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The pope weighs in on the Iranian nuclear issue: “May an honourable solution be found for all parties, through honest and serious negotiations.” Now why did no one else think of that? That must be why he’s the pope.
Iyad “Comical” Allawi and Adnan Pachachi suggest a coup to “save [Iraq] from its current deadly crisis,” with a government of strong men modesty forbids them from naming, ignoring the results of the December elections.
The Chicago Tribune (via Juan Cole, reg./BugMeNot, void where prohibited) asked how the US was following the Leahy Amendment, which requires no military aid to foreign security units connected to human rights violations, in Iraq. You will be surprised and amazed and shocked to hear that it isn’t. In fact, the US isn’t really tracking where the tens of thousands of guns it has given the Shiite-militia-riddled Interior Ministry are going. And the US embassy has no system in place for tracking allegations of human rights abuses. And despite the discoveries of secret Interior Ministry torture prisons, Americans still don’t inspect Iraqi detention centers.
In case the US invades, Iran has started recruiting martyrs. They sign a “Registration form for martyrdom-seeking operations.” Who knew there’d be paperwork?
The NYT says that inflammatory social issues may not do it for the Republicans in the 2006 elections. Lindsey Graham utters this rather wonderful sentence: “Gay marriage is not the magic bullet to get us out of our situation.” The article has this picture, featuring the international symbol for unisex bathrooms heterosexual marriage.
Shimon Peres, Israel’s former prime minister and current #2 man in Kadima, says that Iranian President “Ahmadinejad’s statements remind those of Saddam and he will end up the same way as Hussein has.” In other words, he is threatening Iran with American invasion. That should go over well in the Muslim world. Also, “Ahmadinejad represents Satan and not God.”
Ha’aretz says that Israel’s master plan is to wait until Palestine is reduced to complete chaos, and then offer to release Marwan Barghouti, who would ride in and save the day from Hamas, but only if the US released Jonathan Pollard. The paper doesn’t name its sources, so who knows how serious this really is. One thing about Pollard: Israel has been demanding the release of their spy for 20 years, but has never been willing to reveal just what information he gave them.
By the way, Israel has been shelling Gaza very heavily in recent days, and has reduced the distance they’re supposed to keep between their targets and civilian housing to exactly the same as the distance that fragments fly from the point of impact. All to the news media’s usual deafening silence, blind indifference, and, oh, some metaphor involving the sense of smell.
Sarah Baxter of the Sunday Times of London says that the US is planning a “second liberation” of Baghdad when/if an Iraqi government forms (four months today since the elections!), in essence a re-invasion involving rockets, attack helicopters, etc etc.
The article says that Baghdadis now carry two ID cards, one for Shiite militia checkpoints, one for Sunni militia checkpoints.
A DEA agent who literally shot himself in the foot while demonstrating gun safety to children is suing the agency because the tape of the incident somehow leaked out into the public domain, causing him emotional distress, preventing him from doing undercover work, and also for some reason they won’t let him make those presentations anymore.
I was hoping for a transcript of Scalia’s comments at the U of Conn. Law School, but no such luck. I’d forgotten that all his appearances are subject to the rule of omertà. We do know that Fat Tony said that his refusal to recuse himself from the case involving Cheney’s secret energy task force was the “proudest thing” he has done whilst on the Supreme Court. Yes, for centuries to come, Scalia’s words of wisdom will resound throughout legal history: “quack quack.” He suggests that “if you can’t trust your Supreme Court justice more than that, get a life.” Coming from a man supposedly skilled in logical argumentation, the second half of that sentence doesn’t have much to do with the first half. You start off expecting him to put some sort of case for the integrity of the judiciary – rather an important cornerstone of the third branch of government, since there is no recourse against an unethical justice – and instead get a blank dismissal, indeed an insult directed against anyone who vests less than blind, unquestioning faith in the Infallible One.
Speaking of infallible, Bush has issued a statement of support for Rumsfeld, in which he repeatedly called him Don. Evidently, Don’s “energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period,” adding “if you can’t trust your securrtery of dee-fense more than that, get a life.”
Rummy Don spoke energetically and steadily in an interview with Al-Arabiya yesterday (scheduled for C-SPAN today 6:45pm PST).
Asked how the situation in Iraq differed from a civil war, Rummy Don said that “If you go to civil wars historically and look at them in different countries around the globe, they have existed in time.” Um, right. They’ve also existed in height, width and depth. What’s your point? “I’m not going to get into the debate as to semantics as to what is or is not a civil war. ... I personally think of it as a situation where in 18 provinces of the country about 14 are at peace.”
Asked about Guantanamo, Rummy Don trashed the UN report because the UN team hadn’t been to Gitmo. The reporter pointed out that this was because they wouldn’t have been allowed to speak to any prisoners. He said this was because the Red Cross goes there and “To let any other group go down there, and then you have to open the floodgates and let everyone go down there.” Everyone? The United Nations is not “everyone.” The Red Cross, says Rummy Don, “do, in my view, a job that is representative for the world of what the actual situation is.” Except in as much as they’re not permitted to speak publicly about conditions there.
Rummy Don repeats his recently acquired mantra that it’s all Turkey’s fault. If it had allowed US troops to enter Iraq through Turkey, the Sunnis could have been crushed early on. Or greeted us as liberators. Or something.
And said that if secretaries of defense quit every time a bunch of retired generals criticized them, it would be like a merry-go-round. Whereas now, it’s like another ride.
At yesterday’s Gaggle, McClellan sounded really upset at the WaPo, saying, “That is absolutely false and it is irresponsible, and I don’t know how The Washington Post can defend something so irresponsible.” He added, “Really, I don’t know how and I wish they’d give me some pointers on how, cuz no one ever believes me when I defend irresponsible shit.”
I’ve never been quite sure what the phrase “international community” is supposed to mean. Isn’t that, like, everyone? Still less do I understand how this community can have a greater or lesser degree of credibility, but Condi Rice says (while standing next to her “good friend,” Equatorial Guinea’s dictator, as every blogger and his uncle have pointed out) that the UN must slap down Iran hard (take “strong steps”) in order “to make certain that we maintain the credibility of the international community on this issue.” Credibility with whom? The Martian community?
Bush met today with the president of Ghana, who uttered the least credible sentence of the day: “I want to thank the President for understanding Africa.” Understands Africa? I’m surprised he’s heard of it.
The White House issued one of those amusing “Setting the Record Straight” releases, attempting to bury the WaPo story about the mobile “biological weapons labs” under a flurry of disinformation and distortion. It dismisses the DIA field report as a mere “preliminary finding,” ignoring the fact that it was, you know, accurate, says that it’s not the practice to change (false) reports by the intelligence community just because they’re contradicted by people on the ground, and ignoring the question of whether the White House was aware of the report when Bush made his statements (Scotty McClellan said today that he was “looking into that matter”.) You can read the thing and count the distortions for yourselves, including accusing the Post of saying that Bush’s only rationale for invading Iraq was WMDs, although the quote from the WaPo says no such thing. My favorite bit (and the second least credible sentence of the day): “The Administration Has Repeatedly Acknowledged Intelligence Problems And Has Taken Multiple Steps To Address Them.”
Name of the day: the new Italian parliament will include four out gays. One of them, who was re-elected, is named Titti De Simone.
Which is also her porn name.
