Credibility

I’ve never been quite sure what the phrase “international community” is supposed to mean. Isn’t that, like, everyone? Still less do I understand how this community can have a greater or lesser degree of credibility, but Condi Rice says (while standing next to her “good friend,” Equatorial Guinea’s dictator, as every blogger and his uncle have pointed out) that the UN must slap down Iran hard (take “strong steps”) in order “to make certain that we maintain the credibility of the international community on this issue.” Credibility with whom? The Martian community?

Repeatedly acknowledging intelligence problems

Bush met today with the president of Ghana, who uttered the least credible sentence of the day: “I want to thank the President for understanding Africa.” Understands Africa? I’m surprised he’s heard of it.

The White House issued one of those amusing “Setting the Record Straight” releases, attempting to bury the WaPo story about the mobile “biological weapons labs” under a flurry of disinformation and distortion. It dismisses the DIA field report as a mere “preliminary finding,” ignoring the fact that it was, you know, accurate, says that it’s not the practice to change (false) reports by the intelligence community just because they’re contradicted by people on the ground, and ignoring the question of whether the White House was aware of the report when Bush made his statements (Scotty McClellan said today that he was “looking into that matter”.) You can read the thing and count the distortions for yourselves, including accusing the Post of saying that Bush’s only rationale for invading Iraq was WMDs, although the quote from the WaPo says no such thing. My favorite bit (and the second least credible sentence of the day): “The Administration Has Repeatedly Acknowledged Intelligence Problems And Has Taken Multiple Steps To Address Them.”

Name of the day: the new Italian parliament will include four out gays. One of them, who was re-elected, is named Titti De Simone.

Which is also her porn name.

Not police

Iraqi Interior Minister Jabr tells the BBC that death squads are “not police.” But when asked if the reverse were true, if the police are death squads, he remembered another appointment and backed quickly out of the room.

Some people just simply don’t want to be confronted with choice

The Czech manufacturer of semtex explosives has decided not to sue Madonna for damaging their good (trademarked) name by calling her company Semtex Girls Ltd.

Bush held another staged event to try to convince people to join his Medicare drug plan. Kept talking about how many choices people had now, although he admits “Some people just simply don’t want to be confronted with choice.” But he loves him some choice. For example, the audience members were all chosen by the local Republican party and chamber of commerce.

As someone who uses a fair number of quotes in my blog, I’ve noticed the tendency of news organizations to “clean up” quotations – eliminate awkward constructions, combine sentences, insert clarifying words that were never actually spoken, etc – often while retaining the use of quotation marks. This is why I so often seek out a transcript when I see a “quote” I want to use in a news article. Eli at Left I on the News has caught AP turning these words from Rumsfeld today about Iran – “It’s a country that has indicated an interest in having weapons of mass destruction” – into “‘It is a country that has indicated’ a desire to obtain nuclear technology.” First, they totally uncontracted that contraction, second, in deciding to turn his bombastic lie into an accurate statement, they missed that he did not technically lie, but used language intended to mislead. Rumsfeld’s very deliberate choice of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” wasn’t just intended to be emotive. He intended it to be understood as asserting that the Iranian government had actually said it wanted nukes, which it does but isn’t so stupid as to say in public, but if heaven forfend he were actually challenged, he could say that by golly gosh golly he meant that Iran has used chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War and therefore can’t be trusted with nukes. The care that went into this mislead (Rummy not normally being the most careful of speakers) shows the importance the Bushies put on demonizing Iran, almost... as if... they’re planning... something...

During that briefing, Rummy was flanked by General Peter Pace, who is supposed to be the sane one but who kept referring to himself by name: “Pete Pace believes...”, “As far as Pete Pace is concerned...” (Notice that he’s good enough friends with himself to call himself Pete just as Robert Dole always called himself Bob.)

La commedia è finita, but how was it that Prodi only just barely managed to defeat the buffoon? Jonathan Freedland suggests in the Guardian that the recent trend of razor-thin victories in Germany, the US etc show that electorates strongly dislike the free-market, globalization-loving attacks on social welfare programs but that the oppositions have failed to provide a meaningful alternative.

