Thunk

Kenya’s tourism minister told a travel agents’ conference that Mt. Kilimanjaro was “among the top tourist attractions in Kenya”. Except it’s in Tanzania, which is not amused.

Many fine news organizations have brought us the story of a plane stowaway’s body parts raining from the sky, but New York Newsday reports the vital news that the sound made by the leg was a “thunk.”

His record is apparent and speaks for itself

Bolivia is in the middle of a major crisis, as you will no doubt know from the paragraph about it on the bottom of page A27 of whatever newspaper you read. There have been demonstrations for weeks, with roadblocks keeping La Paz in an economic stranglehold. President Carlos Mesa has again offered to resign (the last president was forced out by protests 19 months ago). Protesters want nationalization of the natural gas industry and more rights for indigenous peoples (that’s one of their leaders in the hat).



American Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega hints in his usual subtle way that all of Bolivia’s problems are caused by Hugo Chavez: “Chávez’ profile in Bolivia has been very apparent from the beginning. His record is apparent and speaks for itself.” In other words, Noriega has absolutely no proof of anything.

The Miami Herald is the only paper that has that, by the way. On its website, I also discovered that Katherine Harris, “who had flirted with the idea of running for Senate in 2004, said Tuesday that after ‘months of encouragement’ from supporters, she had decided to risk her congressional seat and run against [Senator Bill] Nelson.” For the sake of humanity, Miami Herald, I implore you never to use the name Katherine Harris and the word flirted in the same sentence, ever again. Harris says, “one of the greatest honors in life is having a chance to make a difference in the lives of others.” Gee thanks, but you’ve done enough already.

Rep. Harris

Let history record you had me jumping in my seat

On the White House website: “President Celebrates Black Music Month at the White House.” Sure he does. “Let history record you had me jumping in my seat,” George said.

Bush also got to practice his Spanish today, whi the OAS (quoting Jose Marti, with whom Bush has soooo much in common) that “La libertad no es negociable.” And freedom is evidently a tide, which one day will reach Cuba. And then, presumably, go away again, as tides do. He said that democracy must deliver results: “They need to see that in a democratic society, people can walk in the streets in safety, corruption is punished, and all citizens are equal before the law.” He was in Florida at the time. Then he told the assembled delegates of 34 nations, “Let history record you had me jumping in my seat.”

Tuesday marks the same length of time elapsed since 9/11, 1365 days, as between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan.

Whatever else you can say about the 6-3 Supreme Court decision that the feds can enforce federal laws even when they are stupid and conflict with state laws, in this case state laws legalizing marijuana for medical use, it did produce some uncharacteristic responses. The LA Times reports: “Marijuana Patients Remain Defiant.” Dude, there is no such thing as a “defiant” pothead. Mellow, that’s the word you’re looking for. And the head of the DEA says, “We don’t target sick and dying people.” Isn’t that nice to know? Can we have it in writing? Of course if enforcement of federal policies were effective, the sick would get sicker and the dying dyinger.

I’m of two minds about the legal basis of the case. I have a fairly expansive idea of the legitimate powers of the federal government, which I consider derive not just from the commerce clause but are inherent in its nature, its federal governmentness if you will. But the majority on the Court found that the power to ban non-economic distribution of marijuana (or indeed just possession, since you could be arrested for growing the stuff for your own use, pot that not only didn’t cross state borders but never even left your house) derived from Congress’s right under the commerce clause to ban economic sales of illegal drugs, and that’s a logic I don’t accept, a slippery-slope logic that allows for unlimited government intervention into citizens’ lives, if that intervention had some tenuous, seven-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon connection to illegal activity. (Update: oh dear lord, that’s the same argument Clarence Thomas made. I have agreed with Clarence Thomas. Unclean, so unclean....) (And O’Connor, who writes that this broad interpretation “threatens to sweep all of productive human activity into federal regulatory reach.” Which may be the first time toking up has been called productive human activity.)

