Making things that appear strange appear not so strange

Gay Arabic-language students come back, all is forgiven! The hearing in Guantanamo about bin Laden’s alleged driver/bodyguard is hampered by incompetent translators. Read the Reuters story: this is a farce. This was the US’s chance to demonstrate some sort of commitment to fairness and the rule of law, and it can’t demonstrate even basic competence. The Yemeni POW wanted to defend himself, or at least have a Yemeni lawyer, but was told he needed an American with legal experience, unlike the tribunal hearing the case, which has only one member with any legal experience, and that member could use an English-English translator, at one point asking Bahlul, "Is your understanding of our culture sufficient to make things that appear strange appear not so strange?" Is anyone’s?

Australian PM John Howard, major shit, spammed voters. Illegally. If anyone has a copy, could they forward it to me?

Misunderestimations were made

Bush admits to having made “a miscalculation of what the conditions would be” in occupied Iraq. That wasn’t so hard, was it, George? One mistake admitted, 3,869,172 to go.

I keep reading that Sadr’s men are turning in their weapons. To whom?

The primrose path to the dogs

Kerry will stop running the ads about Bush’s vicious attacks on McCain in 2000, because McCain asked him to. I don’t see how McCain’s opinion bears on the matter, or his fear of having his hypocrisy (or flip-floppery) in supporting Bush exposed. McCain said he doesn’t want 2000 brought up because America doesn’t like a sore loser, but what does it think about a loser who toadies to the winner?

And while McCain previously asked Bush to condemn the SUBVERT ads, he now says Bush doesn’t have to after all, the weasely statements about all 527 ads are good enough for him. So Kerry has given Bush another gift, gratis, as demonstrated by this oh-so-balanced AP headline: "Bush, Kerry Bow to McCain’s Wishes on Ads."

I have to hand it to the Iraqi security forces. When it was said that they’d take the lead in Najaf, I laughed, but today they did indeed take the lead in slaughtering dozens of unarmed peaceful marchers who had responded to Sistani’s call to go to Najaf (and this should be a warning to NY convention protestors, since I believe the Iraqi police said they were just protecting the grass). The moral authority of Comical Allawi, the potemkin strongman, hasn’t exactly risen here. Nor has that of the Americans, who as part of the deal decreed by Sistani, will have to get the hell out of Najaf, making it (and Kufa as well, I think) another no-go zone like Fallujah.

So now, whether the country holds together depends on Ayatollah Sistani, an elderly man with a heart condition who does not listen to his doctors.

12 British MPs are planning to impeach Tony Blair, a procedure that hasn’t been used in 156 years, didn’t work then and won’t work now, but should be fun to watch. The law firm drawing up the document is the one where Blair’s wife Cherie Booth works.

There’s a nicely written Polly Toynbee column in the Guardian, responding to a harrumphing speech by Tory party leader Michael Howard decrying "political correctness" gone mad, mad I tell you. I might have linked to it for its writing alone, but it has relevance for Americans who will be exposed next week to similar speeches by R’s. "It was tribal, straight from a Tory heart to the heartlands of conservatism, touching every raw nerve, poking every prejudice and agitating every dearly held anxiety. How well he rattled the deep blue fear of the way we live now in a world forever plunging downward on the primrose path to the dogs."

One of Howard’s complaints is the state intervening to stop parents "disciplining" their children. Coincidentally, another Guardian column, about Mark Thatcher, is entitled "I Blame the Parents." The South Africans evidently arrested Thatcher in the nick of time. He denies that he was planning to flee the country, although he did sell his 4 cars, put his house on the market and buy the plane tickets. The coup plot against Equatorial Guinea was what the London Times calls a time-share coup. Millionaires literally invested in this coup, like it was any other business deal. From the Times: "Some of those who claim that they were approached by the coup organisers have described to investigators in South Africa how at lavish drinks parties they were promised that the select group who agreed to write a cheque for about £100,000 each would share a £15 million payout within weeks."

Panama pardons 4 Cuban exiles convicted of plotting the assassination of Fidel Castro, as well as other terrorist actions (hotel and plane bombings, kidnapping, etc). And 3 of them are moving to Miami. As I said 2 days ago, the US is a haven for all sorts of terrorists and war criminals. Thatcher’s tickets, by the way, were for Texas.

