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Secretary of War Rumsfeld says that the US is less competent in “manipulating opinion elites” than are the terrorists.
A few years ago in Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, an Iraqi could have his tongue cut out if he was found in possession of a satellite dish or used the Internet without government approval. Today, satellite dishes are ubiquitous in that country as well. Regrettably, many of the news channels being watched through these dishes are extremely hostile to the West.
So Rummy is advocating going back to the tongue-cutting-out-thing, I take it.
(Also, I don’t know of anyone having their tongue cut out for using the Internet in Iraq, and I don’t think Iraq banned satellite dishes; that’s Iran you’re thinking of. But other than that...)
Rummy laughs at the thought of people’s tongues being cut out
He says the US is slower to respond because “unlike our enemies, which propagate lies with impunity -- with no penalty whatsoever... Our government has to be the source. And we tell the truth.”
Rummy laughs at the thought of telling the truth
He complains that “allegations of ‘buying news’ in Iraq... leads to a ‘chilling effect’ for those who are asked to serve in the military public affairs field. The conclusion is drawn that there is no tolerance for innovation”. Hate to tell ya, but bribery isn’t an innovation, it’s actually a pretty old concept.
He cites as an example of improving practice the deployment of a military communications team after the Pakistan earthquake, “to help focus the attention of the media on the U.S. government’s truly extraordinary commitment to help the Pakistani people.” Well, its truly extraordinary commitment to be filmed helping the Pakistani people. He says this “changed dramatically” the attitudes towards the US in Pakistan. Evidently his speech was written before the riots this week in which a KFC and other symbols of America were burned. “Indeed, it was not long before the new favorite toy in Pakistan was a small replica of a Chinook helicopter, because of the many lives our helicopters saved, and the mountains of relief supplies they delivered.” Are you suspecting what I’m suspecting, that the mountains of “relief supplies” included small replicas of Chinook helicopters?
Rumsfeld pretends to be a bird (or possibly a Chinook helicopter)...
But quickly realizes his mistake when he sees Dick Cheney with a rifle.
Condi Rice, who has just requested Congress fund dissidents in Iran and Syria (click here for the application form for the latter), suggests those countries “think twice” before funding the Palestinian government. The US has even asked for $50m in aid to be returned, and Chairman Abbas, in the full-on quisling mode that seems to be his response to the Hamas election victory, has agreed to do so.
Sometimes when I read a Bush speech, there’s some piece of idiocy that seems to have come from the Chimp himself, winging it. And then in the next speech, you see it again. And in the next speech. This, for example, is something he clearly thinks is clever, because it’s about the fifth time I’ve seen it:
My buddies in Texas, when they show up to Washington, after they get over the initial surprise that I’m still there -- (laughter) -- or got there in the first place -- (laughter) -- say, like, what’s it like, you know? What is the job description? What’s it like to be President? And the best way to answer it is, I make a lot of decisions.
The Italian Supreme Court, long a source of asinine and/or sexist decisions (past examples here and here) rules that a man who raped a 14-year old may have his sentence reduced because she was not a virgin.
Follow-up: Schwarzenegger denied clemency to the rapist-murderer who won that case on death-penalty drugs and who was represented by Kenneth Starr. No word on whether the question of virginity entered into the gropinator’s decision. He did say that Morales failed to use the word murder in his clemency request, or acknowledge the rape, so he had insufficiently accepted responsibility. How’s that inquiry into the allegations of sexual abuse by you going, governor?
Speaking of taking responsibility, Bush spreads his even further: “I thought there would be weapons of mass destruction -- and so did everybody else in the world”. “This man [Saddam Hussein] was harboring terrorists. He was on a state sponsor of terrorists list. I didn’t put him on there, he was put on there by previous Presidents.”
Speaking of taking responsibility, Media Matters points out a reluctance in the media to use the word “shot” in relation to what Cheney did to Whittington. Lots of passive voice, lots of “peppered,” lots of “was sprayed with birdshot” (makes it sound like Cheney was marking his territory, which, in a way...)
And back to the Bush speech again: “And we started off initially [In Iraq] with kind of these grand projects. We got the Congress to appropriate money, and we tried to build some great electricity-type renovations, and the enemy kept blowing them up. ... And so now we’ve got much smaller-scale projects that are yielding instant results for the people on the ground, so people say, wait a minute, this democracy deal is a pretty good thing, you know.” He doesn’t say what these instant results are, but I hope the Iraqis can see them in the dark. Electricity-type renovations?
He also hasn’t retired a phrase that’s always creeped me out due to its dehumanization of the enemy. “So on the security side, we’re on the hunt.” Dude, maybe you don’t use that phrase the week your veep shot a guy in the face.
The Q&A was, as ever at these events, staggering in its intensity:
Q Mr. President, I just wanted to take an opportunity to tell you I think our country is blessed to have you as our President.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.)
And
Q Thank you for being our President. We are all way better off and very safe --
THE PRESIDENT: Thanks. My high honor, by the way. (Applause.)
Q Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: I’m glad I did it.
Q We appreciate it. How do you -- earlier you shared with us some intimacy about how you make decisions, and I felt that was heartfelt. How do you keep it together? What do you really think about when the biggest story this week was Dick Cheney’s hunting trip, and not Al Gore blasting our troops and being treasonous in his regard to this war on terror in the Middle East? (Applause.) How do you keep it together?
THE PRESIDENT: Booze and hookers.
I may have made up the last part.
I hate the State Department’s crappy website. I’ve been getting Condi’s budget committee testimony in dribs and drabs (by the way, do you know what a drab is? It’s a drib). Here’s another drib: she accused Hugo Chavez of practicing a “Latin brand of populism that has taken countries down the drain.” I’m kind of enjoying thinking about a brand of populism conducted entirely in Latin (“Vox populi, vox Dei,” I always say). Or, if you wanted to be even more populist, Pig Latin. Or did Condi mean something else, with salsa music and the tango and the hot Latin blood and suchlike? Populism is one of the Bushies’ swear words, although it really hasn’t caught on. You were supposed to gasp when she said it: “Populism, oh my word! heavenly mercies! oh the horror!” As I commented in October, “The Bushies don’t seem to be defining what this populism thing they’re castigating actually is, but the label is meant to somehow delegitimize leaders they dislike who nonetheless have the effrontery to win elections.”
Another drib, or possibly a drab, about building the Iraqi military and police: “To be fair, we made a mistake earlier. We relied on number rather than on quality.” I dunno, the death squads operating within the Interior Ministry seem fairly efficient.
The chief Internet guy in the Chinese government, Liu Zhengrong may or may not be horrified by the thought of populism, with or without salsa, but is afeared of “harmful information.” However, he says that Chinese censorship practices are based on those in the West, just like the Washington Post turning off comments. Oh, and the Patriot Act, it’s just like that. “We have noted that the US is doing a good job on this front.” And a Google VP told a House subcommittee, that Google’s censoring of the internet in China “was not something we did enthusiastically, or not something that we’re proud of at all.” So that’s ok, then.
There’s another reward for the death of the Danish cartoonist, this time from a cleric in Pakistan: $1 million (why must they use American currency? why not the Danish herring, or whatever they use over there?) and a car. Doesn’t say what type of car.
Harry Whittington is leaving the hospital. He says he is “deeply sorry” for the trouble he caused Dick Cheney by getting shot by him, adding, “Accidents do and will happen, and that’s what happened last Friday.” The Associated Press put a period after the word happened, covering up the worrying detail that Whittington doesn’t know what day he got shot.
Israel will in future allow Palestinians from the West Bank to enter Israel only at one of 11 separate-but-equal checkpoints; the others are reserved for “Israelis,” which includes tourists and... and some would suggest this is the giveaway... anyone entitled to emigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. Oh, and a creeping-annexation alert: 8 of the 11 are not on the actual border, but somewhere inside the West Bank.
