I’m guessing minus

About that poll showing Bush’s favorable rating among blacks was 2%: its margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

BBC headline: “French Crack Baby-Smuggling Ring.” Who would want to smuggle French crack babies?

George Bush wishes everyone a merry Ramadan

Smoking will be banned in pubs, restaurants and other workplaces in Northern Ireland. Just what we need, more cranky people in Northern Ireland. People in prisons and mental asylums will still be allowed to smoke.

Update: the Supreme Court tells Missouri not to block the abortion of that prisoner. She will get her abortion this week, more than 8 weeks after she first asked for it.

At an Iftaar dinner at the White House (!), Bush announces that the White House library now has a Koran, right next to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and says “I believe the time has come for all responsible Islamic leaders to denounce an ideology that exploits Islam for political ends, and defiles your noble faith.” He doesn’t explain why it is the particular responsibility of Muslim leaders (but note his use of the word “Islamic”) to denounce every single “bad” Muslim of the billion plus Muslims in the world, or indeed why it is any business of a Christian American to point out their supposed duty to them. Maybe he wants them to set up a Muslim Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis Sanctum Officium too.

Oh, what the White House website doesn’t tell you: there was a segregated Iftaar dinner for women, hosted by Laura Bush.

The last Australian World War I veteran (at least the last one posted to a war zone) has died, age 106.

I was going to write something about Saddam Hussein’s impending trial, then decided against. But here are the pictures that would have accompanied it:

The idea of deciding to go into a ballot box is a positive development

Bush today repeated one of the silliest talking points about the Iraqi referendum: “an increase in turnout was an indication that the Iraqi people are strongly in favor of settling disputes in a peaceful way”. How is it an either/or situation? Was there fine print that no one read, like the license agreement for a piece of software which says that using the software means you’ve given up all your legal rights? Or is it more that it would be kinda hypocritical? I mean they might be willing to blow themselves up outside the post office, but surely they wouldn’t do it after having voted, that would just be so tacky.

And yet I suspect there will be many purple fingers on triggers. I’m sorry, but most people don’t look at casting a ballot as a grand statement of principles, like John Hancock signing the Declaration of Independence, but view it a tad more instrumentally. If anyone knows that, it should be Republicans, since no Republican has ever run for any office ever without promising to cut taxes.

Bush went on, “I was pleased to see that the Sunnis participated in the process. The idea of deciding to go into a ballot box is a positive development.” I know we’ve blown up a lot of their houses, but isn’t a ballot box just a little cramped? He added, “It’s an exciting day for a country that only a few short years ago was ruled by a brutal tyrant.” Somehow I don’t think they’ve feel like short years to the Iraqis.

George Packer in the New Yorker describes Bush’s philosophy as “more Harding than Reagan; not anti-government, just anti-good-government”.

Hate, fear, dominatrixes and cocaine

Two adjacent headlines in the London Times:

Hate and Fear Drive Sunnis to the Polling Stations

Iraq Referendum Gives Hope to Those Seeking New Democracy

Schizophrenic much?

But when support for the constitution is 95% in Karbala province and 3 to 5% in Fallujah and Samarra, it’s by definition unworkable, whether it meets the technical grounds for ratification or not.

Speaking of hate and fear, the British Tory party has been trying to pick a new leader, and of course it all comes down to... whether front-runner David Cameron took drugs at college. He won’t say, and his opponents are deploying that air of superiority which makes the Conservatives what they are. Another contender, David Davis, has opined that anyone who has used drugs shouldn’t lead the Tory party, although last go-around he refused to the answer the question himself. In an interview, Jonathan Dimbleby asked Davis if it wasn’t true that he was “skilful at dripping poison into the campaign” and then “pretending to pour balm on the wound.” And we only get Tim Russert and Judith Miller. You have to love a campaign that gives you headlines like “Dominatrix Leaves No Mark in Tory Dirty Tricks Dispute” (The Times). The dominatrix in question appears in a 12-year old photo with Shadow Chancellor George Osborne (who was 22) and a suspicious line of white powder. Osborne’s office says that he never took cocaine... with her. And so it goes.

