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During the Iran-Contra investigations, which now seem like a much more innocent time--a thought which would have astonished me at the time--it wasn’t quite clear if John Negroponte was actively colluding with and covering up and lying about the Honduran government’s use of death squads, or if he was lazy, stupid and oblivious. With the information we have now (it’s all over the Web today, you can’t take a step without getting some Negroponte on your shoe), it was definitely the former, but the point is that Negroponte’s attempts to save his reputation depended on presenting himself as oblivious to what was going on around him (the Mr. Magoo/Ronald Reagan defense). So he’s the perfect man to be Chimpy’s intelligence tsar, even though he only got the job after everyone else refused it.
One of my favorite Negroponte moment’s was when he was appointed ambassador to Iraq. The CPA put up a picture of him at the UN, this one
standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica. Within hours, they’d cropped the picture.
The Bushies still aren’t giving a coherent reason for having withdrawn the ambassador to Syria, if they’re not going to blame it explicitly for the Hariri assassination. Here’s Bush, today:
We’ve recalled our ambassador, which indicates that the relationship is not moving forward, that Syria is out of step with the progress being made in a greater Middle East, that democracy is on the move. And this is a country that isn’t moving with the democratic movement.
BBC headline: “US Congress Focuses on Indecency.” No kidding.
The Onion offers details of the Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire.
Musical condoms.
I’ve noticed before that Bush’s Social Security rhetoric is often addressed narrowly to his own age group. I don’t have a Bush quote handy, but the White House website says
The President is committed to keeping the promise of Social Security for today’s retirees and those nearing retirement and strengthening Social Security for our children and grandchildren.
So anyone under 55 falls into the category of “our” children and grandchildren.
Switzerland is to return to Nigeria money stolen by the late dictator Sani Abacha, in a devastating blow to the country’s scam email trade, whose discerning clientele seem already to have moved on: someone bought this picture and a companion piece, painted by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge in 1903, for $590,400.
And still a better investment idea than Bush’s Social Security plan. Coolidge also wrote an opera and was an inventor and a banker.
The Bushies are going after Syria for Rafik Hariri’s assassination, and clearly they’ve learned something from the Iraqi WMD fiasco, because they aren’t even bothering to fabricate evidence this time, and some of them (speaking anonymously, so far) are saying that Syria can be blamed even if it didn’t do it. It will be awfully hard to accuse them of lying if they refuse to use any facts or arguments. Or irony, since they’re saying that even if it was just the action of one of Lebanon’s many terrorist groups, Syria’s occupation of Lebanon created the instability that made that possible. Do as we say, not as we do. The Bushies’ foreign policy is just like its budget--it pretends the costs of the Iraqi occupation are “off-book” and don’t count. So the State Dept says that the recall of the American ambassador to Syria is to express the US’s “profound outrage” over the assassination, but that we’re not accusing Syria of that assassination. Makes perfect sense.
I don’t know if Syria is responsible. Given Hariri’s extensive protection, some are saying that only a state has the capability of pulling something like this off, but the same thing was said after September 11. Actually, it’s hard to see why Syria would carry out this assassination of a man no longer in office at this particular time when 1) the US is looking for an excuse to go after this particular “outpost of tyranny” and 2) Israel is desperately trying to derail Russian sales of anti-aircraft missiles to Syria.
Speaking of keeping the facts off-book, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions appeared on McNeil-Lehrer today, calling the D’s obstructionists for failing to pass all of Bush’s judicial nominees. Once again, no one had the bad taste to bring up Sessions’s past as a Reagan nominee for the federal bench, rejected because of certain racist acts in his past and remarks like “I used to think the Klan was all right until I learned they smoked marijuana.”
On the same subject, Orrin Hatch was quoted as saying that the D Senators just hate Bush. Somehow Hatch’s air of sorrowful sanctimony lets him get away with this sort of crap. A couple of weeks ago, his speech in favor of Alberto Gonzales outright accused D’s of opposing him because he was Hispanic.
