Timely information about my philosophy

Bush gives a stirring thank you to outgoing press secretary Scott McClellan: “I will always be proud to call him, ‘friend,’” adding, “because I’ve already forgotten his name.” And as for the new guy, Tony Insert-Snow-Related-Pun-Here, “He’s going to work hard to provide you with timely information about my philosophy, my priorities, and the actions we’re taking to implement our agenda.” Can’t wait for that timely information about Bush’s philosophy.

Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are both in Iraq at the same time! Presumably that was where she meant to go, because she said in Greece yesterday “The United States of America understands and believes that Iran is not Iraq” (I adore her choice of the verb believe)(maybe that’s what Bush meant by “my philosophy”). Rice tells reporters on the plane, “and I will obviously link up there with Secretary Rumsfeld.” Hey, she said it, not me. Maybe they can finally come to an agreement on whether we’ve made thousands of mistakes or zero mistakes in Iraq. She said the purpose of the trip is “to make sure there are no seams between what we’re doing politically and what we’re doing militarily.” I’m sure what you’re doing politically and what you’re doing militarily will indeed be unseamly.

Oh, get a room, you two

A reporter asks Condi whether this visit doesn’t just reinforce the charges made by Zarqawi that the Maliki regime is a puppet of the US. She replies by repeating over and over that it is a “government of national unity.”

Canadian PM Stephen Harper has followed American practice in banning news coverage of the return of the bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. He says it’s all about privacy and certainly not aboot hiding the consequences of Canada signing on to fight America’s wars – but at the same time he halted the practice of flying the flag at half-staff for slain soldiers.

The kind of progress that is political progress

Condi tries to lower expectations that the new Iraqi government will actually accomplish anything any time soon: “I just hope that people understand and keep those expectations in check... Progress is going to be the kind of progress that is political progress, which doesn’t come in great flashes, it doesn’t come in great outbursts of another election or purple fingers or any of that.”

And Bush had deep philosophical conversations when he phoned Iraq’s president, speaker of parliament & PM-to-be and “encouraged them to stand strong for the Iraqi people. I reminded them the people had voted, the people had expressed their desire for democracy and unity, and now there’s a chance for these leaders to stand up and lead.” I know it was quite some time ago but... he reminded them the people had voted.

The London Times has two stories today whose headlines are so good that the stories themselves could only be a let-down: “Stop Condom Pyres, Mourners Told” and “Pope on Pogo Stick ‘Inappropriate.’”

New “Get Your War On.”

And no one tried to tackle him

I call this series “Trying to Look Dignified and Solemn and All-Presidential-Like While Carrying a Football (And Then Blowing It By Showing Off His Secret Decoder Ring).”

What happens in Anatolia, Las Vegas and Gitmo stays in Anatolia, Las Vegas and Gitmo

Bush issues a presidential message commemorating the Armenian genocide, while blurring it as much as possible. Guess what word he doesn’t use? Genocide. He twice calls it a “tragedy,” which is a word that does not entail responsibility, especially not Turkish responsibility. He calls it “the mass killings and forced exile of as many as 1.5 million Armenians,” which could mean that 3 people were killed and 1,497,993 were exiled or it could mean that 1,497,993 were killed and 3 people exiled.

But here’s my real beef with Bush: he went to Las freaking Vegas Monday and there’s not a single funny picture for me to use.

The Pentagon wants to put on trial a few of the Guantanamo prisoners, execute a few of them, release some of them (at some point in the future, so why is this news?), transfer others to prisons in their own countries, and declare some of them no longer combatants but continue to imprison them, like those Uighurs, because they can’t safely be sent back to their own countries. The LA Times headline for this, which is obviously inaccurate in so many ways, is “U.S. to Free 141 Terror Suspects.” And it entirely misses the other big Gitmo news: McDonald’s is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its Guantanamo store! Hurrah!

In other words, there’s the line for people

Condi Rice again praises Iraqi PM-designate Maliki: “He comes to this as the strongest political figure really ever ... since the liberation of Iraq”. Oh good, because “strong” political figures have never been any sort of a, ya know, problem for Iraq in the past. “He comes with both the imprimatur of the Iraqi people and ... the mandate to form a unified national unity government.” Yes, he has the sort of imprimatur and mandate that can only come from more than four months of back-room negotiation.

Update: when I first posted, I meant to make fun of “unified national unity government,” but I forgot.

Bush was in Irvine to tell a crowd of Orange County businesspeople that “the war on terror [is] not over.”

There is still an enemy that wants to do us harm. And the most important job of the President of the United States is to protect the American people from that harm. That’s -- and I think about it all the time.

Adding, “There, I thought about it just then. And then. And then. No, that was gas.”


Keywords of the day: “safe haven.” He uses it 7 times to describe the thing that terrorists want to have in Iraq and shouldn’t be allowed to have. They must have run some focus groups.

“You know, it’s really important for people to be able to connect the concept of freedom to our security. And it’s hard. It’s hard, particularly in a day and age when every act of violence is put in your living room.” Yeah, it’s getting really hard to keep the carpet clean.