The biggest asshole in all this: John Walter, the Drug Tsar, who responded to the ruling thus: “We have a responsibility as a civilized society to ensure that the medicine Americans receive from their doctors is effective, safe and free from the pro-drug politics that are being promoted in America under the guise of medicine.” So support for medical marijuana, such as the support expressed by 56% of Californian voters in 1996 (including me), is insincere, compassion for cancer and AIDS and MS and glaucoma patients merely a guise, a ruse, a cunning deception to cover our fiendish pro-drug politics.

Walter also said, “Our national medical system relies on proven scientific research, not popular opinion.” Unless it involves stem cells, condoms, persistent vegetative states....

What to do with the Bastille of our times

When Laura Bush visited a school in Egypt, all the teachers and all the students were replaced by others who didn’t look so... poor.

The Chinese consul for political affairs in Australia tried to defect, offering to tell all about Chinese spies operating in Oz, but was turned down. I don’t know if anything’s behind this other than the Aussie government being scared of China, but there might be an interesting story here.

Eric Umansky argues that closing Guantanamo might make the US even less transparent and accountable, while failing to actually reduce the amount of torture or the number of secretly held prisoners, and increasing the resort to “rendition.” What he’s really worried about though, and rightly, is that without the symbol, the world (and especially Americans) will lose all interest in the treatment of prisoners (Umansky says shutting down Gitmo would be only a symbolic victory, but he values it precisely for its symbolic value). Guantanamo is the brand name for torture news; a generic won’t capture the same share of America’s attention span (nearly a year and a half after the Abu Ghraib revelations, when we were told Abu Ghraib would be handed over to the Iraqis or possibly razed, neither has happened and no one pays much attention to what happens inside its walls anymore). Guantanamo does have propaganda value, but sometimes you just have to storm the Bastille because it’s the right thing to do. Rumsfeld, Gonzales and the other supporters of “stress positions” and detention without trial claim to be pragmatists; those of us on the other side must be idealistic and absolutist in our rejection of torture.

One positive about Guantanamo having become another of those place names that stands in for historical events, like Vietnam, Hiroshima, and Intercourse, Pennsylvania, is that it becomes less usable for other purposes. In the early 1990s, Bush the Elder held Haitian refugees intercepted at sea there; like his son, he refused Amnesty International requests to interview the prisoners and claimed that American political asylum laws didn’t apply there. It will be a long time before Gitmo can be put to such a use again.

Condi divides the Americas

Condi Rice spoke to the general assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) and once again made democracy sound like a threat.

“The divide in the Americas today is not between governments from the Left or from the Right. It is between those governments that are elected and govern democratically -- and those that do not.” Condi does not agree to disagree; she does not have to debate or discuss with governments that have different ideologies and polices from her own, because she can dismiss those governments as illegitimate, even if they happened to win an election. “Together, we must insist that leaders who are elected democratically have a responsibility to govern democratically. And ... governments that fail to meet this crucial standard must be accountable to the OAS.” Governing democratically is a good thing. I’m in favor of leaders who are elected democratically governing democratically. But that’s a pretty subjective standard, and I don’t see that the OAS has the standing, the moral authority or the freedom from United States dominance to apply it.

She mentioned plans to build an “International Law Enforcement Academy” to train Latin American police. Sounds like the School of the Americas, only hidden away in El Salvador so it can operate below the radar.


Obey me! OBEY ME!!

Can’t... resist... really... obvious... joke....

Joe Biden criticizes Howard Dean for saying that many Republicans have never earned an honest living. Guess that means that when you run for president in ‘08 you’ll be plagiarizing someone else’s speeches, huh Joe?

What kind of asshole is John Bolton?

After the tsunami: forced or coerced marriages of under-aged girls in India.

