Oops

No wonder I get so little hate email. Evidently at some point I accidentally deleted the contact information from my template. That’d do it. So there it is again, at the top of the right-hand column. Also, please note that it’s a new email address.

I have added an Amazon search box. Use it if so inclined, or shun it as capitalist evil and the death of independent bookstores, if so inclined. Go to the library instead, or garage sales, Friends of the Library sales, the Goodwill store. Use my Powell’s link, located above the Amazon link. Shoplift from one of the big chain stores. In the future, someone will invent a “shoplift” button to click and I’ll proudly feature that on my site too, if the commission is good enough.

If it isn’t in English, it can’t be important

So I’m watching the BBC World News 3 am broadcast. They say there will be a Bush-Schröder news conference shortly, which they will cut to. They do, but Schröder is speaking in some sort of foreign language, possibly German, and no one at the BBC evidently knows German, so they cut away until Bush started speaking (there is no translator: Bush has an earpiece). CNN & Fox also have no employees who know German, so they do the same. This is pathetic.

As he did yesterday, Bush twice referred to the Iranian “ayatollahs.” Guess that’s a new thing. Delegitimize them.

Not amused

Montenegro, the last former-Yugoslav republic still associated with Serbia, has proposed independence.

This is the picture the London Times is running with the story that Queen Elizabeth is skipping Charles & Camilla’s wedding. Brrr.


In the same context, The Times describes Henry VIII as polyphilogamous. I like the picture and the word, so I’m stealing them both.

I believe Russia is a European country

Bush in Europe: “As I said in my speech yesterday, a strong Europe is very important for the United States, and I really meant that.” Oh, you really mean that, now we understand. “And the Prime Minister [Blair] is one of the strong leaders in Europe, and I really enjoy my relationship with him.” He does like that word “strong,” doesn’t he?

Russia’s ambassador to the US wrote in the WaPo today that “there cannot and should not be a sole standard for democracy”. Presumably he wants Bush to apply the same low standard for democracy that Iraq gets. In Brussels, a reporter asked Bush about that article, and Bush went on and on about his personal relationship with Putin, which is clearly so much more important to him than democracy. In fact that relationship is so good, according to Bush, that it “allows me to remind him that I believe Russia is a European country”.

Asked about Iran, he offers this helpful view of European diplomacy: “Great Britain, Germany and France are negotiating with the Ayatollahs”. Subtle characterization of the Iranian government, huh? And this helpful view of American diplomacy: “And finally, this notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table. (Laughter.)” I’m sure they’re laughing in Teheran too. And speeding up work on their nuclear program. Wouldn’t you?

Before you dismiss that little comment as another Bushism, remember Reagan’s little open-mike “joke”: “The bombing begins in five minutes”? The Russians heard that and went on nuclear alert.

Bush did say that democracy was hard

To be proper democratic elections, there should be some reasonably direct, transparent connection between how the people voted, and who takes office. In Iraq, no such thing. The nineteenth-century British prime minister and foreign minister Lord Palmerston once said that only three people understood the Schleswig-Holstein question--Prince Albert, who was dead, a professor who went insane, and Palmerston himself, “and I have forgotten.” In the case of the process by which Iraq’s next prime minister is even now being chosen, perhaps only a professor, Juan Cole, understands.

What we’re looking at is so much democracy as to be undemocratic. You can’t determine the will of the people with 111 parties running, which was the result of the electoral system the US imposed. That system put a premium on private back-room deals regarding the distribution of seats within lists, coalitions within coalitions, extra-legal rules insisted upon by Grand Ayatollah Sistani, and the endless weeks of negotiations Cole describes. Skim Cole’s post if you, understandably, don’t want to put in the time required to follow it all, and see if it sounds like anything recognizable as democracy to you.

I used the Palmerston thing as my historical allusion du jour because I couldn’t remember if it was the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the 30 Years’ War, or some other peace treaty, which was so complicated that it was described as “the peace which passeth all understanding.”

Tampering with evidence

More from the Bush speech: “The Palestinian people deserve a government that is representative, honest and peaceful.” So do we, but look what we’re stuck with instead.

The best part of this WaPo story is the last three words:

A 44-year-old Anchorage man had his penis surgically reattached after an angry girlfriend cut it off with a kitchen knife and flushed it down a toilet, police said Sunday. The pair had been arguing over an impending breakup. Water utility workers recovered the penis, which was reattached Sunday morning. Kim Tran, 35, was charged with assault, domestic violence and tampering with evidence.

My breath was delightfully redolent of freedom

Bush is in Brussels, where he addressed Europe with this threat plea for unity: “No temporary debate, no passing disagreement of governments, no power on earth will ever divide us.” I’ll bet he says that to all his ex-girlfriends. Note to Europe: get a restraining order.

You know the old joke

In heaven:
The English are the police,
The Germans are the mechanics,
The Swiss are the administrators,
The French are the lovers,
The Italians are the cooks.

In hell:
The English are the cooks,
The French are the mechanics,
The Swiss are the lovers,
The Italians are the administrators,
The Germans are the police.

Well, according to Bush, “the Afghan people know the world is with them. After all, Germany is providing vital police training. ... Italy is giving assistance on judicial reform.”

He also quotes Camus--let me repeat that: George W. Bush quotes Camus--saying “Freedom is a long-distance race.” That’s from “The Fall.” Clearly, someone in the White House found the quote by looking up Bush’s new favorite word, freedom, in Bartlett’s or wherever, to get a quote from some European. That someone failed to check the context:

Once upon a time, I was always talking of freedom: At breakfast I use to spread it on my toast, I used to chew it all day long, and in company my breath was delightfully redolent of freedom. With that key word I would bludgeon whoever contradicted me; I made it serve my desires and my power. I used to whisper it in bed in the ear of my sleeping mates and it helped me to drop them. I would slip it… Tchk! Tchk! I am getting excited and losing all sense of proportion. After all, I did on occasion make a more disinterested use of freedom and even – just imagine my naiveté -- defended it two or three times without of course going so far as to die for it, but nevertheless taking a few risks. I must be forgiven such rash acts; I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It’s a choice, on the contrary and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. No champagne No friends raising their glasses as they look at your affectionately. Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner’s box before the judges, and alone to decide in face of oneself or in the face others’ judgment. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that’s why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you’re down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody.

Gonzo, gonzo, gone

The nice thing about the Net is that someone will do the tasks you think about doing but are too lazy to do. For example, I’ve sometimes talked about the George Bush phenomenon of rubbing the heads of bald men, but the blog Rigorous Intuition has the visual documentation. The man really thinks that everyone else in the world isn’t real, just a toy for his amusement. Soon he’ll be bidding against Michael Jackson for the skull of the Elephant Man.

Hunter S. Thompson and Sandra Dee dead on the same day. There’s probably a joke in that, but it’s hard enough to imagine a world that encompassed both of them, much less a joke.

Happy Displaced Apostrophe Day (aka Presidents’ Day, President’s Day, Presidents Day, Presiden’t’s’ Day, etc).

Maybe they meant to call it Operation River Blintz

The US is reportedly about to start a Fallujah-type attack on Ramadi, which has the astonishingly stupid codename Operation River Blitz. If they really wanted to scare the Iraqis, they’d have called it Operation Riverdance. A Marine major-general says the militants of Ramadi are “intent on preventing a peaceful transition of power between the interim Iraqi government and the Iraqi transitional government.” Interim, transitional, if there are any more stages to this thing we’re gonna run out of words meaning “not a real government.”

Bush is in Europe in order to mend fences--Niall Ferguson writes in the Guardian that it’s like Nixon going to China. He will forgive the Europeans for being, well, Europeans, just as long as he doesn’t have to listen to them being, well, European, for too long. Plans for a town-hall meeting in Germany were cancelled when the Germans refused to screen participants. And he will meet the heads of Europe tomorrow for a summit, in which he will speak for 30 minutes, and 11 heads of governments will be given a maximum of 5 minutes each. I’m picturing a band starting up when Berlusconi goes over.

The king of Swaziland, Mswati III, facing criticism for having bought BMWs for each of his 11 wives, in one of the poorest and definitely the most HIV-ridden country in the world, has issued a royal decree banning photos being taken “when [the king] alights from his car”. Problem solved.

Objective reporting at its finest, from the Daily Telegraph: “Confused Spaniards Vote for EU Constitution.” Although 77% of the few people who turned out to vote supported the constitution (Spain is the first country to vote on it), what the Telegraph is referring to is that few have evidently read the 87,392-page document.

I’ve run stories before about elephants in Thailand taking up painting. One was just bought by a Thai businesswoman living in America for $39,000. The painting, “Cold Wind, Swirling Mist, Charming Lanna Number One,” is reportedly a cross between impressionism and surrealism, as is this whole story.

I’m not 100% sure that this is that painting (and how could so many news outlets run this story without showing the painting?):



Post-Impressionism, maybe, but surrealism?

In a friendly way, of course

Bush will meet with Putin and says he will discuss Russia’s re-authoritarianization (to coin a word with too many syllables) and human rights record. Sounding like Reagan talking about South Africa, or his own father declaring after Tiananmen Square that it was no time for an emotional response, Shrub says he will raise these issues only in private, “so I can explain to him as best I can, in a friendly way, of course, that Western values are, you know, are based upon transparency and rule of law, the right for the people to express themselves, checks and balances in government.” “As best I can,” indeed.

George Bush, pillock of the free world

Robin Williams, on Bill Maher’s show: “George Bush was in the same National Guard unit as Bigfoot.”

Bush says that “We do not accept a false caricature that divides the Western world between an idealistic United States and a cynical Europe.” I’m sure the Europeans will be glad to hear that, in their cynical way. He goes on, “America and Europe are the pillars of the free world.” This is, of course entirely meaningless--what does it mean to be a “pillar”?--but it’s funny to see the re-emergence under Bush of the Cold War phrase “free world.”

There are even more insulting ways to divide the world, and Secretary of War Rumsfeld used one a few days ago when he said that “China is a country that we hope and pray enters the civilized world in an orderly way without the grinding of gears”. His handlers later rushed to explain that he hadn’t actually called China uncivilized, although he obviously had.

A quote I’d missed, from the wife of John Negroponte, last year about his support of Honduran death squads: “I want to say to those people, ‘Haven’t you moved on?’ To keep fighting all that is old hat.”

PS To help you

When I commented yesterday about Negroponte’s record not being addressed by mainstream media or mainstream Democratic politicians, I hadn’t gotten to the part of McNeil-Lehrer where Harry Reid showed his complete ignorance--“He was ambassador to what, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Freedonia, Tatooine, Barsoom? Am I getting warmer?” Lehrer had to help him out. Liberal Oasis has links to articles on Negroponte.

Larry Beinhart (the guy who wrote the novel that became “Wag the Dog”) has a term for this sort of data: Fog Facts, “important things that nobody seems able to focus on any more than they can focus on a single droplet in the mist. They are known, but not known.”

And the NYT today, in a biographical article on Negroponte, has only this to say: “He has spent the ensuing two decades vigorously defending himself against allegations that he played down human rights violations in Honduras when their exposure could have undermined the Reagan administration’s Latin American agenda.” It has indeed been two decades, so why is the NYT still playing it as he said/she said?

The NYT has an amusing obit of Samuel Alderson, inventor of the crash-test dummy, which includes this data: “the first crash-test dummies were cadavers. While useful in collecting basic data, they lacked the durability required for repeated trials.”

Responding to the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, the tourist minister resigned today. Well, it can’t have made his job any easier.

The Daily Telegraph says that the Americans are claiming that the safest place in Iraq is... wait for it ... Fallujah. In one wrecked school, a Marine painted this graffito (note to Telegraph: one graffito, two graffiti): “We came, we saw, we took over all. PS To help you.”

The pope says, in memoirs coming out next week, that the Virgin Mary saved his life during the 1981 assassination attempt; “it was just as if someone guided this bullet.” He explains why the bullet nevertheless hit him: “that Mary chick is seriously passive-aggressive.”

National reconciliation

The WaPo thinks the Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s fatwas are too intrusive, citing this one: “It is unworthy to drink too much water; to drink water after eating fatty food; and to drink water while standing during the night. It is also unworthy to drink water with one’s left hand; to drink from the side of a container which is cracked or chipped off, or from the side of its handle.” Also appearing today is this AP story about an Israeli rabbi who says that sticking used gum under a desk is a violation of Jewish law.

The WaPo interviewed Iyad “Comical” Allawi, who warns against moves away from “national reconciliation” and says he might go back into exile after leaving office if he doesn’t feel safe enough. In other words for him national reconciliation means “Please don’t kill me.”

All-Powerful

Israel will suspend the demolition of the houses of the families of suicide bombers. Astonishingly, they have realized that this policy just pissed people off.



The Vatican issues a denunciation of the “religion of health,” by which they mean people in wealthy countries wanting their ailments cured by medical science rather than suffering stoically, like the pope, who is 133 years old.

And the Pontifical University Regin Apostolorum in Rome is offering a class in exorcism. Say, you know how shakes and speaks incoherently as if possessed: the pope. Just sayin’.

Guardian headline: “Bush Appoints All-Powerful Spy Chief.” I think if Negroponte was all-powerful, he wouldn’t be bald. Just sayin’.

Whatever it Was, I Was Against It

McNeil-Lehrer had a discussion of Negroponte in which his record in Honduras wasn’t even mentioned. This country’s media and politicians have no memory at all. That’s how Jeff Sessions can go on tv to talk about judicial nominees being rejected without anyone mentioning his own past as a failed nominee. This is also how everyone can have fun with the story of Mary Kay Le Tourneau, the teacher convicted of stat rape, now marrying her victim, without mention of her father, Rep. John Schmitz, an Orange County congresscritter so far to the right he thought Reagan was a communist (literally), and who when Mary Kay was a child publicly pulled her out of several schools when they began sex ed courses.

Which brings me to my new project. One of the goals of this blog is to pay attention to the historical context of current events. One means to this end is that my archives go further back than those of most blogs. In 1996 I began sending out comments on the news to the few friends I knew who had email. The number of people on the list grew and so did the volume of my writing. I developed a bloggy style long before the word blog was coined. When I finally began an actual blog last July, I also posted all the old emails, shorn of the copyrighted newspaper articles, Dave Barry pieces and whatnot, all available in the archives linked in the right-hand column (Blogger didn’t foresee my need to retroactively give posts dates earlier than 1999, so the January 1999 link actually contains material from January 1996 through January 1999). So you can read what I had to say about the Clinton impeachment or the 2000 elections or anything else, although I’m not sure why you would, and it’s all searchable through the Google box at the top of the page. Here’s what I said the first time I ever mentioned Osama bin Laden, after the embassy bombings in August 1998:

I suspect this bin Laden character has been promoted, and probably promoted way out of his league, to Darth-Vader-of-the-year to put a human face on the Enemy.

Oops.

But before that, in 1986, I began taking notes on the news into a series of notebooks, to assist my memory, to preserve stupid remarks by Ronald Reagan that I wanted to be able to quote precisely, and because if you’re paying serious attention to a subject, including current events, you take notes. It was also a place to tape cut-out articles and political cartoons, right down quotes, etc.

I’ve recently begun to type those notes into my computer, a little at a time, something I’ve always wanted to do so that I don’t have to read my own handwriting and pore through dozens of pages every time I want to look something up. The job has turned out to be quite interesting, a chance to relive Iran-Contra, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Dan Quayle years. Remember the 1980s? The movies: 8½, Grand Illusion, The Seventh Seal, Holiday. And the music: Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvořák--whatever happened to those guys?

Now these are notes written to myself, they are not a blog, but they may be useful to someone and it takes almost no extra work at all to put them online, so allow me to introduce: “Whatever It Was, I Was Against It.”
1986-89, so far, but I’ll add more as I type it. The permanent link is in the column on the right, at the top of the archives list.

Not moving with the democratic movement

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.

Focusing on indecency

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.

Finding solace only in the works of P. G. Wodehouse

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.”

Guns or butter, elites or cadres, reconciliation or liberation, paper or plastic

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.

Try to imagine a statement so stupid that a Fox exec would have to resign for saying it

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.