Europe is no longer Europe. It is a province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were at the time of the Moors. It hosts almost 16 million Muslim immigrants and teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas, chadors. It lodges thousands of Islamic terrorists whom governments don't know how to identify and control. People are afraid, and in waving the flag of pacifism--pacifism synonymous with anti-Americanism--they feel protected....Mr. Blair too leads a country which is invaded by the Moors. A country that hides that resentment.

"Invaded by the Moors"??

That's Oriani Fallaci; the words can be found at OpinionJournal.com, the Web version of the allegedly respectable Wall Street Journal editorial page. Do I have to say the obvious -- that this is essentially what American bigots said about the immigrant generation of my great-grandparents -- my Italian great-grandparents, Oriana? That they couldn't be assimilated by "civilized" America? That the Italians were anarchists and the Jews were communists and they posed a danger to the Republic? And here I am, Oriana -- an American, an Italian-American. Here a lot of us are.

And the quote above is merely the lite version of Fallaci's message these days -- for a stronger dose, read this January New York Observer interview of Fallaci (by George Gurley, who also interviewed Ann Coulter for the paper and thus apparently has its bigot beat):

"It is a tyranny, a dictatorship -- the only religion on earth that has never committed a work of self-criticism .... It is immovable. It becomes worse and worse .... It is 1,400 years and these people never review themselves, and now they want to come impose it on me, on us?..."

There's yet more of this in her current book, The Rage and the Pride. I haven't read it -- if you want to, be my guest.

(By the way, I wonder what Fallaci would say in response tothis article from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine about a young Jordanian whose two dreams are jihad against the West and being a programmer at Microsoft. No, it's obvious -- she'd think it proves her point. She'd dismiss the fact that the young man's father thinks his son could get a job if he'd just shave the beard that makes him look too religious. Could the urge to jihad just be generational -- and if it varies from generation to generation, doesn't that demonstrate that it's not immutable?)

Know who showed up on The O'Reilly Factor a couple of nights ago bashing the French? David Bossie. Yup, that David Bossie -- the guy who worked with Floyd Brown when Brown produced the Willie Horton ad in 1988; the guy who put Gennifer Flowers in an anti-Clinton ad in 1992; the guy who worked for Congressman Dan Burton when Burton was calling Clinton a "scumbag" until the two of them released tapes of Webster Hubbell that were blatantly doctored and Bossie got fired. Bossie's operating under the Citizens United banner again, and CU is jumping on the French-bashing bandwagon.

You've got to put a wooden stake into some of these guys to get rid of them.

Free Republic's Dixie Chicks boycott coordination thread.

Their career is over. This is not going to go away.

Oh -- I forgot to link your summer movie guide.

Here's a shopping list.

It's courtesy of the grown-ups at FrogWeenies.com.

These are tough times ... and when the going gets tough, the tough make anti-French pee-pee jokes in PhotoShop.

These people really are les nincompoops.

(Thanks to Andrea for the link to the list.)

Why hasn't every able-bodied member of the NRA volunteered to fight Saddam?

Gun fans love to quote the second part of the Second Amendment -- "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" -- but regularly gloss over the first part: The full text of the amendment is, of course, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Curiously, this text, though it's revered by gun fans, doesn't seem to imbue them with the sense that they have an obligation to defend the security of this nation. And this war is about defending the security of this nation, isn't it? After all, the President has said so over and over again, most recently at his March 7 press conference ("But in the name of peace and the security of our people, if [Saddam] won't do so voluntarily, we will disarm him....").

So, NRA members, please head down to the local recruiting center and volunteer to fight Saddam. You do revere the Second Amendment, don't you?

Why do we have to turn to a blogger/cartoonist (Barry at Alas, a Blog) for a detailed analysis of precisely what's banned by the abortion bill just passed by the Senate (potentially a lot of pre-viability abortions, Barry says), while The New York Times contents itself with this geez-I-dunno paragraph?

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said the description of the procedure used in the measure was vague and "could be construed to impact virtually any abortion." Officials at the Center for Reproductive Rights made a similar argument, saying the measure could prohibit the "safest and most common" procedures.

Well, I saw this coming:

San Antonio DJ Pulls The Plug On The Dixie Chicks

A popular country music group has some San Antonians turning off their radios. A KJ 97 DJ pulled the plug on the trio's songs after lead singer Natalie Maines made a negative comment about President Bush.

The trio is on tour overseas, but they're causing quite a stir back here at home.

"Natalie Maines before a concert audience in London, England said, and I quote, ‘Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas,’" said Keith Montgomery with KJ 97.

The comments prompted Montgomery to pull the Chicks music off the air Thursday

"I would say the reaction is 99 percent in favor of what I have done," said Montgomery....

Over at Lucianne.com, they're calling the band "the Blix Chix." One Lucianne.com poster says, "Who do the DC's think back Bush? The people who listen to country music." Wonder how they'd feel knowing that, according to his daughter Rosanne, Johnny Cash "opposes this war more passionately than just about anyone I know."

The Bias Against Guns by John Lott:

#9 at Amazon

#405,455 at Barnes & Noble

Did the right-wing foundations forget to do one bulk buy?

HOW (SOME) AMERICANS THINK

A college professor I know was talking last night about a student she had in the 1980s. The student had been to France and had found the French unfriendly to Americans. Here's how the student put it: "They're so unpatriotic!"

This reminds me of something that happened when my wife and I were in Germany a few years ago. Many of the menus we saw at restaurants there were bilingual or multilingual, but at one restaurant in the Bavarian Alps the menu was (understandably) in German only. As we struggled with the menu and I sneaked furtive looks at my pocket German-English dictionary and German phrasebook, we heard an American-accented voice voice from another table: "Do you have a regular menu?"

OK, I'll be unserious and ask this question:

Now that right-thinking, freedom-fry-eating Americans have concluded that the Pope is a scummy appeasenik, do you think maybe Sinead O'Connor could have her career back?

From ABC News:

U.S. officials fear that once President Bush signals the U.S. is headed to war, Saddam Hussein will strike pre-emptively, administration sources told ABCNEWS.

But if the United States takes action to stop an Iraqi first strike, especially if they try to seize and protect the oil fields, U.S. officials admit they may end up starting the war itself....

Specific new evidence indicates that Iraqi activity in the Western desert shows the strong likelihood Scud missiles are hidden there...

Detailed new intelligence from the southern Iraqi oil fields shows that many of the 700 wells have now been wired with explosives....

Near the border with Kuwait, where 135,000 U.S. troops are now stationed, recent surveillance indicates Iraqi artillery batteries have been moved dangerously close....

The United States is now considering moving against all three of these targets before any war begins in an effort to prevent Saddam from acting first, sources told ABCNEWS.

So we may attack preemptively to stop Saddam from attacking preemptively in response to our decision to go to war preemptively.

This is becoming rather Strangelovian.

Oh, and we're afraid if we attack preemptively, we may start the war early. Excuse me: may? If we attack, isn't that, essentially, the start of the war?

