The Culture of Life

Egypt announced that it would allow more than one candidate for president run in the September elections. It made this announcement after the deadline for voter registration. Subtle, huh?

Bush finally spoke about the Minnesota school massacre today, in his weekly radio address, after he spent several minutes somehow linking Easter and Christ rising from the dead with the US military. It wasn’t too bad, if a bit generic and a lot late. But what to make of this: “To keep our children safe and protected, we must continue to foster a culture that affirms life and provides love”. Ah yes, the “culture of life,” that term which covers a range of issues from abortion to Terri Schiavo and creates linkages between them, performing the same function for cultural conservatives that the “right to privacy” performs for those who oppose them on these same issues. So in Bush’s latest presentation of the culture of life, the banning of abortion would, presumably, stop future school shootings. Or something. (Actually, it would make the schools more crowded, and crowded with unwanted children at that).

Back to Terri. While some people have doubtless truly deluded themselves into believing she is other than vegetable matter, or that Jesus or Elian Gonzales will come riding in on the back of his magic dolphins and restore her to sentience, I suspect that a great many of the politicians bloviating about this case don’t really want what they say they want. If they “win,” all they’ve got is a brain-dead woman with a feeding tube, not much of a victory prize. If they lose, they’ve got an issue and an icon, poor martyred St. Terri. The fact that this proved not to be a particularly popular issue with the general public may have been a miscalculation, or it may not, because the faithful, for whom this was a crusade, will remember it long after the general public, for whom it was an entertainment, like the Michael Jackson trial, will have forgotten.

Isolated

Condi Rice tells the WaPo that “It’s very important that Russia not get isolated.” Isolation is something with which she often threatens nations. Last month I was startled by her warning to North Korea that it was isolating itself further, when any intelligent observer of the Hermit Kingdom would see a country not eager to be anything other than very isolated indeed. The Russia quote impelled me to search Rice’s speeches on the State Dept website, which brings up such remarks as:

• “It’s the North Koreans who are isolated, not the United States. It’s North Korea that is isolated.”
• “It’s the Iranians that are isolated, not the United States.”
• “we need to remember that the Iranians are the ones who are isolated.” “the Syrians, who I do not believe want to be as isolated as they are now. They are very isolated.”

Etc, etc, etc.

So evidently for this black woman, feeling isolated is the worst possible thing, and can be avoided by conforming to the values of the big boys. Poor Condi, she just needs a hug. Not that I’m offering; that woman scares me.

From: ousteddictator@hotmail.com

NRA vice president Sandra Froman responds to the school shooting in Minnesota by suggesting that teachers be armed. Gee, why didn’t I think of that.

80% of the tsunami fatalities were women.

Kyrgyzstan’s ousted president Akayev insisted he was still president because he hadn’t resigned and that he will return from wherever he’s hiding. In a nicely modern touch, this message came by email. No word on whether Akayev used any emoticons.

Putin denounces the change in government as illegitimate and says in the next breath that he can work with the new illegitimate government. The man who turned Chechnya into a charnel house then denounced the violence in Kyrgyzstan, which so far has mostly consisted of looting and is on a smaller scale than, say, the Rodney King riots.

Rummy’s imagination

Kyrgyz dictator Akayev has been forced to flee by a popular uprising which still hasn’t settled on a name, although it seems now to be more tulip than lemon. He has been replaced by former-cronies-turned-opponents as prime minister and president, so look for the authoritarianism to be dialed back a notch, not for actual democracy. Street protests can create a power vacuum, but that’s it.

Secretary of War Rumsfeld speaks in ominous tones about Venezuela’s efforts to purchase assault rifles. “I can’t imagine what’s going to happen to 100,000 AK-47s,” he said. And then resumed military aid to Guatemala, proclaiming its army a lot less death-squad-y now. I don’t know if this means Rummy can’t imagine what the Guatemalan military will do with its weapons... or that he can.

Terri Schiavo: a modest proposal

I haven’t followed the Robert Blake trial, but I do know that LA County District Attorney Steve Cooley should be forced to resign for saying that the jurors were “incredibly stupid” and the Blake is “guilty as sin.” While both may very well be true, a district attorney doesn’t get to say so. He either believes in the principle that only juries get to decide who is guilty, or he shouldn’t be in the job. His remarks are as unprofessional as Dr. Bill “Kitty Killer” Frist’s video diagnosis of Terri Schiavo.

