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We’ve talked about whether the NSA warrantless surveillance is “domestic” or not, and just how many innocent people’s conversations were swept into the net, but what about the assertion, as made by Gen. Michael Hayden again today on the Sunday chat shows, that it was focused on Al Qaeda and only Al Qaeda (oh, and “Al Qaeda affiliates,” whatever that means). Of course Al Qaeda doesn’t really have an official membership list per se, so that what Hayden means is people he designates as being Al Qaeda members, but putting that aside, is Al Qaeda really the only terrorist organization in the world that we’re worried will do something nasty inside the United States?
There have now been 5 deaths in the Cartoon Wars: 3 shot by Afghan police, a boy shot in Somalia, and one of the demonstrators killed in the burning of the Danish embassy in Lebanon (that’ll teach ‘em to mess with Loki). Demonstrations seem to have spread to half the countries on the planet, including India and Thailand. (By the way, I made an editorial decision not to put the cartoons on my site, but only to link to them, because there’s no getting around the fact that some of them are obnoxious, racist, and just not at all good, and because my support for free speech is not conditional on the content of that speech, which is why we call it free speech. I have, however, now made another editorial decision to include a link to the cartoons every time I mention them, in the same way I link to other primary sources like George Bush’s speeches, which are also obnoxious, sometimes racist, and just not at all good.) Iraq (or possibly just the transportation ministry) has announced that it will refuse to accept reconstruction money from Denmark and Norway.
Speaking of cartoon characters, House Majority Leader John Boehner, pictured below, is against banning corrupt lobbying practices but is for “bringing more transparency to this relationship,” for example by passing out checks from tobacco lobbyists during votes on bills affecting their interests right on the House floor in front of God, C-SPAN and everyone.
An American Coast Guard captain put a message in a bottle, which traveled all the way to England, where one Henry Biggelsworth sent back a note scolding him for littering. There will always be an England as long as someone reacts in precisely that way to a message in a bottle and as long as that someone is named Henry Biggelsworth.
Speaking of messages in bottles, this blog experienced a 9-hour outage Saturday. I trust it was not too painful.
In case you were unable to figure it out in my absence, this is a Bad Thing: the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria and the Danish embassy in Lebanon have been burned down in protest against Cathy Ziggy Garfield The Family Circus, because it makes a circus of the family those Danish cartoons (and rumors that Danes were planning to burn the Koran publicly, possibly in front of the Little Mermaid statue). Christopher Hitchens, gin-soaked apostate that he is, has it more or less exactly right in Slate. He thinks that Muslims who “claim to possess absolute truth and demand absolute immunity from criticism” today will not become more tolerant tomorrow if appeased today, such as when the US government pronounces the cartoons “unacceptable.” He says of the protesters, “I refuse to be spoken to in that tone of voice”.
Everyone’s a critic: now it’s the United States Department of State that is calling the Danish cartoons “offensive to the beliefs of Muslims.” So not only is the US government (happily stoking the flames when Muslims are for once pissed off at someone other than the US) now in the business of issuing fatwas against free expression, but it’s also in the business of saying what is or is not offensive to the beliefs of Muslims. I understand the State Department also proclaims that human-animal hybrids are offensive to the beliefs of Muslims.
The Pakistani Parliament has also, unanimously, passed a resolution that the cartoons “hurt the faith and feelings of Muslims all over the world.” Hurt their feelings (the poor delicate flowers), fine, but how precisely did a few feeble cartoons hurt the Muslim faith? The Pakistani general-president-dictator (but he really wants to direct) Musharaf also condemned them, which is funny because he’s normally such a staunch supporter of human rights.
Laura Ingraham asked Dick Cheney who Bush meant when he attacked “isolationists.” He says anyone who wants to “deal with the terrorist threat... the way we dealt with it prior to 9/11” and anyone who thinks “military involvement in the Middle East” is “optional.”
Rumsfeld, in that talk at the National Press Club yesterday in which he said that Hugo Chavez is just like Hitler because they were both elected legally and then consolidated power, a talk in which Rumsfeld gestured with his finger
JUST LIKE HITLER
and in which he said the fight against terrorists could be “generational,” gave this insight into the inner workings of terrorists: “They get up in the morning, have committee meetings and think about how they’re going to manipulate the world’s press to their advantage.” Committee meetings?
And while everyone else in the Bush administration talks about the evil Muslim plan for a caliphate, Rummy has the damning proof: “They have designed and distributed a map where national borders are erased and replaced by a global extremist Islamic empire.” Here there be dragons.