Under the Same Sun has a 2002 George Monbiot column from the Guardian about the United States’s successful effort, led by John Bolton, to fire and trash the reputation of Jose Bustani, the director-general of the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Bustani’s efforts to get his inspectors – who unlike UNSCOM’s inspectors did not also work covertly for the US government – into Iraq, threatened to undercut Bush’s rationale for going to war. I’m not sure this makes Bolton less qualified to be ambassador to the UN than he was before: where some of the earlier stories suggested he was an out-of-control asshole, chasing women down hotel corridors and yelling at them, this one suggests that he was an asshole-for-hire, doing exactly the hatchet job he was supposed to do. Not that he can’t be more than one type of asshole. I think it’s called multi-tasking.

RSS feeds

A nice mention of this blog in the Google discussion group Informed Dissent today said that I don’t have an RSS feed. I do. Two in fact. I created a Feedburner feed last week in a failed (?) attempt to eliminate the problem where Bloglines doesn’t always display my photos. The addresses of those feeds are now in the right-hand column, below the archives.

If there’s anything else I can do to make this site more easily accessible, short of telephoning you all individually to read you my latest post, or if you have any other suggestions, short of fucking myself or stop hurting America by criticizing the president, drop me an email.

In this post is revealed, at long last, what is wrong with the world

Not being British, I often only hear about BBC radio shows when there’s only an episode or two left in their current run. Anyway, I just listened, online, to “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue,” a comedy in quiz show format sort of thing. For example, 2 panelists have to invent a letter from Sir Walter Raleigh to Queen Elizabeth I, speaking alternate words. Sing the lyrics from “You’ve lost that loving feeling” to the tune of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; do the same for “Who let the dogs out” to the Toreador Song from Carmen. I think that episode will be replaced online by the next episode sometime Monday.

The judge who will try Saddam Hussein says that Saddam’s morale has collapsed because “He understands the extent of the charges against him and that he will stand trial before an impartial court.” An impartial judge wouldn’t be making statements like that to the press. The Observer adds that it isn’t clear if Saddam knows about the pictures of himself in his droopy underpants appearing all over the world, including this very website.

Bush’s rejection of the US doing anything to support Tony Blair’s plan to increase to aid to Africa, “It doesn’t fit our budgetary process,” seems especially blithe and dismissive not just towards Africa, which we know he doesn’t care about, but towards Tony Blair, his most reliable ally in the world. Didn’t throw him even a bone, just a bland and not very meaningful phrase (budgetary process?) such as you might use before hanging up on a telemarketer or walking past a pan-handler. Bush’s preferred alternative is forgiving African debt, and then reducing future money to the continent by the exact amount of the forgiven debt.

Condi Rice, in an interview with the Miami Herald which the paper points out more than once is an exclusive, pushes the idea of the OAS stepping up its intervention in the politics of its member states. Well, she calls it being proactive in supporting democracy, but the only two countries she brings up are Haiti and Venezuela, in both of which the Bush admin has supported coups against democratically elected leaders. Speaking about the UN force occupying Haiti, she says, “We’re going to need to look hard at whether not the force posture there is adequate as we get to the run-up in elections”. Because nothing says free and fair elections like a really strong “force posture.”

I mentioned Rumsfeld’s latest attack on Al-Jazeera in my last post, but now I’ve seen more of it, and it’s not pleasant. “Quite honestly, I do not get up in the morning and think that America is what’s wrong with the world. The people that are going on television, chopping off people’s heads is what’s wrong with the world.” In case you were wondering exactly what’s wrong the world, now you know. “And television networks that carry it and promote it and are Johnny-on-the-spot every time there’s a terrorist act are promoting it.” The Johnny-on-the-spot thing is of course a not terribly veiled accusation that Al-Jazeera is in cahoots with terrorists and knows about terrorist acts before they occur.

Does my use of the word cahoots in the previous sentence indicate that when I read Rummy’s words I begin to talk like him? Why goodness gracious no.

