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In Spain, conservatives, Catholics, and conservative Catholics have all taken to the streets to protest the impending legalization of gay marriage, chanting, “What do we expect? The Spanish Inquisition! When do we expect it? Now!”
Just this past week, Condi Rice and other Bushies were criticizing the Iranian electoral process because so many candidates were not allowed to run. Now Rice is in Israel, talking with Israeli officials about demanding that Hamas candidates not be allowed to stand for election to the Palestinian Legislative Council. The Israeli justice minister says such a ban would be “defensive democracy.”
These articles were listed consecutively in the Sunday Times (London)’s world news page:
Bush Wounded by Anger over War
DiCaprio Wounded in Bottle Attack at Party
Lot of wounding going on. Who do you feel less sorry for?
At a DOD briefing Thursday (Left I points out), Gen. James Conway, asked what the measure of success is in Iraq and when American troops can get the hell out, said, “You know, the actual mission, I suppose, is classified, but I can paraphrase it to say that a safe and secure Iraq that we are able to turn back over to the Iraqis.” Classified? Classified?!?! Asked how many attacks a day would the present number have to be reduced to in order for Iraq to be accounted “safe and secure,” Conway said, “I think we’ll know it when we see it.” That’s what Potter Stewart said about pornography.
The Taliban have captured the district chief and district police chief for Miana Shien, as well as other officials. Fortunately, the Taliban promise a fair trial. “If they are found guilty they’ll be executed. If not they will be released.” So that should turn out ok then. Maybe they could get Michael Jackson’s lawyer.
The Pentagon reports that in its latest offensive in Iraq, Operation Spear, in which, it turns out, no actual spears were used, “Some 50 rebels have been killed and another 100 captured.” Now, Left I may be sceptical, but I salute the military for its commitment to round numbers in an otherwise messy, confusing war. Three ten cheers for them!
Jeb Bush, who just ordered an investigation, 15 years late, of whether Terri Schiavo’s husband called 911 a few minutes late, got out his crayons and wrote a letter to the NYT in which he used the word “life” as many times as he could, including in this sentence: “All innocent human life is precious, and government has a duty to protect the weak, the disabled and the vulnerable.” But enough about your relatives, Jeb. For someone who starts off accusing the Times of “grotesque and chilling disrespect for the sanctity of life” (there’s that word again), you’ll notice the qualifier: “innocent” human life is precious, the rest we put in the electric chair. The Miami Herald (registration/BugMeNot) has this cringe-inducing headline: “We’d Do it All Again, Republicans Say.” Scotty McClellan says that Shrub would have played his part exactly the same way: “Our thoughts and prayers remain with her family and friends. The president was deeply saddened by this case.” Aw, he made his sad-monkey face?
In act that defines the term “adding insult to injury,” Halliburton is given a $30m contract to build a permanent prison at Guantanamo Bay. (Update: the LA Times calls it an “improved prison.” I doubt the detainees will see a prison intended to hold them permanently as an improvement.) It may just be an elaborate scheme to see how many elements of scandal you can add together, Lincoln-log style (Gulags of our time + Tea Pot Dome + ...), without attracting significant media attention because it lacks a missing white woman.
To celebrate the belated addition of comments to this blog, I invite you to post mottoes for Haliburton to use in promoting this fine venture. For example, “Building the Gulags of Tomorrow... Today!”
Krugman’s column on Star-Wars-Action-Figure-Gate Coingate contains a detail that jumped out, because it shows how thoroughly the system can be gamed if you drop enough coin (sorry) in the right slots: “[Tom] Noe’s contributions ranged so widely that five of the state’s seven Supreme Court justices had to recuse themselves from cases associated with the scandal.”
Pakistan’s Gen. Musharaf admits, hell, practically brags, that it was he who imposed the travel ban on Mukhtar Mai, the woman who was ordered by a village council to be raped because of something her brother did. Musharaf said she was going to “bad-mouth Pakistan” in the US. He did not of course attribute agency to Mai, but blamed Western NGOs, which he said are “as bad as the Islamic extremists.” “Public relations is the most important thing in the world,” he added.
And accessorizing. That’s pretty important too.
Condi Rice, on Egyptian elections, June 2005: “Democracy isn’t a single-day event.”