About the increasing use of the word “obstructionist”: the term implies that the only legitimate agenda is that of the majority party, as if every one of the Democratic congresscritters was not elected in their own right, with their own mandate. The long term for that attitude is “tyranny of the majority,” the short term is “tyranny.”
From the Daily Telegraph:
President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya is said to have taken to his bed in despair, finding solace, according to a cabinet colleague, “only in the works of P G Wodehouse”.
Thank you for clearing that up: from the NYT’s corrections section: “A front-page article on Friday about Prince Charles's announcement that he will marry his longtime lover, Camilla Parker Bowles, misstated the name of a ceremonial post held by her former husband, Andrew Parker Bowles. It is silver stick in waiting to the queen, not silver stick in waiting to the prince.”
Looking at the names of parties that will have seats in the new Iraqi National Assembly, I can’t decide which one I like best, the National Independent Elites and Cadres Party, or the Reconciliation and Liberation Entity. Advice to both: pick one thing and stick with it; either elites or cadres, reconciliation or liberation.
Also, the Elites ’n Cadres have 3 seats, so that’s one for the elites, one for the cadres, and fearsome civil war over the 3rd seat.
The prime minister is likely to be Ibrahim Jaafari, the brother-in-law of Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Article 1 of the new Iraqi Constitution: It is mandatory for everyone to own a Grand Ayatollah Sistani bath towel.
I wonder how wise it was to choose a former exile (1980-2003).
The world condemned the Lord’s Resistance Army (in Uganda) for forcibly impressing thousands of children. But what to do with them when they are liberated? The Ugandan government has an idea: stick them in the Ugandan Army.
A bunch of stories have framed the resignation of Eason Jordan from CNN as the victory of bloggers, and gosh don’t I feel proud. You’ll notice that the content of Jordan’s remarks was not only so far beyond the pale that he had to quit, but evidently were so far beyond the pale that there was no necessity for the media to fact-check, and ask whether the US military actually has targeted journalists in Iraq, which in at least the cases of Al Jazeera and the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad it certainly did (click here for an April 2003 Robert Fisk article).
(Update: and a current AlterNet article.)
There are other disturbing elements to this: Jordan was an executive, not a reporter, and certainly not on the air, so I’m not sure what standards his comments should be held to and whether we want to open up that can of McCarthyism. Also, since the wingers seem to think that the transcript of the not-open-to-the-public event at which Jordan spoke should be made available to them, well, I’ve always been curious about what people like Bush and Cheney say at all those fundraisers they go to....
And, hey, what about Cheney’s energy task force? And...
Speaking of ridiculously disproportionate responses, the McLibel case is now entering its 15th year, with a ruling due from the European Court of Human Rights.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Pentagon website puts up a picture of a new plane, not at all photographed to look like a penis.
Tony Blair, who is so much less popular than the party he leads, admits to past arrogance in an arrogantly humble speech, if you know what I mean, and says he hasn’t listened to the British people enough. He creepily compares his relationship with the British people to a marriage, saying that they can “go off with” Michael Howard or Charles Kennedy if they like, but “now you, the British people, have to sit down and decide whether you want this relationship to continue”. Why does that require sitting down, I wonder? I’m sure Charles’s proposal to Camilla was more awkward (“Mummy says it’s alright”), but Blair seems once again to have forgotten that he is not a president but a prime minister, answerable to Parliament.
Once again, life is imitating “The Prisoner.”
A large black ball, originally designed by Swedish scientists for use on Mars, could be the latest weapon in the war against burglars.
The device, developed at the University of Uppsala, acts as a high-tech security guard capable of detecting an intruder thanks to either radar or infra-red sensors. Once alerted, it can summon help, sound an alarm or pursue the intruders, taking pictures. ...
