They preach with threats

Headline of the day: “Diver Used Chisel to Fight off Shark That Swallowed His Head.”

Bush in the SOTU, about the, you know, bad guys: “They preach with threats, instruct with bullets and bombs...” But they grade on a curve, so that’s cool.

Click here for a screenshot of the Miami Herald “Americas” section, with ironically dueling headlines: “Bush Emphasizes Support for Freedom Cause in Cuba” and “Leftist Protesters Accuse Exiles of Assault,” the exiles in question having beaten up some opponents of their rally in favor of anti-Castro terrorist Luis Posada Carriles.

The Guardian ran a competition for a Gordon Brown t-shirt. “My mate was prime minister for 10 years and all he left me, other than a terminally hostile electorate, was this lousy T-shirt” beat out “Brown knows.”

John Kerry will not run for president in 2008. This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions no one was actually asking.

State of the Union: I ask you to give it a chance to work

6:14 “I congratulate the Democrat majority.” He just couldn’t bring himself to say Democratic, could he? (Update: it was Democratic in the prepared version.)

6:15 Evidently they must still “guard America against all evil.” Dude, Cheney’s sitting right behind you, with a hurt expression on his face.


6:19 He’s against earmarks, which I can’t quite recall being mentioned in earlier SOTUs. The time has come to end this practice. I wonder what happened in, say, November that makes this the time.

6:20 I’m watching in high definition and, holy shit, I just caught a glimpse of Ted Kennedy....

6:26 Patrick Leahy is not a high-def kind of guy either.

6:22 A disguised proposal, which I wouldn’t have even recognized had AP not predicted it. Bush’s words: “giving families with children stuck in failing schools the right to choose something better.” What that meant is that he plans to propose letting them use public money to pay for private schools. This is obviously one of those obligatory no-chance-in-hell proposals that so enliven SOTU speeches. He might as well suggest letting them transfer to private schools on Mars.


6:23 Speaking of DOA proposals, here’s his health insurance tax-deduction scheme (order now and get free switch grass!). No reference here to “gold-plated” insurance policies, although poor people will supposedly be helped to get “basic” private insurance.

6:31 We will reduce gasoline use by 20% in 10 years, without a single American having to get out of their car and step on a smelly bus or walk or bike to work.


6:34 “Yet one question has surely been settled - that to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the enemy.”

6:37 Who have “shoreless ambitions”.

6:40 “What every terrorist fears most is human freedom”. And spiders.

“Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies”. Dude, Cheney is still right behind you.


6:42 John McCain is adorable when he’s sleeping.

6:43 “This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it’s the fight we are in.” If it’s not the fight we entered, shouldn’t there be a new vote in Congress?

6:47 “the consequences of failure would be grievous and far-reaching.”

6:48 Shia or Shiite, make up your mind.

6:50 “Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq - and I ask you to give it a chance to work.” I repeat: you mean give it a chance to fail.

6:50 “The war on terror we fight today is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others.” Notice the shift: when he first started talking about this being the “struggle of a generation,” he meant a fight that fell to one particular generation. Now he uses “generational” to mean a fight that will last at least a generation.


6:54 We will “continue to awaken the conscience of the world to save the people of Darfur.” So, just talking about it, then.

7:02 Instead of the usual God bless the United States of America, or the creepier May God continue to bless, we just got a perfunctory “God bless.”

Oh, I forgot: the state of the union is strong. He really does have a tiny vocabulary, doesn’t he? We’re lucky he didn’t say the state of the union is interesting.

Well, this wasn’t a very interesting post, but then it wasn’t a very interesting speech. No would-be stirring phrases, no new formulations like “axis of evil,” no clarion call to stop human-animal hybrids. No one will remember a word of it tomorrow.

Transcript.

Chimpy needs all the help he can get

The White House has released a list of people who will be sitting with Laura Bush at the SOTU address. It includes Wesley Autrey, the guy who jumped onto the tracks of the NY subway to rescue a man who had fallen in front of an oncoming train.

Nope, no metaphors here.

Courage

More than 24 hours without blogging. Just had nothing to say (well, I had one thing, which I didn’t post because it was a stupid joke). I have created a label for posts on previous State of the Union speeches.