Iraqi Interior Minister Jabr tells the BBC that death squads are “not police.” But when asked if the reverse were true, if the police are death squads, he remembered another appointment and backed quickly out of the room.
The Czech manufacturer of semtex explosives has decided not to sue Madonna for damaging their good (trademarked) name by calling her company Semtex Girls Ltd.
Bush held another staged event to try to convince people to join his Medicare drug plan. Kept talking about how many choices people had now, although he admits “Some people just simply don’t want to be confronted with choice.” But he loves him some choice. For example, the audience members were all chosen by the local Republican party and chamber of commerce.
As someone who uses a fair number of quotes in my blog, I’ve noticed the tendency of news organizations to “clean up” quotations – eliminate awkward constructions, combine sentences, insert clarifying words that were never actually spoken, etc – often while retaining the use of quotation marks. This is why I so often seek out a transcript when I see a “quote” I want to use in a news article. Eli at Left I on the News has caught AP turning these words from Rumsfeld today about Iran – “It’s a country that has indicated an interest in having weapons of mass destruction” – into “‘It is a country that has indicated’ a desire to obtain nuclear technology.” First, they totally uncontracted that contraction, second, in deciding to turn his bombastic lie into an accurate statement, they missed that he did not technically lie, but used language intended to mislead. Rumsfeld’s very deliberate choice of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” wasn’t just intended to be emotive. He intended it to be understood as asserting that the Iranian government had actually said it wanted nukes, which it does but isn’t so stupid as to say in public, but if heaven forfend he were actually challenged, he could say that by golly gosh golly he meant that Iran has used chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War and therefore can’t be trusted with nukes. The care that went into this mislead (Rummy not normally being the most careful of speakers) shows the importance the Bushies put on demonizing Iran, almost... as if... they’re planning... something...
During that briefing, Rummy was flanked by General Peter Pace, who is supposed to be the sane one but who kept referring to himself by name: “Pete Pace believes...”, “As far as Pete Pace is concerned...” (Notice that he’s good enough friends with himself to call himself Pete just as Robert Dole always called himself Bob.)
La commedia è finita, but how was it that Prodi only just barely managed to defeat the buffoon? Jonathan Freedland suggests in the Guardian that the recent trend of razor-thin victories in Germany, the US etc show that electorates strongly dislike the free-market, globalization-loving attacks on social welfare programs but that the oppositions have failed to provide a meaningful alternative.
Berlusconi controls most of the Italian media and is a monumentally sore loser, so good luck to Prodi, he’ll need it.
So on “West Wing,” Matt Santos was elected fake president. The first Hispanic fake president. If you ignore the fact that Prez Bartlett is played by an actor named Ramon Estevez.
Prodi seems to have defeated Berlusconi, but by a close enough margin that the latter will demand a “scrupulous” examination of the ballots. Which would be the first scrupulous action Berlusconi has ever taken. Who would have guessed he even knew the word?
The state of North Rhine Westphalia has been retraining prostitutes as nursing home workers. Says the person in charge, “They have good people skills, aren’t easily disgusted and have zero fear of physical contact.” Says one person in the program, “Prostitution taught me to listen and to convey a feeling of safety. Isn’t that exactly what is missing so much in care of elderly people?”
You’ve probably all read the WaPo piece about the Pentagon’s propaganda campaign to build up Zarqawi as Villain of the Week, because while Bush may talk about foreign policy being based on principles, he can’t function without demonizing someone. My favorite bit is the quote from a briefing: “Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response.” Leverage xenophobia response. Just charming. So the idea was to get Iraqis to equate the insurgency with a foreigner and forget that there was also this rather large occupying army in Iraq which was also made up of, you know, foreigners.
The Pentagon has responded to the article by saying that Zarqawi really is a great big scary villain. Gen. Rick Lynch, who I am officially awarding Mark Kimmitt’s old title of Military Moron for his many stupid comments and for not knowing the meaning of the word insidious, insists that Z. & those he recruits, trains and equips are responsible for 90% of the “insidious suicide attacks” in Iraq.
Bush pooh-poohs the notion that he plans to attack Iran militarily, calling it “wild speculation”: “I know we’re here in Washington [where] prevention means force. It doesn’t mean force necessarily. In this case it means diplomacy.” In Washington prevention means force? Is that a regional dialect thing like hoagies & grinders, o lexicographer in chief?
One of the students at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins (a first-year) asked Bush what, if any, legal authority governs the actions of private contractors in Iraq. He didn’t know. Boy, didn’t he know. You must, must, must watch the video. Bush has become a parody of Jon Stewart’s parody of him.
Much of the speech portion was spent scolding Iraqi politicians for failing to form a government “that unifies all Iraqis.” Really, his language is getting dangerously insulting, ordering them to “put aside their personal agendas,” thus reducing the political problems of Iraq to issues of ego.
He also belittled American foreign policy before the arrival of his enlightened rule: “And our foreign policy prior to my arrival was ‘if it seems okay, leave it alone.’ In other words, if it’s nice and placid out there on the surface, it’s okay, just let it sit.” He makes it sound like an unflushed toilet.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says that Iraq has a “high level of slaughter” rather than a civil war. So that’s all right, then.
He also says that the idea of a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran is “completely nuts.” And your point is? He says there is “no smoking gun” on the Iranian nuclear program. A quick historical quiz for Mr. Straw: recollect a famous sentence that contained the words “smoking gun” and the words “mushroom cloud.”
The Indian state of Rajasthan has banned religious conversions, the 6th Indian state to do so. Indian usage of the word seems to be narrower than American, and less confusing, so what is being banned is not changing one’s religion (á la Afghanistan) but converting someone else. The state’s ruling party, the Hindu nationalist BJP, claims Christian missionaries bribe poor people to convert. For the purposes of the law, one’s original religion is deemed to be that of their ancestors; that is, religion is inherited. Thus, if Hindus re-convert converts, and they certainly try, that would not be illegal.
Speaking of bigots, the racist British National Party has been riven with controversy over just what constitutes a wog after it adopted a man whose grandfather was a Greek-Armenian immigrant as a candidate for local elections in Bradford, most party members not considering him really One of Us.
So a naturalized American citizen of Palestinian origin, Arafat Nijmeh, a mental patient, told his alleged mental-care workers at the Alton Mental Health Center that he wanted to castrate George Bush. They promptly called the Secret Service, and Nijmeh has been indicted for “knowingly and willfully” threatening His Highness. Overreact much?
Today was Iraqi Freedom Day, the anniversary of the stunt in which Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down by Marines from the crack 75th Unsubtle Propaganda Division. How did y’all celebrate? Iraq celebrated with the usual bombings, shootings and whatnot. Freedom, ain’t it grand?
Huzzah and kudos to the headline-writer at the WaPo. Today, we have the lovely “Campaign Draws to Abusive Close in Italy” and we have “At Least Six Killed in Israeli Strike On Alleged Training Camp in Gaza,” which does that rarest of journalistic things: not taking an Israeli statement on faith.
Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker about Pentagon covert ops in Iran, including contact with “anti-government ethnic-minority groups” – because that’s worked so well in the past – and picking out targets for our planes to bomb (the Pentagon claims that such operations are “force protection” military rather than intelligence operations, and therefore don’t have to be reported to Congress). His ex-DOD source tells him that the Pentagon’s planning is predicated on the belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government” – because that’s worked so well in the past. The article also examines Rumsfeld and the Pentagon’s increasing interest in using tactical nuclear weapons.
Screenshot from the Pentagon website, “President Defends Iraq War for Peace.”
Scotty McClellan: “The president would never authorize disclosure of information that could compromise our nation’s security.” Compromising Valerie Plame’s security is another matter entirely, though. I’m unclear on whether the case against Scooter Libby goes away if this is true. It certainly is true that the president has the authority to declassify information (so when Bush denounced people who “leak classified information,” he was speaking of an act that by definition he and he alone cannot do). But the Philip Agee act criminalizing the naming of CIA personnel is presumably another matter.
McClellan is still using that “can’t talk about things about which there is a legal proceeding” line, but usually it’s bullshit. Of course he shouldn’t try to influence the trial by saying “Scooter is totally innocent,” but here he claims that he can’t tell us the exact date that the NIE which Libby disclosed was declassified. That’s a simple factual datum, of course he can reveal it.
Ambassador Khalilzad admits that he is holding talks with insurgent groups, but not the really bad ones, just “people who are willing to accept this new Iraq, to lay down their arms, to co-operate in the fight against terrorists.” Now those are the people you want on your side, the ones who will lay down their arms and then fight terrorists, bare-handed, mano a mano, using nothing but the noble art of fisticuffs and the somewhat less noble art of bitch-slapping.
Another bombing of a Shiite mosque, the Buratha mosque in Baghdad, which has a well that can cure the sick. 51+ dead. The Baghdad city council is requesting that Iraqis donate blood. Preferably their own.
So what’s going on in these pictures? What’s Frist saying to McCain? Is McCain about to go apeshit and snap his neck like a twig? What’s Kennedy thinking? Is Lieberman packing heat?
At today’s Bush speech on the Iraq War, the 1,263rd in a continuing series, he made a charge against Saddam Hussein that we haven’t heard in a while, presumably since it was understood conclusively that there were no WMDs, that he “was deceiving [UN weapons] inspectors”. Um, about what?
Says “I fully understand that the intelligence was wrong, and I’m just as disappointed as everybody else is.” Disappointed? Is that the word for it? And I think that Cindy Sheehan and many other survivors of dead soldiers, to say nothing of most of the 25 million Iraqis, might be a tad more “disappointed” than Bush is.
He did his usual thing about how his father fought the Japs and now he & Koizumi are bestest buds, although he added a surprising condemnation of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, at least I think that’s what this is:
the war -- and by the way, it ended with an old doctrine of warfare, which is, destroy as many innocent people as you can to get the guilty to surrender. That’s changed, by the way, with the precision nature of our military, and the way we’re structured, and the way our troops think, is we now target the guilty and spare the innocent.
I’ve commented before on Bush knowing only one adjective, interesting. Between the speech & the q&a, he used the word 18 times. For a man whose lack of intellectual curiosity is renowned, nay, legendary, he sure finds a lot of things interesting.
Which is more than I can say for this speech, although one audience member gave him a dressing down:
Q: I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, sure, that’ll happen.
I may have made up the response, although it would sure have been interesting if he had said that, huh?
A couple of days ago Bush said he needs “good, crisp information.” Well, then you have to stop pulling all your information out of your ass.
In the Saddam Hussein trial, a new charge is added: irony in the first degree. Also genocide. Saddam stood up and accused the current regime of running death squads. But wait! the irony doesn’t end there. AP headline: “Saddam Admits Approving 148 Death Sentences.” That’s 4 fewer than George Bush! And, according to the Indy, he read a poem “to illustrate [the] alleged perfidy” of the trial. But do they reproduce the poem? They do not. This probably isn’t it:
Yet each man mass murders the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a weapon of mass destruction.
Secretary of War Rumsfeld told a North Dakota radio interviewer that the American people don’t understand the nature of the enemy: “the tendency is for people to think of terrorism as an act of violence that is designed to kill people when in fact the purpose of terrorism is not to kill people. The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize.” Let me write that down. But “We have to win the test of wills if we want to stay free people.” In other words, we’re free, but we’re only free to take one single course of action.
Asked about Condi’s figurative admission that we figuratively made thousands of figurative mistakes in figurative Iraq, Rummy said, “I don’t know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest.” And didn’t bother asking her either (his interview was four days after her speech). He continued,
The reality in war is this. You fashion a war plan and then you proceed with it. And as the old saying goes, no war plan survives first contact with the enemy. Why? Because the enemy’s got a brain; the enemy watches what you do and then adjusts to that, so you have to constantly adjust and change your tactics, your techniques, and your procedures. If someone says well, that’s a tactical mistake then I guess it’s a lack of understanding, at least my understanding, of what warfare is about.
Did you see what he did there? He literally defined the word “mistake” out of existence, saying that there is no such thing in the “reality” of war.
And in an interview with a Nashville radio station Wednesday, he said, “You know, you think about it, there’s 25 million Iraqis who were repressed and filling up mass graves with hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens and today they’re liberated. That’s important.” Remember: it’s the people who filled up the mass graves with their fellow citizens who are liberated; the people in the mass graves, not so much.
Today Bush held another event on behalf of health savings accounts, part of his campaign to turn every medical decision into an economic decision. Preferably an economic decision you make while you’re bleeding or have a 103° fever. And the real problem, according to Bush, is insurance, because “when somebody else pays the bill, sometimes you don’t pay attention to the cost. You know, when you go out and purchase an automobile, somebody doesn’t pay the bill for you, you pay it. And you tend to shop and you look and you try to find out what’s best for you.” Yes, buying a car is just like purchasing a gall bladder operation, and the exact same economic model applies. “Health savings accounts enable somebody to say, look, if I make the right decisions about smoking or drinking or exercising, that I’ll end up saving money.” Yes, because the prospect of getting lung cancer or cirrhosis is nowhere near as daunting as having to pay actual bucks for treating those diseases.
More of that inappropriate economic rhetoric: because of lawsuits, OB/GYNs “got run out of business.”
Again, he tries to argue that those Washington elitists think you, the American people, are a bunch of ignorant boobs, and how dare they! “You know, it kind of defies the concept that people can’t make decisions on their own -- you know, if you don’t have a Ph.D., you shouldn’t be allowed to decide things.”
Caption contest:
How did I not know that Uruguay’s real name was the Oriental Republic of Uruguay?
Democracy at its finest: Berlusconi says those voting for the opposition are dickheads (coglioni; literal translation, from the Scalia-to-English Dictionary: testicles). He’s also been calling sex lines to, ahem, poll the workers (7 of 9 say they support him). And in a sign of desperation, he suddenly promised, totally unbelievably, to abolish council tax (on homes) altogether.
Democracy at its finest: Jaafari says his refusal to stand down is motivated by dedication to the democratic process which he says chose him to be prime minister (as opposed to being selected by a smallish sectarian party, voted on by a loose sectarian coalition, and then imposed on everyone else): “People will react if they see the rules of democracy being disobeyed. Every politician and every friend of Iraq should not want people to be frustrated.” And by “people,” he means Ibrahim Jaafari.
Democracy at its finest: DeLay put off resigning in order to raise money supposedly for his re-election, which he can now dump into his legal defense fund. DeLay says that his decision to stand down is motivated by a desire to spare his district “a nasty eight-month or seven-month campaign... with all of the Michael Moores and the Barbra Streisands coming down here into Texas to support my liberal Democrat opponent.” Are there more than one each?
Bush continues to condescend, telling Iraqi leaders to “stand up and do their job”. Evidently he thinks they haven’t been able to form a government because they’re lazy, or that the concerns about, for example, Shiite dominance of the security forces, are simply an excuse not to “do their job.”
And what is their job? Keeping Americans safe: “by establishing a democracy, we’re laying the foundation for peace. And that’s what we want. We want there to be peace. We want our children not to have to grow up under the threat of violence coming out of the Middle East.” See, and the Iraqis thought it was all about them, when it was about us all along. Or our children. Those heartless Iraqis: think about the children, THE CHILDREN!
Remember how Condi said that people who don’t learn from recent history are “really rather brain dead”? Well, bring out your dead. Bush: “And one of the lessons of September the 11th, 2001, is that this sense of -- that tyranny is okay, but underneath the surface there was resentment. And the way -- and anger, that became the breeding grounds for these killers.” So, er, I think he’s trying to say that killers have sex while angry, or maybe that they breed on the ground, and there’s resentment under the surface of that ground. Anyway, here endeth the lesson of September the 11th, 2001.
Bush says Josh Bolten will organize the White House to meet Bush’s needs, “And my needs are to have good, crisp information so I can make decisions on behalf of the American people.” Crisp: 1) Firm but easily broken or crumbled; brittle. 6) Having small curls, waves, or ripples.
Patrick Cockburn, in an Indy piece behind a pay barrier (Update: here it is.), says that the daily death toll in the Iraqi civil war is probably 100+, which “may exceed the daily death rate in the first months of either the English or American civil wars.” Areas that are peaceful are those that have already experienced sectarian cleansing and are firmly under the control of a single militia. There is no such thing as a national government in Iraq.
The Guardian provides more evidence of that: the Iraqi Interior Ministry is refusing to use police trained by the US and Britain, preferring to use Shiite militia members.
Evidently the US is starting rumors that Venezuela intends to invade the Netherlands Antilles (when did we stop calling them the Dutch Antilles?).
Tom DeLay. The Hammer. Bug Boy. Call him what you will (and you will), you’ll miss his waxy skin and bad, bad toupee when he’s gone.
Tom DeLay and friend
A quick overview of his greatest hits (I’m excluding the corruption scandals, or we’ll be here all day): Texas redistricting. That supposed children’s charity that was actually a cover for donations to the 2004 Republican Convention. Wanted Clinton impeached because he held “the wrong worldview,” unlike the biblical worldview he said God was using him to promote. Expelled from Baylor for drinking and carousing. Didn’t go to Vietnam because so many minorities from the ghetto had volunteered, to get those high-paid military jobs and escape poverty, that there was no room left for patriots such as himself. “Americans have been tolerant of homosexuality for years, but now it’s being stuffed down their throats and they don’t like it.” To the Republican Jewish Coalition: “My friends, there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There is only the global war on terrorism.” Called the ban on assault weapons “a feel-good piece of legislation.” Said the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube was an act of terrorism but his taking his own father off life support was ok. And this week, he said there’s nothing he would have done differently. (Oh, if you read the Time article: he was admonished three times in 2004, not 1994).
And I’d like to steal this handy chart, from Perrspectives.
Three recent news stories illustrate what I will call the divine right of democracies, in which morality is defined as whatever democratically elected governments choose to do.
1) Jacques Chirac insisted that the new discriminatory employment law must be “respected” because it emanated from the French parliament. Must it? Here in the US, there’s been a lot of condescending scolding (yes, Americans condescending to the French, it really does happen just as much as the reverse) of these “spoiled” French youths supposedly demanding jobs for life. Now while it may or may not be true that the French labor market is over-regulated in a way that stifles job growth, this law treats adults up to 25 years old as an inferior class of citizens without the protection from being arbitrarily fired in the first two years on the job that every other citizen enjoys. There are higher principles, and the protesters are trying to hold the government to them. Monsieur Chirac, fill in the blank: liberté, blank, fraternité.
2) Last week the lower house of the Alabama legislature voted to pardon Rosa Parks and other civil rights activists who were arrested for civil disobedience (they or their survivors will have to individually request those pardons). I’m sorry, who is pardoning who here? There are higher principles, a higher morality, and who exhibited them, the state and its laws, or the people who broke those laws?
3) Republicans have not just stated their disagreement with Russ Feingold’s motion to censure Bush, which is their prerogative, but also attacked it as illegitimate, “beyond the pale” according to John Cornyn, oh, and it puts soldiers at “greater risk.” Beyond the pale equals above the law. There are higher principles.
Robert Fisk notes that the new Israeli Knesset contains 15 generals and 6 secret service agents. Out of 120 members.
Condi did something in Iraq that Rumsfeld, Cheney etc etc have never done: she spent the night. Like American tourists everywhere, she decided that made her more of an expert than the people who live there, informing every Iraqi political leader she met that “the Iraqi people are losing patience.” She knows this because there are cartoons (really, check the transcript, that’s what she says). And they’re not the only ones: “your international allies want to see this get done” and “the President [Bush, not Talabani] ... wants them to get this done,” which is a phrasing Iraqis will see as dismissive of the concerns and fears that have prevented “this” from “getting done.” And she said, and I’m not sure what this actually means, “The American people want to see Iraq succeed, but they want to see Iraq progress toward success.” She added that America has “put a lot of treasure – and I mean human treasure – on the line to try to give Iraq an opportunity for a democratic government” and that “given the sacrifice, people expect that process to continue”. Yes, it’s all about us.
Reading the transcript, it looks like she thinks the only stumbling bloc to a unity government is the choice of prime minister, not the fact that no one really wants a unity government. They could settle on a PM (not Jaafari) tomorrow, and spend three months arguing about who the minister of sport will be.
As to the withdrawal of US and British troops human treasure, “No, no. That didn’t come up.”
Condi tells ITV that “Iran is not Iraq,” in case you were wondering about that. Says the US won’t go to war yet because “we believe that diplomacy has a chance to work.” If I read that correctly, the “Iran is not Iraq” line entails an admission that diplomacy wasn’t given a chance to work in Iraq.
Condi found the welcome in Blackburn so warm that she & Jack Straw quickly escaped to the more congenial environs of Baghdad. Actually, the purpose was to apply to dickering Iraqi politicians still unable to form a government after more than 3½ months the sanction of extreme scolding. Says Rice, “You can’t continue to leave a political vacuum.” Which is funny, because she works for a man who... oh, you were all way ahead of me. She’s putting yet more pressure on Jaafari to step aside – I’d love to know exactly what she said to him in private. In public they talked about... the weather.
Jaafari is now so unpopular with Iraqis, including many Shiites, that even the signs that the US despises him are not helping him – now, that’s unpopular! Riverbend says Iraqis don’t expect any improvement in a new government, but
we’re just tired of waiting for the final formation. People need to know who’ll be in power because they want to know who to pay bribes to... [and] which religious party to go to when the Interior Ministry goons take away a relative.
Of course the problems involved in forming a “unity” government go way beyond just Jaafari, but Americans as always are looking for the quick fix. At least they don’t seem to be looking for another strong man to impose on Iraq.
The new Israeli Knesset will contain no native English speakers.