The cha-cha of plausible deniability

Hungary chooses as its next prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany, the richest man in the country, because that turned out so well in Italy. He made his fortune buying up privatized state assets cheap. And most recently he was minister of sport, which qualifies him to run the whole country because... because... well, maybe the minister of paprika was busy.
Update: I've been informed by DoDo of Manic Net Preacher that Gyurcsany is nowhere near the richest man in Hungary, which is propaganda put out by his opponents, who are themselves supported by even richer people. Sounds familiar, somehow.

Geov Parrish asks, Are You Qualified to be President?

Dahlia Lithwick has a good column on the torture reports, good because it agrees with what I’ve said on the subject, which is the definition of good. She also makes an interesting comparison between the insistence on putting the blame on those at the low end of the torture totem pole rather than their superiors, and the overhyping of those Al Qaida foot soldiers we’ve been able to catch, while talking as little as possible about Rumsfeld & bin Laden respectively. I hadn’t noticed that parallel, although I’m not sure what it means. She argues, as I did here and here, that looking for a smoking gun linking Rummy to Lynndie England "ignores the realities of the chain of command, and the cha-cha of plausible deniability."

The US plans to hand over to the tender mercies of the Afghan legal system, whenever the Afghans get around to having one, the hundreds of Afghans it has been holding, some for close to 3 years. Yes I’m sure that’s a legal system we want to be an integral part of.

The State Dept has decided not to allow Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan to come to this country to teach a course at Notre Dame. Ramadan, who lives in Switzerland, has written about how Muslims can accommodate themselves to secular societies. I guess he’s received a lesson in the subject himself, when Jewish groups (I’ve forgotten which ones since I first heard about this, and the NYT is too dainty to say) lobbied the State Dept not to let him teach at a Catholic university. You could look it up, how many Tariq Ramadans could there be?

The Victorian Sex Cry Generator.

John McCain speaks out for amnesia

James Schlesinger says Rumsfeld shouldn’t resign because that "would be a boon for all of America’s enemies." Possibly that was a misspelling and he meant to call Rummy a boob. That quote could, in theory, be read in either of two ways, and I’d like to point out that in practice we have all discarded one of those meanings out of hand (including the press, which didn’t ask Schlesinger to clarify). The discarded possible meaning: Rumsfeld is so wonderfully competent that he is indispensable and the republic would collapse without him. The real meaning: the US would lose face if it admitted to any mistake or misdeed by holding someone accountable for that mistake or misdeed. This is an argument based solely on PR, on appearances rather than realities. A man who could even make that argument, in public, is a man who set out to write a cover-up.

Another example, from the report: Gen. Myers is criticized for not having "appreciated" the "impact of the photos." Not the reality of what was depicted in them, but the impact of the photos themselves on public relations. His failure was not that he allowed the torture to occur, but that he failed to effectively manage the perception of that torture, the spin. Rumsfeld, likewise, was more annoyed that there was documentation of torture than he was about the torture itself, saying in May that he’d never told Bush about it before the pictures came out because "The problem at that point was one-dimensional. It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t photographs and video." Click here for my post on that from the time, it’s a good post.

Forgot to say: Mark Thatcher’s "alleged coup in Equatorial Guinea" (as he called it), was all about oil.

India had its first execution in 15 years earlier this month. One result: in 3 separate incidents, children playing at executions have accidentally hanged themselves.

The Najaf police chief once again had all foreign journalists rounded up at gunpoint and brought to his office so he could harangue them.

And Israel deports a British journalist after a court decides that her "naivety and convictions" left her open to, well, believing what Palestinians might tell her.

John McCain says he is "sick and tired" of the wounds of Vietnam being reopened. "It’s time to move on," he said. In fact, he doesn’t like the Kerry campaign using his own words from 2000 in an ad. "What happened to me in the year 2000 is over. I have put it behind me." He really is the perfect person to speak for Bush at the R convention, where he can make the case for forgetting everything that’s happened in the last 4 years. Because if we remember the last 4 years, except for you-know-what, the terrorists win.

Fear and smear

John Kerry has accused Team Chimpy and SUBVERT of using “fear and smear” tactics, which I believe is also a service provided by Thai hookers for $75, so not only does the charge rhyme, but I’m pretty sure he just called Shrub a Thai hooker. If he didn’t, he should have. And the rhyming thing will even catch GeeDubya’s attention, because he’ll think it’s Dr. Seuss: I did not fear him on a train, I did not smear him on a plane...