In the Q&A (and by the way, has anyone seen a transcript of this event?), someone quoted his pre-war statements about Iraq definitely absolutely positively having chemical and biological weapons. His response: “Oh, I don’t like to be told what I said.”
Bush: “I think the role of government is to shape the future, not fear the future.” Just in case you were wondering what the role of government is.
BBC headline: “Muslims Urge New Cartoon Protests.” I thought those protesters looked a little like parodies of fanatical loons, but evidently that was the idea all along. Cartoon protests indeed.
The cartoony protests have spread as far as Indonesia and of course to Iraq, where Shiites painted a Danish flag in front of the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf so that they could step on it.
“Step two kick kick.”
(Update: If you’ve googled in with a “cartoon protests” search, you might want to go to the main page, or the February 2006 page, and look for more recent references to the War of the Cartoons)
Iranian President Ahmadinejad responds to Bush’s remarks in the SOTU, saying that Bush’s “arms are submerged up to the elbows in the blood of other nations”. And your point is?
Eli at Left I points out again that Bush’s arguments about why the NSA (supposedly) doesn’t spy on “domestic” calls but on “terrorist” ones, or something, creates an illogical distinction “by which international calls automatically surpass some magical threshold of ‘threat’ while domestic calls automatically do not.” Eli thinks the Bushies are covering up the fact that they also listen in on wholly-domestic calls, and I’m sure he’s right, but I think the purpose of the distinction has nothing to do with the content. That is, we’re seeing a favorite Roveite method: confusing the issue, any issue, by turning it into a he said, she said. What he & she actually say is irrelevant, the illusion of a dispute about the facts is the only thing that matters. It’s a handy template for defusing any scandal, because even if the news media bestir themselves to fact-check, they’ve already put out the initial story, which is “the facts are in dispute,” so half their readers/viewers/listeners have dismissed it as more partisan bickering they’re too busy to get to the bottom of. There’s nothing like a small injection of cynicism to counteract righteous indignation, which is why McClellan, Bush etc falsely claimed that Jack Abramoff gave to Democrats as well as Republicans. Ideally, the Bushies will dominate the phony dispute by dictating both the he said and the she said sides so that suddenly instead of talking about the rights and wrongs of the surveillance, we’re talking about whether or not it’s “domestic.” They could just as easily picked some sort of nit over the word surveillance (“Surveillance means ‘to watch over,’ but the NSA was actually listening; why do the Democrats want you to think the NSA was watching when it was actually listening?”).
Maybe that explains the human-animal hybrid thing too.
Bush talked about making ethanol “not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switch grass.” Does that mean we’ll all be required to spend our vacations clearing brush?
Some people have pointed out the dissonance of a former oil man (and indeed an alcohol addict) talking about an addiction to oil. But then he’s also a politician who claims to despise politics. You’ll notice his expressed distaste for every role he’s ever fulfilled never seems to diminish his own unearned self-regard. The closest he comes is when he discusses his role as husband, where all his talk about “marrying up” suggests a sense of inferiority to the LauraBot. But to get back to the point I was making before my digression into the shallows of the Bush psyche, the dissonance is less than it appears because his approach to energy is to claim that the answers are entirely scientific rather than economic. The day before the SOTU, Exxon announced a $36 billion profit for 2005, the highest profit for any corporation ever, but there was never any question of that being mentioned in the speech. Capitalism is great, huge corporations are great, science is great. As Arthur C. Clarke didn’t say but should have, to a sufficiently stupid person, any science more complex than the wheel is indistinguishable from magic. And Bush does mean magical science rather than mere technology, dismissing fuel efficiency thusly, “We use a lot of foreign oil in our automobiles, and we drive a lot, and people say, well, CAFE this and CAFE that.” I’m convinced he thinks someone will come up with a magic bean that can run an automobile forever.
That line was given today, when Bush followed up the SOTU speech with a recapitulation in the Grand Ole Opry, as is required under the Constitution. After five long (oh god so long) years in the job, he still doesn’t know what words to use for that job: “I like my buddies from West Texas. I liked them when I was young, I liked them then I was middle-age, I liked them before I was President, and I like them during President and I like them after President.” He describes Bill Frist’s job in the Senate as “herding cats.” Brrr. But then he describes his own job as “educator-in-chief.”
Of what else does his job consist? Well, “As a matter of fact, every day, every day of my presidency I think about this war. That’s what you’ve got to understand.” But enough about his masturbatory practices. “And I clearly see the threats to America. My job is to worry about those threats. That’s not your job. We got a lot of people in government worrying about those threats on your behalf, so you can go about your life.” Insert Brownie-heckuva-job reference here.