Governments have to be accurate. Extremists don’t

Secretary of War Rummy Rumsfeld criticizes China for the increase in its military budget: “Since no nation threatens China, one wonders: why this growing investment?” No nation threatens China? Isn’t it kind of a threat when the nation with the largest military budget suggests to the nation with the third-largest that its military is too well-funded and acquiring too many advanced weapons? What did Rummy hope to accomplish? Obviously China wasn’t going to respond by saying Why you’re right, what were we thinking, building ballistic missiles when no nation threatens us, our bad. Mostly I expect the speech was a threat that if China didn’t put more pressure on North Korea, he’d start berating them in public.

That said, while Rummy is a terrible spokesmodel, calling for the US to have “rods from God” and bunker-buster nukes and so on while telling everybody else who tries to upgrade their military (Venezuela as well as China) to content themselves with pointed sticks, it is true that China’s military expansion is designed to give it offensive capabilities, so it can operate outside its borders and invade or coerce Taiwan, and this is a Bad Thing. And this is the 16th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, so I’m not having especially warm & fuzzy thoughts for Beijing today.

Rummy also criticized Al Jazeera, again, for daring to broadcast the views and actions of terrorists, especially the beheadings, Rummy has a real thing about beheadings. He thinks terrorists are bad, and terrorism is bad, but doesn’t trust that people watching them on tv will draw the same conclusion. The problem, he says with a straight, albeit troll-like, face is that the bad guys can lie: “Governments have to be accurate. Extremists don’t.”


The South Korean minister of defense (left) is still laughing, not realizing that Rumsfeld wasn’t joking when he told him to lick his shoes.

There is a 70% to 80% chance you will be OK

I’ve seen 132 of the 149 movies on the USC film school’s must-see list, and 91 of Time magazine’s top 100 films. For whatever that’s worth.

The Pentagon, which has been allowed to get away with not specifying just how Korans were defiled in Guantanamo, releases — gee, is it Friday already? — details of one of the incidents, in which a guard accidentally urinated on a Koran when he was trying to urinate on a prisoner. So that’s ok then. (Actually, he claims the whole thing was an accident, he just happened to pee near an air vent.) Also a guard kicked a Koran, and an obscene inscription was written in another — two words, they don’t say which ones.

Basra announces that its tourism business is now open again. They suggest that foreigners disguise themselves as natives, dye their hair black, and travel with armed bodyguards, but if they do that, “Then there is a 70% to 80% chance you will be OK,” says the head of the tourism office. Plan your vacations accordingly. The Guardian says, “When not disguised, westerners tend to be greeted warmly, if curiously. ‘Problem in the head? Why are you here?’ one waiter asked the Guardian.”

Lakoff and the language of reproductive rights

Lately, the Republicans have made great efforts to take control of the vocabulary in which issues are discussed. They’re personal accounts, not private accounts, and don’t ever call it privatization, we’re told; it’s the constitutional option, not the nuclear option; the prisoners were mistreated or at worst abused, not tortured, and certainly not in a gulag. For a party led by a man who doesn’t know the difference between disassemble and dissemble and can’t pronounce nuclear, the R’s sure know how to control a debate by grabbing the commanding lexical heights.

As someone interested in the use, abuse and misuse of language in politics, I’ve been following linguist George Lakoff’s work off and on since reading an article of his — this one I think — during the first Gulf War about the use of metaphor by Bush the Elder et al in their arguments in favor of going to war. I haven’t gotten around to Don’t Think of an Elephant — expensive for such a short book, and always checked out of the library — but I got the impression that he was better at deconstructing how Republicans framed their arguments than at helping Democrats construct their frames. His AlterNet article posted yesterday on reproductive rights issues suggests that he has now put the cart entirely before the horse, suggesting that D’s drop not only the words “abortion” and “choice,” but back down from the policies themselves in favor of ones that can be better framed. Being smart about how one presents policies to the public is one thing, subordinating the, uh, choice of policies to PR is quite another.

