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On Damadola, we are now being told by Pakistani officials that there really were terrorist leaders at the house, but that their bodies were dragged off before authorities arrived. This is The War Against Terror’s equivalent of “I do have a girlfriend, but she goes to another school, you wouldn’t know her.”
According to the Pentagon website, “The American people must remind themselves every day that the United States is at war, a top Army general said today.” It’s not exactly the serenity prayer, is it? Some people, and I’m thinking Gen. Ray Odierno might be one of them, are just not cut out to write self-help books.
George Bush, meanwhile, invited some “victims of Saddam Hussein” to the White House, on the very day a Human Rights Watch report says that the US uses torture as a deliberate policy, and said some ironic things about a tyrant who considered himself above the law and denied people basic human rights. But mostly, he was there to listen: “The stories here are compelling stories. They’re stories of sadness and stories of bravery.” He added, “I like stories. ‘Specially animal stories. Uncle Dick reads me a story every night before beddie byes.” The event, Bush’s portion anyway, will be broadcast on C-SPAN later, so I can see whether it’s just a transcription error that has him referring to Saddam as “the butcherer,” but it’s kind of too good to check. If the message is how the US invasion and occupation have transformed Iraq, why did they put right next to Bush a guy who (very sensibly) ran away from Saddam’s Iraq, but who doesn’t seem to have any plans to move back to what Bush calls “a society that is beginning to understand the fruits of democracy and freedom.” Understanding fruit. Whatever.
Speaking of people who are often outwitted by produce, Scottie McClellan at today’s Gaggle:
Q There are allegations that we send people to Syria to be tortured.
MR. McCLELLAN: To Syria?
Q Yes. You’ve never heard of any allegation like that?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I’ve never heard that one. That’s a new one.
Q To Syria? You haven’t heard that?
MR. McCLELLAN: That’s a new one.
Q Well, I can assure you it’s been well-publicized.
MR. McCLELLAN: By bloggers?
I take it then that I do not have the honor to number Mr. McClellan among my readers. Nor has he read the Human Rights Watch report, but he condemns it as “based more on a political agenda than on facts.”
McClellan was asked again today about Abramoff meetings with White House staffers, and said “we’re not going to engage in a fishing expedition.” Then he accused people of making insinuations without evidence – the very evidence he is refusing to provide.
He also denied that he had said – in the statement he’d made a few minutes earlier – that the chief of Syrian military intelligence was personally involved in the Iraqi insurgency.
Princess Sparkle Pony points out that Trent Lott is confused by the “outrageous” provision in the Republicans’ compromise(d) ethics rule lowering the spending limit on meals congresscritters could accept to $20. “Where are you going to – to McDonald’s?” The concepts of either a) eating a meal that costs less than $20, or b) paying for his own food, are so alien to him that they literally didn’t enter into that head-like object he keeps under his toupee.
I dunno, does this count as an admission of the Damadola bombing?
MR. McCLELLAN: The President looks forward to visiting with Prime Minister Aziz when he is here in Washington. We put out an announcement on that just recently blah blah blah... The United States is providing extraordinary assistance to those who were victims of this terrible earthquake blah blah blah... In terms of the war on terrorism, Pakistan is a key ally in the global war on terrorism. We work very closely with Pakistan to go after al Qaeda. And we will continue to pursue al Qaeda terrorists wherever they are; they will be brought to justice. The President has pointed out that we have already brought to justice in one way or another some three-quarters of the known leaders within al Qaeda. There are others that we continue to pursue and they will be brought to justice.
What abstract noun is it that they’ll be brought to again, Scottie? Actually, his idea of Justice isn’t really that abstract, is it? with the Predator drones and the missiles and all, although they’ve obviously still got the lady with the blindfold, she’s the one who sets the targets. Speaking of predator drones, Scottie isn’t really evading the question of whether the US was responsible, because that reporter forgot to ask him, as did the next one to ask about the incident, who asked if the US had any expression of regret. Scottie responded, “I’m not going to get into discussing any operational activities or alleged operational activities relating to the ongoing war on terrorism.” So they’re reserving the right to bomb whole new countries without saying a word to justify it.
