PS To help you

When I commented yesterday about Negroponte’s record not being addressed by mainstream media or mainstream Democratic politicians, I hadn’t gotten to the part of McNeil-Lehrer where Harry Reid showed his complete ignorance--“He was ambassador to what, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Freedonia, Tatooine, Barsoom? Am I getting warmer?” Lehrer had to help him out. Liberal Oasis has links to articles on Negroponte.

Larry Beinhart (the guy who wrote the novel that became “Wag the Dog”) has a term for this sort of data: Fog Facts, “important things that nobody seems able to focus on any more than they can focus on a single droplet in the mist. They are known, but not known.”

And the NYT today, in a biographical article on Negroponte, has only this to say: “He has spent the ensuing two decades vigorously defending himself against allegations that he played down human rights violations in Honduras when their exposure could have undermined the Reagan administration’s Latin American agenda.” It has indeed been two decades, so why is the NYT still playing it as he said/she said?

The NYT has an amusing obit of Samuel Alderson, inventor of the crash-test dummy, which includes this data: “the first crash-test dummies were cadavers. While useful in collecting basic data, they lacked the durability required for repeated trials.”

Responding to the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, the tourist minister resigned today. Well, it can’t have made his job any easier.

The Daily Telegraph says that the Americans are claiming that the safest place in Iraq is... wait for it ... Fallujah. In one wrecked school, a Marine painted this graffito (note to Telegraph: one graffito, two graffiti): “We came, we saw, we took over all. PS To help you.”

The pope says, in memoirs coming out next week, that the Virgin Mary saved his life during the 1981 assassination attempt; “it was just as if someone guided this bullet.” He explains why the bullet nevertheless hit him: “that Mary chick is seriously passive-aggressive.”

National reconciliation

The WaPo thinks the Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s fatwas are too intrusive, citing this one: “It is unworthy to drink too much water; to drink water after eating fatty food; and to drink water while standing during the night. It is also unworthy to drink water with one’s left hand; to drink from the side of a container which is cracked or chipped off, or from the side of its handle.” Also appearing today is this AP story about an Israeli rabbi who says that sticking used gum under a desk is a violation of Jewish law.

The WaPo interviewed Iyad “Comical” Allawi, who warns against moves away from “national reconciliation” and says he might go back into exile after leaving office if he doesn’t feel safe enough. In other words for him national reconciliation means “Please don’t kill me.”

All-Powerful

Israel will suspend the demolition of the houses of the families of suicide bombers. Astonishingly, they have realized that this policy just pissed people off.



The Vatican issues a denunciation of the “religion of health,” by which they mean people in wealthy countries wanting their ailments cured by medical science rather than suffering stoically, like the pope, who is 133 years old.

And the Pontifical University Regin Apostolorum in Rome is offering a class in exorcism. Say, you know how shakes and speaks incoherently as if possessed: the pope. Just sayin’.

Guardian headline: “Bush Appoints All-Powerful Spy Chief.” I think if Negroponte was all-powerful, he wouldn’t be bald. Just sayin’.

Whatever it Was, I Was Against It

McNeil-Lehrer had a discussion of Negroponte in which his record in Honduras wasn’t even mentioned. This country’s media and politicians have no memory at all. That’s how Jeff Sessions can go on tv to talk about judicial nominees being rejected without anyone mentioning his own past as a failed nominee. This is also how everyone can have fun with the story of Mary Kay Le Tourneau, the teacher convicted of stat rape, now marrying her victim, without mention of her father, Rep. John Schmitz, an Orange County congresscritter so far to the right he thought Reagan was a communist (literally), and who when Mary Kay was a child publicly pulled her out of several schools when they began sex ed courses.

Which brings me to my new project. One of the goals of this blog is to pay attention to the historical context of current events. One means to this end is that my archives go further back than those of most blogs. In 1996 I began sending out comments on the news to the few friends I knew who had email. The number of people on the list grew and so did the volume of my writing. I developed a bloggy style long before the word blog was coined. When I finally began an actual blog last July, I also posted all the old emails, shorn of the copyrighted newspaper articles, Dave Barry pieces and whatnot, all available in the archives linked in the right-hand column (Blogger didn’t foresee my need to retroactively give posts dates earlier than 1999, so the January 1999 link actually contains material from January 1996 through January 1999). So you can read what I had to say about the Clinton impeachment or the 2000 elections or anything else, although I’m not sure why you would, and it’s all searchable through the Google box at the top of the page. Here’s what I said the first time I ever mentioned Osama bin Laden, after the embassy bombings in August 1998:

I suspect this bin Laden character has been promoted, and probably promoted way out of his league, to Darth-Vader-of-the-year to put a human face on the Enemy.

Oops.

But before that, in 1986, I began taking notes on the news into a series of notebooks, to assist my memory, to preserve stupid remarks by Ronald Reagan that I wanted to be able to quote precisely, and because if you’re paying serious attention to a subject, including current events, you take notes. It was also a place to tape cut-out articles and political cartoons, right down quotes, etc.

I’ve recently begun to type those notes into my computer, a little at a time, something I’ve always wanted to do so that I don’t have to read my own handwriting and pore through dozens of pages every time I want to look something up. The job has turned out to be quite interesting, a chance to relive Iran-Contra, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Dan Quayle years. Remember the 1980s? The movies: 8½, Grand Illusion, The Seventh Seal, Holiday. And the music: Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvořák--whatever happened to those guys?

Now these are notes written to myself, they are not a blog, but they may be useful to someone and it takes almost no extra work at all to put them online, so allow me to introduce: “Whatever It Was, I Was Against It.”
1986-89, so far, but I’ll add more as I type it. The permanent link is in the column on the right, at the top of the archives list.

Not moving with the democratic movement

During the Iran-Contra investigations, which now seem like a much more innocent time--a thought which would have astonished me at the time--it wasn’t quite clear if John Negroponte was actively colluding with and covering up and lying about the Honduran government’s use of death squads, or if he was lazy, stupid and oblivious. With the information we have now (it’s all over the Web today, you can’t take a step without getting some Negroponte on your shoe), it was definitely the former, but the point is that Negroponte’s attempts to save his reputation depended on presenting himself as oblivious to what was going on around him (the Mr. Magoo/Ronald Reagan defense). So he’s the perfect man to be Chimpy’s intelligence tsar, even though he only got the job after everyone else refused it.

One of my favorite Negroponte moment’s was when he was appointed ambassador to Iraq. The CPA put up a picture of him at the UN, this one


standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica. Within hours, they’d cropped the picture.



The Bushies still aren’t giving a coherent reason for having withdrawn the ambassador to Syria, if they’re not going to blame it explicitly for the Hariri assassination. Here’s Bush, today:

We’ve recalled our ambassador, which indicates that the relationship is not moving forward, that Syria is out of step with the progress being made in a greater Middle East, that democracy is on the move. And this is a country that isn’t moving with the democratic movement.

Focusing on indecency

BBC headline: “US Congress Focuses on Indecency.” No kidding.

The Onion offers details of the Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire.

Musical condoms.

I’ve noticed before that Bush’s Social Security rhetoric is often addressed narrowly to his own age group. I don’t have a Bush quote handy, but the White House website says

The President is committed to keeping the promise of Social Security for today’s retirees and those nearing retirement and strengthening Social Security for our children and grandchildren.

So anyone under 55 falls into the category of “our” children and grandchildren.

Switzerland is to return to Nigeria money stolen by the late dictator Sani Abacha, in a devastating blow to the country’s scam email trade, whose discerning clientele seem already to have moved on: someone bought this picture and a companion piece, painted by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge in 1903, for $590,400.



And still a better investment idea than Bush’s Social Security plan. Coolidge also wrote an opera and was an inventor and a banker.

Finding solace only in the works of P. G. Wodehouse

The Bushies are going after Syria for Rafik Hariri’s assassination, and clearly they’ve learned something from the Iraqi WMD fiasco, because they aren’t even bothering to fabricate evidence this time, and some of them (speaking anonymously, so far) are saying that Syria can be blamed even if it didn’t do it. It will be awfully hard to accuse them of lying if they refuse to use any facts or arguments. Or irony, since they’re saying that even if it was just the action of one of Lebanon’s many terrorist groups, Syria’s occupation of Lebanon created the instability that made that possible. Do as we say, not as we do. The Bushies’ foreign policy is just like its budget--it pretends the costs of the Iraqi occupation are “off-book” and don’t count. So the State Dept says that the recall of the American ambassador to Syria is to express the US’s “profound outrage” over the assassination, but that we’re not accusing Syria of that assassination. Makes perfect sense.

