions to the FBI. Spokesmen for the FBI, the National Security Council and the CIA did not respond to multiple telephone calls and e-mails.”

California is evidently going to pass a proposition to make primaries “non-partisan,” with all voters being able to vote for any candidates in the primaries, irrespective of party, with only the top 2 being on the ballot, and those as centrist, bland, and death-penalty-supporting as possible. After it passes, I will never be able to vote again for major statewide public offices. So please, Californians, and I will say this bluntly to catch the search engines, Vote no on 62 (for the rest of my prop. endorsements, use the link at the top of the right column).

You may have heard that Gubana Aahnuld Schwarzenegger demonstrated his alleged independence from his own party by coming out in favor of stem cell research (Prop. 71). But he did it late. Indeed, he did it to bolster his unearned rep for independence, then use that rep for Republican goals. Today, my mailbox was graced by an expensive booklet of “Gov. Arnold S.’s Ballot Proposition Voter Guide,” which was paid for by the Republican Party ($2 million, 5 million copies mailed out), which does not feature any position on 71. You can see it by clicking below on what I assume is an unintended juxtaposition on their website (it shows up this way on IE & Foxfire, but not Opera), showing an elephant emerging from Arnie’s forehead. It’s an impressive piece of obfuscatory propaganda, designed to uninform. For example, its description of Prop 63, which it opposes, is “new tax and state bureaucracy,” with no explanation that it is for mental health services. It does say that 63 “will not contribute one cent to education or dealing with the budget crisis.” Or to legalizing ownership of ferrets, but it’s not supposed to. And it says Prop 66 “waters down three strikes law,” creating “another loophole”. The loophole is that for a criminal to get life imprisonment for a 3rd strike, it would have to be for a violent crime, not stealing a slice of pizza.

But what annoys me about this document, why I’ve spent so long on it, is the impropriety of its use of the trappings of office: the governor’s seal appears no fewer than 3 times on the cover and 16 times in total, in a leaflet put out by one party. It is legitimate to put the Gropenführer’s influence into play, but not his office. There are no stylized elephants in the pamphlet.

How much training do you need to learn that it’s wrong to force a man to masturbate?

Fidel Castro trips and breaks his knee. The Times of London helpfully provides a photo sequence of the fall.

Bush signed a law providing $82 million in grants for preventing suicide among the young. And yet he still funds abstinence programs, which can’t be helping.

Brad Friedman has a list of some of the audio/video clips of Bush’s more embarrassing moments removed from the White House website.

Alternet on polls showing that Bush supporters (the unreality-based community) still believe that Iraq had WMDs and links to Al Qaida. Oh, and they believe that this is exactly what experts and the 9/11 Commission have determined. And the percentage of people who are wrong on the facts is increasing over time. In some ways it’s reassuring that so much of Bush’s support is based on pure pig ignorance (they are also wrong about his positions on various issues). In other ways, not so much.

Sgt Ivan Frederick of the Abu Ghraib Fredericks is going to jail for 8 years. The prosecutor asked, “How much training do you need to learn that it’s wrong to force a man to masturbate?” I’m pretty sure that’s a trick question.

Be vewwy vewwy quiet, I'm pwooving my manwiness to swing voters

John Kerry went hunting in Ohio today.

Shouldn’t that be cetacean-American?

Kerry: “The president says he’s a leader. Well, Mr. President, look behind you. There’s hardly anyone there. It’s not leadership.” Ah, the old “Look behind you!” ploy.

Clearly, everyone needs to call their Congresscritter and ask if they have had a flu shot. If they have, vote against them, the wimps. That’s what I like about American elections, their sense of perspective: yesterday Cheney threatened that if Kerry were elected, American cities would be hit with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, rains of toads, the slaying of the first born, crappy parking, etc, and today Kerry attacked Cheney for having been vaccinated.

The 9th Circuit throws out a suit by the “cetacean community” against the Pentagon for damage caused to them by the use of sonar. A scientist brought the suit on the cetaceans’ behalf, in order to bring attention to their plight by becoming the butt of late-night comedians’ jokes.

From the White House website, Department of Shamelessness:

Email the White House...
Q:Heidi from Grafton, WI:
My mother called me in a panic today, because she heard that President Bush has a plan to privatize Social Security. Is this right?
-- Click here for more...

Fallujah, again

Enjoythedraft.com suggests that Bush won’t call the draft a draft, but watch out for the “No 18-to-25-Year-Old Left Behind Act.”

I feel like I’ve been writing about Fallujah forever. The first time most of us heard the name was when American soldiers shot up a crowd peacefully protesting the occupation of their school. The next day, they shot up a crowd protesting the earlier shootings. 25 dead over both days, and that was it for any possibility of winning the hearts and minds of Fallujah, it wasn’t possible after that. Everything since then has been about subjugation, pure and simple.

When the soldiers withdrew from the school, they left graffiti such as “Eat shit Iraq,” and “I love pork.” By June of last year, I wrote, Fallujah had become “Belfast without the politeness.”

I’ll spare you further recapitulation--although anyone who wants to know more about the history of US-Fallujah relations before we pound the city into dust might wish to use the handy search function. There’s a must-read article in the Guardian by Patrick Graham. He reports that many Fallujans don’t believe there is such a person as Zarqawi. The city authorities say he’s left the city, and I can’t imagine how they would be able to capture him and hand him over if they wanted to.

If you haven’t had enough horror, the Guardian also provides a detailed description of the shooting of a 13-year old Palestinian girl by an Israeli officer. Firing on full automatic.

God’s blessing is on him

The problem with quoting Pat Robertson quoting Bush saying that there would be no casualties in Iraq, is that it’s Pat Robertson, who is batshit insane.

Pat goes on to endorse Bush because “God’s blessing is on him.” Similarly, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council also endorses Bush to head up the Great Satan. That Bush sure does know how to build a coalition!

Iraq is trying to persuade Care International not to leave Iraq after its director Margaret Hassan is kidnapped, saying that pulling out would be giving in to the terrorists. Care International says we’re ok with that.

The US bombs a teacher training college in Fallujah. Fallujah children say we’re ok with that.

You’ve got to get your mind around that concept

Embarrassing death of the day, Guardian headline: “Farmer, 73, Killed by Rutting Stag.”

