Talabani: We are independent now

So that whole story about Sunnis taking hostages in Madaen and ordering all Shiites out of a town was a fake. The government that the US planted in power after a war justified by false rumor and innuendo is now governing by false rumor and innuendo, quel surprise. The story was evidently planted in order to foment sectarian discord and discredit the army, which Rumsfeld told the Iraqi government, just last week, that it shouldn’t (read: couldn’t) purge of Baathists (read: Sunnis). Today Talabani says that he favors such a purge, but if not, he’ll be happy to use Shiite and Kurdish militias — “popular forces,” he calls them — instead. “We cannot wait for years and years of terrorist activity because we haven’t enough government forces,” he says, although the two months it took after the elections before he was selected for his current post doesn’t indicate any great sense of urgency up until now. He dismisses American opposition to the use of militias by saying “But we are independent now.” Funny, wasn’t he the guy just a few days ago saying how American troops would need to stay for some time yet? Being independent would entail, sort of as a minimum, his government being able to survive five minutes without Americans keeping him alive.

Talabani also repeats his opposition to the death penalty for Saddam Hussein, but says he might just happen to be out of the room when that decision gets made. A man of strong principle... but weak bladder.

Remain calm

From the Daily Telegraph’s contents page:

Shias asked to flee

Sunni Arabs who seized control of a town near Baghdad threaten to kill hostages
unless the Shias in the area flee, Iraqi officials have said.

Asked?

The town, by the way, named Madaen, is only 20 miles from Baghdad, in case you were taken in by all the happy talk about the insurgency declining. It’s hard to tell how big a deal this particular event is, but given all the stories today in the NYT & elsewhere marking the 30th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge ordering everyone out of the cities, this tactic of the "Sunni Arabs" (!) is a little worrying.

Fortunately we have Iyad ("Comical") Allawi, who somehow is still interim prime minister, to reassure us. This sentence is from the Reuters report:

He said some people were trying to implement "wicked plans of extremist terror"
and urged Iraqis to remain calm.

Not exactly a lullabies and sweet dreams kind of guy.

A gift to humanity

Follow-up: West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin has vetoed the Hillbilly English-only bill.

But is it art? From the Observer: “A Berlin couple plan to have their first baby at an art gallery on 24 April. Winifried Witt and Ramune Gele described their decision to have their child at the DNA-Galerie in central Berlin as ‘a gift to humanity’. About 30 people are expected to attend the birth.” I’ve heard of an art opening, but this is ridiculous.

A WaPo exclusive contains the stunning news that the American military commander in Afghanistan claims to be winning. Lt. Gen. David Barno went on to assert that any really spectacular military action by the Taliban will just show their desperation. Heard that one before. Barno says that Talibani are giving up because “they don’t want to be in this fight that goes against the tide of history here in Afghanistan any longer.” Yes, Talibani hate going against the tide of history, they positively pride themselves on their trendiness.

California prison guards, who have a ridiculously powerful union, have been getting training credits for finding words in jumbles, you know the sort of thing. For example at Pelican Bay last December, guards found words like candycane, elf, Frosty, and Santa Claus for one hour’s credit. Guards are of course supposed to be finding actual elf and frosty, which are I believe street slang for amphetamines and cocaine respectively, up prisoners’ asses, at least I assume that must be the rationale.

An LA Times article gives the D’s their strongest approach to combating Bush’s judicial nominees. It points out the existing strong R majority on most federal circuit courts, with only the currently evenly divided 6th Circuit due to change hands. So it’s not, can’t be, about fighting R domination of the judiciary; rather, the article says, it’s about “the kind of Republican who joins the courts”. That’s what the D’s should be saying. And oh look, here’s Rick Santorum writing an op-ed piece in the WaPo, paving the way for the nuclear option by pretending that Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown (she’s the daughter of a sharecropper, you know) are middle-of-the-road jurists unfairly hurt by an “unprecedented campaign of obstruction.” He uses the word “extreme” two times in as many sentences. Rick Santorum does. Rick fucking Santorum. And then accuses the D’s not only of dissing the American people by their stalling of Bush nominees, but of threatening the separation of powers.

