How surprising!

Released after five on Friday, just in time for the Saturday riots in the Middle East -- Pentagon details mishandling of Quran which describes " . . . a soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book . . . an interrogator stepped on a Quran . . . water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran."
Well, well -- how could this be?
Wasn't Newsweek the absolute lowest of the absolute low for daring to print that Guantanamo guards dissed the Quran? Oh, of course, really, you know, Newsweek WAS wrong -- THEY said a guard flushed a Quran down the toilet, when ACTUALLY guards pissed on it, kicked it, stepped on it, and defaced it.
And don't you just love the Act of God passive voice sentence construction here -- " . . . a guard's urine came through an air vent . . . " -- like the guard himself wasn't actually on the other end of that urine stream.

The some sayers

Who except James Wolcott could write this and get away with it:
"Donald Rumsfeld, whose Steely Resolve more and more resembles aluminum siding, is a man unafraid of confronting the full spectrum of America's enemies from Al Qaeda to Amnesty International. Some say he is too zealous in defending our freedom. Too candid. Too cocksure. Too unwilling to accept counsel and criticism. Too wedded to his overriding vision of military transformation. Those some sayers are right."
Wolcott goes on to quote Antiwar.com's William Lind "under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. armed forces have . . . been taken over by "wreck it and run" management. When Rumsfeld leaves office, what will his successor inherit? A volunteer military without volunteers . . . The world's largest pile of wrecked and worn-out military equipment . . . A military tied down in a strategically meaningless backwater, Iraq, to the point where it can't do much else . . . Commitments to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of future weapons programs that are militarily as useful as Zeppelins but less fun to watch . . . [and] a lost war."

Nixon was the snake

Deep Throat takes fire -- a hero or a snake?
Watching Pat Buchanan on Hardball last night, the spin direction emerged quickly -- first, that Nixon didn't do anything worse than Kennedy or Clinton, and second, that Felt was a traitor to the White House.
Both are completely ridiculous.
Yes, Kennedy had affairs -- and so what? This didn't affect his presidency or his decision-making as president. And yes, Clinton had affairs -- and again, so what? Three or four episodes of oral sex with a 22-year-old woman had no effect whatsoever on his responsibility as president. With all the high indignation and harrumphing from Republicans now about both these presidents, they cannot identify a single presidential decision made by either man which was tainted by their affairs. In the Starr investigation the only wrongdoing charge Starr could come up with after years of investigation was that Clinton lied about having an affair. In both cases, the American public didn't care. Clinton's approval rating remained above 60 per cent even during the impeachment attempt.
In contrast, here is what the Nixon and his administration did (from Wikipedia):

"President Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman were tape-recorded . . . on June 23 discussing use of the Central Intelligence Agency to obstruct the FBI's investigation of the Watergate break-ins. Nixon followed through by asking the CIA to slow the FBI's investigation of the crime—claiming, speciously, that national security would be put at risk. In fact, the crime and numerous other "dirty tricks" had been undertaken on behalf of CRP, mainly under the direction of Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. They had also previously worked in the White House in the Special Investigations Unit, nicknamed the "Plumbers". This group investigated leaks of information the administration did not want publicly known, and ran various operations against the Democrats and anti-war protesters. Most famously, they broke into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg, a former employee of The Pentagon and State Department, had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the NewYork Times and as a result was prosecuted for espionage, theft, and conspiracy. Hunt and Liddy found nothing useful, however, and trashed the office to cover their tracks. The break-in was only linked to the White House much later, but at the time it caused the collapse of Ellsberg's trial due to evident government misconduct. There is still much dispute about the level of involvement of leading figures in the White House, such as Attorney General John Mitchell, chief of staff Haldeman, leading aides Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman, and Nixon himself. Mitchell, as the head of CRP, along with campaign manager Jeb Stuart Magruder and Fred LaRue, approved Hunt and Liddy's espionage plans, including the break-in, but whether it went above them is unclear. Magruder, for instance, provided a number of different accounts, including having overheard Nixon order Mitchell to conduct the break-in in order to gather intelligence about the activities of Larry O'Brien, the director of the Democratic Campaign Committee.

There is simply no comparison -- Nixon conspired with his staff and with government officials to obstruct criminal investigations, and he directed a White House staff who authorized or participated in criminal activities and criminal conspiracies, all with the goal of subverting the US electoral system and making sure Nixon won the 1972 election.
Now THAT was criminal. Felt was the patriot. Nixon was the snake.

No fops allowed

The Daily Howler is getting set to explore the question of why conservatives outshine liberals in the US spin wars. Howler writes "Why do liberals fail in our nation's spin wars? Over the weekend, we thought about that problem as we watched Woody Allen's Interiors . . . As we watched, we were mainly struck by the self-involved foppishness of all the central characters . . . right to this day, liberal interests have often been fronted by these very same foppish folk, by the deracinated Manhattan types who thought Interiors showcased great tragedy—the tragedy of a “mediocre novelist” who is furious because his wife, “an embittered poet,” gets better reviews than he does. Why do conservatives often do better in the nation’s endless spin wars? In part, it’s because liberal interests are often promoted by a wide array of self-involved fops."
Reading this, it struck me that we simply do not have this problem in Canada -- here, everybody speaks up.
We frequently see Chantal Hebert and Alan Gregg and Andrew Coyne and Rex Murphy on The National, articulating leftish and rightish views; we watch Harper and Martin and Layton in Question Period. We read Rick Salutin and Jeffrey Simpson and Margaret Wente in the Globe. There is nary a shrinking violet in sight.
Maybe its because so many of our left wingers came out of the union movement while our right wingers came out of the oil patch, but here both sides are tough, and ready to give as good as they get.

I love it when this happens

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Miss Universe

Miss Canada is new Miss Universe
I am posting this because so many Canadian bloggers are men.
No, no! Not that.
Being enlightened men, they cannot post a picture of a beautiful woman or else everyone will think they are sexist pigs, etc.
So, here she is...

Miss Canada Natalie Glebova, who just won the Miss Universe contest. Congratulations.

Fiddling while Rome burns

Hmmm -- while I am fiddling along posting snarky posts about Martin and Harper and Bush and Iraq and all the usual suspects, Dem from CT posts some material at Daily Kos about the bird flu and the possibility of a world wide epidemic.
First, here is a collection of daily links where the epidemic is being tracked: The Coming Influenza Pandemic?
Second, here is an update entitled What is Really Going On in China:

Reports coming out of Qinghai suggest H5N1 infections in humans and birds are out of control, with birds distributing H5N1 to the north and west, while people are being cremated and told to keep quiet. Reports from Chinese language papers detail over 200 suspected infections in over two dozen locations in Qinghai Province. In the most affected 18 regions, there are 121 deaths, generating a case fatality rate above 60%.Even if only a small fraction of the deaths are H5N1 linked, the cases would move the bird flu pandemic stage from 5 to the final stage 6, representing sustained human-to-human transmission of H5N1. The high case fatality rate suggests the H5N1 in Qinghai has achieved efficient human transmission while retaining a high case fatality rate. If confirmed, these data would have major pandemic preparedness implications. These cases began almost a month ago and are now spreading via people who have previously entered the high risk area. The official media comments coming out of China appear to be carefully worded, describing "new cases" being brought under control, inability to "see" human cases, or lack of "pneumonia" cases. Several reports from Qinghai have cited limitations on discussing or reporting details. All nature reserves in China have been closed.

Third, here is a public health discussion site, Effect Measures, where preparedness issues are covered.
I think it's worth bookmarking some of these sites, and checking in occasionally to see what is new.

So, its all the Iraqis' own fault

Well, finally -- an explanation for why US troops were not greeted with flowers when they invaded Iraq to bring peace and democracy -- U.S. general defends Guantanamo procedures: "Myers said he did not think the United States should have used more troops in the Iraq invasion but acknowledged that progress has proved slower than Pentagon officials had hoped. "I don't think we understood that people had been suppressed, and their spirit had been suppressed to the point where it wasn't just going to naturally blossom once they had the opportunity," Myers said on CBS' Face the Nation." -- so, you see, the explanation is that it is the Iraqi's own fault. THEY were to blame because they had been so suppressed that they could not "blossom".
Well, I said it was an explanation.
I didn't say it was a GOOD explanation.

Remember "You're either with us or against us"?

Review May Shift Terror Policies
The article starts by saying that the US has basically declared victory in the global war on terror (cutsy nickname, GWOT) because Al Quaeda has mostly disintegrated.
So one would think that a kind of vigilant peace could now be declared and the US could move on to other things.
But not so fast, Kemo Sabe.
The Bush administration is now admitting what everyone has been saying for the last two years, that the war on Iraq has radicalized Muslims. The article notes that the Bush administration now "[has to] deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple years. Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called "the bleed out" of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe."
Now, I think this is a little silly -- the people who came to Iraq to fight the US are either dead or are still there, fighting.
However, what concerns me most is this -- the Bush administration now may be using the radicalization they themselves caused as an excuse to begin a new war against an enemy even less clearly defined than "terrorism" was. Their new war would "target . . . broader support in the Muslim world for radical Islam."
In other words, it really will be the Christians vs the Muslims.
And in a paranoid moment, I now wonder how long with it be before they widen it again -- to define as 'radicals' anyone anywhere in the world who objects to the Bush administration itself, or who is trying to overthrow the dictators who are now allied with the Bush administration, or who elects governments which do not want to ally with Bush.
I guess we could call it the "You're either with us or against us" War.

Place the blame where it belongs

Slate has a new Torture Feature web page here
It summarizes everything that has happened since 9/11 to turn America from the world's leader into the world's tyrant.
The article does use the "C" word, war crimes, and notes that "There are few slopes more slippery than that the one from small war crimes to large ones; any wartime action, however heinous, can always be justified by some perceived necessity. Once discipline is lost, it is nearly impossible to restore."
But I fault the conclusion. Instead of laying the blame for torture where it belongs, it wimps out and adopts a "collective guilt" conclusion.
First, the article blames the torture on Congress, becuse they haven't stopped it. ". . . the elected branches of government have exercised almost a total lack of oversight . . . Lawmakers have not taken any steps to ensure, for example, that if extreme measures are to be taken, this step occurs only after the White House and the Pentagon have directly authorized it and Congress has been notified, as it is about other forms of clandestine activity. Nor has Congress asked for more transparency at the detention facilities . . . The story of extreme interrogation practices is a story of a Congress asleep at the switch . . ."
Then the article blames the American public, apparently because they haven't protested enough. " . . . a slow slide from coherent, consistent standards for interrogation and treatment of prisoners to a sometimes ad-hoc, occasionally brutal search for information at all costs — should warrant public outcry. That it has not suggests either that this shift doesn't interest us because it affects outsiders, or that we no longer consider torture or near-torture to be beyond the bounds of civil conduct. "
Sorry, Slate -- I think you are the cowardly ones for refusing to lay the blame directly where it belongs -- on America's bloody-minded leaders Rumsfeld, Cambone, Meyers, Gonzales, Rice, Cheney and Bush.

Conference? We don't need no stinking Conference!

Well, here's another example of a sensible reality-based analysis which doesn't make sense anymore in Bush's Bizarro World.
In Daily Kos: No progress made after month of nuclear talks a Kos blogger named Plutonium Page writes a sensible update on the recent nuclear treaty UN meeting, noting that not much progress was made because the US didn't take it seriously. The piece ends is a rather odd way: "Hopefully they will make more progress at the IAEA meeting in September."
PP, you must have been joking -- surely you cannot seriously expect that John Bolton and the Bush administration will actually want to make progress in any UN initiative to reduce nuclear proliferation?
What they want, with intense longing, is to go to war with Iran.
And the UN is acting all obstructionist. The Security Council is not going along with sanctions on Iran, the organization is not dumping Kofi Annan and the IAEA's ElBaradei was reconfirmed over US objections. Therefore, as a secondary goal, the US wants to discredit the UN as an effective decision-making organization.
So of course there will be no cooperation or progress made at any UN-related conference. Not ever.

Sticks and stones

will break my bones but names will never hurt me.
They are pretty funny, though.
I've seen some good ones lately for George Bush:
The Simpson's Commander Cuckoo Bananas
Frogsdong's Horse Fluffer
WTF's The Smirking Chimp, Presnit Privilege, Smirking Sockpuppet, Idiot in Chief, Smirking Moron, Squinting Numbskull and - wait for it - Bunnypants.
And POGGE is having just as much fun with Paul Martin, calling him (affectionately, of course) "Mr. Dithers" in many posts.

The Second Writing

From "The Poor Man" Poetry corner by Phoenican:
Turning and turning in the parking lot
The driver cannot steer the Lexus;
The Left falls apart; the Centre cannot hold;
Mere Rightism is loosed upon the wheel,
The brain-dimmed metaphor is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of intelligence is drowned;
The best lack all publication, while the worst
Are full of verbose columnisity.
Surely some deadline is at hand;
Surely the Great Comparison is at hand.
The Great Comparison! Hardly are those words thought
When a vast surge out of my gall and stomach
Troubles my gorge: somewhere on a computer screen,
A piece with a hollow body and the head of a dodo,
A jeremiad blank and witless as the moon,
Is plonking its slow phrases, while all about it
Reel shadows of the reality-based community.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of hard-won reason
Are vexed to nightmare by inane business-babble,
And what rough screed, its hour come round at last,
Witters towards Washington to be read?

(apologies to WB)

Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon

An AP photo from a Ballon competition in Hungary.
Once when we were driving west into Edmonton, on that long, straight stretch of divided highway which goes for miles and miles outside the city, we saw dozens of balloons floating above the highway -- it must have been some kind of competition too. This was at least 20 years ago, but I have never forgotten it.

Harper continues to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

Frogsdong found this article in today's Globe and Mail: Christian activists capturing Tory races which says that "Christian activists have secured Conservative nominations in clusters of ridings from Vancouver to Halifax -- a political penetration that has occurred even as the party tries to distance itself from hard-line social conservatism. At least three riding associations in Nova Scotia, four in British Columbia, and one in suburban Toronto have nominated candidates with ties to groups like Focus on the Family . . . organizers say many more will be on the ballot during the next federal election, a feat achieved by persuading parishioners, particularly new Canadians, to join the party and vote for recommended candidates."
I thought the federal Conservative Party was smarter than this, to get so distracted by Ottawa events that it let its nomination process be hijacked by these people.
Now hear this -- the majority of Canadians WILL NOT VOTE for a federal party dominated by ideological activists, whether they are left-wing or right-wing. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt (the one that says "I Heart Broadbent" and "Eberhart for PM")
Even Tommy Douglas, the most beloved ideologue in the nation's history, the man who gave Canada Medicare, could not make the NDP a significant federal presence.
Why is this? Canadians have seen ideological activism in action, from Social Credit in BC to the separatists in Quebec. We will sometimes let them run a province, but not the country.
And why is this? Because ideologues DO NOT LISTEN. In fact, they pride themselves on not listening. They would think they were elected to do what THEY wanted to do, not what WE wanted them to do. When we send a federal politician way off to Ottawa, we want someone who won't forget who he is working for. In a federal politician, Canadians want to elect people like Chuck Cadman, who listens to his constituents regardless of what his party in Ottawa is telling him to do.