I don’t know if Syria is responsible. Given Hariri’s extensive protection, some are saying that only a state has the capability of pulling something like this off, but the same thing was said after September 11. Actually, it’s hard to see why Syria would carry out this assassination of a man no longer in office at this particular time when 1) the US is looking for an excuse to go after this particular “outpost of tyranny” and 2) Israel is desperately trying to derail Russian sales of anti-aircraft missiles to Syria.

Speaking of keeping the facts off-book, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions appeared on McNeil-Lehrer today, calling the D’s obstructionists for failing to pass all of Bush’s judicial nominees. Once again, no one had the bad taste to bring up Sessions’s past as a Reagan nominee for the federal bench, rejected because of certain racist acts in his past and remarks like “I used to think the Klan was all right until I learned they smoked marijuana.”

On the same subject, Orrin Hatch was quoted as saying that the D Senators just hate Bush. Somehow Hatch’s air of sorrowful sanctimony lets him get away with this sort of crap. A couple of weeks ago, his speech in favor of Alberto Gonzales outright accused D’s of opposing him because he was Hispanic.

About the increasing use of the word “obstructionist”: the term implies that the only legitimate agenda is that of the majority party, as if every one of the Democratic congresscritters was not elected in their own right, with their own mandate. The long term for that attitude is “tyranny of the majority,” the short term is “tyranny.”

From the Daily Telegraph:

President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya is said to have taken to his bed in despair, finding solace, according to a cabinet colleague, “only in the works of P G Wodehouse”.

Thank you for clearing that up: from the NYT’s corrections section: “A front-page article on Friday about Prince Charles's announcement that he will marry his longtime lover, Camilla Parker Bowles, misstated the name of a ceremonial post held by her former husband, Andrew Parker Bowles. It is silver stick in waiting to the queen, not silver stick in waiting to the prince.”

Guns or butter, elites or cadres, reconciliation or liberation, paper or plastic

Looking at the names of parties that will have seats in the new Iraqi National Assembly, I can’t decide which one I like best, the National Independent Elites and Cadres Party, or the Reconciliation and Liberation Entity. Advice to both: pick one thing and stick with it; either elites or cadres, reconciliation or liberation.

Also, the Elites ’n Cadres have 3 seats, so that’s one for the elites, one for the cadres, and fearsome civil war over the 3rd seat.

The prime minister is likely to be Ibrahim Jaafari, the brother-in-law of Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Article 1 of the new Iraqi Constitution: It is mandatory for everyone to own a Grand Ayatollah Sistani bath towel.



I wonder how wise it was to choose a former exile (1980-2003).

The world condemned the Lord’s Resistance Army (in Uganda) for forcibly impressing thousands of children. But what to do with them when they are liberated? The Ugandan government has an idea: stick them in the Ugandan Army.

Try to imagine a statement so stupid that a Fox exec would have to resign for saying it

A bunch of stories have framed the resignation of Eason Jordan from CNN as the victory of bloggers, and gosh don’t I feel proud. You’ll notice that the content of Jordan’s remarks was not only so far beyond the pale that he had to quit, but evidently were so far beyond the pale that there was no necessity for the media to fact-check, and ask whether the US military actually has targeted journalists in Iraq, which in at least the cases of Al Jazeera and the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad it certainly did (click here for an April 2003 Robert Fisk article).
(Update: and a current AlterNet article.)

There are other disturbing elements to this: Jordan was an executive, not a reporter, and certainly not on the air, so I’m not sure what standards his comments should be held to and whether we want to open up that can of McCarthyism. Also, since the wingers seem to think that the transcript of the not-open-to-the-public event at which Jordan spoke should be made available to them, well, I’ve always been curious about what people like Bush and Cheney say at all those fundraisers they go to....

And, hey, what about Cheney’s energy task force? And...

Speaking of ridiculously disproportionate responses, the McLibel case is now entering its 15th year, with a ruling due from the European Court of Human Rights.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Pentagon website puts up a picture of a new plane, not at all photographed to look like a penis.

Now you have to sit down and decide whether you want this relationship to continue

Tony Blair, who is so much less popular than the party he leads, admits to past arrogance in an arrogantly humble speech, if you know what I mean, and says he hasn’t listened to the British people enough. He creepily compares his relationship with the British people to a marriage, saying that they can “go off with” Michael Howard or Charles Kennedy if they like, but “now you, the British people, have to sit down and decide whether you want this relationship to continue”. Why does that require sitting down, I wonder? I’m sure Charles’s proposal to Camilla was more awkward (“Mummy says it’s alright”), but Blair seems once again to have forgotten that he is not a president but a prime minister, answerable to Parliament.

Once again, life is imitating “The Prisoner.”

A large black ball, originally designed by Swedish scientists for use on Mars, could be the latest weapon in the war against burglars.

The device, developed at the University of Uppsala, acts as a high-tech security guard capable of detecting an intruder thanks to either radar or infra-red sensors. Once alerted, it can summon help, sound an alarm or pursue the intruders, taking pictures. ...

Serbian President Boris Tadic goes to Kosovo in an echo of Milosevic’s visit to the province 16 years ago, and tells an audience of ethnic Serbs, “This is Serbia.” No it isn’t, and fuck off out of it.

Iraqi elections

After two weeks, and no explanation for what the problem was with those 300 ballot boxes or how the problem was resolved, the Iraqi election results have finally been released. Figures on how many people were killed on election day still haven’t been added up, for some reason.

I’ve been assuming that the Iraqi ballot boxes would be stuffed, at the very least to increase voter turnout to make the election look more legitimate. So in one sense, it’s a good sign that the official turnout figure for Anbar province (including the rubble fields of Fallujah) was an uninflated-sounding 2%. In another sense, of course, a national election is not legitimate when that many people are not represented.

It’s also nice to see a politician spend huge amounts of money from mysterious sources, monopolize the airwaves, and then be thoroughly trounced, as Iyad “Comical” Allawi has been. It will be interesting to see if the secret police thugs and torturers he has recruited transfer their loyalties to whoever replaces him.

Some years ago San Francisco, which like Iraq had at-large elections, had a polling station which for some years was in an upscale bakery, which gave away pastries to voters. Voter turnout in that precinct was nearly 100%, giving that precinct disproportionate, um, weight in the board of supervisors, so the bakery was quite rightly told to stop. That is how these things should work. In Iraq, that 2% turnout was matched by 92% turnout in a Kurdish region.

The Indy says that US officials are having “are you now or have you ever been” discussions with Iraqi politicians to see how close they are to Iran, and how the Iraqi government will react when the US attacks Iran.

Way out there

So the US was sending spy drones over Iran, and the Iranians assume not that they’re from the Great Satan, but that they’re UFOs. Infidels from Alpha Centauri, no doubt. The truth is out there.

A couple of entries to a New Statesman competition last month, which asked for updated sayings:

It’s a short road that has no Starbucks.

Look before you invade.

Three exemplars of democratic values

Schwarzenegger tells a Republican group that Democratic members of the state legislature are “addicts” who “cannot stop spending money.” But the LAT buries the lead by focusing on that quote. The key line is actually his most explicit statement yet of the führerprinzip: “Now,” he said, “we have a governor who represents the people’s interests instead of special interests.” D’s didn’t “get the message” of the recall of Gray Davis in 2003: “If they had been on the ballot, they all would have been recalled.” So Ahhnuld considers himself the only genuine representative of the people (notwithstanding the 2004 elections).

After all the talk about spreading freedom, Bush has had to send Henry Kissinger to Moscow to reassure Putin that he doesn’t mean a word of it. Because if you want to send a message about how important ideals and democracy are to you, the messenger you choose would just have to be Henry Fucking Kissinger.

Speaking of bad representatives of democratic values, Dexter Filkins’s NYT story about Achmad Chalabi’s attempt to wheel ’n deal his way into the office of prime minister takes seriously the line that Chalabi is out of favor with the Americans. Actually, it’s hard to tell; the position of the Bushies on Iraq’s future has become curiously opaque over the last few months. Did his Pentagon backers really back away from him? If so, Filkins gives a singularly unlike reason for it: “Mr. Chalabi’s footing in the Bush administration steadily eroded as it became clear that much of the intelligence he had turned over to the American government, which was used to justify an invasion, turned out to have been exaggerated or false.” Sure, everyone else who produced false intelligence is promoted, but Chalabi is dropped for doing the same, and if you buy that, I’ve got some Nigerien yellowcake to sell you.

