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The WaPo has another wacky foreign policy editorial, this one entitled “Haiti, One Year Later.” Actually it’s been one year, one month and a few days since, in the Post’s words, “U.S. forces escorted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile,” but who’s counting. Escorted! like they were taking him to a high school dance. The article notes the violence that has roiled Haiti since then, which it then blames entirely on the (unexplained) existence of armed thugs and the weakness of the UN’s armed thugs peacekeepers, who are weak by definition because they are led by Brazilians and not Americans. The Post’s conclusion is that the Bush admin needs to bite the bullet and bow to the “inevitable,” which is to intervene now alongside the UN (fat chance!) because later, “the only recourse, as so often before in Haiti’s history, may be the Marines.”
Haiti is referred to as a “quasi-failed state,” a description I can’t disagree with, without any suggestion that that failure might have something to do with the repeated “recourse” to the United States Marines. The Post demonstrates the same blithe disregard for Haitian political institutions that was behind the removal of its elected president when it says that now, “[h]eavily armed gangs loyal to Mr. Aristide or to drug traffickers roam urban neighborhoods”. Note the false equivalency: drug traffickers, President Aristide, same thing.
Recourse, according to Webster’s, means “a turning to someone or something for help or protection.” If asked whether they want, “as so often before in Haiti’s history,” the help or protection of an invasion by the Marines, not that we ever do ask, the Haitians would doubtless respond, Thanks, you’ve done enough already.
Bush on the pope: “And he didn’t like war, and I fully understood that and I appreciated the conversations I had with the Holy Father on the subject.”
Israel has decided to use the West Bank as a garbage dump, violating international law, threatening the local water supply, and generating more symbolism than should be contained in a single news story.
Bush, hypnotized by Yushchenko’s scarred skin reaches slowly, slowly, to touch it, but at the last moment gives a little screech and runs from the room.
So what channel do the candidates for pope run their attack ads on?
Wouldn’t it be fun to have a pope who wasn’t white?
Or a pope who actually did shit in the woods?
Not that I’m suggesting a non-white pope would shit in the woods.
Anyway, good luck to the next pope, whoever he or she is.
Not the best-chosen AP headline: “World Gets First Glimpse of Pope’s Body.”
The WaPo has an op-ed piece on Zimbabwe that is typical of several I’ve seen the last few days in British and American newspapers in placing much of the blame for Mugabe stealing last week’s elections on South Africa in general and Thabo Mbeke in particular. This article says Mbeke “did everything... to signal that mass fraud would be acceptable.” It helpfully suggests, just as a ferinstance, that SA could have “strangle[d] its smaller neighbor’s economy by switching off its electricity.”
Now I yield to no one in my contempt for the corrupt, fascist thug Mugabe and I am appalled and disappointed by Mbeke’s continued support for him, but how exactly the white man’s burden passed to South Africa I’m not sure. Mugabe has been stealing elections for decades, and officially turned Zimbabwe into a one-party state in 1987, when SA was still an apartheid state and most ANC leaders were in prison. Mbeke’s negative opinion would have made no difference at all (and Mugabe is capable of strangling Zimbabwe’s economy all by himself).
There’s an unspoken assumption in all these pieces that there is a hierarchy of civilization and that those higher up, like SA, have a duty to instruct those beneath them, their “new-caught, sullen peoples, Half devil and half child,” just as we are now in articles like the Post’s instructing the South Africans in their duty. Presumably SA is higher up the ladder because it was run by white people more recently, so it hasn’t fully degenerated or “gone native” yet.
(Update: Matthew Yglesias says something similar here.)
Carl Hiaasen today:
Life is the hot issue in Tallahassee these days.
State lawmakers could hardly wait to hurl themselves into the Terri Schiavio dispute, wiping their feet on the U.S. Constitution along the way.
Even now, rebuked and embarrassed by the courts, they still preach on about the incalculable value of life.
But here’s what they really think a life is worth: barely $9,000 a year.
That’s what the House Claims Committee has told a man who was wrongfully imprisoned for more than 22 years.
More (registration/BugMeNot).
After thinking about it for a couple of months, the US decides that Mark Thatcher, son of Maggie, is disqualified for a US visa by his conviction for his role (note to London Times: not “alleged” role) in trying to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. Says Mark: “It was always a calculated risk when I plea-bargained in South Africa.” No, Mark, it was a calculated risk when you invested in a coup.
Archeologists in Germany have found the oldest known clay figurine of a man. The 7,200-year old man was evidently depicted fucking a 7,200-year old woman (or a 7,160-year old woman if he was a Stone-age Woody Allen, or possibly a 7,225-year old woman if he was a Stone-age Ashton Kutcher). Prior to this discovery, the oldest known porn was 5,000 years more recent. I don’t have a picture, but who really wants to see their great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandparents having sex?
