Stubbornly rubber-stamping

The International Astronomical Union has voted in favor of the broad definition of “planet,” so we’ve got 12 now and they’re threatening us with more to come. That’s what happens when you let a union make these decisions: inventing mnemonics for 20 or 30 planets, teaching schoolchildren how to pronounce Quaoar, Varuna, Ixion, etc, it’s like guaranteed employment for the “I’ve got a really big telescope” crowd.

Quaoar, indeed.

I’m serious: Charon is not a planet, it’s just not.

Speaking of jumped-up satellites with delusions of grandeur, Joe Lieberman called today for Rumsfeld to resign. The Lamont campaign says this won’t disguise his “many years of stubbornly rubber-stamping Bush’s failed policies”. Stubbornly rubber-stamping?

Snipers, mysteriously undeterred by the ban on automobiles, have fired on a Shiite pilgrimage in Baghdad, which if the photo illustrating the BBC story about this is correct, is one of those pilgrimages with flagellation. It must be very annoying when you’re flagellating yourself and people start shooting at you.

Duck herders?

The LAT reports that while the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division knew that members of the 173rd Airborne tortured detainees in Vietnam (some of them to death, and some using a form of waterboarding), information they kept to themselves, although 3 low-ranking soldiers were fined or reduced in rank, their real concern was digging up dirt to smear the people who said there was torture. The people in the military, obviously, the Vietnamese didn’t count. No one noticed when all these files were declassified in 1994. When the LAT started investigating, they were re-classified (but not before the LAT read most of them).

A second story tells of a sergeant convicted of murdering three Vietnamese farm workers (an irrigation worker and 2 teenage duck-herders) who not only served no prison time but was allowed to stay in the army another 12 years, not even transferred out of Vietnam.

Strip poker, running backwards, and the Middle East situation – but I repeat myself

The Israeli commandos driven back from Lebanon today, who Israel claims were trying to interdict arms shipments from Syria and/or Iran, but who Lebanon more plausibly asserts were trying to seize or kill a Hezbollah leader, were reportedly disguised in Lebanese army uniforms. Aren’t there rules against that sort of thing? Certainly, Israel has forfeited its right to demand that the Lebanese army take any action to disarm Hezbollah, since they have put Lebanese soldiers at risk of being attacked as possible Israeli infiltrators.

And now the sports news:

Switzerland is hosting the retro-running championships, in which contestants run backwards 11 kilometers up a mountain.

That’s very picturesque, no doubt, but not as picturesque as the World Strip Poker Championship in London. Brings new meaning to the phrase Texas Hold ‘Em. You can look for the pictures yourself: I’ve already been quite sufficiently traumatized by the sight of the guy with the huge Arsenal tattoo and the unfortunate case of acne on his back, thank you very much.

Test in progress

Reuters headline: “Israel Raid in Lebanon Tests Truce.” If a squadron of Israeli attack helicopters leave Haifa Air Force Base traveling north at 150 miles per hour...

Presumably if they’re only “testing” the truce, that’s okay because it’s not like they’re breaking it or anything. However Lebanese PM Siniora calls the raid a “naked violation” of the ceasefire. So it’s like one of those dreams where you’re taking a test naked.

Bush in his radio address talked yet again about how “foster[ing] the development of young democracies” in the Middle East will defeat the terrorists. And Israel has seized the Deputy Prime Minister of Palestine. Because sometimes young democracies need a “time out.”

People were trying to come and kill people

The Indy asked some Labour MPs whether they agreed with Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott that Bush’s Middle East policy was “crap” (which Prescott denies saying but no one believes him, because it sounds just like him, and anyway we’ve all just been enjoying watching the BBC use the word as often as possible). Says Ian Davidson MP: “I think that John Prescott is to be commended for the quality of his political analysis.”

CentCom’s new slogan: “It’s fun to shoot some people.” To be fair, they may just have promoted Mattis because they were scared of him. Wouldn’t you be?

Bush had a meeting with his economic advisers, who advised him not to wear a tie, then they all did the traditional “Buckaroo Banzai” walk to the microphones


to answer questions, none of which were about the economy. He was asked to explain why he thinks Hezbollah was defeated: “The first reaction, of course, of Hezbollah and its supporters is, declare victory. I guess I would have done the same thing if I were them.” Ya think?