A NYT article Saturday about the US cancelling water projects in Iraq and shifting the money to the military contains this killer quote from a civil engineer: “If the Americans think that training the Iraqi Army comes before clean drinking water for the people of Halabja, then we can’t expect anything from them.” And of course Halabja is a Kurdish town, so a stronger Iraqi army doesn’t protect it but actually threatens Kurdish autonomy.

The Sindy reports that the US has been selling arms to the Haitian coup government in violation of its own supposed arms embargo.

At long last, someone has developed a methodology for the typical unification of access points and redundancy

The Pentagon website appends this helpful datum at the very bottom of an article on Rumsfeld’s triumphal tour of the colonies (Iraq, Afghanistan, Kyrgystan): “He also made an overnight stop and met with local leaders in Baku, Azerbaijan.” Yes, it’s the local color that makes travel writing come alive. I’m sure he couldn’t be up to anything clandestine and unsavory in Azerbaijan.

Here is the ad for the Bill Frist anti-filibuster telecast, called “Justice Sunday,” which won’t be available on tv but will be streamed on the internet.



The choice would probably be more equal if the gavel were a bit bigger, if you know what I mean. The words, too small to read, are “The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and now it is being used against people of faith.” Of course, if they’re saying that the D’s oppose Bush’s judicial nominees because of their overt religiosity, the corollary is Bush chose them precisely for that religiosity. They’re delusional if they believe that that’s an argument that will appeal to, instead of frighten, the public at large. Equating attempts to preserve the separation of church and state with Southern opposition to racial integration, which the American Talibani have decided is their best line of attack, requires portraying the nominees as part of a specific, identifiable class of people which can be discriminated against. I say, if they want to depict the nominees as Evangelical Christian activists rather than as qualified jurists, let them.

What’s curious is that the same people who are so politically tone-deaf about how Americans view the role of the judiciary, do understand that their real agenda, which is of course overturning Roe v. Wade, is unpopular, which is why you never hear them use the word abortion when attacking judicial filibustering.

A chimney is being erected at the Sistine Chapel, to indicate when a new pope is chosen. It’s all about the phallic symbols today, isn’t it? Also, the body that will choose the next pope is called a conclave, the device that is supposed to be used to destroy the flu strain accidentally mailed out is an autoclave. It would probably be bad to reverse the two.

I rather like that the legislative calendar has put the permanent repeal of the estate tax adjacent to the bankruptcy bill. Shows the war against the poor in all its glory. Honestly, they should just pass a bill to require families bankrupted by illness to hand over their cars and houses directly to the ne’er-do-well offspring of plutocrats; call it the Capitalism Simplification Act of 2005.

Bush depicted the bankruptcy bill as making credit more available to the poor. Three hundred years ago people made the same argument about the poor financing their emigration to America through indentured servitude.

Nine years after the journal Social Text printed a deliberately meaningless paper entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” gibberish has gone high-tech. Three MIT students programmed a computer to generate a paper, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy,” which was accepted for an academic conference.

Being tough when it comes to running down people in caves that are trying to do harm to free people

Entomologists have named newly discovered species of slime-mold beetles after Bush (Agathidium bushi), Cheney and Rumsfeld. Being entomologists, they thought that was a compliment. Guardian headline: the axis of weevils. I can’t find a picture, and you know I tried.

Fun with abstinence. I think it was on Atrios where I found this link; I pretty much figured out it was a parody when I saw the phrase “faith-fucking.” It includes a section, “Ask Dr. Frist,” in which he gives such advice as “whenever you masturbate, God kills a kitten.”

