skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Saw a commercial for Steve Westly, one of the D’s running for governor in California. It says he’d be a “different kind of governor.” Thank you for making that clear, or we might have thought you planned to be another Austrian-former-bodybuilder-action-film-star-married-to-a-Kennedy-harasser-of-women kind of governor. No, you plan to be different from that. Not the same. Dissimilar.
Karl Rove has given up one of his titles... no, not Boy Genius, but rather “deputy chief of staff for policy.” I’m wondering if his pay will go down accordingly. OK, I’m not really, but shouldn’t it?
Jay Rosen at Salon thinks that Scott McClellan’s incompetence (“McClellan’s specialty was noncommunication; what’s remarkable about him as a choice for press secretary is that he had no special talent for explaining Bush’s policies to the world. In fact, he usually made things less clear by talking about them.”) was the reason he had the job in the first place: “Not to be persuasive, but to refute the assumption that there was anyone the White House needed or wanted to persuade -- least of all the press! ... The very notion of persuasion conceded more to democratic politics than the Bush forces wanted to concede. ... McClellan was there to make executive power more illegible... The intended result: a presidency that is less questioned in the eyes of the world. That’s not news management; it’s a new balance of power between them and us.” Read it. It’s an interesting argument, but whether or not you are persuaded by it, which comes down largely to whether you believe the Bushies are smart enough to have that coherent a strategy, it is an explanation that fits the facts, and that’s frightening enough.
Bush met Chinese President Hu Jintao today. Said, “The United States and China are two nations divided by a vast ocean -- yet connected through a global economy”. That must be the ocean we used to think would protect us. Afterwards, they took questions from reporters, a reversal of the earlier plan to avoid such an encounter, a plan for which the WaPo editorially spanked the White House (they rather adorably assumed it was Hu and not Bush who wished to avoid questions). One reporter asked Hu when China would become a democracy. Hu replied “what do you mean by a democracy?” I hope he didn’t look to GeeDubya to explain it to him.
Bush says the US & China have a common goal “that Iran should not have the nuclear weapon, the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, or the know-how to how to make a nuclear weapon.”
But fuck the nukes issue, what Bush is really interested in is sports. He mentioned a Chinese basketball player, the visit of the US ping pong team to China 35 years ago, the Olympics, and here he is with Michelle Kwan.
Multiple picture caption contest:
Little Scotty, the over-sized, sweaty, sputtering face of the White House, is out! Sez Chimpy, “It’s going to be hard to replace Scott”. Yes, yes it will.
The Supreme Court decided not to hear the case of two Chinese Uighurs who have spent four years in Guantanamo for no very good reason, were “cleared” (determined to no more be enemy combatants, whatever that means) more than a year ago but not released because they can’t be sent back to China and no one else wants them. The Bush admin argued that their case shouldn’t be heard at all because their continued Gitmoization “does not establish that they are suffering irreparable harm requiring this court’s immediate intervention” and “The Executive’s power to detain enemy combatants necessarily includes the authority to wind up detention in an orderly fashion after a determination has been made that it is no longer necessary to hold a detainee for war-related reasons.”
Bush said today, “we also recognize that vacuums in the political process create opportunity for malfeasance and harm.” You knew he meant Iraq, right?
I’ve mentioned the, to me, obnoxious idea of Alabama “pardoning” Rosa Parks and other civil rights activists. I’m not revisiting that, but I need to give the prestigious Name of the Day award (sorry, Suri Cruise, you lose) to its sponsor, who I just found out is one Thad McClammy.
Rumsfeld explained today that retired generals were criticizing him because he had modernized the military and they’re stodgy old fogeys who don’t like change, such as cancelling the Crusader artillery piece, closing bases, adjusting our global posture and, oh yeah, totally and completely fucking up Iraq. No, “people like things the way they are, and so when you make a change like that, somebody’s not going to like it... It’s hard for people who are oriented one way to suddenly have to be oriented a different way.” I think he’s trying to tell us he’s gay. Sort of like Vito Spatafore on The Sopranos.
The worst use of “jazz hands” ever
Another of his great ideas that people have obstructed: performance pay. “The idea of paying for performance is stunning for some people.” It’ll be really stunning for him when he finds out he owes the federal government several billion dollars because of his performance.