Earlier I mentioned that TBOGG has a link to a site advertising a "Golf and Prayer Walk." The site is for something called the "Presidential Prayer Team." Here's some copy from the elsewhere on the PPT site:

Pray for the President and his advisors as they consider which course of action to take regarding Iraq. Pray that God's hand will continue to move in the timing of any decision to be made.

"Timing"? Hey, maybe the delays we in the anti-war movement are causing are part of God's plan! Maybe God wants the war to be delayed -- or even prevented. Maybe we're instruments of God. Maybe you don't have to be a rich Texas Republican to be an instrument of God.

Ever consider that possibility, smart guys?

Below I have a post about Representative Ginny Brown-Waite (R - Fla.), who wants to spend your tax money to dig up the corpses of U.S. soldiers buried in France. I now see that MWO was already on this story, and has more information. Go here and scroll down -- but, on the way, be sure to read the story of a Washington Post reporter who let himself be a press agent for the White House -- and admits it.

This could get ugly....

One of the Dixie Chicks is clarifying remarks she made about President George W. Bush during a concert in London earlier this week.

Reporting on a Chicks' concert, the Web site for the United Kingdom paper The Guardian said singer Natalie Maines told the crowd, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

The singer's barb got the audience cheering, the Guardian said....

"I feel the president is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world," Maines said in the statement. "My comments were made in frustration and one of the privileges of being an American is you are free to voice your own point of view." ...

Hey, they're women -- and they play their own instruments! We shoulda known they were commies!

Seriously, wasn't k. d. lang basically driven out of country music for saying she didn't eat meat? It makes me wonder what the hell they're going to do to the Chicks.

More unseriousness, beamingly posted by Andrew Sullivan on his letters page:

We are headed back to a state of nature with nukes. Where, I ask myself, has this situation been thoroughly thought through? Why, in The Road Warrior and other Mel movies. Forget the Bush Doctrine: The United States must cultivate the virtues of Mad Max! I would submit to you that a world that admires the statesmanship of Arafat, the steely determination of Saddam, and the sociopath's flare of Kim Jong Il is ripe for a righteous throat slitter like Max. He did not call meetings or wait for approval. He would just act and let others slip stream behind him, and they did.

Is it just me, or does the use of the phrase "thoroughly thought through" in this letter make your jaw drop, too?

They're falling all over themselves trying to out-moron one another....


WASHINGTON - In another swipe at the French, a Florida congresswoman has proposed that the government pay for families who might want to bring home from France the remains of Americans who fought and died in the world wars.

"I, along with many other Americans, do not feel that the French government appreciates the sacrifices men and women in uniform have made to defend the freedom that the French enjoy today," Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite said in introducing legislation providing financial help for the reburial of veterans from the two world wars...

--AP

This won't surprise you:

President Bush campaigned for Brown-Waite at a rally days before the election, and appeared in ads for her....

"It was very much a party-line vote," [political scientist Susan] MacManus said. "The president's endorsement probably put Ginny Brown-Waite over the top...."

What was it that Peggy Noonan said to the Democrats last week? Ah, yes, here it is...

You have grown profoundly unserious.

The pot calling the refrigerator black.

Nice one, from TBOGG. Not for the kiddies, but spot-on nonetheless.

(Lots of good stuff if you keep scrolling, too -- "Golf and Prayer Walk"?? -- although T and I part ways on Everclear.)

YIKES!

It is time for a truly ethical foreign policy, based on true moral superiority. Of course, a half-century of war in Europe, followed by a half-century of peace in Europe, have entirely drained Britain’s own capacity for this sort of project. The responsibility rests with our imperial offspring, the United States. But she can take the earlier empire, which she once so rudely resiled from, as her guide.

The British empire, said Queen Victoria, existed ‘to protect the poor natives and advance civilisation’. On one level this was a practical project — the irrigation of Egypt and the Indus, the laying of railways and founding of schools. But at a deeper level the empire was a moral project. Lurid tales of imperial savagery — the dumdum bullet and the Maxim gun, and the fate of the Indian mutineers, lashed to the muzzles of fieldpieces and blown to bits to the beat of drums — rather understandably obscure the fact that the empire was essentially a humanitarian undertaking.

--Daniel Kruger in The Spectator

I like these lines from Barry Crimmins:

I am tired of people who set themselves up as the heroic opponents of the vague adversary that is 'political correctness.' Anyone beyond one block of the Smith College campus is in no real danger of running afoul of those prone to adding a few too many qualifying terms to descriptions....

When reactionaries want to alter public discourse they say they are fighting for community standards. But if I don't want some Klansman barking the 'n' word on the street corner, I'm with the politically correct mind police.

OK, maybe that's unfair -- the righties do seem to have figured out that overt expressions of anti-black bigotry are bad. Overt anti-Muslim bigotry? Apparently, for some of them, that's a different story. Check out the ad for this book. The book says Islam is utterly vile in all ways -- and National Review's book club sells it proudly. Are the folks at National Review selling bigotry? Oh, no. The book isn't bigoted. The book is, as the ad says, "politically incorrect."

More from that damn Frist article:

Dr. Frist, who has represented Tennessee in the Senate since 1995, is also enjoying something of a honeymoon among moderate Republicans, the result of assiduous efforts not to isolate a group of senators who will play a vital role in shaping compromises on taxes and Medicare. Even as the leader steers the Senate's agenda rightward, moderate Republican senators say he meets far more often with them, soliciting their views and making them feel valued, than did Mr. Lott.

"Last week, he met with several of us for an hour and let us raise questions about the size and the content of the administration's economic stimulus bill," said Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine and a centrist leader. "If senators feel they're consulted, even if they don't prevail in the end, it makes for a better feeling in the conference."

Haven't we seen this movie before? Remember that really, really nice guy George W. Bush assiduously courting Democrats and moderate Republicans in his first few months in office -- while refusing to give an inch on any significant aspect of his extremely conservative agenda?

But even some top Democrats find it hard not to like the 43rd president.

He's courteous, hospitable and his words reflect unusual humility for one whose job makes him the most powerful man in the world.

He has said one of his top goals is to change the tone of discourse in Washington. And he thinks he's succeeding.

"There is a culture of respect that's beginning to emerge in Washington," he said Wednesday in Arkansas. "I'm beginning to notice that the rhetoric is toning down just a little bit."

In pursuit of that goal, the president on Monday will mark his first 100 days in office by inviting all 535 members of Congress to lunch at the White House.

In another stab at humility, a spokesman says Mr. Bush wants Congress to know he regards this period as "our" first hundred days and not "his" first hundred days....

That's Mark Knoller of CBS News on April 27, 2001. And remember Bush and dyed-in-the-wool-liberal Alexandra Pelosi, maker of the documentary Journeys with George?

He found the loudmouthed girl and her camera amusing, and though he never forgot she was The Enemy, he charmed her back....

[Pelosi said,] "...The relationship I had with Bush was like the great … he was seducing me and I was luring him in, and he was trying to seduce me, and it was this beautiful dance...."

Why do people fall for this crap?

