Validating the strategy of the terrorists

The WaPo, in a long story about why we still haven’t found bin Laden (short answer: Pakistan isn’t helping, and the US has starved the mission of resources), has an anecdote that if properly sourced should by yet another reason why Rumsfeld has to go: in November 2002, after the CIA assassinated an Al Qaida leader in Yemen, Rumsfeld was livid that it wasn’t the military that had done it, and ordered NSA head Michael Hayden to stop sharing intel with the CIA of the sort that had made it possible. The article says that Hayden claims not to recall the conversation, which is funny because you’d think that would have been an important one to remember. The Post doesn’t seem to have asked Rummy for his recollections. And while the paper is evidently sure enough of its source’s accuracy to put Rummy’s words in quotation marks, its failure to name that source renders the story merely interesting rather than usable (that is, you can’t demand Rummy’s resignation on the basis of this sort of hearsay).

I wonder if the 9/11 tv programs will rerun footage of the many times Bush said that bin Laden “can run but he cannot hide”?

The LAT has an analysis piece that starts by saying that the US military won’t say how it came up with that figure of a 50% reduction in sectarian deaths in Baghdad because, shh, it’s a secret.

During weekly news briefings deep inside barricaded compounds, commanders regularly display slick charts, multicolored bar graphs and PowerPoint presentations, all heralding good news.

“One more indicator that operations are in fact reducing the amount of attacks on civilians is shown here on this graph,” Caldwell assured reporters the other day, pointing to a bar chart dutifully placed on an easel by a stone-faced uniformed subordinate. But all the numbers had been carefully scrubbed. They were classified.

The Iraqi government’s contribution to opacity: the Baghdad morgue has just been banned from releasing death figures, which will now come from the Shiite-dominated Health Ministry, and “Morgue officials who previously provided details have abruptly ‘retired’ or left the country.”

The article also discusses the recent use of the term “death squads” by the Pentagon to describe the groups responsible: “By unmooring death squads from the context of government-backed Shiite militias, U.S. officials have redefined the problem — and avoided a direct confrontation with the U.S.-backed Iraqi leadership.” Now that you mention it, the US used that term in the 1980s to deflect blame from the Central American governments backed by Reagan, applying it to those killing leftists in El Salvador, where the death squads were closely linked to the military, and Honduras, where the death squads were the military.

On the talk show circuit today, Condi and Cheney both denied the Senate report (which Cheney said he hadn’t read) that Saddam Hussein had no connection to Al Qaida.

Cheney also hadn’t read the WaPo article on the hunt for bin Laden. Or the NYT story saying that his ascendancy over the White House is weakening. Evidently he didn’t think he’d be asked about any of this on Meet the Press on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, although he was prepared to discuss current cinema – “‘Snakes on a Plane’ was a real hoot, Tim, a real hoot.”

What else did Cheney, wielding his Index Finger of Doom, have to say? Well, as always he supported a free and open discussion of American foreign policy: “And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we’ve had in the United States, suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists.”


He refused to say whether there are more or fewer terrorists now than there were 5 years ago.


He claimed that everything he ever said was correct, that we were in fact greeted as liberators, and that when he said the war would be over quickly, “that’s true within the context of the battle against the Saddam Hussein regime and his forces. That went very quickly.” And the “last throes” thing, that was also true, I forget how, but it was true, goddamit!


The Shiite-Sunni “strife,” he said, is entirely the fault of Zarqawi and the mosque bombing.

In an interesting slip when defending Maliki’s visit to Iran (“It also visits the Saudis”), he admitted, “the new government in Iraq. It is a Shia government, no question about it.”


On the Iranian nuclear program, Cheney cited information from the International Atomic Energy Agency, “an international body that I think most people wouldn’t question.” Russert reminded him that he did in fact question the IAEA during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: I asked you on this very program...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s correct.

MR. RUSSERT: ...about ElBaradei and you said he’s wrong.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yes. It wasn’t consistent with our report.

MR. RUSSERT: But he was right about Iraq.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I haven’t, I haven’t looked at it. I’d have to go back and look at it again.

You do that.

They’re violent in Iraq for a reason

The Republicans have put out what purports to be a newspaper from 2007 showing what would happen if, heaven forfend, the Democrats win the 2006 elections. Bush impeached! Star Wars dismantled! Tax cuts for the rich repealed! Michael Moore eating! Universal health care! Don’t miss the horoscopes.

Bush gave an interview to ABC’s Charles Gibson. Here are some quotes, taken out of context, just because I feel like it:

“You know, when you have Republicans hugging Democrats, it really does inspire the nation.”

“No question the Iraq War has been a divisive, you know, war”.

“Some say, ‘Well, it’s impossible for democracy to take hold in the Middle East.’ Well, that’s true if we leave.”

“We have learned since that [Saddam] did not use them, but he had the capacity to use weapons of mass destruction.”

“No question they’re violent in Iraq, but they’re violent in Iraq for a reason”.

“The short term objective is to understand the stakes in this war against extremists. The long term objective is to ... win the ideological struggle.”

I mean, they are all very hot

The LAT got hold of a recording of Gov. Schwarzenegger with his advisers, speculating about the ethnicity of a state legislator (“She maybe is Puerto Rican or the same thing as Cuban. I mean, they are all very hot. They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it.”). His people are claiming it was a joke. No one mentioned that other Austrian who had theories about the blood of different races. But the best part of the story was when the LAT set the scene for us:

The meeting probably took place in the Ronald Reagan Cabinet Room, the governor’s de facto office that adjoins his smaller official quarters. The conference room faces east toward lush Capitol Park and has a long conference table that serves as a giant desk. The sword from Schwarzenegger’s movie “Conan the Barbarian” rests on a nearby table.

I don’t see dead people

So the Pentagon touted an astounding 50% drop in civil war-related deaths in Baghdad, thanks to Operation Forward Together, but then the Iraqi Health Ministry revised its figures up drastically, showing the number of deaths basically the same. Not that the Pentagon is admitting it, as shown by that hapless general on McNeil-Lehrer yesterday, still saying “well that’s not what our numbers show.” Dude, their numbers come from the Baghdad morgue. They get dead bodies, they count dead bodies. You’re not disputing numbers, you’re disputing the existence of 750 corpses you evidently didn’t know about. So the next question is: we’re occupying their country, we have responsibility for security, we’re running a major operation to reduce sectarian violence in the capital... and we don’t know how many fatalities there are in the capital to within plus or minus 50%? We had no one on the ground with enough of a sense of the overall picture to realize that the claim that deaths were down 50% did not accord with that overall picture?

Best line in the WaPo story: the Health Ministry is planning to build some more morgues, get more refrigeration units and hire more personnel to cope with the influx of dead bodies, but said it had “nothing to do with the violence and killing.”

Restoration tragedy

In the NYT today, David Sanger writes, “Mr. Bush is challenging Congress to restore to him the authority to put the United States’ worst enemies on trial on terms he has defined.” Restore? The whole point of the federal court rulings has been that Bush does not have and never had that authority either under law or the constitution.