The word abortion, Lakoff says, suggests a situation in which “something has gone terribly wrong,” and the word choice comes from a consumerist vocabulary, whereas “life” comes from a moral vocabulary, and morality trumps consumerism. So whoever uses the most pompous, sanctimonious language wins? That would only be the case if everyone shared the same view of morality; Jerry Falwell and Tony “I’m not even going to swat that fly” Perkins may use the word “life” all they want, but it won’t be persuasive to those who don’t think like them.

Having stripped us of the words choice (he prefers decision, as less frivolous-sounding — Margaret Sanger coined the term “family planning” for similar reasons — but the word choice entails not only the act of choosing but the right to choose; also, “pro-decision movement” sounds goofy) and abortion (to which he offers no alternative), he wants to shift the debate to issues he thinks can be better packaged, like “zero tolerance [!] for unwanted pregnancies,” which R’s are helping to increase the number of by preventing access to contraception and sex ed., and the excessive infant mortality in America, mercury and other toxins in breast milk from right-wing environmental policies. On these issues, he says, the left’s policies are the ones that value life. Which is true, of course, but all those issues are practical, pragmatic ones, but he’s suggesting giving up or severely downplaying support of human rights — the rights of privacy and bodily integrity — in favor of them, which does not seem to me like taking the moral high ground, but ceding it.

He then suggests foregrounding rape victims as the women most in need of access to abortion, which is the mirror-image of the right-to-lifers’ slippery-slope strategy of making inroads on the right to abortion by first eliminating the most squirm-inducing type of abortion, so-called partial-birth abortion.

As I said at the start, the right wingers have been attempting, with a great deal of success, to force their opponents to debate using a vocabulary chosen by the right. Yesterday the NYT noted that the groups which place excess embryos created during fertility treatment in the wombs of good Christian women have been trying to replace the term “embryo donation” with “embryo adoption,” and that that language has been dutifully taken up by the government. The term is intended to implant the notion that life begins at conception. Personally I worry less that this sort of thing will increase the status of clumps of cells to that of human children, than that blurring the line between them will subtly reduce the status of actual living human beings, whose minds and meat are just casings for a soul which was already perfectly realized shortly after daddy ejaculated.

You know, I don’t worry all that much, frankly. ... I’ve got peace of mind.

Bush: “I spend most of my time worrying about people losing their lives in Iraq, both Americans and Iraqis”. But, “You know, I don’t worry all that much, frankly. ... I’ve got peace of mind.”

Which piece?

I could have gone so many different directions with that: references to peas, the peace that passeth all understanding, etc etc. Seriously, dude, you’ve gotta give us more challenging straight lines than “I’ve got peace of mind.” The American people expect better — nay, they deserve better.

Nay?

So before the US sent Canadian (and Syrian) citizen Maher Arar to Syria to be tortured in 2002, they offered to return him to Canada if it promised to arrest him and put him in jail. Canada responded that it had no grounds to do so, and you’re not the boss of me, and so off Arar went for a year of hell. Bill Graham, then foreign minister, now defense minister, apologized — boy, Canada is not America — to Arar for not getting him out of Syria earlier.

The Latvian parliament ignores the French and the Dutch and votes 71-5, with 24 abstentions, to ratify the EU constitution. An earlier attempt was aborted when it turned out to be a really bad translation, with hundreds of mistakes.

3 years ago (Feb. 2002), after 6 Israeli soldiers were ambushed and killed, the Israeli government ordered a revenge operation to kill unarmed Palestinian cops, preferably at least 6 of them (12 were, plus 3 other people) according to 2 of the soldiers who took part in those missions. The Israeli army responded today by claiming that the cops, who manned checkpoints, had let terrorists pass through them. So it was good revenge, not bad revenge. Either way, that’s not what the 2 soldiers say; they say it was pure tit for tat.

Izvestia is in the process of being bought by the state gas company. Having taken over all Russian tv, Putin is now trying to neutralize the print media.