A study in the Lancet says that executions performed in the US are incompetently done and therefore painful. The executioners are supposed to administer anesthesia but have no training in it, and in 21 of 49 bodies autopsied, didn’t administer enough to render the prisoner unaware of pain, much less unconscious. 43 received less anesthetic than the standard for surgery. Since they were also given a paralytic, any pain would have been invisible to observers.

One thing that should reduce the number of executions: the Texas legislature has voted to allow juries to give sentences of life without parole. Faced with the possibility that a killer could be released one day, juries have often preferred to execute. Of death-penalty states, now only New Mexico lacks the no-parole option. When Bush was governor, I believe he was a strong opponent of the culture of life-without-the-possibility-of-parole.

He was asked today how he reconciled his support of the death penalty with the culture of life. Of course, Bush being Bush, the amazing thing wasn’t that he kept two contradictory ideas in his head, but how he kept two ideas in his head, period. He said that the difference between Terri Schiavo and a convicted killer is “the difference between guilt and innocence”. And the death penalty saves lives.

That was Bush talking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors today. Talked down to them, in fact:

Today I was with the Indian Foreign Minister, and we were talking about the neighborhood. [what’s with the thing he’s been doing lately where he says “neighborhood” instinstead of “region”?] And I reminded him that I was appreciative of the efforts of President Musharraf and his efforts in fighting al Qaeda. I thought it was in the best interests of the United States and India that President Musharraf be tough when it comes to running down people in caves that are trying to do harm to free people. After all, India is a free country. It made sense to encourage a leader like President Musharraf.

And when asked about his failure to give the details of his Social Security plan, he slipped into an Edward G. Robinson impersonation:

we have been talking about it for a while, but it’s going to take a while more to continue making clear to people in Congress that we got a problem, see.

None of the editors asked him how he felt about the slime-mold beetle. But then again, no one asked the slime-mold beetle how it felt about being named after Bush.

Outlawing nuclear terrorism. And Swahili

The West Virginia legislature has made Hillbilly English the state’s official language. There’s a bit of a fuss because many legislators voted on the bill (regulating the size of park and recreation boards) without knowing the provision had been added on, because they had not read the bill, which was written in Swahili, just proving how necessary the whole thing is.

The UN General Assembly has voted in favor of a treaty outlawing the use of nuclear weapons by terrorists, and about time because there was this big legal loophole just waiting for terrorists to walk right through it. As we know, terrorists are very concerned with legal niceties.

The treaty doesn’t apply to nuclear war conducted by nation-states; it would hardly be worth the bother to establish a state, write a constitution, blah blah blah, and then not be able to nuke another country).

Oh, and if the terrorists use nuclear weapons within the countries of which they are citizens, that’s also kosher. That should increase the chances of it being ratified in the US, where the NRA supports the right to keep and bear nuclear arms for, say, hunting purposes. If nuclear terrorism were outlawed, only outlaws would... you get the idea.

They’ve been working on this treaty since 1996.

The Labour Party manifesto: banishing the demons of outside toilets

Britain’s Labour party issues its election manifesto.

Tony Blair says he has proven his party’s competence; they “banished the demons of ten per cent interest rates, mass unemployment, wages of £1.50 an hour, and outside toilets in our schools.” Outside-toilet demons? Someone call Stephen King. “I have heard teachers in Bexley, Middlesbrough and Sheffield tell me how they no longer have to work in crumbling classrooms without books and computers – and pupils show me, with pride, round their sparkling new school.” Sparkling schools? Someone call J. K. Rowling.

Tony says, “we refuse to accept false choices. The British people never wanted to choose between wealth creation and social justice. They never wanted to choose between national security and overseas aid. They never wanted to choose between equal rights and protection from crime.” The false choices thing might seem a touch more sincere if he hadn’t said the page before, “Now we have to decide whether to go forward or back.”

Interestingly, Blair implicitly acknowledges his personal unpopularity by including a promise that this is his “last election as Leader of my party and Prime Minister”. In other words, he will step down in favor of Gordon Brown sometime in the next 4 years.