In recent speeches justifying the invasion of Iraq, Bushies, like Condi in Blackburn, England yesterday, have added to the list of charges against Saddam Hussein that he subverted the UN sanctions on Iraq. What was he supposed to do?
Condi says that if you haven’t learned lessons from the past few years, “you’re really rather brain dead.” I wonder if she had anyone in mind? Then she proceeds to not so much learn from recent history as rewrite it, asserting that some people said the goal in Iraq shouldn’t be democracy, but to replace Saddam with another strong man, but that would have been, you know, wrong. Hey Condi, does the name Achmad Chalabi ring any bells? How ‘bout Iyad Allawi?
In what the news media have taken as the money quote, she admits to “thousands” of tactical errors in Iraq, but their strategic decision to invade was correct and virtuous and their hearts were pure, so that’s all right then. Also, she didn’t name any of the thousands of errors, and her spokesmodel Scott McCormack later explained that she just meant it “figuratively.”
She said that the US has “no desire to be the world’s jailer.” Good to know.
Bush, in Cancun, described Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose appearance at the summit in jungle-explorer garb so dismayed some Canadians in the comments section, as “a very open, straightforward fellow. If he’s got a problem, he’s willing to express it in a way that’s clear for all to understand.” I guess he doesn’t speak figuratively. Or polysyllabically.
Alabama state senator Hank Erwin says that because Alabama is “a family-friendly state,” he has introduced legislation to follow SD and ban all abortions, including in cases of incest (and rape), which is a little friendlier than most of like our families. The state senate’s judiciary committee earlier this week passed a bill defining causing the death of a fetus or embryo, from conception, as a homicide, except in cases of legal abortions.
In the middle of an article in the London Times about Britain secretly buying 20,000 Berettas for the Iraqi security forces without telling the Italian government, there’s this lonely sentence, without further explanation: “The [British Ministry of Defence] has admitted that it targeted members of a Shia militia to join the Iraqi Security Forces after Saddam’s overthrow.” More please.
Here’s what I like about this Miami Herald story about a former colonel in the Haitian army, deported from the US in 2003 because of human-rights abuses and now being sued by his torture victims for the remaining annual payments of the $3.2 million lotto jackpot which he won in 1997 because there is no God: it gives the winning numbers, just in case someone wants to play them.
Oh, ok: 5-7-10-15-25-47.
Speaking of scum, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Orange County, where else?), who wants to deport all illegal aliens, has this solution to the problems that would create in California agriculture: “I say let the prisoners pick the fruits.” And for Rep. Virgil Goode of Virginia – you’d think 17th-century Massachusetts with that name, wouldn’t you? – it’s all about the flags: “I say if you are here illegally and want to fly the Mexican flag, go to Mexico and wave the American flag.” But we are all united by the fact that, whether we wave an American flag or a Mexican flag, that flag will have come from the same place: China.
Also, I think we can all agree that Tom Tancredo is a dick.
Durst says Bush’s guest-worker program “is a political shorthand for: ‘Think of it as a five year slumber party, and when it's over, everybody calls their parents and gets a ride home in their jammies.’”
Dana Milbank article in the WaPo on the R’s’ attempts to use the word “amnesty” over and over. And over. Rep. Steve King (R-Idaho, where potatoes are harvested exclusively by pasty Americans) [Update: damn, I misread that, he's actually from Iowa. So corn, or something] said, “Anybody that votes for an amnesty bill deserves to be branded with a scarlet letter, ‘A’ for amnesty.” According to Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, “In every sense of what people mean by amnesty, it’s amnesty. If it’s not amnesty, it’s the same thing as amnesty.” Er, right. Imagine if the Senate hadn’t rejected him for Circuit Court and he were applying that razor-sharp logic to judicial rulings. The other side, which includes some R’s, seems to share their belief that the word amnesty is anathema to the American people, and is denying its applicability to their proposal in the same manner as the Bushies denying that the crapfest in Iraq amounts to a civil war.
The Afghan parliament agreed that Abdul Rahman not be allowed to leave the country, but didn’t take a formal vote, so we don’t know exactly how many members of that institution we created and protect want apostates tried and executed. Rahman is now in Italy without, in case anyone’s forgotten what set all this off, his daughters, whom I assume he’ll never see again.
The last Bush speech of the current cycle, and the weakest. First, he put blame for the crapfest in Iraq on Saddam Hussein. “[M[uch of the animosity and violence we now see is the legacy of Saddam Hussein. He is a tyrant who exacerbated sectarian divisions to keep himself in power.” He explained, in the manner of a 4th-grade oral report, “Iraq is a nation with many ethnic and religious and sectarian and regional and tribal divisions.”
Talking about the Iranian nuclear energy and/or weapons program, he repeated that “It’s difficult to negotiate with non-transparent societies.” As opposed to the wholly transparent energy task force run by Dick Cheney. Anyway,
It’s easier for a non-transparent society to try to negotiate with countries in which there’s a free press and a free political opposition and a place where people can express their opinions, because it sometimes causes people to play their cards publicly. In negotiating with non-transparent societies, it’s important to keep your counsel.
But in a transparent way, no doubt.
And when talking with Russia, it’s important to be confusing: “I haven’t given up on Russia. I still think Russia understands that it’s in her interest to be West, to work with the West, and to act in concert with the West.”
He explained the importance of history: “It’s what Americans have got to understand. We tend to forget. Ours is a society where things are like instant, so therefore, history almost is like so far back it doesn’t count.”
He explained the importance of economics. Talking about China, which he calls, a “big opportunity for democracy,” he explains, “I happen to believe free markets eventually yield free societies. One of the most -- one of the most pure forms of democracy is the marketplace, where demand causes something to happen. Excess demand causes prices to -- the supply causes prices to go up, and vice versa.” Or maybe it’s the other way around. He has an MBA from Harvard, you know. Do you have an MBA from Harvard? Well then.
The straw man is alive and well: “You hear the debate, well, they’re just imposing their values. That’s all they’re doing. Well, those are the folks who must not think that freedom is universal.”
“I want the Iraqi people to hear I’ve got great confidence in their capacity to self-govern,” which doesn’t stop him issuing orders in the very next sentence: “I also want to hear the -- the Iraqi people to hear it’s about time you get a unity government going. In other words, Americans understand newcomers to the political arena, but pretty soon it’s time to shut her down and get governing.” His “confidence” in the Iraqis was belied earlier, when he said, “If we leave Iraq before they’re capable of defending their own democracy, the terrorists will win.”
Thank you just for being you:
Q I’m Iraqi-American.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.
Q Thank you, Mr. President.
The suave homme du monde speaks: THE PRESIDENT: No, that’s a great question. Thanks. It’s [immigration] obviously topic du jour. (Laughter.) Pretty fancy, huh? Topic du jour? (Laughter.) I don’t want to ruin the image. (Laughter.)
Least plausible statement: “I weep about the suffering of the Palestinians.”
Another episode of the Rummy ’n Pace Pentagon Briefing Comedy Hour today. Rummy again chided the press for focusing on the negative: “It’s far easier to report about a bomb that goes off than to note a bomb that doesn’t.” And he offered an example of good news that they should report: during the Shiite pilgrimage, only 12 Iraqis were killed, way down from 2005 and 2004. “So this year’s pilgrimage for the most part passed peacefully.” Yes, 12 dead = for the most part peaceful.
