We stand on your side in an ethically responsible way

Bush again vetoed stem cell research, then talked to the press, using as props a spina bifida patient and someone who “has whipped cancer twice by using adult stem cells. In other words, adult stem cells have saved her life.”


“America is a nation that leads the world in science and technology. Our innovative spirit is making possible incredible advances in medicine that could save lives and cure diseases,” he said, and he plans to put a stop to all that. Why aren’t these scientists out finding ways to run Hummers on switch grass?

Actually, he claims to be supporting scientists, only, you know, ethical and moral scientists. “We want to say, we stand on your side in an ethically responsible way.”

“Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical,” he said, obliviously. Possibly he’s afraid embryonic stem cells can cure hypocrisy.


Or condescending assholery.

A different hope (updated)

George Packer (The Assassins’ Gate) has a blog (2 entries so far) at the New Yorker site.

Military code name of the day: Operation Arrowhead Ripper.

Yesterday Condi Rice held a press conference about events in Palestine, which gave her the opportunity to use the words “responsible” and “legitimate” over and over and over, as in “the United States supports [Abbas’s] legitimate decision to form an emergency government of responsible Palestinians” and “Our view, very strongly, is that what President Abbas has done is legitimate and it is responsible and we’re going to support that action.” By legitimate, she doesn’t mean democratic or constitutional, of course. Indeed, “I think we will leave to the Palestinians issues of how they work through their own constitutional issues.” That’s one way to describe it. Of course, Abbas’s side will be “working through” those constitutional issues with weapons we provided.

Since Abbas’s coup is blatantly illegal, from whence does that legitimacy derive? Good old-fashioned organic nationalism. Said Rice, “there is one Palestinian people and there should be one Palestinian state” and that “Mahmoud Abbas is the President of all of the Palestinian people”. Ein volk, ein reich... you get the idea.

Today, at a press conference with Israeli How-The-Hell-Is-He-Still-Prime-Minister Olmert, Bush also, twice, called Abbas “the President of all the Palestinians” (now that I think of it, that also sounds like True Czar of All the Russias), adding, “He was elected; he’s the President.”

(Update: Eli of Left I on the News points out in comments that the roughly 3.5 million of exiled Palestinians didn’t have a vote in that election. Of course the point Bush was trying to make with the phrase “President of all the Palestinians,” which Olmert also used, was that he claims authority in both the West Bank and Gaza. Now, there’s a word for “both the West Bank and Gaza,” and that word is Palestine. Since Bush and Olmert would sooner kiss the corpse of Yasser Arafat on the mouth before uttering the word Palestine, they’re stuck with a phrase, “President of all the Palestinians,” which does not have a geographic referent.)

Bush also said Abbas is “a voice that is a reasonable voice amongst the extremists in your neighborhood.” And he called Illegally Appointed Prime Minister Fayyad “a good fellow”. He says that when the President of All the Palestinians and the Good Fellow are “strengthened,” they “can lead the Palestinians in a different direction, with a different hope.”

Bush also spoke about the great work he’d be doing with Olmert “to promote a alternative ideology, based upon human liberty and the human condition.” An ideology based on the human condition, that would be novel. Honestly, I have no idea what Bush means by that. He added that Olmert “said he’s willing to have discussions with the forces of moderation in the Palestinian Territory, laying the groundwork for serious discussions.” So he’ll have discussions laying the groundwork for discussions. “That’s -- that is a statement that shows that the Prime Minister is willing to move with a -- to promote an alternative vision.”


Olmert made it clear that his vision is alternative to that of “the Palestinians”: “We have been very, very attentive to the needs of the -- humanitarian needs of Gaza... Israel will not be indifferent to the human suffering in Gaza. Israel will be different from the Palestinians, themselves, because the reality is that all this suffering is caused by Palestinians against their own people.” He could have said Hamas or extremists. I don’t think it’s going to far to say that his choice to blame “the Palestinians” is a racist one, indicating that they’re all barbarians.


The reporters’ questions were all about Palestine, except one about Iran. But Bush kept talking about Iraq, because he sees the two things as exactly the same problem, you know, the one where “We face extremists and radicals who use violence and murder as a tool to achieve objectives,” and we have to spread democracy because “You can only defeat them so much militarily.” Indeed, in this bit, one can’t be entirely sure that he remembers whether he is talking about Palestine or Iraq:

Matt, what you’re seeing now in this part of the 21st century is going to be played out over time. This is an ideological struggle. We’re looking at the difference between a group of people that want to represent the Palestinians who believe in peace, that want a better way for their people, that believe in democracy -- they need help to build the institutions necessary for democracy to flourish, and they need help to build security forces so that they can end up enforcing what most of the people want, which is to live in peace -- and that’s versus a group of radicals and extremists who are willing to use violence, unspeakable violence sometimes, to achieve a political objective.

Bush & bathing suit

At an event in the White House yesterday with NCAA teams, Bush was presented with a bathing suit. And now I present you with the pictures. You’re welcome.


Please leave any caption suggestions and/or death threats in comments.

Nefarious activity was occurring at the site

US bombed a “compound” in Paktika province, Afghanistan, in which, they say, “nefarious activity” was occurring. The bombs killed 7 or more children, so if there wasn’t nefarious activity occurring before, that pretty much counts. The Independent comments, “The statement gave no indication what such nefarious activity might be”. One might add an additional note of skepticism about intel that is evidently capable of detecting nefarious activity but not children.

The children were killed in a school. The US military says it didn’t expect there to be any children in a school (they used the word madrassa). C’mon, they said, it was Sunday, shouldn’t those kids have been in church?

Military spokesmodel Major Chris Belcher belched spoke: “This is another example of Al Qaida using the protective status of a mosque, as well as innocent civilians, to shield themselves.” Protective status? Shield themselves? Fat chance of that working. Burping Boy continued: “We are saddened by the innocent lives that were lost as a result of militants’ cowardice.” Nefarious cowardice. Or possibly cowardly nefariousness. Al Qaida fighters probably aren’t taking any advice about bravery from a man with a funny name whose job is to talk to reporters. Or from people who drop bombs on schools from airplanes high in the air.

The story the US is putting out is that the fighters kept the children with them by force. If true, then they’re shits too. Although, as Eli at Left I on the News asks, “wouldn’t that only work if the shields were, you know, visible?”

The War Against Nefariousness (TWAN) continues.

Destiny

Nouri al-Maliki was interviewed by Newsweek Friday (link, other link) .

He claimed that the people who attacked the Shiite Samarra mosque would probably also go after Sunni mosques in order to provoke rioting. Sure they would. He took credit for the relative lack of sectarian violence in the aftermath of this week’s attack, due to the “quick and wise reaction” of his government.

He said of the parade of American officials coming to pressure him this week that “Iraq is an Arab country and it is an Arab tradition to welcome guests, so, everyone is welcome to Iraq,” and would they please stop using the word pressure, he really doesn’t like that. And it’s not even necessary because “I am the person who most believes in national reconciliation.” He says he needs more time so that his work will be “written in stone.” That does tend to slow down the steno pool.


Evidently, every time he and Bush speak, they try to one-up each other by denouncing their respective elected legislatures: “Every time I meet President Bush through the videoconference I tell him that I have a hard time dealing with the Parliament or the political blocs. He says, ‘I have a worse time dealing with the Congress.’ And when he says, ‘I have aggravation in the Congress,’ I say, ‘I have bigger aggravation with parliament.’” They do this for hours. Good times, good times.

Maliki denounced the new US policy of arming Sunni sheiks slash warlords slash death squads in Anbar, saying “I believe that the Coalition forces do not know the backgrounds of the tribes” and “They make mistakes by arming tribes sometimes, and this is dangerous because this will create new militias.” I wondered how long it would take him to respond publicly to the news that the US was supporting military forces not subordinate to the central government. And then only to an American magazine.

He described the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in this way: “Destiny wanted to bring together two people who strongly stick to their principles.” Destiny has a sick sense of humor.

Fashion

Now Lou Dobbs is complaining that Mexican lepers are coming into this country and taking jobs away from American lepers, or something.

Secretary of War Robert Gates has made a “surprise” visit to Iraq. How does he stack up against previous surprise visitors?

more at twiigs.com...

There is terror going on

Romney on Bush: “Everything he does, he does from the standpoint of what is best for the American people.”

Romney channeling Bush: “If you look across the world you can recognize that there is terror going on.”

I just found some old clippings of New York Magazine competitions from the ‘90s (and one from 1982!). I’ll type up selected entries from some of them and post them every so often. I did this in old posts, and have collected those comps here.

This is from the 4/20/92 issue, songs from the crap musicals based on a good book, movie etc. You’ll have to guess the original source; New York didn’t list them because its readers are soooo literate that, unlike me, they didn’t have to google the entry
“Can’t This Be Our Little Secret?” – Arthur Dimmesdale
because they’d already know that that referred to The Scarlet Letter. If I had to figure them out, so do you. If I didn’t figure them out, I didn’t bother typing them up. Some have multiple songs, which I’ve grouped together. You’ll get the idea.

“If I Were a Hit Man” – Michael Corleone
“We’re Going to the Mattresses, They’re Sleeping With the Fishes” – Entire Company

“Can’t We Get Some Ice Cream First?” – Lolita

“A Lovely Day for a Ride in the Cah” – JFK
“Waiting for President K to Come Our War” – Oswald and People of Dallas
“The Grassy Knoll” – CIA and Mafia
“Oh, My Suit, My Poor Pink Suit” – Jackie

“How Can We Ignore the Guy Next Door?” - Nick
“What’s New, Old Sport?” - Jay
“Is This Absolutely Where You Live?” – Daisy
“Shirts, Shirts” - Jay
“East Egg, West Egg, All Around the Sound” – Entire Cast

“Look at Me, I’m Madame B!” – Emma

“Honey, I’m Home” - Agamemnon

“The Silence of the Lambs When You Are Gone.”
“Hey, There’s a Moth in Her Mouth” - Clarice

“Decisions, Decisions” – Solomon

“I Hate Spunk” - Mr. Grant
“Hey, Mare” - Rhoda

“My Mama Done Ptolemy” - Cleo
“It’s Only a Papyrus Moon” - Antony
“B-A-D-D- A-S-P-P, Bad Asp” - Cleo

“Here’s Atticus” - Townspeople
“Boo Who?” - Arthur Radley

“Don’t Cry for Me, Oklahoma” - Ma Joad
“I’m Gonna Wash That Dust Right Outta My Hair” - Rose of Sharon

“Call Me Ish, My Game Is Fish” - Ishmael

“There is Nothing Like a Thane” - Chorus
“I Enjoy Being a Churl” - Macbeth
“Greymalkin’s Gonna Clear Up, Put On a Happy Face” - Three Weird Sisters
“Ripp’d Untimely Rag” - Macduff
“Into the Woods” - Macduff

“Boo” - Voice on the Battlement
“Are We Having Fun Yet?” - Gertrude, King
“I’ve Got Those Uncle-Killed-My-Father-Stole-the-Throne-and-Married-Mother Blues” - Hamlet
“Nothing Could Be Finer Than to Be in Asia Minor” - Agamemnon
“Oh, the Hoplites and the Helots Should Be Pals” - Achilles and Myrmidons
“The Last Time Paris Saw Me” - Helen
“A Big Wooden Horse, of Course, of Course” - Priam and Trojans

“A Suitcase Full of Dreams” - Willy
“Attention Must Be Paid” - Linda
“What Am I, Invisible?” - Happy

“We Got Trouble, Right Here in Theban City” - Mr. Oed
“It’s a Wise Child” - Oedipus
“Break the Jinx, Go See the Sphinx, You Little Minx” - Village People
“I Know Something You Don’t Know” – Tiersius
“Uh-Oh” - Jocasta
“I’m A – What?” - Oedipus
“It’s Funny Till Somebody Loses an Eye” – Creon

Or not at all

Bush, in his weekly radio address, called for the abolition of the American government. “The American people expect us to spend their tax dollars wisely, or not at all”. “The American people do not want to return to the days of tax and spend policies.” No taxing, no spending, no government, no problem.

Wherein your humble blogger’s motives are reconsidered

Headline of the day: “Rushdie ‘Humbled’ by Knighthood.” Er, isn’t that rather missing the point of the whole knighthood thing?

Kurt Waldheim, in a document released after his death yesterday, still denies having committed any war crimes, but does acknowledge having taken an “unambiguous position far too late on Nazi crimes,” because, he says, of the “hectic pace of an overloaded international life.” Busy busy busy, what with running the UN and covering up his past, there just weren’t enough hours in the day. He even reached out to the people who hounded him: “I pay respect to all those who confronted me critically and ask them to reconsider their motives and, if possible, grant me reconciliation.” Hmm, let me reconsider my “motives.” Reconsidering... Reconsidering... Reconsidering... Nope, I still don’t like Nazis or torture or mass murder, so I would have to say no, Kurt.

Current UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon managed to come up with this to say about his predecessor: “He was a man who had lived history.” Yeah, that was kind of the problem.

Speaking of war crimes, the Haditha hearings continue. Sharratt’s lawyer says he should get a medal. Sharratt says the reason he went into the house with guns blazing was that he saw male Iraqis repeatedly “turkey peeking” at him over a wall. Clearly they were asking for it.

The Haditha massacre is the subject of a forthcoming motion picture by the director of the documentaries (although the Haditha film is a dramatization) “Kurt & Courtney,” “Biggie and Tupac,” and “Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam.” Which may just make him uniquely qualified to make sense of the Iraq war.

Plus ça change...

Holy Joe Lieberman has another Wall Street Journal op-ed article on Iraq. He insists that in the five months between his trips to Iraq in December 2006 and May 2007, “almost everything about the American war effort in Baghdad has changed”. Except for Joe Lieberman’s Wall Street Journal op-ed pieces, which haven’t changed in the slightest.

He castigates critics of the war for failing to understand, um, something:

Some argue that the new strategy is failing because, despite gains in Baghdad and Anbar, violence has increased elsewhere in the country, such as Diyala province. This gets things backwards: Our troops have succeeded in improving security conditions in precisely those parts of Iraq where the “surge” has focused. Al Qaeda has shifted its operations to places like Diyala in large measure because we have made progress in pushing them out of Anbar and Baghdad.

Yay! Al Qaida is killing people in Diyala province! That means we’re winning!

Lieberman doesn’t say if he’s planning another trip to Iraq, perhaps to Diyala to explain the good news to them.

I’ve been told I’m done

The alliterative Peter Pace explained that he had refused to just retire, he made Gates fire him. Because it would be a bad message to the troops if he “voluntarily walked off the battlefield. That is unacceptable as a leadership thing, in my mind.” How does this thing called leadership thing work?: “I need to be told that I’m done. I’ve been told I’m done.” So, having made some point, now he’ll be retiring. In other words, he’d have happily stayed in the military another two years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but (and I guess this is a good message to the troops) give him anything less than the top job and he’s outta there. By the way, Pace may have convinced himself that this is a leadership thing, that he’s acting all manly and leadership-y, but one way or another he was going to be out of a job in September, so all he’s actually doing is spinning a decision made by others. If he had known the difference between those two things, maybe he’d have been a little better at his job.


This morning, Bush attended the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast. “This prayer breakfast has come a long way since it started five years ago. We could have held it in a little tiny closet. And now, as Luis tells me, it’s oversubscribed the minute it gets announced. It’s a good sign for our country, isn’t it? People want to come together in prayer.” 1) Why does he assume it’s the prayer part and not the breakfast part that is popular? Who doesn’t like huevos rancheros? 2) Yes, there is something about the last five years of your presidency that makes people want to pray, in a no-atheists-in-foxholes kind of way. Good sign for our country, though? Not so much.

This is Bush afterwards, in the White House Rose Garden, clearly uplifted by all that national Hispanic praying.


Little known fact about Rose Garden protocol: one must sieg heil the white roses, but never, ever, the pink ones.


Then he hopped to Air Force One


for a trip to the Boys & Girls Club of South Central Kansas, which he called “a beautiful facility full of beautiful people,” where he was amazed by an exhibition of levitation. Or maybe the Secret Service took away their jump ropes.

Astonishing signs of normalcy

John Negroponte, now in the State Dept, says that the enemy in Baghdad is “increasingly desperate.” As I said in some old post, for four years now the enemy has always been described as becoming more desperate, never once as getting a little less desperate. So that’s pretty desperate, is what I’m saying. Here’s a 2003 Billmon post on this particular cliché, which was getting old even then, and now just seems a little, um, desperate.

Negroponte called the bombing of the minarets at Samarra both “a deliberate attempt by al Qaeda to sow dissent and inflame sectarian strife among the people of Iraq” and “further evidence of the enemy’s indiscriminate violence”. Dude doesn’t know what the word indiscriminate means.

You know, even if Petraeus is right that “If you drive around Baghdad, you’ll find astonishing signs of normalcy in perhaps half to two-thirds of the city,” he’s probably missing a sign of lack of normalcy: the convoy of armored vehicles that is the only way he can drive around Baghdad and live to tell the tale.

Bush gave yet another damn speech, to the Associated Builders and Contractors, and I only skimmed it, so there.

PAST TENSES ARE NOT HIS FRIEND: “Since I’ve took office...”

Most of the speech was on the immigration bill, because if there’s one thing builders and contractors can’t stand, it’s illegal alien workers. “And so the bill we’re talking about says, okay, enough is enough when it comes to document forgery”. This is Bush’s new favorite phrase. In the past couple of weeks, he’s declared that enough is enough in Darfur, and enough is enough for Kosovo independence.

In Iraq, he says, “The population is tired of al Qaeda. They’re tired of murder.” As Samuel Johnson said, when you’re tired of murder...

ON THE SURGE, THE DECIDER DECIDED: “The sectarian violence was getting more severe. And I had a choice. It’s what Presidents do. They make decisions. And that’s what you do. You make decisions. I made a decision.”

CAPTION CONTEST:





And here’s a bonus – if that’s the word I’m looking for – picture of Bush & Cheney in the Oval Office this morning.

An unqualified success

Tonight Bush went to the aptly-named and no doubt delicious “2007 President’s Dinner,” of which he said, “The only way to call this dinner is an unqualified success.”

In his speech, he only found two things “interesting”: 1) “It is interesting that David Petraeus, our commander on the ground, has declared that al Qaeda is the number-one enemy to the people of Iraq.” 2) “Isn’t it interesting, my dad fought the Japanese, I’m making peace with the Japanese.”

If you’re wondering about that last one, no, he hasn’t started and ended a war with Japan without you noticing. He means that 60 years after World War II, he can sit down with the Japanese prime minister and “talk about peace in the world.” Which isn’t really the same thing as making peace. But then they also, he says, “sit at the table talking about making sure that the leader of North Korea doesn’t get a nuclear weapon.” Um, has no one told him that North Korea has had nukes for a while now?

Anyway, now he’s making peace with the Japanese. “Something happened. What happened was, liberty took hold in Japan. Liberty has the capacity to convert enemies into allies.” You know what else happened? We “converted” two of their cities into charcoal. Somehow in all these anecdotes about Koizumi and Graceland and “Japanese-style democracy” that he tells over and over and over, that part always gets left out of his little just-so story. Maybe Japan isn’t really a template for how the United States should, in Bush’s words, “spread freedom far and wide across the globe.”


But for Bush, it is. Elsewhere in the speech, he says, “Our strategy is, in the short-term, to take the fight to the enemy and defeat them where we find them. In the long-term, the way to defeat an ideology of hate is with an ideology of hope.” Got that? Short term: mass slaughter; long-term: ideology of hope. How could that possibly fail?

He doesn’t see why, correctly and repeatedly and simply explained, that policy wouldn’t be tremendously popular in this country: “And I believe if our candidates take the message of doing what is necessary to protect the American people, and take the message, the hopeful message of helping others realize the blessings of liberty, that we will retake the House and retake the Senate, and hold the White House in 2008.” Can’t wait to see the bumper stickers. 2006 elections or no 2006 elections, dude still thinks his policies are wildly popular.


Speaking of wildly popular, it does seem as if Bush’s surprisingly cheap Timex was not stolen, that he really did take it off because he was afraid some Albanian would steal it. This action has made him just a little bit less popular in Albania than he was.

The price is worth paying

Bush issued a statement about the latest attack on the Samarra mosque. He’s against it. The US will send troops to the area to guard the rubble, and to “restor[e] calm and security to the area.” The Samarranians will no doubt be interested to hear that their area was calm and secure right up until this morning. Bush also said, “The United States also stands ready to help the Iraqi people rebuild and restore this holy shrine.” As I said last year, when he made the same offer about the dome, the Shiites really don’t want your infidel fingerprints on their holy site.

Iraqi PM Maliki, who just yesterday said, “we have eliminated the danger of sectarian war,” has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal today, suggesting that “Americans keen to understand the ongoing struggle for a new Iraq can be guided by the example of their own history,” specifically, the American Civil War, which “took hundreds of thousands of lives but ended in the triumph of freedom and the birth of a great power.” And Iraq is just like that. Well, the taking of hundreds of thousands of lives part; obviously not the triumph of freedom part or the birth of a great power part.

He gives a little history of Iraq. Under the Baathist Party, “Countless people were put to death on the smallest measure of suspicion.” Thank god that could never happen in Iraq today. Also, “Wars were waged by that regime and our national treasure was squandered without the consent of a population that was herded into costly and brutal military campaigns.” I can’t even imagine what it would be like to live under such a regime. Oh, wait.

He uses the word “national” a lot, as if repetition will convince us that Iraq isn’t irreconcilably fragmented: national army, national government, national interests, national ideas, and, most laughably, national reconciliation.

He says that freedom “is never cheap but the price is worth paying if we are to rescue our country.”

He doesn’t say precisely what that price will be.

Also, I don’t recall Iraq being a whole lot of help during our Civil War.

Where we know what to do...

Bush today received the report he commissioned after the Virginia Tech shootings. The key to preventing another such event seems to be “information sharing,” a phrase Bush repeated three times in a single sentence.


From the grins on these clowns’ faces – Jeebus, just look at Gonzales, he looks like a 5-year old just told he’s getting ice cream and pony rides – I can only assume that the information that 32 people were slaughtered at Virginia Tech less than two months ago was not shared.

This picture from the White House website shows how serious Bush is about the report. He has his special readin’ glasses on and everything.


My favorite recommendation in the report: “Where We Know What to Do, We Have to be Better at Doing It.”

Meanwhile, the House passed a bill that would require states report to the federal government people who aren’t supposed to buy guns because of mental problems. Veterans receiving disability benefits because of mental-health problems, however, will have their gun-purchasing rights restored automatically. Oh good.

He’s the Understander

Polls show that if Fred Thompson entered the presidential race, he would be preferred by Republicans over everyone except Giuliani. Does that mean Republicans think that “9/11” is a better tv show than “Law and Order?”

Bush met with Republican senators today, to push them not to block the immigration bill, which he ominously called “the product,” saying he hoped Harry Reid “has that same sense of desire to move the product that I do”.


In his brief statement after the meeting, he used the word “understand” twice. He uses it often, and in two distinctive ways. Applied to himself, it is meant in the usual cognitive sense. Today, for example, he said, “Some members in there believe that we need to move a comprehensive bill, some don’t, I understand that.” Often he says that he “fully understands” something. That’s usually good for a giggle. But when applied to other people, he quite often means that they agree with some opinion of his. Because he does not acknowledge the legitimacy or often even the existence of other people’s opinions, he treats his own opinions and preferences as if they were factual statements about the universe. Thus this peculiar construction: “I want to thank those senators on both sides of the aisle who understand the time is now to move a comprehensive piece of legislation.”

Our spirit is not broken. Although everything else is.

Haditha massacre hearings update: last week Lt Col. Chessani tried to call an expert witness on Islamic culture, to prove... well, what exactly we’ll never know because the court decided hearing from a Benedictine monk would look bad in Iraq. This week we’ve learned that Corp. Justin Sharratt said in a 2006 statement that he believed the entire Haditha area (pop. of city 90,000) was hostile, so he was free to “use any means necessary and my training to eliminate the hostile threat.” For example, after shooting one armed man (or so he says), he took out several others. That’s the “any means necessary” part. Here’s the “training” part: “I could not tell while I was shooting if they were armed or not, but I felt threatened.” Of course he felt threatened; after all, there were Iraqis around, and he considered every single Iraqi to be hostile.

Although, to be fair, I don’t imagine Sharratt is the most popular guy in Haditha.

There has been a parade of Americans visiting Maliki to tell him to, you know, accomplish something. Anything, really. Maliki, while saying that “There are lots of difficulties that are not well understood from outside,” also claims that there have been many successes that aren’t well understood from outside Maliki’s head. He says that Petraeus’s report in September “should list the accomplishments.” For example, “Our spirit is not broken.” I’m not sure “accomplishment” is the precise word for “our spirit is not broken.” What else’ve ya got? “Another success is that no one is above the law.” Or below it, because, really, what law? Also, and I’ll reprint in full the every-so-slightly sceptical NYT sentence containing the quote, “Without providing evidence, he added, ‘we have eliminated the danger of sectarian war.’”

Bush in Bulgaria: I call him George

Bush went to Bulgaria today.


He met with its President Parvanov, of whom he said, “I call him George. He calls me George.” Parvanov probably calls himself by his actual name, which is Georgi.

He praised Bulgaria for joining the EU and NATO: “These are big achievements for this country, and the people of Bulgaria ought to be proud of the achievements that they have achieved.” Cuz they’ve, you know, achieved them.


The forthcoming confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales made George positively incoherent with rage: “I, frankly, find it interesting that in -- a so-called important subject they need to get to would be to pass a political resolution on my Attorney General that’s going to have no bearing on whether he serves in office, or not. ... this process has been drug out a long time, which says to me it’s political.” You know, because of the drugging. “[H]e -- they haven’t said, here’s -- you’ve done something wrong, Attorney General Gonzales. And therefore, I ascribe this lengthy series of news stories and hearings as political. And I’ll make the determination if I think he’s effective, or not, not those who are using an opportunity to make a political statement on a meaningless resolution.”


Sounds like he needed a little something to take the edge off. Fortunately, there was a lunch, with toasts,


and that got him in a more mellow mood. “And I care deeply about the Bulgarian nurses,” he said.

Don’t we all, George, don’t we all.

The Sopranos conclusion (no spoilers)

I have a few thoughts. But so anyone who hasn’t seen it yet and plans to do so won’t accidentally read about the thrilling series finale – who expected Furio to come out of nowhere and throw himself in front of the bullet the Russian from the Pine Barrens meant for Carmela? – I’ve put it here.

We cannot let them get away with it

An Orthodox rabbinical court has placed a curse on anyone who participates in a gay pride parade in Jerusalem. And the cops guarding the parade. “[T]hey will feel in their souls a curse, a bad spirit will come over them and haunt them, they will never be cleansed of their sins, from the judgment of God, in their bodies, their souls and their finances.”

Ousmane Sembene, Senegal’s most famous novelist (God’s Bits of Wood) and film director (I especially like “Ceddo” and “The Camp at Thiaroye”) has died. Yes, it’s a small country to be the most famous novelist and director from, but he was still pretty good.

Holy Joe Lieberman went on Face the Nation (pdf) (or video if you can bear it) and called for bombing Iran, because if we bomb Iran, everything will be fine in Iraq. In a five-minute interview he said that Iranians and/or people trained in Iran are: “killing American soldiers and Iraqis,” “killing Americans,” “killing Americans in Iraq”, “coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers”, “coming in and killing Americans”, “have killed as many as 200 American soldiers”, and “come in and kill Americans”.

“It’s just--we cannot let them get away with it.”

I’d say something sarcastic, but it’s time for The Sopranos.