Berlusconi controls most of the Italian media and is a monumentally sore loser, so good luck to Prodi, he’ll need it.

Scrupulous

So on “West Wing,” Matt Santos was elected fake president. The first Hispanic fake president. If you ignore the fact that Prez Bartlett is played by an actor named Ramon Estevez.

Prodi seems to have defeated Berlusconi, but by a close enough margin that the latter will demand a “scrupulous” examination of the ballots. Which would be the first scrupulous action Berlusconi has ever taken. Who would have guessed he even knew the word?

The state of North Rhine Westphalia has been retraining prostitutes as nursing home workers. Says the person in charge, “They have good people skills, aren’t easily disgusted and have zero fear of physical contact.” Says one person in the program, “Prostitution taught me to listen and to convey a feeling of safety. Isn’t that exactly what is missing so much in care of elderly people?”

Leverage xenophobia response

You’ve probably all read the WaPo piece about the Pentagon’s propaganda campaign to build up Zarqawi as Villain of the Week, because while Bush may talk about foreign policy being based on principles, he can’t function without demonizing someone. My favorite bit is the quote from a briefing: “Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response.” Leverage xenophobia response. Just charming. So the idea was to get Iraqis to equate the insurgency with a foreigner and forget that there was also this rather large occupying army in Iraq which was also made up of, you know, foreigners.

The Pentagon has responded to the article by saying that Zarqawi really is a great big scary villain. Gen. Rick Lynch, who I am officially awarding Mark Kimmitt’s old title of Military Moron for his many stupid comments and for not knowing the meaning of the word insidious, insists that Z. & those he recruits, trains and equips are responsible for 90% of the “insidious suicide attacks” in Iraq.

Bush pooh-poohs the notion that he plans to attack Iran militarily, calling it “wild speculation”: “I know we’re here in Washington [where] prevention means force. It doesn’t mean force necessarily. In this case it means diplomacy.” In Washington prevention means force? Is that a regional dialect thing like hoagies & grinders, o lexicographer in chief?


One of the students at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins (a first-year) asked Bush what, if any, legal authority governs the actions of private contractors in Iraq. He didn’t know. Boy, didn’t he know. You must, must, must watch the video. Bush has become a parody of Jon Stewart’s parody of him.

Much of the speech portion was spent scolding Iraqi politicians for failing to form a government “that unifies all Iraqis.” Really, his language is getting dangerously insulting, ordering them to “put aside their personal agendas,” thus reducing the political problems of Iraq to issues of ego.


He also belittled American foreign policy before the arrival of his enlightened rule: “And our foreign policy prior to my arrival was ‘if it seems okay, leave it alone.’ In other words, if it’s nice and placid out there on the surface, it’s okay, just let it sit.” He makes it sound like an unflushed toilet.

Completely nuts

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says that Iraq has a “high level of slaughter” rather than a civil war. So that’s all right, then.

He also says that the idea of a preemptive nuclear attack on Iran is “completely nuts.” And your point is? He says there is “no smoking gun” on the Iranian nuclear program. A quick historical quiz for Mr. Straw: recollect a famous sentence that contained the words “smoking gun” and the words “mushroom cloud.”

The Indian state of Rajasthan has banned religious conversions, the 6th Indian state to do so. Indian usage of the word seems to be narrower than American, and less confusing, so what is being banned is not changing one’s religion (á la Afghanistan) but converting someone else. The state’s ruling party, the Hindu nationalist BJP, claims Christian missionaries bribe poor people to convert. For the purposes of the law, one’s original religion is deemed to be that of their ancestors; that is, religion is inherited. Thus, if Hindus re-convert converts, and they certainly try, that would not be illegal.

Speaking of bigots, the racist British National Party has been riven with controversy over just what constitutes a wog after it adopted a man whose grandfather was a Greek-Armenian immigrant as a candidate for local elections in Bradford, most party members not considering him really One of Us.