So Iraqi “democracy,” which was fresh and young and hopeful two weeks ago has, before the votes are even counted, become so decrepit, debased and cynical that Chalabi, a man with no discernible principles except self-interest, could be a major player in the backroom intrigues which will establish an Iraqi administration, with no particular reference to how Iraqis actually voted. Maybe they could be persuaded to take Arnold Schwarzenegger instead, cuz I hear he supports the people’s interests rather than the special interests. Maybe they could take Kissinger as well.

America is in fact a land of liberators, not a land of occupiers

The Czech parliament rejects gay marriage by a single vote.

Secretary of War Rumsfeld, in Iraq, tells American troops occupying Iraq, “You have shown that America is in fact a land of liberators, not a land of occupiers.” And has been ever since we liberated it from the Indians.

Rep. Louise Slaughter has written to the White House asking how “Jeff Gannon” was allowed to use a pseudonym as a White House “reporter” when she is forced to continue calling herself Louise Slaughter, it just isn’t fair.

ATTENTION (TO SPELLING) MUST BE PAID: A word to the Daily Telegraph: entitling the obituary of Arthur Miller “Death of a Playright” might have made you seem cleverer if the word were not actually playwright. You might as well have gone with your first instincts: “Guy Who Shagged Marilyn Monroe Fifty Years Ago Dies.”

But the Telegraph almost redeems itself with the headline “Gays Angry at Penguin Plan.”

A plan by a German zoo to test the sexuality of a group of suspected homosexual penguins by bringing in females has sparked outrage among gay and lesbian groups, who fear keepers might force them to abandon their male partners.

Bremerhaven zoo saw the male penguins trying to mate and hatch stones.

Isolated

Don’t expect to get much sense out of the British newspapers today: two middle-aged unemployed people announced their engagement.

The reason I quoted a chunk of North Korean verbiage in my last post, and linked to their statement about nukes, was to suggest that North Korean leaders do not think in the same way as we do. This is why dealing with them is so dangerous and requires such care and expertise. Unfortunately, the US is now ruled by folks who share both George Bush’s complete inability to comprehend people who don’t view the world the same way he does, and his complete lack of curiosity about the thought patterns of other peoples and cultures, and who portray their own ideals as universal ideals, meaning there really is no reason to attempt to understand other ideals, which are by definition less than universal. So when Condoleezza Rice says that North Korea’s rejection of the 6-party talks (which were always a fig-leaf for our unwillingness to talk directly with North Korea) will just isolate them further, you have to wonder how she’s failed to notice that North Korea’s rulers like being isolated and work very hard indeed to maintain their isolation.



Asked about North Korea’s belief that the US was coming after it, Condi says, “Well, I’m not quite sure to what the North Koreans are referring.” Can’t you?

Condi also praises Saudi Arabia’s municipal elections, while hoping that “at one point [they] would include women.” She failed to add that half the local council seats, and mayors, would still be appointed by the monarchy, and would have no defined powers.

Are you aware of the reason the Saudis give for the exclusion of women? Nothing religious or ideological about women being stupid or impure or whatever, but the somehow more insulting, because so completely dismissive, excuse that it would have been too much work to build all those (separate, naturally) polling stations and ballot boxes



for women. I mean, even in Iraq we managed...



...well ok, bad example. You’ll notice no one ever suggests that if they can only manage polling places for half the population, the men could sit this one out.

Revealing the wicked nature and brazen-faced double-dealing tactics of the U.S. as a master hand at plot-breeding and deception

The Axis of Evil is acting all axis of evilly today. Both Iran and North Korea issued statements saying they’ll be keeping their nuclear programs, thank you very much.

The North Korean government is always hard to interpret, because it speaks entirely in badly translated jargon which it may actually believe. Sometimes this is entertaining, and when I’m bored I surf to the NK news agency website for stories like “Japan Termed Wicked Trickster.” But the problem is that, believing in their own over-blown jargon, sometimes they believe in our over-blown jargon as well--axis of evil, regime change, outpost of tyranny, etc etc--and think we’re about to go to war with them. Their statement today said, yeah we got nukes (“nukes for self-defence”) and whaddya gonna do about it, denouncing American attempts to push regional diplomacy as “a far-fetched logic of gangsters as it is a good example fully revealing the wicked nature and brazen-faced double-dealing tactics of the U.S. as a master hand at plot-breeding and deception.” Uh, yeah, and what’s your point?

Freedom and liberty, if you have a penis and don’t mind it being flaccid

Thursday there will be municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, and women will not be allowed to vote. Has anyone heard any outrage from the United States government, as part of its new mission to spread freedom and liberty and still more liberty and yet more freedom everywhere?

A bill is being proposed to ban Medicare from covering Viagra. But was it necessary for the WaPo to say that such coverage “could strain the already strapped program”?

The coup in Togo has been condemned by ECOWAS and other African organizations. This is a good sign, and compares well with the toleration given to Zimbabwe’s deepening fascism.

There’s a better future, and I want to take a risk toward that future

Truly leaving no child behind, a public elementary school in Sutter, California (north of Sacramento) required students to carry Radio Frequency Identification tags (RFIDs) to track their movements. This will be overturned, but only because pedophiles can also use readers to track their movements, not because it is degrading and creepy.

Juan Cole points out that once Iraqi election results are announced, the winners will no longer be anonymous and will be subject to assassination. Fortunately the proportional representation system the US imposed on Iraq should mean that replacements come from the existing party lists. Imagine being subjected to all those clichés about brave Iraqis defying the blah blah blah every time there was an election to fill a suddenly vacant seat.

I’m getting a certain amount of traffic today from search engines because Monday I mentioned mud-wrestling contests among American women MPs at one of our prison camps in Iraq. People want to see the pictures. You’ve gotta love the assumptions the Internet has created that if there is such an event, there will be pictures (in fact there are) and they will be posted to the internet (not yet). Information wants to be free, especially when it involves women mud-wrestling.
(Update: my mistake. Tex at UnFairWitness has a couple of pictures posted for your unfair-witnessing pleasure. It seems that the NY Daily News ran pictures a few days ago.)

As much as I depend on the White House website for sources of humor, I found it impossible to do more than skim “President Participates in Class-Action Lawsuit Reform Conversation.” I see he doesn’t know the real word for “baby doctor.” Bush does explain that “A capitalist society depends on the capacity for people willing to take risk and to say there’s a better future, and I want to take a risk toward that future. And I’m deeply concerned that too many lawsuits make it too difficult for people to do that.” Of course what he doesn’t explain is that he wants to make it easier for capitalists to get their better futures by risking other people’s lives.

Wooing Old Europe, Condi-style

Kamen at the WaPo quotes State Dept spokesmodel Tom Casey, who objected to Cuba and Zimbabwe being on a UN human rights panel: “The United States believes that countries that routinely and systematically violate the rights of their citizens should not be selected to review the human rights performance of other countries.” But when the US does it, it’s just a few bad apples, and mostly we violate the rights of citizens of other countries and blah blah hypocrisy Abu Ghraib naked human pyramids Alberto Gonzales detention without trial blah blah blah blah....

Sorry, I just had a vision of 4 more years of sanctimonious Bushies pretending to be spreading freedom throughout the world, and I went into blogger automatic pilot.

Kamen points out that Saudi Arabia, another exemplar of human rights, is also on that panel.

Condi Rice was in Paris, “wooing” the French, as all the news sources put it. It somehow comes as no surprise that her style of “wooing” is actually the issuing of marching orders, thinly disguised. An Independent editorial (not available for free online) points out (as does Eli at Left I On the News) that when she said, “America stands ready to work with Europe on our common agenda -- and Europe must stand ready to work with America,” “it sounded very like a command - and if not a command, then a threat.” (The arrogance of power is never far from the Bushies; Chimpy himself today said that Congress “needs to” pass his budget.)

Elsewhere in that speech, she suggests a single historical line from Rosa Parks to the fall of communism to the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq. Must be Black Propaganda History Month.

People accused Bill Clinton of running a permanent campaign, of electioneering rather than governing. Well what do we make of the promotion of Karl Rove, a man who has spent his career running slimy campaigns on behalf of slimy candidates, to the policy position of deputy chief of staff?