After all, the purpose of a democracy is to make sure everybody is -- participates in the process

At the Million Man March reunion, there were signs reading “Bush Lied, People Died.” You know, that doesn’t really narrow it down that much, does it?

The Bushies are claiming that even Sunnis who turned out for the sole purpose of voting against the constitution have now accepted the political process, and are welcoming them back like the formerly lost lambs they are. Condi on Mess the Preet today said she was “confident that Sunnis participated in large numbers, which means that the base of politics has expanded in Iraq.” For example, in Samarra, 95% voted No; somehow it’s hard for me to see that as expanding the base of politics. Along the same lines, Shrub says, “After all, the purpose of a democracy is to make sure everybody is -- participates in the process.” Now you know what the purpose of a democracy is, in case you were wondering. The Chimpster adds, “The vote today in Iraq stands in stark contrast to the attitudes and philosophy and strategy of al Qaeda and its terrorist friends and killers.”

On that Meet the Pross, Tim Russert asked Condi “do you have any information that Osama bin Laden may have been killed or injured” in the earthquake in Pakistan.

She doesn’t.

Russert asked her about Bush’s low approval rating among blacks (2%). She just doesn’t understand it, she said more in sorrow than in anger; after all,

I represent the fact that the United States of America is a multicultural and multiethnic society in which we are finally coming to terms with a history in which not all Americans were always represented. And so, I think, as an African-American secretary of state, that’s special.

Yes Condi, it’s all about you, you, you. And you are special, yes you are, yes you are.

Forced pregnancy, a Missouri value

A federal district court judge told the Missouri prison system to stop blocking a prisoner from exercising her right to abortion; they had been refusing to transport her to a clinic, under a policy adopted in July. The state, with the governor noising off about “an outrageous order from an activist federal judge that offends Missouri values,” then went to the Supreme Court and got Clarence Thomas to block the order, at least temporarily. The woman has been fighting the prison authorities on this for several weeks, and is now 16 or 17 weeks pregnant. I guess they wanted to delay until she was showing. Geddit, the “show me” state, geddit?

3½ inches

In his weekly radio address, Shrub is still touting the Zawahiri letter, which he says “explain[s] why Iraq is the central front in their war on civilization,” though it is now universally understood to be not only a fake, but as badly executed a fake as the Nigerien yellowcake forgeries. I actually expected, silly me, that Chimpy would drop this latest scam once it was exposed. Forgot for a moment who I was dealing with.

An Iranian woman has been convicted of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. Iranian officials, though, insist that Iran is a civilized country that no longer stones people to death; she’ll probably be hanged instead, they say. Hey, she might just be lashed. (Update: the Reuters story has a little detail the Observer left out: she was also convicted of helping her lover kill her husband. For that, she received a separate sentence of 15 years. Note that adultery got a stronger sentence than murder.)

The Observer’s Jason Burke notes that, once again, when a natural disaster hit a Muslim nation, the government fell down badly (Musharraf was early on excusing the slow response to the earthquake by comparing it with Bush’s response to Katrina) while Muslim charities, many connected to extremists (but many not), not bogged down by incompetence and corruption, did excellent work, undermining the credibility of yet another secular government.

The Guinness Book of World Records has recognized this man, Mehmet Ozyurek of Turkey, as having the largest nose in the world, 3½ inches. Congratulations, Mr. Ozyurek.

Was that a fairly typical way that he gets information about what’s happening in Iraq?

From today’s Gaggle:

Q Scott, just to follow on the event yesterday the President had with the troops. Was that a fairly typical way that he gets information about what’s happening in Iraq?

MR. McCLELLAN: No.

Q When the President meets with his commanders, is there a more vigorous give-and-take, or what we saw yesterday --

MR. McCLELLAN: Of course there is. I don’t even know why you’re making such a suggestion.

Q Just asking.

So I’ve pre-ordered Robert Fisk’s Great War for Civilization, which will be out next month. I’ll review it here, but it’s 1,136 pages long – evidently it’s a war of attrition – so you probably don’t want to hold your breath waiting.

A while back I thought that Rick Santorum’s It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good might be good blog fodder, but my local public library hasn’t purchased it, and I didn’t want to spend money on it. I thought about asking you, my readers, to buy it for me, then I would read it and quote all the (unintentionally) funny bits and mock them for you, only I really didn’t want anyone spending money on this book, so I thought about asking you, my readers, to shoplift a copy for me, preferably from a Wal-Mart, but ultimately thought better of it.