So a naturalized American citizen of Palestinian origin, Arafat Nijmeh, a mental patient, told his alleged mental-care workers at the Alton Mental Health Center that he wanted to castrate George Bush. They promptly called the Secret Service, and Nijmeh has been indicted for “knowingly and willfully” threatening His Highness. Overreact much?

Today was Iraqi Freedom Day, the anniversary of the stunt in which Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down by Marines from the crack 75th Unsubtle Propaganda Division. How did y’all celebrate? Iraq celebrated with the usual bombings, shootings and whatnot. Freedom, ain’t it grand?

Abusive close

Huzzah and kudos to the headline-writer at the WaPo. Today, we have the lovely “Campaign Draws to Abusive Close in Italy” and we have “At Least Six Killed in Israeli Strike On Alleged Training Camp in Gaza,” which does that rarest of journalistic things: not taking an Israeli statement on faith.

Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker about Pentagon covert ops in Iran, including contact with “anti-government ethnic-minority groups” – because that’s worked so well in the past – and picking out targets for our planes to bomb (the Pentagon claims that such operations are “force protection” military rather than intelligence operations, and therefore don’t have to be reported to Congress). His ex-DOD source tells him that the Pentagon’s planning is predicated on the belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government” – because that’s worked so well in the past. The article also examines Rumsfeld and the Pentagon’s increasing interest in using tactical nuclear weapons.

Friday Orwellianism blogging

Screenshot from the Pentagon website, “President Defends Iraq War for Peace.”

The president would never...

Scotty McClellan: “The president would never authorize disclosure of information that could compromise our nation’s security.” Compromising Valerie Plame’s security is another matter entirely, though. I’m unclear on whether the case against Scooter Libby goes away if this is true. It certainly is true that the president has the authority to declassify information (so when Bush denounced people who “leak classified information,” he was speaking of an act that by definition he and he alone cannot do). But the Philip Agee act criminalizing the naming of CIA personnel is presumably another matter.

McClellan is still using that “can’t talk about things about which there is a legal proceeding” line, but usually it’s bullshit. Of course he shouldn’t try to influence the trial by saying “Scooter is totally innocent,” but here he claims that he can’t tell us the exact date that the NIE which Libby disclosed was declassified. That’s a simple factual datum, of course he can reveal it.

Ambassador Khalilzad admits that he is holding talks with insurgent groups, but not the really bad ones, just “people who are willing to accept this new Iraq, to lay down their arms, to co-operate in the fight against terrorists.” Now those are the people you want on your side, the ones who will lay down their arms and then fight terrorists, bare-handed, mano a mano, using nothing but the noble art of fisticuffs and the somewhat less noble art of bitch-slapping.

Another bombing of a Shiite mosque, the Buratha mosque in Baghdad, which has a well that can cure the sick. 51+ dead. The Baghdad city council is requesting that Iraqis donate blood. Preferably their own.

Caption contest

So what’s going on in these pictures? What’s Frist saying to McCain? Is McCain about to go apeshit and snap his neck like a twig? What’s Kennedy thinking? Is Lieberman packing heat?

Will Bush have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of himself inside himself?

At today’s Bush speech on the Iraq War, the 1,263rd in a continuing series, he made a charge against Saddam Hussein that we haven’t heard in a while, presumably since it was understood conclusively that there were no WMDs, that he “was deceiving [UN weapons] inspectors”. Um, about what?

Says “I fully understand that the intelligence was wrong, and I’m just as disappointed as everybody else is.” Disappointed? Is that the word for it? And I think that Cindy Sheehan and many other survivors of dead soldiers, to say nothing of most of the 25 million Iraqis, might be a tad more “disappointed” than Bush is.

He did his usual thing about how his father fought the Japs and now he & Koizumi are bestest buds, although he added a surprising condemnation of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, at least I think that’s what this is:

the war -- and by the way, it ended with an old doctrine of warfare, which is, destroy as many innocent people as you can to get the guilty to surrender. That’s changed, by the way, with the precision nature of our military, and the way we’re structured, and the way our troops think, is we now target the guilty and spare the innocent.

I’ve commented before on Bush knowing only one adjective, interesting. Between the speech & the q&a, he used the word 18 times. For a man whose lack of intellectual curiosity is renowned, nay, legendary, he sure finds a lot of things interesting.

Which is more than I can say for this speech, although one audience member gave him a dressing down:

Q: I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and the grace to be ashamed of yourself inside yourself.

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, sure, that’ll happen.

I may have made up the response, although it would sure have been interesting if he had said that, huh?

The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize

A couple of days ago Bush said he needs “good, crisp information.” Well, then you have to stop pulling all your information out of your ass.

In the Saddam Hussein trial, a new charge is added: irony in the first degree. Also genocide. Saddam stood up and accused the current regime of running death squads. But wait! the irony doesn’t end there. AP headline: “Saddam Admits Approving 148 Death Sentences.” That’s 4 fewer than George Bush! And, according to the Indy, he read a poem “to illustrate [the] alleged perfidy” of the trial. But do they reproduce the poem? They do not. This probably isn’t it:

Yet each man mass murders the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a weapon of mass destruction.

Secretary of War Rumsfeld told a North Dakota radio interviewer that the American people don’t understand the nature of the enemy: “the tendency is for people to think of terrorism as an act of violence that is designed to kill people when in fact the purpose of terrorism is not to kill people. The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize.” Let me write that down. But “We have to win the test of wills if we want to stay free people.” In other words, we’re free, but we’re only free to take one single course of action.

Asked about Condi’s figurative admission that we figuratively made thousands of figurative mistakes in figurative Iraq, Rummy said, “I don’t know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest.” And didn’t bother asking her either (his interview was four days after her speech). He continued,

The reality in war is this. You fashion a war plan and then you proceed with it. And as the old saying goes, no war plan survives first contact with the enemy. Why? Because the enemy’s got a brain; the enemy watches what you do and then adjusts to that, so you have to constantly adjust and change your tactics, your techniques, and your procedures. If someone says well, that’s a tactical mistake then I guess it’s a lack of understanding, at least my understanding, of what warfare is about.

Did you see what he did there? He literally defined the word “mistake” out of existence, saying that there is no such thing in the “reality” of war.

And in an interview with a Nashville radio station Wednesday, he said, “You know, you think about it, there’s 25 million Iraqis who were repressed and filling up mass graves with hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens and today they’re liberated. That’s important.” Remember: it’s the people who filled up the mass graves with their fellow citizens who are liberated; the people in the mass graves, not so much.

A banana a day will keep Dr. Chimpy away

Today Bush held another event on behalf of health savings accounts, part of his campaign to turn every medical decision into an economic decision. Preferably an economic decision you make while you’re bleeding or have a 103° fever. And the real problem, according to Bush, is insurance, because “when somebody else pays the bill, sometimes you don’t pay attention to the cost. You know, when you go out and purchase an automobile, somebody doesn’t pay the bill for you, you pay it. And you tend to shop and you look and you try to find out what’s best for you.” Yes, buying a car is just like purchasing a gall bladder operation, and the exact same economic model applies. “Health savings accounts enable somebody to say, look, if I make the right decisions about smoking or drinking or exercising, that I’ll end up saving money.” Yes, because the prospect of getting lung cancer or cirrhosis is nowhere near as daunting as having to pay actual bucks for treating those diseases.

More of that inappropriate economic rhetoric: because of lawsuits, OB/GYNs “got run out of business.”

Again, he tries to argue that those Washington elitists think you, the American people, are a bunch of ignorant boobs, and how dare they! “You know, it kind of defies the concept that people can’t make decisions on their own -- you know, if you don’t have a Ph.D., you shouldn’t be allowed to decide things.”

Caption contest:

People will react if they see the rules of democracy being disobeyed

How did I not know that Uruguay’s real name was the Oriental Republic of Uruguay?

Democracy at its finest: Berlusconi says those voting for the opposition are dickheads (coglioni; literal translation, from the Scalia-to-English Dictionary: testicles). He’s also been calling sex lines to, ahem, poll the workers (7 of 9 say they support him). And in a sign of desperation, he suddenly promised, totally unbelievably, to abolish council tax (on homes) altogether.

Democracy at its finest: Jaafari says his refusal to stand down is motivated by dedication to the democratic process which he says chose him to be prime minister (as opposed to being selected by a smallish sectarian party, voted on by a loose sectarian coalition, and then imposed on everyone else): “People will react if they see the rules of democracy being disobeyed. Every politician and every friend of Iraq should not want people to be frustrated.” And by “people,” he means Ibrahim Jaafari.

Democracy at its finest: DeLay put off resigning in order to raise money supposedly for his re-election, which he can now dump into his legal defense fund. DeLay says that his decision to stand down is motivated by a desire to spare his district “a nasty eight-month or seven-month campaign... with all of the Michael Moores and the Barbra Streisands coming down here into Texas to support my liberal Democrat opponent.” Are there more than one each?

Good, crisp information

Bush continues to condescend, telling Iraqi leaders to “stand up and do their job”. Evidently he thinks they haven’t been able to form a government because they’re lazy, or that the concerns about, for example, Shiite dominance of the security forces, are simply an excuse not to “do their job.”

And what is their job? Keeping Americans safe: “by establishing a democracy, we’re laying the foundation for peace. And that’s what we want. We want there to be peace. We want our children not to have to grow up under the threat of violence coming out of the Middle East.” See, and the Iraqis thought it was all about them, when it was about us all along. Or our children. Those heartless Iraqis: think about the children, THE CHILDREN!

Remember how Condi said that people who don’t learn from recent history are “really rather brain dead”? Well, bring out your dead. Bush: “And one of the lessons of September the 11th, 2001, is that this sense of -- that tyranny is okay, but underneath the surface there was resentment. And the way -- and anger, that became the breeding grounds for these killers.” So, er, I think he’s trying to say that killers have sex while angry, or maybe that they breed on the ground, and there’s resentment under the surface of that ground. Anyway, here endeth the lesson of September the 11th, 2001.

Bush says Josh Bolten will organize the White House to meet Bush’s needs, “And my needs are to have good, crisp information so I can make decisions on behalf of the American people.” Crisp: 1) Firm but easily broken or crumbled; brittle. 6) Having small curls, waves, or ripples.

Bye bye Bug Boy

Patrick Cockburn, in an Indy piece behind a pay barrier (Update: here it is.), says that the daily death toll in the Iraqi civil war is probably 100+, which “may exceed the daily death rate in the first months of either the English or American civil wars.” Areas that are peaceful are those that have already experienced sectarian cleansing and are firmly under the control of a single militia. There is no such thing as a national government in Iraq.

The Guardian provides more evidence of that: the Iraqi Interior Ministry is refusing to use police trained by the US and Britain, preferring to use Shiite militia members.

Evidently the US is starting rumors that Venezuela intends to invade the Netherlands Antilles (when did we stop calling them the Dutch Antilles?).

Tom DeLay. The Hammer. Bug Boy. Call him what you will (and you will), you’ll miss his waxy skin and bad, bad toupee when he’s gone.





Tom DeLay and friend
A quick overview of his greatest hits (I’m excluding the corruption scandals, or we’ll be here all day): Texas redistricting. That supposed children’s charity that was actually a cover for donations to the 2004 Republican Convention. Wanted Clinton impeached because he held “the wrong worldview,” unlike the biblical worldview he said God was using him to promote. Expelled from Baylor for drinking and carousing. Didn’t go to Vietnam because so many minorities from the ghetto had volunteered, to get those high-paid military jobs and escape poverty, that there was no room left for patriots such as himself. “Americans have been tolerant of homosexuality for years, but now it’s being stuffed down their throats and they don’t like it.” To the Republican Jewish Coalition: “My friends, there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There is only the global war on terrorism.” Called the ban on assault weapons “a feel-good piece of legislation.” Said the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube was an act of terrorism but his taking his own father off life support was ok. And this week, he said there’s nothing he would have done differently. (Oh, if you read the Time article: he was admonished three times in 2004, not 1994).

And I’d like to steal this handy chart, from Perrspectives.