Stopping all acts of violence everywhere

Bush describes his budget as one that “reduces and eliminates redundancy.” Also eradicates, extinguishes, annihilates and wipes out redundancy. He adds that he will hold “federal programs to a firm test of accountability,” but does not say if this test will involve Western-style accountancy.

21 are killed in Baghdad. Care to guess what they were doing? Yes, waiting on a line (to join the military), which is behaviour abhorrent in the eyes of Allah.

Denmark returns its Center-Right government to power, on a strong anti-immigrant platform. That’s the theme of European elections this year, with Tony Blair and Michael Howard also engaged in a bidding war on who can be more beastly to Johnny Asylum-Seeker.

Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas come to an agreement “that all Palestinians will stop all acts of violence against all Israelis everywhere, and, at the same time, Israel will cease all its military activity against all Palestinians everywhere”. That line comes from Sharon, who evidently doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of Israeli citizens who are also Palestinians.

So we can now forget about the Middle East because, as we all know, cease-fire agreements are considered sacred in that part of the world and are never broken. So there’s no reason to bet on how long it lasts, because it will last forever, although if you’ve got a pool, put me down for 5..4...3...2...


And then Sharon ate him.

All the different shirts

From the LA Times:

"They’re all around there in the Capitol, as you know, the different special interests," Schwarzenegger said recently, "the purple shirts and the brown — all the different shirts."

The purple shirts refer to T-shirts worn by unionized state workers who have been holding protests around Sacramento over the governor's plans to change their retirement system and take away some of their holidays, among other things. As for the brown shirts, it was unclear to whom Schwarzenegger was referring.

When an Austrian politician starts having hallucinations involving brownshirts--run.

Rep. Jane Harman will introduce a bill to ban torture. One would have thought that was illegal already, but evidently one would have been wrong. The bill would also ban “rendition.” I’ll be interested to see how Harman defines torture, something no Bush official has been willing to do.

Now, a gay activist with a trimmed beard standing on line for a mud-wrestling contest....

The London Times presents an interesting juxtaposition. Tacked on to the end of a story about Iraqi Taliban-wannabes allegedly killing barbers for trimming beards contrary to the will of Allah is this: “An American military policewoman who took part in a mud-wrestling contest at an Iraqi prison was yesterday demoted and found guilty of indecent exposure.” See, we have our standards, they have their standards.

There must also be something in the Koran about standing in line also being contrary to the will of Allah. Two more queues were bombed today, one of Iraqi policemen waiting to collect their pay, another of applicants to join the Iraqi police. This is only the 853rd and 854th time respectively that this has happened, by my count.

A gay activist, Scott McCoy, is named by D party activists to replace a Utah state senator resigning on health grounds. Should be fun.

George Monbiot writes that we may hear less UN-bashing from the R’s on the subject of the oil-for-food program in Iraq, since the Volker report says that much bigger violations of sanctions occurred through illegal sales of oil--which the US knew about and did nothing to stop, because it benefitted allies we wished to keep sweet, like Turkey and Jordan. Monbiot also has more details of the money that the CPA lost through its non-Western accounting methods: “Some $800m was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. A further $1.4bn was flown from Baghdad to the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil, and has not been seen since.”

Social Security Privatization and the Permanent Republican Majority

Now that Bush has revealed more details of his Social Security privatization scheme, I must say I’m relieved to see how lame it is. This turkey could pass only if the D’s efforts to stop it reach a Kerryesque level of incompetence. Which is quite possible, of course: I never thought the Medicare drug benefit could make it all the way into law still containing that idiotic “donut,” which shows what I know. But with the government managing the investment funds, with the clawback of anything below a 3% return, and with those mandatory annuities, and with even the Bushies now admitting it won’t help the long-term stability of Social Security, even the gamblers with visions of stock market windfalls won’t find this very attractive. One can only hope Bush expends lots and lots of his “capital” trying to push this turd uphill.

So what was it about? Like tax cuts, Social Security privatization was fundamentally about “starving the beast,” circumscribing the powers of government. Connect pensions to the stock market, and any attempt to regulate pollution, raise the minimum wage, tax corporations, prevent them sending jobs oversees, etc etc etc would be denounced as threatening granny’s private personal retirement account. Almost every aspect of a progressive agenda would be measured against the Dow Jones and found wanting. The R’s would be practically assured of a permanent majority.

So maybe just as well the plan stinks up the joint.

Always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom

Rumsfeld revealed this week that he twice offered to resign over Abu Ghraib. But just as Rummy was more concerned about the leak of images of Abu Ghraib torture than with the actual torture, his faux-resignations offer the image of taking responsibility without actually taking responsibility. By offering to resign rather than simply resigning, he was signaling that he believed he had done nothing wrong, but if Bush thought otherwise, he could act. This wasn’t accountability, but passive-aggressiveness, the equivalent of asking “do these pants make my butt look big?”. Rather than treat torture as a moral issue, his actions indicate once again that he saw it purely in pragmatic terms--whether his political effectiveness had been damaged--the very same amoral stance that led his subordinates to consider torture a legitimate tool.

And as long as I’m talking about Rumsfeld’s amorality, I haven’t yet mentioned his push this week for research into “bunker-buster” nuclear weapons, but I don’t think the discerning readers of this blog need explained to them why developing usable nukes is insane.

The US has forced the UN drugs agency to stop giving clean needles to heroine addicts to prevent AIDS transmission.

A week ago I mentioned (and posted) the British Labour party poster accused of being anti-semitic. That one, and another which supposedly made Michael Howard look too much like Fagin, have been removed from the Labour website. So the latest thing is the new Labour slogan, “Britain Forward Not Back,” intended to show that Labour is too dynamic to use verbs or correct grammar. But the slogan turns out to bear a certain similarity to a Halloween episode of the Simpsons which showed Bill Clinton declaring, “We must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.”

How socks can be a direct violation of human rights

Rumsfeld says there won’t be an Iranian-style theocracy in Iraq, run by “a handful of mullahs” (yes, those mullahs are a handful), because “The Shia in Iraq are Iraqis, they are not Iranians”. He does have a way of stating the bleeding obvious in a way that makes it sound like bullshit.

Rummy says “the great sweep of human history is for freedom.” The Bushies are beginning to talk about history being on their side the way “scientific Marxists” used to.

An Israeli military court releases the captain who emptied his gun into a 13-year old Palestinian girl last November, after one of the witnesses, another soldier, recants. This is insane, there are recordings of the bastard saying “I confirmed the kill” and there are ballistics from the ten bullets he used in the confirmation process. Previous posts here and here.

I trust my silence up until now about the royal coup in Nepal hasn’t been taken as tacit approval or anything. In the unlikely case that you’ve been waiting to hear from me before forming an opinion on the subject, here we go: authoritarian rule bad, democracy good.

The now censored Nepalese press has taken to running editorials on socks, how there are many types of socks on the market but if someone insists on wearing “the same pair of socks day in and day out, not even bothering to assess the detrimental effect of the overpowering stench... Isn’t it a direct violation of human rights?” This could just be a metaphor. There have also been editorials against chopping down oxygen-producing trees, on archery, women’s cricket, and how to enjoy sunshine.

If you need help making up your minds about the coup in Togo, here’s a hint: authoritarian rule bad, idiot son succeeding father bad, democracy good, “Togo” funny name for a country.

A Hong Kong firm is making feng shui underpants.

I don’t know what he said precisely or the context

From Secretary of War Rummy’s press conference Thursday: “The number of Iraqi security personnel who have died defending their country tells without question that they have the courage to do so.” Or just that they’re not very good at it.

Asked about Gen. Mattis calling shooting people fun and a hoot, Rummy declined to condemn the remarks. “I have not read his words. I don’t know what he said precisely or the context.” The reporter, who had actually just quoted the remarks in full, did not ask what possible context would excuse the remarks or whether Rumsfeld’s laziness about looking into such matters was indicative of his own permissive attitude to such assholery. Rummy pulled the same “haven’t read his words” thing with William “My God’s bigger than your God” Boykin, and was saying quite late in the game that he hadn’t read the report on Abu Ghraib torture (Maureen Dowd wrote, “Fire Rummy, or make him read faster.”) Clearly, DRummy has still not improved his literacy skills.

Consistent with our values

Condi says that the US’s Iran’s “behavior, internally and externally, is out of step with the direction and desires of the international community.”