Responding to less than complimentary statements by Dick Cheney about North Korea, NK responds: “Cheney is hated as the most cruel monster and blood-thirsty beast as he has drenched various parts of the world in blood.”

And your point is?

The g-word

The ferocity of the concerted verbal assault by Bush, Cheney, Myers and Rumsfeld on Amnesty International caught me by surprise. I’d have expected a mock-dignified silence, in the hope that it would go away, which, sad to say, would probably have worked. But after successfully demonizing Newsweek, they’ve decided that vicious attacks might silence critics of Guantanamo altogether. Sadly, that may work too.

The message is that Amnesty’s use of the g-word somehow means we can ignore them now. Cheney: “For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don’t take them seriously.” (Somehow? We saw the pictures.) Rummy: “those who make such outlandish charges lose any claim to objectivity or seriousness.” The word “absurd” has also been bandied about.

Myself, I was critical of Amnesty when it failed to condemn the US for force-feeding hunger-striking inmates at Guantanamo.

Secretary of War Crimes Rumsfeld suggested that the word gulag can’t be used because “Most would define a gulag as where the Soviet Union kept millions in forced labor concentration camps,” as if an analogy has to be exact, right down to the uniforms and haircuts, before it has any salience. Using that standard, we’d never learn anything from history, which is of course the point.

A reporter asked Rummy whether removing the prisoners from Cuba to the US would increase transparency and oversight. Rummy: “Oh, my goodness. There’s so much transparency in Gitmo and so much oversight.”

The suggestion that Amnesty didn’t pay attention to Saddam Hussein’s crimes against his people is, to steal a word from the Bushies, absurd. In fact, one of Britain’s pre-war “dossiers” was largely culled from old Amnesty reports.

Somebody threw that number out there, and it stuck

Operation Lightning is evidently lightening. Although the operation was designed to make it appear that the Iraq military could handle the country’s security, it was clear that it fielded nowhere near as many soldiers as the 40,000 claimed by the Iraqi regime. Yesterday, Pentagon spokesmodel Bryan Whitman said, “Somebody threw that number out there, and it stuck. I don’t know where it came from. We certainly didn’t put it out.”

Sure, if by “we” you don’t mean George W. Bush, General Carter Ham (possessor of the WASPiest name in Christendom), General Richard Myers, Katie Couric, the WASPiest woman in Christendom (during an interview with Myers, who doesn’t correct her), etc. I was about to ask why they bother lying about things so easily googled, when I realized that the NYT hadn’t bothered to fact-check him. Whitman added, “More important than the total numbers is that this is a sizable Iraqi operation that demonstrates that Iraqi security forces are operating in greater numbers and with greater effectiveness.” Don’t try giving that answer on a math quiz: “More important than how many balls Susie had after she gave 3 to Jimmy...”

The Knights Who Say Nee: By a vote of more than 61%, the Dutch have crushed the dreams of the Eurocrats beneath their shoes, which rumor says are made of wood. Don’t know myself; the one time I tried to go to the Netherlands, Belgium was on strike and my train stopped at the border.

British soldier Mark Cooley — the one driving the forklift —

was sentenced to 2 years, but only served 4 months before being released, his sentence reduced by a closed-door hearing news of which the military clearly hoped wouldn’t leak out.

Turkey’s new penal code abolishes legal leniency for honor killings and the annulment of rape convictions if the victim marries the rapist, and makes several other welcome steps forward. Criticizing the state or asserting that the Armenian genocide actually happened are still illegal.

Meet Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin

A British couple will celebrate their 80th anniversary tomorrow. The secret is evidently saying sorry and Yes dear. Oh, and not dying. (The Telegraph’s front page has their wedding photo.)