In Beijing, a restaurant that serves only penises. And an hour later you want to eat a penis again. The Telegraph penis restaurant reviewer sampled the cuisine, but doesn’t say if yak penis tastes like chicken penis.
I don’t know if this is better or worse than being an axis of evil, but Condi referred yesterday to “Iran’s sidekicks Syria, Venezuela ... and Cuba”. Sidekicks? Sidekicks? What does that even mean? She is also talking about an “inoculation” strategy against Venezuela, which is evidently less a country than a disease now.
If it weren’t for a certain shooting incident, we’d all be having more fun this week with Kenneth Starr’s involvement in fraudulent affidavits submitted as part of a clemency appeal in a death penalty case purportedly from jurors who’d changed their minds (although, sadly, there is no evidence Starr was aware of the fraud) (none of this , curiously, is even mentioned in the LAT story that link goes to). Starr became convinced that execution would be unjust because the man, who raped, strangled and stabbed a 17-year old girl – oh, and hit her with a hammer – has since become a “deeply sorrowful Christian,” in Starr’s words. Makes you wonder how history would have been different if Clinton had played the Jesus card.
The US has rejected a UN report calling for the closure of Stalag Guantanamo or at the very least for the torture and forcible feeding to stop, have real legal proceedings, and blah blah blah. Why, the US says in badly feigned righteous indignation, we can tell the report is biased because the investigators never even visited Gitmo, having refused our generous offer to come and not be allowed to speak with any of the prisoners (lack of transparency works twice: first you keep everyone in the dark, then you accuse them of ignorance like it’s their fault. Alberto Gonzales did this last week re NSA eavesdropping). “We know that al-Qaeda terrorists are trained in trying to disseminate false allegations,” says Scott McClellan, who, can you believe it, never had a lesson. The US response to the report (pages 53-4 of the pdf linked above) finds its condemnation of the force feeding of hunger-striking prisoners “bewildering.”
Speaking of unethical medical practices, the state of California will respond to a federal judge’s ruling that its particular cocktail of drugs used in executions may inflict pain on prisoners, won’t change the drugs but will provide an anaesthesiologist to ensure that the prisoner in the case, due to be executed next week, will be unconscious before the drugs are administered. The California Medical Association says participation by a doctor in an execution is unethical because “Capital punishment is not a medical task,” but it won’t actually do anything about it.
Condi Rice is asking Congress for tens of millions to “support the aspirations of the Iranian people” (Condi does not say how she determined what those aspirations are; possibly she went door to door with a clipboard). She accuses the Iranian government of “toxic statements and confrontational behavior,” which is funny because she just talked about trying to overthrow that government, which is usually considered at least a wee bit confrontational. Some of this money will be distributed secretly to certain Iranians, ensuring that all reformers can be denounced as American puppets. Condi says that she’s “read that” Beethoven and Mozart cannot be played in Teheran. Well, if she’s “read” it, it must be true.
Damn, I’m stale today. On Fox Cheney said “was one of the worst days of my life,” and while I immediately wondered what the other ones were, all I could think of were 1) the day he found out that to continue to stay out of Vietnam he would have to (shudder) fuck Lynne and get her pregnant [it’s funny because it’s true], and 2) the day he found out that Mary was a lesbian [it’s unfunny because it’s true]. See what I mean? Stale. So it’s contest time: what are some of the other worst days in the Dickster’s life?
My, that was the epitome of soft-ball interviews, wasn’t it? Or non-interview, really, since Hume didn’t ask a single question that Cheney didn’t want asked. One thing: I didn’t put any particular credence in the rumors that Pamela Willeford, the ambassador to Switzerland who was also on the hunt, was Cheney’s mistress until he referred to her only as “the other hunter.” As for “taking responsibility,” Media Matters points out that for several days, Cheney’s office referred all questions to Katharine Armstrong, who blamed Whittington for being shot. Still, he talked about shooting an old man in the face without actually bursting into giggles or maniacal laughter, and that’s the important thing.
That interview, remixed as a gay porn script by someone with too much time, and god knows what else, on their hands.
State Dept lawyer John Bellinger, speaking about the new (to us) Abu Ghraib photos, takes exactly the same disingenuous line that so many media outlets in the US and elsewhere have taken towards the Danish cartoons: “It’s unfortunate, though, that the photographs are continuing to come out because I think it simply fans the flames at a time that sentiments on these issues are raw around the world. People know, the world knows, that this behavior went on. It was described. It’s been prosecuted. There’s no value that can be added.” And Pentagon spokesmodel Bryan Whitman added (but without adding any value) that release of the pictures “could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world and... would endanger our military men and women”. You know the word I really like in that sentence? Unnecessary. And are you sure you didn’t mean that the photos would inflame our military men and women and endanger our unnecessary violence? Anyway, the link for those unnecessary-violence-inciting photos once again is here.
Tony Blair forces Parliament to override a House of Lords vote and ban “glorification” of terrorism, to wit,
Statements that are likely to be understood as indirectly encouraging acts of terrorism [because it] glorifies the commission or preparation (whether in the past, in the future or generally) or such acts or offences; and is a statement from which those members of the public could reasonably be expected to infer that what is being glorified is being glorified as conduct that should be emulated by them in existing circumstances.
Blair intends to use this power to ban whole organizations, and to deport foreign imams. Blair said, “We have free speech in this country, but you cannot abuse it.” I wouldn’t have thought that free speech is that difficult a concept to grasp – what part of “free” is so hard to understand?
Another cartoon contest, in Israel, calling for the best anti-Semitic cartoons, with only Jews allowed to enter because they will not be under-sold.
Dick Cheney forthrightly says that he and not Harry Whittington is responsible for his having shot Whittington in the face – after waiting four days to see how well having his surrogates say the reverse was playing out, maybe have a few focus groups...
By the way, the line I’d like to see engraved on Cheney’s head-stone: “I’m the guy who pulled the trigger.”
The interview will be on Fox at 3 pm PT. I... may... have more to say afterwards.
Bush gives a speech on “health savings accounts. I call them HSAs. When you hear me say HSA, that’s kind of government-speak for health savings account.” He gave the speech at the hq of Wendy’s, a fast-food chain. Not being fully conversant with the concept of insurance, he finds it “interesting” that people with insurance pay only part of their own health care costs.
It means most Americans have no idea what their actual cost of treatment is. You show up, you got a traditional plan, you got your down payment, you pay a little co-pay, but you have no idea what the cost is. Somebody else pays it for you. And so there’s no reason at all to kind of worry about price.
And that’s a bad thing, that sick people don’t have to kind of worry about medical bills. He keeps talking about people making their health care decisions themselves, but of course what he’s advocating is having them make their health care decisions on financial rather than medical grounds. Now when people make their dietary decisions on those grounds... I did mention that he was speaking at the headquarters of Wendy’s, didn’t I?
Peppergate has traction and resonance because it looks, sounds, feels and especially smells like a metaphor for so many policies and attitudes of the Cheney-Bush administration that we can’t pick just one. This little incident fits a certain genre, for which Echidne of the Snakes provides the Cliff’s Notes:
Picking targets that they think are easy (tame birds in this case), then finding out that the whole thing turned into a disaster (shooting yourself or someone on your side), then exhibiting a certain callousness about the whole thing (going to have the meal as planned) and then trying to keep everything a secret.
The variants are endless: blaming the victims of Katrina; the US taking aim at a guy on crutches, experiencing “target fixation,” wheeling around and shooting peppering Afghanistan/Iraq; Valerie Plame, etc etc and etc.
