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An email from a reader associated with Students for a Free Tibet (site; blog; both with lots of info on Chinese/Google [Choogle?] censorship) reminds me that I meant to write about Google, actually google.cn’s censoring the internets on behalf of the Chinese government. Clearly, their resisting the US Justice Dept subpoena was less about not being evil than protecting trade secrets. It would be nice to figure out exactly what they’re doing, and to keep track of which search terms are censored as they’re added to a no doubt constantly increasing list. The day they rolled out google.cn, for example, I checked it for the only really important metric: does it block my site? It didn’t then, a few days ago, but it more or less does today, when searches for “WIIIAI” and “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” no longer yielded no hits for this site, but whateveritisimagainstit.blogspot.com works (of course, if you know the URL, you don’t need Google). I don’t know (not being able to read Chinese, much less those boxes that show up on my screen instead of Chinese) if Google mentioned that it was censoring the results of those searches, but as an interesting Cnet News report on what sorts of things are being censored indicates, Google is failing to inform users when they censor stuff, like they said they would.
It’s kinda fun watching everybody talk about shunning Hamas as the scum of the earth while attempting to absolve the people who elected them. Which is great for Americans, because it means we should also bear no responsibility for the chimp-like resident of the Oval Office. So as I understand it, a large majority of the Palestinian people are supposed to have said, “Yes I know they want to launch a war to the death against Israel, but they did promise to fill the potholes.” It’s like a protest vote, we’re told, a Ross Perot/Ralph Nader kind of thing. Me, I don’t know exactly what the Palestinian citizenry were thinking, and neither do you. If their lives are miserable and their economy is in bad shape and they’re all unemployed, I doubt that they entirely blame Fatah, corrupt and inefficient though they certainly have been, and probably assign a jot of blame to, well, you fill in this phrase: “Death to I_____l”
Rumsfeld said something a couple of days ago that’s still annoying me. Denying reports that the US Army was “broken,” he said that to the contrary, it was “battle-hardened.” They’ve been shot at, blown up, and kept in a constant state of tension for months on end; suggesting that they’ve been hardened by the experience strikes me as insulting. Maybe it’s just me.
Update: Or not:
Sez Condi Rice about Hamas, “You cannot have one foot in politics and another in terror.” Sounds like a really bad game of Twister.
Netanyahu and Likud are predictably claiming that the withdrawal from Gaza was responsible for the Hamas victory, because it showed that terror and violence worked. Yup, no hypocrisy there, no sirree. Netanyahu has coined the charming term “Hamastan.”
Fafblog asks, How does a War Bill become a War Law, and reassures us that “the president would never ever eat a baby unless it was reasonably suspected to be affiliated with possible terroresque program activities.”
In Thailand, a man who set a world record by spending 32 days in a glass cage with 3,400 scorpions will marry a woman who set the Thai record for 28 days with 1,000 centipedes, in a wedding sponsored by the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. Of course the problem with these mixed marriages is how do you bring up the children?
Bush press conference, yippee. Gives us a little State of the Union (SOTU) preview: “I’m going to remind people we’re living in historic times.” Of course while he’s giving the speech, it will feel like geologic times.
In his ongoing efforts to reduce his vocabulary to the smallest number of words possible, Shrub has pretty much stopped using any adjective except “interesting.” Today, for example, on the SOTU: “it’s an interesting experience to walk out there”; on meeting Alito’s law clerks: “an interesting experience”; on the Palestinian elections: “very interesting”, “an interesting day”; on budget talks: “that’s going to be an interesting discussion”. It’s just about the least communicative adjective he could choose, conveying almost no information. It’s public speaking by the lazy for the lazy; the listener isn’t supposed to think any harder about the meaning of the sentence than Bush did in formulating it.
The Palestinian elections provide Bush an opportunity – an interesting opportunity – to go all Federalist Papers on the meaning of democracy:
You see, when you give people the vote, you give people a chance to express themselves at the polls
Dude, you’re blowing my mind.
-- and if they’re unhappy with the status quo, they’ll let you know. That’s the great thing about democracy, it provides a look into society.
But “if your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you’re not a partner in peace. And we’re interested in peace.” Yeah, peace is interesting.
Actually, his words really do give an insight into his view of democracy, despite himself. The election was “a wake-up call to the leadership” which “should open the eyes of the old guard”; “one way to figure out how to address the needs of the people is to let them express themselves at the ballot box”; “If government hadn’t been responsive, I’m not the least bit surprised that people said, I want government to be responsive.” This is a top-down model, in which leaders listen to the people, respond to them, take their views under advisement, but aren’t really controlled by them.
In defending the “terrorist surveillance program,” Bush uses the phrase “connecting the dots,” which we’ve been hearing several times a day from one Bushie or another. I wonder if they focus-grouped it?
On domestic spying: “And I’m intending to use that power -- Congress says, go ahead and conduct the war, we’re not going to tell you how to do it.”
On the pictures with Abramoff, “I’m also mindful that we live in a world in which those pictures will be used for pure political purposes, and they’re not relevant to the investigation.” Of course he met with Abramoff for purely political purposes, Abramoff was a purely political operator, so what’s your point?
No one bothered to ask about the Damadola airstrike, so I guess there wasn’t much point to forgoing the usual questions when he met the Pakistani prime minister (Rumsfeld also skipped a Q&A after his meeting). Molly Ivins has the question I’d like to see asked: “Are you the worst president since James Buchanan, or have you never heard of him?”
You’ll be happy to know that the Pentagon will soon deploy robots that, in its words, “pack heat.” Says the toy’s human (I assume) owner, Army Sgt. 1st Class Jason Mero, “Terrorists will likely think twice before engaging machine-gun-packing robots.” They still can’t go faster than 5 mph, though.
Last week I started to write an analysis of the Justice Dept’s 42-page “zenith of his powers” memo in support of domestic spying the terrorist surveillance program. Can’t remember why I deleted what I wrote, except that one part of my rant was undercut when I realized that the phrase about the president being the “sole organ” in foreign relations actually came from some 1936 Supreme Court decision. For the record, the Constitution gives the president precisely three things he can do in foreign relations: 1) appoint ambassadors, with the approval of the Senate, 2) sign treaties, which must be ratified by 2/3 of the Senate, 3) run the military, when Congress has declared war. Anyway, there’s a piece not far from what I would have written by Jacob Weisberg at Slate. On Bush’s assertion that the Sep. 2001 Congressional Gulf of Tonkin resolution gives him the right to do anything he felt like doing, whether it was mentioned or not, and going so far as to claim that that was what Congress meant to do, even though, unlike the authors of the Constitution, almost all of the 2001 congresscritters are still alive (or what passes for life in Congress) and capable of speaking (and speaking and speaking; or in Joe Biden’s case, speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking), Weisberg says “Bush as much as declares: ‘I determine what my words mean and I alone determine what yours mean, too.’” Especially frightening when Bush knows so very few words, can pronounce even fewer, and understands the meaning of yet fewer. What struck me about the white paper was that most of it was not about legal and constitutional issues, as one might expect from a Department of Justice document, but the same old “9/11! 9/11! 9/11! Be afraid, be very afraid!” rhetoric. Weisberg notes that while it cites the Hamdi case, which denied the Bushies the right to detain people forever without a hearing, in which O’Connor wrote that a state of war is not a blank check, “The Justice Department memo, however, cites Hamdi as ballast for its stance that when it comes to spying domestically, Bush has not only a blank check but a wallet full of no-limit platinum cards.”
When Britain deports people to countries with questionable human rights records, it makes those countries promise, cross their hearts, not to torture or kill them, and gets an independent monitor to keep tabs on them. They want to start deporting Libyans, so they’re trying to recruit an independent monitor there... Qaddafi’s son.
Bush went on a field trip to the No Such Agency today, where “officials learn information about plotters and planners and people who would do us harm.” Or the 3 P’s, as they’re known in the world o’spooks.
Here he is, looking around for Jack Bauer, or at least Chloe.
Here is the worst violation of the truth in advertising laws ever.
And the caption for this one I’ll leave up to you.
Bill Ford, who I’m sure got his job based solely on the merits, just like another chief executive we could name, says of the massive job-cuts at Ford Motor that “we’re moving from a culture that discourages innovation back to a company that celebrates it.” Of course the party that celebrates innovation will be a much smaller one now.
Every so often the White House website decides to “set the record straight.” Today, they totally completely set straight all those people who are complaining about domestic spying. Not the spying part, they’ll totally cop to that, just don’t call it domestic:
DEFINITION: Domestic Vs. International.
- Domestic Calls are calls inside the United States. International Calls are calls either to or from the United States.
- Domestic Flights are flights from one American city to another. International Flights are flights to or from the United States.
- Domestic Mail consists of letters and packages sent within the United States. International Mail consists of letters and packages sent to or from the United States.
- Domestic Commerce involves business within the United States. International Commerce involves business between the United States and other countries.
So that’s okay then.
Yesterday Bush was asked if he’d seen Brokeback Mountain. He hadn’t, but said that he’d heard about it. Now we know that Bush doesn’t read the newspapers and gets all his information from trusted sources such as Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and Rummy Rumsfeld. So who told him about Brokeback Mountain, and how did they explain it to him?
A slogan at the anti-abortion rally, spotted by the WaPo: “Abortion is mean.”
Army inquisitor Lewis Welshofer Jr., convicted for sleeping-bagging Iraqi General Abed Hamed Mowhoush to death, has been sentenced by a jury of his military peers to a jolly stiff reprimand, a smallish fine and he’ll be restricted to barracks and work for 60 days – that’s right, suffocating a guy is not a firing offense in the Army. The prosecution failed to call any witnesses at the sentencing hearing.
And remember: it’s not a domestic surveillance program, it’s a terrorist surveillance program.
Speaking of phone calls nobody should be listening to, George Bush spoke to the “March for Life” by phone today. He said, “the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence apply to everyone, not just to those considered healthy or wanted or convenient. These principles call us to defend the sick and the dying, persons with disabilities and birth defects, all who are weak and vulnerable, especially unborn children.” Especially unborn children. Speaking of persons with disabilities, the weak and vulnerable, I’ve been waiting for Bush to say a single word about his failure to have the drug prescription plan up and running on time. “We’re sending a clear message to any woman facing a crisis pregnancy: We love you, we love your child, and we’re here to help you.” Man, how creepy is that?
About as creepy as the X Files Fanatics Against Abortion (from the 2001 march).
This guy is “overcome with emotion,” according to the Reuters caption, just like a little girl. But not like this little girl, with her little fetus dolly.
And these three men (the one with the stripy umbrella is Ralph Reed) agree that abortion hurts women, although they’re pretty sure that childbirth is quite pleasant.
8 minutes after delivering his little anti-choice message, he began a speech at Kansas State University, the theme of which was how the president has to make decisions, even if women aren’t allowed to: “I make a lot of decisions. I make some that you see that obviously affect people’s lives, not only here, but around the world. I make a lot of small ones you never see, but have got consequence. Decision-maker is the job description.” Hell, even terrorists make decisions: “They make decisions based upon their view of the world, which is the exact opposite of our view of the world.” I don’t know, Osama and George probably both think the earth is flat.
Here’s my favorite sentence: “And when the American President speaks, it’s really important for those words to mean something.” Would that they did, would that they did.
The other theme of the speech is that 9/11 Changed Everything, which if it were true, you’d think he wouldn’t have to keep repeating it. One change: “Threats must be taken seriously now, because geography doesn’t protect us”. Dammit, you mean I learned the difference between an isthmus and a peninsula for nothing?
Once again he defends invading Iraq, using that pin-point logic for which he is justly famous: “He was a state sponsor of terror. In other words, the government had declared, you are a state sponsor of terror. And, remember, we’re dealing with terrorist networks that would like to do us harm. There’s a reason why he was declared a state sponsor of terror -- because he was sponsoring terror.”
And of course that invasion was followed by... magic! “When somebody says, if you vote, I’m going to get you, sometimes people maybe say, well, maybe I don’t want to vote. Eleven million or so Iraqis went to the polls in defiance of these killers. (Applause.) It’s a magical moment in the history of liberty.” I’m going to get you? He’s been watching too many Dudley Do-Right cartoons.
And the US won’t reduce troops in Iraq until the commanders on the ground tell him he can:
You see, sometimes in the political process people feel beholden to polls and focus groups. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m going to be listening to the people that know what they’re talking about, and that’s the commanders on the ground in Iraq.
Yes, he just said that the American people, the ones who answer polls, don’t know what they’re talking about.
“I view it as a chance for an historic opportunity to make this place better for your children and your grandchildren -- ‘this place’ being the world.” Thank god he cleared that up. Now when can I move to Mars?
And then he opened it up to obsequious questions. The first one began thusly: “Mr. President, we salute what you have done, your aggressive stance on terrorism. But more than that, as you know, Kansas is a beef state. ...” It didn’t get much better, with questions (update: this one from someone in the Air Force ROTC, according to the WaPo) about how he withstands all those mean attacks on his character (through faith, family and friends) (and by friends, he meant Barney the dog, the “son I never had”), and how Laura contributes to his decision-making process (she brings “common sense,” at least when her common sense chip is activated), and whether he’s seen Brokeback Mountain yet (no). A student did manage to stump him on his education cuts (which he denied had been made).
Hookay, when I looked for pictures, I may have come up with the reason for the softball questions. When you’re busing in a claque to fill up the front rows, it might be less obvious that they’re not real Kansas State students if they changed out of their uniforms first.
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.