O.J. Simpson has failed to give the heirs of Ron Goldman the $33.5 million they were awarded, so Goldman’s father is asking LA County Superior Court to transfer to him O.J.’s “right of publicity,” including the rights to his name, image and likeness.

The Iraqi government announced that it hanged 27 “terrorists” Wednesday. Which seems to be all it’s willing to disclose; it wouldn’t say where this took place, and I don’t think it released their names. Secret mass executions are back, baby! Freedom, ain’t it grand?

No, really, ain’t it?

Wherein is revealed why America is a wonderful country

Another day, another Bush speech. Fortunately, right near the start, he tells us, “Many Americans look at these events and ask the same question: Five years after 9/11, are we safer? The answer is, yes, America is safer. (Applause.)” Who really needs to know more than that?

Making the case that one of the major goals of The War Against Terror (TWAT) is to deny “safe haven” to the terrorists (no one thought to excise this bit after Pakistan ceded Waziristan to the loons?), he quotes a “fatwa” issued by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996, “by the grace of Allah, a safe base here is now available.” Notice how Bush subtly included the “by the grace of Allah” bit, which doesn’t add anything substantive to the quote except to remind us that Osama is a Muslim.

Actually, this is another speech with a more clever and effective rhetorical strategy than we’re used to hearing from Chimpy. He narrates the 9/11 plot as it unfolded, interpolating at various points how it could have been stopped if there had been in place the visa screening and unified watch-lists we now have, or the warrantless surveillance he wants Congress to legalize. Most of this is Bush congratulating himself for closing the barn door after the horse has, um, hijacked an airplane with box-cutters, but someone has put better than usual words into his mouth.

How they come out of his mouth is another matter entirely: “And the United States Congress was right to renew the terrorist act -- the Patriot Act. (Applause.) The Terrorist Prevention Act, called the Patriot Act.”


He went on to a fundraiser, where he said:

I fully understand why Americans are troubled by the death and destruction they see on their television screens. I know that. You see, it’s easy to understand because I understand the compassion of the United States of America. Isn’t it a wonderful country when people suffer when they see a child maimed by an extremist’s car bomb. It’s the nature of our country.

Makes you proud to be an Amurriken.

Re-branding Guantanamo

One effect of transferring prisoners from CIA custody to Guantanamo is that Gitmo now has real terrorists people have heard of, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They’re trying to restore Gitmo’s reputation (!) as the place where “the worst of the worst” are stowed (albeit with volleyball courts and Harry Potter), rather than the place where low-level go-fers, wannabes and innocents sold out for the reward money are tied down in restraint chairs and forcibly fed (how many prisoners are still hunger-striking, by the way?).

The US Senate refuses (70-30) to limit the use of cluster bombs near civilians, or to restrict their sales to countries like Israel that refuse to do the same.

Harper’s follows up a Guardian story I must have missed, that a UN report on the history of human rights abuses in Afghanistan has been suppressed because it names those responsible, some of whom are currently prominent in the Afghan government, parliament or military (click here for the report in pdf).

I think you understand why

Somewhat unfortunate headline of the day: “Bush Taps Peters for Transportation.”

Bush gave a broadcast speech in support of secret prisons and torture. He surrounded himself with lots of American flags in case you were wondering if this is still America.


The centerpiece of the speech was a story about how the torture of Abu Zubaydah (who many analysts doubt is as important as the US claims he is, or indeed as important as he claims he is). It’s a rather odd and not hugely believable story, or maybe it’s just the way Bush tells it. Zubaydah, who the US had shot and was holding in a secret prison, “declared his hatred of America. During questioning, he at first disclosed what he thought was nominal information,” including descriptions of Al Qaida members planning a terrorist attack in the US, and where to find them. Then he clammed up, and “it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. ... I cannot describe the specific methods used -- I think you understand why... But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.” So they extracted information from him through these unnameable “procedures,” and then “confronted” other prisoners with it, whereupon they immediately caved: “When confronted with the news that his terror cell had been broken up, Hambali admitted that the operatives were being groomed at KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed]’s request for attacks inside the United States -- probably [sic] using airplanes.” Evidently despite being trained to resist interrogation, they never considered the possibility that interrogators might lie to them.

The [sic], by the way, is in the transcript, rather mysteriously. There’s another mysterious sic, a reference to Al Qaida and Taliban fighters being “held secretly [sic]”.


According to him, any number of plots to blow things up, fly airplanes into things, or spread anthrax, have been thwarted because of data given by prisoners held secretly [sic] after alternative sets of procedures were used upon their persons. And yet he claimed once again, “the United States does not torture.” As proof of this, he cites the McCain Act, neglecting to mention his signing statement. So he won’t tell us – “I think you understand why” – the procedures that induced fanatical terrorists to betray their ideals, their plans, their friends and their cause, but the United States does not torture. Phew.

He does tell us that CIA interrogators “had to complete more than 250 additional hours of specialized training”. Oddly enough, he says that like it’s supposed to be reassuring.

Today marks the first time that the White House has admitted that the CIA holds prisoners in secret prisons outside the country. It has not said under what legal authority it does so, or where those prisons are. Or did so, since Bush says that the CIA’s prisoners are all being transferred to DOD control at Guantanamo. Since they’ve denied up until now that there were secret prisons and secret prisoners, I can’t imagine why we would take that claim seriously.

Also, the Pentagon today released a new interrogation manual, which bans hooding, the use of dogs, sexual humiliation, waterboarding, etc. None of this applies to the secret CIA prisons.

Bush demanded that Congress pass laws establishing military tribunals and ensuring that interrogators using alternative procedures cannot face prosecution under the War Crimes Act.

Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?

Bush gave the first in the latest series of “pretty please won’t you support my war?” speeches today. It’s actually a kind of interesting speech, containing many quotes from documents and speeches of Al Qaida leaders and others showing that they don’t like us very much and that they think Iraq is important to their cause and so on. He says ignoring these statements would be like ignoring Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” He says that “Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?” but intentions are not capabilities. Al Qaida may want to take over Iraq and Afghanistan and establish a caliphate from Basra to Boise, or wherever, but...

OK, right in the middle of that sentence I realized that just as Bush was treating bin Laden’s wet dreams as sensible strategic thinking, I was attempting to engage Bush’s speech with logic, which is about as sensible as punching jello. Moving on...

Condi Rice has translated the “people who oppose the Iraq war are like Nazi-appeasers” argument into African-American, telling Essence magazine, “I’m sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold.” She also added that she’s sure there are some people who think Captain Kirk should have “taken a peace” with the Tribble-hating Klingons...

