If you aren’t reading James Wolcott’s blog, you’re missing elegant bullseyes like this.
Elections are about the future. Or so we’re constantly told.
But the future has barely made a guest appearance during this election campaign. And not the recent past of no WMDs, Abu Ghraib, and the failure to capture Osama Bin Laden. But in a hazy three-decades-old flashback in which John Kerry is/isn’t spending Christmas in Cambodia and George Bush is/isn’t showing up for National Guard duty. The entire scuffle between Kerry and Bush’s surrogates is stuck in the past and mired in the old, the political operatives and pundits picking through bureaucratic garbage for anything resembling forensic evidence of buried shame. To anyone under the age of forty, these controversies must seem as far-off as the quiz show scandal.
RT figures out Chechnya so you don’t have to.
Remember the Iraqi flag flap? Spencer Ackerman points out an interesting item on the Kurds’ resentment of the all-Arabic language interim Iraqi national council processes, as well as the fact that the old Saddam-era Iraqi flag is exclusively present at the council meetings, while the Israeli-ish new flag adopted by the first Puppet Council with its Kurd stripe is missing. All this violates the Transitional Administrative Law that the Kurds worked so hard to pass, but apparently the TAL died when it wasn’t approved by the UN Security Council.
As long as you’re at Spencer’s place, his next post is fairly amusing, being a long and involved analysis of a poll of Iraqis that basically demonstrates that Iraqis know what democracy is (Two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner) better than Americans. For example, Spencer highlights the following poll results: Asked which type of government would best secure their individual interests, almost 57 percent chose a “strong, central government,” contrasted with 26.7 percent support for “a government in Baghdad made up of representatives from different regions, tribes and sects.” […] Over 60 percent of Iraqis want elections without delay, and nearly 50 percent consider a delay of just one month to be “very unfavorable.” Uh, what was the breakdown of Iraqi ethnic groups again? Shiites are 60% of the population? Hmmmm…..
What if the Republican, far-right and warflogger chunk of the blogosphere were as interested in tracking down the mystery of the forged Niger uranium documents as they are in the Killian memos? On the subject of the memos, I think Steven Horwitz is wrong. What this means for his larger point about the blogosphere being a force for liberty, I’m not sure. I do think it’s a mistake to take the baying of the warfloggers seriously. Really, The Editors have the right attitude toward the crowd that screamed forgery.
The Angry Arab: “Powell: Key to Mideast progress is stripping Arafat’s power. Now Arafat is a certifiable and corrupt buffoon, but how stupid is this statement? Does Powell really think that an end to Arafat would bring about peace? As’ad, I don’t see the word “peace” anywhere in Powell’s statement. Has anything the Bushie Administration done indicated that it equates “progress” with “peace?”
Via Jim Henley, who got it from Hit & Run, here’s George Bush singing sunday bloody sunday.
Ah, zeynep has the links as well as an excellent post on how the CPA ordered the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Health Minister to stop counting Iraqis killed by the invaders. I was looking for that when I wrote this post. Also, see zeynep’s next post on a recent callous statement from the ghoul Rumsfeld.
UPDATE: Another excellent post on Rumsfeld’s comments here, by Arthur Silber.
Food for thought. That’s what you get for being in my referrers, Dan.
Some lovely photos of Compassionate Conservatives at Republican events.
UPDATE: Okie dokie, then.