skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Democracy at its finest:
The solemnity of the moment yesterday was marred when the new Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, mysteriously left the ceremony. When he reemerged he explained that he had momentarily forgotten the name of the new Prime Minister whom he was appointing.
Slow news day, so I’m gonna make fun of the place I got my lunch, a Chinese food chain called Panda Express (so sue me, I like the orange chicken). The cashier was a Chinese man named Danny, if one were to believe his nametag. I’ve noticed this before: everyone there works under an American pseudonym, a nom de eggroll, if you will.
And as long as I’m in Seinfeld mode, what’s the deal with the expiration date on my shampoo?
Followup: Well, I’ve read Perle’s prepared statement to the House Armed Services Committee (pdf, 4 pages), which included the bit that perplexed me two posts ago. In context, the exact nature of the cunning conspiracy by Saddam to draw us into a war against him is no clearer, at least to me.
His attack on the CIA says its last 30 years have been marked by “chronic failure: faulty estimates accompanied by smug confidence about future developments rendered in the face of repeated nasty surprises.” Dude, that’s your resumé:
1981-87 Assistant Secretary of Defense for Faulty Estimates Accompanied by Smug Confidence about Future Developments Rendered in the Face of Repeated Nasty Surprises.
2001- Chairman and then member of Defense Policy Board in charge of chronic failure and faulty estimates accompanied by smug confidence about future developments rendered in the face of repeated nasty surprises.
Perle argues that all the failures in Iraq stem from not working with “those whose interests parallel our own,” by which he means Chalabi, whose name he never uses (although he didn’t testify wearing Groucho glasses, so I guess he doesn’t realize that his name is even more discredited than Achmad Chalabi’s). We should have invaded side by side with his people, who we should have trained, and we should have handed over the country the day after Baghdad fell. He thinks many of our problems occurred because of “the image on Iraqi television of an American pro-consul informing the Iraqi people of the rules we made for them.” Oh, I doubt it. For a start, they didn’t have electricity.
I don’t think I mentioned the US soldiers participating in the war on drugs on Colombia who are charged with drug smuggling. Charged by the US, of course, which says they have the protection of diplomatic immunity against the Colombian legal system.
Rep. Roy Blunt says Tom DeLay is “taking arrows for us all.” Again, it’s just as well I don’t have Photoshop, or I’d be spending the morning trying to put Tom’s hair on a picture of St. Sebastian. Or General Custer.
The Chinese government, ever eager to play the role of the petulant 3-year old who must be appeased, rolls out the deputy head of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association to complain about the president of Taiwan being allowed to go to the pope’s funeral: “The decision to let Chen Shui-bian attend has hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”
There is a push to have John Paul named a saint as quickly as humanly heavenly possible. To that end, I present two miracles performed by his corpse:
1) The saintly corpse did not slide down. It can defy gravity!
2) Bill didn’t put his hand on Condi’s ass for an entire hour!
Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday, Richard Perle blames the lies he used in arguing for the invasion of Iraq on the “appalling incompetence” of the CIA, although we all know that he considered the CIA a bunch of limp-wristed pacifists and got his intel straight from Achmad Chalabi. He also said, “There is reason to believe that we were sucked into an ill-conceived initial attack aimed at Saddam himself by double agents planted by the regime.” What? WHAT?? Is he really claiming Saddam was behind our invasion of Iraq? There doesn’t seem to be a transcript anywhere, so I can’t put the quote into better context than the Post did (and no other news source in Lexis-Nexis or news.google has this). One could in theory listen to the hearings here but we’re talking 3½ hours.
Last week it was dogshit, this week a 17-year old in London is arrested for spitting at a bus driver after that spit is DNA tested.
From the DOD website, I learn that
A group of San Antonio area quilters are doing their part to support wounded veterans. Stitched with love and gratitude, their lap quilts are just big enough to cover the legs of those in wheelchairs or on stretchers. ... “A quilt means so many things,” said Lytle Stitcher Kitty Janiga. “Warmth, cheer and caring, as well as something for the (servicemembers) to wrap themselves in. They’re perfect; what’s better than a quilt?”
Um, legs?
The state legislature in Florida, where persistent vegetative state is a way of life, passes the “Stand Your Ground” Bill, allowing people to shoot other people for lookin’ at ‘em funny. Previously, one could not defend oneself with deadly force if one could save oneself from harm by running away. Now, one can shoot the perp dead because, explained legislative moron Dennis Baxley, “If I’m attacked, I should not have to retreat.” Yeah, that’s worth taking a human life for. I’m telling you, these people won’t be happy until they bring back dueling.
The LA Times has a (long) article on the military recruiters roaming the halls of high schools, giving out goodies to students and staff, getting the schools to require students to take military aptitude tests. It’s not an especially tough piece — it doesn’t for example mention the rampant lying by recruiters — but you do get a sense of the aggression (and limitless resources) with which these recruiters go after potential cannon fodder. Here’s the ending:
Carloss [the Marine recruiter] asked them to fill out cards with their name, address, phone number, age and grade. Students must be at least 17 to enlist. Those younger than 18 need parental consent.
“Are you scared?” Carloss said jokingly to one boy.
Carloss waved down a girl: “Go to one of these boys over here who you think is cute and tell him to do it.”
“Who?” she replied.
“I don’t care,” Carloss said, “as long as he’s 17.”
The WaPo has another wacky foreign policy editorial, this one entitled “Haiti, One Year Later.” Actually it’s been one year, one month and a few days since, in the Post’s words, “U.S. forces escorted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile,” but who’s counting. Escorted! like they were taking him to a high school dance. The article notes the violence that has roiled Haiti since then, which it then blames entirely on the (unexplained) existence of armed thugs and the weakness of the UN’s armed thugs peacekeepers, who are weak by definition because they are led by Brazilians and not Americans. The Post’s conclusion is that the Bush admin needs to bite the bullet and bow to the “inevitable,” which is to intervene now alongside the UN (fat chance!) because later, “the only recourse, as so often before in Haiti’s history, may be the Marines.”
Haiti is referred to as a “quasi-failed state,” a description I can’t disagree with, without any suggestion that that failure might have something to do with the repeated “recourse” to the United States Marines. The Post demonstrates the same blithe disregard for Haitian political institutions that was behind the removal of its elected president when it says that now, “[h]eavily armed gangs loyal to Mr. Aristide or to drug traffickers roam urban neighborhoods”. Note the false equivalency: drug traffickers, President Aristide, same thing.
Recourse, according to Webster’s, means “a turning to someone or something for help or protection.” If asked whether they want, “as so often before in Haiti’s history,” the help or protection of an invasion by the Marines, not that we ever do ask, the Haitians would doubtless respond, Thanks, you’ve done enough already.
Bush on the pope: “And he didn’t like war, and I fully understood that and I appreciated the conversations I had with the Holy Father on the subject.”
Israel has decided to use the West Bank as a garbage dump, violating international law, threatening the local water supply, and generating more symbolism than should be contained in a single news story.
Bush, hypnotized by Yushchenko’s scarred skin reaches slowly, slowly, to touch it, but at the last moment gives a little screech and runs from the room.
So what channel do the candidates for pope run their attack ads on?
Wouldn’t it be fun to have a pope who wasn’t white?
Or a pope who actually did shit in the woods?
Not that I’m suggesting a non-white pope would shit in the woods.
Anyway, good luck to the next pope, whoever he or she is.
Not the best-chosen AP headline: “World Gets First Glimpse of Pope’s Body.”
The WaPo has an op-ed piece on Zimbabwe that is typical of several I’ve seen the last few days in British and American newspapers in placing much of the blame for Mugabe stealing last week’s elections on South Africa in general and Thabo Mbeke in particular. This article says Mbeke “did everything... to signal that mass fraud would be acceptable.” It helpfully suggests, just as a ferinstance, that SA could have “strangle[d] its smaller neighbor’s economy by switching off its electricity.”
Now I yield to no one in my contempt for the corrupt, fascist thug Mugabe and I am appalled and disappointed by Mbeke’s continued support for him, but how exactly the white man’s burden passed to South Africa I’m not sure. Mugabe has been stealing elections for decades, and officially turned Zimbabwe into a one-party state in 1987, when SA was still an apartheid state and most ANC leaders were in prison. Mbeke’s negative opinion would have made no difference at all (and Mugabe is capable of strangling Zimbabwe’s economy all by himself).
There’s an unspoken assumption in all these pieces that there is a hierarchy of civilization and that those higher up, like SA, have a duty to instruct those beneath them, their “new-caught, sullen peoples, Half devil and half child,” just as we are now in articles like the Post’s instructing the South Africans in their duty. Presumably SA is higher up the ladder because it was run by white people more recently, so it hasn’t fully degenerated or “gone native” yet.
(Update: Matthew Yglesias says something similar here.)
Carl Hiaasen today:
Life is the hot issue in Tallahassee these days.
State lawmakers could hardly wait to hurl themselves into the Terri Schiavio dispute, wiping their feet on the U.S. Constitution along the way.
Even now, rebuked and embarrassed by the courts, they still preach on about the incalculable value of life.
But here’s what they really think a life is worth: barely $9,000 a year.
That’s what the House Claims Committee has told a man who was wrongfully imprisoned for more than 22 years.
More (registration/BugMeNot).
After thinking about it for a couple of months, the US decides that Mark Thatcher, son of Maggie, is disqualified for a US visa by his conviction for his role (note to London Times: not “alleged” role) in trying to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. Says Mark: “It was always a calculated risk when I plea-bargained in South Africa.” No, Mark, it was a calculated risk when you invested in a coup.
Archeologists in Germany have found the oldest known clay figurine of a man. The 7,200-year old man was evidently depicted fucking a 7,200-year old woman (or a 7,160-year old woman if he was a Stone-age Woody Allen, or possibly a 7,225-year old woman if he was a Stone-age Ashton Kutcher). Prior to this discovery, the oldest known porn was 5,000 years more recent. I don’t have a picture, but who really wants to see their great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandparents having sex?
For a couple of days I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people who googled “Joe Lieberman nudist,” which took them to a 2000 archive in which I used both terms in the same month but not in relation to each other. I’ve finally gotten curious and yes, Joe Lieberman is indeed a nudist. Read all about it here, if so inclined, but I accept no responsibility for any images that may stick in your mind.
(Update: a New Haven reader has suggested that the story is an April Fool’s joke, and she may well be right. Just as well then that I don’t have Photoshop, or I’d have been spending my Saturday night putting Holy Joe’s head on Jeff Gannon’s body.)
In keeping with my goal of bringing to light news stories that are ignored by the mainstream press, I must inform you that the pope is dead.
Maybe they’d have been this obsessive about reporting in detail a story that really has no details — dead is dead — if they hadn’t made such a fuss about Terri Schiavo, but since they did, they had to make sure that the fuss they made about the pope was even bigger and more circusy.
When Bush in his statement on the pope’s death (and indeed in his statement on Terri Schiavo’s death two days before) insisted on bringing up the “culture of life,” I wanted to slap him.
From the NYT obituary for Frank Perdue, the chicken king, who did his own commercials: “It helped that he looked like a chicken.”
The man at Sandhurst (Britain’s West Point) who will be in command of Prince Harry: “Prince Harry will call me sir. And I will call him sir. But he will be the one who means it.”
Condi Rice says the pope is “a great moral figure, as well as religious figure.” There just might be something wrong with organized religion when you have to specify which religious leaders are also “great moral figures.”
Speaking of great moral figures, Capt. Rogelio Maynulet was sentenced to no jail time for murdering putting out of his misery a wounded Iraqi, although he was discharged from the army. Said Maynulet, “I’m happy to have my life back, but I’m being forced out of my family. It’s hard to leave the Army this way.” I’m sure the guy he killed felt the same way, except for the having-his-life-back part.
Tom DeLay not only doesn’t clarify yesterday’s fatwa, even to call for there to be no violence against judges in the Schiavo case, but threatens to impeach those judges, who he describes, in a pot-calling-the-kettle-black moment, as “arrogant, out of control, unaccountable.” It’s called the separation of powers, Bug Boy: they’re not supposed to be under your control, they are not accountable to you.
I’ve finally looked at the government website 4parents.gov there’s been all the fuss about. Yup, it really calls for parents to take their gay children to therapists “who share your values,” and implies that homosexuality is a choice or a “lifestyle.” Here’s a sentence that hasn’t been widely quoted, but invokes the Christian right’s fears that children are “recruited” into homosexuality: “Since adolescents are impressionable, parents need to address the issue of sexual orientation within the context of their own value system.”
Georgia passes a law requiring photo ID for elections. Leaving aside the obvious bad faith behind this, it’s unconstitutional if Georgia doesn’t provide picture ID’s for free (Georgia has some sort of provision for doing that for the indigent or elderly, but it has to be universal).
Headline of the day, Thank-You-For-Sharing division: “Pope Has Urinary Infection.”
Kevin Moley, US ambassador to UN organizations, denies the report of UN food expert Jean Ziegler that children in Iraq are starving and that malnutrition rates have doubled under the American occupation. Said Moley, “First, he has not been to Iraq, and second, he is wrong.” Ooo, so sure of himself, but he then insisted that malnutrition data is “difficult to validate,” meaning he has no actual data to rebut Ziegler’s, and that even if malnutrition was increasing, it started when Saddam was still in power. Yes, let’s blame Saddam Hussein for starvation occurring two years after he was forced out of power. Also, why is it relevant that Ziegler hasn’t been to Iraq; how would that in any way help him correlate data? When they throw in that sort of thing as a refutation, you know they don’t have a leg to stand on.
Every blog is quoting Tom DeLay on Schiavo: “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.” They’re assuming he meant some sort of secular retribution, but when I first read it I thought he meant they would all go to hell. Really, it could be read either way, and isn’t it frightening that when he speaks you can no longer tell if it’s in his capacity as House Majority Leader or his capacity as Spokesman for the Wrath of God.
(Afterthought:) and how stupid a politician do you have to be to leave that sort of hostage to fate? If someone attacks the husband or the judge, that comment will be tattooed across DeLay’s forehead forever.
Bush commends the Schindler and Schiavo families for “the example of grace and dignity they have displayed at a difficult time.” Yeah, grace, dignity, just the words I would have used.
Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, head of the Catholic Church’s office for sainthood (now there’s a weird job to put on your resume) says that letting Terri Schiavo die is “an attack against God.” Dude, we totally kicked God’s ass.
That army captain, Rogelio Maynulet, has been convicted for shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner. The court martial judge says he “played God” in shooting rather than treating him. Whereas deciding to invade a country, bomb its cities and depose its leader, that’s not playing God at all.
The intelligence commission says that the spy agencies were “dead wrong in almost all of [their] pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” and still know jack shit about WMDs. Scotty McClellan says they’ll get right on that “in a fairly quick period of time.”
Of course, as Left I points out, intel had little to do with the decision to invade Iraq. I’m agnostic on Eli’s contention that the Bushies never believed there were WMDs. I would guess they expected there to be something, a few anthrax samples, a centrifuge or two, that they could claim was a WMD program, but that they knew there was nothing that was a threat to anyone, no imminent “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Eli uses as evidence the “decidedly lackadaisical search for WMD after U.S. troops had taken control of the country,” but that could just be incompetence. When you are both evil and stupid, it’s hard to differentiate which characteristic is behind any given action.
(Update: Eli responds here and I respond to his response in his comments section.)