Scottie went on to draw a distinction that would have been lost on the 18 people in those houses: “The enemy, as I said, targets innocent civilians. That’s the difference. They target innocent civilians. We help innocent civilians.” I keep waiting for someone to ask McClellan or McCain or anyone how many innocent civilians would be an acceptable number to kill in order also to kill someone like Zawahiri. If they think that 18 is an acceptable number, they ought to be able to tell us if 100 is too many, or 1,000.
Finally, a reporter asked, “Has the administration acknowledged the air strike?” Scottie: “I’ve seen the reports. I’m aware of the reports. I don’t have any additional information for you.”
He also refused to answer if Abramoff had ever met with Karl Rove.
California executes the 76-year old blind, deaf guy in the wheelchair. I’m so proud. No word on whether his last meal included a birthday cake with candles. Actually, he had sugar-free pecan pie with sugar-free ice cream. Diabetic. Funny time to be watching the blood sugar levels.
Speaking of blood sugar levels, I celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday by going to see a picture of him made out of jelly beans.
The American not-embassy in Cuba celebrated MLK’s birthday by running the “I Have a Dream” speech on an electronic sign. Because George Bush so totally has the right to appropriate King’s words to serve his anti-Castro foreign policy goals (although what those words were supposed to indict Castro of, I’m just not sure).
The Bush campaign asked the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq (in what turned out to be a hushed-up friendly-fire incident) to appear in campaign commercial?
From the German internet cannibal retrial, testimony of the defendant: “I wanted to eat him but not to kill him.” So that’s okay, then.
The US still hasn’t admitted having bombed houses in Damadola, Pakistan last Friday, although several congresscritters (McCain, Lott, Bayh) skipped the “We did it” part and went right to the “and by God we’ll do it again” bit. Condi Rice, the only official who’s said anything about it on the record, didn’t “have anything for you” on it, but she also skipped to the “and by God we’ll do it again” bit: “The Waziristan frontier area is extremely difficult. It’s been lawless for a long time.” And sending planes across an international border to bomb it, does that make the area a) less lawless or b) more lawless, in your opinion, Condolencia?
Bush: “It seems fitting on Martin Luther King Day that I come and look at the Emancipation Proclamation in its original form.” Adding, “So where are the comics?”
A full day after a missile strike on Pakistan, a bungled attempt to assassinate Ayman al-Zawahiri, resulting in the deaths of something like 18 Pakistanis, the US has yet to acknowledge that those were its drone planes and its missiles (indeed, the first reaction was to deny it) and explain why it committed an act of war against a supposed ally, the second airstrike inside Pakistan in a week. Of course it wasn’t technically an act of war against Pakistan because the US had Musharaf’s permission. Musharaf won’t admit that, of course, so he has to pretend to be outraged; a government statement called the attack “highly condemnable.” Considering how much pretending to be outraged people like Musharaf have to do, you’d think they’d be better at it, if not actually convincing. Musharaf diluted his faux outrage even further by blaming the victims for the missile strike on their village: “If we kept sheltering foreign terrorists here... our future will not be good.” That will look really good on 18 head-stones, although it may not fit on the child-sized ones. That’s assuming the authorities give back the bodies they seized for the FBI to perform DNA tests on.
Of course for some people, the real crime isn’t the 18 or more dead, but the singeing of a Koran.
George Bush, putter at half-mast, in a room full of women golfers.
Bush met German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He said twice that he talked with her alone in the Oval Office, which is interesting since she doesn’t seem to know English and he sure as hell doesn’t speak German.
But it’s not like he was listening anyway. Although he claimed to have been “touched” and “uplifted” by hearing about her experiences living in both tyranny and freedom, he dismissed the concerns she expressed about Guantanamo by calling her ignorant:
Yes, she brought up the subject, and I can understand why she brought it up, because there’s some misperceptions about Guantanamo. First of all, I urge any journalist to go down there and look at how the folks that are being detained there are treated. These are people picked up off a battlefield who want to do harm. A lot of folks have been released from Guantanamo.
So they’re dangerous but a lot of them have been released. I see a Willie Horton ad in the future. And journalists can just go there and talk to them, who knew? Bush called Guantanamo
a necessary part of protecting the American people, and so long as the war on terror goes on, and so long as there’s a threat, we will, inevitably need to hold people that would do ourselves harm in a system that -- in which people will be treated humanely, and in which, ultimately, there is going to be a end, which is a legal system.
Pfew, for a second there I thought he was going to say “final solution.”
The acting Prime Minister of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov says that with all the men killed there over the last decade, the only solution, really, is polygamy. Granted, this guy’s answer to pretty much everything, including potholes, bird flu and spam e-mail, is always “let’s legalize polygamy.”
For a month, the Israeli military has been cutting off parts of the West Bank from other parts of the West Bank, preventing travel between them, without actually announcing it as a new policy. You know what would help with this, according to Ramzan Kadyrov? Polygamy.
Boy I wish I had some more items so I could string that out into a proper running joke. You know what help me with this post? Polygamy.
Pat Robertson apologizes for “remarks which I can now view in retrospect” – in retrospect, mind you, after, you know, some reflection – “as inappropriate and insensitive,” but doesn’t actually retract his opinion that God smote down Ariel Sharon for pulling out of Gaza.
Robertson’s fellow theologian Ryan Thomas Green was sentenced to death in Florida today for shooting a guy who was wearing a University of Alabama baseball cap – Green thought the letter “A” meant the guy was the Antichrist. Also, a bull told him to do it, as did some colors (I’ll bet it was magenta; magenta’s such a bitch) and symbols. He also shot another guy and a bull that day, not clear in the AP story whether it was the talking bull. Green may have some mental health issues. Or bulls and colors talk to him.
The Chinese government supports the practice of extracting bile from bears, says it’s painless. But it is concerned about Tibetan eagles, and will crack down on the Tibetan practice of feeding dead people to the birds which, while gross, is the prescribed religious practice there.
AP headline: “Records Show Army Ended Abuse Probe Early.” Anal probes, not so much. The Iraqi detainee, who held a high-level position in the Baathist regime – he’s a relative, possibly a second cousin, of one of Saddam Hussein’s bodyguards – claimed the usual colorful variety of abuses, and the army ended its investigation without questioning any Americans involved, or looking at the records, which were “lost” in a computer “glitch.” When the military says it investigates these cases, this is evidently what it means.
Speaking of lost stuff, the palaces handed over by the US to the Iraqi military were all thoroughly, and I mean thoroughly, looted, including doors and electrical switches. Freedom, ain’t it grand?
By the way, after a week of hearings, I have to ask: what was so bad Harriet Miers, exactly?
I have sent this message to my senators:
Senator Boxer,
It is essential that Samuel Alito’s nomination be filibustered, and that you must support that filibuster. Indeed, I believe the oath you took to uphold the Constitution requires it. There are many reasons why Judge Alito should not be promoted, but I will focus on three:
1) If you believe that there is a right to privacy, and a right to bodily integrity including the right to abortion, you must oppose the nomination of a man who will wrongly take those rights away. If you are not there to protect the rights of Americans, what are you there for?
2) Judge Alito’s advocacy of the false theory of a “unitary executive,” not only verbally but in his record as a judge and in the Reagan White House, would undermine the constitutional system of checks and balances and separation of powers that protects us from an overweening, even dictatorial executive branch. If you are not there to protect Americans from tyranny, what are you there for?
3) Judge Alito’s pattern of evasion, contradiction and outright dishonesty makes many of his answers suspect, and from a constitutional standpoint make a mockery of the advice and consent role of the Senate. If you will not stand up for the prerogatives of Congress and its proper role as a co-equal branch of government, what will you stand up for?
If it were only a matter of disagreeing with Judge Alito’s judicial philosophy and worrying about how he would vote in individual cases, I might ask you for a no vote but not a filibuster. But I believe he represents such a threat to individual rights and to the constitutional order that I do not hesitate to call a filibuster your duty. Thank you for your attention.
Lindsey Graham, in between bouts as the self-appointed politeness czar of the ScAlito hearings, tells Democrats (yesterday, I’m a bit behind), “I know that free speech is important. It’s important to me, and it’s important to you. But we can’t build a judiciary around that issue.” No, wait, it wasn’t free speech. “I know that freedom of religion is important. It’s important to...” No, that wasn’t it either. “I know that the right not to have soldiers quartered in time of peace in any house....” Oh, I’ve got it, it’s the right of abortion people are making too much of a fuss about.
I could have used “the right to bear arms” in that paragraph, but does anyone think he’d even have been nominated if he hadn’t decided in favor of everyone’s right to a machine gun?
And then Graham made ScAlito’s wife, played here by Nathan Lane but still looking very much like someone named Martha-Ann should look – good job Nathan – cry by asking, doing his impression of a Democrat – leave the impressions to Mr. Lane, Senator Graham, but please, do give up your day job – ScAlito if he was a bigot. And everyone was so focused on the Runaway Bride that they missed him answering, yes, I am one huge bigot, thank you for asking. I don’t have the stomach to watch much more of this nonsense, but I’m guessing that today every news channel has their cameras firmly affixed to her, looking for a little faux drama.
Bolivia’s president-elect Evo Morales, a light packer, has been traveling the world, showing off this sweater in meetings with the presidents/prime ministers of France, Spain, China, and here, South Africa.
Detail about the military commissions in Guantanamo I didn’t know: the prisoners are not allowed to represent themselves, are required to be represented by someone assigned to them by the Pentagon. This from the hearing for “Osama’s bodyguard,” actually a Yemeni guy who put together videos for Al Qaeda, and is therefore clearly too dangerous to be allowed to roam free.
Back in October I asked who would be the first senator to call Judge Alito “ScAlito” (which I believe is his porn name). It was John Cornyn, yesterday, according to Maureen Dowd.
Today is the 4th anniversary of the use of Guantanamo to detain prisoners in The War Against Terror without trial.
Bush, at a “town hall meeting” in Louisville organized by the Chamber of Commerce, has a little pronoun trouble, or possibly a Sun Kingly inability to distinguish between himself and the United States:
We took action because the Taliban refused to expel al Qaeda. And we took action because when an American President says something, he better mean it. In order to be able to keep the peace, in order to be able to have credibility in this world, when we speak, we better mean what we say. And I meant what we said.
About the invasion of Iraq, he (or possibly they) says “I understand that the intelligence didn’t turn out the way a lot of the world thought it would be. And that was disappointing”. Yeah, disappointing, exactly the word I was looking for, like when the pie at that restaurant isn’t as good as you remember, disappointing, like when your kid gets a B+ instead of an A, disappointing, like when the most powerful person in the world is a complete moron, disappointing, like when he gets us into a never-ending quagmire, with tens of thousands dead, disafuckingppointing.
Still, it was a hard decision to go to war, “because I understand the consequences. I see the consequences when I go to the hospitals. I see the consequences when I try to comfort the loved ones who have lost a son or a daughter in combat. I understand that full -- firsthand: War is brutal.” I happened to catch this bit on CNN; do you see which phrase enraged me? First-hand. He thinks he knows what this war is like first-hand because he visited some wounded soldiers, well after they received their wounds, in an antiseptic hospital.
On Iraqi insurgents: “They’re not going to shake my will.” Now that’s just dirty.
Asked about immigration, he said he was against amnesty, but defined amnesty as “automatic citizenship,” which of course it isn’t.
Although it was said in advance that the questions wouldn’t be screened, there wasn’t a single critical one.
Oh, it’s on.
I’m not sure I see the logic behind Alito’s admitting that his 1985 statement that he didn’t believe the Constitution protected the right to abortion was indeed a statement of his views in 1985, while refusing to say what his views are now. He does, however, promise to keep an open mind, which certainly reassures me. If he’d said, No Senator, I do not intend to keep an open mind, then I might have worried just a little bit, but he didn’t say that, he said that he’d keep an open mind. He even said, and this just shows how open his mind would be, that if an abortion case were argued before the Court, “I would listen to the arguments that were made.”
You know what’s always open that shouldn’t be? Joe Biden’s fucking mouth.
Bush visits the Veterans of Foreign Wars, whose numbers he has worked so hard to increase: “You took an oath to defend our flag and our freedom, and you kept that oath underseas and under fire.” We have to fight them in Atlantis so we don’t have to fight them over here.
Gearing up for the election year, he set out the limits of acceptable discourse:
there is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate... The American people... know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right. When our soldiers hear politicians in Washington question the mission they are risking their lives to accomplish, it hurts their morale.
So minor quibbling about the way the war is conducted is okay, but any discussion of The Mission at all is disloyal, and any questioning of how we got into this mess is dishonest. Got it.
Jack Abramoff’s next endeavor: writing a commentary on the Torah. The All-Loophole Torah, no doubt.
Noted ethicist Newt Gingrich had this to say about the Abramoff scandal: “You can’t have a corrupt lobbyist unless you have a corrupt member.” Heh, he said corrupt member, heh.
It’s interesting that Alito... hold on a second...
Corrupt member. Heh.
... that Alito chose in his opening statement to rehash some old class resentments. Considering that he’s pretending that if confirmed he’ll just drop his opinions – if those are his opinions and he’s not gonna confirm or deny that they are – here he is talking about how he worked his poor Italian ass off to get to Princeton and when he got there it was full of damned hippies!, “very privileged people behaving irresponsibly” as opposed to the “good sense and the decency of the people back in my community.”
Actually, that period may be the key to Alito. He really did work his poor Italian ass off to join the ruling elite, this modern-day Rastignac, and just as he was poised to do so, its offspring experienced a Vietnam-fueled crisis of confidence and began to question the very legitimacy of the power so nearly in his grasp. He’s spent the rest of his career trying to bolster that power, making the intellectual and legal case for its legitimacy.
Corrupt member. Heh. Heh.
(Update: oh dear, it seems the whole quote is “You can’t have a corrupt lobbyist unless you have a corrupt member or a corrupt staff.”)
I was listening to the opening salvos in the ScAlito hearings, but had to turn off the car radio after Chuck Schumer said that ScAlito was trying to fill Sandra Day O’Connor’s shoes, which were big shoes, and they were also special shoes.
Scottie McClellan denied that the US was talking with terrorists in Iraq, but “We have been reaching out to the rejectionists.” No means no! Bad touch!
Speaking of rejectionists, the Bushies seem to spend a lot of time lately playing Miss Manners, telling people what they can and can’t say. On critics of the war, McClellan: “There’s a difference between loyal opposition that has a different view, and those who are advocating a defeatist approach that sends the wrong message to our troops and the enemy.” Scottie was asked to clarify Bush’s call for “dignified” confirmation hearings, to define what exactly wasn’t dignified, which he didn’t really do, although he suggested that questioning ScAlito’s integrity was out of bounds. However, he did say “the Senate has a very important role to play in confirmation hearings,” which I’m sure Chuck Schumer would be delighted to hear, but he seems to have locked himself in the bathroom with Sandra Day O’Connor’s shoe again.
What Scottie would not do was tell us what the heck is wrong with Cheney’s foot, and I am so not gonna make another Schumer joke here. I’m not even going to make a joke about gout, which is what rumor would have it afflicts Big Time. I understand it’s quite painful and not just for bloated plutocrats anymore and not humorous at all despite having the funny name, c’mon say it with me: gout gout gout gout gout...
Here’s what Iraq has come to: the sister of the interior minister was kidnapped last week, and it’s barely considered news.
Today Bush visited a school to commemorate the 4th anniversary of No Child Left Behind, trumpeting the death of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” where “It’s more important that somebody be shuffled through than it is to determine whether or not they’re capable of meeting certain standards”. Speaking of standards, earlier in the day he said that Samuel Alito should be confirmed because “Sam’s got the intellect necessary to bring a lot of class to that Court.” It’s all about standards, folks. Speaking of standards, back to the NCLB photo op: Chimpy commented that Laura often read to the twins, for all the good it did; “Occasionally, I did, too, but stumbled over a few of the words and might have confused them.” That was at the start of a speech about how important education is.
Hell, even the transcript guy is marking Bush down:
And the best place to start is to make sure every child can read and write and add and subtract. And so that was the spirit behind proposing the No Child Left Behind Act. And as I mentioned, there was a lot of non-partisan cooperation -- kind of a rare thing in Washington. But it made sense when it come [sic] to public schools.
That’s transcript guy’s sic. And later, “Laura and I’s [sic] spirits are uplifted any time we go to a school that’s working”.
Naturally, because he was in a public school, he ended his speech, “God bless the teachers here, and the principal. God bless the parents. And may God bless the students, as well.”
As for ScAlito, as far as Bush is concerned, it’s all about surface appearance dignity:
And my hope, of course, is that the American people will be impressed by the process. It’s very important that members of the Senate conduct a dignified hearing. The Supreme Court is a dignified body; Sam is a dignified person. And my hope, of course, is that the Senate bring dignity to the process and give this man a fair hearing and an up or down vote on the Senate floor.
Followed by a dignified funeral for the Constitution as we knew it. He made the same call for a dignified confirmation process for Roberts, when I wrote,
I can’t even imagine how he defines dignity in this context (but then, I can’t imagine him spelling dignity). Possibly for him, nothing says dignity and gravitas like abject capitulation and subservience, like that butler he always calls Jeeves (but whose name is not actually Jeeves), who always says Yes sir, at once sir, in that fruity accent.
The British government has set up a website where members of the public can nominate and vote on the Icons of England: Stonehenge, Punch & Judy shows, a nice cup of tea, Benny Hill in drag, John Cleese in drag, Winston Churchill in drag, double-decker buses, the Amritsar massacre, an Eton schoolboy being buggered, a Beefeater being buggered, Oscar Wilde being buggered, Winston Churchill being buggered, a stockbroker in a bowler hat with a rolled-up umbrella being buggered, Dr. Who being buggered, Mr. Bean being buggered, Pitt the Younger being buggered, Big Ben, the humble bobby being buggered, queues, Winston Churchill in a queue, queues for being buggered, those red phone boxes, the Queen Mum’s gin bottle, Prince Charles’s ears, that sort of thing. (Update: I’ve gone through more of the site. They actually do list men in drag.)
After hearing that an Iraqi journalist working for the Guardian and Britain’s Channel 4 was investigating the misuse and theft of funds, American troops, according to the Guardian, “blasted their way into [his] home... firing bullets into the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife and children”, put a hood on his head, seized his videotapes, and dragged him off for interrogation. He was later released.
Darn, I knew I forgot something. “Justice Sunday III” was today, broadcast on finer Christian tv stations everywhere, and I forgot to watch. Rick Santorum said that “The only way to restore this republic our founders envisioned is to elevate honorable jurists like Samuel Alito”. Republic? Are you sure you aren’t thinking monarchy, Rick? Or theocracy? (I started writing Holy Roman Empire there, but realized it might be taken as a reference to the forthcoming Catholic majority on the Supreme Court, which wasn’t what I had in mind). Little Ricky claimed... actually, I want to point out that the WaPo truncated his comment to “extremely liberal justices [are] destroying traditional morality”, when the complete quote is, “destroying traditional morality, creating a new moral code and prohibiting any dissent.” Damn activist judges: that’s the role of the executive branch.
On the other hand, the Post mentioned, and the AP left out, that the event was held at a black church, whose pastor has received over $1 million from the federal government through the Faith Based Initiative program. One speaker is from something called Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation; didn’t really think that acronym through, huh?
Favorite headline of the day, from the Sunday Times: “Cannibal Goes on Charm Offensive.” That’s the German guy who advertised on the Web for a willing main course. The prosecutors are appealing his sentence (8½ years), which was light because the victim did volunteer. Herr Meiwes says, “I have three good lawyers and I am calm, relaxed and very confident.” Now when you say good lawyers, do you mean good in the sense of delicious with some fava beans and a nice chianti, or something else? He piously turned down media offers until he found one that would tell the story properly: “I want to explain what made me do this and I want to warn other people.” Yes, because without your warning, who knows how many people might kill and eat somebody they found on the internet. One good thing about being a cannibal in prison: they give you your own cell.
The Pentagon claims that the number of hunger-strikers at Guantanamo has dropped to 40, of whom 32 are currently being force fed. The new German chancellor has criticized Guantanamo, saying “Different ways and means must be found for dealing with these prisoners.” I’m handicapped in formulating a joke about that because I have somehow never watched Hogan’s Heroes. Please feel free NOT to post your own in comments. And here’s a little detail in an Observer story about all this, demonstrating American cultural sensitivity at its finest: “During Ramadan, tube-feeding takes place before dawn.”
Name of the week, from a WaPo article about how evangelical Christians love them some Jewy Jews: the Rev. Lamarr Mooneyham.
Paul Bremer, former Viceroy and Grand Vizier of Iraq: “we really didn’t see the insurgency coming”. Bremer has a book coming out, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope. So he didn’t see the insurgency coming because he was too busy filling his hope chest. Or trying to lure the centenarian out of retirement for one last Bob Hope tour.
Bremer’s ghost-writer is one Malcolm McConnell, who also ghosted Tommy Frank’s memoirs, a book on “How Belief and Prayer Can Help You Triumph Over Disease,” a book on the Challenger explosion, and a book on prostate cancer, so he was clearly the man for the job.
Tom DeLay has decided not to seek to regain his leadership position, not that anyone was asking him to, and pass on the Toupee of Power to Roy Blunt.
He says that he has “always acted in an ethical manner” and expects to be cleared, but that Congress needs to be focused on, you know, not him, because “we live in serious times”. Which is presumably why he tried to relieve that seriousness with the joke about acting in an ethical manner. “History,” he goes on, “has proven that when House Republicans are united and focused, success follows.” Er no, not success, that would be evil which follows. Republicans always get those two confused for some reason.
Hugh Thompson, Jr. has died. He met the enemy, and it was us.
The Pentagon admits to having hit the wrong house in Baiji (on which I posted Tuesday night). But while I’ve re-read yesterday’s CNN story reporting this several times, I can’t figure out if they just bombed the wrong house, or if the strafing (over 100 cannon rounds) also targeted the wrong house. Bad writing by CNN or fuzzy info by the Pentagon, I dunno. I’ve waited before posting anything because I assumed someone other than CNN would be covering the story of the US bombing the wrong house and killing an entire family, but, well, not so much. Also, 4 days later and apparently no one has yet checked to see if that was really an IED those guys were planting.
Dick Cheney tells the troops forced to listen to him at Fort Leavenworth, “Every American serving in this war can be absolutely certain that the people of our country do not support a policy of passivity, resignation, or defeatism in the face of terror.” You’ll note that passivity, resignation and defeatism are not, in fact, policies, they are states of mind, as is terror. Clearly, the Bushies have now left the real world entirely, and are fighting The War on Terror (TWAT) not in Iraq but completely within the confines of their own skulls. Says Cheney, “The only way to lose this fight is to quit” (which, he adds, is not an option); that’s only the case if the fight is taking place entirely within your own mind. I wonder how the troops who actually have to fight this war and be shot at and blown up feel being told that victory is really just a matter of the Power of Positive Thinking.