No briefing is complete without Rumsfeld admitting to having not read something he really should have read, in this case the report saying that Russia had passed intel to Saddam about American troop movements. But he doesn’t consider it that big a deal to get it right before publicly accusing another country of what is essentially an act of war: there are lots of captured documents, he says, they’re in Arabic, some of it will be rumor – hey, Pace interjects at this point, we don’t even know if the translation is accurate. Is Russia owed an explanation? Rummy: “I’m sure if anyone is owed anything, they will get it.” And what about the possibility that someone at CENTCOM gave that intel to the Russians, is that being looked into? “If it should be, it will.”
On the Mustafa Mosque Massacre: was the raid on a Shiite militia meant to announce a new policy? “that was not an announcement. It was an operation that they conducted.” Sometimes a cigar massacre is just a cigar massacre.
And they (almost) admit that the mosque was a mosque. The minaret, evidently, was the tip-off. Rummy did say that weapons including rocket-propelled grenades were found and “Those are not religious instruments.” Clearly, he’s never heard of the Holy Grenade of Antioch.
IRONY ALERT! IRONY ALERT! Rummy says that we’re not as “deft and clever and facile and quick” as the enemy at getting our message out, because they are “perfectly capable of lying, having it printed all over the world, and there’s no penalty for having lied.”
Kadima (which means “At least we’re not Bibi” in Hebrew) wins the Israeli elections, in the sense that the Kadima party, itself an uneasy coalition, will lead an uneasy, unstable coalition government. Acting- and future-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is talking about setting permanent Israeli borders, unilaterally or otherwise. “We are ready to compromise, to give up parts of the beloved Land of Israel... and evacuate, under great pain, Jews living there, in order to create the conditions that will enable you to fulfil your dream and live alongside us.” Isn’t that sweet of him, giving up parts of the beloved occupied Palestine Land of Israel like that? But the Palestinians must “accept only part of their dream.”
Speaking of dreams, I just took a nap and dreamed that I was talking on the phone to my mother, looked out the window and noticed that my car had been stolen. When I woke up, I said, Whew, you could tell that was just a dream because no one would want to steal my car. Boy what a... relief.
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld keeps getting wackier. This is the case that Scalia did not recuse himself from after saying in advance that the position of the Hamdan side was “crazy.” And it’s the case where Senators Lindsey Graham and Jon Kyl told the Court that it should interpret Congress’s intentions in passing the egregious Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 based on a conversation between the two of them that they intended the justices to think occurred on the Senate floor before the vote, but which did not. And it’s the case in which the US Solicitor General today told the Court that it was possible and legitimate and legally binding for Congress to have suspended habeas corpus unconsciously, to have “sort of stumble[d] on a suspension of the Writ.” Possibly Congress all took Ambien and ate the Bill of Rights in their sleep.
Funniest headline for a piece of WaPo so-called analysis: “[Andy] Card’s Departure Seen as a Sign President Hears Words of Critics.” Which is peculiar, because Bush once said that he never reads newspapers, the filter, he gets all the news he needs from Condi Rice and Andy Card. Anyway, Bush used the same search process to replace Card that he used to pick Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, and chose Joshua Bolten. The best line on that is by John Dickerson at Slate, “[Bush has] defined ‘the bolten’ as a new unit of Washington measurement. It is the smallest staff change possible short of doing nothing at all.”
Bush says of his next (sigh) speech on Iraq, “I’ll remind the people we’re not going to lose our nerve.”
Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction author, has died. If you don’t know him, or just know him as the author of Solaris, go read the satiric short stories in Cyberiad or the reviews of non-existent books in Perfect Vacuum.
Berlusconi, who is running for reelection against the Communist menace, says China under Mao used babies as fertilizer.
So after raiding that secret Iraqi Interior Ministry prison, the Americans decided they had made a mistake, that it was really a legitimate facility – you know, one of the good secret dungeons not one of the bad secret dungeons – legitimately holding a bunch of Sudanese, supposedly for violating residency laws. Well, my concerns are certainly allayed.
Two British residents who were rendered to Guantanamo from Gambia after MI5 told the CIA they had bomb parts in fact had... a battery charger. That was in 2002. They’re still in Gitmo.
Sez Lt Col Sean Swindell about the Mustafa Mosque raid, “There was nobody praying when we hit the objective, they were firing weapons at us.” But failing to hit anything? That sentence had an if-she-floats-she’s-a-witch-if-she-drowns-she-was-innocent vibe when I first read it. And a Lt Gen Peter Chiarelli claims that the enemy – gasp – staged the pictures of unarmed dead bodies in the mosque (the second picture is a screen-grab from Iraqi tv); “After the fact, someone went in and made the scene look different from what it was, for whatever purposes.” The perfidy! So, the troops and, ahem, advisers didn’t even bother to secure the scene?
One point made by an Iraqi official: a bunch of people were killed (figures given have ranged from 17 to 37), but none wounded, which tends rather to suggest execution, not firefight.
About the killings inside the Baghdad mosque, officials are claiming American troops were only there in an “advisory capacity.” Some advice. Some capacity. They also claimed the shootings occurred in an office next to the mosque, not in the mosque. The BBC disagrees. A military spokesmodel says, “In our observation of the place and the activities that were going on, it’s difficult for us to consider this a place of prayer. ... I think this is frankly a matter of perception.”
In the Republican attempt to make immigration central to the 2006 elections, Bush will play good cop, leaving others to do the Willie Horton thing. Today, he spoke at a naturalization ceremony, so no one can say our new citizens don’t know what they’ve gotten themselves into. He announced that he was establishing an Office of Citizenship in the Department of Homeland Security and, you know, as a blogger, I hate to use the word Orwellian too often, but I mean, really. He says, “I believe every new citizen has an obligation to learn the customs and values that define our nation, including liberty and civic responsibility, equality under God, tolerance for others, and the English language.” The English language thing is just too easy (which is the English language, anyway, a custom or a value), and he had to slip God in, didn’t he? Then he went on and on about enforcing the border, even using that obnoxious phrase “catch and release” in front of the immigrants, three times. He also used the terms “border security” or “securing the border” more times than I could count, while standing in front of one of those signs that read “Securing the American dream,” courtesy of the new Office of Dream Security.
Learning the true meaning of the American custom (or is it a value?) of “no backsies”
Another day, another massacre. The Indy says the killings by US troops inside a Baghdad mosque are “likely to lead to increased tensions with the Shia community.” Ya think?
Another day, another secret Iraqi Interior Ministry prison.
Another minute, another stupid comment out of Antonin Scalia’s mouth. Newsweek reports that Fat Tony called the idea of proper hearings for Guantanamo detainees “crazy.” “Give me a break,” he added. “War is war,” he said, using that keen logic for which he is known. He mentioned the totally irrelevant fact that his son served in Iraq and “they” were shooting at him. “If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs.” (my emphasis, obviously). I’d like to see a transcript. There’s a link to a .wav, but I don’t really want to download a 239m file. He said something about Europe’s reaction to Guantanamo being “hypocritical” which I’d like to hear in context.
Zombie party?