Ten weeks into his term, Senator Bill Frist has adopted a vastly different approach as majority leader, preferring the broad themes and political gestures favored by the White House and conservatives to the pragmatic, back-room tasks favored by his Republican predecessors.

... Dr. Frist is charting a different path as a committed conservative who says he does not intend to compromise his party's principles for momentum.

...His legislative agenda, disclosed last month, after a slow beginning, is packed with conservative or business-oriented medical proposals, like a ban on the type of late-term abortion that critics call partial-birth abortion, a limit on medical malpractice jury awards, and assistance to vaccine manufacturers — all issues that senators say he has moved to the top of the priority list.

--New York Times, 3/13/03

OK, folks, it's flashback time....

"...I think Bill has a kind of a more moderate record and a more moderate approach toward things, and I think that it's going to be very difficult to criticize him."

--Senator Orrin Hatch, quoted in WorldNetDaily, 12/23/02

"Bill Frist is not somebody conservatives would be comfortable with. He's a moderate Republican who's not really pro-life."

--Paul Weyrich, to Family News in Focus, 12/20/02

"...the Tennessee moderate..."

--CBS News, 12/23/02

"A wealthy moderate from a Southern state..."

--Joe Johns, NBC News, 12/20/02

"We think he's a real pragmatist, that he understands that the party needs to get back on track of becoming Lincoln's party once again. We're hopeful we'll have a seat at the table to talk about everything from judgeships to legislation."

--Jennifer Stockman, co-chairwoman of the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition, quoted in Salon, 12/21/02

"But Frist is also a pragmatist and a vote counter, and he knows that 50 senators, even adding the vice president's vote, don't add up to the 60 votes he would need to stop a filibuster."

--Orlando Sentinel, 1/5/03

A federal judge in Manhattan refused yesterday to reverse a ruling that Jose Padilla, who has been held for nine months in military custody, be allowed to meet with lawyers challenging his detention as an enemy combatant.

--New York Times

That judge must be a bleeding-heart, America-hating wimp, right? Well, it seems unlikely -- Judge Michael Mukasey is a longtime friend of Rudolph Giuliani who swore him in as mayor in 1998. Mukasey also presided over the trial in which Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine co-defendants were convicted.

(Thanks to Janet for pointing this out to me. She says, by the way, that Giuliani asked Mukasey to swear him in at both of his inaugurals.)

Accused of terrorism?

Our terrorism defense lawyers will protect your rights. (800) 841-1881

This is an ad that's currently in the banner at the top of my blog -- on my browser, at least.

This disturbs me.

"...Speaking of champagne, there was some serious talk -- in 1918, I think it was, the second centenary of the first use of the name to designate the sparkling wines of Hautvillers -- some talk, as I say, of seeking canonisation for Dom Pérignon, champagne's inventor. Nothing came of it, and yet men have been canonised for less."

"Very much less," said Hillier. "I would sooner seek intercession from Saint Pérignon than from Saint Paul."

--Anthony Burgess, Tremor of Intent (1966)

A senior intelligence analyst in Australia just resigned, expressing doubts about the wisdom of war with Iraq.

''I'm convinced a war against Iraq at this time would be wrong. For a start, Iraq does not pose a security threat to the U.S., or to the U.K. or Australia, or to any other country, at this point in time," former Office of National Assessments intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie said, announcing his resignation late on Wednesday evening....

A critical factor behind Wilkie's resignation was claims made by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council purporting that a link exists between al-Qaeda and Iraq. ''As far as I'm aware there was no hard evidence and there is still no hard evidence that there is any active cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda,'' Wilkie told Australia Broadcasting Corp (ABC) television....

Wilkie believes that a war on Iraq may well turn out to be counter-productive. ''In fact, a war is the exact course of action most likely to cause Saddam to do exactly what we're trying to prevent. I believe it's the course of action that is most likely to cause him to lash out recklessly, to use weapons of mass destruction and to possibly play a terrorism card,'' he said.

Damn, and all those right-wingers just stocked up on Australian wines to replace the French stuff they flushed down the toilet....

Take the recommendation of TAPPED and read this Washington Post article by Vernon Loeb and Thomas Ricks on likely problems in an occupation of postwar Iraq. For starters, Loeb and Ricks write,

An occupation force of 45,000 to 60,000 Army troops -- the range under consideration by the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- could force an end to peace-time training and rotation cycles in a service already deployed in Germany, Korea, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and the Sinai.

And that range might drastically underestimate the real need:

Retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash[, who] commanded the first Army peacekeeping operation in the Balkans in 1995...said he believes 200,000 U.S. and allied forces will be necessary to stabilize Iraq....

Nash says that

up to two divisions alone -- 25,000 to 50,000 troops -- could be required just to guard any chemical or biological weapons sites that are discovered until the weapons are disposed of properly.

The Joint Chiefs want to use barely more troops than that for the entire occupation.

Loeb and Ricks don't speculate on what might happen if the occupation force is too small, but what do you think's going to happen if we short-staff the job of guarding chem/bio sites? Think it's possible that some anthrax might go missing here and there?

"There's going to be a power vacuum," said one senior defense official sympathetic to the Army. "How will that be filled? I'm not an expert in the region, but if you use the Balkans as a model, we may be getting into the middle of a civil war."

If that happens, will we care? Or, with Iraq probably gone from the front pages, will essentially we blow it off?

By the way, if the words "weapon," "mass," and "destruction" still mean what I think they mean, don't we logically have to include, on the list of "weapons of mass destruction," the MOAB?

This was posted recently on a Web board by someone who works on surveys for a media-affiliated polling outfit:

... I have to say that what I found most interesting about the actual polling this time was the extraordinary increase in naked hostility I got from pro-war people, both the ones who consented to do the poll (sometimes while expressing disgust with the "obvious liberal slant" of such questions as "Do you approve or disapprove of using military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power?") and those--and they were legion--who called me a motherfucker or worse after I told them who I was working for and slammed down the phone. Perhaps surprisingly, I really haven't been getting that much of this sort of thing since 9/11, which perhaps reflects the mellow mood that finding themselves at one with the zeitgeist had put many arch-conservatives in. At the risk of reading too much into one (very big) change, I suspect that the Angry White Men have been seeing enough TV coverage of anti-war protesters and lily-livered UN'ers and reading enough squishy editorials to start to feel beleaguered again. I'm not sure whether this a good thing, a bad thing, or neither.

I think it's a bad thing -- you have an honest debate in a free society and these guys think it's a personal attack on them.

A blistering editorial in this week's New York Observer:

Somehow, the Bush administration’s cowboys have done the unthinkable. They have alienated friends, ruined international relationships, squandered the good will and sympathy that the Sept. 11 atrocities inspired, and turned America into a global villain. All of this, while Saddam Hussein smiles and watches the world turn in his favor, inheriting the gusts of international opinion that Mr. Bush has mind-bogglingly forfeited. Rarely in modern times has such a blundering swap taken place. ...

With its Reagan-era bluster and frat-house machismo, the Bush administration has played into the hands of terrorists, breaking apart NATO and fracturing half-century-old relations with Europe that have persevered through all the roilings of post–World War II history. And the administration did it at just the very moment when the West has been targeted—not by that wretched despot Saddam, but by the murderous followers of Osama bin Laden....

Osama bin Laden did not create this sad state of affairs. George W. Bush did.

Rarely in the face of war has the leadership in this country—both the executive and the opposition—served it so badly. The opposition has cynically acquiesced; they have not challenged this intellectually challenged President....

Oh, just read it.

You know, of course, that they're now calling french fries "freedom fries" in the cafeterias at the House of Representatives. What do the French think? From The Boston Globe:

''We are at a very serious moment dealing with very serious issues and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes,'' said Nathalie Loisau, an embassy spokeswoman.

Sometimes a sneer like that is exactly what's called for.

You realize, of course, that they’re going to try to blame us for everything from now on.

It doesn’t matter whether the war has been prevented or merely delayed. It doesn’t even matter that it may take place and be an easy rout. Afterward they’ll blame our resistance to the war for anything that goes wrong in America or the world.

Another terrorist attack? More and scarier saber-rattling from North Korea, or possibly Iran? Difficulties in an Iraq war? They’ll say it’s because the administration had to deal with us, the naysayers, instead of focusing completely on terror or rogue states or war planning. (They’ll say we distracted them even though they’re saying now that Iraq isn’t distracting them from al-Qaeda.)

More trouble between Israel and the Palestinians? They’ll say we encouraged it, with our “pro-terror” demonstrations, or that we delayed the peaceful resolution of the crisis that was simply inevitable after an Iraq war.

A worsening economy? They’ll say the war cost more because we forced them to delay it. They’ll say oil prices stayed high for too long because they had to wait to fight.

This won’t just be the same old right-wing line, that everything bad is the fault of liberals. This will essentially be an accusation of treason. Our “disloyalty,” not foolhardy tax cuts, will be blamed for hard times. Our “disloyalty,” not diplomatic ineptitude and the reckless “axis of evil” insult, will be blamed for a worsening Korean crisis. Our “disloyalty” will be blamed if too many GIs die in friendly fire in an Iraq war, if there are excessive civilian casualties, if Saddam uses chemical or biological weapons (they’ll say we gave him time to perfect his nefarious schemes).

A lot of Americans really might buy this argument. And if they don’t do so spontaneously, they’ll certainly be encouraged to do so in 2004. Unless life is suddenly very, very good, the election that year will almost certainly be an “angry white male” election, and we’re going to be the targets of that anger.

Damn, I hope I’m wrong about this.

Andrew Sullivan, ex-wunderkind New Republic editor and alleged Really Smart Guy, writes this today:

here's the economic expert, Krugman, on the looming deficit:

"[R]ight now the deficit, while huge in absolute terms, is only 2 — make that 3, O.K., maybe 4 — percent of G.D.P."

I take Krugman's broader point about the deficit, and agree with it. But why such contemptuous sloppiness? There's a critical difference between 2 and 4 percent of GNP. Isn't there?

Um, Andrew? That's not sloppiness -- it's a joke. It's a wry joke about the fact that every few days the administration says, in effect, "Whoops, sorry -- it looks as if the deficit is going to be even bigger than we said it would be a few days ago."

Get it, Andrew?

(UPDATE: TBOGG beat me to the punch on this one.)

Over the weekend, Bill Keller reported in The New York Times that Michael Drosnin, who believes that prophecies can be found in the Hebrew Bible if you lay its text out like a word-search puzzle, has apparently given a briefing on his nutball theory to officials of the Defense Department.

Today, in a letter to the Times, Drosnin says, yes, he has briefed U.S. officials.

If, even in a tiny corner of your brain, you wonder whether there might possibly be something to this Bible Code stuff, please go here immediately and let Brendan McKay, an Australian mathematician, reassure you that what Drosnin's trying to palm off is absolute bollocks.

Drosnin insists that there's something magical and mystical about the Bible -- only there, he says, can so many references and allusions be found. McKay disproves this, with gusto. From the links on his page you can learn, for instance, that references to Chanukkah candles are secretly encoded in War and Peace, and that many assassinations are predicted by Moby Dick, as is the death of Princess Diana. (Others have also had at the Bible Code theory -- this gentleman, for instance; alas, the fellow who, according to this page, found prophecies in the Microsoft Access Developers Toolkit 2.0 license agreement seems not to have posted his results.)

If you have a chance, go to a bookstore and look at Drosnin's book -- not the current book, The Bible Code II, which (conveniently) predicts recent cataclysms, but the first book, The Bible Code, published in 1997. You'll probably find it in the Religion section. Look for Osama bin Laden's name in the index -- not there. Look for a prediction of the 9/11 attacks -- not there either. A nuclear attack by Islamic terrorists is predicted, but its instigator is supposed to be Muammar Khaddafi (and, of course, no such thing has happened yet). Benjamin Netanyahu, elected prime minister of Israel shortly before Drosnin published his first book, figures prominently in its prophecies. Alas, he's no longer prime minister and he's not even foreign minister anymore; as Israel's new finance minister, maybe he'll bring about the Apocalypse by devaluing the shekel, but somehow I doubt it.

Did I include Japan among the countries opposed to Bush's war last week? My bad. Japan is, in fact, part of the C.O.W. (coalition of the willing).

Iraq:

United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq recently discovered a new variety of rocket seemingly configured to strew bomblets filled with chemical or biological agents over large areas, United States officials say.

The U.S.:

U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf may be armed with radioactive bombs and missiles hundreds of times more potent than similar weapons used during the Gulf War and the U.N. military campaign in Bosnia.

Iraq:

The reconfigured rocket warheads appear to be cobbled together from Iraq's stockpiles of imported or home-built weapons, some [of] which Iraq had used with both conventional and chemical warheads.

The U.S.:

[British researcher Dai] Williams and others also claim that patents covering conversion or modification of earlier generation bombs for use as bunker-busters indicate that depleted uranium is being used in these weapons.

Iraq:

At first, [an American official] said, Iraq told the inspectors that it was designed as a conventional cluster bomb, which would scatter explosive submunitions over its target, and not as a chemical weapon. A few days later, he said, the Iraqis conceded that some might have been configured as chemical weapons.

The U.S.:

The Pentagon has not confirmed the use of uranium or depleted uranium in the bunker-busters, and it has refused to identify the composition of the dense-metal warheads that enable the missiles to penetrate structures deeply buried under earth, steel and reinforced concrete.

Iraq:

The distinctive appearance of the rockets' cluster munitions, heavy metal balls with holes in them, suggested their use as a way to disperse chemical or biological weapons, said the official. "If you take the kinds of fuses we know they have, and you screw them in there, when these things come out from the main frame and they explode inward, chemical agents come out," [the American official] said.

"These can be used for biological weapons, too," he said.

The U.S.:

...critics such as British researcher Dai Williams contend that only uranium -- in one form or another -- possesses the density and other characteristics necessary to achieve the penetration levels attributed to such weapons as the 2,000-pound AGM 130C air-to-ground cruise missile, and the guided bomb unit, or GBU, series of laser-guided hard-target penetrators intended to pierce bunkers and other reinforced structures.