Or Damadola, that town in Pakistan where the US bombed peppered a house more than a month ago to kill an Al Qaeda guy who wasn’t there, killed 18 people including children, but still hasn’t admitted it. There may be consequences for Harry Whittington, but never for Damadola, such are our priorities.
(Update: the 10 ways Iraq is like Harry Whittington.)
I watched Tuesday morning’s Gaggle for a while, but Little Scottie was simply refusing to answer any questions – “It is what it is” – and it got a little tedious. Now it turns out that he knew about the heart attack before he entered the room, and failed to say anything. Good luck with the White House press corps in the future, Little Scottie.
And good luck Iran, because Dick Cheney may have to endure the next three years without going hunting again, and he needs to burn off that cold furious rage somehow.
Elsewhere in the world, the Cartoon Wars resulted in fatalities in a new country today, Pakistan. I’ve lost track of the number of deaths. 20? A Taliban commander put a price on the heads of the cartoonists.
We finally found WMDs: the Nazis released malarial mosquitos in Italy in 1943, intending to infect invading Allied soldiers (who were taking their quinine and were unaffected, not so the civilians who lived in the area).
Some more Abu Ghraib pictures have come out.
For Vday, a selection of personals from the London Review of Books. For all my favorite LRB personals, click here.
Librarian-looking punk, 34, seeks punkette-looking librarian.
Every year, without fail, the LRB produces the biggest turkey. This year it’s me – monocled, plaid-festooned gadabout, out of place in any relationship, or century, that fails to recognise the comfort of a secure knickerbocker. Please help me. Man, possibly your embarrassing uncle, 51. Box no. 24/10
It takes me just seven minutes and thirty-one seconds to dress for dinner. Woman, 34. Don’t even pretend not to be impressed. Box no. 01/04
Technically, by writing this ad, I’m breaking the terms of my probation. Technically, though, I’m not really a woman either. Two wrongs always make a right in the mixed-up, muddled-up, security-tagged and banned from most Croydon shopping centres world of box no. 01/09.
I once came within an ace of making my own toothpaste. M, 36, seeks woman with knowledge of fluoride compounds/tantric love-making. Box no. 02/18
I ate a pencil and three Post-Its whilst writing this ad. Oh, and drank a bottle of correcting fluid. Whhheeeeeeee!!! Man, 33-and-a-quarter. Box no. 03/06
The only thing that makes me happy is weeping in front of the television whilst wearing mother’s clothes. That, and jazzercise. M, 42. There’s always time for guilt, Newsnight, and a good abs workout in the tortured juvenile psyche of box no. 03/07
I have the largest collection of bus tickets in Sunderland. Beat that. Man, 41. Box no. 03/11
Today’s Gaggle is especially amusing and worth reading/viewing. One reporter used the line I used as this post’s title. You almost feel sorry for Little Scottie. Okay, you don’t. Looks like the press corps has finally found an issue they’re not willing to be lied to about.
Scottie may not be able to answer basic questions about The Incident, but he does have an answer for the Cartoon Wars: “And I think we ought to look at all the goodwill that’s being shown at the Olympics as an example of the kind of understanding that we would like to see moving forward.”
And evidently God has his own response to the cartoons: a calf born in Egypt whose skin folds form the words (presumably in Arabic but possibly in Moo-Cow) “There is no God but Allah.” I was unable to find a picture.
The lame-duck Palestinian parliament, in its last session, voted to greatly expand the powers of Mahmoud Abbas at the expense of the incoming Hamas-led parliament, including the right to appoint judges to the highest court without parliamentary confirmation. The packed court will then overturn legislation passed by Hamas.
It looks very much like the elections in Haiti are being stolen, or at least forced into a second round (after the first one was postponed 4 or 5 times). Lenin’s Tomb has details, but there’s one Lennie missed: the 50% Preval has to get to prevent that run-off includes 50% of all those ballots which are rejected as “faulty” or (allegedly) blank (14% in some areas). In the election-theft biz, that’s known as having your hanging chad and eating it too.
Oh dear holy fuck, it just gets better. This is the statement, evidently the ONLY statement, issued by the office of the vice president:
It has been brought to the Vice President’s attention by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department this afternoon that, although he had acquired a 125 dollar Texas non-resident season hunting license, he lacked a 7 dollar stamp for hunting upland game birds. To address any questions about the licensing:
-- A member of the Vice President’s staff wrote a check for 140 dollars understanding that this would purchase a Texas non-resident season hunting license that would permit the Vice President to hunt quail in Texas. It appears now that the license itself cost 125 dollars, and an extra 15 dollars covered the cost of a Federal migratory bird stamp. The Vice President did not need the Federal stamp, as he already possessed one.
-- The staff asked for all permits needed, but was not informed of the 7 dollar upland game bird stamp requirement.
-- Because the requirement is new, the Department has informed us that it is issuing warnings, and the Vice President expects to receive one. He will take whatever steps are needed to comply with applicable rules.
-- In the meantime, the Vice President has sent a 7 dollar check to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which is the cost of an upland game bird stamp.
I know I’m satisfied.
Actually, I’m no longer convinced that the wall of secrecy was just to get them past the Sunday talk shows. Not telling Bush for 12 hours, and telling the White House that there had been a shooting but not who the shooter was, smells of “plausible deniability.” I think they were planning a cover-up that didn’t work, probably getting Whittington to say that he’d accidentally shot himself.
Wait a minute, why is a member of Cheney’s staff, paid for by taxpayer dollars, running personal, blood-sport-related errands for him?
I was going to ask if Cheney spoke to the local cops before fleeing the scene back to Washington, but silly me: in Texas when someone gets shot while hunting there’s no requirement even to inform the authorities unless they actually die.
Still less is there a legal requirement to inform the press. White House press corps to McClellan: “Why didn’t you tell us Cheney shot a guy?” McClellan: “You didn’t ask.” (I wrote that before seeing his actual words: “Well, I think we all know that once it is made public, then it’s going to be news, and all of you are going to be seeking that information.”) Ten bucks to the first reporter who asks just how many other people Cheney has shot over the years that they failed to tell us about. Remember all that construction work a couple of years ago at Blair House (the Veep residence)? Installing giant freezers to store all the bodies.
Rumsfeld has been visiting North Africa, citing Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia as positive examples for dealing with “the problem of extremism.” Here’s how he describes his conversation with Algerian President Bouteflika:
He described it from the inside, as to what took place and how they fought off the terrorism problem and the problem of extremism, and the numbers of people who were killed or beheaded, and the task of persuading the Algerian people that their future was in a forward-looking, economically prosperous, democratic system, as opposed to violence and extremism.
Or to put it another way, how the Algerian government refused to implement the results of elections won by Islamists, banned their parties, then massacred many thousands of people and threw tens of thousands into prison.
And I was musing as he talked about the fact that so many people looking at it from the outside had so many ideas and critiques, and opined on this and opined on that, and it was very different from where he was.
Different still from a dungeon or a mass grave.
Mary Matalin says Cheney “was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.” Now they’re just cut-and-pasting, using the same assertions to defend torture, holding people without trial, wiretapping, shootin’ a guy, whatever. In comments on my last post, Neil Shakespeare suggests the delay in getting Whittington to the hospital was in case someone checked Cheney’s blood-alcohol level, which seems plausible.
Also – obvious, but I didn’t think of it earlier – he waited until after the Sunday-morning shows were safely past.
Also, at some point he has to make a public statement, in which he will have to attempt to express contriteness and sympathy for the fellow human being he shot, so he’s gotta be practicing that, like Dick Gregory once said Lyndon Johnson didn’t talk about race for a while after he became president because his aides were trying to teach him how to say negro. “Niggra-o.” “Not quite, Mr. President, try again.”