Once again he magnanimously concedes the right of people in a free society to engage in impotent debate: “I welcome the debate. But as I said last night to Congress, whether you agree or not agree with the decision, this country has one option, and that’s victory in Iraq.”
Before I forget: the state of the union is strong. Who knew?
Evidently “our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger.” Oh, I’m pretty sure they can be.
Then he tried to define those differences as between something and nothing. For example, “We will choose to act confidently in pursuing the enemies of freedom – or retreat from our duties in the hope of an easier life.” Isolationism and protectionism is how he describes the alternative, essentially an absence of policy rather than a competing policy.
An odd historical statement: he describes 9/11 as resulting from “problems originating in a failed and oppressive state seven thousand miles away”. It took me a minute to get that he was blaming 9/11 on Afghanistan rather than, for example, any of the countries that the hijackers or bin Laden actually came from.
More bad history-writing: “In 1945, there were about two dozen lonely democracies on Earth. Today, there are 122.” I can’t wait to see that list, although he names just 5 that aren’t on it: Syria, Burma, Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and “the demands of justice, and the peace of this world, require their freedom as well.” You know, just to shake it up a little, I say the next country we invade should be Zimbabwe rather than Iran. It’s actually a little hard to see how the peace of the world requires regime change in Burma and Zimbabwe.
Of course one of the reasons there are so many more countries now than in 1945 is that many of those “lonely democracies” held vast colonial empires. It’s funny that when he talks about the march of freedom, he never mentions the freedom of nations from the control of more powerful nations.
America, of course, is such a total innocent that the fight with “radical Islam” is “a great ideological conflict we did nothing to invite.”
Here’s a rather un-PC statement: “No one can deny the success of freedom, but some men rage and fight against it.” Equal opportunity for women freedom-ragers-against!
“Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder”. Dude, that’s just when they’re at work.
Evidently the United States “will never surrender to evil.” Hey, Cheney is sitting right behind you, and now his feelings are all hurt.
Evidently “second-guessing is not a strategy.” Er, is it a tactic?
Who was the guy in the Dr. Who scarf?
Here’s what you missed if you heard it on radio: he introduced the parents and wife of a dead soldier, and then he winked at them, he fucking winked. Winked! As the applause went on, a smug look, smug even by Bush standards of smugness, spread across his chimp-like face – what the hell did he have to be smug about? – and then he winked again, I’m not sure at who. What is wrong with him?
He may not have had that long a laundry list of things he wanted from Congress, but he sure did for Hamas, and as he told Hamas that it needed to disarm, renounce terrorism, recognize Israel, etc etc, the CNN cameras moved inevitably to Bush’s house Jew, Holy Joe Lieberman. Later, when he talked about malpractice reform, they went to Bill “Kitty Killer” Frist. And when he talked about infants with malaria, they went to Rumsfeld. What do they know about him?
In a silly stunt, he spoke directly to the citizens of Iran. Who he respects. No, sorry, who America respects. We do? Since when? He really needed to say when he stopped talking to the citizens of Iran, or turned to face a different camera or something.
He called it the “terrorist surveillance program” twice. And he informed “appropriate” members of Congress about it. As opposed to the inappropriate members of Congress.
Evidently “we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.” And just let me be the first of many bloggers to respond to that line with this picture:
Aw, he called for a line-item veto. How quaint.
Talking (vaguely) about health care, he said we should strengthen the doctor-patient relationship. I have no idea how he proposes to do that.
Oil, he says, “is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” Huh, see any causal relationship there, chuckles? “The best way to break this addiction [to oil] is through technology.” Certainly not by, I don’t know, driving less. And so he announced this year’s mission to Mars / hydrogen car, i.e., the thing that will never be heard from again, well, along with the bipartisan commission on Social Security, the Advanced Energy Initiative (his buddies at the American Enterprise Institute won’t be happy with that name). He wants “safe, clean” nuclear energy, and “cutting-edge” ethanol.
On education, he focused entirely on teaching math. Somebody has issues. He wants to “give early help to students who struggle with math, so they have a better chance at good, high-wage jobs.” If they’re so bad at math, why don’t we just tell them their jobs are high-wage, they’ll never know the difference.
He repeated the phrase “a hopeful society” over and over, often in contexts that seem to have little to do with being a hopeful society: “A hopeful society depends on courts that deliver equal justice under law.... A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners... A hopeful society expects elected officials to uphold the public trust” etc etc.
Also, he’s really against human cloning and human-animal hybrids. In case you were wondering.
Britain has its 100th military death in Iraq.
And Tony Blair loses a vote on banning religious hatred. And I do mean Tony Blair, since he lost 283-282 because he himself didn’t stick around to vote. Inciting religious hatred will still be illegal, but only “threatening” words and behaviour will be outlawed, not “abusive and insulting” or “reckless” ones.
Speaking of religious hatred, Palestinians, who evidently have no more pressing concerns than those cartoons, held a march through Gaza City, chanting “War on Denmark, death to Denmark,” and burned Danish flags, and no I don’t know where they got them.
A dog food manufacturer in New Zealand offered to send 42 tons of the stuff to Kenya to feed that country’s many starving children, as well as give them an increase in energy and vitality, shiny coat, bright eyes, strong teeth and bones, and a stronger immune system. To be fair, the manufacturer insists that she eats the stuff herself, sprinkled on her morning porridge, and it’s “yummy.” Kenyans, meanwhile, not so thrilled with the idea. The Kenyan relief minister said, “It is an insult for somebody to think Kenya can accept food meant for animals. Such people should desist because we will be very careful in vetting the donations.”
Condi: “Perhaps Palestinian people want their children to be suicide bombers, and that’s the great desire of large numbers of the Palestinian population. I don’t believe it.” See, that’s why they need a referendum. For the children.
There’s been a Rushdie-lite thing in the Muslim world for several months now, with various nations denouncing Denmark for some cartoons depicting Mohammed in a bad light (Libya and Saudi Arabia have recalled their ambassadors, a boycott of Danish goods is growing, condemnations have been issued by Pakistan, Hamas, etc and a move is afoot to introduce a UN resolution banning insulting religions). Into this rising idiocy steps Bill Clinton, the man who did meet Salman Rushdie but timorously banned pictures being taken of the event (he did the same when he met Ellen DeGeneres), giving his seal of approval to the fake outrage, calling the caricatures “appalling” and “totally outrageous cartoons against Islam” (whilst in Qatar, no less) and comparing them to anti-Semitism, and, you know, “In Europe, most of the struggles we’ve had in the past 50 years have been to fight prejudices against Jews, to fight against anti-Semitism.”
Clinton also wants US troops to stay in Iraq a while, saying as he must so often have said to Hillary, “We shouldn’t just precipitously give this thing up and say it can’t work.”
Bush: “this new democracy that’s emerging in the Palestinian Territories must understand that you can’t have a political party that also has got an armed wing to it; that democracies yield peace.” Was there ever a point in time when Bush made some tiniest effort to make sense and failed, as opposed to not trying in the first place?
Some bloggers are criticizing Democrats for not having a strategy on the Alito nomination. Are you sure the strategy isn’t to lose? I’m not sure they haven’t consciously or unconsciously or, if I know Democrats, semi-consciously, decided to be a failure as an opposition party in the hopes that things will get so bad that they might, somewhere, some day, win a freaking election again.
There is a lot of pressure on Hamas to recognize Israel, a term which is falsely taken as self-explanatory, which might be the case for, say, Luxembourg, but not so much for Israel. Israel is a nation without defined borders, and not just because of the Occupied Territories (I assume no one is actually trying to get Hamas to recognize an Israel that includes the West Bank) and Jerusalem (whose borders Israel quietly expands into the West Bank every couple of years); even Israel doesn’t say what borders it claims for itself. So if it’s not a geographical entity, what is it? Its state lacks a constitution, the Knesset making up its rules as it goes along. And its population, because of the right of return, is undefined, potentially including millions of Jews who live outside its not-quite borders who may or may not ever visit there, much less become citizens.
None of this is to absolve Hamas of the anti-Semitic, even genocidal feelings expressed by some of its leaders (my favorite bit in the Hamas Covenant is the one that goes out of its way to blame the Jews for the French Revolution), but Arabs must get a little tired of being told, as Arafat so often was, what they are required to say, and say, the dictation usually continues, in Arabic. I say the only form of recognition that is truly meaningful is sitting down at a table and negotiating with the Israelis.
Israel has promised to keep up its very special form of recognition of Hamas by continuing to assassinate its leaders, even if they take governmental office.
The World Bank is responding to criticism of its loans to the famously corrupt Kenyan government – by loaning that government another $25 million... to fight corruption.
Silvio Berlusconi (who has had plastic surgery to enhance his likeness to Mussolini, or something) promises not to have sex between now and the April 9 elections. It’s unclear who that would persuade to vote for his party.
In his Thursday press conference, Bush said that “the FISA law was written in 1978. We’re having this discussion in 2006. It’s a different world.” So remember everybody, no laws enacted before 1978 (2001, really) still count. It’s a different world, possibly a different universe, although oddly enough the same solar system. Plan your weekends accordingly.
I was waiting to see what the major papers had to say about yesterday’s AP story about the US in Iraq taking wives of wanted men hostage to coerce their husbands into surrendering (it turned out this week when US-held women prisoners were released, absolutely not in exchange for Jill Carroll, that all or most were hostages rather than suspected of anything in their own right). But guess what, no stories in the Saturday WaPo or NYT that I saw, or the Sunday NYT (a search of the NYT site lists the AP story, but I didn’t see it in the print paper). And Eli at Left I wrote the post I would have written, pointing out that this has actually been an American tactic since the start of the war in Iraq, with any number of wives, mothers, offspring, etc held hostage. Imagine a world in which your government does that, and so much more, and it’s not considered news.
Ultimate Christian Wrestling. Of course. Wrestler dressed as Jesus on a cross. Of course. Wrestler dressed as Judas. “Actually, we’re more violent than secular wrestlers because we don’t seem to feel it like they do. The bumps and bruises that we take in the ring - I think God takes them and puts them on His own back.” Of course He does.
An email from a reader associated with Students for a Free Tibet (site; blog; both with lots of info on Chinese/Google [Choogle?] censorship) reminds me that I meant to write about Google, actually google.cn’s censoring the internets on behalf of the Chinese government. Clearly, their resisting the US Justice Dept subpoena was less about not being evil than protecting trade secrets. It would be nice to figure out exactly what they’re doing, and to keep track of which search terms are censored as they’re added to a no doubt constantly increasing list. The day they rolled out google.cn, for example, I checked it for the only really important metric: does it block my site? It didn’t then, a few days ago, but it more or less does today, when searches for “WIIIAI” and “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It” no longer yielded no hits for this site, but whateveritisimagainstit.blogspot.com works (of course, if you know the URL, you don’t need Google). I don’t know (not being able to read Chinese, much less those boxes that show up on my screen instead of Chinese) if Google mentioned that it was censoring the results of those searches, but as an interesting Cnet News report on what sorts of things are being censored indicates, Google is failing to inform users when they censor stuff, like they said they would.
It’s kinda fun watching everybody talk about shunning Hamas as the scum of the earth while attempting to absolve the people who elected them. Which is great for Americans, because it means we should also bear no responsibility for the chimp-like resident of the Oval Office. So as I understand it, a large majority of the Palestinian people are supposed to have said, “Yes I know they want to launch a war to the death against Israel, but they did promise to fill the potholes.” It’s like a protest vote, we’re told, a Ross Perot/Ralph Nader kind of thing. Me, I don’t know exactly what the Palestinian citizenry were thinking, and neither do you. If their lives are miserable and their economy is in bad shape and they’re all unemployed, I doubt that they entirely blame Fatah, corrupt and inefficient though they certainly have been, and probably assign a jot of blame to, well, you fill in this phrase: “Death to I_____l”
Rumsfeld said something a couple of days ago that’s still annoying me. Denying reports that the US Army was “broken,” he said that to the contrary, it was “battle-hardened.” They’ve been shot at, blown up, and kept in a constant state of tension for months on end; suggesting that they’ve been hardened by the experience strikes me as insulting. Maybe it’s just me.
Update: Or not:
Sez Condi Rice about Hamas, “You cannot have one foot in politics and another in terror.” Sounds like a really bad game of Twister.
Netanyahu and Likud are predictably claiming that the withdrawal from Gaza was responsible for the Hamas victory, because it showed that terror and violence worked. Yup, no hypocrisy there, no sirree. Netanyahu has coined the charming term “Hamastan.”
Fafblog asks, How does a War Bill become a War Law, and reassures us that “the president would never ever eat a baby unless it was reasonably suspected to be affiliated with possible terroresque program activities.”
In Thailand, a man who set a world record by spending 32 days in a glass cage with 3,400 scorpions will marry a woman who set the Thai record for 28 days with 1,000 centipedes, in a wedding sponsored by the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. Of course the problem with these mixed marriages is how do you bring up the children?
Bush press conference, yippee. Gives us a little State of the Union (SOTU) preview: “I’m going to remind people we’re living in historic times.” Of course while he’s giving the speech, it will feel like geologic times.
In his ongoing efforts to reduce his vocabulary to the smallest number of words possible, Shrub has pretty much stopped using any adjective except “interesting.” Today, for example, on the SOTU: “it’s an interesting experience to walk out there”; on meeting Alito’s law clerks: “an interesting experience”; on the Palestinian elections: “very interesting”, “an interesting day”; on budget talks: “that’s going to be an interesting discussion”. It’s just about the least communicative adjective he could choose, conveying almost no information. It’s public speaking by the lazy for the lazy; the listener isn’t supposed to think any harder about the meaning of the sentence than Bush did in formulating it.
The Palestinian elections provide Bush an opportunity – an interesting opportunity – to go all Federalist Papers on the meaning of democracy:
You see, when you give people the vote, you give people a chance to express themselves at the polls
Dude, you’re blowing my mind.
-- and if they’re unhappy with the status quo, they’ll let you know. That’s the great thing about democracy, it provides a look into society.
But “if your platform is the destruction of Israel, it means you’re not a partner in peace. And we’re interested in peace.” Yeah, peace is interesting.
Actually, his words really do give an insight into his view of democracy, despite himself. The election was “a wake-up call to the leadership” which “should open the eyes of the old guard”; “one way to figure out how to address the needs of the people is to let them express themselves at the ballot box”; “If government hadn’t been responsive, I’m not the least bit surprised that people said, I want government to be responsive.” This is a top-down model, in which leaders listen to the people, respond to them, take their views under advisement, but aren’t really controlled by them.
In defending the “terrorist surveillance program,” Bush uses the phrase “connecting the dots,” which we’ve been hearing several times a day from one Bushie or another. I wonder if they focus-grouped it?
On domestic spying: “And I’m intending to use that power -- Congress says, go ahead and conduct the war, we’re not going to tell you how to do it.”
On the pictures with Abramoff, “I’m also mindful that we live in a world in which those pictures will be used for pure political purposes, and they’re not relevant to the investigation.” Of course he met with Abramoff for purely political purposes, Abramoff was a purely political operator, so what’s your point?
No one bothered to ask about the Damadola airstrike, so I guess there wasn’t much point to forgoing the usual questions when he met the Pakistani prime minister (Rumsfeld also skipped a Q&A after his meeting). Molly Ivins has the question I’d like to see asked: “Are you the worst president since James Buchanan, or have you never heard of him?”
You’ll be happy to know that the Pentagon will soon deploy robots that, in its words, “pack heat.” Says the toy’s human (I assume) owner, Army Sgt. 1st Class Jason Mero, “Terrorists will likely think twice before engaging machine-gun-packing robots.” They still can’t go faster than 5 mph, though.
Last week I started to write an analysis of the Justice Dept’s 42-page “zenith of his powers” memo in support of domestic spying the terrorist surveillance program. Can’t remember why I deleted what I wrote, except that one part of my rant was undercut when I realized that the phrase about the president being the “sole organ” in foreign relations actually came from some 1936 Supreme Court decision. For the record, the Constitution gives the president precisely three things he can do in foreign relations: 1) appoint ambassadors, with the approval of the Senate, 2) sign treaties, which must be ratified by 2/3 of the Senate, 3) run the military, when Congress has declared war. Anyway, there’s a piece not far from what I would have written by Jacob Weisberg at Slate. On Bush’s assertion that the Sep. 2001 Congressional Gulf of Tonkin resolution gives him the right to do anything he felt like doing, whether it was mentioned or not, and going so far as to claim that that was what Congress meant to do, even though, unlike the authors of the Constitution, almost all of the 2001 congresscritters are still alive (or what passes for life in Congress) and capable of speaking (and speaking and speaking; or in Joe Biden’s case, speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking and speaking), Weisberg says “Bush as much as declares: ‘I determine what my words mean and I alone determine what yours mean, too.’” Especially frightening when Bush knows so very few words, can pronounce even fewer, and understands the meaning of yet fewer. What struck me about the white paper was that most of it was not about legal and constitutional issues, as one might expect from a Department of Justice document, but the same old “9/11! 9/11! 9/11! Be afraid, be very afraid!” rhetoric. Weisberg notes that while it cites the Hamdi case, which denied the Bushies the right to detain people forever without a hearing, in which O’Connor wrote that a state of war is not a blank check, “The Justice Department memo, however, cites Hamdi as ballast for its stance that when it comes to spying domestically, Bush has not only a blank check but a wallet full of no-limit platinum cards.”
When Britain deports people to countries with questionable human rights records, it makes those countries promise, cross their hearts, not to torture or kill them, and gets an independent monitor to keep tabs on them. They want to start deporting Libyans, so they’re trying to recruit an independent monitor there... Qaddafi’s son.
Bush went on a field trip to the No Such Agency today, where “officials learn information about plotters and planners and people who would do us harm.” Or the 3 P’s, as they’re known in the world o’spooks.
Here he is, looking around for Jack Bauer, or at least Chloe.
Here is the worst violation of the truth in advertising laws ever.
And the caption for this one I’ll leave up to you.
Bill Ford, who I’m sure got his job based solely on the merits, just like another chief executive we could name, says of the massive job-cuts at Ford Motor that “we’re moving from a culture that discourages innovation back to a company that celebrates it.” Of course the party that celebrates innovation will be a much smaller one now.
Every so often the White House website decides to “set the record straight.” Today, they totally completely set straight all those people who are complaining about domestic spying. Not the spying part, they’ll totally cop to that, just don’t call it domestic:
DEFINITION: Domestic Vs. International.
- Domestic Calls are calls inside the United States. International Calls are calls either to or from the United States.
- Domestic Flights are flights from one American city to another. International Flights are flights to or from the United States.
- Domestic Mail consists of letters and packages sent within the United States. International Mail consists of letters and packages sent to or from the United States.
- Domestic Commerce involves business within the United States. International Commerce involves business between the United States and other countries.
So that’s okay then.
Yesterday Bush was asked if he’d seen Brokeback Mountain. He hadn’t, but said that he’d heard about it. Now we know that Bush doesn’t read the newspapers and gets all his information from trusted sources such as Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and Rummy Rumsfeld. So who told him about Brokeback Mountain, and how did they explain it to him?
A slogan at the anti-abortion rally, spotted by the WaPo: “Abortion is mean.”
Army inquisitor Lewis Welshofer Jr., convicted for sleeping-bagging Iraqi General Abed Hamed Mowhoush to death, has been sentenced by a jury of his military peers to a jolly stiff reprimand, a smallish fine and he’ll be restricted to barracks and work for 60 days – that’s right, suffocating a guy is not a firing offense in the Army. The prosecution failed to call any witnesses at the sentencing hearing.
And remember: it’s not a domestic surveillance program, it’s a terrorist surveillance program.
Speaking of phone calls nobody should be listening to, George Bush spoke to the “March for Life” by phone today. He said, “the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence apply to everyone, not just to those considered healthy or wanted or convenient. These principles call us to defend the sick and the dying, persons with disabilities and birth defects, all who are weak and vulnerable, especially unborn children.” Especially unborn children. Speaking of persons with disabilities, the weak and vulnerable, I’ve been waiting for Bush to say a single word about his failure to have the drug prescription plan up and running on time. “We’re sending a clear message to any woman facing a crisis pregnancy: We love you, we love your child, and we’re here to help you.” Man, how creepy is that?
About as creepy as the X Files Fanatics Against Abortion (from the 2001 march).
This guy is “overcome with emotion,” according to the Reuters caption, just like a little girl. But not like this little girl, with her little fetus dolly.
And these three men (the one with the stripy umbrella is Ralph Reed) agree that abortion hurts women, although they’re pretty sure that childbirth is quite pleasant.
8 minutes after delivering his little anti-choice message, he began a speech at Kansas State University, the theme of which was how the president has to make decisions, even if women aren’t allowed to: “I make a lot of decisions. I make some that you see that obviously affect people’s lives, not only here, but around the world. I make a lot of small ones you never see, but have got consequence. Decision-maker is the job description.” Hell, even terrorists make decisions: “They make decisions based upon their view of the world, which is the exact opposite of our view of the world.” I don’t know, Osama and George probably both think the earth is flat.
Here’s my favorite sentence: “And when the American President speaks, it’s really important for those words to mean something.” Would that they did, would that they did.
The other theme of the speech is that 9/11 Changed Everything, which if it were true, you’d think he wouldn’t have to keep repeating it. One change: “Threats must be taken seriously now, because geography doesn’t protect us”. Dammit, you mean I learned the difference between an isthmus and a peninsula for nothing?
Once again he defends invading Iraq, using that pin-point logic for which he is justly famous: “He was a state sponsor of terror. In other words, the government had declared, you are a state sponsor of terror. And, remember, we’re dealing with terrorist networks that would like to do us harm. There’s a reason why he was declared a state sponsor of terror -- because he was sponsoring terror.”
And of course that invasion was followed by... magic! “When somebody says, if you vote, I’m going to get you, sometimes people maybe say, well, maybe I don’t want to vote. Eleven million or so Iraqis went to the polls in defiance of these killers. (Applause.) It’s a magical moment in the history of liberty.” I’m going to get you? He’s been watching too many Dudley Do-Right cartoons.
And the US won’t reduce troops in Iraq until the commanders on the ground tell him he can:
You see, sometimes in the political process people feel beholden to polls and focus groups. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m going to be listening to the people that know what they’re talking about, and that’s the commanders on the ground in Iraq.
Yes, he just said that the American people, the ones who answer polls, don’t know what they’re talking about.
“I view it as a chance for an historic opportunity to make this place better for your children and your grandchildren -- ‘this place’ being the world.” Thank god he cleared that up. Now when can I move to Mars?
And then he opened it up to obsequious questions. The first one began thusly: “Mr. President, we salute what you have done, your aggressive stance on terrorism. But more than that, as you know, Kansas is a beef state. ...” It didn’t get much better, with questions (update: this one from someone in the Air Force ROTC, according to the WaPo) about how he withstands all those mean attacks on his character (through faith, family and friends) (and by friends, he meant Barney the dog, the “son I never had”), and how Laura contributes to his decision-making process (she brings “common sense,” at least when her common sense chip is activated), and whether he’s seen Brokeback Mountain yet (no). A student did manage to stump him on his education cuts (which he denied had been made).
Hookay, when I looked for pictures, I may have come up with the reason for the softball questions. When you’re busing in a claque to fill up the front rows, it might be less obvious that they’re not real Kansas State students if they changed out of their uniforms first.
I feel stupid for not having realized that National Sanctity of Human Life Day was scheduled for the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Subtle, huh? I hope you all celebrated with appropriate ceremonies.
For his contribution to National Sanctity of Human Life Day (and isn’t it interesting that no one needs to have explained to them that the “human life” sanctified sanctimoniously on such a day would be embryonic or fetal? You didn’t think it was about opposition to the death penalty or to war, did you?), William Saletan bestows on the pro-choice movement the bounteous gift of his advice, on the op-ed page of the Sunday NYT (I’ve kneed Saletan in his own reproductive organs on this subject in the past). Evidently what is needed is... wait for it... “for the abortion-rights movement to declare war on abortion.” He wants sex ed. & morning-after pills & better health insurance & so on, which is all to the good, and “more contraceptive diligence in the abortion counseling process,” which sounds an awful lot like scolding women before allowing them to undergo a medical procedure. The question is why Saletan thinks it’s the pro-choice movement specifically that has an obligation to push these side-issues. And the answer is that like a lot of Democrats these days, he may apply the word “right” to abortion, but he doesn’t really mean it. Those Democratic senators who will refuse to filibuster Sammy “The Coathanger” Alito, or who will actually vote to confirm him, would, I hope, not do so if it were the right of free speech that he was going to eviscerate. Saletan, whose deepest fear about abortion is that some women who have them won’t feel horribly guilty for the rest of their lives, doesn’t understand that the pro-choice movement is in no way responsible for what women do with the reproductive rights it defends. That’s what it means when we call it a right. The ACLU is not responsible for the stupid religions some people choose when they exercise their right of religion, or the stupid things they say when they exercise their right of speech, or the way they don’t vacuum the spare bedroom just because they won’t have soldiers quartered upon them. Saletan says, “Most people will tolerate it as a lesser evil or a temporary measure, but they’ll never fully accept it.” First, I didn’t know that abortions could be temporary, but even more ill-chosen a word is “tolerate.” You don’t tolerate a right, you respect it: the fact that it is a right means you don’t have a say over how it is exercised.
(Update: see also Katha Pollitt's excellent response to Saletan, and a debate between the two here.)
Follow-ups:
The Pentagon is claiming that the number of hunger-strikers at Guantanamo is way down, to 22, of whom 17 are being forcibly fed.
I was wondering how Burns responded to Musharaf about the Damadola airstrike, and I’m still wondering. The Embassy in fact refuses to confirm or deny that Musharaf even raised the issue.
In other Musharaf-is-a-prick news, Mukhtar Mai, the woman whose gang-rape was ordered by a village council, who Musharaf last year prevented coming to the US because she would “bad-mouth Pakistan,” and about whom he said, “This has become a moneymaking concern. A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped,” has gotten the UN to cancel a speech by Mai scheduled for Friday.
Speaking of follow-ups, whatever happened to the kidnapped sister of Iraq’s evil interior minister? (Update: Willie in comments points out that she was released, very quietly, a few days ago.)
And another great name: general manager of Houston tv station KRIV D’Artagnan Bebel.
