Antiwar.com Blog

From The Daily Star (Lebanon), a verbal tour of a city’s hopes and fears:

Each dawn, Baghdadis discover the helpless victims of the city’s nightly battles: its walls, scarred by a ferocious war of words. In a city where graffiti was once punishable by death, there’s barely a surface that doesn’t shout a political position…

But for the most part, the Arabic script that crisscrosses every wall in this city is like American talk radio writ large: obscene, inaccurate and often hilarious political abuse. Like shock jocks, Baghdad’s hundreds of anonymous new pundits even interrupt each other: Every night, warring scribes scratch out each other’s manifestos and superimpose their own, turning Baghdad’s kilometers of gray concrete walls into a cacophony of public opinion.

“This is a very dangerous matter, this matter of the writing,” says Amir Nayef Toma, 52. “Because through it, you can understand the entire feelings of a people ­ their suffering, their feelings and even their hopes.” Toma is the Virgil of Baghdad’s graffiti inferno. A retired army officer and full-time scholar of the word, he wanders through the city transcribing the city’s nocturnal tirades and translating them into English. For the price of a cup of tea, he’ll take you on a guided tour of the raucous new souk of ideas.

… read more

From Thomas M. DeFrank, Washington Bureau Chief, New York Daily News:

WASHINGTON – Condoleezza Rice is supposed to be a slam dunk for secretary of state in a second Bush administration. But she may do the unthinkable and just say no. Friends and colleagues of the national security adviser report that the 49-year-old Rice is exhausted, approaching burnout and aching to return to her idyllic previous life as a tenured professor at Stanford.

“I would be surprised if she stays in government at all,” one well-placed source told the Daily News. “From a personal standpoint, she wants her life back.”

Rice’s departure would be a personal as well as professional blow to the President. She spends more time with him than any other subordinate, including frequent weekends at Camp David, where she and Bush play tennis and work out in the gym. … read more

The question that comes to mind is: If Condi jumps ship now, will it be in time to absolve her of blame for this preemptive war against Iraq and the lies which the Bush administration used to lead America into it? I surely hope not! If I had my druthers, they would all spend the rest of their natural lives basking in the striped sunshine shimmering through the bars of their cells.

In his opinion column for the Toronto Sun, Eric Margolis, although admitting that this is not necessarily a reliable nor scientific method of assessment, shares his observations on the changing tenor of his incoming mail which may be a harbinger of real changes in American attitudes toward Bush and the war.

I’ve received a huge e-mail response from around the globe in reply to my last Sunday Sun column. In it, I contended that George Bush’s fabricated war against Iraq was a far worse crime than Watergate, and said the president and his men were either liars or unbelievably inept.

These messages do not represent a reliable cross-section of U.S. public opinion, of course. They are simply what was known as a “convenience sample” when I worked in market research. But they reveal much about the changing mood in America.

Most were well-written messages from intelligent, educated people appalled by what their government had done.

I was stunned by the volume of bitterly anti-Bush mail from his home state, Texas.

In response to last week’s shocking admission by Bush’s arms hunter, David Kay, that “We were all wrong,” a Chicago reader wrote: “No, David. You were wrong. Do not include me in your idiocy.”

…read more

Mark Ames’s inspired review of David Richard Frumperle’s An End to Evil will almost certainly come to be known as a classic of criticism

From: Glenn Reynolds pundit@instapundit.com

I’ve been following that story for a long time. Just search “zeyad”
in my search engine.

Antiwar either knows this, and is trolling, or is a bunch of idiots.
Or both.

My reply:

You have not commented on the post linked to, in which Zeyad complains about the reception of such news in America. I put a link to your earlier post, and a link to a Google cache of all your posts on Zeyad. By the way, Professor, I don’t recall any mention on your site of Zeyad’s rape-all-the-Sunnis diatribe. Perhaps you could point me to it.

Best,
Matt Barganier

Update/Note: By “put a link,” I mean to say that those links were included in the original post. I did NOT add them after the response from Reynolds.

Hey, Glenn Reynolds, Jeff Jarvis: When ya gonna comment on this post by Iraqi blogger Zeyad? Too hot to handle? Could Zeyad work his way back into your good graces by calling for more rape and murder?

(For what it’s worth, here’s Instapundit’s free-for-all debunking of an earlier Zeyad post on the subject.)