Starting with the woman who owns the ranch where Cheney stalked and gunned down his prey, we have and will be hearing a lot of people talking about how it’s no big deal to be shot (or “peppered,” as they like to call it), why heck being shot by one of your buddies while huntin’ and drinkin’ is the Texas equivalent of a bar mitzvah.
Lech Walesa suggests to Cuban exiles in Florida that they should prepare for what happens after Castro dies. Yeah, they should really do that instead of whatever it is they’ve been doing for the last 50 years.
Cheney exercised one of the little-known “inherent rights of the vice presidency,” and shot a 78-year old man.
Harry Whittington, who has just found his way into history trivia quizzes for decades to come, may have been a Republican, a lawyer and a hunter, but he also campaigned for better treatment of retarded prisoners, including not, you know, executing them.
They didn’t make an announcement until the local press got hold of the story over a day later. Say, do you think they reported the shooting to the police? Oh, and despite the fact that Cheney has his own personal ambulance, which did take Whittington to the hospital (insert your own ambulance-chaser joke here), it didn’t do so until nearly 3 hours after he was shot. What’s that about?
I’m gonna have that Tom Lehrer song – you know the one I mean – going through my head the rest of the day.
The United Arab Emirates sentences 26 men who attended a gay wedding (!) to 5 years each for being gay.
Norman Solomon makes the point that we’re being too sanguine if we think Bush can’t use an over-stretched US military against Iran: “But what’s on the horizon is not an invasion -- it’s a major air assault”.
Riverbend raided.
Salman Rushdie, in an op-ed piece in favor of free speech (who’da thunk it?), quotes a t-shirt: “Blasphemy is a victimless crime.”
A letter to the London Times: “I have just purchased a bread and butter pudding from the Finest range of a leading supermarket chain. A heart-emblazoned sticker proclaims: ‘Perfect for Valentine’s Day’. Lower down, an information box states: ‘Serves 3’.” David Lilley, Leicestershire
And the Olympics Fever computer virus infects the LauraBot 3000. Or do any of you have a better caption you’d like to share with the class?
The NYT runs the story of the alleged Al Qaeda shoe-bomb plot against LA on page A20, the WaPo on A4. Get the feeling they don’t really believe it either?
But it doesn’t matter. Democrats probably also have their doubts, but they’re afraid of saying so, in case they turn out to be wrong and look foolish. This is how Bush can lie, can be known to have a long record of lying, and not be slapped down for it.
Condi Rice congratulates the Haitian people on voting, just as if the US hadn’t forced the last elected president to resign before they would save his fucking life from thugs supported and funded by the US (my recap here). So anyway, pretending all that never happened, she tells the Haitian people to “respect the final results” (!) and says the Bush admin will “support the people of Haiti as they progress toward a transparent and stable democracy”.
However, nothing says transparent democracy like an open-mike incident.
The lower house of the South Dakota legislature votes 47-22 to ban pretty much all abortions, turning back moves to make exemptions in cases of rape, incest or the woman’s health. The pro-choice side was careful to follow Saletan’s advice and proclaim their abhorrence for abortion itself, one legislator saying, “I don’t believe in abortion by choice... But I sure as H.E. double hockey sticks believe in something for victims of rape.” AP says that Rep. Keri Weems, who made the usual don’t-punish-the-fetus-just-because-its-father-raped-its-mother argument, “describes herself as a stay-at-home mother,” which is funny because I thought that “Rep.” stood for Representative, which isn’t really a stay-at-home job, but perhaps in South Dakota Rep. is a special title they give to mothers, standing for Reproducer. Actually, she so describes herself on her website, where we find that she also wants to make distribution of condoms in schools punishable by one year in prison and a $1,000 fine, and to exempt cattle and swine semen from sales tax. Sort of a mixed message, really. A Democrat noted that this vote would be used “in campaign fodder,” impelling one of the Righteous, Republican party leader Rep. Larry Rhoden, to say, “I’m offended that anybody on this floor would accuse us of being political on this issue. We’re debating this based on our own personal beliefs.” Yes, precisely: you’re trying to impose your own personal beliefs on everyone else.
Via SF Chronic columnist Jon Carroll, this 4½-minute video of a guy juggling (the one at the right labeled “big finale”). Take my word for it, go watch.
Bush met today with right-wing Polish President Kaczynski. “I asked the President his advice on Ukraine. That’s what friends do -- they share information and share strategic thoughts.” Oh, and help each other move.
Some people think the sudden eruption of the Cartoon Wars four months after the cartoons’ original publication indicates some sort of organization or conspiracy. If so, the four-month delay is the tell-tale signature of that most dastardly group (you’re way ahead of me, aren’t you?), FEMA.
The part of the story about the supposed plot to shoe-bomb hijack a plane into downtown LA that is least credible is that the alleged hijackers went to meet Osama and get his blessing a month after 9/11, which would have been a ridiculous breach of security. At today’s Gaggle, Little Scottie was stumped by a question about how you hijack a plane with a weapon more suited to blowing up a plane. The administration answer is that they would use the shoe-bombs to blow up the cockpit door so that they could gain access and... what? hijack the plane with no other weapons, and not even a door to stop the passengers tearing them apart?
By the way, Bush accidentally referred to the Library Tower as the Liberty Tower, verbally replacing one thing with which he is completely unfamiliar with another thing with which he is completely unfamiliar.
Man, remember when the phrase “cartoon protests” applied only to any event Al Sharpton showed up at?
When Democrats in the House International Relations Committee submitted resolutions asking for information about torture policy and extraordinary rendition, Henry Hyde suggested that they should “at least silently confess to themselves that their actions pose real dangers to our country.” The resolutions were of course voted down by the R’s.
An AP story yesterday passed on the Pentagon’s claim that there were only four detainees still hunger striking in Guantanamo. Spokesscum Col. Jeremy Martin, who we’ve seen before defending the torture of forcible feeding and describing hunger striking as an Al Qaeda tactic, claims to have no idea why the drop in numbers – Martin never seems to know what prisoners are thinking, saying or demanding, because that would humanize them – saying, “We haven’t changed anything. Our processes and procedures are the same.” In fact, they are not, as is proven in an actual by god piece of investigative journalism, only 4 years late, in today’s NYT. I won’t quote at length because you need to go read it now. Take your time, I’ll be waiting in the next paragraph.
They have clearly stepped up the level of violence used against hunger-striking prisoners, and deliberately increased the pain involved in forcible feeding, removing throat lozenges, over-feeding to cause diarrhea, and introducing... the Emergency Restraint Chair.
They’ve bought 25 of these puppies, and are clearly using them as punishment, strapping prisoners into them for hours at a time, which goes against the manufacturers’ instructions that “Detainees should not be left in the Emergency Restraint Chair for more than two hours. The Emergency Restraint Chair should never be used as a means of punishment.” The company told the NYT that the Pentagon never asked for instructions in the chairs’ use.
My googling also turned up this site, which has many prisoner-restraint products for sale, and is quite scary.
(Update: Sigh, Slate’s Today’s Papers did the same Google search I did and has a link to the restraint chair company too. I thought I’d be the only blog with a picture of the chair. Actually, the print NYT, which arrived after I wrote the above, has the first picture, although the Times website does not.)
As long as I’m being unoriginal, I’ll hat-tip A Tiny Revolution’s catch on this wonderfully telling sentence from the London Times: “Iran has threatened to defend itself if attacked.”
Condi Rice failed to respond when Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a fellow member of the my-parents-were-drunk-when-they-picked-my-name club (or, in Livni’s case, not so much drunk as tzipsy), said that a Palestinian state run by Hamas would by definition be a “terrorist entity.”
Israel is building a Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem. On the site of an ancient Indian Muslim cemetery, used for more than 1,000 years. Says the srael Antiquities Authority, “If we didn’t build on former cemeteries, we would never build.”
