cheese it, the cops!

the speaker of the iranian parliament seems to know what hezbpollah's packing, and finishes like this:

He also warned that there would be no peace until the United States stopped supporting Israel.

Addressing Washington, he said: "Either cut your support for Israel, or don't expect peace and compromise with the world."

The crowd responded with chants of "Death to Israel!"

 

it will be a miracle if this doesn't turn into complete disaster. shit is spiraling  out of control in iraq, and we're hardly in a position to notice.

i'd like to hear someone intelligently discuss the relation of the sunni/shia divide as it plays across hamas/hezbollah, syria/iran, and the iraqi civil war. get me? how can there be an alliance between the two when they are deathsquading one another next door. anybody know a good source on this or have some thoughts?

i think this  could be the way to get hezbollah out of lebanon. but it's inhuman.

what scared me as much as anything was watching "the beltway boys" last night on fox and listening to barnes and kondrake agree: there should be no ceasefire: iran and syria must be destroyed. the conflict should not be contained. even if they're right, it's a premonition of horror. they were just as enthused by the idea of attacking iraq, of course.

this is a very disturbing development. disaster stalks us, i tell you. even aside from whether it's true or not, israel is setting the groundwork for strikes into iran.

i felt bad about my mental deformity...until i met a man with no head. he told me, without a mouth, that he felt bad until he met a man with no torso. and the man without a torso told the man with no head that he felt bad...until he met a man who was "perfectly intact."

what they're not telling you: the return address was karl rove, 1600 pa ave. just more plame-like strategizing.

btw, i think this lebanon thing has a chance to spin massively out of control and be the biggest story of the new century. start thinking about this: iraqi shia demonstrating in favor of hezbollah while aligning themselves with iran. between lebanon and iraq there's only syria, which might be partway into this conflict by tomorrow.

more on the "women will never be free" tip: robin givhan in the washington post:

When bikinis were first introduced, they were scandalous, but over time they have become less so. One-piece suits have been redesigned so that some of them, with their cut-outs and strategically placed adornments, are more risque than the average bikini. Still, the bikini is forever associated with a woman's willingness to flaunt her body, to strut her confidence, to revel in her sex appeal. There is liberation -- of far more than just the bellybutton -- in a bikini.

understand. for many women, "liberation" seems to mean absolutely only exhibitionism, for which you certainly didn't need - indeed yould do better to avoid - feminism. this identification is all over the women's magazines: freedom = weight loss + mini-skirt. "confidence," "self-esteem" etc: these are not exactly politically transformative ideas: they're more like ways of expressing your enthusiasm for your  status as sheer object.

ok. so why do i hear a "but" on the horizon? perhaps the admin is going to start issuing "compliance statements" with regard to supreme court decisions, not to speak of basic humanitarian international law.

the difference in the way the news networks are covering the mumbai bombings and the way they covered madrid or, extremely, london, is very revealing. essentially they're continuing with already-scheduled stories.

dude. shroooms.

alberto gonzales, finally getting a vague feeling for the rule of law, has suggested that the prisoners at guantanamo's  due process rights might be satisfied in trial by water.

WASHINGTON

— A new report describes Canadian teen Omar Khadr being carried into early interrogations by U.S. officials on a stretcher, dangling from a door frame for hours and later used as a human floor mop to clean his own urine at Guantanamo Bay.

basayev

the life of shamil basayev is in some sense beyond tragedy: an idealist shatttered by the destruction of everything he ever loved into a sheer annihilator of life: transformed by evil into nihilism. he killed many people. but vlad putin has killed incomparably many more.

this is what i want you to say: addiction killed us all. there was no choice.

just had some very hard news. my brother, jim abell, died last night. i started with one brother and two stepbrothers (including jim). now i'm the only one left.

charles krauthammer is a nightmare. check this passage, in a column arguing for the indefinite extension of martial law in america.