Iraq:

"... they found Iraq could manufacture these indigenously, so who knows how many they have?"

The U.S.:

Depleted uranium ... is dirt cheap. Tons of it, over 500 million pounds the last time anyone counted, is lying around in various states of nuclear "decay" at government repositories throughout the country.

Iraq:

"When you look at page after page of what the Iraqis have done over the years to hide, to deceive, to cheat, to keep information away from the inspectors, to change facts to fit the latest issue, and once they put that set of facts before you, when you find you those facts are false, they come up with a new set of facts — it's a constant pattern," [Secretary of State Colin Powell] said on "Fox News Sunday."

The U.S.:

The Pentagon has not confirmed the use of uranium or depleted uranium in the bunker-busters, and it has refused to identify the composition of the dense-metal warheads that enable the missiles to penetrate structures deeply buried under earth, steel and reinforced concrete.

...the patent application for a narrow-profile version of the BLU-109B bomb (which is delivered by a GBU-24) specifically refers to penetrating bodies made of tungsten or depleted uranium.

"If they're really using tungsten, why keep it classified?" Williams said.

(Iraq rocket story: New York Times, 3/10/03. U.S. bomb story: Wired, 3/10/03. Thanks to BuzzFlash for the Wired link.)

GOP GRATITUDE

ALBANY — [Republican] Gov. Pataki [of New York] has set up a $1,000-a-member “Governor’s Trust” to help deliver his message of fiscal austerity “without distortion from the liberal media.”

Announcement of the new organization was contained in a fund-raising letter sent earlier this month to former Pataki donors. A copy of the letter was obtained Monday by The Associated Press....

“With your financial support, I will be able to get my message out to New Yorkers directly — without distortion from the elite liberal media — and to fight on a level playing field with our opponents,” Pataki wrote....

--New York Daily News, 3/10/03

NEW YORK (AP) — The editorial board of the New York Times has endorsed Gov. George Pataki for a third term, calling him the most qualified candidate to lead the state during its ongoing financial troubles....

--USA Today, 10/27/02

Why does Andrew Sullivan think Al Sharpton will be a major factor in the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination when Sharpton doesn't even crack double digits in his home state?

Oh, and by the way, George W.'s job approval rating is down to 54%, according to Zogby.

Let me make the obvious point about the kidnapping of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad's children (emphasis mine):

Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi which their father had fled hours earlier. They were found cowering behind a wardrobe with a senior al-Qaeda member.

The boys have been held in Pakistan, but this weekend they were flown to America to be questioned about their father.

CIA interrogators confirmed on Saturday that the boys were staying at a secret address.

"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said an official.

The interrogators are handling them with kid gloves, in America. But what about the six months when they weren't in America? Were they handled with kid gloves, do you think? In Pakistan?

Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft on the seizure of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's kids:

Isn't this kidnapping? How about a human rights violation? What kind of precedent does this set? Seven and nine years old -- has this Administration lost its mind?

We didn't realize that enemy combatant status was hereditary.

This was in last Saturday's Daily Mirror. Can this possibly be true? Can the leadership of this country possibly have degenerated this much?

George Bush pulled out of a speech to the European Parliament when MEPs [members of the European Parliament] wouldn't guarantee a standing ovation.

Senior White House officials said the President would only go to Strasbourg to talk about Iraq if he had a stage-managed welcome.

A source close to negotiations said last night: "President Bush agreed to a speech but insisted he get a standing ovation like at the State of the Union address.

"His people also insisted there were no protests, or heckling.

"I believe it would be a crucial speech for Mr Bush to make in light of the opposition here to war. But unless he only gets adulation and praise, then it will never happen."...

(Thanks to Susan M. for the link.)

Your pro-war acquaintances think Hans Blix is a bumbling idiot (Dennis Miller calls him "Inspector Clouseau"). They think Blix is blind -- or willfully blind -- to evidence of Saddam's perfidy. Do they understand that this is simply not true? Do they understand that he seeks more time for inspections knowing that there is probably a lot of nasty stuff to be found?

Hans Blix, head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, delivered the report Friday to the U.N. Security Council. It has not been released to the public, but the Los Angeles Times has obtained a copy.

The U.N. report increases the estimate for Saddam's presumed stockpile of anthrax, for example, from 8,500 liters to 10,000. "Based on all the available evidence, the strong presumption is that about 10,000 liters of anthrax may still exist" and could still be viable, it said.

U.N. inspectors also warned that they may have underestimated the danger of Saddam's aging supply of mustard gas, a systemic poison that blisters the skin and is lethal if inhaled. Recent tests confirmed the "high purity" of sulfur mustard stored in artillery shells for 12 years.

In addition, previous U.N. reports stated that Iraq had not accounted for as many as 550 artillery shells and 450 aerial bombs filled with mustard gas. "However, based on a document recently received from Iraq, this quantity could be substantially higher," the report notes. Iraqi officials blame the discrepancy on faulty accounting.

--Los Angeles Times, via the Newark Star-Ledger

The UN report, according to the Times, says that Saddam planned to launch a chem/bio attack in the '91 war if Baghdad was nuked.

Could the pro-war side, whether they agree or not, please at least make an effort to follow the logic of the pro-inspections argument -- that war may mean a chem-bio attack and continued inspections could well be a way to prevent one?

Two young sons of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, are being used by the CIA to force their father to talk.

Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi which their father had fled hours earlier. They were found cowering behind a wardrobe with a senior al-Qaeda member.

The boys have been held in Pakistan, but this weekend they were flown to America to be questioned about their father.

CIA interrogators confirmed on Saturday that the boys were staying at a secret address.

"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said an official. "But we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care." ...

--Sydney Morning Herald

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's kids, Elián González -- I guess the U.S. is where all children really belong, regardless of where their so-called "homes" are, if it suits America's geostrategic interests.

This was a joke:

BUSH ON NORTH KOREA: "WE MUST INVADE IRAQ"

WASHINGTON, DC - With concern over North Korea's nuclear capabilities growing, President Bush reassured the American people Monday that "extreme force" will be used to remove Saddam Hussein from power if the Iraqi president fails to give up suspected weapons of mass destruction.

"For years, Kim Jong Il has acted in blatant disregard of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons, and last week, he rejected it outright," Bush told reporters after a National Security Council meeting on North Korea. "We cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to remain in the hands of volatile, unpredictable leaders. Which is exactly why we must act quickly and decisively against Saddam Hussein."

--The Onion, January 15, 2003

This is a real news story:

Rice, Powell Say Reports of Iranian Nuclear Program Bolster Iraq Policy

WASHINGTON (AP) - Top U.S. officials said Sunday that Iran had advanced its nuclear weapons program beyond what authorities had previously believed, and they used the reports to bolster the American case that Iraq must be disarmed.

Time magazine reported Sunday that a nuclear power facility at Natanz in Iran is closer to enriching uranium than previously thought. The magazine reported that the plant has hundreds of gas centrifuges ready to produce enriched uranium that could be used in advanced nuclear weapons.