Picture from the Pentagon website, where it has the caption, “U.S. Marines perform log drills, which are exercises conducted using logs”.
Bush met with Jordan’s King Abdullah, his Oilaholics Anonymous sponsor, today. “We had a little time by ourselves to talk strategically about the world and our deep desire for this world to be peaceful.” One of the things they talked strategically about was... those damn cartoons. Evidently “we believe in a free press. We also recognize that with freedom comes responsibilities. With freedom comes the responsibility to be thoughtful about others.” Bush is always willing to stand up for rights, as long as they’re not exercised. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to suppress free speech: “we reject violence as a way to express discontent with what may be printed in a free press.” Jordan, for example, simply arrested two editors. Think George asked Kingy about them? He went on to call on all governments to stop the violence (the largest number of deaths, 12 so far, has been in US-occupied Afghanistan), “to be respectful” (!), and to protect the lives of “innocent diplomats” (is there such a creature as an innocent diplomat?).
Condi Rice has found the real culprit in the Cartoon Wars: Iran and Syria, who have “gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes. And the world ought to call them on it.” Yeah, I’d hate for the smoking cartoon gun to come in the form of a cartoon mushroom cloud.
Favorite White House website article title of the week: “President Honors Dance Theatre of Harlem at the White House.”
Also honored by the president today, Coretta Scott King. Less honored was the woman at the far right of this picture, who goes unidentified in the caption on the White House website. Hillary Clinton, of course, and they were so anxious not to have her fully in frame that they cropped the picture in a way which also left out George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. And, er, how disrespectful would it be to have a caption contest here, about just what Shrub is thinking at this moment?
A week ago I asked how the cartoon protesters got those Danish flags they were burning in Gaza. Capitalism, baby, capitalism.
When entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Dayya first heard that Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed were being reprinted across Europe, he knew exactly what his customers in Gaza would want: flags to burn.
$11 each.
Abu Dayya sources some of his flags from suppliers in Taiwan, but he buys Israeli flags from a merchant in Israel, even though he sells them to be burned at anti-Israeli rallies.
And the Danish flag was also burnt today by Members of the state parliament of the Kano province of Nigeria, the closest thing Nigeria has to Taleban-era Afghanistan, where they resisted polio vaccinations as a diabolical Western plot. No word on where they acquired the flag. The flag was also burnt in the Philippines today.
Something seems a bit suspicious about the fact that in the Cartoon Wars, 5 Afghans were killed by Afghan police trying to storm Bagram Air Base. Since when does the American military entrust its security to Afghans?
Job title of the day: “bling handler” for a rapper. And that guy just got killed, so the job is available.
The deputy editor of the Taizhou Evening News dies following a police beating.
Gonzales said that the only reason they’re not wiretapping calls both ends of which are in the US is that public reaction might be negative. In other words, they probably think it’s one more thing they have the “inherent authority” to do (the list grows with each episode of “24”: every time Jack Bauer threatens to gouge someone’s eye out or whatever, Gonzales “discovers” something else they have the inherent authority to do), but it’s politically expedient not to, at least for the present.
Reminds me: I would have quoted Russ Feingold yesterday, but I thought everyone else would, and they haven’t. In response to that nonsense about D’s having a “pre-9/11 mindset,” he said that Bush is demonstrating a pre-1776 mindset.
Poland is down to fewer than 200 legal abortions a year, and often it’s the doctors themselves doing the refusing. A woman who was told by 3 eye doctors that a pregnancy could result in blindness was refused an abortion by all 3 of those doctors and a gynecologist; she gave birth, is now close to blind, and is taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights.
The language about Iran has been quietly ramping up, not perhaps helped by the announcement by Iran’s largest newspaper that it will run cartoons making fun of the Holocaust. In fact, it will have a contest to find the best one. What would an appropriate prize be for that? In addition to the Security Council referral over its nuclear program, I’ve heard government statements in the last week claiming Iran is the biggest state sponsor of terrorism and that the increasing sophistication of IED’s in Iraq is down to Iranian assistance.
Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to do a brief book report slash recommendation of a book I finished last week, Norman Solomon’s War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. The book’s an essay about the myths, lies, memes used to sell America’s wars, using the wars of the last 40 years to illuminate the current Iraq war. It’s very much a journalist’s book, relying mostly on old newspaper and magazine articles rather than archives and memoirs. This means he doesn’t really delve into whether Lyndon Johnson, Reagan, Rumsfeld, Bush etc actually believe what they’re saying, but that would be a different book. This book is divided into 17 chapters, each of which focuses on one of these myths, such as: This Guy is a Modern-Day Hitler, They Are the Aggressors, Not Us, The Pentagon Fights Wars as Humanely as Possible, Withdrawal Would Cripple U.S. Credibility, What the US Government Needs Most is Better PR, etc (the table of contents is on the Amazon site). He demonstrates that the same themes are recycled over and over; this book is intended to be the antidote to the American amnesia that allows successive administrations to get away with that. The structure of the book really works: I knew most of this stuff, but the thematic chapters arrange the information in a way that is genuinely enlightening. Since his concerns overlap so well with my own, I would venture that anyone who likes my blog would like this book. And if you use the link at the top of this paragraph, Amazon will kick back 89¢ to me (or check your public library, like I did). Solomon’s previous book, Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You, is available as a free download on his website. I haven’t read it yet, but I will. Oh, and no small thing: the man can write.
The BBC said it, I didn’t: “Muslim Cartoon Fury Claims Lives.”
Alberto Gonzales, testifying about domestic surveillance, gave an answer that it took me a second to realize was inadvertently revealing: asked why the admin hadn’t consulted Congress, he replied, “The short answer is, we didn’t think we needed to.” Going into the store this morning, I didn’t need to hold the door for the person behind me, it wasn’t a legal requirement, but I did it anyway. Asked where in the Constitution it says that the prez can wiretap American citizens without a warrant, he admitted “nowhere specifically.” So if they don’t wanna do something, they don’t gotta unless it says so in exactly as many words in the Constitution, but if they wanna do something, they’ll interpret the shit out of that parchment. (Update: Leahy made exactly that point: “I’m getting the impression this administration picks and chooses what it’s subject to.”) So there was a lot of talk about the inherent powers of this incoherent president; “inherent powers” are the Holy Ghost of this administration’s constitutional theology. Biden asked what damage could really have been caused by the leak of the existence of this program, didn’t terrorists already figure that they were being listened to; Gonzales replied that “if they’re not reminded about it all the time in the newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget.” And for sweeps, a little stunt casting: the R’s brought the sister of one of the 9/11 pilots to the hearings.
We’ve talked about whether the NSA warrantless surveillance is “domestic” or not, and just how many innocent people’s conversations were swept into the net, but what about the assertion, as made by Gen. Michael Hayden again today on the Sunday chat shows, that it was focused on Al Qaeda and only Al Qaeda (oh, and “Al Qaeda affiliates,” whatever that means). Of course Al Qaeda doesn’t really have an official membership list per se, so that what Hayden means is people he designates as being Al Qaeda members, but putting that aside, is Al Qaeda really the only terrorist organization in the world that we’re worried will do something nasty inside the United States?
There have now been 5 deaths in the Cartoon Wars: 3 shot by Afghan police, a boy shot in Somalia, and one of the demonstrators killed in the burning of the Danish embassy in Lebanon (that’ll teach ‘em to mess with Loki). Demonstrations seem to have spread to half the countries on the planet, including India and Thailand. (By the way, I made an editorial decision not to put the cartoons on my site, but only to link to them, because there’s no getting around the fact that some of them are obnoxious, racist, and just not at all good, and because my support for free speech is not conditional on the content of that speech, which is why we call it free speech. I have, however, now made another editorial decision to include a link to the cartoons every time I mention them, in the same way I link to other primary sources like George Bush’s speeches, which are also obnoxious, sometimes racist, and just not at all good.) Iraq (or possibly just the transportation ministry) has announced that it will refuse to accept reconstruction money from Denmark and Norway.