Russia has crushed the Chechens who invaded Nalchik, killing many of them and many civilians, we’ll never know how many. I don’t really have anything to say about that.




The Justice Dept is in court defending the refusal to let the lawyers and families of hunger-striking detainees in Guantanamo speak with them. “There are all kinds of security issues there,” said the government lawyer. He claimed that there were 24 hunger-strikers, of whom 7 were being forcibly fed, but we know the Pentagon’s figures are no more worthy of trust than the official Nalchik death count will be. There is an article in the current British Medical Journal (not free to the general public), by a doctor who works in a British prison, which notes that the American justification for force-feeding hunger-striking prisoners, that authorities have a right to prevent “suicide,” and that hunger striking constitutes a suicide attempt, “has been almost universally rejected. The aim of suicide is death. Hunger strikers do not want to die; they want to live. They want to live with a better quality of life”. If the prisoner is sane, he or she has the same right to refuse medical treatment as anyone else. The British Medical Journal has come a long way since 1909, when it was very much in favor of the forcible feeding of suffragette prisoners, but even then (editorials Oct. 9, 1909, Dec. 18, 1909; sorry, no links!) it was contemptuous of politicians who hid behind the doctors and disclaimed any responsibility, as the Pentagon does today.

Interfacing with Iraqi civilians

Follow-up on Bush’s heavily staged video-conference blogged in my last post (Scotty McClellan, by the way, claims that the obvious scripting and admitted prepping of the soldiers, which was overheard by CNN, was necessitated by the technological problems of the event with the satellites and all that). But as scripted as it was, the exchange could still be revealing, as when Bush asked one captain, “As you move around, I presume you have a chance to interface [!] with the civilians there in that part of the world. And a lot of Americans are wondering whether or not people appreciate your presence or whether or not the people are anxious to be part of the democratic process.” The captain responded, “Sir, I was with my Iraqi counterpart in Tikrit, the city Tikrit last week, and he was going around, talking to the locals. And from what he told me that the locals told him, the Iraqi people are ready and eager to vote in this referendum.” So the only interfacing he’s doing is with someone in the Iraqi military, who told him exactly what he wanted to hear (and who in turn was informed by locals who told him what he wanted to hear).

Growing confusion and some misunderstanding

From the Schwarzenegger Prop 75 campaign, a cartoon every bit as subtle as the Governator himself.

---

Speaking of subtle, at MacDill Air Force Base, Secretary of War Rumsfeld suggested that troops should set their fellow citizens straight and dispel the “growing confusion and some misunderstanding” about The War Against Terror (TWAT). Evidently, “the public impression is so different from the reality.” Why does “the public” hate America? Rummy wants the troops to send out lots of emails to present the public with “a balance of what’s happening, as opposed to an imbalance that they’re receiving through normal channels.” If you have not yet been the lucky recipient of one of these Rumm-e-mails, here is some of the suggested content: “Well, you can tell those who ask such questions that you and your friends across the world are standing on the front lines to protect them and to safeguard their freedoms, as well as your own.” That should certainly take care of that growing confusion and some misunderstanding.

---

Speaking of growing confusion and some misunderstanding, George Bush says he wants Syria to be a “good neighbor to Iraq.” Oh, and it should also not “agitate killers in the Palestinian territory.” Really, agitating killers is probably not a good idea anywhere.

Bush also video-conferenced today with some American soldiers in Tikrit. He told them that “the American people are standing strong with you.” Well, not actually with them, that would be kinda dangerous; he was actually watching them on a large tv from several thousand miles away, so it was more sort of a metaphorical standing with them than an actual standing with them although, to be fair, he really was standing.

He added, “Thank you for all your work. When you [get] back to the United States, if I’m hanging around, come by and say hello.” The soldiers, who were not pre-screened or carefully prepped in any way, were able to answer Chimpy’s probing questions:

“Do the Iraqis want to fight, and are they capable of fighting?” he asked. He was told they were. [AP]

And Bush informed them that in Iraq they were facing “an enemy that actually has a philosophy.” Oh, the horror.