Mostly it’s detailed and wonkish and not really meant to be read; you’re meant to turn the pages rapidly and receive the reassuring impression of solidity and competence without actually absorbing any details (pretty much what I did, but then I’m not British and if I were I’d be voting LibDem or Green or Monster Raving Loony). It doesn’t have any of the space-filling tricks of the Tory manifesto, those pages of scrawled slogans and pictures (my favorite was the stills from CCTV footage of a woman’s handbag being stolen). Labour’s 112 pages includes 1 picture — Tony, of course.

I’m expecting the LibDem manifesto to consist entirely of pictures of Charles Kennedy and his newborn son. The kid was born yesterday, just after midnight, and some time before the sun went down, he and his mother were out of the hospital for a photo op across from the Houses of Parliament.

A quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy

To keep their deliberations on the next pope secret, the Vatican will use an “electromagnetic force field,” and the cardinals will be frisked to ensure that they don’t sneak in cell phones, laptops, Gameboys and suchlike. And speaking of people who should never speak in public, I’d have more sympathy (well, no I wouldn’t, but play along) for the Vatican decision to give Cardinal Bernard Law, the enabler of so much child sexual abuse, an honored speaking role if these were not the same people who ordered all those Liberation Theologians to repent their views or shut up.

A former subordinate suggested that John Bolton does not play well with others and is a “a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy.” Precisely the character traits which the Bushies consider make him perfect for the job of ambassador to the UN.

You’d think the WaPo would have put this paragraph higher up:

Negroponte was unable to answer some of the panel’s questions. He did not know what his authority is under the USA Patriot Act, was not conversant in the difference between clandestine and covert military operations, and believed that the government is classifying fewer documents than it had previously. That interpretation is at odds with the findings of numerous government commissions.

Actually, the first of those is a little unfair: he said he didn’t know what his authority was in relation to wiretaps under the Patriot Act. (Transcript). What he was, though, was legalistic: he said that as ambassador to Honduras, “my comportment was always in an absolutely legal and entirely professional manner.” On torture he said he would try “to make sure that all practices of the intelligence community are in full compliance with the law” and on rendition that “the law will be obeyed”. “Not quite breaking the law” is a pretty low standard to set. If the best thing you can say about a doctor is that her practice of medicine always stayed within the boundaries of the law — or a plumber, or a checkout clerk, if it comes to that — it wouldn’t be a ringing endorsement.

Hoo-ah!

When I quoted Rummy in my last post warning Iraqi leaders about being “attentive to the competence of the people in the ministries,” I should have made it clear that he was telling them not to purge Baathists. He said a purge would make it difficult to “defeat a doggone insurgency.”

The Emperor Chimpy inspects the troops at Fort Hood. From the transcript:

Many of you have recently returned from Iraq. (Hoo-ah!) Welcome home -- and thank you for a job well-done. (Hoo-ah!) Others are preparing to head out this fall -- (Hoo-ah!) -- some for a second tour of duty. (Hoo-ah!)

I think that’s the soldiers doing the hoo-ah’ing, unless Shrub has come down with Tourette’s. He went on:

Whether you’re coming or going, you are making an enormous difference for the security of our nation and for the peace of the world.

It’s official: he doesn’t know whether we’re coming or going in Iraq.

When Ironhorse soldiers left for Iraq, Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator sitting in a palace, and by the time you came home, he was sitting in a prison cell.

What I’m saying is, he sits down a lot. Not a lot of standing.

In Baghdad, soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division launched Operation Adam Smith, and the new generation of Iraqi entrepreneurs you helped nurture will create jobs and opportunities for millions of their fellow citizens.

Operation Adam Smith? Does the military enforce the division of labor in pin manufacture by force of arms? Somehow I think the 1st Cavalry Division is a rather more visible hand than the Scottish philosopher envisioned.