He defended his conduct of the Iraq war once again by claiming that he didn’t conduct the Iraq war, but left it up to Tommy Franks to tell him what to do and what was needed to do it. “One the lessons of Vietnam, it seemed like to me -- still does -- is that people tried to make decisions on behalf of the military, which I think is a terrible precedent to make if you’re the Commander-in-Chief.” So the one thing a commander-in-chief shouldn’t do is command. What happened to “I’m the decider”?

Most of the speech was about immigration, in that county named after an agricultural product picked almost exclusively by immigrants. And we got more focus-grouped language designed to make an anti-immigration policy sound friendly to the people actually trying to immigrate: “One of the things that Congress has done, it’s done a good job of providing additional money for bed space and money to make sure that we can send people back home.” We’re giving them bed space, not putting them in detention centers surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire. And then we’re sending them “home.” Isn’t that nice of us? Although even he acknowledges, “They’re going broke at home”. Also, we’re saving them, he mentions in every speech on immigration, from coyotes. The Border Patrol and INS are really doing rescue work, if you think about it.

The guest-workers will be given – and here’s another focus-grouped phrase that he repeats like a gazillion times – “tamper-proof cards.” “All of a sudden, we’ve kind of taken this smuggling industry and dismantled it through rational policy. All of a sudden, we recognized that we want to treat people with respect.”

Then he started talking about lines, how illegal immigrants should get to the back of the line, how Congress could decide on the lengths of different lines for different nationalities. “In other words, there’s the line for people.” I think he was just feeling nostalgic for lines of coke.


In the Q&A, someone asked if he knew any illegal immigrants, say in Texas, who might give him their perspective. No, he doesn’t.

And now for a game of Find the Racist:

I was talking to a congressman from -- I don’t want to -- they’ll start trying to find the guy, so I’m not going to give him any hints, but -- (laughter.) It’s a guy. Anyway, but he said, my town was like a small number of minorities, and now it’s 50 percent Latino, and we don’t know what to do.

My guess: Dan Lungren.

Freedom, unless you count...

Two stories about Iraq. Halli-fucking-burton has been importing workers to do menial jobs on American bases in Iraq (because the occupation is such a success that there are no unemployed people in Iraq) and then taking their passports so they have no choice but to work in the conditions and for the pay Halli-motherfucking-burton feels appropriate. The words slavery and human trafficking are used, with good reason.

That article can be skimmed if you’re short of time. But the WaPo has a must-read about torture, abuse and starvation in Iraqi prisons, which are in fact still being inspected by American soldiers: they’re just not doing much of anything about it. They always, always find evidence of abuse, but short of actual broken bones they leave the prisoners in the hands of their torturers. You’ll remember the Interior Ministry “unofficial jail” discovered and shut down last November. Evidently the US military decided after that to stop embarrassing the Iraq regime. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, Military Moron, has lied about the inspections, claiming they’d uncovered no abuse. He should be fired. The Post says it has photographs, plural, but runs only one.

Worth the wait

Bush: “The Iraqis are showing the world that democracy is worth the wait”. Maybe, but if my dinner arrived more than four months after I placed the order, I sure wouldn’t tip 15%.

Evidently chants of “death to Arabs” are common at Israeli soccer matches. Charming.

I just found an LA Times clip from God knows when with suggestions for California license plate slogans:

California: Omigod! Omigod!

Millions of People, Dozens of Stories

Where Anyone Can Get Elected Governor

Whatever

Bush went to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, and demonstrated his “aren’t I the cutest thing ever” face. No one was buying.

No choice but to become suicide bombers

Bush: “And the doctrine, if you harbor a terrorist you are equally as guilty as a terrorist, came right from my soul.”

Managed care: a shoot-out at the Palestinian health ministry was caused, according to the BBC, by Fatah gunmen “seeking better treatment for a hospital patient”.

A few days ago, I linked to a London Times article about postal carriers in Baghdad. Today’s Sunday Times has one about garbage men, who are increasingly being targeted. The Iraqi version of “First they came for the communists...” is gonna be a little strange. According to a Sunni militant interviewed by the paper, it is because they spy for the government and report when they find booby traps in rubbish heaps (at no point is there an explanation for why anyone would booby-trap a rubbish heap).

In a followup to the story about Abdul Rahman, the Afghan Christian convert, which doesn’t actually mention what he’s doing now that he’s in exile, the WaPo quotes an imam saying that if it’s Afghanistan’s democratic decision to kill apostates, “we ask that you not interfere, or else we will have no choice but to become suicide bombers.” No choice. None at all.

George W. Bush’s Earth Day

Bush celebrated Earth Day today; he went to “commune with nature” in a state forest in California. As always when communing with nature, he brought a crowd.


His bike has a name. It’s called Mountain Bike One.

He then went to Sacramento to see a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered car.


And a hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered bus (exact change only, Mr President!).


He said that hydrogen is the “fuel of the future.” He said that hydrogen is “domestically produced” (in hydrogen factories, I assume).