Attorney Generalissimo Gonzalez says the Department of Justice will combat terrorism “in a way that’s consistent with our values.” Which is odd, because his previous dismissal of the Geneva Conventions as quaint and obsolete in the “new kind of paradigm” that is the war against terrorism suggests that he sees values such as civil and human rights as merely situational and revocable.

Speaking of combating terrorism in a way consistent with their miserable, vicious, desiccated values, the Iraqi police have taken to showing videos of prisoners confessing to their heinous crimes on tv. Totally voluntary confessions, I’m sure.

Loathed, loathed I tell you!

A day after Bush in SOTU said the US would work with our European allies to get Iran not to develop nuclear weapons, Condi Rice says we won’t do so because “I think our European allies agree that the Iranian regime’s human rights behavior and its behavior toward its own population is something to be loathed.” So until they change their human rights situation, they’ll just have to keep their nuclear weapons.

Condi did add that a US invasion of Iran is not on the agenda “at this point in time.” That’s a little too temporally specific to be reassuring.

“It’s fun to shoot some people”

The Marine Corps decides not to punish Lt. Gen James Mattis for saying that shooting people is “fun” and “a hoot.” Possibly they’re afraid to.

If recreational homicide doesn’t bother anyone these days, we should hardly expect torture to, and indeed Waterboardin’ Al Gonzales is confirmed as Attorney Generalissimo and Grand Inquisitor by 60-36. There were no anti-torture Republicans, including John McCain, himself a former torture victim. At Condi Rice’s confirmation hearing, during a discussion of her opposition to giving legal protections against torture to foreign prisoners, Christopher Dodd told her “I’d like you to spend about 15 minutes with John McCain.” Turns out, wouldn’t have done any good.

Oh dear, the UN oil-for-food program didn’t have “Western-style budgeting and accounting procedures.”

This Guardian article deals with some of the questions I’ve been pondering about the odd collapse of the latest Northern Irish peace efforts following unlikely accusations that IRA leaders were associated with a bank robbery in December and culminating this week with the IRA’s withdrawal from arms decommissioning, evidently in a sulk about the aspersions on their hitherto unsullied honor.

So bored that I’m blogging the Annual National Prayer Breakfast

And today, Bush follows up on the SOTU address with prayer, as do all of us under 55. Specifically, at something the White House website calls the “Annual National Prayer Breakfast.” I’m having trouble sorting out those adjectives--is it the breakfast that’s national or do we have a national prayer that I don’t know about? And it was held at the International House of Pancakes, which just confuses the thing more.

The White House chooses to use this picture of Bush doing his little-boy-closing-his-eyes-real-tight thing, although whether that’s because he was praying or that’s how he always eats eggs benedict, it doesn’t say.



He said this: “You know, last night was a prayerful occasion. (Laughter.) I noticed a lot of members were praying that I would keep my speech short. (Laughter.)” Oh no stop my sides are splitting.

Don’t know if the event was filmed, because the President of Madagascar was there, and I would dearly love to hear Shrub trying to pronounce one of those great Malagasy names: Marc Ravalomanana.

He says that “prayer has always been one of the great equalizers in American life.” I thought that was the Colt revolver.

Here’s another picture. I think the circular things are the angels that follow him everywhere.

Friday Species-in-Danger-of-Extinction-from-Global-Warming Blogging

Eli at LeftI notes “the tremendous disparity in press attention between the very real global warming crisis and the bogus Social Security ‘crisis.’” We all know what’s needed to make people give a shit about environmental issues: cute animal pictures. Therefore, I hereby invite other bloggers to join in Friday Species-in-Danger-of-Extinction-from-Global-Warming Blogging, which I’m inaugurating a day early, and calling dibs on polar bears.

Evil smug scum watch

Elliott Abrams, who did such a lovely job undermining democracy here and in Central America during the Reagan administration, has been promoted to deputy national security adviser with responsibility for advancing democracy. Back then, I said that if one good thing came out of Iran-Contra, it was that that smug prick would never become secretary of state. If you’re too young to remember this supporter of death squads, dictators and Contras, do google him. The first Google hit is a David Corn article in the Nation, which should be a good place to start. But a list of his misdeeds doesn’t convey how obnoxious this guy’s smugness was, how irritating his ubiquitous appearances on McNeil-Lehrer and Nightline.

My favorite Abrams story: a Congressional committee once asked him if any foreign governments had contributed funds to the Contras. He said no, which was technically true only because when Abrams had solicited $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei, he gave him the wrong Swiss account number, so the money hadn’t technically gone to the Contras but to one temporarily lucky (until he got caught) Swiss citizen.

So Abrams’s rehabilitation continues. At a glacial pace, I suppose, compared to the near-instant whitewashing of torture apologists like Alberto Gonzales (yesterday I caught a bit of the Senate speeches, with Orrin Hatch outright accusing D’s of racism). Still, even Bush daren’t put him up for a position requiring Senate confirmation (he was after all convicted of lying to Congress, later pardoned by Bush the Elder) or make the announcement on any but a busy news day. I think the best response to this is a reminder that Bush’s father still hasn’t answered questions about his role in Iran-Contra, about which he said the Reagan administration had “erred on the side of life.” Ah, the culture of life.

Alternative caption: Republicans display fingers they had dipped in the blood of infidels.

Marc Cooper on this stunt: “These congress-twerps who spend their days and night suckling on the special interests tit braved no more than the risk of camera-light sunburn for their efforts.”

Opening the door to freedom, but not to frivolous asbestos lawsuits

The Czech Republic is going to lower the minimum wage. I can’t remember a country ever doing that before.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) has boldly come out against old people having sex, which we can all agree is as icky as anything thought up by the other Stephen King. The Medicare drug plan will cover Viagra in cases of erectile disfunction, but Mr. King says “If we are going to subsidize someone’s recreational sex, I don’t think that’s what our founding fathers had in mind.” Right, they had slaves for that.

Allawi claims that all the suicide bombers caught on the day of the elections were non-Iraqis, which is not a claim I’ve heard before (nor do I believe it).

Clean-up on the SOTU post, below: Bush said “We expect Syria to end all support for terrorists and open the door to freedom.” 1) Is that what you expect, really? Megalomaniacal much? 2) I understand the ending support for terrorists bit, but what exactly are they supposed to do to comply with the door-opening part?

Really, blogging that travesty with a cold was not the funnest experience ever. I must have been coughing during the “frivolous asbestos lawsuits” line, cuz I missed it. And life is definitely too short to bother with the Democratic response. I’m ready for my nap now, I’ll tell you. Do Republicans party after the SOTU, I wonder? Tomorrow morning will D.C. call girls be scrubbing purple ink out of their various orifices?


I don’t really have a caption for this one, I just thought Bush looks particularly goofy in it.



We’re number one! No wait, we’re purple! Hey, did you say indelible?




That look of smug bemusement does not go with that tie.



Donald Rumsfeld and John Snow wait patiently to receive their kisses.

The State of the Union is private, I mean personal, I mean strong, I don’t know what I mean

6:06 Bush enters, shakes a lot of hands. I’m hoping some of that purple ink rubs off on his hand.

Oo, the state of the union is both confident AND strong. A twofer.

6:11 CNN camera finds John McCain, who is managing to both glower and look bored at the same time. He sees the camera and immediately pretends to be asleep.

Taxpayer funds must be spent wisely or not all. Guess which one he prefers.

We must raise children to meet the demands of the 21st century. Translation: troops to occupy Iran, Syria and, just for the hell of it, Togo.

6:15 Joe Lieberman doing one of those things where you look like you’re applauding but make no sound. They learn that in Senate school.

6:18 As much as his mispronunciation of nuclear annoys me, following it up with “Clean Skies policy” is even more obnoxious. And he calls for ethanol, even though last week’s West Wing was specifically designed to scuttle that.

6:20 There’s Hillary, giving the most grudging applause on record.

6:22 He has a message for everyone 55 or older: don’t let anyone mislead you. And a message to everyone younger: let me mislead you.

6:24 I don’t think I’ve heard so many voices raised in opposition (to Bush’s lies about Social Security) in one of these things before.

6:27 The Boy in the Bubble says he’ll listen to anybody with good ideas. Except increasing payroll taxes.

6:30 We have to pass on values to the next generation. Like homophobia. As he talks about a “culture of life,” CNN turns its cameras to Christopher Reeve’s widow. Awkward... . Says values don’t come from the government. Except abstinence. And faith-based programs. And...