The unfixable part of the Hamdan ruling, however, is the court's reading of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Conventions, which were designed to protect civilian populations and those combatants who respect them, were never intended to apply to unlawful combatants, terrorists of the al-Qaeda kind. The court tortures the reading of Common Article 3 to confer upon Hamdan -- and by extension the man for whom he rode shotgun, bin Laden -- the kind of elaborate legal protections that one expects from "civilized peoples."

just consider: the people that are referred to with scare quotes as "civilized" are not hamdan and bin laden, but us: that is the only way to read the syntax of the sentence, as a straight out assertion of our own savagery. the question about whether we treat people humanely or extend some semblance of due process is not a test of their decency but, of course, of ours. the reason one doesn't simply torture or execute people is not because they're decent - which is as it may be - but because one is oneself decent. krauthammer's argument - explicitly - is that we have been released by 9.11 into a dictatorship and from all our previous moral restraints. that is madness. it will bring about our own destruction, and when it does, we will be getting precisely what we deserve.

john kerry, courageous dissident

this from his serene highness john kerry:

Patriotism also means dissent -- when it's hardest. The bedrock of America's greatest advances--the foundation of what we know today are defining values--was formed not by cheering on things as they were, but by taking them on and demanding change.

actually, what patriotism really means is looking at the polls and then voting for the war and the patriot act. in fact, it means fudging all apparent differences between yourself and the current administration because you believce it to be to your political advantage, then getting your ass kicked anyway. true patriotism is expressed in mush-mouthed empty cliches followed by fundamental compromise of all your deepest ethical commitments.

 

iraq, korea

the bush admin would still like you to believe that they believed that saddam had the weapons. that's silly, as demonstrated incontrovertibly by the  way they deal with north korea. the bushies are far too smart or cowardly to attack a country that actually has wmds, or even a country with regard to which they are unsure what they've got. the whole iraq war was predicated on the idea that they had no realistic military response. this makes the n korean weapons program and iran's completely rational:  it really is an effective act of self-defense. the admin will do absolutely nothing but squawk. and in doing nothing they show you at every moment that all that iraq stuff wasn't merely an intelligence failure, but a series of inyourface lies.

ok. i am an american: deep-fried. i speak one language: americanish. i'm a country music fanatic. i'm all about pork barbecue. when i was dragged to england for a year in the mid-eighties by my wife rachael, i couldn't stand it, because i missed the dukes of hazzard, the a-team, and the nfl. my heroes are thoreau, mencken, ben wallace. but now, now i hate my country. i have never been a fan of the the government of the united states; now i would like to blow the fuck out of it, vaporize it, take it down stone by stone and expunge every one of its employees. i'd like to keep alberto gonzales alive,  though, and manacle him to a wall, so that he was always available for a bitch-slapping. when i was watching the world cup, i rooted against the usa, representing the imperial power of the world, the torturers, the killers, the exploiters. i feel more aligned with portugal or trinidad and tobago. i'm rooting for north korea to develop missiles capable of reaching my hometown - dc - and warheads capable of flattening the whole cursed place and all its cursed inhabitants. i would happily die if it meant the destruction of my country.

i still dig the way fox news framed the conflict from the beginning:  "the terrorists" against "our american heroes" .

judith warner is just unbelievably dull and flat. try this sentence on for size: "The notion that boys are in crisis rings true to many middle- and upper- middle-class parents because it feels true to them." now *there* is an insight.

maybe hillary can win. maybe not. but one thing's for sure: like her husband, she's a spineless, completely unprincipled charlatan, dedicated to nothing but her own aggrandizement.

times literary supplement, febriary 24, 2006: "Then, shortly before converting to Protestantism, and while becoming increasingly depressed, Weininger fatally shot himself, in October 1903."

all i can say is: thank god people can still be alone. intimacy simply entails homicide.

horrible things happen when you start reading thomas friedman. you find yourself absolutely condemning things like local autonomy.  you start thinking to yourself: how will our little johnny compete with chinese children in the idiot world of the twenty second century? you start condemning no child left behind on the grounds that it does not assert sufficient centralized bureaucratic control of american children. but you will die, a victim of chaos and the beautiful strange fact of human eccentricity. i hope it's soon.