For a couple of days I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people who googled “Joe Lieberman nudist,” which took them to a 2000 archive in which I used both terms in the same month but not in relation to each other. I’ve finally gotten curious and yes, Joe Lieberman is indeed a nudist. Read all about it here, if so inclined, but I accept no responsibility for any images that may stick in your mind.
(Update: a New Haven reader has suggested that the story is an April Fool’s joke, and she may well be right. Just as well then that I don’t have Photoshop, or I’d have been spending my Saturday night putting Holy Joe’s head on Jeff Gannon’s body.)
In keeping with my goal of bringing to light news stories that are ignored by the mainstream press, I must inform you that the pope is dead.
Maybe they’d have been this obsessive about reporting in detail a story that really has no details — dead is dead — if they hadn’t made such a fuss about Terri Schiavo, but since they did, they had to make sure that the fuss they made about the pope was even bigger and more circusy.
When Bush in his statement on the pope’s death (and indeed in his statement on Terri Schiavo’s death two days before) insisted on bringing up the “culture of life,” I wanted to slap him.
From the NYT obituary for Frank Perdue, the chicken king, who did his own commercials: “It helped that he looked like a chicken.”
The man at Sandhurst (Britain’s West Point) who will be in command of Prince Harry: “Prince Harry will call me sir. And I will call him sir. But he will be the one who means it.”
Condi Rice says the pope is “a great moral figure, as well as religious figure.” There just might be something wrong with organized religion when you have to specify which religious leaders are also “great moral figures.”
Speaking of great moral figures, Capt. Rogelio Maynulet was sentenced to no jail time for murdering putting out of his misery a wounded Iraqi, although he was discharged from the army. Said Maynulet, “I’m happy to have my life back, but I’m being forced out of my family. It’s hard to leave the Army this way.” I’m sure the guy he killed felt the same way, except for the having-his-life-back part.
Tom DeLay not only doesn’t clarify yesterday’s fatwa, even to call for there to be no violence against judges in the Schiavo case, but threatens to impeach those judges, who he describes, in a pot-calling-the-kettle-black moment, as “arrogant, out of control, unaccountable.” It’s called the separation of powers, Bug Boy: they’re not supposed to be under your control, they are not accountable to you.
I’ve finally looked at the government website 4parents.gov there’s been all the fuss about. Yup, it really calls for parents to take their gay children to therapists “who share your values,” and implies that homosexuality is a choice or a “lifestyle.” Here’s a sentence that hasn’t been widely quoted, but invokes the Christian right’s fears that children are “recruited” into homosexuality: “Since adolescents are impressionable, parents need to address the issue of sexual orientation within the context of their own value system.”
Georgia passes a law requiring photo ID for elections. Leaving aside the obvious bad faith behind this, it’s unconstitutional if Georgia doesn’t provide picture ID’s for free (Georgia has some sort of provision for doing that for the indigent or elderly, but it has to be universal).
Headline of the day, Thank-You-For-Sharing division: “Pope Has Urinary Infection.”
Kevin Moley, US ambassador to UN organizations, denies the report of UN food expert Jean Ziegler that children in Iraq are starving and that malnutrition rates have doubled under the American occupation. Said Moley, “First, he has not been to Iraq, and second, he is wrong.” Ooo, so sure of himself, but he then insisted that malnutrition data is “difficult to validate,” meaning he has no actual data to rebut Ziegler’s, and that even if malnutrition was increasing, it started when Saddam was still in power. Yes, let’s blame Saddam Hussein for starvation occurring two years after he was forced out of power. Also, why is it relevant that Ziegler hasn’t been to Iraq; how would that in any way help him correlate data? When they throw in that sort of thing as a refutation, you know they don’t have a leg to stand on.
Every blog is quoting Tom DeLay on Schiavo: “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.” They’re assuming he meant some sort of secular retribution, but when I first read it I thought he meant they would all go to hell. Really, it could be read either way, and isn’t it frightening that when he speaks you can no longer tell if it’s in his capacity as House Majority Leader or his capacity as Spokesman for the Wrath of God.
(Afterthought:) and how stupid a politician do you have to be to leave that sort of hostage to fate? If someone attacks the husband or the judge, that comment will be tattooed across DeLay’s forehead forever.
Bush commends the Schindler and Schiavo families for “the example of grace and dignity they have displayed at a difficult time.” Yeah, grace, dignity, just the words I would have used.
Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, head of the Catholic Church’s office for sainthood (now there’s a weird job to put on your resume) says that letting Terri Schiavo die is “an attack against God.” Dude, we totally kicked God’s ass.
That army captain, Rogelio Maynulet, has been convicted for shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner. The court martial judge says he “played God” in shooting rather than treating him. Whereas deciding to invade a country, bomb its cities and depose its leader, that’s not playing God at all.
The intelligence commission says that the spy agencies were “dead wrong in almost all of [their] pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” and still know jack shit about WMDs. Scotty McClellan says they’ll get right on that “in a fairly quick period of time.”
Of course, as Left I points out, intel had little to do with the decision to invade Iraq. I’m agnostic on Eli’s contention that the Bushies never believed there were WMDs. I would guess they expected there to be something, a few anthrax samples, a centrifuge or two, that they could claim was a WMD program, but that they knew there was nothing that was a threat to anyone, no imminent “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Eli uses as evidence the “decidedly lackadaisical search for WMD after U.S. troops had taken control of the country,” but that could just be incompetence. When you are both evil and stupid, it’s hard to differentiate which characteristic is behind any given action.
(Update: Eli responds here and I respond to his response in his comments section.)
Eyeglasses that play DVDs. Civilization is officially at an end.
Some of the Save Terri people have taken to making mock-feminist arguments, saying that Mrs. Schavio is being treated like property by her husband. Where were these people a couple of weeks ago when some businessman actually tried to buy her from her husband for $1 million?
If you look at a newspaper, it’s all medical ethics, all the time. Here’s Tom DeLay, defending taking his father off life support: “My father was in a coma. Schiavo is a living person. My father was on life support and dying. Schiavo is living and wants to live. There is no similarity at all and to even suggest so is pretty sad.” So there you have it, from one of the Every Sperm is Sacred Brigade: people in comas are not living people. I’m not clear what they actually are. And there’s the pope’s nasal-gastric feeding tube. And there’s the US tank commander who told a court martial that he shot a wounded Iraqi prisoner to “put him out of his misery”. Guess he hasn’t understand that America’s rulers are firmly pro-misery. “Misery is on the march!” they proclaim proudly. His lawyer is evidently arguing that mercy killing is allowed under the Geneva Conventions.
Laura Bush in Afghanistan: “As a teacher, I know how important teaching is.” I think she means that as a former teacher, she knows how important teaching was.
Although she spent less than 6 hours in Afghanistan, Laura Bush evidently ran out of Afghans worth speaking with, and decided to hang out with American troops instead. She told them, “Thanks to you, millions of little girls are going to school in this country.” Great, they’re like the world’s most heavily armed school crossing guards.
Follow-up: Juan Cole says that the reason Allawi stalked out of the National Assembly after the cameras were turned off and the press expelled was that his choice for Speaker was rejected for having been too close to Saddam.
The NYT has a story, “U.S. Helped to Prepare the Way for Kyrgyzstan’s Uprising.” The US supplied paper and a printing press and money to an opposition newspaper, and broadcast its stories on the local Radio Free Europe. All relatively mild activities, and Akayev was certainly on my list of Top 40 Dictators Who Need to Be Sent Into Exile, but it still amounts to the US considering it its right to undermine willy nilly any government it dislikes. The difference between this and the covert actions which overthrew the governments of Arbenz, Mossadegh and Allende is one of degree only. It will also give other dictators the ability to paint their oppositions as American puppets, in much the same way that Robert Mugabe is currently campaigning in Zimbabwe’s fake elections as if Tony Blair were running against him.
Also, the NYT puff piece on these activities was pretty obviously spoon-fed to the Paper of Record by someone in State or the CIA.
Laura Bush is going to Afghanistan to demonstrate America’s deep commitment to women’s education there. She will spend a total of 5 hours in the country, but they will be a deeply committed 5 hours. She had this to say: “We want them to develop their education that works for them, just like we do the same thing in our country.” They say married couples begin to look alike, but hanging around with George has obviously done horrible things to her verbal skills. Also, she says she plans to tell Karzai “how moved we are by their efforts, by the big huge vote that turned out earlier this year”. Actually, that was October of last year. Hopefully she’ll demonstrate her deep commitment to Afghanistan by figuring out the difference between it and Iraq before she touches down.
Evidently there will be an “American University in Afghanistan,” which sounds like a really bad idea, and why have I not heard of this before? A cursory googling doesn’t really say who’s behind this, although the US military is currently building it a $370,000 wall (it has to be of good quality because of all the student-hostages who will be shot in front of it)(graduates wear a mortar board and blindfold).