6:35 He proposes a program to keep young men out of gangs (he’s never heard of girl gangs?). You will never hear another word about this.

Wants to focus AIDS spending on African-Americans. Not butt-fuckers. Managed to talk about AIDS without mentioning gays, just like he called for banning gay marriage without mentioning gays.

6:38 Wants competent defense lawyers in capital cases. Of course in Texas that’s defined as “awake more than 50% of the time.”

6:40 Our military operations are determined, successful and continuing. If they’ve succeeded, why do they need to continue?

Will continue to build the coalitions that will defeat the dangers of our time.

The only thing that will defeat tyranny and whatnot is “the force of human freedom.” He makes it sound like a weapon; the words “force” and “freedom” don’t belong together. I’ve said it before: only Bush can make freedom and liberty sound like a threat.

Will support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with ultimate goal of defeating tyranny in the world. Is there any example of Bush now supporting the democratic opposition to an established government in the Middle East?

Evidently there’s an arc of freedom or something from Morocco to Jordan to Bahrain. Please consult your globes. It’s an arc, really it is. They’re really reaching for geometrical expressions.

6:51 Several people aren’t standing to applaud the brave Iraqi people. I’m sure Fox is taking down their names.

They’ve even got one of those voters, sitting next to Laura. She can’t decide how many fingers she’s supposed to hold up.

6:59 If he had to pick just one soldier killed in Iraq to mention by name, wasn’t it a bit tacky to pick one from Texas?

Who you gonna call?

Should it worry us that the CIA website’s Terrorism FAQ page hasn’t been updated since April 2002? And this, I swear to Allah, is an actual logo on the actual CIA’s actual website.

Complete nonsense

I may live blog the State of the Union Address, and I may not, depending on the state of my personal union, i.e., how bad my cold is. If I can’t do it live, you’ll have to amuse yourselves. May I suggest: each time Bush uses the word “personal” to describe some aspect of his Social Security plan, respond by saying “private” in a different funny voice.

A while back I said that I wanted the Gonzalez nomination to become an up-or-down vote on torture, because I really am curious how such a vote would go, how badly damaged the moral compass of this countries’ elected representatives had become. I half-way got my wish: the D’s have proclaimed this a vote on torture, but say that they intend to confine themselves to impotent squawking. This is the lead of a WaPo article by Dana Milbank: “Senate Democrats angrily denounced White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales yesterday as an advocate of prisoner torture but said they would not block his confirmation as attorney general.” Tells you everything you need to know about the D’s.

That article ends with this quote from Orrin Hatch: “To have this man, who has come from nowhere, from the most humble of circumstances, who typifies the struggle every immigrant family to this country has gone through, to not give him this opportunity when he is fully qualified for it, I think would be a travesty.” Yes, he deserves to be attorney general because he’s an immigrant. But does Hatch have a deeper agenda in that remark? Because the LA Times also quotes Hatch today, supporting a constitutional amendment overturning the ban on immigrants like Governor Terminator becoming president as “an anachronism that is decidedly un-American.”

Iraqi “President” Yawar says it would be “complete nonsense” to ask for American troops to be withdrawn. Right, like every previous action taken by the US in Iraq wasn’t based on complete nonsense. Wasn’t that Bush’s campaign slogan?: 4 More Years of Complete Fucking Nonsense.

Do as we say, not as we do

Now the bastards are taking our action figures hostage. THIS MUST BE STOPPED!

Compare and contrast:

Today’s NYT, p.9: “the State Department sharply rebuked Egypt on Monday for arresting a major opposition leader ahead of what may be a sixth referendum on Mr. Mubarak’s rule.”

And another story, on p.8 (the facing page), notes that Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca detention center have “been swollen by more than 2,500 arrests of suspected insurgents in the last month, part of a nationwide pre-election crackdown.”

The Israeli attorney general rules that the land seizures I mentioned yesterday are illegal.

Secretary of Edukashion Margaret Spellings and George Bush. Don’t tell Condi that someone’s eyeing her husband.

Western-style budgeting

Comical Allawi says he will “begin a national dialogue to guarantee that the voices of all Iraqis are present in the coming government.” Funny, I thought that’s what the fake-election was for.

If, according to the Bushies, the ideals of freedom and liberty are universal, those of accounting are evidently not. Paul Bremer responds to a report that his Proconsulship failed to keep track of $8.8 billion in Iraqi money: “Western-style budgeting and accounting procedures could [not] be immediately and fully implemented in the midst of a war.” Knowing how you actually spend money is “Western-style budgeting”?

With “only” 50 or so Iraqis killed yesterday, many Americans, such as Gen. Carter Ham, whose name really could not be more Caucasian, say that they expected many more dead. So how many dead Iraqi civilians was considered an acceptable price for the Iraqis to pay for this little exercise?

And how many dead Iraqi civilians were there, anyway? An alert reader emails to point out that we’ve seen no figure, but they claim to know what the election turnout was. Must be some more of that non-Western counting.

Bush today congratulated the Iraqi people for “supporting those who have helped make this world a more peaceful and free place.” Oh, did I say Iraqi people, I meant the Detroit Pistons.

More details on the Israeli plan to steal land from Palestinians on the wrong side of the Wall: the decision was made secretly last July, and implemented secretly, which is quite a trick. Palestinians who lived on one side of the wall and owned olive groves and whatnot on the other side were simply refused transit permits, not told until recently that Israel considered their land no longer theirs. The seizure is under a 1950 law meant to apply to lands abandoned by Palestinians who fled Israel in the war of independence, not people who can literally see their property from their houses.

What we’re seeing here is the voice of freedom

Condi Rice, who evidently processes auditory sensations through her eyeballs--which would explain a lot--says, “What we’re seeing here is the voice of freedom.”

Enough about the plucky Iraqis already. My polling station is usually in the local Methodist church, so each election I run the risk of bursting into flame and you don’t hear any CNN anchors singing my praises.

Less brave were the candidates whose names were not made public before the election. Perhaps the details of the constitution will be worked out entirely by people wearing ski masks. And how is it so many Iraqis seem to own ski masks, anyway? Does Iraq possess many ski slopes? Is Halliburton importing them?

How lazy and uninformed and easily bamboozled were the journalists who quoted turnout figures based on the number of registered, rather than eligible, voters? And which even then turned out to have been made-up.

Stick it

Bush hails the “courage” of the Iraqis who came out to vote (“They have demonstrated the kind of courage that is always the foundation of self-government”), ignoring the fact that it was his failure to create the conditions of security which some would consider the prerequisite of a free vote that made voting an act of courage in the first place.

Wednesday I predicted there wouldn’t be much violence today. Yesterday I guessed (not here in the blog, which I thought would be ghoulish) 15-20 dead. It was higher than that, but as far as we know mostly confined to Baghdad. Elsewhere, weeks of threats did their job. With the travel ban, and journalists in fear for their lives, 1) we won’t hear of some of the violence outside the Green Zone, 2) turnout figures will be inflated with little fear of discovery.

Juan Cole gives a nice summary of how these elections were forced on the Bushies against their will by Sistani and his followers, and why the cheerleading press should refrain from making this another “Mission Accomplished” moment (I think of it more as another Bush-and-the-plastic-turkey moment).

Just tuned in to Fox News, because it is both fair and balanced. It could have settled for just being fair or just being balanced, but no, nothing less than fair and balanced would do. Evidently, the Iraqi people told the insurgents to “stick it.”


To prevent fraud, voters dipped their fingers into the blood of infidels.



Bullets and ballots, like belt and suspenders.


Maybe it’s me, but this polling station in Mosul doesn’t really inspire much confidence.

Their future in the making

Iyad “Comical” Allawi: “They should take part because this is their future in the making and people have to take their fate in their own hands.” Their own hands? Interesting words, coming from a man put in office by an army of occupation.

After reading Michael Ignatieff in the NYT Magazine (the same piece appears in the Observer), I have to respond to his assertion that “antiwar ideologues can’t support the Iraqis because that would require admitting that positive outcomes can result from bad policies and worse intentions.” He suggests that those of us who denigrate tomorrow’s elections are ivory-tower purists--note the use of the word “ideologues”--to which I answer: damned straight. Even if I personally accepted on pragmatic grounds that these elections were good enough, I would not be able to tell an Iraqi who took the position that elections held under occupation were unfree that she should settle for less-than-free. If the election workers putting up banners at your polling station looked like this



and were dressed in the uniform of a foreign power, would you feel the elections were legitimate? Would you vote in them, and if you did choose to vote rather than lose your say in your country’s future, would you feel at least a little ashamed?