Speaking of cartoon characters, House Majority Leader John Boehner, pictured below, is against banning corrupt lobbying practices but is for “bringing more transparency to this relationship,” for example by passing out checks from tobacco lobbyists during votes on bills affecting their interests right on the House floor in front of God, C-SPAN and everyone.
An American Coast Guard captain put a message in a bottle, which traveled all the way to England, where one Henry Biggelsworth sent back a note scolding him for littering. There will always be an England as long as someone reacts in precisely that way to a message in a bottle and as long as that someone is named Henry Biggelsworth.
Speaking of messages in bottles, this blog experienced a 9-hour outage Saturday. I trust it was not too painful.
In case you were unable to figure it out in my absence, this is a Bad Thing: the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria and the Danish embassy in Lebanon have been burned down in protest against Cathy Ziggy Garfield The Family Circus, because it makes a circus of the family those Danish cartoons (and rumors that Danes were planning to burn the Koran publicly, possibly in front of the Little Mermaid statue). Christopher Hitchens, gin-soaked apostate that he is, has it more or less exactly right in Slate. He thinks that Muslims who “claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism” today will not become more tolerant tomorrow if appeased today, such as when the US government pronounces the cartoons “unacceptable.” He says of the protesters, “I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice”.
Everyone’s a critic: now it’s the United States Department of State that is calling the Danish cartoons “offensive to the beliefs of Muslims.” So not only is the US government (happily stoking the flames when Muslims are for once pissed off at someone other than the US) now in the business of issuing fatwas against free expression, but it’s also in the business of saying what is or is not offensive to the beliefs of Muslims. I understand the State Department also proclaims that human-animal hybrids are offensive to the beliefs of Muslims.
The Pakistani Parliament has also, unanimously, passed a resolution that the cartoons “hurt the faith and feelings of Muslims all over the world.” Hurt their feelings (the poor delicate flowers), fine, but how precisely did a few feeble cartoons hurt the Muslim faith? The Pakistani general-president-dictator (but he really wants to direct) Musharaf also condemned them, which is funny because he’s normally such a staunch supporter of human rights.
Laura Ingraham asked Dick Cheney who Bush meant when he attacked “isolationists.” He says anyone who wants to “deal with the terrorist threat... the way we dealt with it prior to 9/11” and anyone who thinks “military involvement in the Middle East” is “optional.”
Rumsfeld, in that talk at the National Press Club yesterday in which he said that Hugo Chavez is just like Hitler because they were both elected legally and then consolidated power, a talk in which Rumsfeld gestured with his finger
JUST LIKE HITLER
and in which he said the fight against terrorists could be “generational,” gave this insight into the inner workings of terrorists: “They get up in the morning, have committee meetings and think about how they’re going to manipulate the world’s press to their advantage.” Committee meetings?
And while everyone else in the Bush administration talks about the evil Muslim plan for a caliphate, Rummy has the damning proof: “They have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire.” Here there be dragons.
In the Q&A (and by the way, has anyone seen a transcript of this event?), someone quoted his pre-war statements about Iraq definitely absolutely positively having chemical and biological weapons. His response: “Oh, I don’t like to be told what I said.”
Bush: “I think the role of government is to shape the future, not fear the future.” Just in case you were wondering what the role of government is.
BBC headline: “Muslims Urge New Cartoon Protests.” I thought those protesters looked a little like parodies of fanatical loons, but evidently that was the idea all along. Cartoon protests indeed.
The cartoony protests have spread as far as Indonesia and of course to Iraq, where Shiites painted a Danish flag in front of the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf so that they could step on it.
“Step two kick kick.”
(Update: If you’ve googled in with a “cartoon protests” search, you might want to go to the main page, or the February 2006 page, and look for more recent references to the War of the Cartoons)
Iranian President Ahmadinejad responds to Bush’s remarks in the SOTU, saying that Bush’s “arms are submerged up to the elbows in the blood of other nations”. And your point is?
Eli at Left I points out again that Bush’s arguments about why the NSA (supposedly) doesn’t spy on “domestic” calls but on “terrorist” ones, or something, creates an illogical distinction “by which international calls automatically surpass some magical threshold of ‘threat’ while domestic calls automatically do not.” Eli thinks the Bushies are covering up the fact that they also listen in on wholly-domestic calls, and I’m sure he’s right, but I think the purpose of the distinction has nothing to do with the content. That is, we’re seeing a favorite Roveite method: confusing the issue, any issue, by turning it into a he said, she said. What he & she actually say is irrelevant, the illusion of a dispute about the facts is the only thing that matters. It’s a handy template for defusing any scandal, because even if the news media bestir themselves to fact-check, they’ve already put out the initial story, which is “the facts are in dispute,” so half their readers/viewers/listeners have dismissed it as more partisan bickering they’re too busy to get to the bottom of. There’s nothing like a small injection of cynicism to counteract righteous indignation, which is why McClellan, Bush etc falsely claimed that Jack Abramoff gave to Democrats as well as Republicans. Ideally, the Bushies will dominate the phony dispute by dictating both the he said and the she said sides so that suddenly instead of talking about the rights and wrongs of the surveillance, we’re talking about whether or not it’s “domestic.” They could just as easily picked some sort of nit over the word surveillance (“Surveillance means ‘to watch over,’ but the NSA was actually listening; why do the Democrats want you to think the NSA was watching when it was actually listening?”).
Maybe that explains the human-animal hybrid thing too.
Bush talked about making ethanol “not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switch grass.” Does that mean we’ll all be required to spend our vacations clearing brush?
Some people have pointed out the dissonance of a former oil man (and indeed an alcohol addict) talking about an addiction to oil. But then he’s also a politician who claims to despise politics. You’ll notice his expressed distaste for every role he’s ever fulfilled never seems to diminish his own unearned self-regard. The closest he comes is when he discusses his role as husband, where all his talk about “marrying up” suggests a sense of inferiority to the LauraBot. But to get back to the point I was making before my digression into the shallows of the Bush psyche, the dissonance is less than it appears because his approach to energy is to claim that the answers are entirely scientific rather than economic. The day before the SOTU, Exxon announced a $36 billion profit for 2005, the highest profit for any corporation ever, but there was never any question of that being mentioned in the speech. Capitalism is great, huge corporations are great, science is great. As Arthur C. Clarke didn’t say but should have, to a sufficiently stupid person, any science more complex than the wheel is indistinguishable from magic. And Bush does mean magical science rather than mere technology, dismissing fuel efficiency thusly, “We use a lot of foreign oil in our automobiles, and we drive a lot, and people say, well, CAFE this and CAFE that.” I’m convinced he thinks someone will come up with a magic bean that can run an automobile forever.
That line was given today, when Bush followed up the SOTU speech with a recapitulation in the Grand Ole Opry, as is required under the Constitution. After five long (oh god so long) years in the job, he still doesn’t know what words to use for that job: “I like my buddies from West Texas. I liked them when I was young, I liked them then I was middle-age, I liked them before I was President, and I like them during President and I like them after President.” He describes Bill Frist’s job in the Senate as “herding cats.” Brrr. But then he describes his own job as “educator-in-chief.”
Of what else does his job consist? Well, “As a matter of fact, every day, every day of my presidency I think about this war. That’s what you’ve got to understand.” But enough about his masturbatory practices. “And I clearly see the threats to America. My job is to worry about those threats. That’s not your job. We got a lot of people in government worrying about those threats on your behalf, so you can go about your life.” Insert Brownie-heckuva-job reference here.