“But sometimes it takes people a while to come to the sober realization of what forces create stability and which don’t.” Ya think?


(Update: While waiting for the pictures for this post to upload, I looked over to Bob Harris’s site. Sigh.)

“Hezbollah is a force of instability. ... Hezbollah, they’re pretty comfortable there in south Lebanon.” If you like sitting on piles of rubble. “They’re now going to find themselves not only that which caused the destruction, but they’ll find themselves with now a Lebanese army, with U.N. help, making it clear they won’t have the safe haven necessary -- that they think is necessary to launch attacks.”

On yesterday’s ruling against his warrantless surveillance: “I would say that those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live.” See, this is what happens when they let him read Camus; he starts talking about the “nature of the world.” Next thing you know he’ll be dressing all in black and smoking unfiltered cigarettes.

Why just last week, he says, “we disrupted a plot. People were trying to come and kill people.” Peoples is the craziest people. “The judge’s decision was a -- I strongly disagree with that decision, strongly disagree. ... I made my position clear about this war on terror. And by the way, the enemy made their position clear yet again when we were able to stop them.” Just as long as we’re all clear.

All you need to know about today’s eavesdropping ruling

Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, ruling the warrantless wiretapping program both illegal and unconstitutional: “There are no hereditary kings in America”.

The White House, responding: “We couldn’t disagree more with this ruling”.

Wherein I settle some matters to everyone’s complete satisfaction

Summary judgement 1: The validity of Günter Grass’s writings is not undermined to any significant extent by the revelations about his youth.

Summary judgement 2: I still don’t think Pluto is a planet, but I’m willing to let it be grandfathered in. Charon is not a planet. Indeed, if the argument for Charon not being a satellite of Pluto (that the barycenter [center of gravity, around which both objects revolve] of the two does not lie within Pluto) is legitimate, then Jupiter is not a planet. And Jupiter is obviously a planet. I don’t care about Ceres, and neither does anyone else. 2003 UB 313 can be a planet, but only if it’s called Xena (no, I’m not a fan of the show, but the idea gives me a bit of a giggle).

And there’s some good people in our country who believe we should cut and run

A Gallup poll shows that 39% of Americans interviewed believe that Muslims in the US should be required to carry a special i.d. I just wrote a comment on that before realizing I already wrote one 20 months ago after a similar study (which had it at 27%). I thought what I was writing seemed familiar (although this time I went with “ham sandwich” instead of “pork products”).

Speaking of racists, John McCain was out campaigning for George Allen, because if you’re trying to pretend that “Makaka” isn’t a racial epithet, the person you really want standing next to you is the guy who said (when running for president in 2000), “I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.”

Salon investigates voter security/suppression efforts. A must-read. It could almost make you support Norm Ornstein’s proposal for mandatory voting, providing the fine for a vote not being cast is matched by one for a vote not being counted. This is one of those areas where the left (or even the Dems) have been afraid of sounding like conspiracy theorists, allowing the R’s to, well, conspire. I mean, do you check your supermarket receipts for errors? Your first thought is that the people who work there are idiots and errors happen, but 90% or more of those errors invariably favor the store. By the way, anyone who has to wait on line at the DMV four times like that woman in Indiana in order to register, should get four votes at the next election – it’s only fair.

After Bush toured the Harley plant (“I’m impressed by the fact that they're impressed by the product they make”), Bush gave a speech at a fundraiser for Lynn Swann. His reiterated phrases and stories are not getting less irritating with familiarity, like the things “I happen to believe/disagree.”

They want us to cut and run. And there’s some good people in our country who believe we should cut and run. They’re not bad people when they say that, they’re decent people. I just happen to believe they’re wrong.

Why is that phrasing so much more obnoxious than “I believe they’re wrong” or “They’re wrong”?

Here’s Bush making yet another claim he can’t prove, while pretending that he’s not making it:

I know it’s hard for Americans to believe this, but the enemy that attacked us before has got people that want to act like them, are maybe taking instruction from -- I can’t tell you whether this plot we disrupted was al Qaeda. I’m not going to say that unless I’m certain it was.