"We have seen this week Iran has got a more aggressive nuclear program than the (International Atomic Energy Agency) thought it had," Secretary of State Colin Powell said on CNN.

"Here we suddenly discover that Iran is much further along, with a far more robust nuclear weapons development program than anyone said it had," Powell said. "It shows you how a determined nation that has the intent to develop a nuclear weapon can keep that development process secret from inspectors and outsiders, if they really are determined to do it, and we know that Saddam Hussein has not lost his intent."

--AP, March 9, 2003

In the process of doing an unrelated search, I just stumbled on this.

Excuse me while I pull my jaw back up off the floor.

If you can bear it, here's the full catalog.

Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained -- by torturing children while their parents are made to watch....If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.

--State of the Union address, 2003

Mr. [Khalid Shaikh] Mohammed's two sons, 7 and 9, are reported to be in custody in Pakistan; threats against them, serious or not, might be far more persuasive than threats against Mr. Mohammed himself.

--New York Times, 3/9/03

Why are these children in custody? What's going to be done to them?

This is being done by our allies. We are the good guys, aren't we?

Good cartoon.

SERENITY

As war with Iraq draws inexorably closer, President Bush is described by friends as not just determined, but surprisingly serene about the most profound decision he will likely ever make.

--New York Daily News

People who have met with Mr. Bush have been struck by his tranquillity. "You would never have known that he was sitting on a powder keg," said Don Hewitt, the executive producer of "60 Minutes," who recently spent 15 minutes with Mr. Bush in the Oval Office. "He was amazingly calm and wanted to talk about Harry Truman and not Saddam Hussein."

--New York Times

"You may find this curious." Chilton took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. "Here, he's resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse's head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn't resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing. His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue."

--Thomas Harris, from Red Dragon, the first novel about Hannibal Lecter

The Central Intelligence Agency has warned that terrorists based in Iraq are planning attacks against American and allied forces inside the country after any invasion, government counterterrorism officials say.

The agency's previously undisclosed assessment has circulated among senior Bush administration officials. It describes both the risks of terror attacks on American forces inside Iraq if an invasion occurs and the danger of similar attacks on troops already massing in the region.

--Yahoo News, via The New York Times

Two thoughts:

(1) The sons of bitches found another way to get that "Saddam = al-Qaeda" nonsense back into print, disguised as fact.

(2) Excuse me, but if the people being attacked are soldiers, it's not terrorism. It may be sneaky, it may be in violation of the rules of war, but it's guerrilla warfare, not terrorism. People who don't want you to think clearly keep blurring the distinction between "terrorism" and other forms of nastiness -- thus helping to blur the distinction between heads of state like Saddam and stateless terrorists like Osama. The same people use words like "democratic" and "free" when they merely mean "pro-Western," or now, perhaps, "pro-First World" (or "pro-American," or "pro-Bush-and-his-friends"). Don't get sucked in.

You may have read in today's New York Times (or via Atrios) that people who are paid out of your tax dollars to keep you safe from harm are listening to presentations made by certifiable loons -- and claim to have no idea beforehand what those loons are going to say:

Two weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims — I am not making this up — that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time.

This is strikingly similar to what we heard last year when the ex-Larouchenik Laurent Murawiec made that scarily imperialistic presentation to the Defense Policy Board, the one that said, "Iraq is the tactical pivot / Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot / Egypt the prize." According to Slate's second article on the Murawiec presentation,

[Richard] Perle, who had invited Murawiec to speak to the Defense Policy Board, told Time magazine he didn't know what Murawiec was going to say before the talk.

So which is it? Is the Bush defense establishment deliberately turning to nutjobs for enlightenment? Or is it running foreign policy, in part, by conducting a series of open-mike nights?

Here's Tony Judt, writing in the current New York Review of Books:

In World War I, which the French fought from start to finish, France lost three times as many fighting men as America has lost in all its wars combined. In World War II, the French armies holding off the Germans in May–June 1940 suffered 124,000 dead and 200,000 wounded in six weeks, more than America did in Korea and Vietnam combined. Until Hitler brought the US into the war against him in December 1941, Washington maintained correct diplomatic relations with the Nazi regime. Meanwhile the Einsatzgruppen had been at work for six months slaughtering Jews on the Eastern Front, and the Resistance was active in occupied France.

Judt then makes a rather chilling point:

Fortunately we shall never know how middle America would have responded if instructed by an occupying power to persecute racial minorities in its midst.

Read Judt's article for its defense of an internationalism bratty neocons want to destroy, as well as for a devastating statistical debunking of the neocons' notion that America and the "new Europe" have now cornered the market on enlightenment (surely you didn't believe that the French are more anti-Semitic than the Poles -- did you?).

This is from a review by Nixon biographer Richard Reeves of a new book by Henry Kissinger:

But Mr. Kissinger does not really believe in democracy. Neither did Nixon. Their fatal flaw was the contempt they had for American institutions—and Americans. The real enemies in their many books are, routinely, not the totalitarians they publicly and militarily opposed, but the Congress, the press and that misguided electorate....

I worked on the Nixon Presidency for the better part of 10 years, and found some of what I just said difficult to understand, at least at first. If one thing brought that together for me—and it was what I thought of while reading this book—it was something told me by Winston Lord, who was Mr. Kissinger’s principal assistant at the National Security Council and was often part of conversations between the President and his National Security Advisor. "They deliberately mirrored adversaries who were secretive," said Lord. "In China, only two or three people were involved in decision-making."

Not an exact parallel to the present day, but...

The most clear-eyed account of the Bush press conference is, naturally, written by a TV critic -- someone who doesn't give a damn about access, about that exclusive sit-down with 43 on Air Force One or Cheney in The Bunker. Read it, it's fun.

I'll quote just one passage:

There were brief interludes during the news conference -- especially the long languid pauses -- when some viewers might have flashed back to the presidency of Richard Nixon. That is, the Nixon Years at their most tumultuous and Twilight Zoney, when the old Trickster would come on TV and you'd sit there not just fascinated but a trifle terrified of what he might say, who he'd accuse of persecuting him, and whether he might come completely unglued or just melt into a hideous puddle right before your horrified eyes.

He's right. I'm old enough to remember Nixon, and Bush absolutely shares Nixon's sneakiness, his paranoia, his free-floating resentment, his utter inability to relax as long as he knows that even one person, anywhere in the world, could possibly impede one of his goals in any way.

They say we became more cynical as a nation after Watergate, but there was never a time in Nixon's presidency when his weirdness wasn't frankly discussed. Now, by contrast, if we talk about Bush's psyche at all we ascribe to him a praiseworthy Marlboro Man clarity of thought, utterly devoid of shadows and grays. This is utter nonsense.

This gives me the creeps:

Teenage sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo faced a disciplinary hearing in jail for allegedly scrawling the word "Muhammad" on the floor of his cell and writing on his shoes....

After Malvo was taken to a hearing Monday at the Fairfax courthouse, deputies searched his cell and saw the word scrawled on the floor with a blue felt-tip pen that had been issued to Malvo, Barry told The Washington Post. Muhammad is the last name of the second sniper suspect....

When I started this blog, I wrote a few times about my belief that Malvo, after effectively becoming an orphan in his mid-teens, was the victim of grievous psychological harm at John Muhammad's hands. Muhammad, I thought, took over Malvo's identity. Reports at the time said Malvo ate what Muhammad told him to eat, walked several paces behind Muhammad, and sat in cold cars shivering while waiting for Muhammad to finish odd jobs; Malvo also called himself John because that was Muhammad's first name. It seemed to me that Malvo's ego had somehow been destroyed and remade in Muhammad's image.

Later, as I began to read more and more reports that said Malvo was the triggerman in the snipings, and also that Malvo bragged about the killings, I found it harder to feel sympathy for him. And the report today also mentions a casual death threat by Malvo.

But graffiti-ing another man's name is weird.

I still think Malvo underwent some sort of soul-murder at Muhammad's hands. I think on some level he was killed by the events of his life -- obviously not in the vicious way he's said to have killed others, but not in a nice way, either. We don't have to be bleeding hearts -- we don't have to hold him blameless. But we ought to want to know what happened to him, so we can prevent it from happening to others -- and for the sake of the people those others might harm.

Does Ms. magazine still have that "No Comment" section? Does Ms. magazine still exist? Well, as Ms. says/used to say, no comment.

A lot of people think France, Germany, and Russia are trying to prevent an Iraq war because they have oil deals with Iraq (France and Russia) or they're actually violating trade sanctions on Iraq (France and Germany). But surely these countries can see that war is all but inevitable. If they were afraid of postwar consequences (from a U.S. president who's obviously highly vindictive), wouldn't they want to cooperate with him as much as possible? Wouldn't lining up with him make it more likely that they'd get a piece of the postwar oil action, and that any shady deals would be swept under the rug?

As I think about Bush's press conference last night, it occurs to me that what we were watching was a weird hybrid: a cold, contemptuous dad crossbred with a sullen teenager.

Bush's message to the world certainly was that of a tyrant dad: "Why? Because I said so, that's why." But that was mixed with the attitude of a fifteen-year-old boy slumped in the backseat of Mom's SUV, consumed with exasperation because he isn't allowed to drive and isn't allowed to get a tattoo until he’s eighteen and isn't allowed to do anything. Old Europe, and Turkey, and protestors, and reporters, and Americans and Brits who support war only if there's a second resolution -- they all get to be at the wheel, singing those gross embarrassing hippie songs from the sixties and being totally lame. And Bush is not talking back, he's not raising his voice -- he's deliberately not raising his voice. He's explained a million times why he's right. But we're not listening.

You know, as soon as he can, he's going to do exactly what he wants, and nobody's going to stop him.

But for now, he can't. It's so unfair.

Thousands of American soldiers are pouring into Saudi Arabia in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, independent sources say.

--Daily Telegraph (U.K.)

Oh, great -- isn't the fact that we based troops in Saudi Arabia for Gulf War I precisely what pissed al-Qaeda off in the first place?

REPUBLICAN PUNDIT: APPEASEMENT IS OK

In North Korea, that is. That's what Charles Krauthammer says here.

That lack of sound you hear is fellow conservatives not rushing to their PCs to denounce Krauthammer as "objectively pro-Kim Jong Il."

The New York Times has an article today about how the war is being discussed in schools:

In Maine, for instance, Gov. John Baldacci, a Democrat, admonished teachers to maintain neutrality recently after the National Guard complained that teachers, in their classrooms, were calling the military "unethical."

Yes, we knew that -- it was reported in the Times and elsewhere.

In an Omaha district, students said in interviews that a teacher had been playing Rush Limbaugh tapes in class.

Oh, really? We didn't know that.

Your liberal media in action.

Now, I think it makes sense to have war talk in classrooms. And at the risk of sounding hokey, I'll add that I also think balance and mutual respect are necessary in these discussions.

Here's what some right-wingers think about the right to disagree with the president: A teacher in Colorado who wore a "Not My President, Not My War" button on her coat during a school field trip has had her name, e-mail address, and phone number published at Free Republic (scroll down to post #2), after a Colorado radio host revealed her name. Nice, huh?

I want to give the Freepers their due: In the discussion, some of them acknowledge feeling the same way about Clinton for eight years, and some of them think no political opinions should be expressed in classrooms on either side (or that pro-Bush students should respond by wearing buttons and T-shirts of their own). In other words, rather than licking their lips at the thought of harassing this teacher, they're looking for a fair single standard on this issue. But that doesn't excuse the posting of the number and e-mail address.

I gave up on the Bush press conference about halfway through. "As far as I can tell, it's all about war, war, war," Kos says. "And God tells him war is okay. And he's using a yoga voice -- perhaps to counter the 'foaming-at-the-mouth war-crazed' persona he's cultivated. But he sounds sedated." That basically sums it up.

Instead, I decided to fisk Fred Barnes. I don't usually do this sort of thing, but Fred just made it so damn easy. He published a list of ten "peacenik" objections to Bush's war. He thinks he's got them well and truly debunked. I don't think so....

(1) Rush to war. ...President Bush has taken all the steps asked of him before going to war: getting the approval of Congress, getting another U.N. resolution (with perhaps yet another on the way), and building a coalition of supporters. He's hardly rushing.

“All the steps asked of him”? Did he actually obtain that second UN resolution finding Saddam in material breach while I wasn’t looking?

(2) It's a war for oil. The United States could buy all the oil it wants from Iraq by lifting the sanctions and helping to reconstruct the Iraqi oilfields. It's the French and Russians who have oil deals with Saddam and thus are fixated on that issue. They don't want a war that would upset those deals.

Right -- obtaining oil from a country run by your own puppet regime is just as difficult as buying it from a megalomaniac dictator whose country you’ve bombed for a dozen years.

(3) War with Iraq will bring more terrorism. This is a hardy perennial. It was claimed before the Gulf war and the Afghanistan campaign--and when bombs fell on al Qaeda and the Taliban during Ramadan....

The first Gulf War was followed by the first World Trade Center bombing, the attacks on the Khobar Towers and Cole, the African embassy bombings, the second World Trade Center bombing....

Rather than more terrorism, removing Saddam will bring more respect for the United States. Terrorists will be increasingly fearful.

Right -- just like after the Afghan war. That disco in Bali? It bombed itself.

(4) The Arab street will erupt. Another perennial. This is often predicted but rarely happens. A swift, decisive victory over Saddam will quiet the Arab street....

Sure -- just the way every swift, decisive Israeli retaliation for suicide bombings brings peace and harmony to the Palestinian street.

(5) Bush is doing it for his dad. ... consider the source of this charge: Martin Sheen.

No, Fred, you consider the source: George W. Bush.

(6) Attacking Iraq would be unprovoked aggression. No, it wouldn't. Andrew Sullivan has pointed out a significant fact: There was no peace treaty, only the truce, so the state of war resumes when the conditions are violated....