George Bush, on American elections, January 2005: “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections.”
The Bushies have been dissing the Iranian electoral process, which Condi calls “illegitimate” and Shrub says “ignores the basic requirements of democracy.” That’s right: George Bush expressed concern for the basic requirements of democracy. With a straight (but chimp-like) face. I assume he means Fox News and the Swift Boat Veterans.
Which is not to say that there isn’t cause for grave concerns, just that those concerns would be better expressed by someone else, indeed by anyone else. Still, if they’re going to intervene ham-handedly in another country’s elections the day before they take place, they should at least make suggestions for the appropriate response, and they don’t. Should Iranians boycott the process or, as they told Afghans and Iraqis to do in elections that were no less flawed, should they show the strength of the universal desire for freedom and blah blah blah by standing in line to vote (segregated by gender, of course), and hoping for the best?
(Update: Elizabeth “No, that’s his other daughter” Cheney, the “democracy tsar shah” tells VOA’s Persian tv service that the US “believes in supporting the bravery of the people of Iran.” Again, how are the Iranian people supposed to take that?)
The US used napalm in Iraq. This isn’t really news. Two years ago, for example, I linked to this story, which said the same thing. But no one ever follows up, and they won’t this time either.
The AP reports that two college students from California were arrested in Paris, posing nude for pictures near the Arc de Triomphe. The sentence I like: “A bet was said to have been involved.”
Today Bush attended the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast (whether it’s the Hispanics, the prayer or the breakfast that is “national” is unclear). He informed them “America is founded on los valores de fe y familia.” If I remember my high school Spanish and those Ricardo Montalban commercials correctly, valores is a car with rich Corinthian leather, familia probably means family, and fe means feh. He thanked the Congresscritters in attendance, including Nancy Pelosi, for “setting aside politics to come and honor the Almighty through prayer.” ‘Cuz Bush is all about separating politics from religion. He talked about the “universal call” to love your neighbor, and how “we see the love of neighbor in tens of thousands of Hispanics who serve America and the cause of freedom.” Yes, because the motto of the Marines is “We’re looking for a few good neighbors to love like we’d like to be loved ourselves.”
Oh yeah, every minute you’re in the fucking White House.
Stay away from the beans, if you know what I mean.
Todd the Human Cannonball, was fired sacked by the British traveling circus he performed in because his employers wanted to send him to Brazil for safety training — and he’s afraid to fly.
Lately the defenders of Guantanamo, whose names will someday be remembered with the distaste now felt for the senators who filibustered federal anti-lynching legislation (which you’ll notice is always called that rather than “federal lynching legislation” to avoid people thinking that what was proposed was to legalize lynching, or perhaps to make it mandatory), have been taking a gastronomic turn, lauding the menu at the gulag of our times as proof of American munificence. Lemon fish, they say. With two types of vegetables, they say. Chicken three times a week, they say. Really, what more could these people want, for the rest of their lives? We give and we give and we give and we give, and it’s just never enough for them. I mean two fucking types of vegetable. And do they thank us for it? Not a bit of it. The ingratitude.
Trust George Bush to meet a defector from a dictatorship, which is normally the sort of behaviour I encourage in a president, and turn it into something ignoble and childish: “If Kim Jong Il knew I met you,” he asked Kang Chol Hwan, “don’t you think he’d hate this?”
Secretary of War Rumsfeld admits that Iraq is “statistically” no safer now than two years ago. Which is odd because the Pentagon always claims not to have those statistics.
However, he avers, “A lot of the bad things that could have happened have not happened.” Like what? Well, plague of locusts, slaying of the first-born, Martian invasion, rain of lightning bolts from an angry Thor, Iraqis throwing flowers at the American soldiers - but they’re actually triffids, a macarena revival, Godzilla stomping Fallujah flat — well, ok, that would have had about the same results.
And then there’s this variant on a favorite old Rummyism:
There are things we know we know, and that’s helpful to know you know something. There are things we know we don't know. And that's really important to know, and not think you know them, when you don’t. But the tricky ones are the ones - the unknown unknowns - the things we don’t know we don’t know. They’re the ones that can get you in a bucket of trouble.