Like Bush’s logic, Condi’s charge is too fatuous to merit a response, but let’s compare & contrast their tone with that of members of the Democratic Congressional leadership. Reid, Pelosi, Murtha, Biden, Lantos et al have written to George Bush asking him to “consider changes to your Iraq policy” and “consider changing the civilian leadership at the Defense Department”. It’s the tone of supplication that annoys me. Not just that they don’t dare to say R*msf*ld’s name out loud, but that in requesting not that he do these things but only that he “consider” doing them, they are reaffirming his contention that only he has any say over foreign and military policy. They are speaking as if they are humbly offering advice to an emperor, not as if they are people with any share of power themselves. Bush, while paying utmost attention to Al Qaida fantasists with delusions of grandeur, will not have to ask “Will we listen?” about this letter.

(Update: which is why the reply to a letter written by a bunch of United States senators was delegated to White House chief of staff Josh Bolten.)

Just treat us the way we treat you

I’ve had one report of problems with this site in Internet Explorer 6. Has anyone else experienced that? My current stats show that 39% of you are using IE6 to access my blog, but they don’t say if that’s the last thing you ever did.

Bush gave a little Labor Day speech at the Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education. He doesn’t have much to offer actual working-class people, so he talked about tax cuts: “I like it when people are working for a living, have more after-tax money in their pocket. That’s what I like.”



And he talked about dependence on foreign oil: “I mean, the problem is we get oil from some parts of the world and they simply don’t like us.” You know what they call parts of the world that don’t like us? The world.


He talked about opening up foreign markets to American goods: “See, we got 5 percent of the world’s people here in the United States, which means 95 percent are potential customers.” He added, “And my message to the world is this: Just treat us the way we treat you.” There’s a truly scary thought.


I’ll leave you with a better one, which I stumbled upon on the Internet Movie Database: there will be a Futurama movie (for video).

Whaddaya want, an engraved invitation?

Israeli PM Olmert claims to have made repeated offers to Lebanese PM Siniora (which Siniora says he never received and wouldn’t accept) to “sit down together, shake hands, make peace and end once and for all the hostility, fanaticism and hatred that part of his country feels towards us.” I don’t understand Siniora: who wouldn’t accept such a gracious offer? In a variant of that sentence, Olmert said he wanted to “sit, shake hands, make peace and end once and for all the hostility and jealousy”. I’d be interested to know what he thinks the Lebanese are jealous of.

Book review: Steven Poole, Unspeak

I seem to be reading bloggers in book form lately. July I read and reviewed Glenn Greenwald’s book. Then I read “Crashing the Gate,” a book supposedly about politics but with no idea in its head that is not about winning elections. If that thought doesn’t bother you and depress you a little bit, maybe you’ll like the book.

Speaking of books by bloggers, I think everyone should pester Billmon to write one.

Which brings us to Steven Poole’s Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality.

One of the unexpected pleasures of blogging is discovering a blog you like because they discovered you first. So I’m declaring an interest: I am blogrolled on Poole’s blog, also called Unspeak, and he has posted comments here two or three times. I thought I’d recommended his blog before, I certainly intended to, but a search indicates I haven’t.

One of my areas of bloggy focus, in the jokes as well as the more serious bits, has increasingly been the use of language in politics. So Poole’s book on that subject is very much of interest to me. Language has also been a great concern of the Bushies, who are constantly telling us to be careful what we say, that those who think we aren’t engaged in a “war” against “terror” are mistaken, that Iraq is not in a “civil war,” that prisoners were “abused” and not tortured,” that it’s not domestic surveillance, it’s terrorist surveillance, etc etc. Democrats have begun to show some interest in “framing,” following George Lakoff, who unlike Poole is a professional linguist, with degrees and everything, but whose work I find to be much less persuasive and useful than Poole’s.

Poole’s concept of “unspeak” focuses attention on how political language functions. “Unspeak” is a catchy term (although not catchy enough for the Guardian, which recently mis-identified him as the author of “Unthink”), although it arguably creates a false distinction between propagandistic language and ordinary words, downplaying the extent to which all vocabulary influences and canalizes our modes of thinking. Unspeak is language designed not only to advance one’s position, but to preempt and delegitimze one’s opponents’ viewpoints. “Rhetorically,” Poole says, “Unspeak is a kind of invasive procedure: it wants to bypass critical thinking and implant a foreign body of opinion directly in the soft tissue of the brain.” It works well in our newsbite age because “it packs the maximum amount of persuasion into the smallest space.” The word “reform,” for example, implies the superiority of any proposed change: “The very word ‘reform’ thus argues efficiently in favour of itself, whatever it actually is, in paradigmatic Unspeak fashion.” Another example: “To call someone an ‘extremist’ is to denounce him merely for his position on our imaginary spectrum of ideas, rather than to engage with what he is actually saying.”

The book is a compendium of case studies of such terms as community, global warming/climate change, sound science, intelligent design, ethnic cleansing, the Israeli apartheid wall/security fence/separation barrier, weapons of mass destruction, terrorist, extremist, war on terror, abuse, enemy combatant, and others, tracing their coinage, spread and evolution. He even makes brief forays into Unspeak in other languages; it had never occurred to me to ask what Israeli “settlements” are called in Hebrew and Arabic.

People who like my blog will enjoy this book. Indeed, there is some overlap between our writings. For example, we both object to the phrase “freedom is on the march,” which he traces back to Reagan and observes that “To be ‘on the march’ means to be unfree, insofar as one is subject to military discipline,” while I wrote (two years ago), “Freedom does not march. It may walk, hop, skip, traipse, mosey, even flounce, but it does not march.” His humor is similar to mine too, except he’d spell it humour, and I must say seeing blog-like snarky humor on the printed page rather than a computer screen took a little getting used to. Actually, the book is quite like Poole’s blog, so if my recommendation isn’t (sniff) enough, you can window-shop there.

Powell’s link

Amazon link

For those of you not playing volleyball and reading Harry Potter...

I forgot to mention that in his op-ed piece, Rumsfeld made a big deal about Guantanamo having volleyball and basketball courts and that the inmates are all reading Harry Potter. Does anyone truly believe (as Rummy would say) that Gitmo prisoners are allowed to use the volleyball and basketball courts?

I’m sitting by the computer waiting to pounce on any juicy news this holiday weekend, but so far not a dicky bird. Also, the change to Beta Blogger seems to have cut my readership way down, possibly because there’s a new RSS feed and the old feed may or may not be working for everybody, and of course I have no way of contacting them to tell them that, and did I mention how annoyed I’m getting with Beta Blogger?

Or possibly my stats are low because my readers are all at the beach, playing volleyball and basketball and reading Harry Potter.

Anyway, while we’re waiting for someone to do something for me to mock, here are some London Review of Books (LRB) personal ads (for those of you looking for that special someone to play volleyball and basketball and read Harry Potter with). The complete collection of my favorites is here.

Estella, 42, seeks Pip. Low expectations. Box. No. 17/03

I am not as high maintenance as my highly polished and impeccably arranged collection of porcelain cats suggests, but if you touch them I will kill you. F, 36. Likes porcelain cats. Seeks man not unused to the sound of sobbing coming from a bedroom from which he is strictly prohibited. Tell me how attractive I am at box no. 16/08

6.10 am, January 19, 1977. Snow falls for the first time on West Palm Beach. The snow spreads to Fort Lauderdale by 8.30am, continuing south to Miami and Homestead. At Crandon Park Zoo, heat lamps are brought in to protect the iguanas. True story. Man (35) incapable of making any point whatsoever would like to meet woman to 40 for nights of awkward smiles and petering off mid-sentence. Box no. 16/05

I’m placing this ad against my better judgment. But then the last time I listened to my better judgment it told me the only way to find a well-read articulate man to 45 was to hide in a bin outside his flat until he arrived home from work then lunge wildly at him as he struggled to put the key in his door. If the ad doesn’t work, keep your bins inside until collection day. Woman. 40. Tactile and cuddly in a mildly terrifying sort of way. Box no. 17/06

When the authorities eventually remove this covert recording device from my brain, they’ll be able to download not only the most profound musings on the universe ever conceived by man but also possibly the whereabouts of my car keys. Until then paranoid amateur tailor (M, 37, Warwickshire) remains unable to take these cross-stitch manuals back to the library. The chirps and whistles aren’t getting any quieter, and the fines aren’t getting any smaller, but this dog-fur suit is sewing up a storm at box no. 17/09 That’s not revulsion you’re feeling right now – it’s passion (or possibly it is revulsion).

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this personal advert puts me firmly on the map. Box no. 17/10

Shepherd of Love seeks F to 45 free of scrapie, pinkeye and Caseous Lymphadenitis. Vet (M, 43). Little experience of human contact outside the farming communities of Pembs. Box no. 16/01

‘Good news! My favourite flavour of crisp is in production again!’ If this is a sentiment you have ever expressed or conceived in adulthood, you needn’t write. You know who you are. F, 32. Box no. 16/09

Meeting the stringent international legal standards for civil war

Wouldn’t you know it? On the Friday before a holiday weekend, the Pentagon released a report (pdf) saying that violence is increasing in Iraq, that “Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife” in which civilians are increasingly targeted, and admitting that the campaign to reduce violence in Baghdad has had no effect.

It admits that “Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq, specifically in and around Baghdad,” but gives this very comforting reason why there won’t be a civil war, or at least not something we’ll ever call a civil war: “there is no generally agreed upon definition of civil war among academics or defense analysts.” So the term has no meaning? Funny, because you seemed to think it had a meaning when you said on page 3, “the current violence is not a civil war.” It goes on, “Moreover, the conflict in Iraq does not meet the stringent international legal standards for civil war.” So that’s all right, then.

Did you know there were stringent international legal standards for civil war? Really, you have to dot every i and cross every t, it’s all “the party of the first part” this and “no implied warranty is created” that. Lawyers, huh? Take the fun out of everything.

Comment link, same caveats as before.

Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America is the real source of the world’s troubles?

BBC headline: “Pope in Visit to Religious Relic.” Coals to Newcastle.

Jonathan Cook provides a good demolition of Israeli lies and exaggerations about the late unpleasantness, including claims that over a billion Israelis were forced to flee their homes because of Hezbollah rockets, while another 1.7 trillion were in bomb shelters. Some of these lies are about pretending to have suffered more than the Lebanese, and some are because the Israeli government intends to stiff the Israeli Arabs who are half the population of northern Israel and suffered a disproportionate number of deaths, damaged buildings etc.

We’ve been hearing a bit lately about military families winding up paying usurious rates on payday loans, which effects security clearances. The California state senate rejected a bill to cap those interest rates at 36%.

Secretary of War Rumsfeld had an op-ed piece in the LA Times today. As always, he had a lot of questions and they were all rhetorical, designed, he said, “to guide us during this struggle against violent extremists.” Here are those questions:

• With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that vicious extremists can somehow be appeased?

• Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?

• Can we truly afford to pretend that the threats today are simply “law enforcement” problems rather than fundamentally different threats requiring fundamentally different approaches?

• Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America — not the enemy — is the real source of the world’s troubles?

Let the great debate begin! I like how each one has that “can we really” or “can we truly” phrase, as if someone had already said yes and he’s responding, No, can we troooly blame America first (a phrase he’s been very fond of recently)? Rummy says the question is “whether we believe that the defense of liberty is worth the cost.” Gee, I’m pretty sure that’s a trick question.

To which you can respond in the comment link below. I haven’t gotten HaloScan working, but I can cobble together comments links individually. It’s just a pain in the ass and it may disappear if I ever do get HaloScan functional.

Blogspot blues, redux (updated)

I switched over to the new version of Blogger, and made a few minor design changes, like the font and color of my blog title. I tried to change that color once before, and it looked fine on the front page, the blog title in maroon, the subtitle in red, but on other pages it was an ugly purple. The interface on Beta Blogger (yes, they’re calling it Beta Blogger, which sounds like beta blocker) is more user friendly, for those of us who only speak Pig HTML.

I was going to ask for a show of hands about some of the elements (for example, what color should I use for hyperlinks and visited hyperlinks, currently blue and grey respectively), but I’m having a major problem with comments.

Does anyone know how to re-install Haloscan in Beta Blogger? Haloscan’s automatic install doesn’t work, and Blogger rejects the html generated by Haloscan’s manual install. Instructions using very simple words would be much appreciated.

(Update: there are comments for this post only which should work, but it's not something I can use normally, so I still need Haloscan help. Anyone else having problems with or comments about the blog's appearance can also comment).

(Update: attempting to simply insert html [which may not work in Beta Blogger since it was designed for old Blogger] into the template including phrases like "/www.haloscan.com/comments/wiiiai/<$BlogItemNumber" and "...javascript">postCount('<$BlogItemNumber$>" produces the reaction from Blogger: Invalid variable declaration in page skin: Variable is used but not defined. Input: BlogItemNumber. Does that tell anyone what the problem is?

I also need to figure out how to make the Blogspot bar at the top go away again, as the “search this blog” feature sucks.

Let me point out one nice new feature: at the bottom of each individual post page, there are links for “newer post” and “older post.” This means you can navigate the posts in chronological order rather than reading down the home page in reverse chronological order. If your computer accepts cookies, you can tell which posts are new since your last visit by the color of the post titles (blue or grey, remember?) in the archives section in the right-hand column.

Other bloggers on Blogspot should probably not change to Beta until a few more of the bugs are worked out. Also, my blog was off-line for 2 hours while they transferred it, which I'd have done in the middle of the night had they warned me. And don’t forget to save your old template first; I had to extract from mine the code for my Sitemeter, PayPal, Amazon, Powell’s and Google search functions (although the Beta interface made it very easy to plug them in). Only HaloScan was a problem, about which, let me repeat, HELP!!

The ideological struggle of the 21st century

Bush addressed the American Legion in Salt Lake City today.
His rhetoric about Iraq is not getting less messianic over time: “the battle for Iraq is now central to the ideological struggle of the 21st century.” So how was that vacation, George? Catch a lot of fish? Get a good rest from the ideological struggle?

“Ideological struggle,” by the way, is his new favorite phrase.

He admits that there are “radicalized followers of the Sunni tradition” and “radicalized followers of the Shia tradition,” and “homegrown” terrorists, but insists that these all “form the outlines of a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology. And the unifying feature of this movement, the link that spans sectarian divisions and local grievances, is the rigid conviction that free societies are a threat to their twisted view of Islam.” Also, they’re all secretly controlled by the Trilateral Commission. Because, honestly, what’s a good conspiracy theory without the Trilateral Commission? And Freemasons.

There’s an interesting new twist to The History of the Middle East According to a Man Who Couldn’t Find It on a Map: he’s still saying that religious extremism and terrorism developed in the Middle East because the US (it’s always all about the US, of course) was only interested in apparent stability and calm. Now he says that this was actually the correct policy at the time: “we were fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and it was important to support Middle Eastern governments that rejected communism.”

But that was then. Now it’s democracy time, because democracies are peaceful and “focus on building roads and schools -- not weapons of mass destruction.” I forget, who has the biggest stockpile of WMDs in the world?

Now here’s a sentence that... oh, words fail me: “Dissidents with the freedom to protest around the clock are less likely to blow themselves up during rush hour.”

“Our enemies saw the transformation in Lebanon and set out to destabilize the young democracy.” Again, it’s all about us: “our enemies.”

“I appreciate the troops pledged by France and Italy and other allies for this important international deployment. Together, we’re going to make it clear to the world that foreign forces and terrorists have no place in a free and democratic Lebanon.” Er, except for foreign forces from France and Italy and...

The terrorists are totally wrong about everything, except when they agree with me, because if you can’t trust bin Laden’s judgment, whose judgment can you trust?:

Here at home we have a choice to make about Iraq. Some politicians look at our efforts in Iraq and see a diversion from the war on terror. That would come as news to Osama bin Laden, who proclaimed that the “third world war is raging” in Iraq. It would come as news to the number two man of al Qaeda, Zawahiri, who has called the struggle in Iraq, quote, “the place for the greatest battle.” It would come as news to the terrorists from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and other countries, who have to come to Iraq to fight the rise of democracy. It’s hard to believe that these terrorists would make long journeys across dangerous borders, endure heavy fighting, or blow themselves up in the streets of Baghdad, for a so-called “diversion.”

Hey, American soldiers went to Iraq because there were supposed to be weapons of mass destruction; Rick went to Casablanca for the waters: people make mistakes, they are misinformed. You’ve never traveled a long distance for a crappy vacation someplace you thought would be fun?

Bush says that until we intervened in the Middle East, it was on a path where “a generation from now, our children will face a region dominated by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.” Which may or may not be true, but what an insult to an entire region. As is this: “Or we can stop that from happening, by rallying the world to confront the ideology of hate, and give the people of the Middle East a future of hope.” Note the verb: we are the givers, they the passive receivers. Thus, when he says that freedom is a gift from the Almighty...


(Update: A Tiny Revolution links to video of what I missed by only reading the transcript: “This war will be difficult, this war will be long, and this war will end in the defeat of the terrorists of tola-tera-tera-to-totalitarians.” Banana-fo-fana.)

Would you buy a used war from this man?

This is the lead of a WaPo story: “President Bush and his surrogates are launching a new campaign intended to rebuild support for the war in Iraq by accusing the opposition of aiming to appease terrorists and cut off funding for troops on the battlefield”. Actually, that’s about silencing the opponents of the war, which is very much not the same thing as “rebuilding support” for it. There is simply no way to rebuild support for this war. There may be some inattentive people who still believe that the war is transforming the Middle East in a, you know, good way, or that we are spreading, as Bush phrases it, “the peace,” but their number is not going to increase.

Lacking a convincing positive rationale, they’re pushing the fear button (going to the fear well? Metaphors, people, I need metaphors!), but I don’t think most Americans see a strong connection between Iraq and the threat of terrorism in the US or subscribe to the Bushite assertion that, as Frank Rich put it, “If we leave the country that had nothing to do with 9/11, then 9/11 will happen again.” I’m especially amazed that the remarkably silly phrase, that if we leave Iraq, the terrorists will “follow us home,” which I made fun of when the alliterative Peter Pace first uttered it, has actually been adopted by Bush.

The other line I’ve been hearing over and over the last two weeks is that if Iraq falls to the “terrorists,” they’ll have access to all that oil. And that’s our oil, dammit!

Given the collapse in the credibility of so much of the rhetoric about Iraq, I’m not sure what language they’d use to justify a pre-emptive war against Iran. I think someone asserting “We’ll be greeted as liberators” would be greeted with guffaws.

By the way, that WaPo story more or less redeemed itself after that crappy opening:

Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone.

Fallen in the hands of evildoers

Indy article on the increasingly blatant interventions of the American ambassador to Nicaragua in its forthcoming elections.

The Catholic Church will excommunicate the medical personnel who performed Colombia’s first legal abortion... on an 11-year old who had been raped by her stepfather. Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo said the girl had “fallen in the hands of evildoers.” He did not of course mean the stepfather. The Guardian quotes a Colombian senator, Gina Parody, who is on the right side and so gets one (1) free pass for that name.

I don’t have anything insightful to say about it, but I hope everyone’s read this story about the Muhammad and Jaber Ismail, a father and son, American citizens, who the US is blocking returning from a trip to Pakistan unless they submit to FBI interrogation without a lawyer and with a polygraph in Pakistan, where their constitutional rights don’t exist.

For your captioning pleasure, some pictures from a church service in New Orleans yestereday.

I think Americans have sacrificed

I guess Bush won’t accept Ahmadinejad’s proposal of a live debate. They could have sold that one on pay-per-view and rebuilt New Orleans with the proceeds.

Yesterday Bush was interviewed by Brian Williams, and I’ve finally found where NBC was hiding the transcript. Williams asked if he shouldn’t have asked the American people to make some sort of sacrifice, possibly a goat, after 9/11. Bush:

Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.

Those things are not sacrifice. Sacrifice is something people do actively, voluntarily; the things Bush enumerates are things that people endure passively. A passive, demobilized citizenry, which experiences The War Against Terror (TWAT) only as something they see, as Bush often says, on their television screens, as a consumer good, which only turns out for one “accountability moment” every four years, that’s the sort of citizenry that suits Bush.

Asked whether he ever gets advice from his father:

He understands that often times I have information that he doesn’t have [!]. And he understands how difficult the world is today. And I explain my strategy to him, I explain exactly what I just explained to you back there how I view the current tensions, and he takes it on board, and leaves me with this thought, “I love you son.”

He makes it sound like a really crappy finger-painting his father has to coo over and put up on the refrigerator, then shudder every time he gets a glass of milk.

Actually, Bush the Elder not chewing out Chimpy for his massively incompetent foreign policy, now that’s a sacrifice.

Does that make Rummy a suicide bomber?

Article on Pentagon website: “Rumsfeld: Truth Serves as Powerful Weapon.”

Look, there is so much ammunition

I can understand wearing a Ronald Reagan mask to rob a Bank of America, but why the cape?

Improbable government announcement of the day, from the White House deputy press secretary: “President Bush was saddened to learn of the passing of Egypt’s Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, Naguib Mahfouz.”

The three major Russian “opposition” parties merge, because Putin tells them to. They will compete with Putin’s United Russia party as to who can most slavishly implement Putin’s policies. Really, that’s what the head of the Party of Life party said.

Must-read: WaPo article on how Shiite militias dominate Iraq’s Health Ministry, especially its 15,000-strong “security” force (of 30,000 total employees), and periodically drag Sunnis out of their beds and kill them. In the US, this is called “managed care.”

Harper’s has some phrases from a web page, “Military English Learning” on the website of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army:

The principles of war can never be changed.

Special forces can penetrate into an enemy’s rear to gather information.

Without military maps, you don’t know where you are sometimes.

It is necessary for war fighters to master the skills of temporary fixations.

There have been too many famous battles.

Look, there is so much ammunition.

Oh, so many weapons. Great!

The weapons displayed here are almost conventional weapons.

These are tanks, aren’t they?

Yes. But this one is an armored vehicle.

We saw this kind of missile on TV.

As far as we know, there are atomic weapons.

Mass-destruction weapons bring more difficulties to the first aid.

Theoretically, space must be digitized.

Cyber-war techniques can be treated as weapons of mass destruction.

Do you know the most terrorist event?

It was the September 11 attack in New York.

Thousands of people died unnatural deaths.

The World Trade Center can never be mended.

Bin Laden immediately became the most famous person of the world.

Has he been dead or still alive?

No one knows, I’m afraid, except himself.

The original pages have been scrubbed from the PLA site, but some cached versions may be found here. The page of useful phrases for the interrogation of POWs includes these:

92. What do you hope now?

102. How is the morale of your unit?

103. Where is your vanguard?

104. Do you know our lenient policy towards POWs?

105. The chief criminals shall be punished without fail.

106. Those who are accomplice under duress shall go unpunished.

107. Those who perform deeds of merit shall be rewarded.

Bush in New Orleans

Bush: “I take full responsibility for the federal government’s response, and a year ago I made a pledge that we will learn the lessons of Katrina and that we will do what it takes to help you recover. I’ve come back to New Orleans to tell you the words that I spoke on Jackson Square are just as true today as they were then.”

Yes, that’s exactly the problem.

Fucker.

There is a difference between healthy debate and self-defeating pessimism. Yes there is.

Cheney and Rummy’s speeches at the VFW’s annual meeting slash hootenanny [correction: Cheney was at the VFW, Rummy was at the American Legion convention] were designed, just in time for the elections, to limit debate about the war in Iraq. Cheney, while claiming to believe in democratic values, insisted that some forms of speech just aren’t legitimate: “there is a difference between healthy debate and self-defeating pessimism.” The Bushies tend to prefer self-defeating optimism.


By the way, I had to check the spelling of hootenanny at dictionary.com, which has this definition: “3. Older Use. a thingumbob.”

Rummy castigated the “moral and intellectual confusion” of those who don’t see the danger of the “new kind of fascism,” a confusion that “can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.” (To clear up any remaining confusion, he slipped a few more references to fascism into the speech as delivered than were in the prepared version that link goes to.)


He has a whole list of things people, especially people in the journalism business, have said that he doesn’t like. Why, did you know that in the leading newspapers, there were 10 times the number of mentions of one of the Abu Ghraib torturers as of the guy who won the first Medal of Honor in the Global War on Terror? Shocking. He’s also still pissed off at Amnesty International calling Guantanamo the gulag of our times, more than a year later. He wants the VFW to perform a “watchdog role” over the media, citing approvingly the VFW’s successful Mau Mauing of the Smithsonian into censoring its exhibition on the Enola Gay in 2003.


Also, “I know there are some places where Boy Scouts are a subject of scorn.” He does not say where those places are. Girl Scout jamborees, maybe.

The rule of law is promoted, but General Chaos is still in charge

Alberto Gonzales says he’s in Iraq today to “promote the rule of law”. Some days it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. To answer this question, I turn to you, the readers:

Laugh?
Cry?
Current results

Discrediting the operations that are ongoing

5 Afghans were returned home to Afghanistan (probably to Afghan prisons) from Guantanamo. One of these most dangerous of men is 71, needs a walker, and his hearing and eyesight are not so good.

From AP, a story from China whose first sentence is the platonic ideal of the silly-season story: “A woman’s vehicle collided with another car while she was teaching her dog to drive.”

Gen. William Caldwell, Military Moron, announces that operations to reduce violence in Baghdad have been going great, except for all the violence: “It was always expected that there would be this extremist element that would get out and try to discredit the operations that are ongoing by striking at areas where civilians are readily available, where they can inflict some casualties.”

See, there’s a new Mississippi that’s coming

Bush went to Mississippi today to talk about how wonderful everything is, one year after Katrina. “I’m amazed by the opportunity, I’m amazed by the hope that I feel down here.” And it’ll just get better: “there will be a momentum, momentum will be gathered. Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses.” He makes it sound so... dirty.

And really, it’s all about the debris: “People say, how can we rebuild with debris? Now it’s gone.”

He praised the Republican governor of Mississippi: “You have a strategy now to build smarter homes.” That’s not one of those computerized homes that start acting weird and then seal the doors and electrocute people, cause I’ve seen that movie and I remember it as kind of crappy.

“And I understand that rebuilding neighborhoods begins one house at a time, and that’s what’s happening here.” Um, wouldn’t it be faster to rebuild more than one house at a time? Just sayin’.

“When somebody goes back to their home, it helps renew the community, and so part of our efforts, and part of our focus is to make sure that people can get back in their homes as quickly as possible.” So, let me get this straight, you’re saying that a community should have people living in it.

Hey, when he’s right, he’s right.

(Update: in comments, Aaron, a resident of MS and a victim of Katrina, writes about the failures of federal funds to make it to actual, you know, human beings.)

They had the guns and we didn’t know what the hell was going on

In comments on my last post, Mrs. Malaprop suggests an answer to my question, what the Holy Jihad Brigades thought forcing the Fox reporter hostages to “convert” would accomplish: it’s an allegory, like introducing democracy at gunpoint. I’ll buy that. Thus this statement by one of the reporters, Steve Centanni: “It was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns and we didn’t know what the hell was going on.” Pretty much sums up the human condition in the 21st century.

Update: oh for crummsake, they videotaped the “conversion.” Of course they did. Here it is, if you’re curious. The Foxies are forced on pain of death to say that Islam is a religion of peace, and that “Islam is not fascism. Words like that only serve to deepen the great chasm between peoples, to fan the flames of anger and distrust that already burn in the Muslim world.” I know you can’t turn people into democrats by application of military force, but boy if you could bring an understanding of irony to the Middle East... The War to Make the World Safe for Irony, has a ring to it, huh?

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This sounds strangely familiar:



Yesterday there was a completely incoherent interview of Iraqi PM Maliki by Wolf Blitzer on CNN. I assume it was Maliki’s translator who was incoherent rather than Maliki, but who knows? A sample: “Therefore, the agreement of the Iraqis is like a ship that all Iraqis should all be in to face terrorism and explosions that you mentioned with these numbers.” So we got some incoherent answers about when US troops might leave Iraq, an incoherent answer about whether Israel has a right to exist, and an incoherent response to Blitzer’s demand that Maliki apologize for having criticized American troops who massacred civilians “at a time,” said Wolfy, “when the United States military has done so much to try to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq.” Through the translator, this is the “clarification” Wolf asked for: “There’s a difference between the forces that are there to protect Iraqi experience and help Iraqis, and difference between have violations -- which is natural.” About the only comprehensible statement was this: “The violence is in decrease. And our security ability is increasing. And I want to assure he who loves Iraq that Iraq will never be in a civil war.” I’m curious whether the translator worked for Maliki or for CNN, and why CNN bothered putting this gibberish on the air, and I know you’re all waiting for me to say something about Bush’s speech patterns, but I’m not gonna do it, it’s just too easy.

I sacrificed myself

South Africa’s Apartheid-era Law and Order Minister, Adriaan Vlok, washed the feet of Rev. Frank Chikane, a man Vlok tried to have assassinated in 1989 by poisoning his clothes. Vlok said that if Jesus could do it (the foot-washing, not the clothes-poisoning), so could he. “I sacrificed myself,” Vlok says of the incident, adding, “I give up my pride, my own self, my superiority, my uncharitable attitude, and my selfishness.” If I were Chikane, I’d begin to feel like my feet were being insulted. Actually, if I were Chikane, I would have walked through some dog shit first. Which is probably why I’m not a reverend.

The kidnappers of the two Fox reporters forced them to convert to Islam, or else. I can’t imagine what they thought they were accomplishing.

Or the Islamists in Malaysia who are obstructing the attempts to marry of a woman who converted to Christianity. She’s being refused permission by the sharia courts, which she thinks that, no longer being a Muslim, shouldn’t have jurisdiction over her. The constitution of Malaysia, however, defines Malays (that’s an ethnic group, as distinct from Malaysians) as Muslim.

The group in Gaza holding the Fox reporters, by the way, calls itself the Holy Jihad Brigades. Which is redundant and trying just a little too hard.

As long as we’re doing Muslims Behaving Badly stories, Islamist legislators in Pakistan went on a minor rampage in Parliament a few days ago when the government tried to reform rape laws, which make it almost impossible to convict rapists, and then leave the victims in failed cases vulnerable to adultery charges.

In other news: elsewhere, various Muslims were nice to each other, kind to animals, and were perfectly pleasant people you’d be glad to know.

Contest

British cabinet ministers are getting “life coaches” at taxpayer expense, to improve their emotional intelligence and blah blah blah. So what would a life coach advise Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales or other members of the Bush cabinet? Offer your sage advice in comments (example, for Condi: “He’s just not that into you.”)

Exposed

Bush’s radio address today is about Katrina. In contrast to the Iraqi people, who he has said have expressed insufficient gratitude for all we’ve done for them, he had Rockey Vaccarella, who “drove to Washington to thank the federal government for its efforts to help people like him.”

Here’s the sentence I like: “And the floodwaters exposed a deep-seated poverty that has cut people off from the opportunities of our country.” Exposed? I’m pretty sure the poor people already knew about their own poverty. What you mean, George, is that that poverty was temporarily brought to the attention of over-privileged, uncompassionate, oblivious assholes such as yourself.

Appropriate programs and activities

I distinctly remember the first time I road an AC Transit bus in Oakland. There were people smoking underneath the No Smoking sign. Someone tried to sell me a watch. Now, the buses are getting Wi-Fi.

George W. Bush has signed a proclamation making September National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month, and he “call[s] upon the people of the United States to observe this month with appropriate programs and activities.” I’m thinking toga party. He praises his own policy of funneling federal drug treatment dollars through religious groups “answering the universal call to love a neighbor.” Of course he didn’t write this proclamation himself, but you’d think he’d have a, ahem, personal interest in the subject matter which might impel him to actually read it before signing it. My concern being the passivity and lack of personal responsibility attributed to addicts in the document, especially in the section on methamphetamine: it is called a “scourge,” and Americans are described as needing to be “protect[ed]” from meth “reaching” them. Anyway, the White House website provides a helpful link to a government website for National Alcohol and Drug Addiction Recovery Month, which suggests as one of those appropriate programs and/or activities a “Recovery Walk.” I don’t know what that is, because I was too scared to click on a link featuring this picture.


Speaking of scary clowns, Jenna and Dubya have been demonstrating this week how much fun you can have without alcohol:

Dwarf-planet tossing: In your tiny, icy face, Pluto!

What is the possessive for Harper’s? Harper’s’s Luke Mitchell has a fascinating discussion with Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr. about the ethics and morality of force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo. The man is a master of logic origami. Winkenwerder claims (wrongly) that the World Medical Association’s 1991 Malta Declaration allows doctors to substitute their own judgment for the prisoner’s when he or she reaches the final stages of delirium or coma, but, he says, why wait that long, let’s strap them into restraint chairs and shove NG tubes into their nose while they’re still healthy and mentally competent.

Pluto has been sent down to the minors, and is now a “dwarf planet.” I think they prefer “little planet.” According to the BBC it was because of its oblong orbit. For me, it was always that its orbit left the plane of the ecliptic that did it.

Now, about Xena...

The President is a people person

Nearing the anniversary of Katrina, Bush finds the one guy from Louisiana who doesn’t hold a grudge, a Republican failed office-seeker, as it happens, which the White House says they had no idea of when they invited him. He is one Rockey Vaccarella, who finds it “amazing” that “a small man like me” could meet the president of the United States. It’s the American dream, really. He lost everything he owned, but now he has this precious, precious memory. “The President is a people person,” Mr. Vaccarella informs us. Oh, and FEMA trailers, he thanked Bush for all the FEMA trailers, and drove a replica of one from Louisiana to DC. Read the transcript at the first link, it’s an odd little photo op.

China is considering legislation to ban strippers from funerals. According to Reuters, they’re used to boost attendance. Evidently in China funerals have Nielsen ratings.

The WaPo report today on the Haditha massacre says in as many words that the Marines involved didn’t think that anything unusual had taken place, quoting the statement of a sgt in a “Marine human intelligence exploitation team” who walked the scene and talked to the Marines a few hours later. The Post writer suggests that the Marines “viewed the civilian deaths as accidental rather than the result of a vengeful rampage.” 24 accidental deaths. Oops. Certainly their colonel didn’t consider those deaths to be anything remarkable, much less worthy of investigation. What these stories leave out is the attempted cover-up. As I’ve said before, when the first story the Marines told was a blatant lie (that they were all killed by an IED), it behooves you to look fairly carefully at their next story. Also, I’m not sure how exonerating it is if they killed dozens of civilians calmly following procedure rather than in a furious rage after the death of a Marine, directed not at those responsible but at the nearest available Iraqis. Even had they thought themselves under attack, which they claim and which I don’t believe, how many innocent people do you get to kill in the name of preserving your own life? In the last scene of “Saving Private Ryan,” Ryan wonders if his life had been worth the lives of the men who had been killed “saving” him. How is that question changed if you’re the one who pulled the trigger?

