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I feel stupid for not having realized that National Sanctity of Human Life Day was scheduled for the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Subtle, huh? I hope you all celebrated with appropriate ceremonies.
For his contribution to National Sanctity of Human Life Day (and isn’t it interesting that no one needs to have explained to them that the “human life” sanctified sanctimoniously on such a day would be embryonic or fetal? You didn’t think it was about opposition to the death penalty or to war, did you?), William Saletan bestows on the pro-choice movement the bounteous gift of his advice, on the op-ed page of the Sunday NYT (I’ve kneed Saletan in his own reproductive organs on this subject in the past). Evidently what is needed is... wait for it... “for the abortion-rights movement to declare war on abortion.” He wants sex ed. & morning-after pills & better health insurance & so on, which is all to the good, and “more contraceptive diligence in the abortion counseling process,” which sounds an awful lot like scolding women before allowing them to undergo a medical procedure. The question is why Saletan thinks it’s the pro-choice movement specifically that has an obligation to push these side-issues. And the answer is that like a lot of Democrats these days, he may apply the word “right” to abortion, but he doesn’t really mean it. Those Democratic senators who will refuse to filibuster Sammy “The Coathanger” Alito, or who will actually vote to confirm him, would, I hope, not do so if it were the right of free speech that he was going to eviscerate. Saletan, whose deepest fear about abortion is that some women who have them won’t feel horribly guilty for the rest of their lives, doesn’t understand that the pro-choice movement is in no way responsible for what women do with the reproductive rights it defends. That’s what it means when we call it a right. The ACLU is not responsible for the stupid religions some people choose when they exercise their right of religion, or the stupid things they say when they exercise their right of speech, or the way they don’t vacuum the spare bedroom just because they won’t have soldiers quartered upon them. Saletan says, “Most people will tolerate it as a lesser evil or a temporary measure, but they’ll never fully accept it.” First, I didn’t know that abortions could be temporary, but even more ill-chosen a word is “tolerate.” You don’t tolerate a right, you respect it: the fact that it is a right means you don’t have a say over how it is exercised.
(Update: see also Katha Pollitt's excellent response to Saletan, and a debate between the two here.)
Follow-ups:
The Pentagon is claiming that the number of hunger-strikers at Guantanamo is way down, to 22, of whom 17 are being forcibly fed.
I was wondering how Burns responded to Musharaf about the Damadola airstrike, and I’m still wondering. The Embassy in fact refuses to confirm or deny that Musharaf even raised the issue.
In other Musharaf-is-a-prick news, Mukhtar Mai, the woman whose gang-rape was ordered by a village council, who Musharaf last year prevented coming to the US because she would “bad-mouth Pakistan,” and about whom he said, “This has become a moneymaking concern. A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped,” has gotten the UN to cancel a speech by Mai scheduled for Friday.
Speaking of follow-ups, whatever happened to the kidnapped sister of Iraq’s evil interior minister? (Update: Willie in comments points out that she was released, very quietly, a few days ago.)
And another great name: general manager of Houston tv station KRIV D’Artagnan Bebel.
USAID is using some of its funds for something other than development: to prop up Fatah in advance of Wednesday’s Palestinian election. USAID’s budget for this little secret (until now) electoral intervention (the USAID logo does not appear on these projects or in ads it pays for) is twice as large as Hamas’s warchest. This is all part of something in USAID called “the Office of Transition Initiatives.” USAID’s mission director James Bever says they are “not favoring any particular party,” but boy are they opposing a particular party. “We are here to support the democratic process,” he added, “with large secret donations, just like Jack Abramoff.” (I may have made up the last part). “We wanted to give maximum credit to the Palestinian Authority and to the freely elected president, Mahmoud Abbas, for taking the initiative and for inviting us to help get the message out to the Palestinian people.” I think that sentence means that the project’s goal is that Abbas get credit for secretly inviting in USAID. So it’s, like, secret credit, or something.
The US still hasn’t officially admitted to the Jan. 13th airstrikes on Damadola, Pakistan. Musharaf, who almost certainly approved the attack in advance and certainly hasn’t publicly condemned it or indeed said anything at all for eight days about missiles being launched against his country, which is normally the sort of thing you’d expect a country’s ruler to have an opinion about, tut tuts to visiting undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns that such attacks must never happen again.