Once again he magnanimously concedes the right of people in a free society to engage in impotent debate: “I welcome the debate. But as I said last night to Congress, whether you agree or not agree with the decision, this country has one option, and that’s victory in Iraq.”
Before I forget: the state of the union is strong. Who knew?
Evidently “our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger.” Oh, I’m pretty sure they can be.
Then he tried to define those differences as between something and nothing. For example, “We will choose to act confidently in pursuing the enemies of freedom – or retreat from our duties in the hope of an easier life.” Isolationism and protectionism is how he describes the alternative, essentially an absence of policy rather than a competing policy.
An odd historical statement: he describes 9/11 as resulting from “problems originating in a failed and oppressive state seven thousand miles away”. It took me a minute to get that he was blaming 9/11 on Afghanistan rather than, for example, any of the countries that the hijackers or bin Laden actually came from.
More bad history-writing: “In 1945, there were about two dozen lonely democracies on Earth. Today, there are 122.” I can’t wait to see that list, although he names just 5 that aren’t on it: Syria, Burma, Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and “the demands of justice, and the peace of this world, require their freedom as well.” You know, just to shake it up a little, I say the next country we invade should be Zimbabwe rather than Iran. It’s actually a little hard to see how the peace of the world requires regime change in Burma and Zimbabwe.
Of course one of the reasons there are so many more countries now than in 1945 is that many of those “lonely democracies” held vast colonial empires. It’s funny that when he talks about the march of freedom, he never mentions the freedom of nations from the control of more powerful nations.
America, of course, is such a total innocent that the fight with “radical Islam” is “a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite.”
Here’s a rather un-PC statement: “No one can deny the success of freedom, but some men rage and fight against it.” Equal opportunity for women freedom-ragers-against!
“Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder”. Dude, that’s just when they’re at work.
Evidently the United States “will never surrender to evil.” Hey, Cheney is sitting right behind you, and now his feelings are all hurt.
Evidently “second-guessing is not a strategy.” Er, is it a tactic?
Who was the guy in the Dr. Who scarf?
Here’s what you missed if you heard it on radio: he introduced the parents and wife of a dead soldier, and then he winked at them, he fucking winked. Winked! As the applause went on, a smug look, smug even by Bush standards of smugness, spread across his chimp-like face – what the hell did he have to be smug about? – and then he winked again, I’m not sure at who. What is wrong with him?
He may not have had that long a laundry list of things he wanted from Congress, but he sure did for Hamas, and as he told Hamas that it needed to disarm, renounce terrorism, recognize Israel, etc etc, the CNN cameras moved inevitably to Bush’s house Jew, Holy Joe Lieberman. Later, when he talked about malpractice reform, they went to Bill “Kitty Killer” Frist. And when he talked about infants with malaria, they went to Rumsfeld. What do they know about him?
In a silly stunt, he spoke directly to the citizens of Iran. Who he respects. No, sorry, who America respects. We do? Since when? He really needed to say when he stopped talking to the citizens of Iran, or turned to face a different camera or something.
He called it the “terrorist surveillance program” twice. And he informed “appropriate” members of Congress about it. As opposed to the inappropriate members of Congress.
Evidently “we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.” And just let me be the first of many bloggers to respond to that line with this picture:
Aw, he called for a line-item veto. How quaint.
Talking (vaguely) about health care, he said we should strengthen the doctor-patient relationship. I have no idea how he proposes to do that.
Oil, he says, “is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” Huh, see any causal relationship there, chuckles? “The best way to break this addiction [to oil] is through technology.” Certainly not by, I don’t know, driving less. And so he announced this year’s mission to Mars / hydrogen car, i.e., the thing that will never be heard from again, well, along with the bipartisan commission on Social Security, the Advanced Energy Initiative (his buddies at the American Enterprise Institute won’t be happy with that name). He wants “safe, clean” nuclear energy, and “cutting-edge” ethanol.
On education, he focused entirely on teaching math. Somebody has issues. He wants to “give early help to students who struggle with math, so they have a better chance at good, high-wage jobs.” If they’re so bad at math, why don’t we just tell them their jobs are high-wage, they’ll never know the difference.
He repeated the phrase “a hopeful society” over and over, often in contexts that seem to have little to do with being a hopeful society: “A hopeful society depends on courts that deliver equal justice under law.... A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners... A hopeful society expects elected officials to uphold the public trust” etc etc.
Also, he’s really against human cloning and human-animal hybrids. In case you were wondering.
Britain has its 100th military death in Iraq.
And Tony Blair loses a vote on banning religious hatred. And I do mean Tony Blair, since he lost 283-282 because he himself didn’t stick around to vote. Inciting religious hatred will still be illegal, but only “threatening” words and behaviour will be outlawed, not “abusive and insulting” or “reckless” ones.
Speaking of religious hatred, Palestinians, who evidently have no more pressing concerns than those cartoons, held a march through Gaza City, chanting “War on Denmark, death to Denmark,” and burned Danish flags, and no I don’t know where they got them.
A dog food manufacturer in New Zealand offered to send 42 tons of the stuff to Kenya to feed that country’s many starving children, as well as give them an increase in energy and vitality, shiny coat, bright eyes, strong teeth and bones, and a stronger immune system. To be fair, the manufacturer insists that she eats the stuff herself, sprinkled on her morning porridge, and it’s “yummy.” Kenyans, meanwhile, not so thrilled with the idea. The Kenyan relief minister said, “It is an insult for somebody to think Kenya can accept food meant for animals. Such people should desist because we will be very careful in vetting the donations.”
Condi: “Perhaps Palestinian people want their children to be suicide bombers, and that’s the great desire of large numbers of the Palestinian population. I don’t believe it.” See, that’s why they need a referendum. For the children.
There’s been a Rushdie-lite thing in the Muslim world for several months now, with various nations denouncing Denmark for some cartoons depicting Mohammed in a bad light (Libya and Saudi Arabia have recalled their ambassadors, a boycott of Danish goods is growing, condemnations have been issued by Pakistan, Hamas, etc and a move is afoot to introduce a UN resolution banning insulting religions). Into this rising idiocy steps Bill Clinton, the man who did meet Salman Rushdie but timorously banned pictures being taken of the event (he did the same when he met Ellen DeGeneres), giving his seal of approval to the fake outrage, calling the caricatures “appalling” and “totally outrageous cartoons against Islam” (whilst in Qatar, no less) and comparing them to anti-Semitism, and, you know, “In Europe, most of the struggles we’ve had in the past 50 years have been to fight prejudices against Jews, to fight against anti-Semitism.”
Clinton also wants US troops to stay in Iraq a while, saying as he must so often have said to Hillary, “We shouldn’t just precipitously give this thing up and say it can’t work.”
Bush: “this new democracy that’s emerging in the Palestinian Territories must understand that you can’t have a political party that also has got an armed wing to it; that democracies yield peace.” Was there ever a point in time when Bush made some tiniest effort to make sense and failed, as opposed to not trying in the first place?
Some bloggers are criticizing Democrats for not having a strategy on the Alito nomination. Are you sure the strategy isn’t to lose? I’m not sure they haven’t consciously or unconsciously or, if I know Democrats, semi-consciously, decided to be a failure as an opposition party in the hopes that things will get so bad that they might, somewhere, some day, win a freaking election again.
There is a lot of pressure on Hamas to recognize Israel, a term which is falsely taken as self-explanatory, which might be the case for, say, Luxembourg, but not so much for Israel. Israel is a nation without defined borders, and not just because of the Occupied Territories (I assume no one is actually trying to get Hamas to recognize an Israel that includes the West Bank) and Jerusalem (whose borders Israel quietly expands into the West Bank every couple of years); even Israel doesn’t say what borders it claims for itself. So if it’s not a geographical entity, what is it? Its state lacks a constitution, the Knesset making up its rules as it goes along. And its population, because of the right of return, is undefined, potentially including millions of Jews who live outside its not-quite borders who may or may not ever visit there, much less become citizens.