Donald “Unnecessary Turbulence” Rumsfeld speaks

Secretary of War Rumsfeld issues a warning to Iraqis: “It’s important that the new government be attentive to the competence of the people in the ministries and that they avoid unnecessary turbulence.” Sage advice from a man who eats, drinks, breathes and craps unnecessary turbulence. You want less unnecessary turbulence, you warmongering idiot? Stop invading shit!

I’ve been meaning to write a little about the British elections, although they haven’t yet become as interesting as in years past.

In fact, LibDem leader Charles Kennedy’s wife gave birth today and he took parental leave from the campaign.

I’ve skimmed the Tory Party election manifesto, which was issued yesterday. It’s always amusing to see policy wonks trying to sound like loudmouths at the local pub. It’s full of such clever policy pronouncements as “I mean, how hard is it to keep a hospital clean?”, “What’s wrong with a little discipline in schools?”, “It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration”, “Put more police on the streets and they’ll catch more criminals. It’s not rocket science, is it?” Still, Michael Howard is most persuasive (which isn’t saying much) when he attacks Tony Blair personally, threatening that Labour’s (near-inevitable) victory will mean “five more years of smirking.” The Tory campaign slogan is, for fuck’s sake, “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”

Fortunately, there is an alternative.

Settling on the settlements

Chimpy met Ariel Sharon today.

Bush went out of his way to be vague about settlements. His handlers had given him a really short mantra from which he did not stray: “the road map says no expansion of settlements.” Also, “road map road map road map.” At no point did he say that Sharon’s plans for major expansions of the settlements contravened the road map, although he said it in such a way that you might think he had, which was the point. But when Sharon stood up and insisted that Israel will “meet all its obligations under the road map” but that he intends to build new housing to make the settlements contiguous with Jerusalem, Bush didn’t object. Clearly, Sharon will be allowed to interpret the road map to mean the exact opposite of what it says. In fact Bush said that “the United States will not prejudice the outcome of final status negotiations” and went on to do just that: “changes on the ground, including existing major Israeli population centers, must be taken into account in any final status negotiations.”

Sharon kept talking about an “opportunity” that shouldn’t be missed. By which he means the death of Yasar Arafat. A little hint: when you’re making nice with people, you don’t usually refer to the death of their leader as an opportunity.

When talking about the settlements, Sharon slipped in some wording as carefully chosen as Bush’s: Judea and Samaria.


And we’ll make Mahmoud Abbas jump this high.


Speaking of unnecessary expansion, here George offers Ariel cookies in the shape of the Israeli flag.

Accountability and the bull in the China shop

USA Today reports that the State Dept is trying to spend $3m on “educational institutions, humanitarian groups, non-governmental organizations and individuals inside Iran to support the advancement of democracy and human rights.” Interestingly, the US is prohibited from interfering in Iran’s internal affairs by the 1981 agreement under which Iran released the 52 hostages. The State Dept website describes this project as seeking “to raise public awareness of accountability and rule of law as an important aspect of the democratization process in Iran.” So Iranians taking money secretly from a foreign government will explain the importance of accountability? We’re like those American tourists in Europe complaining about all the tourists: we just don’t see our interventions into the politics of other countries as peculiar, alien, foreign in any way. We expect the governments of every other country to consist of four branches: the executive, the legislative, the judiciary, and the CIA.

Speaking of accountability, John Bolton was evidently questioned so harshly at his confirmation hearings that his mustache turned white.

Responding to a question about how much respect he had for the UN.

Joe Biden: “Some have said that sending you to New York would be like sending Nixon to China. I’m concerned it will be more like sending the bull into a China shop.” (Most of the news stories mutilate this bon mot by only giving the second sentence.)

Bolton explained that he didn’t really hate the UN, just the fact that it was run by all those foreigners, saying “for the UN to be effective, it requires US leadership. I deeply believe that.” So he sees his role less as ambassador, and more as King of the World.

