A struggle that will outlast all of us

Condi and Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer visited Camp Pendleton yesterday, where she told the troops that they might “wonder if we are having the success that we should be having” and then, I guess, told them no: “It’s going to be a struggle that will outlast all of us.” (I’d like more context on this, but I can’t find a transcript at the famously unhelpful State Department website.)


Condi and Downer (that just sounds funny) watched Iraq-bound Marines training in a mock city (which I presume to mean a fake Iraqi city, as opposed to a city that mocks you, like Paris). Downer spouted afterwards about the Marines’ “sensitivity to human rights,” adding “I was impressed with their compassion.” Evidently no one explained to him that he was in California, not Iraq, that the exercise wasn’t real and that the “civilians” the Marines showed such sensitivity and compassion to were in fact actors.

Condi was also interviewed by Fox. She said about the Middle East: “a lot of the responsible parties in the region are beginning to see that their great threat comes from extremism, not from the Israel-Palestinian conflict.” Well, that’s okay, then.

Alert reader Josh Narins emailed me the one war metric that actually works: the more Bush appointees mention 9/11, the worse the war is going.

Pentagon press release: “The undersecretary of defense for intelligence will also now serve as the director of defense intelligence.”

Dangerous winds are swirling

Today Bush gave the commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy. Evidently the graduates “learned to brace up, do orderlies, square meals, and eat ‘hamsters’ with your ‘eyes in the boat.’” Those may or may not be euphemisms. Except for the thing about doing orderlies. They totally did orderlies.

Here, by the way, is Bush before he left for the Academy.



Much of the speech was devoted to the claim that the war in Iraq is really all about fighting Al Qaida, including dark intimations about Abu Faraj al-Libi, an Al Qaida guy who they captured two years ago, dumped in Guantanamo and never mentioned publicly before this week but are now claiming proves that Iraq is really all about Al Qaida and that this proves that if we leave Iraq, the enemy will follow us home.

He said, “As we carry out the new strategy, the Iraqi government has a lot of work to do. They must meet its responsibility to the Iraqi people and achieve benchmarks it has set”. Wouldn’t you think that after 6 years as the head of a government, he’d know if government is a “they” or an “it”?

He warned against complaisance about terrorism, cleverly appealing to his audience by using meteorological terms. Coasties are totally into weather. “The danger has not passed. Here in America, we’re living in the eye of a storm. All around us, dangerous winds are swirling, and these winds could reach our shores at any moment.” Insert your own Katrina reference here. And while you’re at it, caption these pictures for me and make me some lunch. I’m feeling cranky and I’m going to go lie down now.

A good step forward for democracy

Congressional Democrats have caved in on the Iraq spending bill. Contain your astonishment. If Kerry voted for it before he voted against it, Dems in Congress voted for it before they voted for it before they voted for it before they voted for it before they voted for it before they voted for it before they voted for it....

The US has called the abolition of term limits for Kazakhstan’s “President” Nursultan Nazarbayev a “good step forward for democracy in Kazakhstan.” Hurrah! Okay, actually the US is trying to ignore that part and focus on some other rather minor amendments to the constitution, such as giving the rubber-stamp parliament some voice in the naming of the powerless prime minister. Anyway, says the US ambassador, just because there are no longer term limits, it is “very speculative” to suggest that that means Nazarbayev will be president-for-life, just because he’s fixed every election he’s ever held. At the daily State Dept briefing, Scott McCormack also claimed there were “a whole host” of reforms that indicated Kazakhstan was moving “in the right direction.” He was unable to name any of them.

Military Jargon Watch: the latest term for the bad guys in Iraq: “abusive sectarian actors.”

20 months is a long time during this presidency

More stupid Hollywood remake ideas, just green-lit: Barbarella, The Long Good Friday.

I’ve been reading Paula Poundstone’s book There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say (Quickie review: if you like her stand-up, you’ll like the book; if you don’t, there’s no accounting for tastes). She suggests that Kansas, which had just put “intelligent design” into science classes, should actually abolish the study of science and instead tie up each student in a burlap sack and throw them into a pool. The students God thinks are really good science students will float and get an A... Intelligent flotationism, she calls it.