He was asked a rather good question: why did he offer to resign twice during the Abu Ghraib scandal, when there wasn’t evidence that he was involved or knew about it, but not now, when there are questions about decisions he actually did make. Rummy: “Oh, just call it idiosyncratic.” That’s one word for it.
Here he deploys the “Rummy Scowl of Doom” on a hapless reporter
Gen. Peter Pace made an interesting comment about militias coming under central government “control.” Asked to elaborate, he said that when (and if) there is a central government, it will have to decide “either... to assimilate them back into civilian society without weapons or into the police forces or the army with weapons”. Huh.
Bush went to a magnet school in Maryland today, and learned all about magnets. Science, he said, is “cool.” Except for climatology and evolution and genetics and...
You know, just once I’d like him, when he goes to a school, to go to a crappy one, or even an average one, and sit in on a real average class. He just has no idea. He sees the dog and pony show, he sees “people using little devices to look for sun spots,” and he thinks that’s what it’s like every day. Here he is defending No Child Left Behind:
And, oh, by the way, I’ve heard every excuse not to measure -- you know, You’re teaching the test. No, you’re teaching a child to read so he or she can pass the test, that’s what you’re doing. Or, All you do is test. No, good schools are those who [sic] have got a curriculum that enables a child to be able to pass a standardized test. That’s what we’re talking about.
Piffle.
Today the Parkland Magnet Middle School for Aerospace Technology, tomorrow, ze world!
Here he greets students of the magnet school while standing on the chest of the photographer taking this picture.
Here a student explains his science project for the fourth time, using even smaller words, but Bush still just doesn’t get it.
And finally a couple of random pictures from the visit of Bush looking like a doofus.
Secretary of War Rumsfeld told Rush Limbaugh today that if we’d listened “every time there were critics and opponents to war... our country would be a totally different place,” adding, “for example, if we hadn’t started the Spanish-American War, we wouldn’t have that nice base in Guantanamo to torture prisoners in.”
The White House issued a statement about the bombing in Tel Aviv, in which 9 people died. They’re against it. Indeed, “no excuse or justification is possible.” And the Pentagon issued a statement about the killing of 7 Afghan civilians by American troops. In that case, evidently some excuse or justification was possible. But not apologies, and I stress this because some news reports said that the military apologized for killing innocent bystanders. In fact, it said that it “regretted” the deaths, but blamed them on “terrorists” for “expos[ing] innocent civilians” to the “grave risk” that Americans would shoot them.
A nice piece of reporting from the Times (London) Monday about those brave men walking a beat in Baghdad: postmen. They have to take different routes to avoid being kidnapped, figure out where people have disappeared to, and sort out mail sent to addresses that no longer exist.
You’ll remember I linked to this Sunday Times story about plans for a “second liberation of Baghdad,” described this way by a Pentagon adviser: “If you cut up the city into pieces neighbourhood by neighbourhood, you can prevent it from becoming a major urban fight.” And we see in the NYT that troops have already “sealed off” a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. If these tactics sound at all familiar, well, today’s Ha’aretz says that one response to the suicide bombing (besides the shelling of Gaza, which has killed at least 25 this month) will be “Stricter implementation of the policy of separating the West Bank into sections, in an effort to prevent Palestinians from moving from one section to another”. Great minds think alike, or something.
China is bestowing upon a no-doubt grateful Tibet a 35-ton, 24-foot statue of Mao, which they decided was a cheaper way of “marking” their territory than the original plan, which involved tanker trains full of urine.
The sculptor claims that he tried to make Mao look a bit like Buddha. Searching for stories on this, I couldn’t help but notice that Xinhua, the Chinese government news agency, also features prominently a story, “Cruise: Holmes is a Scientologist.” Evidently that’s big news in China. Big “Dawson’s Creek” and “Risky Business” fans, I’m guessing.
Speaking of granite (the Mao statue, not Tom Cruise’s acting) (or the contents of Katie Holmes’s head for getting involved with Tom Cruise), Bush today visited a Europa Stone Distributors. Here, he is seen mesmerized by his own reflection in a polished granite table.
Little-known fact: Dick Cheney casts no reflection.
Here, he is seen hangin’ with some of the workers there, in a picture which is in no way awkward.
And for this picture, you may provide your own caption:
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.