In the meeting, Musharaf, who reneged in 2004 on his promise to step down as army chief but now says he might do so in 2007, explained to Burns that he is bringing democracy to Pakistan not despite being a military dictator, but because of it: “it has been acknowledged worldwide that I consolidated democracy and democratic norms at the grassroots by remaining in uniform.”
The Army interrogator, Lewis Welshofer Jr., who stuffed an Iraqi general into a sleeping bag and sat on it until he suffocated to death has been convicted of dereliction of duty and “negligent homicide,” which must be a definition of the word negligent with which I am not familiar, and acquitted of murder. The highest sentence he can now get is 3 years. Welshofer claimed to be following a directive from the US commander in Iraq: “The gloves are coming off, gentlemen… We want these individuals broken.” Welshofer responded that the military needed to loosen its interrogation standards, now that it’s no longer facing such pansies as, um, the Nazis: “Today’s enemies, especially in southwest Asia, understand force, not … mind games.” Evidently his superior didn’t recognize that that meant he planned to use, well, force. The name of Welshofer’s lawyer, by the way: Spinner, Frank Spinner.
The United Iraqi Alliance, which is neither united nor an alliance, although it is Iraqi, has put forward conditions for allowing Sunnis into the government, and they sound a little... familiar. Said one UIA leader, “We’ll require them not only to condemn terrorism - as they do normally - but to work with us in combating terrorism and overcoming it.” An unnamed American official said the same thing to AP with greater specificity: “the official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said Sunni Arab leaders must denounce insurgent violence and ensure that rebel groups lay down their arms.” Sounds just like the Israeli government laying down preconditions for talking with Palestinians, doesn’t it? So now elected Sunni politicians are to be held responsible for the actions of every single Sunni.
And if you’re keeping track of lame operation names, a series of raids south of Baghdad is denominated “Operation Warrior Intercept.”
So the Israelis won’t outright ban Palestinians in East Jerusalem voting in the Palestinian election, but they will set a maximum of 5.5% of total voters, who will be issued tickets on a first come, first served basis. The rest will have to leave the city and vote in the West Bank, assuming they’re allowed through the checkpoints and not deterred by the ridiculous length of time that usually takes. Just for the fun of it, it’s possible that the Israelis will make them literally jump through hoops.
I haven’t written much about Hillary Clinton because, basically, I just hope she’ll go away if I don’t. Fortunately, Molly Ivins
did it for me:
Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election.
Ivins’s only mistake:
Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite.
Because in fact Hillary is planning to run to the right of Bush, as hard a concept as that is to wrap your head around, having recently taken him to task for being soft on Iran and North Korea. Just not enough of a war-monger, is Shrubya.
Evidently Sunday is National Sanctity of Human Life Day, and while I was just gonna get Human Life a nice card, Chimpy “call[s] upon all Americans to recognize this day with appropriate ceremonies and to reaffirm our commitment to respecting and defending the life and dignity of every human being.” Appropriate ceremonies?
Clarence Ray Allen, the 76-year old executed in California this week, has asked that if he had another heart attack, he be allowed to die. Prison officials said no. “At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life,” said a San Quentin spokesmodel.
George Bush, asked by some idiot in Virginia whether the LauraBot would run for the US Senate: “she’s not interested in running for office. She is interested in literacy.” Jeez, George, your example to the contrary, literacy isn’t actually a disqualification for public office.
And don’t think you’re safe just because you don’t know what the squiggly things on paper mean: according to George, “The terrorists have got a weapon: It’s called our TV screens.” Especially those big-screen jobbies, those can really hurt if they get dropped on your foot.
Actually, George says you don’t need to be able to read, you just need to be able to dream: “One of the things about our country is it’s a place where you can start with zero,” you know, son of a president, grandson of a senator, that sort of thing, “you start with a dream and a good idea... and take risk and realize your dream. And it’s really important we keep it that way forever. America has got to be a place where dreamers can realize their dreams. And I love being in the midst of dreamers.”
In a speech today, Dick Cheney called for a renewal of the Patriot Act, saying “I believe the security of the United States needs to be above politics.”
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.