None of this is to absolve Hamas of the anti-Semitic, even genocidal feelings expressed by some of its leaders (my favorite bit in the Hamas Covenant is the one that goes out of its way to blame the Jews for the French Revolution), but Arabs must get a little tired of being told, as Arafat so often was, what they are required to say, and say, the dictation usually continues, in Arabic. I say the only form of recognition that is truly meaningful is sitting down at a table and negotiating with the Israelis.
Israel has promised to keep up its very special form of recognition of Hamas by continuing to assassinate its leaders, even if they take governmental office.
The World Bank is responding to criticism of its loans to the famously corrupt Kenyan government – by loaning that government another $25 million... to fight corruption.
Silvio Berlusconi (who has had plastic surgery to enhance his likeness to Mussolini, or something) promises not to have sex between now and the April 9 elections. It’s unclear who that would persuade to vote for his party.
In his Thursday press conference, Bush said that “the FISA law was written in 1978. We’re having this discussion in 2006. It’s a different world.” So remember everybody, no laws enacted before 1978 (2001, really) still count. It’s a different world, possibly a different universe, although oddly enough the same solar system. Plan your weekends accordingly.
I was waiting to see what the major papers had to say about yesterday’s AP story about the US in Iraq taking wives of wanted men hostage to coerce their husbands into surrendering (it turned out this week when US-held women prisoners were released, absolutely not in exchange for Jill Carroll, that all or most were hostages rather than suspected of anything in their own right). But guess what, no stories in the Saturday WaPo or NYT that I saw, or the Sunday NYT (a search of the NYT site lists the AP story, but I didn’t see it in the print paper). And Eli at Left I wrote the post I would have written, pointing out that this has actually been an American tactic since the start of the war in Iraq, with any number of wives, mothers, offspring, etc held hostage. Imagine a world in which your government does that, and so much more, and it’s not considered news.
Ultimate Christian Wrestling. Of course. Wrestler dressed as Jesus on a cross. Of course. Wrestler dressed as Judas. “Actually, we’re more violent than secular wrestlers because we don’t seem to feel it like they do. The bumps and bruises that we take in the ring - I think God takes them and puts them on His own back.” Of course He does.
An email from a reader associated with Students for a Free Tibet (site; blog; both with lots of info on Chinese/Google [Choogle?] censorship) reminds me that I meant to write about Google, actually google.cn’s censoring the internets on behalf of the Chinese government. Clearly, their resisting the US Justice Dept subpoena was less about not being evil than protecting trade secrets. It would be nice to figure out exactly what they’re doing, and to keep track of which search terms are censored as they’re added to a no doubt constantly increasing list. The day they rolled out google.cn, for example, I checked it for the only really important metric: does it block my site? It didn’t then, a few days ago, but it more or less does today, when searches for “WIIIAI” and “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” no longer yielded no hits for this site, but whateveritisimagainstit.blogspot.com works (of course, if you know the URL, you don’t need Google). I don’t know (not being able to read Chinese, much less those boxes that show up on my screen instead of Chinese) if Google mentioned that it was censoring the results of those searches, but as an interesting Cnet News report on what sorts of things are being censored indicates, Google is failing to inform users when they censor stuff, like they said they would.
It’s kinda fun watching everybody talk about shunning Hamas as the scum of the earth while attempting to absolve the people who elected them. Which is great for Americans, because it means we should also bear no responsibility for the chimp-like resident of the Oval Office. So as I understand it, a large majority of the Palestinian people are supposed to have said, “Yes I know they want to launch a war to the death against Israel, but they did promise to fill the potholes.” It’s like a protest vote, we’re told, a Ross Perot/Ralph Nader kind of thing. Me, I don’t know exactly what the Palestinian citizenry were thinking, and neither do you. If their lives are miserable and their economy is in bad shape and they’re all unemployed, I doubt that they entirely blame Fatah, corrupt and inefficient though they certainly have been, and probably assign a jot of blame to, well, you fill in this phrase: “Death to I_____l”
Rumsfeld said something a couple of days ago that’s still annoying me. Denying reports that the US Army was “broken,” he said that to the contrary, it was “battle-hardened.” They’ve been shot at, blown up, and kept in a constant state of tension for months on end; suggesting that they’ve been hardened by the experience strikes me as insulting. Maybe it’s just me.
Update: Or not:
Sez Condi Rice about Hamas, “You cannot have one foot in politics and another in terror.” Sounds like a really bad game of Twister.
Netanyahu and Likud are predictably claiming that the withdrawal from Gaza was responsible for the Hamas victory, because it showed that terror and violence worked. Yup, no hypocrisy there, no sirree. Netanyahu has coined the charming term “Hamastan.”
Fafblog asks, How does a War Bill become a War Law, and reassures us that “the president would never ever eat a baby unless it was reasonably suspected to be affiliated with possible terroresque program activities.”
In Thailand, a man who set a world record by spending 32 days in a glass cage with 3,400 scorpions will marry a woman who set the Thai record for 28 days with 1,000 centipedes, in a wedding sponsored by the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. Of course the problem with these mixed marriages is how do you bring up the children?
Bush press conference, yippee. Gives us a little State of the Union (SOTU) preview: “I’m going to remind people we’re living in historic times.” Of course while he’s giving the speech, it will feel like geologic times.
In his ongoing efforts to reduce his vocabulary to the smallest number of words possible, Shrub has pretty much stopped using any adjective except “interesting.” Today, for example, on the SOTU: “it’s an interesting experience to walk out there”; on meeting Alito’s law clerks: “an interesting experience”; on the Palestinian elections: “very interesting”, “an interesting day”; on budget talks: “that’s going to be an interesting discussion”. It’s just about the least communicative adjective he could choose, conveying almost no information. It’s public speaking by the lazy for the lazy; the listener isn’t supposed to think any harder about the meaning of the sentence than Bush did in formulating it.
The Palestinian elections provide Bush an opportunity – an interesting opportunity – to go all Federalist Papers on the meaning of democracy:
You see, when you give people the vote, you give people a chance to express themselves at the polls
Dude, you’re blowing my mind.
-- and if they’re unhappy with the status quo, they’ll let you know. That’s the great thing about democracy, it provides a look into society.
But “if your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you’re not a partner in peace. And we’re interested in peace.” Yeah, peace is interesting.
Actually, his words really do give an insight into his view of democracy, despite himself. The election was “a wake-up call to the leadership” which “should open the eyes of the old guard”; “one way to figure out how to address the needs of the people is to let them express themselves at the ballot box”; “If government hadn’t been responsive, I’m not the least bit surprised that people said, I want government to be responsive.” This is a top-down model, in which leaders listen to the people, respond to them, take their views under advisement, but aren’t really controlled by them.
In defending the “terrorist surveillance program,” Bush uses the phrase “connecting the dots,” which we’ve been hearing several times a day from one Bushie or another. I wonder if they focus-grouped it?
On domestic spying: “And I’m intending to use that power -- Congress says, go ahead and conduct the war, we’re not going to tell you how to do it.”
On the pictures with Abramoff, “I’m also mindful that we live in a world in which those pictures will be used for pure political purposes, and they’re not relevant to the investigation.” Of course he met with Abramoff for purely political purposes, Abramoff was a purely political operator, so what’s your point?
No one bothered to ask about the Damadola airstrike, so I guess there wasn’t much point to forgoing the usual questions when he met the Pakistani prime minister (Rumsfeld also skipped a Q&A after his meeting). Molly Ivins has the question I’d like to see asked: “Are you the worst president since James Buchanan, or have you never heard of him?”