I believe the official story is that Burma’s semi-moderate semi-reformer PM, Khin Nyunt, has arranged to be deposed by the military in order to spend more time with his family. No, sorry, he has retired “for health reasons.” This is an intramural thing (the Indy explains that in military-junta terms, General Nyunt being made prime minister in the first place was considered a demotion), so not a big deal, I think.

In Ohio, Dick “Mr. Sensitive” Cheney again accuses Kerry of having gone “over the top” by mentioning Mary Cheney’s lesbianism. That metaphor comes from World War I trench warfare. In the very same speech, Dick the Dick demonstrates his greater modernity by going nuclear on Kerry’s ass, saying that under Kerry terrorists would attack American cities with chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, or possibly all three at once, ‘cause Kerry will suck just that bad. “That’s the ultimate threat. For us to have a strategy that’s capable of defeating that threat, you’ve got to get your mind around that concept.” As for instance:



AP headline: “Mormon Church Voices View on Gay Marriage.” I won’t leave you in suspense: they’re against it.

A Guardian article on the US elections notes that while there are some PC limits established by the left--attacking gays and women is now off-limits, for example--the right has created still more taboos: the military can’t be criticized, so Abu Ghraib is never mentioned; anything done in the name of 9/11, including the Patriot Act, is also sacrosanct; concern for international opinion is verboten.

A WaPo article about the use of lies in campaign ads quotes a consultant saying something I’ve said before, that there are simply no penalties for distortion and just plain making shit up. I can’t tell how much of it is that Americans consider it such an integral part of the political process that they literally don’t mind being lied to, and how much is that Bush (and yes, Kerry does it too, more so lately, but he’s not in the same league) has made the calculation that he can lie to the politically ignorant (which is what the undecided voters mostly are at this stage) without pissing off those among his base who know that Kerry didn’t say that terrorism is just a nuisance, and understand why he voted against the $87 billion. You would think that the fact that Bush threatened to veto that very same money if the tax cut for the rich was repealed would make it impossible for him to say that Kerry was abandoning the troops. Another possibility is that news & commentary consumption is so bifurcated now that Bush’s base will simply never see their fearless leader corrected on Fox. The distortions and lies should be treated as a great insult, both to the intelligence of the electors, and to the dignity of the electoral process. You can stop laughing at the word “dignity” now. Really, stop.

Relishing victory

In yesterday’s speech, Bush said that Kerry “has a record of trying to weaken American intelligence.” As opposed to Bush, who brings down the average national IQ all by himself.

Factcheck.org points out that some of the weapons programs Bush is faulting Kerry for not supporting were also opposed by Bush’s father.

I’ve said before that we need to stop using the same vocabulary to describe real elections and sham elections. In the NY Times today, a headline on page 3: “Relishing Victory at Polls, Belarus Leader Denounces Critics.” But there’s also an editorial, headlined “A Sham Election in Eastern Europe.” The former, by attempting to appear neutral, winds up being a less accurate representation of reality than the latter. It wasn’t a “victory” at the polls, because Lukashenko had rigged the election; the word “relishing” is therefore also inappropriate.

Our duty as an ally

I will not run for president in 2008. I know this is a question no one has asked, but I’m sure the groundswell for me to run is no smaller than that for Jeb Bush, and he felt compelled to announce yesterday that he wouldn’t be running either. Of course, now that he knows he won’t have to compete against me, he might change his mind.

A fun article on neologisms in the Guardian. I love these things. There are always words that appeared astonishingly late (sex, 1929, ceasefire 1918, racism 1935), and those that appeared astonishingly early (celeb, 1913, hip 1904, awesome 1961) (I once saw the 1938 movie Bringing Up Baby in a theater in the Castro district, and when Cary Grant explains his appearance in a women’s bathrobe with the line, “I just went gay, all of a sudden,” the cheering drowned out the next five minutes of dialogue), and those you just never thought about: bagels 1932, egghead 1907, dumb down 1933, pissed off 1943, hippy 1953, F-word 1973).

Speaking of linguistic usage, when did the abbreviation USA--to say nothing of the creepily aggressive/militaristic chant USA! USA!--become the property of the jingoistic right-wing?

In Parliament, British Defense Minister Geoff Hoon defended his accession to American requests that he redeploy British troops in Iraq in the most lap-doggy terms he could think of, saying that to refuse would mean “we will have failed in our duty as an ally.” Most MPs believe that British soldiers will now pay the price for the incompetent policies of the Americans in the areas they will be moving into, as well as for whatever barbarities will be inflicted on Fallujah. They know that this is entirely about sharing the blame and the bleeding in advance of the US elections, since there is no operational reason for 650 British soldiers being added to the 130,000 American soldiers already in northern Iraq. Hoon had no real support in the House, and one MP said that Hoon reminded him of the song in “Oklahoma,” “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.”

In Florida, people are being called up and being registered to vote right over the phone. Except, of course, they aren’t being registered, just tricked into thinking they have been. Others are getting automated phone calls telling them that they can actually vote over the phone right now, press 1 for George Bush, 2 for Patrick Buchanan etc. Except, of course, they aren’t. It’s gonna be a dirty, dirty election.

Speaking of dirty elections, Tsar Vladimir I of Russia has endorsed Bush. Bush once claimed to have looked into Putin’s soul. We know this is false because everyone else who has looked into Putin’s soul spends the next hour huddled in a corner, saying over and over, “So cold, so cold...”

A September 10 attitude

Bush accuses Kerry of having a “September 10 attitude.” Every time Shrub makes one of these statements suggesting that his own view of the world changed drastically on 9/11, doesn’t he just underline his own pre-9/11 ability to ignore intelligence reports entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,” reminding us that September 11 might possibly have been prevented if not for Bush’s own “September 10 attitude?”

The excerpts of the speech I saw on tv were creepy, as much for the audience as for GeeDubya. A bit from the White House transcript:

THE PRESIDENT: Most Americans still felt that terrorism was something distant, and something that would not strike on a large scale in America. That is the time that my opponent wants to go back to.

AUDIENCE: Booo!

THE PRESIDENT: A time when danger was real and growing, but we didn’t know it. A time when some thought terrorism was only a “nuisance.”

AUDIENCE: Booo! .....

My opponent has a fundamental misunderstanding on the war on terror. A reporter recently asked Senator Kerry how September the 11th changed him. He replied, "It didn't change me much at all."

