Optic rectosis




Whoever is responsible for the mistreatment of the Iraqi POWs is going to pay. Big time, as our veep would say. But you know what? That's the difference between the US and the Islamofascists who fear Democracy. Saddam's government not only approved of torture, but legitimized it. In fact, what we see in the recently released photos is tame by Iraqi secret police standards. Where are the plastic shredders? The gallows? The piles of kiddie corpses? I can almost hear Saddam chuckling, asking "Is that all you've got? What a bunch of amateurs!"

I'm not excusing torture by anyone, or the gentle cluck-clucking of the Bush apologists and right-wing pundits who downplay the whole incident. They have their heads further up each other's asses than any of the poor devils in the photos.

But so, too, does anyone who really thinks the US has lost the moral high ground because of this incident. Equating America with Saddam is firey rhetoric, and looks great on a t-shirt, but it doesn't hold up to the facts. But hey, why let facts get in the way of a good rant, right?

Abusing POWs is reprehensible, and the accused Americans will receive the justice they deserve. Not because they violated some barometer of international opinion, or drew the ire of a morally relativistic world community, but because Americans are better than that, and the world knows it.
1.5.04 19:19


Randy Rice

Washington's chattering class is collectively scratching it's furrowed brow over a slip of the tongue made by Condoleeza Rice at a recent dinner party:
Rice, according to an account in this week's New York magazine, at one point said: "As I was telling my husb . . . " then stopped and said, "As I was telling President Bush. . . ."

Eyebrows jumped; jaws dropped. There was a slight pause in the chatter. But we're also thinking that while the first phrase was correctly reported, there's a possibility the second one did not immediately follow. In which case, it's not at all clear whom or what Rice, who is single, may have been talking about.

Well, Heraldblog has obtained a transcript of the dinner party converstation (don't ask how), and in the interest of full disclosure, we've decided to post it here for the first time:

Dinner guest No. 1: Don't you think the President was being a little rash, entering a war without international backing and all that?

Rice: As I was telling my husb...As I was telling President Bush, the job of toppling Saddam was too important to be left to our European allies.

Dinner guest No. 2: There's talk around Washington that many in the President's inner circle had serious misgivings about embarking on another war when bin Laden and al Qaeda were still on the loose.

Rice: You know, just this afternoon I was fellat.. I was telling the President that he has the full support of his erec.. entire staff, and that history would respect his orgas...organizing principles.

Dinner guest No. 3: These must be very stressful times on the Bush family. How is the President's wife holding up under all the pressure.

Rice: Just last night, The President and the First lady and I were having three-way se.. discussion about that very subject. The Bushes are very strong people, and they're doing just fine.

As Freud himself would have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.


3.5.04 21:30


I said e-lec-tion. We're having a big e-lec-tion.

Strip clubs in about 18 states, including Wisconsin, are rocking the vote these days:
The adult entertainment industry hopes to sway the 2004 presidential election, saying President Bush's conservative agenda threatens their livelihood and jeopardizes the First Amendment.

"Under the Bush administration, the industry has already taken a serious step backward," said Angelina Spencer, an Ohio club owner and executive director of ACE, a national trade organization of adult night clubs that has 700 members and represents more than 3,800 clubs.

"At what point is the country run under the New Testament or under the Constitution?"

Randall Tigue, a Minneapolis-based First Amendment attorney, said nude dancing could take a major hit should seats on the Supreme Court open up in the next four years under Bush.

"A lot of people in the industry realize that if George Bush gets three appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, the industry is going to be dead," Tigue said.

Wisconsin Republican Party spokesman Chris Lato said party leaders had not heard of the effort, but the clubs need not worry.

"I'm not sure the president is deeply concerned about strip clubs, necessarily," he said. "The effort to register voters, that's welcomed. That's a good thing. That's certainly an audience or constituency that's not necessarily been targeted in the past. But I would question the motives here. This is a group with a political agenda. These folks are getting propaganda from the left."

Yeah, right. No Republicans in this strip club. Nope. Strip club thing. Not doing it.
4.5.04 04:40


Of mugwumps and jihad

Just read this fascinating profile in the UK's Independent about a Canadian woman, a Muslim, who has been marked for death by Jihadists. Why? Oh, all the usual reasons: she openly criticizes the Islamofascists who have hijacked her religion, and she says Muslims should be free to interpret the Koran on their own. And, uh, she's a lesbian. I guess you could say she hit the trifecta.

One paragraph really jumped off the page:
She is frustrated that more moderate Muslims do not fight. "At all of the public events I've done to promote this book, not once have I seen a moderate Muslim stand up and look an extremist in the eye and say, 'I'm Muslim too. I disagree with your perspective. Now let's hash it out publicly.' Yes, after the event people tip-toe up to me and say, 'Thank you for what you are doing.' And there are times when I really want to say, 'Where was your support when it mattered? Not for my ego. But to show the extremists that they are not going to walk away with the show."

More and more the world is waking up to the fact that there is a civil war within Islam. I don't know that there has ever been an historical parallel to the current state of affairs. Throughout history, your typical civil war has been contained within national borders, and involved persons in the same nation or geographic region. Brits fighting Brits, Yankees killing Southerners, etc. Today we have large groups of people at odds over differing interpretations of a 1,300 year old book, and one side is making their point by killing people of other religions who don't even follow the same book.

A cynic friend of mine says that all religious wars can be distilled to one statement: my imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend, and now I must kill you. But a religious civil war is even more absurd. This one can be summed up thusly: My imaginary friend says you can no longer listen to your imaginary friend, and if you do, I will kill you and some other people who have a different imaginary friend altogether.

A different kid of war

American culture prides itself on being a melting pot of peoples and religions and all that, and we've done a fairly good job of assimilating "the other" into our culture. But our emphasis on assimilation, and the tolerance and secular nature of American society that makes assimilation possible, blinds us to the underlying realities in The War Against Terror. Radical Islam, a political philosophy that views religion and government as inseparable, couldn't be any more foreign to the American mind. Success in the current war hinges on our leaders understanding just who we're fighting, and who we are not fighting. We are fighting Islamofascists, those illiberal jihadists who blame modernity and non-Muslims for their poverty and ignorance. We are not fighting moderate Muslims, people who embrace modernity, and education, and personal hygiene, and want nothing to do with bin Laden and the rest.

But alas, the world is not divided quite so neatly. There is a great mass of humanity that I will call Islamic mugwumps, or fence sitters, who don't much like the Islamofascists because they suck all the fun out of life, but they don't much like the West either because we have huge, efficient armies and we manufacture all the cool stuff and our women look like Angelina Jolie. So the mugwumps are not too happy when bin Laden makes all Muslims look like crazed assassins and mass murderers, but they're not terribly bothered when he makes the US look stupid, either.

But the US needs the wugwumps. Without them, we will get the "war-without-end" that Bush has promised us.

Most wars throughout history have been a game of capture the flag. Two uniformed armies beat on each other until one quits. That won't work this time. The enemy doesn't wear uniforms, or carry a flag, or even have a country. It's like fighting the Barbary Pirates, but instead of ships, the pirates all have cell phones and they dress like us. So how do we know when the war has ended? One of two ways: either we kill all the bad guys so there's no one left to fight, or we convince the wugwumps that they're better off with us than the Islamofascists. Now I don't have to burn up too many pixels to convince you that option number one is not really an option. Not unless our scientists discover some sort of "crazed religious fanatic" gene that we can manipulate into converting couscous to arsenic. So that leaves option number two: we sell ourselves. We demonstrate that Western values of religious tolerance, human rights, and pluralistic democracy offer far greater advantages than dressing women like beekeepers.

Option number two took a big hit last week with the release of photos of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. The mugwumps are already skeptical that America is not in Iraq for the oil, or to eradicate Muslims, or to silence Saddam about his dealings with past US adminstrations, or any of the countless other conspiracy theories heard on the Arab street. If the US was making any progress in winning hearts and minds, it was lost when the first prison photos were published.

Anyone who downplays the seriousness of this scandal is signing onto option number one, which can be summed up in a famous Marine Corps slogan: Kill 'em all. Let God sort 'em out. That attitude, as onerous as it is, was necessary in your Dad's war, when the generals had their eye on a theatre map, and at the center of that map was a big, bright-colored stick pin that said "Berln" or "Tokyo". Your Dad's war was a war of attrition, much like a boxing match, where each side beat on each other until someone went down.

The War Against Terror is not your Dad's war. We need our allies to win this one, and that includes being nice to people who look an awful lot like the enemy. It's a huge challenge. It's something the US has never done before, and there is scarely even a vocabulary available so we can discuss it. To get through it, we will need more than bullets and bombs. We will need our liberal institutions of free speech and free inquiry. We need to lead by example, and fight by example. I am worried that Bush and Rumsfeld and the rest don't get it. Instead of openness and willingness to adapt, we are getting the same tired slogans over and over. Stay the course. We'll be there as long as it takes.

As one writer recently put it: "Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue. Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice. "
7.5.04 03:58


Something's fishy




From an American MP serving in Baghdad:
"I have to say this stuff that happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is an example of leadership gone really bad. I can’t believe for one second that those troops didn’t know what they were doing was wrong. Nor can I believe the command was not aware that it was occurring. It sure doesn’t help our cause here in Iraq or the perspective of our being humane and following the codes of conduct. It really angers me."
The fish rots from the head down.
7.5.04 23:31


More on moron Moore




I am more dismayed than puzzled that so many people take Michael Moore seriously. Dismayed because the same "entertainment-is-truth" virus that has infected millions of right-wing ditto heads has apparently crossed the species barrier into human beings who pride themselves on being so damn smart that they would never fall for the logical fallacies that pass as deep thought among the Bushies. But I'm far from surprised, because entertainment is passing more and more these days for informed comment.

Moore, a gifted filmmaker but little else, is treated as a genius with something important to say by millions of people who should know better. Now Moore is whining because his latest movie, Fahrenheit 911, may not be distributed by Disney Corporation. The movie savages President Bush for his ties to Saudi Arabia and the bin Laden clan.

Now there may very well be a reason to criticize Bush, and Bush pére, for their cozy ties to mideast dictators. And I for one would like the truth to come out big time. I just don't trust Moore to get the story right. Michelle Cottle of The New Republic gets it right:

But facts, in Moore's view, should not stand in the way of good entertainment. Indeed, when quizzed about inaccuracies in his work, Moore has two lines of defense: One, dismiss his critics as right-wing cranks. (This, despite the fact that many of them are liberals.) And two, claim his movies and books should be taken in the satirical spirit in which he offers them. "How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?" he smirked to CNN's Lou Dobbs a couple of years back.

Fine. So you're an entertainer. Then don't wrap yourself in the Constitution and rage about how you're being censored because of your courageous crusade to reveal unpopular political truths. Don't pretend you're a muckraking journalist if you are, in fact, simply a dumpier, left-wing version of Ann Coulter. Like you, Coulter is flitting around this free country lobbing her share of ideological bombs. She just has the good sense not to expect Mickey Mouse to help her do it.

In summary: Rush Limbaught still a big fat idiot. Ditto Michael Moore.

What's so hard to understand?


Googlebomb

Ralph Nader
9.5.04 00:32


The road to Abu Ghraib

"Here's an intelligent comment from Indian blogger Gargi at Point of View:
I thought that it was the "good intentions" more than anything else that screws the Americans in every war. If they went to fight for land or for oil they would probably do a good job on it.

"But the altruism that they go in with - to save the poor souls from communism or dictatorship - really hampers them. All war is ugly. If you expect your armed forces to fight like saints - they will end up dead. The Americans somehow expect their army to win without either killing or get killed. Its a dangerous attitude for any armed involvement.

"It's like the line from Godfather. Kay tells Tom Hagen "he's not the man i married'(on Michael Corleone). Tom replies "you would have been a widow if he was."

Call me jaded, but I think there's more than good intentions behind the current White House cabal. They talk about good intentions, as most American adminstrations have, but what's really in play is national interest. It's in the national interest to bring peace and freedom to the Arab world. It's high mindedness of the first order, but it's born more of desperation that altruism.



Arrested development

Thomas Friedman in today's NY Times:
"The Bush team has made a mess in Iraq, but the pathologies of the Arab world have also contributed — and the sheer delight that some Arab media take in seeing Iraq go up in flames is evidence of that. It's time for the Arab world to grow up — to stop dancing on burning American jeeps and claiming that this is some victory for Islam."
Spot on. Read the whole piece.
9.5.04 20:10


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