Speaking of idiot children of former leaders, Sir Mark Thatcher, the unsavory son of Maggie Thatcher, has been arrested in South Africa for involvement in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. I find the last time I wrote about him was in 1998, when he was loan sharking.

Freedom means freedom for everyone, unless they're queer or something

Bob Dole returns to the question of Kerry and Vietnam, saying Kerry’s "grandstanding" just didn’t "smell right". Rather than grandstanding, said Dole, Kerry should have let his rage and resentment fester inside himself for decades, growing increasingly bitter, corroding his very soul, until... and then Dole snapped out of it and abruptly ended the interview, going out to look for a puppy to kick.

Schlesinger complains that all the publicity about torture in Abu Ghraib has had "a chilling effect on interrogation operations." I think that means they are now using ice rather than electrodes on prisoners’ genitals.

Dick Cheney mentions his gay daughter while setting out his position on gay marriage, a position which is evidently being taken as more liberal than Bush’s because he advocates banning gay marriage on the state rather than the federal level. He said "freedom means freedom for everyone" and "people ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to." Someone should ask him if that means he opposes laws against sodomy. But he makes a distinction which some of the press fails to catch, saying that the question is "what kind of official sanction or approval is going to be granted by government?" No it isn’t. It’s about legal recognition, which is not the same as approval. The state gets to register the personal, private decisions of its citizens, it doesn’t get to approve or disapprove. That’s what freedom for everyone means.

Animal House

The program director for the R convention says, "We tried to look at what TV shows do to keep an audience. We’re taking lessons from TV shows." I hope they’re not getting a twin pregnant just to boost ratings. That would be wrong.

Once the convention starts, or perhaps before, I encourage those of you who can stand to watch to submit your choice for the convention’s jump-the-shark moment to jumptheshark.com. But in which category? "Special Guest Star"--Schwarzenegger? "They did it"--Bush & McCain?

In Guantanamo, the first military tribunal in 60 years, the names of whose members we are not allowed to know, has formally charged Osama bin Laden’s driver, possibly for failing to signal a turn, as part of George W. Bush’s bold plan to inconvenience bin Laden by making him have to walk, or possibly take a bus. Correction: the panel’s names were already known, but the media are now being asked not to print their names anyway. Only one member has any legal training.

In May I joked about Fox turning Abu Ghraib into a reality show, suggesting that Corp. Graner had provided the perfect title, "I Love to Make a Grown Man Piss Himself." It turns out that the guards already did just that, using their dogs in a competition to get under-aged prisoners to piss themselves. The Post does not say what the prize was.

I’m not sure why the Schlesinger report into the prison abuses is being portrayed as blaming Rumsfeld, when it seems to have gone rather far out of its way to avoid doing so. The "Animal House" line seems to follow the "boys will be vicious, sadistic, evil boys" position the Pentagon has been pushing from the start. In fact, the report is just blaming the prison night shift. We are supposed to believe that the day shift was torturing prisoners as part of an interrogation strategy (we know this, we have the memos), then the night shift came in and did the exact same things, but for fun, because they were bored.

As Argentina was to fleeing Nazis, so is the US today a haven for war criminals and other shits from all over the world, with very little comment or discussion. For example, Haitian death squad leaders live in Florida with impunity. And the guy on the left in this picture moved to Virginia, where he owned a pizza parlor and died in 1998 of natural causes.

So it's interesting that the trial of Alvaro Rafael Saviria, one of the masterminds behind the assassination of archbishop Romero in El Salvador in 1980, is getting so little attention. The trial, which is a civil trial, is going ahead although the guy has disappeared, fearing prosecution. Not for the assassination, but for rolling back odometers and selling lemons--he was a used car dealer in Modesto, CA.

The Palestinian hunger strikers will, obviously, overstrain normal prison medical facilities. But the Israeli health minister has said that "these murderers" will not be allowed into regular hospitals.

What, you again?

With so few states in play in the presidential election, some small towns in battleground states are being bankrupted by the security costs of the constant visits by Bush and Kerry. Some of them have taken to sending bills to the campaigns, which are never paid.

In Najaf, says the NYT, "Sadr’s loyalists appeared to be on the verge of collapse... American commanders said on Tuesday morning that they had been surprised by the lack of resistance to the attack and that they believed that Mr. Sadr’s forces were becoming discouraged." Maybe, but wasn’t that what we heard when Baghdad "fell"? Sadr’s followers were mostly not Najafians (Najafinos?), so leaving the town could be just a shift in strategy, a refusal to fight the type of war the Americans want.

The American problem is that the US military cannot remain in occupation of Najaf for very long, and I don’t imagine they can go knocking down doors in search of militia members and weapons, the way they did in Fallujah with such spectacularly bad results. Soon they will leave, and then what?

I’m still suspicious about how closely the timing of the Najaf campaign is being coordinated with the R convention. If Sadr is captured--or revealed to have already been captured sometime in the last week, when, like the integrity of Bob Dole and John McCain, he has seemingly vanished from the face of the earth--I won’t be especially surprised.

Moral gymnasium

When Dole deployed his more-wounded-than-thou act against Kerry yesterday, he didn’t even bother getting his facts straight first, falsely claiming that 2 of Kerry’s wounds occurred on the same day. And here’s the astounding part, to me: he actually used no-smoke-without-fire as if it were a legitimate debating point: "not every one of these people can be Republican liars. There’s got to be some truth to the charges." What a high standard of proof he holds himself to.

Kerry called Dole today to express his disappointment. Dole told him, "John, I didn’t mean to offend you." Or to quote Michael Corleone, "It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business." (Although Dole is really more like Fredo, but with Sonny’s temperament.)

Reporters did get to the Boy in the Bubble today, but once again he would only condemn the ad in the context of all the ads, which means he is effectively putting these scurrilous lies in the same category as all other 527 ads, honest or dishonest. He won’t give up using this form of ad unless Kerry does too, which means that he is declaring the use of libelous ads legitimate; he won’t unilaterally say that this sort of ad is beneath him. McClellan said today, "Sen. Kerry wants to have it both ways. He should call for a stop to all of these ads." Scotty is trying to establish a moral equivalence where there is none (indeed, CNN had a spectacularly stupid but not inaccurate headline, "Bush Urges Kerry to Condemn Attack Ads.") The American Prospect’s weblog today is a good one-stop shopping place for articles on 527s. And it has McClellan repeatedly dodging efforts to get him to answer whether Bush condemns the content of the ads.

It is fascinating to see how little historical content there is in what is that rarest of all things in American politics, a debate about history. I mean, with all this talk about what Kerry did or did not do in Vietnam, there is no discussion of the war itself, its legitimacy, the role of the US in the world, when and how the US should have withdrawn, etc etc. You’d never know the Vietnamese War had actual Vietnamese people in it, a bunch of them shot dead by Kerry himself, which I guess is somehow less significant, less revealing of his character, than the one American guy he pulled out of the water. In Kerry’s portrayal, it’s all about his relation to other Americans in Vietnam, the "band of brothers," as if, to quote Bernard Shaw, "the world [was] a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in".

It’s not like the consequences of that war don’t continue. One of them is the tens of thousands of Hmong who made the mistake of fighting for the US, still sitting in refugee camps in Thailand. The US has finally agreed to take them, but only if they give up polygamy (and presumably leave the extraneous wives behind, although that’s not clear from this article).

An op-ed piece in the Indy asks what’s so "radical" about "radical cleric" Sadr, who wants the occupation to end, and even then didn’t turn away from non-violence until a year into the occupation.

It would be lovely

An interesting counterpoint to the military service or lack of it of those children of privilege, Bush and Kerry, is Prince William, who is talking about joining the military, but the Ministry of Defence doesn’t necessarily want the aggravation of trying to keep him from being killed while pretending they’re not coddling him. William, however, has said, "A career in the armed services would be the best thing at the moment because it would be lovely to recognise all the hard work that the armed forces are doing." I don’t need to point out the not-especially-martial word in that sentence.

"More than 40% of British adults have admitted comfort eating to mask feelings of sadness, tension or anger," according to the Guardian. I’ve eaten in Britain: comfort is not the word that comes to mind. In fact, the #1 cause in Britain of feelings of sadness, tension or anger is British cuisine.

Don’t know how I missed this story: "Unfortunately, my fellow Klansmen judged me solely on the colour of my robe. But I can’t help what colour my robe is, can I? It’s what’s inside that counts."