Bush gave a not hugely interesting interview to Reuters aboard Air Force One today.

On Iraq, Bush reached out in that very special way of his: “There is a way forward, there’s a compromise to be had. My hope is that the Democrat leader sees it.” Yes, clearly the problem with everybody who is not George Bush is that they are stubborn and unwilling to compromise.

On immigration, he twice said the issue was “emotional,” which I believe is a word he reserves for Republicans who disagree with him. He also said he’d “ask people to actually look at it before they opine; study the bill.” How many of those thousand pages have you read, George?

Interviewer Steve Holland asked about some, presumably Democratic, presidential candidates who are “trying to convince people that there really isn’t a war on terrorism”. Bush: “If that person -- if the people who say we’re not having any war on terror ever gets elected, they’ll sit in the office, the Oval Office, and realize we are in a war on terror. They’ll realize there are people that are out plotting and planning. They’ll see the complexities of taking on this enemy. I think that we’re in for a long ideological struggle.”

On Putin, “I’m still close to him, personally. ... He thinks that they’ve got a democracy emerging there in Russia. Obviously, there’s a lot of suspicion about that, and I look forward to continuing to talk to him as to why he thinks his country is on the path to democracy. It looks like at times it’s not, to me. ... It looks like some of the decisions he has made aren’t leading the country to democracy. He, on the other hand, says it’s a special kind of democracy that we in the West don’t understand, and therefore I’d be willing to listen more about why he thinks that what he’s doing is democratic in nature.”

“I have been a President during a war,” he said.


Asked what his legacy will be, he said, “Whatever it is, I’m not going to be around to see it.” Since he’s pretty healthy and his father is still jumping out of airplanes, I assume he means not so much that he won’t be around as he won’t see it, in that he won’t be paying any attention, and it’s not like he has that clear an understanding of what his effect on the world is right now.

But he has aspirations for the legacy thing: “I hope it is that George Bush fought the war, he laid out a strategy for America and her allies to ultimately defeat these ideologues; he recognized the nature of the enemy, he spoke clearly [!] about the nature of the enemy; he went on the offense in order to protect his own country; he put in place a variety of measures to help deal with this threat, and he had great faith in the capacity of liberty to ultimately conquer this ideology.”

Asked his top successes and failures, Bush said “I’m not through being President yet” and added the most devastatingly truthful words he has ever spoken: “20 months is a long time during this presidency.”

Embracing reconciliation

General David Petraeus issued an open letter (pdf) last week to the Iraqi people. Kneel before me, he said, or I will crush you like worms. Okay he didn’t, and I’ll bet you all guessed that because of the tip-off: you don’t crush worms so much as smoosh them, and as a military commander Petraeus knows which things you crush and which things you smoosh because they teach you that in your first week at military commander school. No, he politely requested that the Iraqis “take an active role in the rebirth of your nation. Choose to reject violence and the sectarianism that fuels it.” I’d be interested in an elaboration of what he means by “sectarianism” and what rejecting it would entail. This is how he seems to define taking an active role in the rebirth of Iraq: “Deny the enemy shelter, report any information you may have regarding his whereabouts, and be proud of and support your nation’s security forces.” He also suggests, twice, that they “embrace reconciliation.” This all may be perfectly sensible advice, I’m just wondering if the head of an army of occupation is really the person to be lecturing on the virtues of rejecting violence and embracing reconciliation.

Speaking of rejecting violence and embracing reconciliation, George Bush held a press conference this morning with NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at his ranch in Crawford.


See, that’s why Bush clears all that brush, so that he can hold press conferences in the middle of a field unencumbered by brush.

Bush said the two of them talked about Afghanistan and missile defense and they “had a lovely dinner.”

Hoopty Hoop said that while NATO kills scads of civilians in Afghanistan, “we are not in the same moral category” as the Taleban. So that’s okay then. Bush added that there are civilian deaths in Afghanistan because the Taliban “don’t mind using human shields because they devalue human life.”