The Abdul Rahman case is nearing a resolution: he will be released while his case is being reviewed, whereupon he will hopefully take the hint and spend the rest of his life in hiding or exile; everybody’s happy. Unless, of course, you believe in the rule of (Sharia) law, enforced by a judicial system that includes clerics, which was after all the system Bush had no evident qualms about establishing. But let that system make rulings that get Christian ministers start calling the White House, and orders are issued, pressure applied. Karzai intervenes where he has no legal right to intervene, and the Supreme Court justice who was talking last week about not bowing to outside pressure is suddenly saying that Rahman is unfit for trial, and how do we even know he’s an Afghan citizen anyway. If American Christian groups are now to be an integral part of the Afghan legal system, I hope they’re equally attentive when adulterous women are sentenced to stoning, or homosexual men... you get the idea.
Zombie party?
Update: Condi appeared on several Sunday talk shows. On Rahman, she said this on Fox: “This is a complicated situation.” A man is being prosecuted for his religion. What’s complicated about that? She says the role of the US is “to help them work through some of these contradictions.”
And they’re not the only ones: on Iraq, Condi says that “because the Sunnis had not been a part of the process [when] the constitution was written, they have some very important, really even existential issues that they are trying to deal with”. Well, as Sartre said, “Hell is other Sunnis.”
Still in that philosophical mode, Condi revealed on a couple of these shows a new system of logic tying Saddam Hussein to 9/11. On CNN, she said:
Saddam Hussein, and we have said this many times, as far as we know, did not order September 11, may not have even known of September 11. But that's a very narrow definition of what caused September 11. If you think that what caused September 11 was that the people who flew airplanes in caused September 11 then, no, Iraq has no relationship. But if you think that this was a broader problem of an ideology of hatred, of terrorism becoming an acceptable means in places where there was a freedom deficit and there was no possibility for legitimate political discourse, then you realize that you have to have a different kind of Middle East. And a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein at the middle of it is unthinkable.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
On Meet the Press, she described the Iraqi insurgents as “a few violent people.” Challenged, she said, “Well, it’s a few in terms of the population of Iraqis.” So that’s okay, then.
Zombie party?
On Abdul Rahman, Afghan Supreme Court justice Khoja Ahmad Sediqi (hey, he’s also a Muslim cleric, what’re the odds?) says: “The words of our prophet are very clear. There can only be one outcome: death.”
The Washington Post’s next right-wing blogger?
A London Sunday Times columnist has a quote from classicist FM Cornford: “Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists of nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.”
Speaking of the art of lying, I’ve been holding off weighing in on the Haditha massacre, waiting for some sort of official response to the Time report, in which Marines last Nov. 19 mowed down a family after one Marine in a convoy was hit by a roadside bomb, killing one Marine (massacres, actually, as the Sindy reports that some students in a car on the same road as the convoy were also shot, one left for hours to bleed to death). But there evidently won’t be a response until the “investigation” is complete. Not the investigation that said all the dead Iraqi civilians were “collateral damage,” which was discredited, like the first story that the 15 civilians were all killed by that bomb, after the second story that the Marines were under fire was discredited by a video showing a complete absence of bullet marks. Maybe it’s just me, but when the first story put out by the Marines is a lie, shouldn’t that trigger the idea that maybe there is something being covered up, and that it should be looked into?
And as long as we’re doing massacres, where’s the follow-up on last week’s killing of 11 members of a family in Abu Sifa?
The British military has had its feelings hurt by the Christian hostages it rescued, who failed to thank them publicly. It’s just bad manners. Gen. Sir Michael Jackson said he was “saddened,” but in a gruff, manly, military way, “that there doesn’t seem to have been a note of gratitude,” or at the very least a Hallmark card. Me, I appreciate this lack of hypocrisy by members of what sound like a fairly radical pacifist Christian group who had said in advance that they didn’t want violence used if they were kidnapped.
The Justice Dept says the NSA’s warrantless domestic spying may legitimately target doctor-patient and lawyer-client communications. And although the claim has been that one half of the conversation has to be non-domestic, Justice refused to say either that warrantless wiretapping of purely domestic calls was illegal or that it hadn’t been done.
My cat got an email from RNC Chair Ken Mehlman. Evidently, the Democrats’ plan for 2006 is to win the House and Senate and then impeach Bush. See, and you thought they didn’t have a plan. “Democrat leaders’ talk of censure and impeachment isn’t about the law or the President doing anything wrong. It’s about the fact that Democrat leaders don’t want America to fight the War on Terror with every tool in our arsenal.”
A few days ago I commented on the number of times Bush says that he understands things, such as, he understands that we’re in a war, he understands that people are dying, etc etc. I suggested he’d finally realized that people think he’s stupid, but after reading the speech he gave at a fund-raiser for the re-election of Rep. Mike Sodrel (R-Obscurity), in which he applied the verb to Sodrel no fewer than 13 times, claiming that Sodrel understands that this is a nation at war, he understands that the role of the government isn’t to create wealth, he understands the effects of the death tax on the American family farmer, etc etc (I pictured Sodrel standing off to the side during Bush’s speech, saying “I understand, I understand” after every sentence), I realized that Bush’s hated of “politics” is so strong, that he has no willingness to discuss the details of policy; rather, he debates the nature of the universe, what the world looks like. Note his use in so many speeches of the phrase, “I strongly disagree.” It’s rarely about policy; usually it’s about reality, as in “My opponents don’t believe there’s an enemy that lurks. I strongly disagree.” If your “understanding” of the world accords with his, agreement about how to deal with that world is supposed to be automatic. This is a way of focusing attention on his “vision” and away from both formulation and implementation of policy, away from his woeful lack of competence. Or to put it another way, the jackass still thinks he’s smart.
George Bush celebrated Greek Independence Day (which is just like American Independence Day, except the alien invaders blow up the Acropolis instead of the White House). The holiday gave Shrub a too-rare chance to talk about ancient Athens, in a bit of his speech I’m guessing he didn’t write himself. Evidently democracy “is a universal concept, started by the Athenians. ... Freedom is not confined to Greece, nor is it confined to America. It is universal in its application, and that’s one of the great lessons of Greek Independence Day.” Reading these things, I always fantasize that I’m in the room, pop up and ask him, for example, if he can tell us what it was that Greece became independent from.
And just before he made out with a Greek Orthodox archbishop, he commented that Greek Independence Day is held on the same day as the Greek Orthodox Feast of the Annunciation, “because they both represent good news.” Is that line as creepy to everyone else as it is to me?
Rumsfeld, about people calling for him to resign: “those kinds of calls have been going on for five-plus years. And the president has asked me not to get involved in politics, and that’s politics.” So the fact that some people recognized your extreme incompetence more than five years ago makes their recognition of that fact less valid in some way?
Rummykins says it would reduce violence if there were an actual Iraqi government, blames lack of one on violence. “Have they [terrorists] delayed it? Probably. They probably have. And is that harmful? Yes.”
Quoting FDR after Pearl Harbor, Rummy says, “we can prevail only if we are in it all the way.” I assume he’s working on defending his failures in Iraq, as many generals did after Vietnam, by claiming that the country never really “fought to win.” The stab-in-the-back theory (Dolchstoß, in the original German). When a reporter asked him a question about the quote, he said, “I think that I was quoting, as I recall, Franklin Roosevelt...” In a time when his competency is being questioned, he’s already unsure of the source of his own quote ten minutes after he’s used it.
Asked about the Pentagon bribing Iraqi newspapers to insert happy-news: “I’m not going to make a judgment off the top of my head.” That’s the difference between Rummy and the rest of us: we knew this was a bad thing within seconds after this was revealed nearly four months ago, but Rummy will not be rushed into forming a thought. He is, and I’m quoting, as I recall, Abraham Lincoln, or possibly Genghis Khan, in it all the way.