Liz “No, I’m the other one” Cheney has an op-ed in the WaPo in which she bemoans that Hillary Clinton will do whatever it takes to become president but not to win the war. She points to the waffling of Hillary and others about the war and says that Holy Joe Lieberman is “the only national Democrat showing any courage on this issue.” I can think of a few national Democrats who have shown courage in opposing the war, Russ Feingold, for example, but I guess in her definition of the word, courage can only be displayed by people who support wars.

(“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” Mark Twain)

Courage is not the only thing Liz says opponents of her father’s war can’t demonstrate: “And by the way, you cannot wish failure on our soldiers’ mission and claim, at the same time, to be supporting the troops. It just doesn’t compute.” Yeah, that would be like claiming to support Mary Cheney while denying her right to marry.

The LA Times examines just how little evidence has been offered about the alleged Iranian support for insurgents in Iraq.

My legacy will be written long after I’m president

In an interview with USA Today, Bush says that in the State of the Union Address he’ll scold Congress about earmarks. Well how about this? The Bushies have decided to let a student loan company called Nelnet (say that six times in a row and you turn into Jerry Lewis)(not a one of you said that six times in a row, did you?)(if you’re reading this at work, say it six times in a row in a loud clear voice and they’ll probably give you the rest of the day off) keep $278 million in federal money they weren’t entitled to (I don’t really understand the scheme, but the bottom line is that the Education Dept believes the subsidies were improper but isn’t asking for them back). Nelnet, one finds out in the 17th paragraph but suspected in the first, is a major donor to Republicans.

USA Today asked Bush whether he supported Schwarzenegger’s mandatory health insurance plan. He seems rather to have avoided answering, but did say that it was “interesting” that Arnie, Jeb, and Mitt worked on plans to “meet the needs of their particular states,” which suggests that some states don’t need to have children’s health insured.

Bush more or less admitted that the “surge” plan has convinced no one. In fact, he’s still using the “People want to know whether or not we’ve got a plan to succeed” line. Fortunately, “people” are entirely irrelevant: “the best way to convince them that this makes sense is to implement it and show them that it works”. Hmm, I wonder if there’s a more appropriate way of presenting that sentiment?


But just when will all this convincing take place? Will we, for example, be out of Iraq by 2009? “That’s a timetable; I just told you we don’t put out timetables.” So I ask again, when will we know that “it works”? Here’s a hint from elsewhere in the interview: informed that historian Eric Foner has declared him the worst president ever, he says, “My legacy will be written long after I’m president.” Oh, man, that was the sort of straight line that gives me an ice cream headache.

How about LBJ and Vietnam, they asked, any, you know, lessons from that? “Yes, win. Win, when you’re in a battle for the security … if it has to do with the security of your country, you win.” Really, it’s so simple, I don’t know why Johnson didn’t think of it.

Death squads, you say? Why did no one tell me of this before?

In Israel, Richard Perle, who brings a ray of sunshine to any gathering, promised that if Iran gets close to having a nuclear weapon, within the next two years anyway, Bush will launch a military attack on it.

Say, wasn’t the United States fighting in the Somali civil war a couple of weeks ago? Whatever happened with that?

There’s a piece of hilariously transparent spin-doctoring going around. According to the AP version of it, “Iraq’s prime minister has dropped his protection of [Muqtada al-Sadr]’s Shiite militia after U.S. intelligence convinced him the group was infiltrated by death squads”. See, the reason Maliki has hitherto protected the Shiite militias isn’t that he owes his political position to their leaders, or that he personally is committed to establishing complete Shiite domination of the Iraqi state by violently subjugating the Sunnis, no no no, it was that he had somehow been entirely unaware of the sectarian violence until now. I feel so much more confidence in Maliki now, don’t you?

Stressed

Actually, doesn’t “I’m in, and I’m in to win” sound like something Bill Clinton might have said, but in, um, entirely different circumstances, if you know what I mean?

Headline of the Day, from the Sunday Telegraph: “Stressed Doctor Cuts Off Patient’s Penis.” Boy if you think the doctor is stressed...

The London Review of Books has a very good, comprehensive article by Perry Anderson on Putin’s Russia.

She’s in

Hillary Clinton announces for the presidency with the words, “I’m in. And I’m in to win.” Because it’s all about her. And it’s also about Bush, or more specifically, “the bold but practical changes we need to overcome six years of Bush administration failures.” Is anyone’s pulse set racing by the words “bold but practical”? Also, by January 2009, there’ll be 8 years of Bush administration failures to overcome.

She’s going to start a “national conversation” right now. “So to begin, I’m going to spend the next several days answering your questions in a series of live video Web discussions.” That’s Hillary’s idea of a national conversation: her answering questions. I call her Hillary, by the way, because “Clinton” seems to have gone the way of “Rodham” and those headbands she used to wear; by 2008 she may have run out of names. References to Bill in her website are avoided almost as scrupulously as mentions of her original strong support for the Iraq war.

Her statement is full of the usual content-free clichés: renewing the promise of America, the future is calling us, true to our values, etc etc. I should be excited by the prospect of an election that replaces George Bush; Hillary just makes me feel tired.

A gut feeling

Remember the 4 mercenaries who were killed in Fallujah and strung up on the bridge, giving the US an excuse to besiege and bomb the city? Their families are suing the “security” company that employed them, Blackwater, and now Blackwater has counter-sued for $10 million, claiming that the lawsuits violated the dead men’s employment contracts. Kenneth Starr is involved in this in some way I’m not clear on.

In Basra, British military spokesmodel Major Chris Ormond-King told reporters that he had absolutely no evidence of Iranian arms, money, or anything else in the region but “As a gut feeling we know there is Iranian influence.” Hey, we’ve invaded countries on less than that!

Speaking of gut feelings, Hugo Chavez says that the Venezuelan telecom company CANTV has been spying on him on behalf of “the empire” (whether the United States or CANTV’s part-owner Verizon, he didn’t say). Sigh. Of course it might be true, it might very well be true, but I like for accusations like that to be accompanied by some scintilla of proof. Chavez plans to nationalize CANTV along with... well, we’ll have to see what else he’ll nationalize, because he’ll do it all by decree power, which he claims is a “completely democratic process,” and I know some of you will explain to me in comments how it really is a completely democratic process and I can’t wait for that. To me the fundamental restructuring of a nation’s economy should follow an open national debate involving representative institutions, but what do I know?

There’s a “series of tubes” joke in here somewhere, I just know there is

From AP: “Ted Stevens, the Republican senator, has said that his wife, Catherine, has frequently been identified as Cat Stevens and stopped on US flights.” And the funny thing is, it’s not that they have the same name: they actually look uncannily alike.

An insurance company in Spain failed to get a court to order a man to return €550,000 they’d paid him in compensation for having been 90% blinded in a traffic accident, when he was stopped by police two years later driving a car at 96 mph. He said he’d just asked his wife to let him drive on a straight stretch of road.

Yesterday Maliki claimed that his forces had arrested 400 followers of Sadr. Possible, but who trusts anything Maliki says to be true? So was no one actually arrested? 400 random people, “Casablanca” style? 400 not-so-random Sunnis? Will we ever know?

A cute detail about the ethics measure passed by the Senate today: not all travel paid for by lobbyists would be banned; AIPAC can still pay for trips to Israel, although Sen. Stevens may have trouble getting his wife through security.

All the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized people

Alberto Gonzalez testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee today. His opening remarks included a plea for Bush’s judicial appointees to be treated “at least as fairly” as Clinton’s. He also said that “At the Department of Justice, every day is September 12th.” Also, their VCRs keep blinking 12:00.

He said that the secret ruling held after a secret hearing, which allegedly gives him the power to continue wiretapping, will remain secret even from Congress. He said that it took him two years to come up with a program that could survive even this farcical approximation of judicial scrutiny because “It’s not something you just pull off the shelf.” Only my renowned sense of decorum prevents me suggesting from whence he did pull it.


[P.S. Glenn Greenwald actually (shudder) watched the hearings, and has much more.]

The military tribunals will allow hearsay evidence, under trial rules issued today, including in capital cases. The Pentagon says that this is fair because both sides can use hearsay evidence, which “levels the playing field,” except of course that the defense is unlikely to have access to hearsay evidence originating with American military personnel or people living in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.

Statements obtained by “coercion” may also be used, although it doesn’t look like the defense is allowed to torture anyone. So much for a level playing field. Pentagon lawyer Dan Dell’Orto says this affords “alien unlawful enemy combatants” (my, what a long list of scare words that is!) “all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized people.” I would be interested in hearing his definition of “civilized.”

To be fair, there are many improvements over the original proposed rules, which isn’t saying much. There will be no secret evidence not seen by the defense, but only the judge gets to decide if redacted classified material introduced at trial accurately represents the whole. Like hearsay, that’s a violation of the defendant’s constitutional right to confront the evidence against him (and presumably the defense doesn’t get to check other classified files for exculpatory evidence).

Short-term plus-up

Pentagon website headline: “Gates Wants to Build on Success in Afghanistan.” And if he had ham, he could have ham and eggs, if he had eggs. In order to “sustain” all of our success in Afghanistan, and not at all because insurgent attacks are up 300%, he’d like to send more troops. Now, I know you’re all wondering what they would call such an increase in troop levels. Not a surge. Not an escalation. Not an augmentation. A “short-term plus-up.” My theory is that even at the Pentagon they don’t really speak this way: at this point they’re introducing silly Orwellian euphemisms just so they can giggle when Fox News anchors slavishly repeat them on-air. The deployment of troops in Baghdad will be called Operation Desert Boogers.

Obviously, we’re all very concerned about cancer

Digby picked up a bit of the Bush interview on McNeil-Lehrer that I somehow missed, Bush on the subject of sacrifice: “Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”


Today, George Bush visited the National Institutes of Health, which he said was “an amazing place because it is full of decent, caring, smart people, all aiming to save lives, in other words completely unlike me in every way.” I may have made up the last nine words. They talked about cancer. “Obviously, we’re all very concerned about cancer,” he said. At the end of the presentation, he thanked them for “the work being done at the grassroots level.” Evidently he thinks cancer comes from grass. “I thank you for your articulate presentation, both of you all. And this government supports what’s happening in order to save lives, and we will.” Completely unlike him in every way, including articulativity.


The man speaking here is Dr. Marston Linehan, chief of Urological Oncology, talking about urological oncology, one assumes. Personally I’m with Bush on this one, more hands-over-the-genitals than hands-nonchalantly-in-pockets.

To celebrate Haloscan functioning normally again, a caption contest.

We still have a chance to move beyond the broken egg

Amsterdam will soon get a bronze statue of a prostitute. According to the Dutch news agency ANP, “The statue represents a self-assured woman, her hands on her hips, looking sideways towards the sky, and standing on a doorstep”. ANP also says that “The precise place where the statue will be laid and its title have not yet been announced”.

Speaking of bronze prostitutes, Bush was interviewed on McNeil-Lehrer today. He says the Iraqi regime “fumbled” the recent hangings – yup, they really dropped the severed head ball on that one – and said this reinforced doubts that the Maliki government “is a serious government. ... this is a government that has still got some maturation to do.” Boy, when George W. Bush accuses you of being immature...

He said that Saddam’s execution “looked like it was kind of a revenge killing,” but on the other hand, he said (because Bush likes to see the bright side of executions) that it “closed a terrible chapter... In other words, there’s people that were around Iraq saying, well, I think he may come back. And that obviously is not going to happen.” Given Bush’s track record in predicting events in Iraq, I’m expecting Zombie Saddam to show up right about now.

He says if we “don’t crack this now,” “the violence will spiral out of control.” Yeah, imagine what that would be like. And if that were to happen, the spiraling thing, “it will embolden Iran; it will provide safe haven for Sunni killers”. Yeah, why should Sunni killers be the only people in Iraq to have safe haven?

There was an odd exchange:

LEHRER: Just today, another 35 people were killed in bombings; 80 over the weekend.

BUSH: Yeah, there is a difference between - look, death is terrible - but remember, some of these bombings are done by al-Qaida and their affiliates, all trying to create doubt and concern and create these death squads or encourage these death squads to roam neighborhoods. And it’s going to be hard to make Baghdad zero - to make it bomb-proof, blather blather blather...

What point was he trying to make here? A difference between what and what? Clearly, he believes there’s some “difference” we should “remember” that somehow mitigates these 115 deaths, but I don’t get it.

Asked if he has any feeling of personal failure, he sidesteps the “personal” part, and just says that failure in Iraq would be bad and that he is “frustrated with the progress.” You’ll notice that in just four sentences, failure turned into progress, although progress whose pace he is frustrated with. Why, “If you were to take it and put me in an opinion poll and said do I approve of Iraq, I’d be one of those that said, no, I don’t approve of what’s taking place in Iraq.” Boy, no wonder he doesn’t pay any attention to opinion polls.

Says “No question, 2006 was a lousy year for Iraq.”

Asked how success will be measured, says “A success means a Baghdad that is, you know, relatively calm compared to last year”. Dare to dream, Mr. President, dare to dream.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS: Jim Lehrer asked if Iraq was like a broken egg that we’re now saying the Iraqis should put back together. Bush responded that Iraq is a cracked egg, not a broken egg, “where we still have a chance to move beyond the broken egg... and you know, if I didn’t believe we could keep the egg from fully cracking, I wouldn’t ask 21,000 kids - additional kids to go into Iraq to reinforce those troops that are there.”

He says he’s “spent a lot of time during my presidency talking to the American people and educating the American people about the stakes and what we’re trying to get done.” Does anyone actually feel more educated, more knowledgeable after listening to Bush speak? I just feel like I’ve been struck on the head with a ball-peen hammer, and I need to lie down.

Caption contest. The first picture is “Bush helping paint a mural at a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday volunteer day at a high school in Washington.”


The second is Bush with the St. Louis Cardinals, who I’m told are a baseball team which won some sort of contest.

Iraqi process

So two more executions in Iraq, and 24 hours later the video (and there is video) still hasn’t turned up on the internet. I had 12 hours in the pool. The video was shown to international reporters to prove that there were no unseemly incidents this time. Unless you count the whole thing being filmed and then shown to reporters. I saw an Iraqi official on the BBC news saying that this time the executees weren’t “subjected to any mistreatment.” Unless you count the part where they were hanged, and that head-ripped-off thing.

Condi, while granting that the executions might have been carried off with more “dignity,” for example if the hangman had worn a tuxedo instead of a ski mask, says “Let me just say that the decision concerning the execution of Saddam Hussein and the two defendants today were made according to Iraqi process and Iraqi law.” Because nothing says “Iraqi process” like having your head torn from your body.

But now I’m here, guess I’m goin’ to stay, and lick you into shape

Bush’s questioning of whether the Iraqis are showing “a gratitude level that’s significant enough” reminded me of an article about Cuba: Louis Pérez, Jr. “Incurring a Debt of Gratitude: 1898 and the Moral Sources of United States Hegemony in Cuba,” American Historical Review, 104:2, April 1999. Check your public library’s website; I was able to download the pdf through mine. It’s about how Americans were bewildered that the Cubans didn’t show sufficient gratitude for our generosity in liberating them from the Spanish. And they weren’t the only ingrates: Gen. Otis Howard, a former director of the Freedmen’s Bureau, wrote an article in 1898 suggesting that Americans were developing a prejudice against Cubans, who “have not properly appreciated the sacrifices of life and health that have been made to give them a free country,” similar to the “dislike of black men in 1863... because so many of them did not seem to understand, or be grateful for, what had been done for them.”

When the US was pressuring Cuba to accept the Platt Amendment denying it the right to its own foreign policy, ceding Guantanamo Bay, and giving the US the right to intervene militarily in Cuba at will, Secretary of War Elihu Root thundered, “If the American people get the impression that Cuba is ungrateful and unreasonable, they will not be quite so altruistic and sentimental the next time they have to deal with Cuban affairs as they were in April, 1898.”

This more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger-although-actually-pretty-angry-too-now-that-you-mention-it attitude persisted for decades, as did the belief that the history of the country only began when the US became interested in it: Teddy Roosevelt often said “Cuba owes to us her birth,” just as Bush last week described Iraq as a “young society.” In October 1959 a reporter asked President Eisenhower what he supposed was “eating” Castro. Ike admitted bafflement: “The whole history – first our intervention in 1898, our making and helping set up Cuban independence... and the very close relationships that have existed most of the time with them – would seem to make it a puzzling matter to figure out exactly why the Cubans and the Cuban Government would be so unhappy.” Rep. Mendel Rivers in 1960 called Cuba “a country that was conceived by America, delivered by America, nurtured by America, educated by America and made a self-governing nation by America. ... When ingratitude on the part of a nation reaches the point that it has in Cuba, it is time for American wrath to display itself in no uncertain terms.”



(Click here for larger image.)

They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq

I didn’t see Bush’s 60 Minutes interview because the cable was out and I could only watch one program with the antenna, so I went with “24,” just to see how long it took for the writers to resort to their favorite piece of dialog, “What are you talking about?” Less than five minutes. And again before the end of the hour. I fully expect by the end of the season there will be a scene in which two characters, possibly Jack and Chloe, just repeat “What are you talking about?” over and over while applying electric shocks to each other. It’ll be the highest-rated episode ever.

No, I didn’t say they were naked, that’s just how you pictured it in your filthy, filthy mind.

But there is a transcript of the interview, you’ll be pleased to hear.

Bush said he really did seriously weigh the pros and cons of withdrawing from Iraq, and he takes us step by step through his thought process: “I thought long and hard about would withdrawal cause victory or cause success. And the answer is I don’t believe so, and neither do a lot of experts. And so then I began to think, well, if failure’s not an option and we’ve gotta succeed, how best to do so? And that’s why I came up with the plan I did.” The man uses logic like a scalpel, doesn’t he?

Asked if the instability in Iraq wasn’t caused by, you know, him, Bush said, “Well, our administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran.” Dude, for the 9,000th time: there was no nuclear weapons program.

Asked about the mistakes he admitted in Wednesday’s speech having made, Bush said, “Abu Ghraib was a mistake.” Oops?

Other mistakes? “Using bad language like, you know, ‘bring them on’ was a mistake.” Yeah, but at this stage I don’t think “bad language” even makes it onto the list of your top 100 mistakes, Georgie.

And troops levels, he admits after prompting, “Could have been a mistake.” He says that he referred to mistakes in the speech because he didn’t want anyone blaming the military. “Well, if the people want a scapegoat, they got one right here in me ‘cause it’s my decisions.” Of course just ten seconds before that, when admitting that troops levels could have been a mistake, the Scapegoat-in-Chief subtly slipped in a mention of “John Abizaid, one of the planners. And ten seconds later, asked if there are enough troops there now, he responded, “Let’s let the historians work it out.” My, but that “cause it’s my decisions” thing sure didn’t last long. And it gets worse:

PELLEY: Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?

BUSH: That we didn’t do a better job or they didn’t do a better job?

PELLEY: Well, that the United States did not do a better job in providing security after the invasion.

BUSH: Not at all. I am proud of the efforts we did. We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude, and I believe most Iraqis express that. I mean, the people understand that we’ve endured great sacrifice to help them. That’s the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.

PELLEY: Americans wonder whether . . .

BUSH: Yeah, they wonder whether or not the Iraqis are willing to do hard work necessary to get this democratic experience to survive. That’s what they want.


Pelley asked twice “Is Muqtada al-Sadr an enemy of the United States?” Bush sidestepped the question both times: “Anybody who murders innocent people or frustrating the ambitions of the Iraqi people and the United States” ... “If he is ordering his people to kill Americans, he is.”

He also sidestepped on whether Iran’s (alleged) interventions in Iraq amount to an act of war against the United States: “I’m not a lawyer. So act of war is kind of a . . . I’m not exactly sure how you define that. Let me just say it’s unacceptable.” So it’s an act of unacceptability.

Asked what he would tell the Iranian president: “I’d say, first of all, to him, ‘You’ve made terrible choices for your people. ... You’ve threatened countries with nuclear weapons.” He threatened which countries with what nuclear weapons? “‘You’ve said you want a nuclear weapon. You’ve defied international accord.’” Then he’d tell Ahmadinejad, “it’s in your interest to have a unified nation on your border.” Yeah, remember back in the ‘80s when you had a unified nation on your border? Good times, good times.