Serbian President Boris Tadic goes to Kosovo in an echo of Milosevic’s visit to the province 16 years ago, and tells an audience of ethnic Serbs, “This is Serbia.” No it isn’t, and fuck off out of it.
After two weeks, and no explanation for what the problem was with those 300 ballot boxes or how the problem was resolved, the Iraqi election results have finally been released. Figures on how many people were killed on election day still haven’t been added up, for some reason.
I’ve been assuming that the Iraqi ballot boxes would be stuffed, at the very least to increase voter turnout to make the election look more legitimate. So in one sense, it’s a good sign that the official turnout figure for Anbar province (including the rubble fields of Fallujah) was an uninflated-sounding 2%. In another sense, of course, a national election is not legitimate when that many people are not represented.
It’s also nice to see a politician spend huge amounts of money from mysterious sources, monopolize the airwaves, and then be thoroughly trounced, as Iyad “Comical” Allawi has been. It will be interesting to see if the secret police thugs and torturers he has recruited transfer their loyalties to whoever replaces him.
Some years ago San Francisco, which like Iraq had at-large elections, had a polling station which for some years was in an upscale bakery, which gave away pastries to voters. Voter turnout in that precinct was nearly 100%, giving that precinct disproportionate, um, weight in the board of supervisors, so the bakery was quite rightly told to stop. That is how these things should work. In Iraq, that 2% turnout was matched by 92% turnout in a Kurdish region.
The Indy says that US officials are having “are you now or have you ever been” discussions with Iraqi politicians to see how close they are to Iran, and how the Iraqi government will react when the US attacks Iran.
So the US was sending spy drones over Iran, and the Iranians assume not that they’re from the Great Satan, but that they’re UFOs. Infidels from Alpha Centauri, no doubt. The truth is out there.
A couple of entries to a New Statesman competition last month, which asked for updated sayings:
It’s a short road that has no Starbucks.
Look before you invade.
Schwarzenegger tells a Republican group that Democratic members of the state legislature are “addicts” who “cannot stop spending money.” But the LAT buries the lead by focusing on that quote. The key line is actually his most explicit statement yet of the führerprinzip: “Now,” he said, “we have a governor who represents the people’s interests instead of special interests.” D’s didn’t “get the message” of the recall of Gray Davis in 2003: “If they had been on the ballot, they all would have been recalled.” So Ahhnuld considers himself the only genuine representative of the people (notwithstanding the 2004 elections).
After all the talk about spreading freedom, Bush has had to send Henry Kissinger to Moscow to reassure Putin that he doesn’t mean a word of it. Because if you want to send a message about how important ideals and democracy are to you, the messenger you choose would just have to be Henry Fucking Kissinger.
Speaking of bad representatives of democratic values, Dexter Filkins’s NYT story about Achmad Chalabi’s attempt to wheel ’n deal his way into the office of prime minister takes seriously the line that Chalabi is out of favor with the Americans. Actually, it’s hard to tell; the position of the Bushies on Iraq’s future has become curiously opaque over the last few months. Did his Pentagon backers really back away from him? If so, Filkins gives a singularly unlike reason for it: “Mr. Chalabi’s footing in the Bush administration steadily eroded as it became clear that much of the intelligence he had turned over to the American government, which was used to justify an invasion, turned out to have been exaggerated or false.” Sure, everyone else who produced false intelligence is promoted, but Chalabi is dropped for doing the same, and if you buy that, I’ve got some Nigerien yellowcake to sell you.
So Iraqi “democracy,” which was fresh and young and hopeful two weeks ago has, before the votes are even counted, become so decrepit, debased and cynical that Chalabi, a man with no discernible principles except self-interest, could be a major player in the backroom intrigues which will establish an Iraqi administration, with no particular reference to how Iraqis actually voted. Maybe they could be persuaded to take Arnold Schwarzenegger instead, cuz I hear he supports the people’s interests rather than the special interests. Maybe they could take Kissinger as well.
The Czech parliament rejects gay marriage by a single vote.
Secretary of War Rumsfeld, in Iraq, tells American troops occupying Iraq, “You have shown that America is in fact a land of liberators, not a land of occupiers.” And has been ever since we liberated it from the Indians.
Rep. Louise Slaughter has written to the White House asking how “Jeff Gannon” was allowed to use a pseudonym as a White House “reporter” when she is forced to continue calling herself Louise Slaughter, it just isn’t fair.
ATTENTION (TO SPELLING) MUST BE PAID: A word to the Daily Telegraph: entitling the obituary of Arthur Miller “Death of a Playright” might have made you seem cleverer if the word were not actually playwright. You might as well have gone with your first instincts: “Guy Who Shagged Marilyn Monroe Fifty Years Ago Dies.”
But the Telegraph almost redeems itself with the headline “Gays Angry at Penguin Plan.”
A plan by a German zoo to test the sexuality of a group of suspected homosexual penguins by bringing in females has sparked outrage among gay and lesbian groups, who fear keepers might force them to abandon their male partners.
Bremerhaven zoo saw the male penguins trying to mate and hatch stones.
Don’t expect to get much sense out of the British newspapers today: two middle-aged unemployed people announced their engagement.
The reason I quoted a chunk of North Korean verbiage in my last post, and linked to their statement about nukes, was to suggest that North Korean leaders do not think in the same way as we do. This is why dealing with them is so dangerous and requires such care and expertise. Unfortunately, the US is now ruled by folks who share both George Bush’s complete inability to comprehend people who don’t view the world the same way he does, and his complete lack of curiosity about the thought patterns of other peoples and cultures, and who portray their own ideals as universal ideals, meaning there really is no reason to attempt to understand other ideals, which are by definition less than universal. So when Condoleezza Rice says that North Korea’s rejection of the 6-party talks (which were always a fig-leaf for our unwillingness to talk directly with North Korea) will just isolate them further, you have to wonder how she’s failed to notice that North Korea’s rulers like being isolated and work very hard indeed to maintain their isolation.
Asked about North Korea’s belief that the US was coming after it, Condi says, “Well, I’m not quite sure to what the North Koreans are referring.” Can’t you?
Condi also praises Saudi Arabia’s municipal elections, while hoping that “at one point [they] would include women.” She failed to add that half the local council seats, and mayors, would still be appointed by the monarchy, and would have no defined powers.
Are you aware of the reason the Saudis give for the exclusion of women? Nothing religious or ideological about women being stupid or impure or whatever, but the somehow more insulting, because so completely dismissive, excuse that it would have been too much work to build all those (separate, naturally) polling stations and ballot boxes
for women. I mean, even in Iraq we managed...
...well ok, bad example. You’ll notice no one ever suggests that if they can only manage polling places for half the population, the men could sit this one out.
The Axis of Evil is acting all axis of evilly today. Both Iran and North Korea issued statements saying they’ll be keeping their nuclear programs, thank you very much.
The North Korean government is always hard to interpret, because it speaks entirely in badly translated jargon which it may actually believe. Sometimes this is entertaining, and when I’m bored I surf to the NK news agency website for stories like “Japan Termed Wicked Trickster.” But the problem is that, believing in their own over-blown jargon, sometimes they believe in our over-blown jargon as well--axis of evil, regime change, outpost of tyranny, etc etc--and think we’re about to go to war with them. Their statement today said, yeah we got nukes (“nukes for self-defence”) and whaddya gonna do about it, denouncing American attempts to push regional diplomacy as “a far-fetched logic of gangsters as it is a good example fully revealing the wicked nature and brazen-faced double-dealing tactics of the U.S. as a master hand at plot-breeding and deception.” Uh, yeah, and what’s your point?
Thursday there will be municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, and women will not be allowed to vote. Has anyone heard any outrage from the United States government, as part of its new mission to spread freedom and liberty and still more liberty and yet more freedom everywhere?
A bill is being proposed to ban Medicare from covering Viagra. But was it necessary for the WaPo to say that such coverage “could strain the already strapped program”?
The coup in Togo has been condemned by ECOWAS and other African organizations. This is a good sign, and compares well with the toleration given to Zimbabwe’s deepening fascism.
Truly leaving no child behind, a public elementary school in Sutter, California (north of Sacramento) required students to carry Radio Frequency Identification tags (RFIDs) to track their movements. This will be overturned, but only because pedophiles can also use readers to track their movements, not because it is degrading and creepy.
Juan Cole points out that once Iraqi election results are announced, the winners will no longer be anonymous and will be subject to assassination. Fortunately the proportional representation system the US imposed on Iraq should mean that replacements come from the existing party lists. Imagine being subjected to all those clichés about brave Iraqis defying the blah blah blah every time there was an election to fill a suddenly vacant seat.
I’m getting a certain amount of traffic today from search engines because Monday I mentioned mud-wrestling contests among American women MPs at one of our prison camps in Iraq. People want to see the pictures. You’ve gotta love the assumptions the Internet has created that if there is such an event, there will be pictures (in fact there are) and they will be posted to the internet (not yet). Information wants to be free, especially when it involves women mud-wrestling.
(Update: my mistake. Tex at UnFairWitness has a couple of pictures posted for your unfair-witnessing pleasure. It seems that the NY Daily News ran pictures a few days ago.)
As much as I depend on the White House website for sources of humor, I found it impossible to do more than skim “President Participates in Class-Action Lawsuit Reform Conversation.” I see he doesn’t know the real word for “baby doctor.” Bush does explain that “A capitalist society depends on the capacity for people willing to take risk and to say there’s a better future, and I want to take a risk toward that future. And I’m deeply concerned that too many lawsuits make it too difficult for people to do that.” Of course what he doesn’t explain is that he wants to make it easier for capitalists to get their better futures by risking other people’s lives.
Kamen at the WaPo quotes State Dept spokesmodel Tom Casey, who objected to Cuba and Zimbabwe being on a UN human rights panel: “The United States believes that countries that routinely and systematically violate the rights of their citizens should not be selected to review the human rights performance of other countries.” But when the US does it, it’s just a few bad apples, and mostly we violate the rights of citizens of other countries and blah blah hypocrisy Abu Ghraib naked human pyramids Alberto Gonzales detention without trial blah blah blah blah....
Sorry, I just had a vision of 4 more years of sanctimonious Bushies pretending to be spreading freedom throughout the world, and I went into blogger automatic pilot.
Kamen points out that Saudi Arabia, another exemplar of human rights, is also on that panel.
Condi Rice was in Paris, “wooing” the French, as all the news sources put it. It somehow comes as no surprise that her style of “wooing” is actually the issuing of marching orders, thinly disguised. An Independent editorial (not available for free online) points out (as does Eli at Left I On the News) that when she said, “America stands ready to work with Europe on our common agenda -- and Europe must stand ready to work with America,” “it sounded very like a command - and if not a command, then a threat.” (The arrogance of power is never far from the Bushies; Chimpy himself today said that Congress “needs to” pass his budget.)
Elsewhere in that speech, she suggests a single historical line from Rosa Parks to the fall of communism to the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq. Must be Black Propaganda History Month.
People accused Bill Clinton of running a permanent campaign, of electioneering rather than governing. Well what do we make of the promotion of Karl Rove, a man who has spent his career running slimy campaigns on behalf of slimy candidates, to the policy position of deputy chief of staff?
Bush describes his budget as one that “reduces and eliminates redundancy.” Also eradicates, extinguishes, annihilates and wipes out redundancy. He adds that he will hold “federal programs to a firm test of accountability,” but does not say if this test will involve Western-style accountancy.
21 are killed in Baghdad. Care to guess what they were doing? Yes, waiting on a line (to join the military), which is behaviour abhorrent in the eyes of Allah.
Denmark returns its Center-Right government to power, on a strong anti-immigrant platform. That’s the theme of European elections this year, with Tony Blair and Michael Howard also engaged in a bidding war on who can be more beastly to Johnny Asylum-Seeker.
Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas come to an agreement “that all Palestinians will stop all acts of violence against all Israelis everywhere, and, at the same time, Israel will cease all its military activity against all Palestinians everywhere”. That line comes from Sharon, who evidently doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of Israeli citizens who are also Palestinians.
So we can now forget about the Middle East because, as we all know, cease-fire agreements are considered sacred in that part of the world and are never broken. So there’s no reason to bet on how long it lasts, because it will last forever, although if you’ve got a pool, put me down for 5..4...3...2...
And then Sharon ate him.
From the LA Times:
"They’re all around there in the Capitol, as you know, the different special interests," Schwarzenegger said recently, "the purple shirts and the brown — all the different shirts."
The purple shirts refer to T-shirts worn by unionized state workers who have been holding protests around Sacramento over the governor's plans to change their retirement system and take away some of their holidays, among other things. As for the brown shirts, it was unclear to whom Schwarzenegger was referring.
When an Austrian politician starts having hallucinations involving brownshirts--run.
Rep. Jane Harman will introduce a bill to ban torture. One would have thought that was illegal already, but evidently one would have been wrong. The bill would also ban “rendition.” I’ll be interested to see how Harman defines torture, something no Bush official has been willing to do.
The London Times presents an interesting juxtaposition. Tacked on to the end of a story about Iraqi Taliban-wannabes allegedly killing barbers for trimming beards contrary to the will of Allah is this: “An American military policewoman who took part in a mud-wrestling contest at an Iraqi prison was yesterday demoted and found guilty of indecent exposure.” See, we have our standards, they have their standards.
There must also be something in the Koran about standing in line also being contrary to the will of Allah. Two more queues were bombed today, one of Iraqi policemen waiting to collect their pay, another of applicants to join the Iraqi police. This is only the 853rd and 854th time respectively that this has happened, by my count.
A gay activist, Scott McCoy, is named by D party activists to replace a Utah state senator resigning on health grounds. Should be fun.
George Monbiot writes that we may hear less UN-bashing from the R’s on the subject of the oil-for-food program in Iraq, since the Volker report says that much bigger violations of sanctions occurred through illegal sales of oil--which the US knew about and did nothing to stop, because it benefitted allies we wished to keep sweet, like Turkey and Jordan. Monbiot also has more details of the money that the CPA lost through its non-Western accounting methods: “Some $800m was handed out to US commanders without being counted or even weighed. A further $1.4bn was flown from Baghdad to the Kurdish regional government in the town of Irbil, and has not been seen since.”
Now that Bush has revealed more details of his Social Security privatization scheme, I must say I’m relieved to see how lame it is. This turkey could pass only if the D’s efforts to stop it reach a Kerryesque level of incompetence. Which is quite possible, of course: I never thought the Medicare drug benefit could make it all the way into law still containing that idiotic “donut,” which shows what I know. But with the government managing the investment funds, with the clawback of anything below a 3% return, and with those mandatory annuities, and with even the Bushies now admitting it won’t help the long-term stability of Social Security, even the gamblers with visions of stock market windfalls won’t find this very attractive. One can only hope Bush expends lots and lots of his “capital” trying to push this turd uphill.
So what was it about? Like tax cuts, Social Security privatization was fundamentally about “starving the beast,” circumscribing the powers of government. Connect pensions to the stock market, and any attempt to regulate pollution, raise the minimum wage, tax corporations, prevent them sending jobs oversees, etc etc etc would be denounced as threatening granny’s private personal retirement account. Almost every aspect of a progressive agenda would be measured against the Dow Jones and found wanting. The R’s would be practically assured of a permanent majority.
So maybe just as well the plan stinks up the joint.