AUDIENCE: Booo!

Some White House flunky, paid out of your tax dollars, decided how many o’s to put in “Booo!” It appears 15 times in the transcript.

They even booed Kerry for having criticized the Contras and “Ronald Reagan’s policies of peace through strength.”

Bush accused Kerry of having “chosen the easy path of protest and defeatism.” Hey, the path of protest and defeatism isn’t that easy, believe me.

Your self-righteous civics lesson of the day, from someone else whose name ID is nothing

Tom DeLay is refusing to debate his opponent. The Daily Kos points to DeLay’s comment that “A debate would be for his [challenger Richard Morrison’s] benefit, not for mine,” and asks, aren’t debates supposed to be for the benefit of the voters. I’d like to elaborate on that. The Galveston County Daily News story cited by Kos quotes DeLay saying that Morrison’s “name ID is nothing,” and DeLay doesn’t want to raise his profile. DeLay, in other words, is openly and unapologetically counting on voter ignorance, on the differences between their views not being laid before the electorate, and on not having to go before any forum where he might be contradicted or his positions examined critically. Bush’s Boy in the Bubble act writ small. And he’s not the only one. Following the Galveston paper’s website’s links, I find that 69% of Texas’s congressional and state legislative candidates, including DeLay, refused to respond to Project Vote Smart’s questionnaire.

Putting the elements of this story together creates a larger picture of utter contempt for democratic processes and, by extension, for the electorate. One element of this which we’ve become so desensitized to that you probably missed it: DeLay’s stated reasons for refusing to debate Morrison are all hyper-pragmatic, without the smallest sop towards the ideals of democracy. I mean, he’s talking about “name ID”...IN PUBLIC! A campaign manager might speak like that in private, but a candidate in public? It might be the real reason for not wanting to debate, but DeLay announces his cynical political calculus to the world as if it were a legitimate reason, which they should accept and say, “Why of course I shouldn’t expect him debate his opponent, if it might help make his opponents’ name and opinions more familiar to me.” It’s as if Bush had said he wanted to invade Iraq not for WMDs or to bring democracy, but because he wanted the oil, and was going to keep it all himself.

This is, truly, how a republic collapses. People like DeLay think that not just debates, but the entire political system, is for their benefit and theirs alone. Not everyone gets literally to pick and choose their own electorate, as DeLay did when he redrew the boundaries of his district to ensure his easy re-election (one reason this particular electorate might not recognize Morrison’s name), but the continual refusal of imperious candidates to speak to possibly hostile audiences or media or even to the other candidate displays a fundamental reversal of the principles and values of representative democracy: election campaigns and elections are not about the candidates speaking to the people, but about the people choosing the representatives through whom they will speak.

Undisclosed

Team Chimpy decided not to pony up the $1,000 to put a biography and photo of Dick Cheney next to Bush’s in the Oregon voters’ pamphlet. Can’t imagine why.

Transubstantiation?

AP headline: “Bush Says He’s Best Protection from Draft.” Great, can I nail him to my window frame? In another curious example of Shrub misrepresenting Kerry, he says, “The person talking about a draft is my opponent.” Yes, to warn about the threat of YOU instituting a draft.
(Follow up: Tom Tomorrow attempts to lampoon this sort of behaviour in his latest cartoon, but can't really improve upon the original.)

The story also noted that today Kerry “went to Mass and picked up a hunting license”. I blame Vatican II.

I’m not sure exactly what’s going on in Haiti just now. There are evidently gunbattles, or possibly massacres, between the US-backed coup government, which did a spectacularly bad job of coping with the hurricanes, and supporters of twice-ousted President Aristide. The head of UN peacekeepers, a Brazilian general, is blaming John Kerry for the violence, would you believe it, because he “gave hope” to Aristide supporters. That bastard, always giving people hope: spinal-cord injury victims, Haitians... And today Chinese riot police are being deployed. These guys (and 13 women):



Insert your own subtle allusion to Tiananmen Square here.

Bob Harris’s site has a poll:

What would we look forward to most in a second Bush term?

• A Supreme Court with three more Clarence Thomases
• Social Security administered by Halliburton
• A wider, more fascinating variety of national enemies
• Envying the dead

I won’t tell you which I voted for, because the secret ballot is sacred.

How can we revive the Belarusian villages?

Addendum on Brazil’s plans to shoot down drug-smuggling planes, from the BBC: “the authorities have also warned that drug planes that do not obey air force orders will be shot down even if they are carrying children.” Priorities.

Belarus is holding fraudulent elections to eliminate those pesky term limits on Lukashenko. Some of the ballots came conveniently pre-voted. You know, with a picture like this, Wonkette would make some joke about baby-eating. With Lukashenko the laughter produced by such a joke would be a touch more nervous.



Anyway, here’s Lukashenko’s website, English-language version. Go participate in a forum on “How can we revive the Belarusian villages?” Look at any of 873 pictures of the glorious president and his glorious mustache. Look at a glorious military parade in which soldiers march behind what appears to be a glorious 1960s sedan.



And here are 3 posts of mine that deal with Belarus. Link.
Link. Link.

The reality-based community

I know every blogger is saying this but you must all read the Ron Suskind NYT Magazine piece about Bush’s incredible belief that his “instincts” are always right. I hadn’t realized that the “faith-based presidency” was predicated so explicitly on the complete rejection of empiricism. Suskind says that after an earlier piece, a senior Bushie told him that people like him were “in what we call the reality-based community,” but that the US acts, and in so doing creates its own reality. “We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Reminds me of a quote (this is approximate, from memory): “A man of action can always find a philosopher to explain afterwards what he did.” Benito Mussolini.

While reading another, less subtle article about Bush’s brain, asking “Has Bush Lost His Reason?”, I suddenly realized that Shrub, in his petulant refusal to brook disagreement, reminds me of the little kid with god-like powers who everyone is afraid to contradict in Jerome Bixby’s story “It’s a Good Life,” which was the basis of a Twilight Zone episode, and look, someone put it on-line.

Speaking of people unlike you or me, the London Sunday Times has a story on the notes of a US Army psychiatrist who interviewed Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg. Goering told him that the Holocaust went against his “chivalric code”: “I revere women and I think it unsportsmanlike to kill children.” This is also why Republicans oppose abortion but support the death penalty: hunters and fishers throw back the small ones, in order to kill them later. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz for 4 years: “I don’t know what you mean about being upset about these things because I didn’t personally murder anybody. I was just the director of the extermination programme in Auschwitz.” The same standards will be used to promote Gen. Sanchez after the elections.