Oh, he almost let it slip, and then stopped himself in the nick of time! This is a technique he perfected when tattling on Jeb to his mother when he was 6.

And, if you can stand it, another iteration of his sophisticated understanding of the problems of the Middle East:

Isn’t it interesting today that the most violent parts of the world are where young democracies are trying to take root? Isn’t it interesting that Hezbollah would attack Israel, a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, try to destabilize the Middle East so that Lebanon doesn’t get to be a strong democracy and starts to try to turn the world against Israel? Isn’t it interesting that the young democracy of Iraq is the place where the enemy is trying to stop the progress? That should tell the American people the following things: One, we face an enemy that has an ideology that can’t stand freedom; and secondly, as freedom progresses, it changes the world for the better. Otherwise, the enemy wouldn’t be trying to stop it.

Hezbollah was attacking Israel because Israel is a democracy and it hates democracy. Is there anyone else in the world who believes that? Also, who is “the enemy” in Iraq who is trying to stop the progress? Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Al Qaida, there are so many enemies I have no idea who he’s singling out.

I may get hysterical blindness if I have to read another Bush speech.

What’re you rebelling against, Chimpy?

Shrub went to the Harley-Davidson plant today, and they let him pretend to ride a motorcycle.

“Vroom,” went George.

“Vroom vroom.”

“Vroom vroom vroom.”

“Vrooooom.”

“Vroooooooooooom.”

I dunno, I’m kind of reminded of something, I can’t think what it might be....

“Vroom.”

Crying on the inside

Another story about the long-term effects of war on individual lives: in Britain, a 93-year old has finally won a pardon for her father, Priv. Harry Farr, a shell-shock victim executed during World War I for “cowardice” after a 20-minute trial. The daughter was 7 days old when her father was sent to the front, 2 when he was killed; she and her mother were evicted because they received no pension, and she wasn’t told the manner of his death until she was 40.

You know how you avoid generational effects of war? Child soldiers, at least if you kill them before puberty. A spokesmodel for Sri Lanka’s military says it was legitimate that a bombing raid yesterday killed children because they were conscripted (i.e., kidnapped) Tamil Tiger child-soldiers. “If the children are terrorists, what can we do?” asked Brig. Athula Jayawardana. What indeed.

Germany will send troops to the Lebanese-Israeli border. Um, right.

John Spencer, the Republican sacrifice to the unstoppable killing machine that is Hillary Rodham Clinton, has an ad out: “Islamic facists [sic] still hate us....”, Hillary would “leave us vulnerable...”, but Spencer “won’t play politics with our security.” I suspect there will be a lot more of this sort of not playing of politics.

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An ape park in the Netherlands is setting up webcams so its orangutangs (or as George Allen, who is familiar with Krusty’s “comical K sounds,” calls them, “makakas”) can communicate with, and possibly pick out potential mates from, residents in an orangutang center in Borneo. These long-distance relationships never work out.

George Walker Bush, who has already displayed a new-found sophistication by reading one of the, well, shortest works of European literature, astonished and delighted the staff of the National Counterterrorism Center when he burst into song during a visit today.

Ridi, Pagliaccio... e ognun applaudirà!

Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il pianto;

in una smorfia il singhiozzo e’l dolor...

Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore in franto!

Ridi del duol t’avvelena il cor!

Huge crosses, frozen mammoth sperm, recalls, and the thrill of the new

Best headlines of the day, a tie: “Federal Government Takes Control of a Huge Cross” (WaPo), and “Frozen Sperm ‘Could Bring Mammoths Back to Life’” (Daily Telegraph).

Speaking of headlines, the BBC currently has two: “Dell Recalls 4m Laptop Batteries” and “US Recalls 300 Soldiers to Iraq.” What do these recalls have in common? They both tend to blow up.

I’m going to hell for that one.

I mean I am so going to hell for that one.

Speaking of going to hell, those 300 soldiers had just finished a one-year tour and were literally en route home when they were turned around and told they were serving another 4 months (in Baghdad, yet). Another 301 who made it all the way home to Alaska now have to go back. This is no way to run a war.