Under strain

Iraqi President Talibani is opposed to the death penalty! Even for Saddam Hussein.

Guardian headline about the Israeli shooting of 3 Palestinians involved in soccer, or gun-smuggling, or possibly soccer-ball smuggling, depending on who you listen to: “Killing Puts Ceasefire under Strain.” Ya think?

The tool was there to be picked up

Just ran across a 4-month old post in a blog hitherto unknown to me, Apostate Windbag, on the Orange Revolution and all the other “cookie-cutter uprisings,” those media-friendly, focus-grouped, pro-democracy movements in former Soviet republics and elsewhere, and the American role in creating or assisting them, and a follow-up which extends the discussion to Venezuela, Bolivia and Mexico. Mr. Windbag argues that resistance to tyranny is still resistance to tyranny, even if Americans in trenchcoats are wandering around the periphery, and should be supported as such. The US, he argues, is amoral rather than immoral and is

“as happy with Stalinoid dictators who boil people alive - as in Uzbekistan - as it is with bourgeois democrats such as the Ukraine’s Yushenko - it doesn’t matter which form of government, so long as it suits its needs. ... at least in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the US has decided to exploit the strategy of popular ‘revolution’. They would not be able to if the land were not fertile for the planting of such geopolitical seeds in the first place. They have used this tool because the tool was there to be picked up.”

Both posts are quite long, but are full of good information, clear-headed analysis and good writing. And he attacks the same WaPo editorial I eviscerated last month.

Rather less believable “spontaneous” demonstrations have been popping up in oh-so-spontaneous China, to protest “Japanese militarism.” Just as despots in Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe feel obligated to uphold their credentials with rigged elections, China is creating this simulacrum of popular outrage to justify vetoing Japan’s attempt to gain a seat in the UN Security Council. To be fair, Japan has once again put out school textbooks that whitewash the Nanjing Massacre, just to see if there’d be less outrage this time around.

Show of force

The American Street points out that CNN low-balled today’s Baghdad demonstration (the one I posted the pictures of two posts ago) by describing it as “several thousand protesters.”

Well, the WaPo not only gives it more accurate number, “tens of thousands”, but is somehow magically able to determine that they are all “Shiite Muslims loyal to militant cleric Moqtada Sadr”. The Post characterizes the entirely peaceful demonstration as “a show of force” and “as much a show of strength as a declaration of grievances”. What force? What strength? It takes a certain amount of nerve to describe the inhabitants of a country which was bombed, invaded, and occupied for two years, with tens of thousands killed, as conducting a show of “force” when they wave banners and chant slogans to protest that occupation. Hell, they didn’t even so much as pull down a statue.

Friends to whoever wants to be a friend

Prince Charles’ wedding (Indy headline: Charles Makes an Honest Duchess of Camilla) was postponed so he could go to the pope’s funeral (and set off a minor furore by shaking Robert Mugabe’s hand), but that made it conflict with the Grand National — that’s a horsie race. So the queen began her speech at the reception by announcing that Hedgehunter had won.

So how scared should we be of this Marburg virus?

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani: “We will be friends to whoever wants to be a friend, and enemy to whoever wants to be an enemy.” And friends “with benefits” to whoever wants....

In an attempt to humanize Michael Howard, the leader of the Tories (who have announced that they’d really rather not be called Tories anymore), his wife has informed the world that he always cries at the end of Sleepless in Seattle.

The ruling apartheid party of South Africa for so many decades, the National Party, later called the New National Party, has dissolved itself. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, now that you no longer have a black guy in livery to hold the door to prevent it hitting you in the ass.

No, no to the occupiers

Many thousands of Iraqis, after reading my previous post, took to Firdos Square to protest that the sculpture which replaced Saddam Hussein’s statue doesn’t really look much like an abstract representation of freedom to them. They take the plastic arts very seriously in Iraq.






Evidently in Iraqi culture it is customary to thank a country for liberating it by burning its flag in homage.