I love how the BBC headlines that quote “Philosophy.”
Bionic Octopus has an excellent analysis of Nicholas Kristof, that explains in exquisite detail what is deeply wrong with his pith-helmeted forays into Third World dens of iniquity. Some people date the start of modern journalism to the attempt by British journo W. T. Stead in 1885 to prove that in London one could buy a virgin for £5. More recently, NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof traveled to Cambodia and bought some girls out of sexual slavery (it’s unclear whether he put them on expenses or wrote them off his taxes, but one suspects the paperwork involved was more interesting than his actual columns), and then, as BionOc puts it, “dumping her right back in the exact conditions that sent her to the brothel in the first place,” and then blaming her for moral inadequacies, for being afraid of freedom, if things don’t work out. This not only “works to obscure the real root causes and material conditions that engender prostitution” (BionOc’s words), but also, I would add, creates the illusion that complex social problems can be solved in a single moment of time, rather than by sustained attention and effort over an extended period of time. That may be just about the attention span of Westerners for Third World social problems, but it won’t accomplish much on the ground. Kristof’s assumption that he can turn these girls’ lives around by a single intervention is very much of a piece with the Bushies’ assumption that Iraq would, once that statue was torn down, be instantaneously transformed into a peaceful, harmonious, democratic, America-loving nation.
Some of you will be wondering: yes you could buy a 13-year old virginal girl (Stead had her checked out) for £5.
Dick Cheney: “My own personal view of it is that those who are most urgently advocating that we shut down Guantanamo probably don’t agree with our policies anyway.” Oh, he so totally has my number.
So let me make sure I understand this: the only opinions that matter come from people who agree with you. Anyone else’s views may simply be dismissed. Dialogue and discussion are for wimps.
I know the Bushies think that way, but are they supposed to say it out loud like that?
Taking that logic one step further, Microsoft, which is “just following local laws,” is censoring blogs in China that use words like democracy, freedom, demonstration, human rights, Taiwan independence, and Netscape. Microsoft says it “is a multi-national business and as such needs to manage the reality of operating in countries around the world.” Amoral capitalist logic at its finest.
Sicilian authorities suspended a man’s driver’s license when they found out he was gay. So if you’ve ever been in Italy and wondered if they have any standards at all for driver’s licenses, now you know.
The Senate is about to apologize for its predecessors having failed to make lynching a federal crime. I’m sure I won’t be the only one to say this today, but somewhere between lynching black men for looking the wrong way at white women, and Michael Jackson being acquitted, there must be a happy medium.
The Senate vote not be a roll call vote, because 12 senators still consider lynching too controversial, or possibly they support the practice of lynching, we’ll never know.
Today Iraq’s Special Tribunal released the first new footage of Saddam Hussein in over a year. It won’t say when it was taken, the audio was blocked (and not a single media outlet seems to have thought to find an Arabic-speaking lip-reader), and while he seemed to be calmly responding to questions, the tribunal also had control over editing. This is not the sort of thing an unbiased court does, and the court is itself being pressured to get the show trial on the road by an Iraqi regime anxious for seedy speedy justice.
The Italian referendum on in-vitro fertilization, stem-cell research and other such issues is a clear demonstration of why setting a quorum of voters (half of eligible voters had to cast ballots for the results to be valid) is a bad idea. Citizens shouldn’t have to check opinion polls to guess whether voting no or abstaining from voting is the best tactic. Indeed, ideally, voting is never tactical. When the Catholic Church ordered the faithful not to vote in this referendum, saying “Life Cannot Be Put to a Vote - Don’t Vote,” it effectively eliminated the secret ballot, allowing reprisals against anyone seen entering a polling station.
Bush met today with the presidents of 5 African countries he can’t locate on a map, including one country he called “Nambia,” which can’t be located on any map.
Bush could swear that the president of Niger was whispering “yellow cake” over and over.
I’ve now read Time magazine’s extracts from the interrogation log. Some of it’s intriguing and unexplained: “SGT A runs ‘love of brothers in Cuba’ approach.” But mostly it’s just creepy.
0320: The detainee refused to answer whether he wanted water. SGT R explained with emphasis that not answering disrespects SGT A and embarrasses him.