One thing the Americans “forgot” to enact was a McCain-Feingold campaign finance provision, and money became rather important with 111 parties, many with similar names (think People’s Front of Judea/Judean People’s Front on a larger scale) trying to distinguish themselves, and the only people able to practice retail politics being the snipers. Lots of printed matter, lots of tv commercials, lots of money paying for those things coming from the US government, from exiles, various Arab states and Iran and who knows where else.

The Sunday Times of London has an amusing parody of English history, amusing, at any rate, for the minority of you who can follow a joke in which William the Conqueror’s “battle plan hit a snag when his troops became ensnared in an enormous tapestry being woven by the embedded war reporters.” Also describes Henry VIII as the perfect Jerry Springer guest.

Since prostitution is now legal in Germany (plan your vacations accordingly), brothel-owners can advertise in their local (government-run) job centers. And under the new reforms in welfare laws, unemployed people can be sent into the sex industry, on penalty of losing their benefits. A liberalizing policy cross-fertilizes with a conservative policy to create a stupid result; there’s a lesson in that somewhere.

Speaking of stupid results in Germany, the latest reality tv program in that country: Sperm Race. The winner gets a Porsche. A red one.

The best way to ensure the success of democracy is through the advance of democracy

Appointed Iraqi President Yawer says that while the vast majority of Iraqis won’t vote, it will not be because they are boycotting the poll, but because they are afraid for their lives. So that’s alright, then.

Bush’s radio address today: “The terrorists and those who benefited from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein know that free elections will expose the emptiness of their vision for Iraq.” Funny, if anyone would know how elections reward empty visions, you’d think it would be Shrub. “The best way to ensure the success of democracy is through the advance of democracy.” Must be a Zen thing. “One Iraqi, speaking about the upcoming vote, said, ‘Now, most people feel they are living in darkness. It is time for us to come into the light.’” You sure he/she was talking about elections and not your failure to restore electricity?

Governor Terminator wants teachers in low-income neighborhoods to get “combat pay,” which he means literally, saying that they are “threatened always with their lives and their cars are stolen.”

His Muscleness is also moving ahead with a plan he claims is opposed by both major parties, to redistrict California in 2006. This is not good.

Plus ça change: Ronald Reagan, 1987: “I think it’s far better if the Iranians go to bed every night wondering what we might do”.

I know this is shocking to you

Bush, interviewed by the NYT, says little of interest, but in a follow-up to the Wednesday press conference, where he said he’d never read a 2000 article by Condoleezza Rice setting out foreign policy, he had this to add:

“I don’t know what you think the world is like, but a lot of people don’t just sit around reading Foreign Affairs,” he said, chuckling. “I know this is shocking to you.”

No I’m not shocked, Chimpy, but you’re not “a lot of people” but the leader of the most powerful country in the world, and yet you find so incongruous, so beyond your ken as to be a source of amusement, the thought that anyone would think that a president would actually read a journal about foreign policy, or indeed read the opinions of an applicant to head the NSC before hiring her, or indeed read, period.

The Foreign Affairs website, by the way, has a link at the top to the article in question.

In case you were wondering what happened to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, deposed as Haitian president by thugs and the US last year, he has been hired by the University of South Africa, Pretoria.

This Labour Party poster is being attacked as anti-Semitic (the Tory party leader and shadow chancellor pictured here are both Jewish).



The London Times’s “The Week on the Web” has directed me to the PostSecret site, which began at the Washington DC arts festival, where people were given postcards to write secrets which are posted anonymously. A mixed bag, as you’d expect: downloading porn, sex with strangers, not washing hands after going to the bathroom. Some of my favorites, for different reasons: I liked myself better as a boy; I love one of my children; I talked someone into suicide; I archive my farts in carefully labeled mason jars; I used to pee into snowballs before throwing them at friends; I’m secretly fed up with irony.

The Times also mentions this site, which mail-orders toast at ridiculous prices. It may be a joke.

Vulgar names

The LA Times’s editorial page has joined that of the Washington Post in its crusade against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. I wouldn’t mind--they’re entitled to their opinions and I’m not a big fan of Chavez or some of his policies either--but both papers’ editorials (I analyzed the Post’s two weeks ago and in November) are egregiously biased and drip with such contempt for Chavez that they sound like me talking about Bush. If they want to take over this blog and give me control of their editorial pages I’d be happy to oblige, but in the meantime they’re supposed to be better behaved than a mere blogger. The LAT accuses the “demagogic” (fair enough) Mr. Chavez of “picking a fight” with George Bush, neglecting to mention US involvement in a coup attempt against him. The paper applauds Colombia’s use of bounty hunters to kidnap a FARC leader, neglecting to mention that the bounty hunters were actually bribed members of the Venezuelan police, and describes Chavez’s reaction to this incident as throwing a fit. And he called Bush “vulgar names.” Oh deary dear, let’s not give the LA Times the vapors by using vulgarity; after all, they’re used to the high-minded sophistication of Governor Schwarzenegger, who always gives the State of the State Address before the House of Girlie-Men in iambic pentameter.

If he votes, we leave

GOTV under occupation:

Soldiers then surrounded a two-story house. The battalion had received reports that it was being used as a meeting place for insurgents.

A paunchy, middle-aged man invited the soldiers to search the house. As they did, the 1st Platoon leader, 2nd Lt. Jason Shick of Grand Rapids, Mich., questioned the man on the second floor.

“Ask him does he know any anti-American forces or anti-coalition forces at all in this area,” Shick told the interpreter. ...

“We don’t have anything to tell you,” the man’s wife said plaintively, in halting English.

The man shook his head no.

Shick checked the man’s name against a list of suspects. Satisfied he was not a terrorist, Shick then tried to lock up his vote.

“Is he going to vote in the upcoming elections?” he asked the interpreter.

“Yes, they are going to go vote,” the interpreter said after consulting with the couple.

“Good. Tell him thank you very much,” said Shick, heading back down the stairs. “And make sure he votes. If he votes, we leave. Americans go home.”

You’ll notice he didn’t ask the wife if she was going to vote, focusing exclusively on the man even after the interpreter said that both would be voting. But what I adore about this little vignette is the utter lack of self-awareness that allows the soldiers to first terrorize and then canvass this couple.

Hi mum, having a wonderful time, wish you were here

The Times answers something I’d been wondering about, how candidates and election workers can’t appear in public in Iraq, but all those posters get put up (and torn down): street urchins. How sweet.

The British soldier who took those photos of prisoner abuse, testifies at the court-martial of other soldiers that he took them to show his mum. How sweet.



“Comical” Allawi’s election slogan: “Strong leadership, safe country.”

I may be reading too much into this, but what’s a blog for if not to read too much into things? Bush has said, roughly 12,073 times and most recently in his press conference, that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. Presumably he means without Saddam Hussein in power, but that’s not what he says. I think Bush’s grasp of reality is so attenuated that he believes that when he dismisses someone from his mind, that person is no longer present in the world in any meaningful way. Begone Saddam, begone Osama, I banish you from reality!

The fact that they’re voting, in itself, is successful

OK, one final stab at Bush’s press conference:

Can I ask a follow-up, sir? What would be a credible turnout number?

THE PRESIDENT: The fact that they’re voting, in itself, is successful.

So... one?

Really, if there are more parties on the ballot than there are electors, something has gone a little bit awry.

There is a nice piece in the Indy, behind the usual obnoxious pay barrier, by British comedian Mark Steel on the Iraqi elections, which he thinks are a bit of a farce since real power will continue to lie with the occupiers.

They won’t have any say on who runs the country, owns the country, or arms the country. So it won’t be a governing body, it will have the powers of a parish council, making pronouncements such as, “With regard to the incessant artillery fire behind the Burger King, we can’t alter the military situation. But we can come up with suggestions for how to deal with the congestion this is causing at the traffic lights on Rumsfeld Street. Now, Mrs Aziz has proposed a special lane for suicide bombers, with hefty fines for anyone blocking their way, and I for one think that’s jolly clever. But most importantly, it’s that time of year where we invite all those who wish to have stalls for the Baghdad Village Fayre. And I can tell you that Mr Mohammed has very kindly offered once again to take responsibility for the guess the weight of the hostage’ competition.”