As expected, Jacques Chirac fired his prime minister, blaming the failure of the EU referendum on Raffarin’s unpopularity rather than his own or that of the proposed constitution. And because French politicians have been considered out of touch lately, Chirac replaced him with Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin (which is French for Little Lord Fountleroy), who is both a poet and an aristocrat. Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin has never run for elective office, because he considers himself above that sort of thing, saying “My only party is France,” which is very Charles de Gaulle of him, very Sun King. French people consider him to be arrogant.

After a suicide bomb attack on a Shiite mosque in Pakistan, Shiites retaliated by burning down a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, possibly because they think Americans worship fried chicken, or because there is a little-reported religious war between Shiites and Kentuckians, who can say for sure?

From the Onion:

U.S. Intensifies Empty-Threat Campaign Against North Korea

WASHINGTON, DC—During a recent press conference, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued another warning to North Korea, escalating the U.S. empty-threat campaign against the nation. “Make no mistake, if Kim Jong Il does not put a stop to the manufacturing of plutonium in his nation, we will come down on him quite hard,” Rice said. “We demand compliance, and if we don’t get it, then watch out.” Rice went on to say that noncompliance would result in some action that “would be very bad indeed,” adding that North Korea does not want to know what it will be in for.

And an excellent What Do You Think? too:

The House recently passed a bill lifting restrictions on stem-cell research, but Bush has threatened to veto the bill if it passes the Senate. What do you think?

“The Democrats and Republicans-and most of the American public-are actually in agreement over an issue. You can see how Bush would want to put a stop to that right away.”

“Some things are just morally reprehensible, like using science to save people’s lives.”

“Hey, if it weren’t for scientific research, Christopher Reeve would’ve died on that polo field and none of this would even be an issue in the first place.”

“The Democrats want stem-cell research so they can cure multiple sclerosis. The GOP wants it so they can grow an army of zombies. So Bush is in a tough spot politically.”

“They’re not stems, they’re babies! And they’re not cells, they’re babies! And it’s not research, it’s babies!”

Summer reading

Oopsy: This is the Pentagon statement on the seizure of Mohsen Abdul-Hamid: “Following the interview it was determined that he was detained by mistake and should be released. ... Coalition forces regret any inconvenience...” First, don’t blame it on a “coalition” when it was a purely American operation. Second, an “interview” starts with being asked to sit and would you like some coffee, not with having a hood thrown over your head and being dragged out of your house. Third, a bigger lexicological problem continues to be that word “mistake”: it’s a day and a half later, and the Pentagon still hasn’t clarified the nature of the mistaken behooding and seizure of the head of the largest Sunni party, and nobody seems to be asking them to do so.

Gary Indiana’s new book The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt sounds like fun, if a bit pricey ($13.57 at Amazon for 140 pages), according to the Village Voice review. Here’s a quote: “to the bewildered and traumatized who continued to imagine that ‘fascism’ described a condition other than the merger of the state with corporate capitalism, ‘hasta la vista, baby’ sounded like as workable a program as anything else.”
(Update: on the other hand, Marc Cooper hates the book.)

And as long as we’re talking books, Human Events, right-wing morons since 1944, list the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th century, starting with the Communist Manifesto and including the Kinsey Report (#4) and The Feminine Mystique (#7), but not the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which actually was and is harmful. Not even in the honorable mentions. Marx is the only author who appears twice, and yes Das Kapital could be very harmful if you dropped it on your toe. I only own 3 or maybe 4 (I’m not sure if Beyond Good and Evil is among my very modest Nietzsche collection), so perhaps I haven’t been too badly damaged. Next up from the Human Eventers: the 10 most harmful ballets of the 19th and 20th century.

Bush press conference: trained in some instances to disassemble

Bush held a press conference today, in which reporters with names like Stretch asked questions, and Bush responded by stuttering through a series of catch-phrases. He is not getting more articulate over time.

Asked about the Amnesty International "new gulag" report, he repeated the word "absurd" over and over. Reading rather than listening to the press conference, I imagined him flapping his arms and uttering "absurd" in the voice of Daffy Duck, but that's just me.

In terms of the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of -- and the allegations -- by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is.

Thousands detained, and for some reason, they hate America. And they've been trained to "disassemble" -- oh how I hope that isn't a transcript error -- as opposed to picking it up the street, or in the backroom of a Houston bar, like you did George.
(Update: it isn't an error, he really said it! The man is Cliff Claven and Ted Baxter rolled up into one!)

Asked to condemn the massacre in Uzbekistan, George seemed to think there wasn't enough evidence yet, and called for the International Red Cross to investigate. Preferably for two or three years.

He described the demand by Senate D's for documents about John Bolton as a "stall tactic." Like every one of his answers at this press conference.

Says progress on Social Security is "like water cutting through a rock." No, no, it's paper covers rock, rock breaks scissors, how many times do we have to explain it to you, but each time Dick Cheney makes a fist (and Dick Cheney always does rock), you urinate on his hand and yell "Ha ha, I win."

(Update: writing this post quickly at the library, I missed what Bob caught: the wonderful counterpoint of Bush defending Gitmo while lecturing Putin about the 9-year sentence given to Yukos chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky today: "as I explained to him, here you're innocent until proven guilty, and it appeared to us, or at least people in my administration, that it looked like he had been judged guilty prior to having a fair trial. In other words, he was put in prison, and then was tried." Because of course, first you put them in prison, and then you declare them enemy combatants who hate America.)

Nightline

A friend in Vermont informs me that Nightline’s reading of the names of dead tonight has commercials, including one for the Vermont National Guard. What other commercials have people seen? Drop me an email at:

whateveritisimagainstit
at
gmail
dot
com.

Include the city the station is located in.

A mistake

I guess as part of “Operation Lightning,” the US first arrests — sorry, I meant to say seizes; arrest, the verb widely used in news stories, suggests a process of law — the head of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, throwing a bag over his head (why do American police never do that when they arrest people, or will the practice be imported from Iraq within a year or two, I wonder), then releases him, saying the arrest was a mistake. No fucking kidding. Some news media are taking that to mean a case of mistaken identity, but that’s not what was said. Here’s a detail I like: Prime Minister Jaafari ordered an investigation. Hey, the American military didn’t even inform you before grabbing up Hamid, how are you going to get them to cooperate with an investigation? Isn’t it cute when they pretend to be in control?

The chief of police in Basra says he’s lost control of the police force, which is heavily infiltrated by sectarian groups who are using police cars in assassinations. And Basra’s the one peaceful area outside Kurdistan.

Cheney: “For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights [in Guantanamo], I frankly just don’t take them seriously.” The head of Amnesty’s US branch responds nicely, “He doesn’t take torture seriously; he doesn’t take the Geneva Convention seriously; he doesn’t take due process rights seriously; and he doesn’t take international law seriously.”

Cheney went on, “Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment. But if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside and been released ... to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated.” I’ve said before, the Bushies have lost the ability to distinguish between proving a case and just making an assertion. Notice how he starts as if he had actual evidence he was going to present — “if you trace,” “in nearly every case,” “it turns out” — and then peters out into, well they were lying. An argument, it has been said before, isn’t just contradiction, the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes. And in denying that any human rights were violated in Gitmo, he’s also gainsaying the photos we’ve all seen. And the 1,000 pages of Gitmo tribunal documents released to AP under the Freedom of Information Act on this fine holiday weekend, which show the tribunals ignoring every complaint. You can read the documents here.

By the way, in the same interview, Cheney accused Kim Jong Il of running a police state.

Speaking of big round cheeses, today was the traditional Gloucestershire cheese roll, in which a 7-pound circular cheese is rolled down a hill, reaching speeds of up to 70 mph, and a bunch of crazy Brits roll after it. The survivor gets the cheese. Yes that’s him, clutching his prize as they take him to the hospital. The head of PETA complained that the event was not vegan.