Syrian President Assad says that Hezbollah’s, um, victory, has resulted in a “new Middle East.” There’s something he agrees with Condi about: the “old” Middle East was crap.

The funnies

After the Danish cartoon crisis, Iran threatened to have a competition for cartoons about the Holocaust.


Pardon me, about the Holocust. I’ve noted before that the language of choice for Iranian anti-Semitism is English.

And now they have held the competition, staged by the Iran Cartoon Association, which is a hell of a concept in and of itself (update: it has a website. It doesn’t seem to have the cartoons, though there is a better image of the poster.) Most of the pictures I’ve seen are too small to make out, although I saw Hitler dressed as Uncle Sam (or I suppose arguably, the other way around),


and the Statue of Liberty with a book on the Holocaust, giving a Nazi salute (sort of a mixed message, really). Said one 23-year old attendee, “I came to learn more about the roots of the Holocaust and the basis of Israel’s emergence.” Doesn’t this tell you everything you need to know?


Sort of a Monty Python influence, no? No.

Leaving behind a better world

Bush says “We live in troubled times, but I’m confident in our capacity to not only protect the homeland, but I’m confident in our capacity to leave behind a better world.” Leave behind? Are we (gulp) going somewhere?

The Pentagon website has an example of damage-control entitled “Pace Focuses on Human Dimension of Iraq War.” What that means is that the alliterative Peter Pace was confronted in Iraq by a lieutenant who had lost two men to an IED and who told him, “I have no doubt, that if they were in an RG-31 [armored vehicle], they would still be alive today.” Especially if the RG-31 wasn’t in Iraq. So Pace found a tame interviewer, so he could talk about how he knows the cost of battle because he was in Vietnam blah blah blah, never forget the names blah blah, “Lance Corporal Guido Farinaro, then I lost Lance Corporal Chubby Hale.” Yeah, focus on that human dimension, Petey.

Chubby Hale?

After meetings at the State Dept and the Pentagon, Bush had a press conference, in which he described Lebanon as one of the “fronts of the global war on terror.” He says that Hezbollah is completely responsible for all the suffering in Lebanon and Israel, as people will understand when they “take a look-see, take a step back, and realize how this started.” In a month of violence, he was still found nothing done by Israel worthy of criticism.


But, as ever, there was something he found “interesting”:

What’s really interesting is a mind-set -- is the mind-sets of this crisis. Israel, when they aimed at a target and killed innocent citizens, were upset. Their society was aggrieved. When Hezbollah’s rockets killed innocent Israelis they celebrated. I think when people really take a look at the type of mentality that celebrates the loss of innocent life, they’ll reject that type of mentality.

Aggrieved?

Oh, and he says Hezbollah totally lost the war.

Abounds in fictions

Other bloggers have also been considering the possible meaning of Bush’s adoption of the vocabulary of fascism and totalitarianism to describe insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Hezbollah. Juan Cole has, and I’ve seen talk on a couple of linguistics sites, and most recently this discussion on Daily Kos. No one, including me, seems very certain, which is no doubt the idea: Bush doesn’t use language to make a subject clearer, now does he? More simplistic, but not better understood. We know from Peter Galbraith’s book that as late as 2002 Bush didn’t know that there were Shiites and Sunnis. The fascist/totalitarian vocabulary lets him forget it all over again, not just so he can conflate Sunni Al Qaida and Shiite Hezbollah, as MarkC suggests at Kos, but so that no one will notice that the Bushies are using exactly the same “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here / these are the guys responsible for 9/11” rhetoric about Iraq despite the fact that they’re now principally concerned with Shiite militias rather than Sunni “rejectionists.”

A couple of months ago I noted that Bush kept alternating, sometimes in the same week, between saying that the enemy “has a philosophy” and saying they have no philosophy. At least he’s finally made a decision; fascism counts as a political philosophy, doesn’t it?

Al Kamen answers the question how government employees, in this case Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor Karen Czarnecki, can legally appear as a Republican strategist on tv (for pay on PBS, which means the taxpayers are giving her two paychecks), given the Hatch Act: well, she is never identified as a government employee, or as a Republican, only as a “conservative strategist/analyst,” which means that in the case of Czarnecki, Fox and PBS are forced to inaccurately identify one of their talking heads. Also, she takes an official leave of absence – for a few hours. Somehow I don’t think that’s what the law intended.

The White House denies the Seymour Hersh report that the US collaborated with Israel in planning the war on Lebanon. Tony Insert-Snow-Related-Pun-Here scoffed, “The piece abounds in fictions.” Say what you will about Tony Insert-Snow-Related-Pun-Here, but neither Ari nor Scottie would have used the phrase “abounds in fictions.”

The Turkmen melon is the source of our pride

Turkmenistan’s President-for-life Niyazov had a melon named in his honor today to celebrate national Melon Day. According to the AFP, “The Turkmenbashi melon is said to be very big and tasty.” Niyazov sez: “All Turkmens celebrate this holiday. The Turkmen melon is the source of our pride, its taste has no equals in the world, the smell makes your head spin.”

Don’t laugh: do you have a melon named after you?

A small fraction of them have done things that we know for sure were wrong

Iranian President Ahmadinejad has started a blog (that link’s for the English version). So far it’s just got an autobiography of the great leader, some photos of the great leader, some Battlestar Galactica fanfic, and a poll: “Do you think that the US and Israeli intention and goal by attacking Lebanon is pulling the trigger for another word [sic?] war?”

According to Seymour Hersh, the Israelis got their green light from Washington (they went to Cheney first) for a massive bombing campaign in Lebanon, targeting infrastructure, in advance, to start “in response” to whatever the next Hezbollah action was. Cheney and others view it as a test-run for their very similar contingency plans for how to conduct war against Iran, mostly through air strikes. Which gives Ahmadinejad the answer to his poll question. When Iran sees the Israeli attack on Lebanon as an Israeli-American proxy war on Iran, it is merely seeing it the same way the Americans and Israelis do.

The alliterative Peter Pace again says of the various atrocities committed by American troops in Iraq, “It’s not who we are as a nation; it’s not who we are as an armed force.” Says we’ve sent “between 1 million and 1.5 million Americans” to the Gulf (shouldn’t the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs know how many troops he’s deployed with just a little more accuracy than plus or minus 500,000?), and only “A small fraction of them have done things that we know for sure were wrong.” Pace says atrocities are “unacceptable,” and says that because most of them (except the Haditha massacre) were reported through the chain of command, the system... wait for it... works.

Pace adds that any failure in Iraq is not his fault: “The problem is not so much how much combat power you have in a country, it’s more how is the governance going. How are the people doing? What is getting better about their economic situation, what is getting better about their trust for each other? What is getting better about the education system and roads and the like? What gives them hope for a better future? This drives you to the understanding that to have a better future, you need to stop killing one another.”

Stubborn things

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the alliterative Peter Pace, says, twice, that “if we were to come home, the war would simply follow us home.” Well, maybe it would go away again if you just didn’t feed it.

Bush in his weekly radio address claims that the rather nebulous alleged terrorist plot (RNATP) “is further evidence that the terrorists we face are sophisticated”. Yup, blowing up planes is the height of sophistication. He is deeply disappointed that “some have suggested recently that the terrorist threat is being used for partisan political advantage.” I don’t know who this Sum guy is, but why does he always say those things about our leaders? And what sort of a furrin name is Sum, anyway?

He goes on, “We can have legitimate disagreements about the best way to fight the terrorists, yet there should be no disagreement about the dangers we face.” What a guy, he’ll allow you disagreements, as long as you confine yourself to legitimate disagreements and allow him to define all the facts. In his world, of course, there are no real opinions, there are only facts; everything else follows from those facts. There are facts on the ground in Iraq which will determine, like a mathematical formula, the correct number of American troops. There are facts like the existence of terrorists, of which we have just had a “stark reminder,” but which Sum “forgets.” Or worse, Sum denies the fact that we are at war; Bush “respectfully disagrees.” Bush’s speeches are filled with the facts that he “understands” or “realizes” and which he “reminds” people of, rather than trying to persuade them.

He repeated the line that the US is safer than it was before 9/11, which seems to be giving hostages to fortune and which will run endlessly (except on Fox) if there is another terrorist attack. Did he learn nothing from “Mission Accomplished”?

For better or worse, Bush has largely kept out of the Middle East crisis, speaking to Olmert once (Olmert called him) and Siniora twice over the last month, once this morning. Here’s the photo the White House released of that phone call.

“Hey Fouad, guess what I’m wearing. What’re you wearing?”

Cleaner

The Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesmodel, explaining why Olmert ordered the offensive to begin, while recommending that his cabinet approve the UN ceasefire resolution: “if you hand over to the Lebanese army a cleaner south Lebanon, a south Lebanon where you have Hezbollah removed from the territory, that makes their troubles a lot easier”. See, they’re like house-guests, cleaning up after themselves. Do you suppose “a cleaner south Lebanon” sounded better in the original German Hebrew?

Maybe I should take a vacation and read French novels too: I can’t think of anything to say about the unlikely news that George Bush is reading Camus’s L’Étranger (by the way, the linked AFP story gets the year of the novel wrong and notes that Bush quoted Camus once in a speech while neglecting to mention that he took the quote completely out of context). I think at the next press conference the reporters should only ask questions about the book.

Holding a contest over the weekend is usually a losing proposition, but I’ll give you a choice: 1) what French novel should Bush read next? 2) Let’s assume it was a mistake: when he picked up the book, what did Bush think The Stranger was, or who did he think Camus was?

Premature anti-Islamic fascists

Some Muslims have expressed displeasure at Bush’s use of the term “Islamic fascists,” arguing that there can be no Islamic fascism because Islam is antithetical to fascism. And also that Bush doesn’t pronounce his sibilants well, and “fascists” has two of them. Bush started using “Islamic fascists” just a couple of weeks ago, I believe (update: a search of the White House website shows single usages on May 25 and June 14). Originally it was Islamo-fascism, which to me sounds more obnoxious and yet a little bit comical at the same time, that “o” giving it a touch of buffoonery (see also: Defeat-ocrats, David O. Selznik). It took him some months to move from a “Some call this evil Islamic radicalism, others, militant Jihadism, still others, Islamo-fascism” formulation last October to adopting the term without qualifiers by March. He’s also taken recently to describing their ideology as “totalitarian.” I always get a little nervous when I try to discern meaning in these shifts of terminology, given that Bush probably can’t define the words he’s using. Or spell them. These words define the enemy by their goals and philosophy (i.e., telling other Muslims to grow beards and not fly kites) rather than methods (i.e., terrorism), perhaps recognizing that most Americans no longer see much linkage between the war in Iraq and protecting Americans from 9/11-type terrorism.

One of the reasons I started blogging was to clarify my own thinking through the act of writing. Didn’t really work in the previous paragraph. Anyone else have any ideas, or is it just better for the sake of all our sanities not to pay too close attention to the words that come out of George’s chimp-like mouth?

Günter Grass was in the Waffen-SS! What would Oskar Matzerath have said?


For your captioning pleasure, a picture from yesterday’s preznidential tour of Metal-Tech in Wisconsin:

Busting this plot

I dunno. On the White House website I see the phrase “President’s Statement on Kleptocracy,” naturally I have to click on it, but it’s not the pure comedy gold I was hoping for. “Today, I am announcing a new element in my Administration’s plan to fight kleptocracy, The National Strategy to Internationalize Efforts against Kleptocracy”. More chuckle-funny than laugh-out-loud funny.

Bush also made a statement about the rather nebulous alleged terrorist plot (RNATP) to do something or other with airplanes, which for some reason requires mothers to drink their own breast-milk, which sounds like the sort of thing you could sell videos of to a niche market of perverts (and if any of you sets up that business now, I want my share) (of money, not breast milk). I seem to have lost my train of thought. Oh yes, Bush made his statement at the Austin Straubel International Airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin, standing in front of his own personal airplane, which he can board without being strip-searched, taking off his shoes, or drinking breast-milk, unless of course he wants to.

He said that this RNATP is “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom”. So he’s safe. He thanks Tony Blair and British officials for “their good work in busting this plot.” Busting this plot? Has he been watching Starsky & Hutch reruns again?