Speaking of human shields, Bush said that Alberto Gonzales “has done nothing wrong” and calls the upcoming vote of no confidence in him “political theater,” and in fact “it is this kind of political theater that has caused the American people to lose confidence in how Washington operates.” Everyone’s a critic.

The scary thing is Bubble Boy may actually believe that Congress censuring Gonzales creates more disaffection than, say, Gonzales.


Asked about Jimmy Carter’s criticism of his administration as the worst ever for America’s relations with the world, Bush said, “We’re at war with an enemy that is relentless and determined” and “we must go on the offense against radicals, extremists, murderers in order to protect not only ourselves, but our allies.” So he’s going to hunt down Jimmy Carter. Given that Osama’s still out there, I like Carter’s odds.

Comprehensive

Iraqi President Talabani has arrived at the US for a three-week trip and entered the Mayo Clinic. He claims he’s just there to lose some weight. If I were Iraqi, I’d feel insulted that more time wasn’t spent on developing a better transparent lie.


As last week’s R debate showed, we’re going to hear many more cries of “9/11! 9/11!” from presidential candidates this election cycle. I wonder how much purchase it will still have in 2012, 2016, 2020...

The immigration bill sucks, of course, in many, many ways. Since it is a comprehensive immigration bill, it sucks comprehensively. Indeed, much of it (the two-year-on, one-year-off temporary work provision, going back to one’s country of origin to apply for American citizenship, the border-security bits having to be completed before anything else) seems purposely designed to fail. Or to be so punitive as to offer no incentives for current illegal immigrants to leave the legal shadows. Few coyotes will be put out of work by this bill. It will be interesting to see if any congresscritter publicly criticizes the failure of the provisions for bringing in family members to acknowledge the existence of homosexual immigrants. And I’m curious if the bill really, as Bush said Saturday, “affirms that English is the language of the United States.”

But my question is, how did this Republican issue become such a priority that the Democratic Congress seems likely to pass some version of this turd? Why are they wasting time on it at all, when there are so many issues that need attention and on which positive progress could be made?

Caption contest:

Sorted

The NYT has another of those articles about the rising death toll among “contractors” in Iraq that fail even to ask how many Iraqis those contractors are killing, exempt from the jurisdiction of any legal system.

Was it my imagination, or did Tom DeLay, on the Colbert Report Thursday, really cite Terri Schiavo as one of the great Republican successes that the party should have been playing up during the 2006 elections?

Unlike Prince Harry, Tony Blair is making a “surprise” visit to Iraq (some men are born to irrelevance, some achieve irrelevance...) He complained about the press paying too much attention to bad stuff and not enough to good stuff, and he told the British troops, “If we don’t sort this region out then there is, in my view, a very troubled and difficult future for the world ahead of us.” Because no troubled and difficult future has ever come out of some Western imperialist deciding to take up the white man’s burden and “sort this region out.”

Paperwork

In an email from the McCain campaign, more “Fun Facts about John McCain”: One of John McCain’s favorite hobbies is barbequing. His seasoning of choice is Hog’s Breath - a dry mix of salt, pepper, garlic and paprika - and he once joked that as president, he’d replace President Clinton’s putting green at the White House with a grill.

As they say in Al Qaida, it’s the fucking paper work that’ll kill ya. Alert reader Scott points out that one of the key pieces of, you should pardon the term, evidence against Jose Padilla is an application form he supposedly partly filled out in 2000 to attend an Al Qaida training camp, which was captured in 2001 but not fingerprint tested until 2006, and which certainly doesn’t have his fingerprints on it only because his interrogators handed it to him some time in that long period, possibly after they realized that they needed to manufacture some sort of case against him when all the earlier wild accusations against him (dirty bomber etc) had turned out to be unprovable or just plain silly.

But the real question here is... a five-page application form? What do you suppose they ask?

Where do you see yourself in five years? In Paradise surrounded by 72 virgins. Or possibly in marketing.

My biggest fault is that sometimes I love Allah and hate America too much.

Anyone else have any suggestions?

What is pure democracy?

Guardian headline: “Colombian Warlord Says US Firms Paid Death Squads for Bananas.”

Russia detained loads of anti-Putin and/or democracy activists, raided newspapers, and prevented reporters as well as demonstrators reaching a Russia-EU summit meeting. Said Putin, “What is pure democracy? It is a question of ... whether you want to see the glass half-full or half empty.” Yes, Vlad is a gulag half-full kind of guy.

Speaking of pure democracy, Kazakhstan’s parliament amends the constitution to eliminate term limits for “President” Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been in power since Soviet times. Just for him. His successors after he dies or, ha ha, voluntarily gives up office, will again be restricted to two 7-year terms. (Correction: two 5-year terms.)

Who even knew that North Korea had a prime minister? Well, last month North Korean prime minister Pak Pong Ju was fired. His new job: manager of a chemical plant.

Random Friday Bush pictures (the wounded soldiers are from Walter Reed, wheeled over to the White House presumably so Bush can be pictured waving disinterestedly at them).

George Bush meets one of the most diverse institutions in American life

Bush took part today in a Joint ROTC Commissioning Ceremony. He commissioned some joints. Or something. He complained about universities that do not have ROTC programs, putting it in terms he seemed to think should shame and embarrass those beatnik commie hippies: “But surely the concept of diversity is large enough to embrace one of the most diverse institutions in American life.” He added, “But none a’ you is queers, right?”


He asked them to bring honor to their uniforms. He asked them to set high standards for themselves. And he gave this advice: “Do not ask of those under your command anything that you would not ask of yourselves.” He then ordered them to get their daddies to pull strings to make sure they never face enemy fire, bum around Texas bars for a while, then blow off the last year of their commitments.

We filled a lot of space together

Bush and Blair held their very last joint press conference today. So sad.


Bush on Blair: “And it dawned on me, once again, what a clear strategic thinker he is.” “I do congratulate the Prime Minister for being a -- when he gets on a subject, it’s dogged.” “I appreciated Tony’s willingness to interface with our people there” (military commanders in Iraq). “There’s a lot of blowhards in the political process, you know, a lot of hot-air artists, people who have got something fancy to say. Tony Blair is somebody who actually follows through with his convictions, and therefore, is admired in the international community.” “I have enjoyed working with Tony Blair more than I could have possibly imagined.”


Blair on Bush: “You’ve been unyielding and unflinching, and determined in the fight that we face together.” Yeah, that’s the fucking problem.

Bush on the Middle East: “We understand the fright that can come when you’re worried about a rocket landing on top of your home.”

I’ve noticed before that when these two get together, Blair often starts picking up Bush’s speech patterns or phrases, like it’s viral. In other words, like it’s a virus. (Joke. I’m okay, really.) Today the virus was “of course”:

Bush: “We talked about, of course, Iraq. ... We talked about, of course, Africa. We spent a lot of time talking about Africa. ... Can I work with the next guy? Of course... And we talked, of course, about climate change.”

Blair: “And we discussed, of course, the Middle East... And of course, also, we talked about the upcoming G8... Again, in respect of Afghanistan, where American troops, and of course, British troops ... of course I wish [Gordon Brown] well... And then, of course, there are various domestic issues, too, as well. ... And the fact is, the decisions are difficult; of course they’re difficult.” Etcetera.


Incidentally, “Africa” has become one of those place names that stand for something else, like Vietnam or Hiroshima or Intercourse, Pennsylvania. Blair, for instance, spoke of “the cause that is Africa” and said that the G8 would have discussions “over the issue of Africa.”

Bush on Gordon Brown: “I met him, thought he was a good fellow. ... I hope to help him in office the way Tony Blair helped me.” BREAKING NEWS: BUSH TO BE BROWN’S POODLE.

Brown will not be comforted that Bush also made this character analysis: “I admire Paul Wolfowitz. I admire his heart.”


Asked about the news that Gonzales and Card pressured former Attorney General Ashcroft in his hospital bed after surgery to sign off on a wiretapping program they knew he considered illegal, Bush pretended that the question was about the warrantless surveillance program, defended it at length, and talked instead about the importance of spying on people: “Kelly, there’s a lot of speculation about what happened and what didn’t happen; I’m not going to talk about it. It’s a very sensitive program. .... And so there will be all kinds of talk about it. As I say, I’m not going to move the issue forward by talking about something as highly sensitive -- highly classified subject. I will tell you, however, that the program is necessary.”

He added, “No matter how calm it may seem here in America, an enemy lurks. And they would like to strike.” Although they do kind of enjoy the lurking too. “They would like to do harm to the American people because they have an agenda.”

Finally, Bush described the Bush-Blair relationship: “And so I -- we filled a lot of space together.”


(Update: One more picture. Just because.)

Dogged

Tony Blair is visiting George Bush, who described him as “dogged.” Yes, yes he is.

Who’s a good prime minister? You are, you’re a good prime minister, yes you are.
(More, no doubt, later when the transcript is out.)

I’m not going to speculate on what I’m going to be voting on in the future

How did I not know that Jerry Falwell’s father shot his own brother to death?

At yet another event focused on immigration, Bush again came out for comprehensive immigration reform without amnesty, without animosity, and without amniocentesis, but said, “With us are people who are employers, people who provide work for citizens who are in our country legally.” He seems to have engaged in a little verbal amnesty of his own there, promoting people with green cards to the status of citizen, or he simply doesn’t know what the word citizen means.

Hillary Clinton, on the front page of her campaign website: “I will cast my vote to send the President a clear message: Democrats are united in fighting to change course, redeploy our troops out of Iraq, and end this war as soon as possible.” Hillary Clinton today, answering a reporter’s question about the Iraq withdrawal legislation: “I’m not going to speculate on what I’m going to be voting on in the future.” Leadership!

Hillary’s website also asks us to decide for her what her campaign song should be. She’s provided some options, but you can, heh heh, suggest one yourself.

Republican debate: I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they could think of

Another Republican debate! Yay!

On Iraq, McCain said, “I will be the last man standing if necessary.” Now that’s a surge I’d like to see!


Romney talked about the “global jihadist effort” to establish a caliphate and destroy the West. “And they’ve come together as Shi’a and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda with that intent.” He sees “Shi’a and Sunni” as terrorist organizations just like Hamas and Al Qaida.

Brownback blamed environmental problems on teenage girls: “My family, we have a hybrid car. In that car you can get up to 42, 43 miles to the gallon. Now my 17-year-old daughter does about 25 on it, so it does matter how you drive it.”

Romney is running against the state he governored, repeatedly calling it a “pretty tough state.” “You’ve heard of blue states. If you ever bought a suit and you look at it and you can’t tell if it’s blue or black, that’s how blue Massachusetts is.” That’s pretty fucking blue. Or black. Anyway, I’m pretty sure what Romney is saying it that he hates black people, just like the Mormon church used to.


Huckabee, who said that Congress spends money like John Edwards at a beauty shop, ha ha, said that opposition to abortion, like looking for lost hikers, shows we value life, “and it’s what separates us from the Islamic jihadists who are out to kill us. They celebrate death. They have a culture of death. Ours is a culture of life.” Funny, because I think he’d find that he’s very much on the same page as the Islamic jihadists about abortion. And they probably don’t like John Edwards’s haircut either.

Brownback, asked how he would tell a pregnant rape victim she’d be forced to give birth: “Will that make the woman in a better situation if that’s what takes place? And I don’t think so, and I think we can explain it when we look at it for what it is: a beautiful child of a loving God”. I’m pretty sure Brownback just called God a rapist.

Tancredo on how all the other candidates are stealing his platform of hating hating hating immigrants: “I’m glad they happen. But I must tell you, I trust those conversions when they happen on the road to Damascus and not on the road to Des Moines.” They have roads in Iowa now?

Ron Paul said something or other about terrorists acting in response to American foreign policy, and Giuliani took umbrage, “as someone who lived through the attack of September 11”. Remember when Dan Quayle called himself a “Vietnam-era veteran”?

And of course the hypothetical “What Would Jack Bauer Do” question. If there were terrorist attacks just like at the beginning of this season of “24,” would you torture someone to get information? They all (of the ones asked) agreed that they would torture someone, but call it something else. I include John McCain in that: he made a strong case against torture but said that Army Field Manual interrogation procedures “would be adequate in 999,999 of cases”. Out of 1 million, I’m assuming, although it could have been out of 10 million, he didn’t say. Still, even McCain wanted to leave himself the option.

Giuliani said “I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they could think of. It shouldn’t be torture, but every method they can think of...” It’s Giuliani time!

Romney liked the mention of Guantanamo in the hypothetical, because “they don’t get the access to lawyers,” and said we should double Guantanamo. There was applause. And we should use enhanced interrogation techniques have to be used -- not torture but enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Duncan Hunter says he’d order the use of “very high-pressure techniques” and get the information within an hour.

Then the hypothetical was added to. The terrorists are being trained in camps in a West African country. We’re looking at you, Togo! Should we go the UN before nuking it? Brownback says no.

By the time they got to him, Tancredo was upset. “[I]t’s almost unbelievable to listen to this in a way. We’re talking about -- we’re talking about it in such a theoretical fashion.” Because it’s a hypothetical? Tancredo asked, with outrage in his voice, why are they even discussing whether waterboarding would be bad? He wants to waterboard someone now, now dammit! I’m looking at you, Huckabee!

Tom Tancredo thinks that “24” is a documentary.

Chris Wallace asked if candidates worried about all ten being white (or as Romney might put it, so white they’re almost pink). He did not think to ask if they worried about all ten being male. Nor did it occur to any of the candidates to talk about that.

I have been here ever since I’ve been the president

From the London Times, a headline that may or may not have been an intentional joke: “Children Who Miss Numeracy Targets to Get One-on-One Help.”

Mitt Romney received a draft deferment so that he could be a Mormon missionary in France rather than a soldier in Vietnam.

Today George Bush attended the annual Peace Officers’ Memorial Service. He said, “We thank them for their lives of service and we pray to an Almighty God that He bring comfort to you during this time of sorrow.” The time of sorrow speech lasted seven minutes. But even to George, it seemed much longer: “I have been here ever since I’ve been the president, in an event like this, and it’s fitting because this is a really important day for our country.”



That rarest of White House photographs in which Chimpy is not the smuggest-looking person in the shot:

Wherein the death of Rev. Falwell is treated with the utmost respect and subtlety

Jerry Falwell, God’s messenger on earth, is dead. Dead dead dead. Dead.


When reached for comment, John McCain said, “Great, can someone pull me out of his ass now? I seem to be stuck. Little help here.”


When reached for comment, gay Teletubby Tinky-Winky said, “Eh oh,” adding, “I say, Senator McCain, most peculiar to see you here.”

We’ve got al Qaeda in both places right now

Condoleezza Rice says of talk that there is a “new Cold War” with Russia, “I think the parallels just frankly have no basis whatsoever,” adding that it’s just too bad that she spent all those years studying the Cold War, since that information is of no use in her current job, for which she therefore has no qualifications, and will be resigning at once.

Dick Cheney, still in the Middle East, went on Fox News to give his usual forthright, transparent insights into governmental activities: “I don’t want to characterize the conversations I had with any of the leaders.”

He said of American opponents of the Iraq war, “I think they have to be responsible for the consequences of the policy recommendations they make. ... accountable for what would happen when that policy followed, what happens inside Iraq, what kind of encouragement that might give to al Qaeda.” He added, “a responsible public official has to accept the responsibility for the consequences of what they recommend.” So presumably he’ll also be resigning at once.

He also said that “some people want to say they want to fight the good war in Afghanistan, not the bad war in Iraq. Well, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way in the real world. We’ve got al Qaeda in both places right now.” Funny how that happened.

What’s more obnoxious, Cheney lecturing other people about taking responsibility for the consequences of what they recommend, or Cheney lecturing about how things work in the “real world”?

Jeopardizing what is already in jeopardy

John McCain went on Meet the Press today.

He said that people who oppose the war are just plain ignorant: “My point is, and I’m sure we’ll get into it, and that is we have a chance of success, and I don’t think that a lot of Americans are as fully aware as they should be of the consequences of failure in Iraq.” For example, “You’d have to partition bedrooms in Baghdad because Sunni and Shia are, are married.”

Not that the war couldn’t have been run better: “You know, in hindsight, if we had exploited the initial success, which was shock and awe, and we succeeded, and we had done the right things after that, all of us would be applauding what we did. We didn’t. It was terribly mismanaged.” What with the not exploiting shock and not exploiting awe.

Asked if we won’t have to leave if the Iraqi parliament tells us to, he said no, referring to that august body as “the Iraqi, quote, ‘parliament’”. He said of the signatures of the majority of the Iraqi Quote Parliament on a petition calling for a timetable for withdrawal of occupation troops, “there is some, a certain amount of domestic political calculations involved”. That certainly put them in their place.

McCain really is a puffed-up little toad, isn’t he? He says of, I’m not even sure what, something manly about Iraq anyway, “that’s my duty. That’s my obligation. It’s not my privilege.” Even when talking about the Iraqi parliament’s proposed two-month vacation, he doesn’t just oppose that, he is “unalterably opposed to it.” “So if I’m the last man standing, I have an obligation to do what my conscience and my knowledge and my background and everything I’ve known through my well-experienced life is best for this country.”


He says that unless the Iraqi regime acts on various things, “it could jeopardize what is already in jeopardy.” Yeah, hate for that to happen.

Asked if he isn’t planning for Americans to occupy Iraq for a decade or more: “We’ve had troops in South Korea for 60 years, and Americans are, are very satisfied with that situation.” So that’s okay, then.

Russert read him a statement about the uselessness of continued occupation and nation-building and the need for Congress to pull the troops out. McCain responded, yeah and what happens after we leave and blah blah blah, and Russert told him that the quote he’d read was...oh the irony... McCain in 1993 about Somalia, gotcha. McCain said he doesn’t see any comparison between Somalia and Iraq.

Russert read him some quotes about his April visit to the Baghdad market, and McCain responded to one quote about security being a smidge higher than usual, “I don’t know who Mr. Faiyad is, and I’m sorry that I didn’t see him.” McCain is lying. How do I know that? Because Russert never said the name Faiyad, just “the owner of an electrical supply shop.” I had to google Faiyad to identify which quote was his.

He added, “I was glad to walk through that market. I will go walk through a market as often as I can. It was not allowed to go through a market a short time before that. ... I didn’t call for the kind of, quote, ‘protection’ that was around me.” There are those air quotes again. “But I am not afraid... And I’ll be glad to go back to that market with or without military protection and, and humvees, etc.” Cool, is Tuesday good for you?

Evidently in 1999 McCain said that he worried that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, women would have illegal, dangerous abortions. Asked if he’s still concerned about that, he said no, he “would hope” they’d just go ahead and give birth instead. So that’s okay, then.

HANGING AROUND WITH BUSH TOO LONG? “There are some progress being made”. “and this now is got to do with vital national security interests.”

I think you’ll be amazed at how our country got started

Today George and Laura visited Jamestown, Virginia. Would it have killed them to dress up as John Smith and Pocahontas?



Reuters captions the following picture, “President Bush discusses the length of sailmaker Josiah Freitus’ needle...” Yeah, sure, whatever.


AFP captions this one, “US President George W. Bush listens to an explanation of the use of a pistol...”


Ohmigod they just let him pick up a gun. Can you think of anything more dangerous than George Bush with a gun?


Oh, yes I can. George (shudder) spoke.


“I think you’ll be amazed at how our country got started,” he said. Mass murder, like every other country? (Gee, I was going to do some sort of birds and bees joke, but then I just went to the dark place.)

The story of the Jamestown settlement, he informed us, “is a story of hardship overcome by resolve” which “laid the foundation of our great democracy.” Oh brother, everything is a metaphor for Iraq for him now, isn’t it? Oh yes: in 1610 “They were prepared to abandon the settlement, and only the last minute arrival of new settlers and new provisions saved Jamestown.” Ye Olde Surge. “As the colony grew, the settlers ventured beyond the walls of their three-sided fort...” Ye Olde Green Zone. Then, Bush didn’t mention, they started planting tobacco to feed the unhealthy addiction of their brethren back home...

Best Taliban name ever

Mullah Dadullah.