The LA Times comments that in flying to Washington to sign the Terri Schiavo bill in his jammies, but not saying a word about the Minnesota school massacre, Bush is responding to the demands of his core constituencies: “Conservative Christians pressed Bush to intervene for Schiavo, while the National Rifle Assn. and other gun-owner groups generally look to minimize the relevance of political responses to mass shootings.” So there could be a compromise here. If Terri is as functional as Frist says she is, and if she were to “accidentally” shoot herself while cleaning her gun....

The future

The Pentagon website is particularly grotesque at the moment. The picture they thought appropriate for a story on the “Faces of the Fallen” exhibition at Arlington is this one, because children in camouflage ARE the future.



Next to that is this logo, which evidently depicts a heart with dog tags, not an open zipper and really patriotic genitalia, as I first thought.



If you click on that logo at the DOD site, you go here where there’s a picture of Jamie Farr, MASH’s Corporal Klinger, because men wearing dresses to escape the military ARE the future.

Below that is a link to this story, about 48 new military recruits being publicly sworn in before a crowd of 43,000 at the... wait for it ... Houston Livestock and Rodeo Show. How... appropriate.

And a bit below that is this inanity:

People who have hope plant flowers. And Kabul, Afghanistan, will be blooming this spring, according to Mary Jo Myers, wife of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Afghan women are planting flowers and enjoying the rain that seems to have finally broken the decade-long drought in the country. “Given the importance of flowers in the country, the actions of these women show they have hope for the future of the country,” Mrs. Myers said.

Because these flowers ARE the future of Afghanistan:

Big border

Recently I’ve been seeing these stories about how Bush actually reads books, and does not amuse himself in his off-hours, as most of us had thought, with a ball of string. George, these stories try to convince us, is smarter than we think. But if he’s reading all these big-boy books, why is most of his vocabulary still that of a 3-year old? Today, for example, in a news conference with the heads of Canada and Mexico, Bush kept saying that the US has a “big border” with those countries. Long, you moron, the word is long.

Jeb Bush trotted out a “renowned” neurologist to claim that Terri Schiavo was not without brain function but had “minimal consciousness.” At this precise moment I’m suffering from a surfeit of consciousness, as five million Florida jokes all seek to emerge at once. The doctor himself suffers from false consciousness, telling anyone who will listen that he was a nominee for the Nobel Prize, which he was not.

There’s one significant datum in the Terri Schiavo affair I haven’t seen: the cost of sustaining her vegetable existence year in and year out.

The British elections are moving along nicely, with Michael Howard running a campaign that’s a never-ending quest to find people to attack who are more repugnant to the British public than he is. I check in on the Tory website every few days to see who’s on the menu of hate, and yesterday it was “travellers,” aka gypsies, people who have caravans. Mark Steel of the Indy comments:

Having got through burglars and asylum-seekers, he’s running out and has had to go back to historical groups such as Gypsies, with six weeks still to go. Soon he’ll tell us that decent people are having their lives ruined by hordes of Huguenots. He’ll hold a press conference to say: “I was speaking yesterday to an old-age pensioner who can no longer hear her pet cat crying to come in because of the noise of all the Huguenots in her street speaking Flemish and making cloth. The time has come to say Enough is Enough. If you want to weave - you’ll have to leave’.”

This picture of Blair comes from the Tory website:

God.co.uk is an Englishman

In a great victory for evil drug companies, India’s parliament, under severe pressure, has passed a drug patent law that will result in the deaths of millions of people not only in India but in places like Africa that relied on cheap Indian generic drugs.

To prove how modern and yet traditional he is, Tony Blair spoke at a church today. Well, a “church.co.uk” webcast. With the Catholic church urging Catholics to vote Tory, and Michael Howard advocating reducing the cut-off date for legal abortions from 24 to 20 weeks, Labour had been trying to keep religion out of politics — “We don’t do God,” said Blair’s spin doctor — but evidently God.co.uk is another matter.

After writing that, I checked. There actually is a god.co.uk website, where you can download the New Testament in MP3 format.

Eric Umansky asks if the use of a .gov url makes this
strengtheningsocialsecurity.gov propaganda site illegal. If it makes him feel any better, there’s also, heh heh, a
strengtheningsocialsecurity.com.