With emphasis? And what’s with the passive-aggressive crap? He’s brought in with a hood over his head, bolted to the floor, and told that he’s embarrassing them? It gets stupider:
13 December 2002
1115: Interrogators began telling detainee how ungrateful and grumpy he was. In order to escalate the detainee’s emotions, a mask was made from an MRE box with a smily face on it and placed on the detainee’s head for a few moments. A latex glove was inflated and labeled the "sissy slap" glove. The glove was touched to the detainee’s face periodically after explaining the terminology to him. The mask was placed back on the detainee’s head. While wearing the mask, the team began dance instruction with the detainee. The detainee became agitated and began shouting.
It’s like being interrogated by evil 6-year olds.
Let me quote the Pentagon rejoinder again: “Kahtani’s interrogation during this period was guided by a very detailed plan and conducted by trained professionals”. Somewhere there’s a military manual which takes seven pages describing how to make a smiley-face mask out of an MRE box.
And did Halliburton provide this contraption?
The Palestinian government revives, and implements, the death penalty. Terrific.
In the last Iranian elections, the young (and the voting age in Iran is 15) turned out to vote for change, and didn’t get it. So this time candidates need to offer them something else:
Rafsanjani has reinvented himself, attracting the high-society set of north Tehran with beautiful girls on rollerblades handing out posters wearing short tight Islamic gear
The Times failed to include a picture, but here’s one from AFP:
Cheney says that Guantanamo won’t be closed: “The important thing here to understand is that the people that are at Guantanamo are bad people.” And that’s just the guards (rimshot). More Gitmo leaks today, in Time magazine (link, but only for subscribers, so go here instead). Mohammed al-Qahtani, a suspected Al Qaida guy, one of the many people tied for 20th hijacker, was tortured with Christina Aguilera music, “sissy slaps,” and being ordered to “bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog.” So it’s not the gulag of our times, it’s the dog obedience school of our times. But as Cheney said, the people that are at Guantanamo have been very bad! Bad! Bad boy!
The Pentagon has issued a response to the Time article, which you should read. It says basically: 1) yeah, we tortured him, but it worked, 2) hey, remember how afraid you were back then, remember anthrax and the shoe bomber, huh, huh? 3) This was all done according to a detailed interrogation plan. I’m unsure in what way that is supposed to be reassuring. It adds, “The Department of Defense remains committed to the unequivocal standard of humane treatment for all detainees.” Of course by humane, what it’s referring to is the Humane Society.
On the heels of George Lakoff’s wrong-headed article on the language of abortion rights, which I discussed here nine days ago, has come a similar piece by William Saletan in Slate, advocating the linkage of reproductive rights to something he vaguely refers to as “responsibility.” I’ve been corresponding with Bionic Octopus (who was good enough to praise my previous post in her blog) about Saletan’s article, and she has now posted an excellent dissection of it, including excerpts from my side of our correspondence (i.e., material I haven’t posted here). Read it now, then hit the back key for some final stray thoughts from me.
Hello again. Good, isn’t she? BionOc quotes an earlier Saletan article which recommended that the message should be that “The abortion is not the end of the story. Kids and family are the story, ‘when I’m ready.’” She responds: “If the supposed left has ever produced a more crystalline formulation of the idea that a woman's body is ultimately, teleologically a reproductive vessel, I have yet to see it.” Right: Saletan does not consider a rejection of the (perceived) duty to reproduce an acceptable option. The “when I’m ready” approach infantilizes women, by suggesting not that they’re mature enough to be trusted with the choice of abortion, but that they’re too immature to be trusted with a child. He empowers women by disempowering them (and probably expects to be thanked for it). And it relegates abortion to a stage of life women are expected to grow out of. However it is society which has, hopefully, grown out of its paternalistic phase, and people like Mr. Saletan must outgrow their desire to circumscribe the rights of others.
Another Downing Street memo surfaces. Transcript of the document. Favorite sentence: “US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community.” No kidding. Also: “A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the US military plans are virtually silent on this point.” No fucking kidding.
The British government has decided that the best way to reduce crime is to target “potential criminals” early, like when they’re... three. “Tearaway toddlers,” they’re called by the Nursery Nazis.
Speaking at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, Dick Cheney said that the war on terror “will be with us for a good many years to come.” He told the assembled military types, “You do a great job, and our kids and grandkids ... will be a lot safer with the challenges and the difficult duties that you’ve all accepted.” He then added, “Well maybe not your kids, they’ll be fighting in Syria and Iran, and maybe not your grandkids, cause they’ll be fighting in North Korea, but your great-grandkids, they’ll be sittin’ pretty.”
There’s a show on the Discovery Channel in which Americans decide who is/was the greatest American ever. The producers are just afraid it will vote for Oprah, who’s evidently in the top 25. Because Americans have so little sense of history, many of the top 100 nominees are people who are now living, including Barbara Bush and Laura Bush (what, not Jenna?). Compare this to the Czech republic, where a similar show on Czech tv just revealed that the greatest Czech was Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia (1316-1378).
Italian aid worker Clementina Cantoni (pictured below) has been released after being held hostage for nearly 4 weeks. Is anyone keeping track of how many hostages there are in Afghanistan and Iraq? Western hostages I mean, obviously the locals don’t count. The Afghan government earlier told the Italian embassy to butt out (a large bribe was almost certainly paid); the Afghan way seems to have been to take its own hostages, including the kidnapper’s mother.
Yesterday I glossed over Bush’s speech on the Patriot Act a little too quickly. The ACLU response points out that while Bush claimed there have been no abuses under the Patriot Act, he still hasn’t bothered to appoint or fund the Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which was supposed to keep track of those very abuses. And of course any subpoena, search, etc under the Act is accompanied by a gag order. Also, and I did notice this but forgot to blog it, Bush assured us that “The judicial branch has a strong oversight role”, without mentioning his plans to eliminate that oversight and let the FBI write its own subpoenas.
Today Bush visited the National Counterterrorism Center, whose acronym is NCTC despite the fact that its name treats counterterrorism as one word, so it should really be NCC: just one way in which the NCTC is keeping terrorists off balance. You’ll be happy to know that George Bush is not thrown off balance by acronyms; he said, “I went out to the CIA the other day and I reminded the good folks who work there that CIA stands for Central Intelligence Agency.” He talked about the importance of “men and women from different agencies, of different backgrounds, work side-by-side to share information” (such as what “CIA” stands for), “to analyze information, to integrate information”. Sounds like hippy affirmative action to me. Does Clarence Thomas know about this? “I appreciate the fact that here you pool your expertise and your computer systems”. Sounds like rank hippy communism to me. Does Milton Friedman know about this? He explains, “See, the strategy is we’ll defeat them before they attack us”. Yes, it’s the National Counterterrorism Center, they’ve probably heard tell of that strategy.
Half of the National Counterterrorism Center’s budget is spent on really big tv’s
The Guardian: “A British bus company is testing a new secret weapon that it hopes will help forward its push to cut its polluting emissions - sheep urine.”
The British ambassador to the US is Sir David Manning, who had been Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser. In turn Bush, to show the regard in which he holds the “special relationship,” has named a high-ranking professional diplomat a car dealer (and, you’ll be surprised to hear, a major fundraiser) to be next ambassador to Britain. His name is Robert Tuttle. Or possibly Buttle.
Bush made a speech about the Patriot Act today. He told the audience,
As sworn officers of the law, you’re devoted to defending your fellow citizens. Your vigilance is keeping our communities safe, and you’re serving on the front lines of the war on terror. It’s a different kind of war than a war our nation was used to. You know firsthand the nature of the enemy. We face brutal men who celebrate murder, who incite suicide, and who would stop at nothing to destroy the liberties we cherish.
He was speaking at the Ohio State Highway Patrol Academy.
The Daily Show last night (and by the way, I’m also disappointed by Jon Stewart’s obsequiousness when face-to-face with the powerful, or in this case Colin Powell, but jeez, lighten up everybody and let’s not depend too much on comedians to conduct the tough interviews) showed competing clips, Bush in 2000 saying we needed to know more before doing anything about global warming, and Bush this week saying we needed to know more before doing anything about global warming. Bush said, “It’s easier to solve a problem when you know a lot about it.” Now how would he know what it’s like to know a lot about a problem? Or indeed what it’s like to solve a problem.
WaPo story whose headline suggested a much more interesting story: “Texas Sophomore Hooker Off to Strong Start.”
The US knows exactly what Haiti needs: more guns.
My favorite bit of bureaucrateze today, in the NYT story about Philip Cooney, the non-scientist former lobbyist for the oil industry now rewriting all the Bush administration reports on global warming, comes from a White House spokesmodel: “We don’t put Phil Cooney on the record. He’s not a cleared spokesman.”
Bionic Octopus wonders what Israel would have to do to be considered in violation of the ceasefire. After she posted, the Indy opined that the ceasefire “was under continuing strain after Israel launched a missile at Hamas militants in response to a Gaza rocket attack which killed three people on Tuesday”. “Continuing strain” is British understatement for “fucked up the ass.” That sentence also contains the media’s standard characterization of Israeli violence as always being in response to Palestinian violence.
After the so-called Afghan National Army finally deployed a unit outside of Kabul, half the soldiers deserted.
Bush, interviewed on Fox: “You know, I’ve always tried to lower expectations, and I feel like if people say, well, you know, maybe, you know, I don’t think you handle the tough job, and when you do, it impresses people even more.” Are we impressed yet? Actually, only on Fox could Bush come off as less of a doofus than the interviewer, Neil Cavuto, who kept trying to get Bush to say that the Michael Jackson trial is getting too much coverage, and actually asked him whether Laura would run for president.
Um, no she isn’t.
An email from the British Tory party contained this image, carefully chosen to appeal to yoofs.
Photo-essay on the Museum of Rubble that is Fallujah.
Monday I mentioned that the Australian government had turned down a Chinese diplomat’s plea for asylum. You can read more about that on Road to Surfdom, who has many links. In one of them, we learn that Australia determined that Chen Yonglin would not face persecution if forced to return to China. How did they determine that? They asked the Chinese ambassador.
Apostate Windbag has a nice post on events in Bolivia. Also, of course, Narco News.
Yesterday Senator Jeff Sessions took Chuck Schumer to task for asking if Janice Rogers Brown, who puts her own personal views above the law, wanted to be nominated as “dictator or grand exalted ruler”. Sessions decided this was “some reference to the Ku Klux Klan” and he was shocked and appalled. In fact, the Klan’s leader is called a Grand Wizard; it’s evidently the Elks who have a “grand exalted ruler.” What makes all of this worth pointing out is that Sessions himself was rejected by the Senate in 1986 for a circuit court judgeship in large part because he had said that he used to think the Kluxers were okay, until he found out they smoked marijuana.
Although I linked to the Sunday Times story on the Downing Street Memo mere minutes after it was posted to the web, I didn’t consider the information that Bush lied us into war with Iraq to be breaking news. I knew it, you knew it, everyone who today has the faintest idea what “Downing Street Memo” refers to knew it. Still, if it will keep the story alive, I’m all for it, and will even impute importance to the Downing Street Memo by referring to it repeatedly with initial caps.
I rather enjoyed the moment in the Bush-Blair press conference yesterday when a reporter asked about the, ahem, Downing Street Memo, and Blair leaped, almost literally, in front of Bush to take the bullet, to answer the question before George could open his mouth and screw it up. Of course Chimp Boy couldn’t help himself, and followed Blair with his own incoherent denial, including an attack on the motives of the leaker and the Sunday Times. “They dropped it out in the middle of his race,” Bush said, as if we hadn’t just had a week of debate over whether Deep Throat’s motives were good and pure, a debate leading to the conclusion: who cares what his motives were as long as he was speaking the truth. Both Bush and Blair said that the DSM was written before they went to the UN to ask for a war resolution. I’m still not sure what that’s supposed to prove.
Blair’s punishment for Poodleness in the First Degree is to be stuck standing next to Bush at these events over and over, trying not to look appalled at the words coming out of Bush’s mouth. I didn’t see the expression on Blair’s face when Bush congratulated him on his election victory and said, “I’m really thrilled to be able to work with you to be able to spread freedom and peace over the next years,” but I don’t imagine he greatly resembled a child receiving a puppy for Christmas. To paraphrase Sartre, hell is other world leaders.