All of a sudden

After opening with his customary fart joke, Bush gave a talk about “health transparency” today. I would say if you’re transparent, you should definitely see a health care professional immediately. Maybe one of those Gray’s Anatomy chicks in the shower (cause you’re transparent, see, try to keep up). He said, “I think the new trend in medicine is going to be to encourage transparency in pricing, as well as transparency in quality. ... How do we encourage consumerism.” As I’ve said before, the language of consumer choice disguises, and not very well I’d have thought, that he wants to “empower” patients to make decisions based on cost rather than health. Nowhere does he suggest any way in which doctors posting their prices would improve medical care, although he does mean to give the impression that it would. He even made an interesting slip, which I’ll highlight:

Think about the system today as a third-party payer, how many of you have got insurance and you never really cared about the cost because somebody else is paying the bill, right? You don’t really care about the quality, because some person in an office somewhere is paying the bill on your behalf.

Said quality, meant cost.


The new focus on “transparency” leaves out any mention of the mechanism of change, which is more or less magical.

And if we can get a system down where people are able to have a good program, a good product, good insurance, but where the consumer has more to say with what’s purchased or not, all of a sudden the dynamic begins to change, and costs begin to go down. ... if consumers have more information from which to make decisions, all of a sudden, costs begin to become less of a burden on the system

He brings up his favorite, because untypical of most medical decisions, example, Lasik surgery, whose cost has also dropped... wait for it... “all of a sudden.” The mechanism of change hidden in all this suddenness is the imposition of economic penalties on sick people who choose to seek medical care. If you’re the sort of person fooled by that sort of vocabulary, you might find the sight of someone signing their name a great source of fascination and entertainment.

Oh, wait a minute, now I’m going to sign an executive order. And I think you’ll find this interesting. It doesn’t take very long, and we usually have people stand behind me when I do it.

“Can I see a price list for pulling this cadace... coodace... wingy snakey thing out of my head?”

News you can use

BBC headline: “Saddam Trial Hears of Gas Attacks.” Someone alert George Bush, ‘cause we hear he totally loves this stuff.

Hey, did you hear? George Bush likes fart jokes!!!

Slate has a piece about Günter Grass, which I would rather eat grass than actually read, entitled “Snake in the Grass: The pompous, hypocritical hucksterism of Günter Grass.” It is written by... wait for it... Christopher Hitchens, who I assume has already written an attack on Mel Gibson for getting drunk and then saying stupid things.

In Britain, “Tom and Jerry” cartoons are to be censored, with scenes “glamorizing smoking” removed.

Blogs have been complaining about the tv news shows focusing so exclusively on JonBenet Ramsey rather than more important issues. Today, for example, the blogs have all been relaying the news from US News & World Report that George Bush likes fart jokes.

Iran finally gave its answer to the UN: it is ready to enter into “serious negotiations” about its nuclear program. So better not send George Bush; he’d just open with a fart joke.

Bush press conference: disasters, objectives, strained psyches, what good, decent people say, and what we won’t do so long as he’s the president

Bush held a press conference today. He praised himself for giving humanitarian aid to Lebanon, which he called “disaster relief,” as if it was hit by a flood or an earthquake rather than American-made munitions.

Actually, I think he may simply have forgotten just what “disaster” it is that happened to Lebanon, since he also accused Iran and Syria of “working to thwart the efforts of the Lebanese people to break free from foreign domination and build their own democratic future.” He seems to think that the only foreign domination Lebanon has had to contend with recently has been by Iran and Syria.


WILL THIS BE ON THE FINAL? Asked if Iran’s influence in “the region,” meaning Lebanon, is growing, Bush says, “The final history in the region has yet to be written.” Final history? That sounds pretty ominous. “They sponsor Hezbollah. They encourage a radical brand of Islam. Imagine how difficult this issue would be if Iran had a nuclear weapon.” Er, how would the one affect the other? And would it have anything to do with that “final history”?


OBJECTIVELY SPEAKING: Bush has been very big on the word “objectives” for a while now. Just in this presser, he said that the US has a plan to help the Iraqis achieve their objectives, that we should help Middle Eastern reformers achieve their objectives, that a UN force will help the Lebanese government achieve “some objectives,” that in relation to Iran’s nuclear program, “we will work with people in the Security Council to achieve that objective, and the objective is that there’s got to be a consequence for them basically ignoring what the Security Council has suggested through resolution.” Also, the terrorists “want to achieve objectives.”

YA THINK? “Obviously, I wish the violence would go down, but not as much as the Iraqi citizens would wish the violence would go down.”


The key sentence was the announcement that we’ll be occupying Iraq at least until January 2009: “We’re not leaving, so long as I’m the President.”

He says that politicians who disagree with that policy are good, decent people who are undercutting our national security and betraying our troops for political gain: “This is a campaign -- I’m sure they’re watching the campaign carefully. There are a lot of good, decent people saying, get out now; vote for me, I will do everything I can to, I guess, cut off money is what they’ll try to do to get our troops out.”

Our old friend Sum has been expressing unlikely opinions about terrorists again: “Now, I recognize some say that these folks are not ideologically bound. I strongly disagree. I think not only do they have an ideology, they have tactics necessary to spread their ideology.” Chimpy may just be stringing words and phrases together in a random order, but I think he just said that terrorism is an effective means of persuading people to believe in an ideology.

Sum’s cousin Sumbody has also been talking: “And somebody said, well, this is law enforcement. No, this isn’t law enforcement, in my judgment.”


On whether the violence in Iraq is now mostly sectarian, i.e., a civil war: “No, al Qaeda is still very active in Iraq. As a matter of fact some of the more -- I would guess, I would surmise that some of the more spectacular bombings are done by al Qaeda suiciders.” I suppose it’s an improvement that when he has no evidence, he now admits he’s just making stuff up.

On Lebanon: “You can’t have a democracy with an armed political party willing to bomb its neighbor without the consent of its government, or deciding, well, let’s create enough chaos and discord by lobbing rockets.” That’s from the Federalist Papers, right?

On Iraq: “Leaving before the job is done would be a disaster, and that’s what we’re saying.” There’s that word again.


Asked about reports that he expressed frustration about the lack of gratitude of the Iraqi people: “Frustrated? Sometimes I’m frustrated. Rarely surprised. Sometimes I’m happy. This is -- but war is not a time of joy. These aren’t joyous times. These are challenging times, and they’re difficult times, and they’re straining the psyche of our country. I understand that.” But “if we ever give up the desire to help people who live in freedom, we will have lost our soul as a nation, as far as I’m concerned.” So we’re straining our psyche but not losing our soul.

Speaking of strained psyches: