How much training do you need to learn that it’s wrong to force a man to masturbate?

Fidel Castro trips and breaks his knee. The Times of London helpfully provides a photo sequence of the fall.

Bush signed a law providing $82 million in grants for preventing suicide among the young. And yet he still funds abstinence programs, which can’t be helping.

Brad Friedman has a list of some of the audio/video clips of Bush’s more embarrassing moments removed from the White House website.

Alternet on polls showing that Bush supporters (the unreality-based community) still believe that Iraq had WMDs and links to Al Qaida. Oh, and they believe that this is exactly what experts and the 9/11 Commission have determined. And the percentage of people who are wrong on the facts is increasing over time. In some ways it’s reassuring that so much of Bush’s support is based on pure pig ignorance (they are also wrong about his positions on various issues). In other ways, not so much.

Sgt Ivan Frederick of the Abu Ghraib Fredericks is going to jail for 8 years. The prosecutor asked, “How much training do you need to learn that it’s wrong to force a man to masturbate?” I’m pretty sure that’s a trick question.

Be vewwy vewwy quiet, I'm pwooving my manwiness to swing voters

John Kerry went hunting in Ohio today.

Shouldn’t that be cetacean-American?

Kerry: “The president says he’s a leader. Well, Mr. President, look behind you. There’s hardly anyone there. It’s not leadership.” Ah, the old “Look behind you!” ploy.

Clearly, everyone needs to call their Congresscritter and ask if they have had a flu shot. If they have, vote against them, the wimps. That’s what I like about American elections, their sense of perspective: yesterday Cheney threatened that if Kerry were elected, American cities would be hit with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, rains of toads, the slaying of the first born, crappy parking, etc, and today Kerry attacked Cheney for having been vaccinated.

The 9th Circuit throws out a suit by the “cetacean community” against the Pentagon for damage caused to them by the use of sonar. A scientist brought the suit on the cetaceans’ behalf, in order to bring attention to their plight by becoming the butt of late-night comedians’ jokes.

From the White House website, Department of Shamelessness:

Email the White House...
Q:Heidi from Grafton, WI:
My mother called me in a panic today, because she heard that President Bush has a plan to privatize Social Security. Is this right?
-- Click here for more...

Fallujah, again

Enjoythedraft.com suggests that Bush won’t call the draft a draft, but watch out for the “No 18-to-25-Year-Old Left Behind Act.”

I feel like I’ve been writing about Fallujah forever. The first time most of us heard the name was when American soldiers shot up a crowd peacefully protesting the occupation of their school. The next day, they shot up a crowd protesting the earlier shootings. 25 dead over both days, and that was it for any possibility of winning the hearts and minds of Fallujah, it wasn’t possible after that. Everything since then has been about subjugation, pure and simple.

When the soldiers withdrew from the school, they left graffiti such as “Eat shit Iraq,” and “I love pork.” By June of last year, I wrote, Fallujah had become “Belfast without the politeness.”

I’ll spare you further recapitulation--although anyone who wants to know more about the history of US-Fallujah relations before we pound the city into dust might wish to use the handy search function. There’s a must-read article in the Guardian by Patrick Graham. He reports that many Fallujans don’t believe there is such a person as Zarqawi. The city authorities say he’s left the city, and I can’t imagine how they would be able to capture him and hand him over if they wanted to.

If you haven’t had enough horror, the Guardian also provides a detailed description of the shooting of a 13-year old Palestinian girl by an Israeli officer. Firing on full automatic.

God’s blessing is on him

The problem with quoting Pat Robertson quoting Bush saying that there would be no casualties in Iraq, is that it’s Pat Robertson, who is batshit insane.

Pat goes on to endorse Bush because “God’s blessing is on him.” Similarly, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council also endorses Bush to head up the Great Satan. That Bush sure does know how to build a coalition!

Iraq is trying to persuade Care International not to leave Iraq after its director Margaret Hassan is kidnapped, saying that pulling out would be giving in to the terrorists. Care International says we’re ok with that.

The US bombs a teacher training college in Fallujah. Fallujah children say we’re ok with that.

You’ve got to get your mind around that concept

Embarrassing death of the day, Guardian headline: “Farmer, 73, Killed by Rutting Stag.”

I believe the official story is that Burma’s semi-moderate semi-reformer PM, Khin Nyunt, has arranged to be deposed by the military in order to spend more time with his family. No, sorry, he has retired “for health reasons.” This is an intramural thing (the Indy explains that in military-junta terms, General Nyunt being made prime minister in the first place was considered a demotion), so not a big deal, I think.

In Ohio, Dick “Mr. Sensitive” Cheney again accuses Kerry of having gone “over the top” by mentioning Mary Cheney’s lesbianism. That metaphor comes from World War I trench warfare. In the very same speech, Dick the Dick demonstrates his greater modernity by going nuclear on Kerry’s ass, saying that under Kerry terrorists would attack American cities with chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, or possibly all three at once, ‘cause Kerry will suck just that bad. “That’s the ultimate threat. For us to have a strategy that’s capable of defeating that threat, you’ve got to get your mind around that concept.” As for instance:



AP headline: “Mormon Church Voices View on Gay Marriage.” I won’t leave you in suspense: they’re against it.

A Guardian article on the US elections notes that while there are some PC limits established by the left--attacking gays and women is now off-limits, for example--the right has created still more taboos: the military can’t be criticized, so Abu Ghraib is never mentioned; anything done in the name of 9/11, including the Patriot Act, is also sacrosanct; concern for international opinion is verboten.

A WaPo article about the use of lies in campaign ads quotes a consultant saying something I’ve said before, that there are simply no penalties for distortion and just plain making shit up. I can’t tell how much of it is that Americans consider it such an integral part of the political process that they literally don’t mind being lied to, and how much is that Bush (and yes, Kerry does it too, more so lately, but he’s not in the same league) has made the calculation that he can lie to the politically ignorant (which is what the undecided voters mostly are at this stage) without pissing off those among his base who know that Kerry didn’t say that terrorism is just a nuisance, and understand why he voted against the $87 billion. You would think that the fact that Bush threatened to veto that very same money if the tax cut for the rich was repealed would make it impossible for him to say that Kerry was abandoning the troops. Another possibility is that news & commentary consumption is so bifurcated now that Bush’s base will simply never see their fearless leader corrected on Fox. The distortions and lies should be treated as a great insult, both to the intelligence of the electors, and to the dignity of the electoral process. You can stop laughing at the word “dignity” now. Really, stop.

Relishing victory

In yesterday’s speech, Bush said that Kerry “has a record of trying to weaken American intelligence.” As opposed to Bush, who brings down the average national IQ all by himself.

Factcheck.org points out that some of the weapons programs Bush is faulting Kerry for not supporting were also opposed by Bush’s father.

I’ve said before that we need to stop using the same vocabulary to describe real elections and sham elections. In the NY Times today, a headline on page 3: “Relishing Victory at Polls, Belarus Leader Denounces Critics.” But there’s also an editorial, headlined “A Sham Election in Eastern Europe.” The former, by attempting to appear neutral, winds up being a less accurate representation of reality than the latter. It wasn’t a “victory” at the polls, because Lukashenko had rigged the election; the word “relishing” is therefore also inappropriate.

Our duty as an ally

I will not run for president in 2008. I know this is a question no one has asked, but I’m sure the groundswell for me to run is no smaller than that for Jeb Bush, and he felt compelled to announce yesterday that he wouldn’t be running either. Of course, now that he knows he won’t have to compete against me, he might change his mind.

A fun article on neologisms in the Guardian. I love these things. There are always words that appeared astonishingly late (sex, 1929, ceasefire 1918, racism 1935), and those that appeared astonishingly early (celeb, 1913, hip 1904, awesome 1961) (I once saw the 1938 movie Bringing Up Baby in a theater in the Castro district, and when Cary Grant explains his appearance in a women’s bathrobe with the line, “I just went gay, all of a sudden,” the cheering drowned out the next five minutes of dialogue), and those you just never thought about: bagels 1932, egghead 1907, dumb down 1933, pissed off 1943, hippy 1953, F-word 1973).

Speaking of linguistic usage, when did the abbreviation USA--to say nothing of the creepily aggressive/militaristic chant USA! USA!--become the property of the jingoistic right-wing?

In Parliament, British Defense Minister Geoff Hoon defended his accession to American requests that he redeploy British troops in Iraq in the most lap-doggy terms he could think of, saying that to refuse would mean “we will have failed in our duty as an ally.” Most MPs believe that British soldiers will now pay the price for the incompetent policies of the Americans in the areas they will be moving into, as well as for whatever barbarities will be inflicted on Fallujah. They know that this is entirely about sharing the blame and the bleeding in advance of the US elections, since there is no operational reason for 650 British soldiers being added to the 130,000 American soldiers already in northern Iraq. Hoon had no real support in the House, and one MP said that Hoon reminded him of the song in “Oklahoma,” “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.”

In Florida, people are being called up and being registered to vote right over the phone. Except, of course, they aren’t being registered, just tricked into thinking they have been. Others are getting automated phone calls telling them that they can actually vote over the phone right now, press 1 for George Bush, 2 for Patrick Buchanan etc. Except, of course, they aren’t. It’s gonna be a dirty, dirty election.

Speaking of dirty elections, Tsar Vladimir I of Russia has endorsed Bush. Bush once claimed to have looked into Putin’s soul. We know this is false because everyone else who has looked into Putin’s soul spends the next hour huddled in a corner, saying over and over, “So cold, so cold...”

A September 10 attitude

Bush accuses Kerry of having a “September 10 attitude.” Every time Shrub makes one of these statements suggesting that his own view of the world changed drastically on 9/11, doesn’t he just underline his own pre-9/11 ability to ignore intelligence reports entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,” reminding us that September 11 might possibly have been prevented if not for Bush’s own “September 10 attitude?”

The excerpts of the speech I saw on tv were creepy, as much for the audience as for GeeDubya. A bit from the White House transcript:

THE PRESIDENT: Most Americans still felt that terrorism was something distant, and something that would not strike on a large scale in America. That is the time that my opponent wants to go back to.

AUDIENCE: Booo!

THE PRESIDENT: A time when danger was real and growing, but we didn’t know it. A time when some thought terrorism was only a “nuisance.”

AUDIENCE: Booo! .....

My opponent has a fundamental misunderstanding on the war on terror. A reporter recently asked Senator Kerry how September the 11th changed him. He replied, "It didn't change me much at all."

AUDIENCE: Booo!

Some White House flunky, paid out of your tax dollars, decided how many o’s to put in “Booo!” It appears 15 times in the transcript.

They even booed Kerry for having criticized the Contras and “Ronald Reagan’s policies of peace through strength.”

Bush accused Kerry of having “chosen the easy path of protest and defeatism.” Hey, the path of protest and defeatism isn’t that easy, believe me.

Your self-righteous civics lesson of the day, from someone else whose name ID is nothing

Tom DeLay is refusing to debate his opponent. The Daily Kos points to DeLay’s comment that “A debate would be for his [challenger Richard Morrison’s] benefit, not for mine,” and asks, aren’t debates supposed to be for the benefit of the voters. I’d like to elaborate on that. The Galveston County Daily News story cited by Kos quotes DeLay saying that Morrison’s “name ID is nothing,” and DeLay doesn’t want to raise his profile. DeLay, in other words, is openly and unapologetically counting on voter ignorance, on the differences between their views not being laid before the electorate, and on not having to go before any forum where he might be contradicted or his positions examined critically. Bush’s Boy in the Bubble act writ small. And he’s not the only one. Following the Galveston paper’s website’s links, I find that 69% of Texas’s congressional and state legislative candidates, including DeLay, refused to respond to Project Vote Smart’s questionnaire.

Putting the elements of this story together creates a larger picture of utter contempt for democratic processes and, by extension, for the electorate. One element of this which we’ve become so desensitized to that you probably missed it: DeLay’s stated reasons for refusing to debate Morrison are all hyper-pragmatic, without the smallest sop towards the ideals of democracy. I mean, he’s talking about “name ID”...IN PUBLIC! A campaign manager might speak like that in private, but a candidate in public? It might be the real reason for not wanting to debate, but DeLay announces his cynical political calculus to the world as if it were a legitimate reason, which they should accept and say, “Why of course I shouldn’t expect him debate his opponent, if it might help make his opponents’ name and opinions more familiar to me.” It’s as if Bush had said he wanted to invade Iraq not for WMDs or to bring democracy, but because he wanted the oil, and was going to keep it all himself.

This is, truly, how a republic collapses. People like DeLay think that not just debates, but the entire political system, is for their benefit and theirs alone. Not everyone gets literally to pick and choose their own electorate, as DeLay did when he redrew the boundaries of his district to ensure his easy re-election (one reason this particular electorate might not recognize Morrison’s name), but the continual refusal of imperious candidates to speak to possibly hostile audiences or media or even to the other candidate displays a fundamental reversal of the principles and values of representative democracy: election campaigns and elections are not about the candidates speaking to the people, but about the people choosing the representatives through whom they will speak.

Undisclosed

Team Chimpy decided not to pony up the $1,000 to put a biography and photo of Dick Cheney next to Bush’s in the Oregon voters’ pamphlet. Can’t imagine why.

Transubstantiation?

AP headline: “Bush Says He’s Best Protection from Draft.” Great, can I nail him to my window frame? In another curious example of Shrub misrepresenting Kerry, he says, “The person talking about a draft is my opponent.” Yes, to warn about the threat of YOU instituting a draft.
(Follow up: Tom Tomorrow attempts to lampoon this sort of behaviour in his latest cartoon, but can't really improve upon the original.)

The story also noted that today Kerry “went to Mass and picked up a hunting license”. I blame Vatican II.

I’m not sure exactly what’s going on in Haiti just now. There are evidently gunbattles, or possibly massacres, between the US-backed coup government, which did a spectacularly bad job of coping with the hurricanes, and supporters of twice-ousted President Aristide. The head of UN peacekeepers, a Brazilian general, is blaming John Kerry for the violence, would you believe it, because he “gave hope” to Aristide supporters. That bastard, always giving people hope: spinal-cord injury victims, Haitians... And today Chinese riot police are being deployed. These guys (and 13 women):



Insert your own subtle allusion to Tiananmen Square here.

Bob Harris’s site has a poll:

What would we look forward to most in a second Bush term?

• A Supreme Court with three more Clarence Thomases
• Social Security administered by Halliburton
• A wider, more fascinating variety of national enemies
• Envying the dead

I won’t tell you which I voted for, because the secret ballot is sacred.

How can we revive the Belarusian villages?

Addendum on Brazil’s plans to shoot down drug-smuggling planes, from the BBC: “the authorities have also warned that drug planes that do not obey air force orders will be shot down even if they are carrying children.” Priorities.

Belarus is holding fraudulent elections to eliminate those pesky term limits on Lukashenko. Some of the ballots came conveniently pre-voted. You know, with a picture like this, Wonkette would make some joke about baby-eating. With Lukashenko the laughter produced by such a joke would be a touch more nervous.



Anyway, here’s Lukashenko’s website, English-language version. Go participate in a forum on “How can we revive the Belarusian villages?” Look at any of 873 pictures of the glorious president and his glorious mustache. Look at a glorious military parade in which soldiers march behind what appears to be a glorious 1960s sedan.



And here are 3 posts of mine that deal with Belarus. Link.
Link. Link.

The reality-based community

I know every blogger is saying this but you must all read the Ron Suskind NYT Magazine piece about Bush’s incredible belief that his “instincts” are always right. I hadn’t realized that the “faith-based presidency” was predicated so explicitly on the complete rejection of empiricism. Suskind says that after an earlier piece, a senior Bushie told him that people like him were “in what we call the reality-based community,” but that the US acts, and in so doing creates its own reality. “We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Reminds me of a quote (this is approximate, from memory): “A man of action can always find a philosopher to explain afterwards what he did.” Benito Mussolini.

While reading another, less subtle article about Bush’s brain, asking “Has Bush Lost His Reason?”, I suddenly realized that Shrub, in his petulant refusal to brook disagreement, reminds me of the little kid with god-like powers who everyone is afraid to contradict in Jerome Bixby’s story “It’s a Good Life,” which was the basis of a Twilight Zone episode, and look, someone put it on-line.

Speaking of people unlike you or me, the London Sunday Times has a story on the notes of a US Army psychiatrist who interviewed Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg. Goering told him that the Holocaust went against his “chivalric code”: “I revere women and I think it unsportsmanlike to kill children.” This is also why Republicans oppose abortion but support the death penalty: hunters and fishers throw back the small ones, in order to kill them later. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz for 4 years: “I don’t know what you mean about being upset about these things because I didn’t personally murder anybody. I was just the director of the extermination programme in Auschwitz.” The same standards will be used to promote Gen. Sanchez after the elections.

Kerry may have forgotten about Poland, but Poland wants to forget about Iraq and start withdrawing troops; it’s official now. And just when Bush wants to shift casualties to other COW countries (coalition of the willing). So it’s poor Britain’s turn yet again to send soldiers with silly hats



into harm’s way. Something like 650 soldiers will be moved from the relatively calm south to Baghdad, and put under American command, so that American troops can invade Fallujah yet again. In Britain, this is widely seen, and resented, as being driven by the American election.

Perhaps only in Germany: a restaurant for anorexics will open in Berlin, called Sehnsucht (“Longing”).

Halliburton has been dodging US sanctions on Iran by using foreign subsidiaries to sell it oil-drilling equipment. The Cayman Islands subsidiary is just a front, with correspondence to it forwarded to Houston.

Bob Harris, frequent contributor to the This Modern World blog, now has his own blog, Bobharris.com. Check it out. Like me, he sees Lesbian-gate as a deliberate distraction: “pick one non-inflammatory, coherent, compassionate sentence, and try to blow it up into a freakin’ sign of Kerry’s lack of compassion and communication skills. ... Classic Rove. You almost admire the skill. The same way a bullet aimed at your chest might glint in the sunlight just before impact. Nice workmanship, you can think, just before it hits you.” And earlier, on the elder Cheneys’ attitude towards Mary: “Closet. Undisclosed location. Whatever you want to call it is fine.”

Panda

David Brooks makes a mostly-dire effort at a parody of the debates, but does put one good line in Bush’s mouth: “America, we’ve been through a lot together. Imagine how bad things would be if I’d made any mistakes.”

Brazil will start shooting down planes suspected of drug smuggling. The AP story does not say if the CIA will be involved, as it is in Peru and Colombia, in targeting planes for summary execution.

Now, for no particular reason, but who needs a reason?--a panda cub:

Dick Cheney was for his own daughter before he was against her

Watch Jon Stewart on Crossfire, metaphorically strangling Tucker Carson with his own bow tie. The lower-quality video is a 7m. download.

Cheney, after thanking Edwards for speaking about Mary at the Veep debates, lambasted Kerry for doing the same: “I am not just speaking as a father here, although I am a pretty angry father.” What’s with the turnaround or, if you will, flip flop? One theory is that Cheney prefers to attack people who aren’t physically present, but this is disproved by the Pat Leahy “go fuck yourself” incident. Another theory, shockingly, is that he was told to feign outrage.

There is an interesting vice-presidential precedent. In 1992 Larry King asked Dan Quayle what he would do if his 13-year old daughter decided to have an abortion. For a moment Quayle forgot his role and gave a human answer: “obviously I would counsel her and talk to her and support her on whatever decision she made.” Quayle’s awful wife intervened and said that, actually, they would force their daughter to carry the pregnancy to term.

Remember, supporting your daughter is un-Republican.

Take me out to the women’s softball game

US forces have been bombing Fallujah over and over, in what it amuses them to call “precision strikes.” The WordPerfect dictionary has this usage notation in its definition of “precise”: “Strictly speaking, precise does not mean the same as accurate. Accurate means correct in all details , while precise contains a notion of trying to specify details exactly: if you say ‘It’s 4.04 and 12 seconds’ you are being precise, but not necessarily accurate (your watch might be slow).”

Every blog and cable news show is talking feverishly about Mary Cheney. I wonder if this isn’t playing into Team Chimpy’s hands, not by raising the ire of the God-botherers (my favorite silly argument is that Kerry & Edwards are trying to pry homophobic voters away from Bush...by publicly praising and supporting a lesbian), but by not talking about Bush’s poor debate performances and other, ya know, substantive policy issues. This may be why the Chimpites are keeping the issue going.

Not that homophobia isn’t an issue, of course, especially given Alan Keyes’s comments & Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.)’s anti-gay, but rather poorly phrased fund-raising letter: “Leaders of the homosexual lobby know if they can take me out, no one will stand against them in the future.” Oh you just wish, Marilyn. Just sitting by the phone, waiting for the leaders of the homosexual lobby to call, waiting, waiting...

I remember the first US Senate race between two women (1986), in which Linda Chavez started a whispering campaign that Barbara Mikulski was gay, and started calling herself Mrs. Chavez.

It has nothing do with shame

Lesbian-gate continues apace. Elizabeth Edwards wonders aloud if the Cheney’s are ashamed of their live gay daughter. Liz Cheney, the non-gay daughter, responds, “It has nothing do with shame. And I think Mrs. Edwards was also out of line. Mary is one of my heroes. And it has nothing to do with being ashamed of Mary.” No, it’s all about exploiting Mary for “some kind of political gain.” What kind, she does not say, and she is not pressed to define it, or explain how it differs from using this fake outrage for political gain. The best part of the interview:

ZAHN: Was your sister offended?

CHENEY: It was a very offensive thing for him to do, yes.

ZAHN: Did you talk to her about it?

CHENEY: It was very offensive. I think I’ll just leave it there.

Oh yes, a very awkward Thanksgiving indeed.

The English historian Conrad Russell has died. As Earl Russell (I will explain to Americans that Earl is a title of nobility, not an attempt to seem less like a member of the British House of Lords and more like a garage mechanic in Louisiana)(he was actually named after his father’s friend Joseph Conrad), he was also a leading Liberal/Lib Dem member of the Lords, surviving the cull of hereditaries. His father was Bertrand Russell, his great-grandfather the tiny prime minister John Russell, aka Jack Russell, inventor of the terrier.

Neither Bush nor Kerry were willing to be the first to stop their competitive display of public affection for their wives and daughters, but Bush was beginning to panic. Laura whispered, “Stand up straight and don’t scowl.”

Questions

I just came across an old post of mine, from December 2000, in which I noted that there were questions Shrub had been allowed not to answer during the 2000 campaign, despite having made his “character” and his faith his chief selling points. Another campaign is nearly over, and guess what?


--When did you take which drugs and how often?

--Do you really think you would have been given all that money to start an oil business when you were in your 20s if it weren’t for your connections?

--Did you fail in that business because you were drunk a large portion of the time, or were you just incompetent?

--Were you arrested any other times?

--How often did you drive drunk with underage siblings in the car (we know of at least two incidents)?

--Did you use AA to give up drinking, and if not, what methods did you use and what methods do you use currently?

--Do you consider yourself to have been an alcoholic?

--Do gays go to hell?

--Jews?

--Catholics? (and we know that Billy Graham has coached you to avoid this question by saying that it’s not up to you who goes to hell, but that’s not the question and you know it)

--What ever happened to Neil?