The over-riding issues in Iraq are the occupation and the mass privatisation, which the new body will be unable to have any say in. Half of Britain goes berserk if the European Union interferes with British law by recategorising whelks or insisting we can’t set fire to asylum-seekers. So imagine what the Tories and the Daily Mail would say if we were told that, in line with EU regulations, our parliament no longer had the right to oppose the French riding tanks through our cities or the Italians swiping all our oil.

The elections only make sense in the context of the whole war, having been set up by the Americans as part of their process of controlling the region. It’s as if a pack of burglars came into your house, robbed you, then set up an election so you could vote for which member of the family filled out the form for the insurance.

So on the night of the elections in Iraq, there ought to be the shortest Election Special programme ever. Peter Snow will yell, “On the board behind me is a huge map of the country. There are hundreds of candidates, so let’s see what happens if this one over here gets 86 per cent, or if he gets absolutely none at all. All this region, from right up here to way down there, will still be run by the Americans. So there’s the result - goodnight.”

Any time we lose life it is a sad moment

In the opening remarks of his press conference (there’s a link to the transcript in my earlier post on it), Bush failed to mention the transport helicopter that had crashed, leaving it up to one of the reporters to bring up the topic. Similarly, a White House that is pathological about controlling spin, as we have seen in their insistence that the media stop using the term privatization, failed to announce that the search for Iraqi WMDs had been abandoned, leaving the timing and manner of the inevitable leak up to fate (and it was in December, a perfect time to bury a story). I’d also like to include this week’s revelation that 23 Guantanamo prisoners made a mass attempt at suicide, but since that occurred in 2003, perhaps they were right in thinking they could cover up that particular tidbit.

What I’ve concluded is that Bush especially, but also his merry minions, cannot deliver bad news; they don’t know how. Maybe it’s a psychological thing. We know that they lie, of course, deny that bad things have happened, that bad things are bad (increased violence in Iraq spun as a sign that the baddies are becoming “desperate,” etc), but when it’s undeniable and unspinnable, like a helicopter crash, and there isn’t a culprit to hunt down, they haven’t a clue how to talk about it. When he was asked about that crash, here’s what he said: “And, obviously, any time we lose life it is a sad moment.” And later he added that the American people “value life. And we weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life,” a line delivered in a very once-more-without-feeling style (three seconds later he was joking with a reporter).

I’m not looking for Clintonesque mawkishness, but he is not just any other life-valuing American experiencing a sad moment, he is the commander in chief of the armed forces, at the top of the chain of command that included those 31 dead troops. Some acknowledgment of that would be appropriate.

A Bush line I somehow missed earlier: “I will remind [Putin] that if he intends to continue to look West, we in the West believe in Western values.”

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Douglas Feith announced his resignation today. The WaPo describes him as “a principal architect of the Defense Department’s postwar strategy in Iraq” who “devis[ed] the Pentagon’s overall counterterrorism strategy, including that used in Iraq and Afghanistan,” and quotes him:

“I don’t have any definite plans,” he said of his post-Pentagon life. “I just have some notions.”

Wasn’t that always the problem?

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. What’s that you say, Mr. Feith? The door would never hit you in the ass, but will greet you as a liberator? Whatever you say, Mr. Feith.

Getting out the fanatic vote

Four days before Iraqi elections, and the locations of polling stations still haven’t been released, but we now know that there will also be fake polling stations, to lure suicide bombers. Good, because it wasn’t going to be confusing and chaotic enough.

Personally, I doubt there will be all that much violence on election day, but you’d be a fool to count on it, so the threats have done one thing: skewed the participating electorate heavily towards the fanatics. Some of them will be the brave pro-democracy fanatics Bush keeps invoking, some will be other varieties of fanatics; Iraq has rich and diverse assortment of fanatical fauna. But in much of the country, the lack of security has already determined that the electorate will consist of an unrepresentative minority: those willing to risk their lives for their beliefs. Left out will be the “afraid of all the violence” majority.

I passed on a suggestion months ago, I think from a letter to the New York Times, that adding on a referendum on whether the US occupation should end would increase turnout dramatically. Since that didn’t make it onto the ballot, if we are to understand Sunday’s results we need to ask how the voters who are most concerned with that are going to vote. I’m unclear on this. Will they vote for anti-American parties, or will they vote for Allawi and other American puppets on the theory that if the US gets the result it wants it will leave the country alone, much the same way that the Sandinistas were voted out in Nicaragua by a country weary of years of American attacks and economic pressure.

The 4 Brits who were held in Guantanamo for 3 years have been released by the British police, and are now looking forward to selling their stories of American torture (one was told that his wife was being tortured in the next room) to the tabloids. And in response the Pentagon rolled out a spokesmodel new to me, because I think I would have remember the name: Lieutenant Commander Flex Plexico. That’s better than my previous faves, Carter Ham and Michael Formica.

Ah, I’ve just googled him. Flex is a nickname, though not so identified in the news stories. Real name: Alvin Plexico.

The Blair government, responding to a Law Lords decision that its detention of foreigners without trial was illegal because it was discriminatory, will change the law (and opt out of the European Convention on Human Rights) to expand it to include British citizens (which means they can also go after animal rights activists, who are regularly demonized by right-wing newspapers), and allow the government to order house arrest, monitoring bracelets, etc. And there’s surprisingly little outrage evident.

“I firmly planted the flag of liberty”: I blog Bush’s press conference so you don’t have to

Transcript.

our own freedom is enhanced by the expansion of freedom in other nations

You make it sound like a condiment.

We anticipate a lot of Iraqis will vote. Clearly there are some who are intimidated. ... I urge all people to vote. I urge people to defy these terrorists.

I assume he’ll be setting an example by going to Fallujah and walking people to the polls. He is so brave when others’ lives are at stake. Bring it on!

I appreciate the hard work of the United Nations, which is providing a good leadership in the ground.

Freudian slip, transcription error?

And I anticipate a grand moment in Iraqi history. If we’d been having this discussion a couple of years ago and I had stood up in front of you and said the Iraqi people would be voting, you would look at me like some of you still look at me, with a kind of blank expression.

That’s a mirror, George.

And it’s exciting times for the Iraqi people.

Terrifying, George, the word is terrifying.

Iraqi insurgents lack the “vision thing”:

These terrorists do not have the best interests of the Iraqi people in mind. They have no positive agenda. They have no clear view of a better future.

That’s also a mirror, George.

Asked what a credible turnout would be, he astonishingly fails to answer, except with the standard Special Olympics line:

The fact that they’re voting in itself is successful. Again, this is a long process. ... It’s a -- it is a grand moment for those who believe in freedom.

in the long term, our children and grandchildren will benefit from a free Iraq.

How long, George, got a time frame?

In his inaugural speech, he said something about America standing with victims of oppression, “Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there” sort of thing. So today a reporter asked about a Jordanian arrested for an anti-American speech.

PRESIDENT BUSH: I am unaware of the case. You’ve asked me to comment on something that I didn’t know took place.

If reporters only ask about stuff Shrub knows took place, press conferences would be very short affairs indeed.

Describes the Social Security crisis as “dictated by just math,” “the math shows that we have an issue,” and then tries to figure out how old a reporter’s son (who he refers to as “she” even after being corrected) will be when the system goes broke. To give him credit, he almost got his sums right. Further on Social Security:

we have a duty to act on behalf of their children and grandchildren.

We’re already giving them the benefit of a free Iraq, what more do they want?

About his mission to spread freedom everywhere:

There won’t be instant democracy.

Isn’t that we were promised in Iraq? Just add saturation bombing and stir?

And I remind people that our own country is a work in progress.

Explains all the scaffolding and visible butt cracks.

You know, we -- we -- we declared all people equal, and yet all people weren’t treated equally for a century. We said, you know, everybody counts; but everybody didn’t count.

Very zen.

He undeftly evades a question about Gonzales’s confirmation hearing remarks “that cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of some prisoners is not specifically forbidden so long as it’s conducted by the CIA and conducted overseas. Is that a loophole that you approve?”

THE PRESIDENT: Listen, Al Gonzales reflects our policy, and that is we don’t sanction torture. He will be a great Attorney General, and I call upon the Senate to confirm him.

On how wonderful his second inaugural speech was:

I firmly planted the flag of liberty

Enough with the phallic imagery already.