The hunger strike of Palestinian prisoners is in its second week, the number of strikers is over 3,000, the lack of interest by the rest of the world is almost total. I don’t even have enough information to tell you if I consider their demands legitimate, and I don’t know if they’re planning to carry the strike through to death. If so, a massive strike is precisely the wrong way to do it, because only a minority of people, however dedicated, are prepared to see their body consume itself. The high participation rate in the hunger strike, which is at least 3/4, and may be nearly all of the security prisoners, suggests that some prisoners were coerced or morally pressured into joining, which would be spectacularly immoral. The hunger strike is a tricky form of protest, ethically speaking, with rules that must be followed. In Gandhi’s words, "Fasting is a fiery weapon. It has its own science."

A WaPo editorial notes that the investigation of Gen. Boykin was designed to focus on petty technicalities without forcing Bush and Rumsfeld to denounce his blatant Islamophobia. One misstep in the article: "Such beliefs are the general's right, but when a senior defense official utters them in public, they undermine just about every value the administration is trying to project in this war." Not trying to project, pretending to project. Big difference.

More about John Kerry's thigh than I needed to know

The Swift boat thing has dominated the media for days, to the exclusion of all else, which was the point of the exercise. It’s been a pretty content-free campaign on both sides, so “to the exclusion of all else” may not be a great loss. Those people, especially liberal bloggers, who have focused on the details of the financing of SUBVERT and the accuracy of the charges, are missing the point. Even discredited, the campaign worked, because some mud always sticks, especially for people not paying a lot of attention, which is most of the electorate. Bush the Elder’s Willie Horton campaign, which was just as dishonest and significantly slimier, although less of a personal attack, worked for just that reason. Most people will not be reading the fine print on the award commendations of Kerry’s accusers, but will vaguely note that there is some controversy, figure there is no smoke without fire, and move on with their lives with their image of Kerry slightly tarnished. Mission--as Flight Suit Boy would say--accomplished. And Kerry, who actually interacts with the press and the occasional unscreened member of the public, had no choice but to waste time on it, while no one has gotten close enough to the Boy in the Bubble to ask that he forthrightly demand the SUBVERTers stop.

Shrub seems never to have to answer questions. 5 years ago tomorrow I asked, “Anyone want to start a pool on when Bush has to answer the question on cocaine?” I wouldn’t have bet on never. I don’t, of course, know whether Bush abused other substances than the one he’ll admit to, although his non-denial denials weren’t exactly confidence-inspiring. I’m just sayin’.

Bob Dole intervened on the issue today, saying Kerry should apologize to veterans, making the quite valid point that he can’t accuse US soldiers in Vietnam of war crimes and then run on that record, and belittling Kerry’s war wounds. Not the best performance from a man who once suggested to Bush the Elder “stop lying about my record.”

Best response, from John Podesta: “Senator Kerry carries shrapnel in his thigh as distinct from President Bush who carries two fillings in his teeth from his service in the Alabama National Guard, which seems to be his only time that he showed up.”

There have been other black propaganda (that’s the CIA term for lies) attempts to plant smears. Sometimes a story quietly planted somewhere on the periphery in the hopes that it will spread (this is also a common CIA technique: insert a news story in a pliable/gullible media outlet, often the Daily Telegraph in Britain, where it will be picked up by Fox News, Drudge, etc) dies on the vine owing to the vagaries of pack journalism. There was an attempt in March to blame 9/11 on Kerry personally, because someone had written him that security at Logan Airport wasn’t very good, which didn’t go anywhere. (My original link in March is dead, but check this out.)

And I know there have been other flash-in-the-pan attempts at scandal-mongering, but I can’t bring them to mind. It’s a Darwinian thing. Some stories have bright petals which attract the eyes of journalists, who spread the seed, while others don’t. Or to use another metaphor, a lot of mud is thrown at the wall, some of it sticks, some doesn’t, and I’ll stop with the metaphors now.

There’s a sort of anti-smear smear too. Kerry just took out an ad noting that in the 2000 primaries, "Bush smeared John McCain," which has the effect of using that smear to discredit McCain’s speech at the convention a couple of weeks from now.

Let us know what it is that they are doing

The US position of opposition to growth in Israeli settlements, according to the NYT has been covertly downgraded to merely asking that they "let us know what it is that they are doing." (quote from Condi Rice). Evil, Condi, they’re doing evil. And Ha’aretz reports that Sharon’s office will say only that "The issue is under discussion between us and the Americans." The new American position is not only a violation of the "road map," but all this "letting us know" and "under discussion" is between Americans and Israelis, and I seem to recall that there were other people involved, the Palestoovians...the Palestiners...wait, don’t tell me... The premise of the change in policy is also wrong: the premise is that as long as new units are built within existing stolen land, it won’t be making matters worse. But it will. Resources will be diverted from Palestoovians to settlers, most importantly water, which is already badly misappropriated in the Occupied Territories.

In response to the Supreme Court decision that Guantanamo detainees must have a hearing on their "enemy combatant" designation, the military set up laughably one-sided military panels and guess what, so far they’ve decided for the government in 14 of the 14 cases they’ve heard. The prisoners who refused to go before the panels made the right decision.

Those bloodstains were there when we moved in

The turning over of the keys is turning into a farce. Ayatollah Sistani, conveniently out of the country, won’t accept the keys until the shrine is vacated. But Sadr’s people won’t turn over the keys until someone from Sistani’s office inspects the place and confirms none of the treasures have been taken; Sistani’s people are rightly worried about being shot by someone if they come near the place. One minute it’s a civil and international war, the next minute a fight over the cleaning deposit.

What I’d like to hear is the Allawi clique’s explanation for why it claimed to have taken charge of the mosque yesterday. Update: the Observer likens this claim to the utterances of "Comical Ali."

Atrios has the transcript of the Senate testimony of John Kerry. Too bad that guy isn’t running for president, instead of the John Kerry we’re stuck with, who almost seems to romanticize the war.

Matthew Parris, a British, gay, Tory former MP and former parliamentary sketchwriter for The Times (for a hilarious description of a House of Lords debate on "buggery," click here) has written a good serious article on the "primitivisation" of the law, the "disturbing urge to elbow the formal structures of the rule of law impatiently aside in pursuit of those we hate". Most Times stories aren’t available on the Web outside Britain, but this one seems to be, here. Or if that doesn’t work, here’s the cached version.

Another London Times story begins "Ten-year-old Abbas is saving up his pocket money for a hand grenade. He wants an American one to throw at the huge US tanks that sit on every key crossroads of Sadr City. He doesn't want an Iraqi one although, at €3, it is half the price." And reports this graffito in Baghdad: "Country for sale: contact Iyad Allawi." A truncated version (reg. required).

Taking advantage of the olive branch

Possibly, watching the news from Iraq today, we all had this question: major Shiite shrines have keys?

Guardian: "At the moment, the Americans are doing all the fighting. The Iraqi police play merely a cameo role: a massive convoy rode towards the shrine yesterday, sirens blazing, celebrating a victory that never happened. Two minutes later it turned back."

Quisling-in-chief Allawi: "We have extended the olive branch and Mr Sadr can take advantage of the olive branch." He makes it sound so dirty.

Saw a bit of White House spokesmodel McClellan’s press gaggle on McNeil-Lehrer today and had to look it up. Much of it was on the Not Too Swift Veterans (or SUBVERT). Once again McClellan condemned the existence of the ads without getting at their content. Granted, he’s a member of the Bush "re"-election campaign, which isn’t known for its ability to distinguish between form and content. Oh, you say, but Scott McClellan isn’t a member of the Bush campaign, he works for the executive branch and is paid by the American taxpayers? Has someone told him that? Quote, "we weren’t involved in any way in these ads." He says it 3 times, using the first person plural each time. And he accused the Kerry campaign (3 times) of "fueling" attacks by "shadowy groups." Given the long, explicit NYT story about the funding of the Swifties (or NAMBLA) , he needs to be a lot more specific than "fueling" if he’s going to accuse them of something.

He also, as Mark Shields pointed out, accused Kerry of "losing his cool" (4 times) about being called a traitor. Once again, an opponent of Bush is being accused of being a hothead, like McCain in 2000 (and Dean of course, but Bush wasn’t in that fight). Don’t know how the D’s keep finding these emotional hot-blooded types, first Gore, then Kerry, like they’re recruiting candidates straight off a Mexican soap opera. Whereas GeeDubya is so calm and collected that he could hear about the most devastating attack on American civilians in his lifetime and for seven minutes....
(Later: wow, it seems the Kerry campaign also made the last joke. And the RNC chair told CNN, Kerry "looks to me to be wild-eyed.")

Ending what seems like months of speculation, it was confirmed today that Silvio Berlusconi indeed has gotten hair transplants.

Zanzibar bans gay sex. Play your vacations accordingly. The penalty is 25 years for gay men, 7 for lesbians.

Ironic censorship

So in a court case about secrecy and the Patriot Act, Ashcroft’s Justice Dept, in what may be the first use of irony in an act of censorship, tried to censor the ACLU’s brief’s quotation from Justice Powell in a 1972 Supreme Court decision requiring warrants for wiretaps: "The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent." Doesn’t it just? Justice is also using secret evidence the ACLU is not allowed to see.

The Sri Lankan legislature was stymied by its supreme court for passing a law against coerced or bribed religious conversions. There is evidently concern that poor Buddhists are being offered money by Christian evangelical groups funded by Americans. Which is really all I know about that.

While rich candidates for Congress are not allowed to use unlimited amounts of their own money in their campaigns, the FEC just quietly ruled that they can do so for "get out the vote" drives.

Boykin gets off. The long national nightmare is over

The Iraqi admin raised the bar yet again, issuing still more demands for Sadr to comply with or else. He is to agree to their terms in writing, and go on tv & tell his militia to disband. While dressed in a tutu.

And the Pentagon has lowered the bar yet again. General William "My God Is Bigger Than Your God" Boykin has been made the subject of a jolly strong secret report, which says he broke a few piddling rules. Boykin was never a big story over here (by which I mean this country, not this blog), but for a while I had a news.google alert on Boykin, and when a general in the army that’s killing so many Muslims makes bigoted, idiotic comments about Islam, the press in Muslim countries do tend to bring it up over and over and over.

Dahlia Lithwick in Thursday’s NYT says that making of Shrub by portraying him as an infant (like here) makes liberals look like snotty know-it-alls and is a bad way to win over the people who voted for Bush in 2000, who will feel insulted. As for the second part, nonsense: a few years after Watergate, a poll showed that most Americans claimed to have voted for McGovern in 1972. People will remember what they want to remember.

A Russian human rights group has been invaded by the police--and oddly enough, by the public transportation police, the guys on the Moscow Metro.

AP headline: "Official on Leave Over Ten Commandments." What, all of them?

A must-read, on Arauca, Colombia, an oil-producing region, where a unit of the Colombian military, financed by Occidental Petroleum and the United States, is systematically murdering trade unionists. Also, some of those "friendly militias" so beloved by Paul Wolfowitz.

Suddenly, Caltrans doesn’t look so bad: due to mudslides, China has had a 10-day, 60-mile long traffic jam.

And another one for the Guinness World Book of Records: 31 cows were killed by a single lightning strike in Denmark.

He wants them to do his dirty work

Has anyone noticed that the acronym for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is pronounced Subvert? Kerry has (finally) accused Bush of hiding behind the Subversives: "He wants them to do his dirty work." Gee, Bush staying safe at home while sending others to do his dirty work...say, you don’t think Kerry is making a subtle allusion to Bush’s military record do you?

I wouldn’t ordinarily make a big deal over what Olympics competitors have to say about politics or anything else, but the decision of Team Chimpy to run an ad citing the presence of Iraqis at the Olympics as another "Mission Accomplished" moment without first finding out what the response of those Iraqis might be is a repetition in miniature of the assumption that American troops would be greeted with flowers, dancing in the streets and free blow-jobs.

Fafblog suggests that Bush isn’t living far enough in the future.

Not afraid to talk about problems

The Israelis have indeed been training American forces in counter-insurgency techniques, according to the London Times and Jerusalem Post. According to a professor of advanced evil and intermediate scumbaggery at the Israeli military staff college, Americans are especially interested in learning about assassination by helicopter, urban warfare, and conducting large military operations in heavily populated areas. I remember that before the war started, the military was using the Massacre of Jenin as a model.

Kazakhstan has elections next month, and it’s very exciting. Which party will win, Nursultan Nazarbayev’s or his daughter Dariga’s. So far it’s neck and neck. She supports daddy but denies that her party isn’t a real alternative, saying it "is not afraid to talk about problems. We're not afraid to criticise officials for working badly or disobeying the President." And it’s still more democratic than the process we just saw in Baghdad. Note to London Times: does every story about Kazakhstan have to mention that they play a form of polo with the headless carcass of a goat?

Free from its imprisonment and its vile occupation

The FBI’s justifications for its questioning of people planning to protest the R convention suggest that the Fibbies are thinking of themselves less as a law-enforcement agency than a secret police. The assistant director Cassandra (!!) Chandler said that of course they wouldn’t bother innocent people, but those about whom they had received "intelligence" that they were planning violent criminal activity or knew of such plans. Law-enforcement agencies don’t receive "intelligence"--and you know she gets off on calling it "intel" when she’s not talking to the press--they receive information; spy agencies receive intelligence. The arguments for these harassing activities are pre-emptive; you’re not enforcing the law when the law hasn’t been broken yet. This is the Bush Doctrine gone domestic: we don’t want the smoking gun to be a rotten egg thrown at Mayor Bloomberg, to paraphrase Condi Rice.

Speaking of preemption, Iran is talking about launching pre-emptive strikes against Israel and the US (they seem to mean the American troops in Iraq, who the Iranian defense minister described as "hostages") to prevent them launching preemptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. They want to get their preemption in first.

The Iraqi national conference is now history, I believe. We never knew who they were. We never even knew how many of them there were--the tame media said 1,300, but 100 or 200 never showed up, and there were supposed to be 1,000 originally, but the first choices looked too unrepresentative, so more were conjured up somehow. And then they rendered what was already a sham even shammier by rubber-stamping a slate of candidates (that is, a list was chosen as a whole, rather than individuals being voted on) for the 81 seats out of 100 they were allowed to choose (it was meant to be 80, but Chalabi has been kicked out, although how and by whom we do not know). There wasn’t even a vote, the list was just declared to have been adopted. It’s like they think they’re in New Jersey or something.

Sadr, without ever meeting with the delegation, said he accepted their offer for him to give up the insurgency. Only... the US military would have to stop shooting up the place. So the Allayi clique upped the ante. Using the sort of playground-bully language so popular in Iraq lately, the defense minister threatened to "teach them a lesson they will never forget," and "set this compound free from its imprisonment and its vile occupation." And where previously the Mahdi Army was supposed to just drop its weapons and leave Najaf, now he’s telling them they have to turn in their weapons and themselves. Almost like he doesn’t want a peaceful solution. He added that only Iraqi troops would enter the shrine, American forces would just bomb it (sorry, I mean provide air support), and that Iraqi commanders would be in charge of the operation and why is everyone laughing at that? Guardian. Al Jazeera.

Ha’aretz says that Shin Bet is still torturing Palestinians. They got hold of a document. And continuing the foreign vocabulary lessons, here’s a Hebrew term for a torture technique: "hatayat gav" (forcing someone to maintain a position in which the back is bent backwards).

And as long as we’re doing Ha’aretz, there’s an article about a memorial plaque to the victims of a terror attack on a bus last year. All the Jewish victims are called "sainted" on the plaque, but a Filipina woman is just called "Mrs." because she’s not as, you know, good, as the Orthodox Jews.

No comment: "Mass. Judge Denies Relief to Gay Couples" (AP headline).

I also liked a headline about Greek sprinters walking out of the Olympics (as opposed to sprinting out, geddit?). I believe these are the two who missed their drug test because they "got the munchies and just spaced it." By the way, here’s what I wrote about drugs and the Olympics 4 years ago.

The Kerry response to Bush’s line about opponents of Star Wars living in the past is, for once, an effective response, noting that Bush’s pre-9/11 position was that the greatest threat to the US wasn’t, oh, say, terrorism but missile attacks, which are like, so 20th century. And Sam Rosenfeld at the American Prospect’s blog points out that most Americans when polled don’t understand why missile defense won’t work, and think we already have it (when the Russians launched the first Sputnik, many Americans wanted it shot down, not understanding that if the US knew how to shoot a satellite down, it would have been able to launch one of its own).

Funny, I thought we were supposed to have handed Abu Ghraib back to the Iraqis (and wasn’t it supposed to be torn down, too?). So why was it American forces who fired on prisoners today, killing 2 and wounding 5?