Kerry may have forgotten about Poland, but Poland wants to forget about Iraq and start withdrawing troops; it’s official now. And just when Bush wants to shift casualties to other COW countries (coalition of the willing). So it’s poor Britain’s turn yet again to send soldiers with silly hats



into harm’s way. Something like 650 soldiers will be moved from the relatively calm south to Baghdad, and put under American command, so that American troops can invade Fallujah yet again. In Britain, this is widely seen, and resented, as being driven by the American election.

Perhaps only in Germany: a restaurant for anorexics will open in Berlin, called Sehnsucht (“Longing”).

Halliburton has been dodging US sanctions on Iran by using foreign subsidiaries to sell it oil-drilling equipment. The Cayman Islands subsidiary is just a front, with correspondence to it forwarded to Houston.

Bob Harris, frequent contributor to the This Modern World blog, now has his own blog, Bobharris.com. Check it out. Like me, he sees Lesbian-gate as a deliberate distraction: “pick one non-inflammatory, coherent, compassionate sentence, and try to blow it up into a freakin’ sign of Kerry’s lack of compassion and communication skills. ... Classic Rove. You almost admire the skill. The same way a bullet aimed at your chest might glint in the sunlight just before impact. Nice workmanship, you can think, just before it hits you.” And earlier, on the elder Cheneys’ attitude towards Mary: “Closet. Undisclosed location. Whatever you want to call it is fine.”

Panda

David Brooks makes a mostly-dire effort at a parody of the debates, but does put one good line in Bush’s mouth: “America, we’ve been through a lot together. Imagine how bad things would be if I’d made any mistakes.”

Brazil will start shooting down planes suspected of drug smuggling. The AP story does not say if the CIA will be involved, as it is in Peru and Colombia, in targeting planes for summary execution.

Now, for no particular reason, but who needs a reason?--a panda cub:

Dick Cheney was for his own daughter before he was against her

Watch Jon Stewart on Crossfire, metaphorically strangling Tucker Carson with his own bow tie. The lower-quality video is a 7m. download.

Cheney, after thanking Edwards for speaking about Mary at the Veep debates, lambasted Kerry for doing the same: “I am not just speaking as a father here, although I am a pretty angry father.” What’s with the turnaround or, if you will, flip flop? One theory is that Cheney prefers to attack people who aren’t physically present, but this is disproved by the Pat Leahy “go fuck yourself” incident. Another theory, shockingly, is that he was told to feign outrage.

There is an interesting vice-presidential precedent. In 1992 Larry King asked Dan Quayle what he would do if his 13-year old daughter decided to have an abortion. For a moment Quayle forgot his role and gave a human answer: “obviously I would counsel her and talk to her and support her on whatever decision she made.” Quayle’s awful wife intervened and said that, actually, they would force their daughter to carry the pregnancy to term.

Remember, supporting your daughter is un-Republican.

Take me out to the women’s softball game

US forces have been bombing Fallujah over and over, in what it amuses them to call “precision strikes.” The WordPerfect dictionary has this usage notation in its definition of “precise”: “Strictly speaking, precise does not mean the same as accurate. Accurate means correct in all details , while precise contains a notion of trying to specify details exactly: if you say ‘It’s 4.04 and 12 seconds’ you are being precise, but not necessarily accurate (your watch might be slow).”

Every blog and cable news show is talking feverishly about Mary Cheney. I wonder if this isn’t playing into Team Chimpy’s hands, not by raising the ire of the God-botherers (my favorite silly argument is that Kerry & Edwards are trying to pry homophobic voters away from Bush...by publicly praising and supporting a lesbian), but by not talking about Bush’s poor debate performances and other, ya know, substantive policy issues. This may be why the Chimpites are keeping the issue going.

Not that homophobia isn’t an issue, of course, especially given Alan Keyes’s comments & Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.)’s anti-gay, but rather poorly phrased fund-raising letter: “Leaders of the homosexual lobby know if they can take me out, no one will stand against them in the future.” Oh you just wish, Marilyn. Just sitting by the phone, waiting for the leaders of the homosexual lobby to call, waiting, waiting...

I remember the first US Senate race between two women (1986), in which Linda Chavez started a whispering campaign that Barbara Mikulski was gay, and started calling herself Mrs. Chavez.

It has nothing do with shame

Lesbian-gate continues apace. Elizabeth Edwards wonders aloud if the Cheney’s are ashamed of their live gay daughter. Liz Cheney, the non-gay daughter, responds, “It has nothing do with shame. And I think Mrs. Edwards was also out of line. Mary is one of my heroes. And it has nothing to do with being ashamed of Mary.” No, it’s all about exploiting Mary for “some kind of political gain.” What kind, she does not say, and she is not pressed to define it, or explain how it differs from using this fake outrage for political gain. The best part of the interview:

ZAHN: Was your sister offended?

CHENEY: It was a very offensive thing for him to do, yes.

ZAHN: Did you talk to her about it?

CHENEY: It was very offensive. I think I’ll just leave it there.

Oh yes, a very awkward Thanksgiving indeed.

The English historian Conrad Russell has died. As Earl Russell (I will explain to Americans that Earl is a title of nobility, not an attempt to seem less like a member of the British House of Lords and more like a garage mechanic in Louisiana)(he was actually named after his father’s friend Joseph Conrad), he was also a leading Liberal/Lib Dem member of the Lords, surviving the cull of hereditaries. His father was Bertrand Russell, his great-grandfather the tiny prime minister John Russell, aka Jack Russell, inventor of the terrier.

Neither Bush nor Kerry were willing to be the first to stop their competitive display of public affection for their wives and daughters, but Bush was beginning to panic. Laura whispered, “Stand up straight and don’t scowl.”

Questions

I just came across an old post of mine, from December 2000, in which I noted that there were questions Shrub had been allowed not to answer during the 2000 campaign, despite having made his “character” and his faith his chief selling points. Another campaign is nearly over, and guess what?


--When did you take which drugs and how often?

--Do you really think you would have been given all that money to start an oil business when you were in your 20s if it weren’t for your connections?

--Did you fail in that business because you were drunk a large portion of the time, or were you just incompetent?

--Were you arrested any other times?

--How often did you drive drunk with underage siblings in the car (we know of at least two incidents)?

--Did you use AA to give up drinking, and if not, what methods did you use and what methods do you use currently?

--Do you consider yourself to have been an alcoholic?

--Do gays go to hell?

--Jews?

--Catholics? (and we know that Billy Graham has coached you to avoid this question by saying that it’s not up to you who goes to hell, but that’s not the question and you know it)

--What ever happened to Neil?

Clarity, conviction and compassion, oh my

I mentioned the plans to turn Rocky Flats into a wildlife refuge. They also plan to allow a little hunting, which is a definition of refuge I was not familiar with. At least it’ll make hunting a bit fairer, since the deer will be able to defend themselves by shooting death rays out of their eyes.

The Bush campaign has sent my cat a penetrating analysis of the debate. The email asserts, “The President spoke with clarity, conviction and compassion about the most important issues facing our country.” My cat does not care (evidently, the email has infected my computer with the dreaded Alliteration Virus).

“President Bush revealed John Kerry’s tendency to confuse a litany of complaints with a plan.” Of course Bush tends to confuse Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden. And “Kerry believes education is unrelated to the economy” while Bush “believes that no child should be left behind”. Except maybe Jenna. Bush “revealed just how far out of the mainstream Kerry’s record lies on abortion, gay marriage, immigration, taxes, health care and fiscal discipline.” My cat has a headache now, and wishes the whole thing would go away.


The Village Voice’s John Powers says Cheney is “a run-to-fat version of The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns”.

James Wolcott wonders about Bush’s “cavalier lack of preparation” for the debates. “He not only didn’t have the eloquence, he barely had the facts and figures. For some bizarre reason best left to future psychologists, Bush doesn’t seem to have approached these debates seriously. He refused to acknowledge he couldn’t get by with simply rehashing his stump speech.”

More fun with pictures.

A cheap and tawdry political trick

California voters: Although you will no doubt slavishly follow my recommendations, the SF Bay Guardian also always does a good job of describing the issues and candidates fairly, from a progressive standpoint--and then recommending that you vote for the lesser of 2 evils. But they’ll do it in such a way that you might start out reading their endorsement of, say, Barbara Boxer, planning to vote for her, and finish it convinced to vote for the Peace & Freedom candidate, as I just did.

Oh, and I hate do this to you, but they convinced me to vote against 1A, which I was always suspicious of.

Go Granny Go: In the Senate race in New Hampshire, former governor Judd Gregg was forced to debate the D candidate, 94-year-old Doris Haddock, famous for walking across the US at 90 in support of election reforms. He had initially refused, but she then challenged him to Scrabble, and he had to give in.

Which reminds me that I meant to criticize McNeil-Lehrer last week and yesterday because they keep running interviews with pollsters trying to predict the presidential election. Pointless, time-wasting segments, the reason, along with hurricanes and Fannie Mae stories, that I record the News Hour and watch it with one hand near the fast forward button. But there are 34 Senate races, 435 House races, and how many of them has the program bothered profiling?

Molly Ivins: “Character, says George Bush, is the issue. George Bush. Says character is the issue. ... What are George Bush’s principles, this man who accuses John Kerry of waffling.”

I’m afraid I altered that quote, which is from a column Molly wrote 12 years ago. It was George Bush the Elder accusing Clinton. Plus ca change, huh? More: “he has descended into rank McCarthyism with his unfounded charge that there was some impropriety about Clinton’s having visited Moscow...implying that it was unpatriotic to oppose the war in Vietnam.” Just what the Sinclair documentary says about Kerry. The column is in her new retrospective book, “Who Let the Dogs In? Incredible Political Animals I Have Known,” which I’m currently doling out to myself in little bits, as treats.

Speaking of “plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose,” the Indy has a counterpart to the NYT story I mentioned yesterday about Allawi bringing Baathists back into power: “Alleged war criminals [i.e., the warlords] are poised to take positions of power in Afghanistan’s new government”. As in Iraq, it’s just plain convenient to bring back the old shitheads, because they know how to make the trains/torture chambers/poppy trade run on time.

In the debate, Kerry referred in this wise to Mary Cheney: “I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was. She’s being who she was born as.” That’s the sum total of what he had to say, but Lynne Cheney threw a tantrum, calling it “a cheap and tawdry political trick,” saying he “is not a good man” and generally letting her daughter know how truly ashamed she is of her sexual identity. Really will be a hell of an awkward Thanksgiving this year. Oh, and fuck you Lynne Cheney.

Debate 3: A plan isn't a litany of complaints

Full text.

Bush says Kerry’s quoting him about not being worried about Osama is ex-ag-er-ra-ted, taking the 5 syllable word very slowly.

Bush says we took the right action in not permitting the contaminated flu vaccine into the US. Actually, it was the British that shut them down. He had nothing to do with it. Bush says he hasn’t had a flu shot. I’m waiting for him to turn to Kerry and ask him if he has, the big coward. He blames the reliance for flu vaccine on 2 companies on litigation. Everyone says it’s more to do with the unpredictable level of demand for the vaccine year to year.

Ohmygod, Kerry is going to do that “I have a plan” thing over and over again. Bush says a plan is not a litany of complaints, and calls it bait & switch. Like a lot of Bush’s memorized come-backs, it could be easily turned back by a method Kerry would never use: “President Bush, you just used the word ‘litany.’ Could you define litany? Could you spell it?”

Oh-so-hilarious Bush put down: Pay-go to a senator from Mass., a colleague of Ted Kennedy, means you pay and he goes ahead and spends.

I know Massachusetts isn’t that popular a state, so Kerry isn’t standing up for his home state, but isn’t there something unseemly about a “president” of the entire United States using the name of one of those states over and over as an insult?

Kerry alludes to The Sopranos. Oh, he’s so cool and “with it.”

Oops, there’s that blinking again.

Bush: litany of misstatements. Oh dear, he’s learned a new word. Add it to the drinking game. Also: “his rhetoric doesn’t match his record.”

Question: is homosexuality a choice. Bush doesn’t know. Or care.

Bush uses loaded phrase “culture of life” again. Adoption is “a great alternative” to abortion. Also abstinence. Praises Kerry’s wife for being involved in abstinence programs. I’ll bet she is.

Oh, there’s that chuckle again, that always makes me want to smack him. Bush’s chuckle, of course.

The No Child Left Behind Act is “really a jobs act, when you think about it,” at least if you’re trying to fill up time because you have nothing to say about jobs and the minimum wage.

With an opportunity to go after Bush for refusing to give his position on abortion rights, Kerry hits him with the softest of Nerf blows. Bush responds with an attack on Kerry having a “litmus test.” Again, Kerry should ask him to define it. Why do R’s think that that phrase has any resonance with the American people? Oh no, he has a litmus test! Duck!

Ah, there’s the “global test” again. Kerry suggests instead a “sort of truth standard.”

Bush: Part of being a hopeful society is that somebody owns something. Unless it’s a crack pipe.

Bush: “my faith is very personal.” Then fucking keep it to yourself. Faith gives him calmness. I thought that not knowing what was going on is what gives him calmness. God wants everybody to be free. The freedom in Afghanistan is a gift from the almighty. Can you say crusade?

Kerry: we have a lot more loving of our neighbor to do. Thanks, we had enough of that with Clinton.

What did you learn from the women in your life? Bush’s wife was a librarian so...not much. Although there’s this:

Barrel of fish

The Bush campaign is accusing Kerry of standing “in pulpits across the country using Scripture to make political attacks.”

After John Edwards makes a comment about stem-cell research helping people like Christopher Reeve, Sen. Bill “Here, Kitty Kitty” Frist accuses him of cruelly offering false hope to patients. Frist prefers to offer false despair.
(Later: Edwards said “When John Kerry is President, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get out of that wheelchair and walk again.” The repugnant Mr. Frist may have a point.)

From a letter to the NYT: “The Bush record is a barrel of fish, and John Kerry can’t seem to hit any of them.”

Mass graves are being dug up in Iraq, with children in them, and I’ll bet Bush mentions that fact in tonight’s debate even though it’s supposed to be confined to domestic and economic issues. I don’t think it’s too cynical of me to wonder about the timing of this. (Bob Goodsell was on this first.)

The NYT has a piece on Allawi trying to hobble the de-Baathization process, trying to disband the independent commission, and then not allowing its members sufficient passes to enter the Green Zone, ordering ministries not to deal with it, etc.

Hyman, Hyman, nope, can't think of anything humorous to say about that name

Ha’aretz locates one of the secret CIA detention/torture centers, in Jordan. Human Rights Watch claims that this location is so secret that Bush asked the CIA not to tell him where it was. Not that he could find Jordan on a map. But if the existence of such centers is to remain a (dirty little) secret, how can you release any of the prisoners, or try them in real courts? Ever?

I’ve stayed away from the Sinclair Broadcasting issue, because I don’t want to be on the side of speech suppression, even when the speech involved is nasty and one-sided. Did I say “even”--I meant especially. Sinclair has called its anti-Kerry film (I was going to use a pejorative adjective, but I haven’t seen it, so I shouldn’t be characterizing it--that’s a hint to other bloggers) a news report, and while that may be laughable, we really don’t want lawsuits every time Frontline or NBC News profiles a candidate, and the news programs we’d get if that sort of scrutiny became common would be even duller and stupider than they are now.

And then Sinclair VP Mark Hyman, a jerk of the highest order, goes on tv and makes me want to join the baying crowd. First he tells CNN that if this is an in-kind campaign contribution, then every car bomb in Iraq is a contribution to Kerry’s campaign. Then he goes on McNeil-Lehrer and says that his idea of equal time is for Kerry to come on after and respond to the charges that he’s a traitor. No, Sinclair should be required to air anything Kerry wants it to air. In a perfect world, that would be “Fahrenheit 9/11.” The antidote to bad speech is more speech, not censorship.

Purely coincidentally, I’m pleased to announce that this blog has been mentioned negatively (idiot, schmuck were the words used) on a website I will not name here. And let me extend a big welcome to anyone who may have clicked through from there: a mind willing to listen to multiple viewpoints is a free mind.

Irony in Iraq

The US occupation authorities are not letting the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspect in Iraq. And the interim government isn’t fulfilling its responsibilities to the IAEA either.

Interesting LA Times article, explaining the Duelfer report, “Through Hussein’s Looking Glass.” In the world that only existed inside Saddam’s head, he won the 1st Gulf War, was the greatest Arab leader in history, and, get this, the CIA was smart enough to know that he had no WMDs. He was bluffing Iran, but he assumed--god, this cracks me up--that the CIA was competent.

And then Zarqawi will jump out of the wedding cake...

In preparation for the last presidential debate, I have devised the World’s Shortest Presidential Debate Drinking Game: whenever Bush brings up Kerry’s “reducing terrorism to a nuisance” quote, take a drink. Five minutes into the debate, you will be lying unconscious in a pool of vomit. Drinking game over.

I asked 3 days ago how long the US could deny that it bombed a wedding in Fallujah. Well the NYT (which doesn’t bother updating us on the condition of the bride/widow) quotes a senior Pentagon official, who was having a senior-Pentagon-official moment, saying “We know what the strike was supposed to hit, and we hit it. If a wedding was going on, well, it was in concert with a meeting with a top Zarqawi lieutenant.” Some weddings just have the worst entertainment.

The article also quotes a “Pentagon official” thus:

“If there are civilians dying in connection with these attacks, and with the destruction, the locals at some point have to make a decision. Do they want to harbor the insurgents and suffer the consequences that come with that, or do they want to get rid of the insurgents and have the benefits of not having them there?”

Please note that this official is admitting to deliberately bombing a civilian population in order to get them to “make a decision.” This is the textbook definition of both a) terrorism, and b) a war crime.

The government is dismantling the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. It just gave up the idea of blowing up the old plutonium processing building because that might be unsafe. They are planning to turn the site into a wildlife refuge. Really, really wild life. But at least you’ll be able to see the animals at night. When a superintelligent antelope with two heads takes over the world, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Freedom is not given. It is taken by force

Bush meets his Waterloo
(sorry, couldn’t resist)
(but didn’t try very hard).

Kerry really needs to clarify that reducing-terrorism-to-a-nuisance quote to counter the silly charge that he doesn’t take terrorism seriously. If I may make a suggestion: “I meant to say ‘a fucking nuisance.’”

The WaPo spots a banner in the Iraqi city of Hit: “Freedom is not given. It is taken by force.”

Bush chair Marc Racicot has written to the AFL-CIO accusing it of, well really, an unspecified but indirect connection to vandalism at several Bush campaign offices (the union demonstrated at those offices to protest the new overtime rules). Note the care taken to avoid slanderous accusations in the letter (full text here): “Protests by your organization come on the heels of several other incidents... I hope you will put an end to protest activities that have led to injuries, property damage, vandalism and voter intimidation. We will hold you and your organization accountable for the actions of your members and urge you to immediately discontinue any coordinated protest efforts.” Led to? Come on the heels of? Not exactly proof of a causal connection, and indeed the campaign later clarified itself, according to Reuters: “Bush campaign spokesman Brian Jones said Racicot did not mean to link shootings and break-ins to the union protests. ‘I think what he’s trying to show is that there is this pattern of violence and vandalism and just pointing to the fact that it’s a part of an overall pattern,’ Jones said.”

The over-all message is familiar: your legal, peaceful dissent from governmental positions emboldens the enemy, so shut up.


Freedom is not given. It is taken by force.

Even though we’ve destroyed their houses, the people are happy with us

The military budget just passed eliminates the limit on the number of US troops and “contractors” that can be sent to Colombia in support of the government of death-squad promoter and violent thug Alvaro Uribe (I’m not a big fan of Uribe). I’ve written a lot in the past about Colombia and Uribe, and here’s the results of a Google search for those posts (not in chronological order, I’m afraid, but the dates are clear enough).

The Iraqi “government” has been buying up weapons in Sadr City. They may come from members of the Mahdi Army, or not, since the prices are higher than those on the black market. Just in case you’ve got a few RPGs or machine guns you’ve been wanting to get rid of, I am providing the buy-back price list as a public service:

• Heavy machinegun, $1,000
• Heavy machinegun ammunition, 440 rounds, $200
• 60mm mortar, $225
• 120mm mortar, $275
• Rocket-propelled grenade, $160
• Kalashnikov, $150
• Romanian sniper rifle, $630
• Roadside bombs, $50
• Katyusha rocket-launcher $50
• Empty Kalashnikov magazine, $4
• Grenade, $5
• 350 Kalashnikov rounds, $320

Nothing about bows & arrows. One of the many industries for which tax breaks were just secretly voted by Congress is bow and arrow manufacturers.

Elsewhere in Iraq, Marine Capt. Carrie Batson, herewith declared Military Moron of the Day, said of the massive destruction caused by American bombing of Najaf, “Even though we’ve destroyed their houses, the people are happy with us” because Sadr had “hijacked” their town.

The divine right of incumbent Congresscritters

Happy Indigenous People’s Day (Berkeley only).

The LA Times says that of California’s 53 Congressional seats, exactly one is even close to being a competitive race (and that one isn’t very close). Also, 2 out of NY’s 29, 1 out of Florida’s 25. “We’re getting back to the divine right of kings,” says alliterative Rob Richie of the Center for Voting and Democracy. Which explains why members of Congress so often seem like the result of generations of cousins marrying cousins.

Kerry tells the NYT, “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they’re a nuisance.” Even when he’s right, you just want to slap him, don’t you? Although from the look of his face, that would probably hurt your hand more than his face.

Saudi Arabia will have municipal elections in February, its first elections of any kind since the 1960s. And no, women won’t be allowed to vote. The voting age is 21.

Tom Coburn, the asshole running for Senate in Oklahoma, says (said, actually, on 8/31/04, and we’re only hearing this now?) “lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that’s happened to us?” Us? Spend a lot of time in girls’ bathrooms in schools in southeast Oklahoma, do ya, Tom?

Coburn also has an ad out which “shows images of Hispanics and dark hands receiving welfare payments,” echoing an old Jesse Helms ad, which I’ve been unable to see. It’s not, for example, on Coburn’s website, although many other of his ads are. If anyone’s seen it online somewhere, drop me an email.

And given that he’s running racist ads, it occurs to me to ask how many of those under-age girls he sterilized were non-white.

They do exist

Rumsfeld is upset that the media are ignoring the Iraqi security forces: “They do exist. Over 700 of them have been killed.” There’s something wrong with that logic, I just can’t put my finger on it...

The party line is that the complete failure of safeguards against fraudulent voting in Afghanistan is irrelevant. So what if the condom broke, baby, we had a good time, didn’t we? Karzai says the ink thing “did not diminish the value people gave to the vote.” Robert Barry, the OSCE guy I quoted a while back, says talking about the fraud would “put into question the expressed will of millions of citizens.” As Antonin Scalia wrote in Bush v. Gore, counting the votes accurately might “cast a cloud on what [Karzai] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.” Vote-counting is the boring, messy bit, like cleaning up after a party, and I say we don’t bother doing it. If the only thing that’s important is that people showed up to vote, who needs to count ballots? Let’s declare victory and go home.

Many of the candidates have been bribed/pressured/whatever to back away from demands to re-run the election. They will accept the findings of an independent commission. An “independent” commission, in Afghanistan. Really now.

Ground zero

The Indy: “Bombs in Baghdad killed 18 people as the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, declared during a visit to Iraq that America was winning the war against insurgency.” Also, “Mr Rumsfeld’s trip had not been announced beforehand for security reasons.” He held a Q&A with Marines, who were ordered beforehand not to ask him when they would be going home. He told the Marines that Iraq was “ground zero” in the war on terrorism, which must have reassured them no end (American Heritage Dictionary: “Ground zero. n. 1. The target of a projectile, such as a missile or bomb. 2. The site directly below, directly above, or at the point of detonation of a nuclear weapon.”).

For a change of pace, a religious story, from the London Times:

Spanish count jet skis to heaven
From David Sharrock in San Sebastián

A SOCIALITE count hopes to avoid Purgatory by embarking on a maritime pilgrimage, using a jet ski to undertake one of Europe’s most well-trodden paths, the Camino de Santiago.

Alvaro de Marichalar, Spain’s most eligible bachelor, was expected to be somewhere off Spain’s “Coast of Death” this morning, bearing down upon Santiago de Compostela at 35 knots.
For centuries weary pilgrims have walked the Camino de Santiago, from the French Pyrenees and through northern Spain, to atone for their sins, taking an average of three weeks.

But Count Alvaro, who earned a place in The Guinness Book of Records in 2002 by crossing the Atlantic by jet ski, is pioneering what could turn out to be the salvation of time-starved believers.

This is a Xacobeo year — when the day of St James falls on a Sunday in Spain — which means the souls of pilgrims who complete the Camino are excused from Purgatory.

Count Alvaro hopes that by Wednesday evening, having made landfall on the Galician coast and marched the last 18 miles inland, the Camino will have been completed in record time.

The count, 43, was anxious to dispel thoughts that this 650-mile journey is no more than a jaunt for someone who took 63 days to complete the 10,000 nautical miles from Rome to Miami about two years ago.

“Success is never guaranteed, and I will be standing up all the time to avoid injuring my back,” he said.

Credibility test

Although Bush didn’t like the idea of global tests, he says that Kerry “doesn’t pass the credibility tests.” Must not be graded on a curve.

Everyone is rushing, prematurely, to proclaim the Afghan elections good enough. For example, the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), which had just a handful of its own election monitors, has pooh-poohed calls for the Afghan election to be re-run, its ambassador saying that that “would not do service to the people of Afghanistan who came out yesterday, at great personal risk, to vote.” This is a variant of Bush’s “You can’t call the war a mistake, that would demoralize the troops” argument.

Oh, and this should be obvious, but the news reports featuring pictures and interviews with happy voters came from the few parts of Afghanistan it was safe enough for reporters to travel to.

Another piece of animation by the guys who did “This Land.” This one’s even better.

Posturing

Afghan women (one presumes) on line to vote.

It’s bad enough to see the word election applied to the event that just took place in Afghanistan, but to use the word democracy is to strip the word of 90% of its meaning, to turn it into a signifier without a signified (that’s my little homage to the late Jacques Derrida; don’t worry, I won’t do it again.)

First, democracy is a SYSTEM of government. But there won’t be elections for a legislative body for another 6 months. Even if you accept this election as legitimate, it was only for a single branch of government. There are no checks and balances, unless of course you count the fact that the only power he really has grows out of the barrel of an American gun. If he weren’t a puppet, he’d be an absolute dictator.

As for the elections, there seems to be an unspoken agreement in the media to pretend that the mere fact that a lot of people voted, without too many casualties, legitimizes the election, no matter how little the final vote count will correspond to the votes actually cast by the people who voted who were actually qualified to vote. We all know that more people registered than were eligible to register (one of my readers has pointed out that population figures for Afghanistan are just estimates, which is true but the over-registration was highly uneven geographically, with some regions reaching more than 140%). Given that, you’d think the failure today of the procedures that were supposed to prevent multiple voting would be considered serious, but when 15 candidates have the presumption to complain, the WaPo dismissively describes them as “posturing,” which is as childishly insulting as those “Sore Loserman” placards in 2000.

And then there’s the absence of newspapers or national media of any kind, or any other form of political infrastructure, the fact that the country is occupied by a foreign power and too unsafe for the candidates to campaign (I doubt whether the majority of voters could have named more than 2 of the candidates), the attempts by the US ambassador to force candidates to quit, little stuff like that. This is not to denigrate the brave Afghans who went to the polls, some of them children, some of them repeatedly, some enthusiastic at the thought of rejecting warlordism and embracing democracy. But the majority of countries have elections, and the majority of those countries are not democracies.

Moving on alphabetically, I’d also like to reject the results of Australia’s elections. Just because I don’t like John Howard, a liar and racist douchebag.

In 1941 Americans were deeply affected by the diary of a little Dutch boy (Dirk van der Heide, My Sister and I), whose mother had been killed by German bombing during the invasion of Rotterdam and who had fled with his sister to safety in America. Turns out, the whole thing was manufactured by the British Secret Service to help convince the US to join the war.

I haven’t yet mentioned the warning issued, and then retracted, that Al Qaida intended to attack schools in Florida, Oregon, NJ and Michigan. All of which are swing states.

The story about Bush possibly having worn an earpiece in the 1st debate, which was originally just one of those “rumors on the Internets,” has now received play in the WaPo, NYT & Independent. This may not contribute anything, but in Marlon Brando’s last film, the not-very-good “The Score,” Brando refused to memorize lines, which were fed to him through an earpiece.

Who is more important

Made-up quotes are in red.

15 of 16 presidential candidates in Afghanistan’s elections today denounced the election process when indelible ink put on voters’ thumbs to prevent fraud turned out to be rather easily, uh, delible. Karzai dismissed their complaints, asking “Who is more important, these 15 candidates or the millions of people who turned out today to vote,” waiting for hours “in the dust and snow and rain” in order “to participate in a complete bloody farce.”

The UN Security Council passed the Russian resolution for creating a list of terrorist organizations, speeding up extradition and imposing travel bans. Expect many loud battles over what groups are or are not terrorist. US ambassador to the UN John Danforth says that “the deliberate massacre of innocents is never justifiable in any cause,” adding, “unless you, like, totally accidentally, bomb a wedding or something. That’s cool.”

In unrelated news, US planes bombed a wedding in Fallujah. The US has never admitted that the last wedding we bombed (in December, I believe) was actually a wedding, so we’ll see how long they can claim that this was a Zarqawi hideout. Forever, would be my guess. He was probably hiding in the cake. 11 members of the wedding party were killed, including the groom.

The Bush campaign’s email to my cat says: “President Bush won a decisive victory last night. The President dominated the debate with impassioned, thoughtful and concise arguments that left Kerry looking petty and defensive as he sputtered out tired, false political rhetoric and distortions that shattered his credibility and contradicted the Senator’s 20-year record of being on the wrong side of history on national security and domestic policy.” It goes on to quote from emails sent to the campaign from...hey, they’re all from swing states, what a coincidence!... such as “You were awesome,” “You are my winner tonight.” The only quote from Bush himself is the “You can run, but you can’t hide” line, which Atrios and others have pointed out Bush also liked to use about Osama bin Laden.

I was about to say that despite walking with sticks and being 6’4”, Osama seems to be running and hiding perfectly adequately, when it hit me that John Kerry is also 6’4”. So that’s where Osama’s been hiding all this time! Right in plain sight. Oh, he’s good.