A certain investor class

First Draft points out that Bush, so successful in branding critics of No Child Left Behind as racists harboring the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” and branding the opponents of the “liberation” of Iraq and the whole Middle East as racists who don’t believe Muslims capable of democracy, is now branding those who oppose “personal” retirement accounts as racists who think “there’s only a certain investor class in America.” So the new motto is “Investment Accounts: Not Just for Jews Anymore.”

The tulip/lemon/kalpak revolution

Dick Cheney thinks this is a reassuring thing to say about Social Security: “In effect, what we are saying is we are going to tie your future as you retire to the overall health and function of the American economy.” I so look forward to spending my retirement checking the stock market prices every morning to see if I get to have the good cat food for dinner.

Kyrgyzstan’s lemon revolution — or possibly tulip revolution, they still haven’t made up their minds, which probably does not bode well for the future — continues. Or, if you listen to the government, “a putsch and a coup” organized by “criminal elements connected to the drug mafia,” which doesn’t sound very tulipy to me.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I am now an expert on Kyrgyzstan. I know that Kyrgyzstan women are “diligent, faithful, good-natured, loyal, responsible, stable, traditional, understanding, intelligent.” And I know that in Kyrgyzstan it’s all about the hats:


The protester in the center is wearing a seized soldier’s helmet, the guy on the right isn’t actually wearing a hat, that’s his real hair, while the guy at the left is wearing what news stories refer to as Kyrgyzstan’s “traditional felt hats,” which are called kalpak. They account for, oh let’s say 98% of the Kyrgyz economy, so the Kyrguys and Kyrgals get very upset if you don’t look good in one:

Other ways

Crowds protesting the, shall we say, flawed elections in Kyrgyzstan (Motto: It’s Pronounced Just like It’s Spelled!), elections backed, naturally, by Vladimir Putin, the patron saint of stolen elections, have taken over the country’s second city, which even they were surprised to find out is named Osh.

Condi Rice says if North Korea doesn’t return to talks, we will have to find “other ways” of making it comply with our wishes. No, I don’t see any reason they’d feel a need to arm themselves with nukes for self-protection, no reason at all.

The Republicans are finally advocating universal health care. In the future, everyone in the country will have a doctor. Unfortunately, they’ll all have the same doctor, Bill Frist, who will glance at a video of them and make an instant diagnosis. Neurology, gastroenterology, opthamology, podiatry (but not gynecology, he’s a good Christian man and not into that sort of thing), you name it and he’ll issue a pompous, ill-informed pronouncement.


More.

Darned careful

Secretary of War Rumsfeld says Iraqis should “be darned careful about making a lot of changes just to be putting in their friend or to be putting in someone else from their tribe or from their ethnic group.” That describes how George Bush got every job he’s ever had.

Rummy also blames Turkey for the current insurgency, because its refusal to be used as a springboard for the invasion of Iraq slowed us down, allowing “regime elements” to disperse and live to fight another day. The Road to Surfdom points out that this directly contradicts Bush’s “catastrophic success” theory.

Watched a bit of the Terri Schiavo coverage on Fox and it wasn’t too bad, although not terribly competent, saying that the judge in the case was appointed by “President Clinton in 1990.”

A healthy thing

Secretary of War Rumsfeld on why Iraq’s failure to form a government, 7 weeks after the elections, is actually a good thing: “I think all of the debate, discussion and politics is a healthy thing.” Sure wasn’t what the Republicans told Al Gore in 2000.

Outside help

The WaPo is calling for the US to provide “outside help” to preserve democracy in Bolivia, although, as with its editorials attacking Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, you could be forgiven for thinking the Post was more concerned with energy exports to the US than with democracy. Mr. Chávez makes an appearance here too, accused of “meddling” in Bolivia (as opposed to “outside help”). Evidently Chávez, “along with Cuba’s Fidel Castro dreams of a new bloc of Latin ‘socialist’ (i.e., undemocratic) regimes that will join with like-minded states such as Iran, Libya and China to oppose the United States.”

Like-minded? Libya and China? Iran and Cuba?

The funny thing is that the Post news section has an article on John Negroponte’s stint as ambassador to Honduras, providing “outside help” by running interference for its death squads. The article is better than the editorial, although you have to wonder about their choice of words in saying that he “is still being hounded by human rights activists,” such as a woman whose brother was disappeared. Hounded indeed, like Inspector Javert chasing Jean Valjean.

Given that Bush saw fit to promote a man with that record to Intelligence Tsar, it’s hard to imagine why the Post thinks any “outside help” provided by the US to Bolivia would be in the direction of “head[ing] off the breakdown of democracy in Latin America”. Also, we have some idea of the Bushies’ commitment to Bolivian democracy from its past record, which the Post doesn’t see fit to mention: during the 2002 Bolivian presidential elections, the American ambassador and Otto Reich of the State Department issued repeated blunt threats about cutting aid — and worse — if the country elected the wrong candidate. They took the hint and our candidate won.

The editorial also defends the opening of Bolivian infrastructure to outside (i.e., American) investment, so that provision of water is run on a for-profit basis. I don’t know much about the specific situation in Bolivia, but that usually means a whopping increase in water bills, and aggressive disconnection of those who can’t afford it.

This looks like a good place to find out more about Bolivia. (Update: and here. Thanks to Josh Narins of Remain Calm for the link.)

And that’s not the point

This week the Daily Show unfairly made fun of talk show hosts who questioned Condi Rice over and over last Sunday about whether she would run for president, but the reason they did so was that it took several rounds to get her to give an answer not containing weasel words like “I have no intention of running.” So North Korea can take her assertion that the US has “no intention” of attacking it and “no desire” to do so for what it’s worth.

And this doesn’t help either:

In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya. That was a significant new charge, the first allegation that North Korea was helping to create a new nuclear weapons state.

But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction. North Korea, according to the intelligence, had supplied uranium hexafluoride -- which can be enriched to weapons-grade uranium -- to Pakistan. It was Pakistan, a key U.S. ally with its own nuclear arsenal, that sold the material to Libya. The U.S. government had no evidence, the officials said, that North Korea knew of the second transaction.

If we didn’t already have the leaked memo about what a great issue Terri Schiavo’s brain-dead body was for the R’s, we might wonder why Congressional intervention took the form of a law moving the case to the federal courts, which just drags the whole thing out, when the law could just as easily have ordered that she be kept alive forever and ever. Tom DeLay even says that permanently preventing her feeding tube being removed is “not the point.” No, you bottom-feeding demagogic blowhard, it surely isn’t. GeeDubya will fly back to Washington specifically to sign the bill.

Favorite headline: “Boston Archbishop Will Wash Women’s Feet.” I’m sure he will.

Rehabilitation, American style

I’m not sure which was the slimiest thing done by a politician this week, Gerry Adams warning the family of murdered Belfast man Robert McCartney not to be “manipulated” for political gain, or Bill “I’m a doctor you know” Frist proclaiming that he’d watched videotapes of Terri Schiavo for an hour and is convinced that the people who have observed her vegetating for the past 15 years have it wrong.

The Sindy reports that the US military routinely orders the release of Iraqi common criminals, including kidnappers, if they promise to spy on the insurgents. Nice.

Speaking of common criminals, does it worry anyone that Wolfowitz is going to the World Bank even though he based his understanding of Iraq on the word of Achmad Chalabi, a man convicted of bank fraud?

Real men don’t need a strategy of the weak

The idiots at the LA Times just scared the crap out of me with this misleading headline: “Policy OKs First Strike to Protect U.S.” They mean that the Pentagon’s new strategic plans codify Bush’s policy of preemption. This does not mean nuclear attack, which the term “first strike” usually means in a military context, as the headline-writer evidently does not know; thus the crap-scaring-out effect of that headline.

JARGON ALERT: This policy is known by the euphemism “active deterrence.”

My favorite sentence from the report: “Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak, using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism.” I love how those three are just lumped together. The World Court, 9/11, pretty much the same thing. Strategies of the weak. The LA Times, by the way, so careless in its use of “first strike,” saw fit to replace the word fora with forums, in brackets, like there’s something wrong with Latin plurals.