From left to right, Blair, Hussein, Bush (or the “triangle of death,” as they are known).




The traditional re-enactment of Abu Ghraib torture.

There were no such scenes last year because the Americans sealed off the square with razor wire.

Happy anniversary, toppled statue!

Two years ago today, American troops completed the winning of Iraqi hearts and minds by staging the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in what they tried to tell us was a spontaneous act by jubilant, liberated Iraqis.

Dancing and behaving like women

The Greeks are still bitching about the nation of Macedonia being called Macedonia, as they have been bitching about it for something like 12 years now. Greece wants them to use the name “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” held up EU recognition of the country for years, etc etc. Now a UN envoy is suggesting as a compromise the “Republic of Makedonia-Skopje.”

Speaking about thuggish behavior.. well, hell, this whole post is going to be about various forms of thuggish behaviour:

A WaPo article on something I wrote about in late February, the creation by Putin of a youth movement to fight any attempt at an Orange Revolution in the streets.

Another WaPo piece about a prisoner beaten to death by the shiny new Iraqi police force. His family complained to the American military, which told them they should complain to the police. Evidently the Americans respect Iraqi “sovereignty” too much to intervene. I suspect that before too long, Iraqis will spit whenever they hear an American talk about Iraqi sovereignty.

Saudi authorities have sentenced 105 men who attended a gay wedding to sentences ranging from 6 to 24 months and 200 to 2,000 lashes. Their crime: “dancing and behaving like women.”

No doubt in my mind about that

On the plane home, Chimpy spoke to reporters. Because he’s not a big “reader.” Although he did say he was reading Robert Massie’s biography of Peter the Great, so if next year’s budget includes a beard tax, you’ll know who to blame.

Shrub doesn’t realize that the government of Palestine extends to Gaza: “We need to have institution-building, and there needs to be an international effort that encourages and fosters economic vitality so that a government which does emerge in Gaza will be able to better speak to the hopes of those who live in the Gaza.” Someone explain to the moron that a government doesn’t need to “emerge” in Gaza.

He also never heard that Italy announced it was going to pull its troops out of Iraq, after we shot up that hostage/reporter’s car. “I don’t know why you say that. I’m not sure why you said what you just said.”

He also says (asked about Saudi Arabia and Egypt), something he’s said repeatedly: “we shouldn’t try to impose our democracy on other nations. What we should say is, we’ll work with you to develop a democracy which adapts to your own cultures and your own religions and your own habits.” Never does anybody follow up and ask in what ways democracy should be adapted to the culture and religion of the Middle East.

On the pope: “at the end of his life he made his points to me with his eyes” and “a lot of Christians gain great strength and confidence from seeing His Holiness in the last stages of life.” That could be taken more than one way.

On the next pope: “I’m not going to pre-judge the selection process.”

On why we need to “fix” Social Security now: “Every year we wait costs billions of dollars more.” How so?

And then he plays Freaky Friday: “Now, I was born prior to 1950. But if I were my daughter hearing somebody predict that at some point in time she’s paying an 18 percent payroll tax, I’d be suggesting to the old man -- me -- that I get something done.” Also, if he were his daughter, he’d be drinking even more heavily and doing more butt-dancing. Actually there’s a $10 billion item in the Pentagon budget for “paper clips” which is actually a program to create a device that would allow him to switch bodies with his daughter. Some people say it has already been created. Which would explain a great deal.

And there was one thing he wanted to make perfectly clear, just in case we might get it wrong:

By the way, I think when you discuss religion -- on doubt --there is no doubt in my mind there is a living God. And no doubt in my mind that the Lord, Christ, was sent by the Almighty. No doubt in my mind about that. When I’m talking about doubts, I’m talking about the doubts that an individual struggles with in his or her life. That’s important for you to make sure you get that part of the dialogue correct, if you don’t mind.

Q Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Got it? Everybody got it correct? All right.

Q Thank you.