Laura says that Georgie was right to intervene in the Schiavo affair — “It is a life issue that really does require government to be involved” — but also told reporters that she and George both have living wills, presumably so that the government isn’t involved. Aren’t you curious about the details of Chimpy’s living will?
Headline in The Onion: “History Sighs, Repeats Itself.”
The Iraqi parliament met today and, as predicted, accomplished nothing. In fact, it descended into chaos and the acting Speaker (they can’t agree on a Speaker) ordered the tv cameras turned off. Iraqi viewers were then treated to an orchestra playing the national anthem. Disharmony followed by harmony. So they missed “Comical” Allawi storming out and the acting Speaker (chosen because he’s the oldest man there) telling everyone to go home.
Asked about Terri Schiavo, Scotty McClellan said no fewer than six times that Bush is “standing on the side of those who defend life.” I suppose it’s better than standing on their foot.
I don’t know if that joke means I’ve taken too many Vicodin (back trouble) or not enough.
One thing about Bush’s repeated claim that he is “erring on the side of life”: at least he’s finally admitting that he is capable of error.
Not to suggest that the Terri Schiavo protesters are becoming Pythonesque, but I couldn’t help noticing in yesterday’s NYT that some of them were disabled people holding signs saying “Not dead yet,” while elsewhere in the paper the same phrase appears in an article on Spamalot, the theatrical adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which has a song of the same name.
Another juxtaposition that might or might not mean anything: yesterday there was a segment on McNeil-Lehrer on the attempt to insert “intelligent design” into school curricula. The sorts of people who were insisting that they could discern an intelligence behind the development of human life are the same sorts who persist in discerning an intelligence in the living corpse of Terri Schiavo.
As long as we’re talking about intelligent design, here’s today’s Tom Toles:
The Supreme Court let stand a state supreme court ruling allowing newspapers to be sued for accurately reporting false statements made by politicians. This is extremely dangerous. It would be nice if it made them fact-check politicians more, but more likely it will make them even more timid than they already are.
Kyrgyz politicians, in a backroom deal, have agreed to retain the newly, but fraudulently, elected parliament, although presumably without the two offspring of Akayev who were elected it. No one seems to be talking about holding new elections, maybe free and fair ones this time. Akayev fired off another email saying the “revolutionaries” have “ruined our nation’s reputation for the entire world.” Yes, Kyrgyzstan’s... reputation.
The Iraqi parliament is due to meet again Tuesday, and then to adjourn again, having again accomplished nothing. 8 weeks since the election and they haven’t agreed on the shape of the conference table yet. And remember, this is the body that’s supposed to write an entire constitution. I think it’s obvious that’s not going to happen; not these people, not in less than 20 years. So what now?
How far has Russia come since the days of repressive godless communism. The organizers of an art exhibition at the Andrei Sakharov Museum which was attacked by Russian Orthodox thugs have been fined for blasphemy (the thugs were not charged). The exhibit included an icon with a hole for the face where visitors could put their own faces, a Coca Cola logo next to Jesus’s face with the words “This is my blood,” and so on. So the proper charge should not have been blasphemy but first degree triteness.
Speaking of religious zealots, there have been several articles recently about pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions they morally disagree with, like contraception, or contraception for unmarried women. No word on pharmacists who refuse to sell Viagra to unmarried men.
An Evangelical businessman from Michigan has started a company, Zion Oil and Gas, to drill in the spot in Israel where he thinks the Old Testament says oil is located.
Kyrgyzstan now has two parliaments, with different members and government declaring allegiance to one or the other, and the electoral commission and supreme court on opposite sides. Felix Kulov, who would not have his current job as security chief (and indeed would still be in prison) if not for the protests against the patently rigged elections, says the parliament “elected” in those elections is the legitimate one and threatens to arrest any member of the old parliament who protests (and no, I don’t know how much overlap there is, because no reporter has thought to ask that question). The 2000 parliamentary elections were actually probably not much fairer than this month’s.
Dresden city council wants to require dog owners to register their dogs’ DNA so that any poop not picked up by the owners can be tested.
The notion that this might infringe “canine rights” has been dismissed by Saxony's data protection commissioner, Andreas Schurig, who ruled that as dogs were not human they had no rights over their data and could not object to the compulsory tests.
Michael Jackson explained why he showed up at court in pajamas in an interview with Jesse Jackson. No, I won’t tell you why, I didn’t read the article because I don’t care (and neither should you), but I did want to point out that Jesse Jackson interviewed Michael Jackson about why he wore his jammies to court.
If you haven’t seen this comparison of Tom DeLay and Jesus, run click, do not walk.