Jacques Chirac stormed out of an EU summit meeting when Ernest-Antoine Seillière, president of the EU employers’ federation, decided to speak in English instead of French. Chirac interrupted to ask why he wasn’t speaking French, and Seillière told him that English was the international business language. Chirac and his entourage, including his finance and foreign ministers, then stalked out. The Times: “Embarrassed French diplomats tried to explain away the walk-out, saying that their ministers all needed a toilet break at the same time.” (That’s toilet, from the French toilette.)
Musharaf made a speech today calling for all foreign terrorists to leave Pakistan. Oh, so that was the problem: they were waiting for an engraved un-invitation.
Ambassador/Viceroy to Iraq Khalilzad cites as a sign of progress in the 100-day long negotiations since the Iraqi elections that the sides actually talk to each other now, rather than using him as an intermediary. Hurrah!
Condi Rice has called Karzai about the Christian convert, Abdul Rahman, demanding a “satisfactory outcome,” whatever the hell that means (other reports say “favorable resolution”; possibly she really put the screws to him and demanded both a satisfactory outcome and a favorable resolution). It’s unclear whether Rahman’s being thrown into an Afghan insane asylum (imagine what such an institution must be like) would be satisfactory to her. It should be noted that earlier in the week, the State Dept was merely calling for a fair trial – a fair trial under a law that makes apostasy a capital offense. Like a fair trial for witchcraft.
Barbara Bush, as you must know by now, donated money to the Katrina Fund her husband is associated with, with instructions that it be spent on educational software hawked by one of her other idiot sons, Neil. Also, she donated money to the fund for the tsunami, with instructions that it be spent on Asian hookers for Neil.
You know you’ve been blogging too long when you read about the Abu Ghraib dog handler being sentenced to 6 months and you immediately start calculating what that is in dog years.
The Afghans are working on a compromise: instead of sentencing the Christian convert, Abdul Rahman, to death, declare him insane.
Bush today had a meeting on immigration reform, which he described as “a very constructive and important dialogue with members of the agricultural community, the faith community, the concerned citizen community”. The what? He says the debate on immigration “must be done in a way that doesn’t pit one group of people against another.” Funny, I thought the whole point of a border was to pit one group of people against another.
A few days ago I said we should resist the temptation to quote “Comical” Allawi’s announcement of a civil war. Juan Cole writes about Allawi’s agenda (“He therefore wishes to signal that the status quo cannot hold, that sectarianism is the biggest danger, and that only his brand of secular Iraqi nationalism can hope to hold the country together. It is a plea for a minority government under his leadership, with the clear message that Iraq needs a strongman like himself to avoid chaos.”) and quotes a workable definition of crapfest civil war: “Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance, determined by the latter’s ability to inflict upon the government forces at least 5 percent of the fatalities that the insurgents sustain.” A touch mechanical, but good enough.
Today, Bush performed a music hall turn at the Capitol Music Hall in Wheeling, West Virginia. “I knew that the farther we got away from September the 11th, 2001, the more likely it would be that some would forget the lessons of that day. ... And it’s fine that people forget the lessons. But one of my jobs is to constantly remind people of the lessons.”
Think someone’s trying to tell Bush something with the signs?
But here’s the thing: with all the people involved with planning and preparing for a Bush event like this, did no one look at those signs and say, “Hey, the word ‘plan’ could be read as a noun or it could be read as an imperative verb, in which case bloggers will make fun of it”?
On Al Qaeda: “They subverted a great religion to meet their needs, and they need places to hide.”
“The way I put it is, there is an Almighty God. One of the greatest gifts of that Almighty God is the desire for people to be free, is freedom. And therefore -- (applause) -- and therefore, this country and the world ought to say, how can we help you remain free? What can we do to help you realize the blessings of liberty?” How many of you can we kill when we invade your countries? In round numbers?
He does mention the Afghan on trial for his life, Abdul Rahman, although he says “converted away from Islam” rather than converted to Christianity. That came up again in Q&A, when someone asked, “Do you have an army of sociologists to go over there and change that country”? Chimpy sez, “We have got influence in Afghanistan and we are going to use it to remind them that there are universal values.”
On WMDs: “the intelligence broke down.”
He repeated the lie from Monday’s speech and a million previous speeches about Saddam failing to “disarm & disclose,” and in this one, he charges Saddam with having fired at US aircraft enforcing the “United Nations no-fly zone.” It was the US, not the UN, that declared a no-fly zone.
Also, “He’d invaded his neighborhood.”
“The biggest threat America faces is that moment when terror and weapons of mass destruction come together.” You got your chocolate in my peanut butter! You got your peanut butter on my chocolate! “And if we ever suspect that’s happening, we got to deal with that threat seriously.” If we ever suspect?
Every speech now, he tries to indicate that he understands the price of war. And then, often as not, undercuts the message, as today when he said he would meet the survivors of two dead troops: “I’m looking forward to being able to hug them, weep with them.” He’s looking forward to it? LOOKING FORWARD TO IT?
He keeps saying that he “understands” the concern of Americans over the war, and keeps suggesting that people with those concerns are weak-minded people influenced by the terrorists: “And they’re concerned because the enemy has got the capacity to affect our thinking.”
“Iraq is a part of the global war on terror. In other words, it’s a global war.” Isn’t that the same words, but fewer of them?
He says it’s time for Iraq to form a unity government: “That’s what the people want; otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to the polls, would they have?”
Talking about how we need to use more sweet delicious coal (he was in West VA, remember), sort of as a patch to cure our petroleum addiction: “we get oil from parts of the world that don’t like us, is the best way to put it, which creates a national security issue.” Did he just admit that there are parts of the world that don’t like us? I thought we were universally beloved because we are bringing freedom and liberty and sweet delicious KFC?
And finally, he is dragged kicking screaming back to his bubble-dungeon: “I wish I could stay longer to answer your questions. I can’t, I got to go back to D.C. I’m not necessarily saying I’m rather be in D.C. than here; I’d rather be here than there. But nevertheless, that’s what my life dictates.”
One of Bush’s favorite words lately is diversity, as in, Iraq’s government (if one ever forms), will reflect Iraq’s diversity. An unlikely convert to the Rainbow Coalition, but there you are. What then must he think of Israel’s Kadima Party, which thought vaguely about giving a Palestinian a winnable position on the party electoral list, conducted a poll which said that would lose them more Jewish voters than it would gain them Palestinians, and decided to go the apartheid route.
Tony Blair, in a speech I taped off C-SPAN but haven’t watched yet, says that the key to winning The War Against Terrorism (TWAT) is to tell the terrorists that all their ideas are wrong. Specifically, “I mean telling them their attitude to America is absurd, their concept of governance pre-feudal, their positions on women and other faiths, reactionary and regressive.” He says this is “Not a clash between civilisations, but a clash about civilisation”. The British are in an especially good position to clash, in a civilized way, of course, about civilization, because they are so very civilized, as you can tell by the fact that they spell civilization with an s. Blair will not stop sending his armed forces to kill Muslims until they too spell civilization with an s. Honestly, even when Blair’s criticisms are correct, that nannyish mode of being civilized he displays just gives civilization a bad name.
Speaking of a clash about civilization, Saudi Arabia has banned men from selling women’s lingerie.