He arrived in Sacramento on his personal helicopter.


He left Sacramento on his personal airplane.


Here’s the motorcade that took him to his environmentally friendly bike ride.


He even walked at one point, but he didn’t look very pleased about it.

She was yelling at the president

So what assistant US Attorney prosecuting Wang Wenyi said when she denied that Wang’s speech was actually speech was, “She was yelling at the president. You can’t walk into a theater and yell ‘Fire!’ The First Amendment does not permit her to engage in criminal conduct.” You have to go to law school to learn that sort of logic, or possibly Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV.

Which doesn’t explain the logic of the WaPo, which editorializes that she shouldn’t go to prison. So far so good. Then they say “The Secret Service was right to hustle her off the grounds.” Okay. Then they say, “President Bush was right to apologize.” Wrong wrong wrong, and wrong. As the Danish government rightly said when asked ever so politely by the Muslim world to apologize for those cartoons, it is not the place of the government of a free people to apologize for the speech of its citizens. That’s what free speech means.

Bush came to California today, which he doesn’t do often because his staffers like to feed him made-up stories about the weird sex habits of Californians, just to see what they can get him to believe. This is why he said, “I know people here are suffering at the gas pump.” I’m not sure what he thinks we do at, or possibly with, the gas pump...

Speaking of pumping, he met with our beloved governor, so once again I’m disguising my laziness with a CAPTION CONTEST! YAY!

Going beyond political speech

At heckler Wang Wenyi’s hearing, the federal prosecutor said (according to the Reuters paraphrase), “Wang had gone beyond political speech and that the verbal attack was personally directed at Hu.” Political speech can’t be directed towards an actual person?

A CIA employee from its inspector-general’s office has been fired for leaking details of the secret prisons in Eastern Europe to the WaPo (which got a Pulitzer for the story). So we can take that as an official confirmation, right?

Iraq seems finally to have a new prime minister, Jawad al-Maliki, who is exactly in the mold of Jaafari: a sectarian Shiite who the Sunnis will never trust, who spent most of his adult life in exile outside Iraq, mostly in Iran. What’s not to love?

And in Afghanistan, Karzai named a new cabinet, mostly a reshuffle of the old cabinet, including removing all but one token woman (minister of women’s affairs). He tried to get the parliament to vote on them as a slate, but they refused, and rejected several of his choices, including, you guessed it, the woman, and also the minister of culture, who is accused of not censoring enough culture.

Harassing, intimidating or threatening

Yesterday, Bush apologized to Chinese President Hu for Wang Wenyi’s heckling of him, but nothing says “I’m sorry” like a stiff jail term. Wang has been charged with “harassing, intimidating or threatening a foreign official,” for which she could be imprisoned for up to six months. And they may also go after her under local laws for disorderly conduct. I’m guessing she doesn’t get to call Hu as a witness to ask him if he felt harassed, intimidated or threatened. Chinese presidents are notoriously sensitive to such examples of lèse majesté: when protesters were actually allowed within the sight-lines of Jiang Zemin in Switzerland in 1999, he said the Swiss had “lost a good friend.” And yesterday Chinese foreign ministry officials cancelled a briefing session out of pique. On one thing the Chinese, Bush and the penal code all agree: it is the duty of government to keep its subjects quiet in the presence of foreign leaders.

Jon Carroll:

The Bush administration embraced the arrogance of power with gusto. Its motto was “Never complain, never explain,” which morphed into “Never explain, frequently complain,” which morphed into “Always complain, pretend to explain.”

Hu’s your daddy

The museum at the site of the Majdanek death camp in Poland has thought better of its plans to stage a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Speaking of awkward, when that woman heckled Hu, it was blacked out in China. Bush later apologized to Hu for this egregious case of freedom being exercised. The free speech, it burns, it buuuuurrrrns!!! Whenever Bush, or Condi, or whomever, visits China, they always have the common courtesy of arresting all their dissidents to prevent just such an occurrence. Oh, and the White House announcer thought that China’s name is “the Republic of China.” Oops.

What do you mean by a democracy?

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:

Red Beard the Palestinian Pirate

Some Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset met with a Hamas member of the Palestinian parliament, Mohammed Abu Tir today, and.... Um, uh, what the fuck is up with that beard?





I mean WHAT the FUCK??

Hard to replace Scott

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?

Name of the day

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.

Just call it idiosyncratic

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 goes to school, learns nothing

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.

I’m the decider, and I decide what is best

Bush: “I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I’m the decider, and I decide what is best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.” (video here) A condescending but infantile moron who hears voices, and reads the funnies front page.

Oh, and he also refused to take the option of hitting Iran with nuclear weapons off the table.

(“Brando” suggests reasons the Iranians are enriching uranium, including: “Giving President Bush a reason to say “nuc-u-lar” a lot. That always cracks us up.”

What can’t The Decider decide? What to do with his hands. Here he is with Lebanese Prime Minister Siniora.




Bad touch! Bad touch!

Hey, you know Dick Cheney’s daughter is also Lebanese.

No excuse or justification is possible

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.

Stoned

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: