Painting the roses red

So Condi is off to paint the roses red for George in the Middle East.
She's not actually going to do anything there to stop the war.
She's just going to talk a lot of Christian Fundamentalist code about birth pangs for a new Middle East -- you know, the one George Bush thinks is rising from the ashes of Iraq -- and chatter about the mytical pan-Arab coalition that George wants her to create:

. . . Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state, who is due to travel to Israel tomorrow and then to Rome on Wednesday for talks with United Nations, European and Arab officials, has said she will not call for an immediate ceasefire.
'She's not going to come home with a ceasefire but stronger ties to the Arab world,' said a senior official. 'It's going to allow us to say that America isn't going to put up with this and we have Arab friends that are against you terrorists. What we want is our Arab allies standing against [Shia] Hezbollah and against Iran, since there is no one who doesn't think Iran is behind this. We're going to say to Hezbollah and the terrorist groups, 'This will not stand.'
'That is the way to bring real change to the Middle East. If you just have a ceasefire then, sooner or later, they go back to fighting.'
The 'Arab umbrella' policy is accompanied by largely uncritical support for Israel. . .

Let a smile be your umbrella, Beruit.
And don't miss Billmon's take on the Orwellian implications of all this.

I read the news today oh boy

Three comments worth reading -- and the emphasis in these quotes is mine.
Digby:

[Quoting from Dowd]

Having inadvertently built up Iran with his failures in Iraq, W. is eager now to send Iran a shock-and-awe message through Israel.

I honestly think that last is part of what's motivating the warmongers. As with their last epic failure, Vietnam, they believe their hands have been tied by a bunch of liberal generals and a pansy-ass populace who refuse to let them fight the way they need to fight. They see the Israelis as their personal Rottweilers and they want to let them off the chain. The Israelis should ask themselves if they really want to do George W. Bush's dirty work for him. I continue to suspect they did not expect that the US would give them the green light on this (it is insane, after all) and now they have no face saving way out. America did not do its job and now things are deteriorating beyond anyone's control.

Steve Gilliard:

The problem is that Israel cannot stay in South Lebanon. They can bomb, but they cannot stay. And as long as Hezbollah stays in the field, they win.
Israel is frustrated, 50 years of war does that. They want peace and the calculation is that if they crush Hezbollah with shock and awe, they can win.
Some people are wondering when Hezbollah strikes at the US. My bet is that CNN and the BBC are doing a far better job of undermining Israel than a bomb would. Lebanon was at peace, this is like bombing and invading Cancun in mid-winter.
One of the things which is immediately apparent is that Israel is losing the media war. . . . Despite it's capacity for violence, Hezbollah is being treated with a level of respect no Arab state fighting Israel has ever gotten. You are hearing normal people testify to the good works of the Hezbollah quasi-state . . .
The Western public is getting a new view of Israel and the Arabs, and if the Israelis had a clue beyond bombing TV towers, they wouldn't drop another bomb in Beirut and stop shooting up convoys and gas stations. Because you have American reporters running from Israel bombs and American citizens trapped there and Hezbollah is getting a hearing. And that has already forced Bush's hand in sending Condi.
Israel and Bush bet they could destroy Hezbollah with shock and awe. That isn't happening. So what do they do next?

Juan Cole:

Because of their fetish for states, the Neoconservatives of the Bush administration are unable to see that the Levant and points east are now the province of militia-parties that dominate localities and wield asymmetrical paramilitary force in such a way as to stymie states . . . Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas and other groups in Gaza and the West Bank, al-Qaeda/ radical Bedouins in the Sinai, the Muslim Brotherhood in some Sunni areas of Syria, the tribes and gangs of Maan in Jordan, the Peshmerga of the Kurds, the guerrilla groups of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, Badr Corps and Marsh Arabs of the Iraqi Shiites, the Basij and Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Iran, the party-tribes of Afghanistan--whether the Tajik Jami'at-i Islami or the Pushtun Taliban--and the biradaris and ethnic mafias of Pakistan, are all arguably as significant actors as states, and often more significant. . . . The transition under American auspices of Iraq from a strong if odious central state to equally odious militia rule and chaotic violence is only the most obvious example of this process. More people have been killed in terror attacks in Iraq every month since February than were killed on September 11, 2001 in the US . . . Condi Rice echoes the old Neocon theory of "creative chaos" when she confuses the Lebanon war with "the birth pangs" of a "new" Middle East. The chief outcome of the "war on terror" has been the proliferation of asymmetrical challengers. Israel's assault on the very fabric of the Lebanese state seems likely to weaken or collapse it and further that proliferation. Since asymmetrical challengers often turn to terrorism as a tactic, the "war on terror" has been . . . the most efficient engine for the production of terrorism in history.

Culture of life

What Americans really think about Bush's stem cell veto and all his pious 'culture of life' BS:

Great line of the day

Basketballer Charles Barkley: "I was a Republican until they lost their minds."

Is she out of her mind?

So Rice thinks she can put together a new Coalition of the Shilled to fight Hezbollah in Lebanon?:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she wants a "robust'' international military force to try to oust Hezbollah forces from southern Lebanon, as she prepares to leave on a diplomatic mission to the region next week.

Oh, get real, Condi.
No one is going to follow the US and Israel down that rabbit hole.

Laugh du jour

The Poorman posts three great YouTube videos at I am insane -- the second one is particularly hysterical.

Scared yet?

First, here's the setup, a transcript from the G8 microphone transcript:

The camera is focused elsewhere and it is not clear whom Bush is talking to, but possibly Chinese President Hu Jintao, a guest at the summit.
Bush: "Gotta go home. Got something to do tonight. Go to the airport, get on the airplane and go home. How about you? Where are you going? Home?
Bush: "This is your neighborhood. It doesn't take you long to get home. How long does it take you to get home?"
Reply is inaudible.
Bush: "Eight hours? Me too. Russia's a big country and you're a big country."
At this point, the president seems to bring someone else into the conversation.
Bush: "It takes him eight hours to fly home."
He turns his attention to a server.
Bush: "No, Diet Coke, Diet Coke."
He turns back to whomever he was talking with.
Bush: "It takes him eight hours to fly home. Eight hours. Russia's big and so is China."

Now, here is what Cenk at The Young Turks has to say about this:

. . . Can anyone now credibly claim that Bush is secretly working on a master plan behind the scenes and that he's just playing cowboy for the cameras? I hope the master plan doesn't involve figuring out how long it takes to get to China . . . In the old empires, there would be a lot of marriages between the royal families. And from time to time, these inter-family marriages would produce a mentally challenged son who would inherit the throne. This would set the empire back for hundreds of years. I'm not saying anything, I'm just saying. Russia is big and so is China . . . We have third grader for a President. And worse yet, the Vice President has him convinced he is the second coming of Winston Churchill. Scared yet?

Oh. Dear. God.
Don't push the red button, Georgie. Mommy won't like it if you push the red button. All your little friends might get hurt . . .

Friday dog blogging

I had some frames left on the roll I took of our trip, so I was able to take some dog photos this week.
Here is Chillou, in a nanosecond when he was sitting like a good dog:


And here is Charlie (blue collar)and Chillou (red collar) playing in the back yard:

A proxy war?

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that someone isn't really out to get you.
So it is paranoid to think that the Bush administration may be thinking it could use Israel's war on Hezbollah to provoke war against Iran?
I'm spending the day reading stuff here and there about Iran and Iraq and Shiites and Sunnis and who is doing what to whom all through the Middle East, and about the neocon eagerness for World War Three , and what Bush is doing or not doing, and the Republicans thinking they could win the midterms if they become the war party again.
And I'm starting to wonder if there isn't a scenario here, what the Washington Post describes as "not just a crisis . . . but also an opportunity".
Juan Cole writes:

. . . The Israelis warn the small town Shiites of the south to flee their own homes and go hundreds of miles away (and live on what? in what?). But then they intensely bombing them, making it impossible for them to flee. The Lebanese have awoken to find themselves cockroaches.
I repeat, this is nothing less than an ethnic cleansing of the Shiites of southern Lebanon, an assault on an entire civilian population's way of life . . .

Is the Bush administration hoping that if enough Shiite Lebanese civilians are terrorized and killed, then Arab street will be so outraged they will insist on Iran taking direct action against Israel, which would mean the US could immediately declare war on Iran?
Does the Bush Administration see this as a win-win situation, where either, if Iran attacks, the US would be "forced" to protect Israel by declaring war on Iran, or, if Iran doesn't attack, it would be discredited as a regional leader?
Or am I just a raving paranoid?

Great line of the day

From Chris Matthews, of all people:

We've killed 50,000 Iraqis in a war that was supposed to be a two-day wonder. When are we going to notice that the neocons don't know what they're talking about? They're not looking at this country's long term interest. They're bound up in regional and global ideology and they have had no experience, I'll say it again, in even a school yard fight. They don't know what physical fighting is all about.

If a tree falls in the forest...

If nobody is listening, does the tree make any sound?
If George Bush actually did speak to Israel about ending the Hezbollah-Hamas-Israel war, would they listen?
The Bush administration has spent the last five years frittering away America's international credibility -- failing to muscle the Security Council to support the Iraq war, failing to get any uptake on the 2004 "road map" (remember that?), standing around while North Korea builds nuclear missiles, announcing mythical trips to Mars, insulting South America over illegal immigration, insulting Canada over softwood lumber, demonstrating utter contempt for Arabs and Muslims at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo, sending the buffoon John Bolton to the UN. So why would the world care what George Bush thinsk about anything anymore?
Just butter another roll, George, and give someone else a nice backrub.
Over at Firedoglake, Taylor Marsh provides a pretty good summary about what is going on in Lebanon:

. . . President Bush is allowing the current Middle East escalation to continue, because he's hoping Israeli Prime Minister Olmert can take out Hezbollah in a week. Outsourcing American foreign policy isn't the answer. Olmert has a duty to defend Israel against Hezbollah, but Olmert has overreacted badly and miscalculated horribly by pummeling the Lebanese government�s infrastructure, including water purification plants, electrical grids, as well as the airport, which is why we leased a cruise ship. The collective punishment of Lebanon is endangering this fledgling government, which has been given absolutely no backing by Bush except his ad nauseam speeches about 'democracy' . . . For those of you keeping score, here’s the breakdown, as far as I can tell. Hezbollah is Shia (Shiite), with support and backing from Iran, Syria and the Iraqi government sitting inside the Green Zone. Hamas is Sunni, with the support of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinians, Syria (playing all sides), Iraq insurgents and Egypt. That’s simplistic, but you won’t hear it explained on cable, with the nitwits and wingnuts cackling about how Arab leaders are condemning Hezbollah. Well, no kidding, because most of them doing the condemning are Sunnis. The Sunni - Shia showdown could one day be the Israeli - Palestinian conflict on steroids, if we’re not careful. The situation is getting more complicated by the minute . . .

But like other Americans, she continues to assume that America has a role to play in this fight:

We need a leader who can support Israel, while also telling our friend that their actions are out of bounds, because they are destabilizing the Lebanese government . . . What we get instead from George W. Bush is silence, which encourages Israel’s actions. Meanwhile, we are losing Lebanon, while Bush refuses to even appoint an ambassador to Syria. So who are we going to call in a crisis? This isn’t a foreign policy. It’s grade school dramatics.

How long will it be before American commentators realize that the reason Bush isn't telling the world what to do anymore is because the world isn't listening to him anymore?

Find me some Canadians!

Just like the military refused to knuckle under to the PMO on the coffin coverage issue, so the Canadian foreign affairs staff are not going to be blamed for the chaos in Beruit. They're telling the Globe and Mail what happened.
Deny it all you want, PMO -- as this story makes clear, the main goal of the Harper trip to Cyprus was to generate good publicity for Harper. Who cares about all those screamers in Beruit -- the Prime Minister has an urgent photo opportunity emergency! He desperately needs some Canadians to fly home with him!
With the preemptive strike by the foreign affairs staff in today's Globe and Mail, however, the news stories now will focus on how the Prime Minister's Office insisted on trying to control everything from afar, not trusting embassy staff on the spot to make good decisions -- likely because they were all appointed by those dastardly Librulls! --

. . . Suddenly, last night, they were told the Prime Minister would be visiting and that Canadians — any Canadians — would have to be brought to the port of Larnaca, Cyprus. They made an urgent request to the British government, which had been taking Britons on large naval vessels with military escorts to the western city of Limassol, to allow 120 Canadians to board one of the ships so that there would be some available to greet the Prime Minister and ride home on his Airbus jet.
One government official in Ottawa, who asked to remain unidentified, expressed concern that Mr. Harper's decision to fly to Cyprus to offer up the services of the government jet might be perceived by Canadians as a publicity stunt. The government could have sent one of its Challenger jets to Paris to pick up the Prime Minister and his staff, the source said, freeing up more room on the Airbus.
But, even if they had qualms, the Canadian officials quickly booked suites of rooms and offices at the Palm Beach resort hotel in Larnaca, and made the half-hour journey to the port. Joined by newly arrived officials from the PMO, they set up a war room in the hotel's conference centre and were quickly struck by waves of bad news.
First, it turned out that 120 Canadians had not boarded the British vessel — at most, perhaps 20 were on board. The officials then scrambled to see whether the single Canadian-rented vessel that had reached Beirut, the Lebanese-licensed Blue Dawn, could sail more quickly to Larnaca to meet the Prime Minister.
It quickly became apparent this wasn't going to happen. While Israel had guaranteed Canadians passage, the captain wasn't ready to move without military escort — and Canada couldn't deliver that. Hours passed. The sun set. And it wasn't until 11 p.m. in Beirut that the ship finally left the dock with 261 Canadians aboard . . .

The story gets even worse from there.
It's pretty clear that, left on their own, our Canadian foreign affairs staff would have made some pretty good decisions, and made them more quickly, on how to get Canadians out of Lebanon. But with the PMO office horning their way into the situation, it will continue to be a balls-up.

The story behind the story

Here's the news - the Tories have been engaging in illegal fundraising for two years.
Now, you'd never know that from reading this CP story, which promotes the they-are-all-equally-guilty meme. The story says that Liberals, NDP and Conservatives all engaged in "cheque-swapping" until "recently".
What is not made clear by either the headline or the led is that the Liberals and NDP both stopped doing this in 2004, as soon as Elections Canada made it illegal.
The Tories did not. Apparently, they are doing it to this day.
And that's the real story here:

. . . Cheque-swapping, or cheque exchanges as the practice is sometimes called, had been going on for decades prior to 2004 . . . a delegate would make a donation to his or her local riding association, the full amount of which could be claimed by the delegate for a tax credit. The association would then use the donation to pay for the delegate's food, hotel and travel expenses at a convention, bills which would not be eligible for a tax receipt if paid for directly by the delegate.
Essentially, the arrangement amounted to a public subsidy for delegate expenses.
Political financing reforms in 2004 addressed he practice . . .
E-mails obtained by the Vancouver Sun have indicated that some Conservatives were using cheque-swapping to defray their expenses for the party's 2005 policy convention.
"I can tell you that all EDAs (electoral district associations) in Alberta are doing the cheque-swap," advised Red Deer Tory organizer Linda Toews in one e-mail . . .
Mike Donison, the Conservatives' executive director, has said the party had no knowledge that local organizers were using cheque-swapping and did not approve or condone the practice . . .
[Liberal national director Steven] MacKinnon said the Liberals went to considerable effort and expense to analyse the complex political financing reforms and to ensure no one in the party inadvertently breached the law.
Similarly, [NDP federal secretary Eric] Hebert said he spent six months on the phone with officials at Elections Canada, going over every detail of the changes in the law. He acknowledged that some of the complicated details might have been lost on local Tory organizers, but he said it's the responsibility of the central party to ensure all party members respect the law . . .

Except for the Tories, I guess.

Today's pop quiz

1. How many days will it take for the evacuation of Canadians stranded in Lebanon to dissolve into complete chaos?
2. I said "days", but should I have said "hours"?
Now, I know a lot of hard-working civil servants are working hard on this, but how can anyone actually take such Canada's mythical evaluation plan seriously? Here's the plan:

The Canadian government has chartered seven ships with a combined capacity of 2,000 passengers. Girtel said about 30,000 people now have registered with the Canadian Embassy, but it's not clear how many of them want to leave. Ships will ferry back and forth between Lebanon and Cyprus until everyone who wants to leave has been picked up, she said. "People are being contacted and told the evacuation will start (Wednesday). The Canadian government has been working around the clock on this." She said that all registered Canadians will be contacted one way or another and the effort would continue until every single Canadian had been reached.

Here's the reality, and its only just started:

The drive to the harbour used to take 15 minutes but now would likely take an hour or two because the bridges have been bombed, said Chaar . . . Chaar said she has heard nothing from the embassy, has had great difficulty getting through, and has been able to obtain little information when she does get through . . . the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp., Beirut's top-rated radio station, has reported a sit-in by desperate Canadians at a Beirut hotel.

And so each cruise ship would have to make 15 (that's right, fifteen) round trips before everyone is evacuated. Given a day at each trip end for things like refueling, cleaning, restocking - if there is any fuel or food to be had -- and it will be the end of August before all the Caandians are out.

And when they get to Cyprus, what will happen? More chaos, I think. Other countries including the United States are also sending their people to Cyprus, and the CBC reported last night that no plans were in place to accomodate the evacuees -- Cyprus is at the height of its own tourist season now, and there are no hotel rooms available.
We're going to be reading lots of stories like this one:

A pregnant Hamilton, Ont., woman waiting to be evacuated from Beirut expressed her "sheer disappointment in the Canadian government" Wednesday, after she arrived at the port only to be turned away.
Lara Tcholakian, who was on holiday in Lebanon with her husband and one-year-old son, said Canadian officials called her to say she'd be among the first group of Canadian evacuees to leave Beirut and to be at the port at 8 a.m. "When we arrived it was total chaos - thousands of Canadians just waiting inside the gate where the port is, and they were just baking in the sun," she said in a phone call with the Canadian Press from her sister-in-law's home in Beirut.
A Canadian official announced over a loudspeaker that the ship would begin to accept pregnant women, families with young children and the elderly. Tcholakian, six months pregnant with her infant son in tow, was told she was not on the list. Canadian officials told her to go back "in a very abrupt and very rude way."
After nearly six hours at the port, Tcholakian, 33, and her family returned to a relative's house. She said the security situation in downtown Beirut, where the port is located, is so precarious that she resented being told to drive there unnecessarily.
"If you're going to go, you want to make sure you're going to be evacuated instead of driving back and forth and being told to come back later," she said.

Chickenshit understatement of the year

In a blathering article about how Bush should do more dick-swinging at Iran and North Korea, the Washington Post reluctantly admits that perhaps -- just "perhaps", mind you -- the Iraq war is problematic:

It has not helped the neoconservative case, perhaps, that the occupation of Iraq has not gone as smoothly as some had predicted.

Ya think?