No better story

Condolencia Rice (as Hugo Chávez calls her) in Afghanistan: “There could be no better story than the story of Afghanistan in the last several years”. I dunno, the one about the priest, the rabbi and the talking dog was a pretty good story too. She kept talking about the Afghans’ “commitment” to democracy, which remains as unfulfilled as my commitment to drop a few pounds. Condi explained the latest postponement of parliamentary elections (now 15 months behind schedule) as being because Afghanistan is a large and complicated country. Has it grown in size and complexity since it somehow managed to hold presidential elections? In the absence of a parliament, there is no democracy; without checks on his power, Karzai is by definition a dictator.

Incidentally, as an example of the State Dept’s competence and professionalism in dealing with and understanding this part of the world, note the blank spots in the transcript on the State Dept website (link in previous paragraph) whenever a reporter or Karzai spoke in their native language. Just as our new goodwill ambassador to the Muslim world, Karen Hughes, doesn’t need to know Arabic to perform that job, no one at State needs to know Pashto. If it was important, they’d say it in English.

Speaking of professionalism, Porter Goss told a Senate committee yesterday that the US doesn’t use torture because torture is not “professional interrogation.” Like not wearing a tie to work. Nice that he takes such a principled stand. Actually, what he said is that there is no torture “at this time.” Which could just refer to the time zone difference.

And just to combine the topics of Afghanistan and torture, here’s a (long) Guardian investigation of the many American detention centers/concentration camps in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

According to the London Times, Fidel Castro recently gave a “generally upbeat 5¾ hour speech, two hours of which he devoted to the merits of the pressure cooker which he is distributing cut-price to all Cuban households.”

Speaking of cut-price pressure cookers, Congress really did subpoena the late Terri Schiavo, they really really did. At least she’d be the smartest person in the room.

Speaking of the culture of life, when the Argentinian health minister recently said that he supported legalizing abortion, the Catholic bishop to the armed forces said he should have a millstone hung around his neck and be thrown from a helicopter. In the 1970s, this was a favorite method of the military in killing left-wingers in Argentina.



George shows where Dick Cheney touched him.

A whole, separate, unique, living human being

South Dakota has a new law requiring that, before an abortion, the doctor must tell the woman that abortion ends the life of a “whole, separate, unique, living human being.” Also that she could die or get really depressed afterwards, and that “the pregnant woman has an existing relationship with that unborn human being and that the relationship enjoys protection under the United States Constitution and under the laws of South Dakota,” whatever that means.

The London Times claims to have “clear evidence” that Syria was behind the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, although there is nothing resembling evidence in its story. And Robert Fisk in the Indy, who has in recent days been rather more convincing on the subject, reports that Syria’s top Lebanese intelligence guy announced that he would sue himself, presumably in Syrian court, to prove his own innocence in the assassination. Looking forward to that one.

From the Press Association: “A businesswoman paid £2,500 to fly five invisible mermaids from London to Harare to help her recover a stolen car and cash.”

Will Durst suggests some slogans for Karen Hughes in improving the US’s image (edited slightly down):

• When Democracy Reigns, It Pours.
• America: Just a Big Red White and Blue Teddy Bear With a Whole Lot of Guns.
• Snap. Crackle. Pow. Thud.
• Be All We Think You Should Be.
• Tastes Great. Less Torture.
• They Don’t Call Us The GREAT Satan For Nothing.
• America 2.0. Now With Improved Press Suppression.
• What’s So Bad About Bread And Circuses Anyway?
• John Wayne: Not Just an Actor. A Way Of Life.
• Don’t Like Us? Get In Line.
• Wouldn’t You Really Rather Have A Republic?
• Badges, We Don’t Need No Stinking Badges.
• Friendly Fire ‘R Us.
• Democracy: Just Do It.
• You Keep the Sand, We’ll Take the Oil.
• Sometimes You Feel Like a Crazed Tyrannical Despot, Sometimes You Don’t.
• We’re Everywhere You Want To Be. Deal With It.
• The New Improved Low-Carb, Atkins-Friendly America.
• Got Grenades?
• I Can’t Believe I Invaded The Whole Peninsula.
• Nobody Doesn’t Like Britney Spears.

The values of St. Patrick

Just caught the end of Bush, resplendent in ugly green tie, giving his annual St Patrick’s Day speech. I could swear he said that the US and Ireland share a common commitment to the values of St. Patrick. A dislike of snakes? (See, you thought I would go with the drinking thing, but I went another way.) I watched on Fox, whose anchor dutifully repeated O’Chimpy’s mispronunciation of Irish PM Ahern’s name.