---

The NYT’s Joel Brinkley, following Condi Rice in her travels, has been doing some nice work in sneaking irony past his editors. Tuesday:

Rice, beginning a trip to Central Asia, urged the region’s leaders on Monday to hold “elections that are free and fair,” even though in one state she plans to visit nearly all the likely opposition candidates have been jailed and in another laws have been passed that stack the odds in favor of the present rulers.

And today:

“Afghanistan is inspiring the world with its march toward democracy,” she said here, just hours after insurgents fired three rockets into downtown, wounding two Afghans.

The latter story also highlighted the introduction of suicide bombing into Afghanistan, which you’d think would have gotten a little more notice than it has.

Guarantee

Iraq’s parliament has indeed approved the changes to the draft constitution, 3 days before the referendum, which I suppose is better than 3 days after the referendum. The draft now begins, “This constitution is a guarantee for the unity of Iraq.” Always start off with a joke.

A Chinese gentleman who sold bile extracted from the gall bladders of living bears was attacked and eaten by six living bears. Chinese think bear bile has medicinal effects; I don’t know about that, but reading this story did me no end of good.

Waiting

The Air Force’s recruitment website’s slogan is “We’ve been waiting for you.” Should the military really be taking its slogans from the theme songs of ‘70s sitcoms? And does anyone have suggestions for recruiting slogans taken from theme songs of other ‘70s sitcoms?

John Bolton prevented the Security Council from hearing the report of a UN envoy about atrocities in Darfur, for reasons that are obscure to me. His explanation was that the Council should act and not talk. What’s really going on?

I guess it doesn’t matter that so many Iraqis haven’t been given a chance to see the draft constitution they’re supposed to be voting on, since the thing was rewritten yet again today, 4 days before the referendum, by people who had no right or authority to do so, and with the active participation of the American ambassador . One change: instead of the document being unamendable for 8 years if it passed, the next parliament would start rewriting it in December.
(Update: you wouldn’t know from the WaPo story about this just how negligible and unrepresentative were the only Sunnis willing to participate in this farce).

Out of this rubble is going to come some good

Politics at its most elemental: in the Liberian presidential elections, this slogan:

Did he kill your ma? No!
Did he kill your pa? No!
Vote for George Weah!

Bush was asked by a reporter today about Karl Rove & the Plame case. He responded, “I’m not going to talk about the case. It’s under review. Thank you for asking.” The latter was of course sarcastic. His top aide is being investigated for a felony and he thinks he has the right to be snippy when he’s asked about it.

Bush went to Louisiana again, because “Out of this rubble is going to come some good,” by which he meant a photo op. He went to a Habitat for Humanity site, where they gave him, dear God, a hammer. There were no survivors.






Yes George, you’re holding up that wall all by yourself. Just stand like that and you won’t get into any trouble.


Spoke too soon. Looks like he hit himself in what Dick Cheney likes to call “an undisclosed location.”


Aw, the LauraBot’s helping out too. Note that the LauraBot doesn’t need a helmet, as her positronic net is protected by a skull made of durable titanium.


This man is hoping, in vain, that the Secret Service will stop George before he hammers in another nail.

That means when crisis hits an ally, another ally steps forward

Tony Blair is asking Parliament to ban 15 Islamicist groups, i.e., make membership in them or raising funds for them a crime. The groups all seem to have national goals, that is they want to turn Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Somalia, Libya, Bangladesh, Morocco into radical Islamic states. Because it makes life easier if you can convict people based on guilt by association rather than prove they did something themselves. MPs will also be relieved of the burden of having to figure out for themselves whether each of the 15 organizations is as bad as the government says they are, because they will not be allowed to vote on the 15 individually, just on the whole list.

How is it I’ve never heard of the sport of chessboxing, in which rounds of 4 minutes of chess alternate with rounds of 2 minutes of boxing?


The London Times notes that while the US is giving Pakistan $50m for earthquake relief, it is careful to point out that it is also a present for what the American ambassador called Pakistan’s “long-term strategic relationship” with the US, i.e., its alleged help in The War Against Terror (TWAT), adding, in case they don’t get it, “that means when crisis hits an ally, another ally steps forward.” Also, of course, Bush told Musharaf that the US will be offering an urgent shipment of prayers “for the Almighty God’s blessings on the people of Pakistan.” The Pentagon will assist in search and rescue operations, which they must be highly experienced at by now, seeing as they’ve been searching for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar in that region for four years.

Stamp out meaningless phrases

Not feeling inspired by the news, except, you know, with horror, so here are some highlights from the New York Magazine competition for 9/13/93, which asked for slogans for any movement du jour:

Save the dead white males.

It’s the stupidity, economist.

Let’s give it up for the King’s English

Bring back long division.

Give denial a chance.

Send a gay to camp.

Is a barrel of monkeys your idea of fun?

Carnivores are people too.

Godfather knows best.

Get involved. Make love and war.

[NOTE: More New York Magazine competitions here.]

Some people are sycophants, some are Dinks

Maureen Dowd: “W. is so loath to leave his little bubble - where caretakers tell him how brilliant and bold he is - that he keeps selecting the people in charge of the selection committees. It’s just so much easier to choose a sycophant who’s already in the room than to create one from scratch.”

An editor in Turkey who rejoices in the name Hrant Dink has been convicted of “insulting Turkishness,” although his prison sentence was suspended. Actually, his article called on Armenians to reject the poisoning effect of their anger against Turks for the, you know, genocide and whatnot. The prosecutors, who are not good readers, claimed he was saying that Turkish blood was poison.

A fantastic woman

One of the WaPo op-ed writers, I forget who, nailed the problem with Harriet Miers: no other president would have nominated her. Without her personal connection to Bush, her nomination is inconceivable, she wouldn’t have been on a list of the top 100 candidates, and no one can argue otherwise. What I’m enjoying is that with all the right-wing opposition, the Bushies may not be able to get away with refusing to release her papers. So that could be fun. The wingers (Bork of all people attacked her today) are in fact taking the line that I did with John Roberts, that the default position with a candidate you don’t know enough about should be rejection. Bush says “when she’s on the bench, people will see a fantastic woman who is honest, open, humble and capable of being a great Supreme Court judge.”

Maureen Dowd and others keep talking about how much Bush likes to surround himself with strong women, but then how do you explain Jenna and Not-Jenna?

Still, for corrupt cronyism you can’t beat Silvio Berlusconi. While he has often sponsored measures that weakened the Italian judicial system to save his own ass, and decriminalized bribery and corruption, now he is pushing a new law through intended to save his own personal lawyer from going to jail for bribing judges to ensure the success of one of Berlusconi’s personal business deals, but which will have the little side effect of striking down half the cases before the highest court, setting free murderers, embezzlers, etc etc.

During his visit to Nicaragua, Zoelick didn’t just threaten to cut off aid if political events there did not go as he liked, but went so far as to warn businesses that if they supported the Sandinistas they would be banned from doing business with the US.

Holy towering inferno, Batman!

Stately Wayne Manor (or the building that stood in for it in the tv series) has burnt down. It was in Pasadena. (Update: another story says that the mansion used in “Being There” has burned down; evidently it is the same place. I may never be able to watch that movie again.)
[Correction: Holy mistaken identity, Batman! The mansion was not in fact Stately Wayne Manor, although I think it was the one used for Being There and other movies. Same street, though.]

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Britain must allow prisoners to vote, although Britain seems to be planning to implement the ruling only partially, excluding those convicted of murder and rape.

The Israeli Supreme Court has banned the military’s use of human shields.



Of course, there’s been an injunction against that practice (which the IDF calls the “neighbor procedure”) since 2002 and it hasn’t stopped them. The decision rested on the question of whether consent could freely be given; the IDF claimed it always asked people nicely if they’d like to be human shields. The court said, “In light of the inequality which exists between the apprehending force and the local resident, the civilian cannot be expected to resist the request to pass on an alert.” D’ya think? Naturally, there are various members of the Knesset ready to defend the practice, just as there are 9 US Senators ready to support torture.

One of the winners of the IgNobel Prizes, Dr. Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow, author of “Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh: Calculations on Avian Defecation,” was denied a visa to enter the US to collect his prize.


Other winners included two U of Minnesota professors, who conducted a study to answer the age-old questions: can humans swim faster in a pool filled with water, or a pool filled with syrup (guar gum powder). About the same, as it happens; the increased power of their strokes made up for the increased drag. See, you learn something new every day. And not just that people get really bored in Minnesota, which you already knew. Gauri Nanda of MIT won an award for inventing an alarm clock that hides from you.

No act of ours invited the rage of the killers

This morning Bush gave what was billed as a major speech on The War Against Terror (TWAT), which turned out to be yet another attempt to redefine the enemy, to make terrorism more scary than if it were simply, well, terrorism, and to declare a counter-jihad. Shortly after 9/11 he got into trouble for using the word crusade. Now he’s trying to declare a crusade by the back door: it is a crusade, but they started it, he’s saying. He even used the obnoxious term Islamofascism, I think for the first time.

The speech attempted to construct an image of terrorists and terrorist acts as rational, part of a long-term strategy, “evil, but not insane.” “All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness,” but they are not random he says, they are an attempt, using tactics “consistent for a quarter-century,” to create a “totalitarian empire” from Spain (Spain? are the Moors coming back?) to Indonesia, sort of like the Ottoman Empire (which he’s probably never heard of). Bush’s military have never been happy about fighting an enemy without a geographic basis, haven’t known how to do it, which is why the immediate response to 9/11 was to go after a nation, Afghanistan, whose government, while nasty, had only a peripheral relationship to it, and why Rumsfeld’s immediate reaction was to start planning to invade Iraq, which had no relationship to it. So now Bush is creating a fictional geographically based enemy. “They” want to force the US out of the broader Middle East, then “use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country,” you know, any old country, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan, Venezuela, Liechtenstein, whatever, and spread outwards like, I don’t know, dominos, to create this, oh call it the Bin Laden Empire since he seems to be speaking the Dread One’s name again, for some reason no longer embarrassed by the failure to capture him. The name Bush can’t mention any more is Saddam Hussein’s, since he can’t acknowledge that the most dangerous, terrorist-friendly vacuum is the one caused by Hussein’s removal from power and the introduction of an American presence.

Bush rhetorically positions the terrorists as non-human, engaged in a “war against humanity.”

Just as during the Cold War the belief in a monolithic enemy enabled Americans to ignore local conditions and history and to paint Khrushchev, Mao, the Viet Minh, the Parti communiste français, etc etc as identical, Bush justifies, even demands, a similar ignorance today. “The radicals exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization, in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution.” Since local and national grievances are only excuses used by people who are really advancing the cause of the Neo-Ottoman Empire, we can dismiss those grievances from our thoughts. Indeed, we can dismiss them with all the contempt inherent in those phrases “culture of victimization” and “someone else is always to blame,” phrases which demonstrate once again the inability of the rich and powerful to empathize with those who are neither. Thus, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, etc, are merely a “litany of excuses for violence,” not real grievances. “No act of ours invited the rage of the killers,” he says, and if that isn’t the culture of victimization in which someone else is always to blame, I don’t know what is.

Deploying even greater irony and lack of self-awareness, Bush goes on to disparage bin Laden as a rich kid “who grew up in wealth and privilege” [Kennebunkport], who now tells poor Muslims what is good for them [“[our] beliefs... are right and true in every land, and in every culture.”], “though he never offers to go along for the ride.” [Texas Air National Guard]. “[T]hey wish to make everyone powerless except themselves.” Pot, kettle, black.

Indeed, while he insisted that despite its petty disagreements Iraq is a perfectly healthy democracy because “that’s the essence of democracy: making your case, debating with those who you disagree, who disagree, building consensus by persuasion,” this is the man who ran scared from Cindy Sheehan.

Crisp decision-making

A Guantanamo prisoner transferred to Spain is sentenced to 6 years for belonging to Al Qaeda. To add insult, well, injury really, to injury, the two years he spent in Guantanamo won’t count towards that 6 years.

Asked yesterday whether he would release any of the papers Harriet Miers worked on in the White House, Bush replied, “I just can’t tell you how important it is for us to guard executive privilege in order for there to be crisp decision-making in the White House.” He did not give any examples of this alleged crisp decision-making.