The divine right of democracies

Three recent news stories illustrate what I will call the divine right of democracies, in which morality is defined as whatever democratically elected governments choose to do.

1) Jacques Chirac insisted that the new discriminatory employment law must be “respected” because it emanated from the French parliament. Must it? Here in the US, there’s been a lot of condescending scolding (yes, Americans condescending to the French, it really does happen just as much as the reverse) of these “spoiled” French youths supposedly demanding jobs for life. Now while it may or may not be true that the French labor market is over-regulated in a way that stifles job growth, this law treats adults up to 25 years old as an inferior class of citizens without the protection from being arbitrarily fired in the first two years on the job that every other citizen enjoys. There are higher principles, and the protesters are trying to hold the government to them. Monsieur Chirac, fill in the blank: liberté, blank, fraternité.

2) Last week the lower house of the Alabama legislature voted to pardon Rosa Parks and other civil rights activists who were arrested for civil disobedience (they or their survivors will have to individually request those pardons). I’m sorry, who is pardoning who here? There are higher principles, a higher morality, and who exhibited them, the state and its laws, or the people who broke those laws?

3) Republicans have not just stated their disagreement with Russ Feingold’s motion to censure Bush, which is their prerogative, but also attacked it as illegitimate, “beyond the pale” according to John Cornyn, oh, and it puts soldiers at “greater risk.” Beyond the pale equals above the law. There are higher principles.

Get this done

Robert Fisk notes that the new Israeli Knesset contains 15 generals and 6 secret service agents. Out of 120 members.

Condi did something in Iraq that Rumsfeld, Cheney etc etc have never done: she spent the night. Like American tourists everywhere, she decided that made her more of an expert than the people who live there, informing every Iraqi political leader she met that “the Iraqi people are losing patience.” She knows this because there are cartoons (really, check the transcript, that’s what she says). And they’re not the only ones: “your international allies want to see this get done” and “the President [Bush, not Talabani] ... wants them to get this done,” which is a phrasing Iraqis will see as dismissive of the concerns and fears that have prevented “this” from “getting done.” And she said, and I’m not sure what this actually means, “The American people want to see Iraq succeed, but they want to see Iraq progress toward success.” She added that America has “put a lot of treasure – and I mean human treasure – on the line to try to give Iraq an opportunity for a democratic government” and that “given the sacrifice, people expect that process to continue”. Yes, it’s all about us.

Reading the transcript, it looks like she thinks the only stumbling bloc to a unity government is the choice of prime minister, not the fact that no one really wants a unity government. They could settle on a PM (not Jaafari) tomorrow, and spend three months arguing about who the minister of sport will be.

As to the withdrawal of US and British troops human treasure, “No, no. That didn’t come up.”

You can’t continue to leave a political vacuum

Condi tells ITV that “Iran is not Iraq,” in case you were wondering about that. Says the US won’t go to war yet because “we believe that diplomacy has a chance to work.” If I read that correctly, the “Iran is not Iraq” line entails an admission that diplomacy wasn’t given a chance to work in Iraq.

Condi found the welcome in Blackburn so warm that she & Jack Straw quickly escaped to the more congenial environs of Baghdad. Actually, the purpose was to apply to dickering Iraqi politicians still unable to form a government after more than 3½ months the sanction of extreme scolding. Says Rice, “You can’t continue to leave a political vacuum.” Which is funny, because she works for a man who... oh, you were all way ahead of me. She’s putting yet more pressure on Jaafari to step aside – I’d love to know exactly what she said to him in private. In public they talked about... the weather.


Jaafari is now so unpopular with Iraqis, including many Shiites, that even the signs that the US despises him are not helping him – now, that’s unpopular! Riverbend says Iraqis don’t expect any improvement in a new government, but

we’re just tired of waiting for the final formation. People need to know who’ll be in power because they want to know who to pay bribes to... [and] which religious party to go to when the Interior Ministry goons take away a relative.

Of course the problems involved in forming a “unity” government go way beyond just Jaafari, but Americans as always are looking for the quick fix. At least they don’t seem to be looking for another strong man to impose on Iraq.

The new Israeli Knesset will contain no native English speakers.