Bush says he saw “some of” the Saddam snuff film – on the internet! – but didn’t really enjoy it: “I was satisfied when we captured him. I’m just not . . .revenge isn’t necessarily something that causes me to react. In other words, I’m not a revengeful person.”

He says of the Congressional opponents of escalation: “we’ve got people criticizing this plan before it’s had a chance to work.” No, we’ve got people criticizing this plan before it’s had a chance to fail. Which is kind of the right time to be criticizing it.

Asked about the perception that the administration has lied, rather often, to the American people: “The minute we found out they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, I was the first to say so.”

Asked if he feels let down by his subordinates, he says Cheney’s a “great” veep and Rumsfeld “did a really fine job.” “I feel like this country is blessed to have those kind of people serving.” As they say on “24,” what are you talking about?

You can’t fault that logic

Condi tells Israeli television that the very fact that Israel is threatening to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities “just shows how very serious it would be to have Iran continue its programs unabated.”

Stomach

Stupid death of the week: Jennifer Strange participated in a Sacramento radio station’s “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest in which whoever drank the most water without having to pee won. A few hours later she died of water intoxication.

Dick Cheney was interviewed by Chris Wallace this morning.

On Iraq: “Chris, we have, in fact, made enormous progress.”

On the New Way Forward (TM): “Why don’t we get together in a couple of months and see how it worked.” Yes, let’s do that.

On Congress’s complete inability to halt the New Way Forward (TM):

CHENEY: So Congress clearly has a role to play.

Q: That’s a consultative role.

CHENEY: It is a consultative role. ... you cannot run a war by committee.

(Pardon my not blockquoting, by the way, there’s a bug in New Blogger that screws up line spacing after a blockquote.)

On Democrats in Congress: “But then they end up critical of what we’re trying to do, advocating withdrawal or so-called redeployment of force, but they have absolutely nothing to offer in its place. I have yet to hear a coherent policy out of the Democratic side with respect to an alternative to what the President has proposed in terms of going forward. They basically, if we were to follow their guidance, the comments, for example, that a lot of them made during the last campaign about withdrawing U.S. forces, we simply go back and re-validate the strategy that Osama bin Laden has been following from day one, that if you kill enough Americans, you can force them to quit, that we don’t have the stomach for the fight.”

So-called redeployment. And clearly, the way to invalidate Osama bin Laden’s strategy is to let them kill many, many more Americans. That’ll show ‘em we have the stomach.

On Chuck Hagel: “And for us to do what Chuck Hagel, for example, suggests or to buy into that kind of analysis -- it’s really not analysis, it’s just criticism -- strikes me as absolutely the wrong thing to do.”

Just criticism. Notice that now “criticism” is a pejorative term.


Polls, elections, he’ll ignore them equally:

Q: By taking the policy you have, haven’t you, Mr. Vice President, ignored the expressed will of the American people in the November election?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, Chris, this President, and I don’t think any President worth his salt can afford to make decisions of this magnitude according to the polls. The polls change.

Q: This was an election, sir.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Polls change day by day, week by week. ... you cannot simply stick your finger into the wind and say, gee, public opinion is against, we better quit. That is part and parcel of the underlying fundamental strategy that our adversaries believe afflicts the United States.


The key word in the sentence “This President does not make policy based on public opinion polls” is “polls,” because it’s a red herring, a distraction from what he’s really saying. Let’s try the sentence again without it, and see if anything is clarified: “This President does not make policy based on public opinion.”

Bush will be on 60 Minutes tonight. A preview: “I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude and I believe most Iraqis express that.”

Informal museum of agricultural vehicles

In the Bay Area, next to I80 (exit 36) about 10 miles east of the Carquinez Bridge heading towards Sacramento, somebody has arranged on their farmland, alongside miscellaneous cows and donkeys, a bunch of antique tractors and other farm vehicles in a sort of impromptu outdoor museum, lined up so as to be “toured” from inside one’s car in the 30 seconds or so it takes to drive past on the freeway. I like the idea very much.

Due to the position of the sun, I couldn’t see a damned thing through my camera’s viewfinder, so I snapped about 20 pictures more or less at random (not thinking to use the zoom) and hoped for the best. Wish I had a closeup of the carts on the right in the first picture, which might be 19th century.