There was no peace treaty after the Korean War, either. So if North Korea nukes Seoul in the next few months, shall we assume you’ll say it wasn’t unprovoked aggression, Fred?

(7) Containment is working. The problem is the right threat is not being contained: the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Sure, with U.S. troops and U.N. inspectors in the area, Saddam won't attack Jordan or Syria or other neighbors. But he could slip chemical or biological agents to terrorists without anyone knowing. And that's the threat.

Anyone with chem, bio, or nuclear weapons, or the capacity to make them, could slip them to terrorists. But what evidence do we have that this is Saddam’s M.O.? Why would a guy who is sitting on a fixed plot of land -- unlike bin Laden -- do that and risk a massive, possibly nuclear, retaliation? And by the way, when did all the GOP dictionaries start to redefine “could” and “might” and “almost certainly will”?


(8) America doesn't have enough allies. What? Forty or so isn't enough? Is the case for war weakened in the slightest by the absence of the French or the Angolans? ...

That’s not the question. The question is: In the post-Cold War world, is the case for a war to uphold the international order weakened by the absence of the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Japanese -- for starters?

(9) Win without war. That's a nice goal. Unfortunately, it's Saddam's goal. With no war, he wins and emerges as the new strongman in the Middle East, forcing people to come to terms with him.

Ringed by troops, dogged by inspectors, reined in by sanctions, able to control only the half of his own country that’s outside the no-fly zones -- this would make him a “strongman”?

(10) Bush is seeking a new American empire. ... I'll let Secretary of State Colin Powell answer this one. When hectored by a former archbishop of Canterbury on this subject recently, he said: "We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last 100 years . . . and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in." Well said.

All that was before we had a president named George W. Bush.

Was the Churchill of our times outargued by a bunch of kids half his age?

Prime Minister Tony Blair took the debate on Iraq Thursday to some of his youngest critics — a studio audience for MTV...

Niklas Ergandt, 25, of Sweden set the tone early. "I'm able to produce anthrax in my bathroom," he said. "Why don't you bomb Sweden?"

The audience accused Blair of showing "absolute disdain" for public opinion and the people of Iraq. He was also charged with potentially making terrorism worse by planning to attack Iraq and failing to provide sufficient evidence to support military action....

The encounter — due to air in Britain on Friday before it is broadcast in Europe, Australia, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and eventually the United States on Monday — won praise from some members of the audience, but most were not impressed.

"I'm fairly pessimistic. I've heard it all before," said Juan Allos, 23, an Iraqi exile now living in London....

Around ten thousand Russian citizens have applied for entry visas into Iraq to defend this country against the planned aggression by the warmongering USA and UK, according to the Iraqi Embassy in Moscow....

The requests come from young males, some with combat experience, who describe themselves as “volunteers” who are willing to defend Iraq against the illegal armed aggression of the USA and the United Kingdom, two countries which continue to follow a belligerent stance on crisis management, wholly outside the generally accepted concepts of a New World Order based upon multilateralist approaches to problem solving, based upon the United Nations Organisation, a position championed by president Putin’s Russian Federation....

--Pravda

I'm less concerned with the content of the story than with the rhetoric. Is Pravda still essentially in sync with the Russian government? And haven't we been assuming for a decade or so that these guys are now our friends? This sounds exactly like the Soviet rhetoric of my Cold War youth. Is this kind of talk just an ingrained habit at Pravda -- or is George Bush truly alienating a somewhat more powerful global ally than France?

(Thanks to Susan M. for the link.)

It looks as if this was planned a long time ago, but surely true patriots would try to do something about it: The itinerary for a May cruise sponsored by National Review, scourge of the Euro-appeaseniks, requires participants to spend a couple of nights at a hotel in ... Munich. What -- there aren't any good hotels in the "new Europe"? Then again, maybe the participants are planning to trash the place. I hear Jonah Goldberg spray-paints a mean weasel.

Fred Kaplan in Slate reminds us that this isn't even going to be a preemptive war:

...the war that Bush II is pushing is a different sort of war, a war in which we launch an invasion, not in response to aggression and not even "pre-emptively" (to strike the first blow before the other country does) but "preventively" (to keep the other country from doing something that might let it pose an imminent threat someday).

Then he makes what should be a thuddingly obvious point:

There may be a case for preventive war, but if the aim of the war is protecting the international order, then that case should be acceptable to the agency that represents the international order. Specifically, if the war is supposed to enforce a U.N. resolution, then the case for war should be acceptable to the United Nations.

A couple of paragraphs later, he makes another one:

If the administration lacks the acumen or persuasive power to deal with such familiar institutions as the U.N. Security Council or the established governments of France, Germany, Turkey, Russia, China—even Canada—then how is it going to handle Iraq's feuding opposition groups, Kurdish separatists, and myriad ethno-religious factions, to say nothing of the turbulence throughout the region?

I love this:

Protest the Hollywood Left Elites Without Leaving Home

"Sacrificing for the war effort? You bet I'm sacrificing for the war effort! I got carpal tunnel syndrome sending all those e-mails to CAA protesting the anti-war statements of Viggo Mortensen!"

China closed ranks with France, Germany and Russia on Thursday, vowing to block a new UN resolution authorising war on Iraq as the pressure intensified on the United States. --news story

Now China's part of the Axis of Weasels!

Yet another soft, feminine country that became squeamish about the use of force in the latter half of the twentieth century?

It seems likely that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is has been undergoing torture. Does 9/11 justify torture? Does anything? The Economist addressed that question back in January and said this:

Even if you allow, as many will not, that torture might be justified under the most extreme circumstances, it would be difficult to confine its use to those very rare cases. Any system that allowed torture in tightly controlled situations would risk eroding into wider use. To legalise is to encourage. Israel tried to limit use of physical coercion to extreme cases, but its security forces have ended up using such methods far more widely than was initially foreseen.

If America were to sanction torture, to begin with in extremely rare cases, there might be some immediate gains in security. Much as one would like to believe that torture never succeeds in extracting vital information, history says otherwise. But, for the democratic West, any such gains would be outweighed by greater harm. The prohibition against torture expresses one of the West's most powerful taboos—and some taboos (like that against the use of nuclear weapons) are worth preserving even at heavy cost. Though many authoritarian regimes use torture, not one of even these openly admits it. A decision by the United States to employ some forms of torture, no matter how limited the circumstances, would shatter the taboo. The morale of the West in what may be a long war against terrorism would be gravely set back: to stay strong, the liberal democracies need to be certain that they are better than their enemies.

George Bush has said that the fight against al-Qaeda is a battle for hearts and minds, not just a matter of military power. Though critics focus on his sabre-rattling, Mr Bush has been consistent in his claims to be defending human rights and democracy, and he has persisted in reaching out to Muslims, though he rarely gets credit for this. To keep the moral high ground, he needs to bolster public disavowals of torture by specifying the methods American interrogators can employ, by enforcing the limits, and by desisting from handing prisoners over to less scrupulous allies.

I agree.

It's clear that Bush has handed KSM over to nasty interrogators. It's also clear that the U.S. doesn't care who knows that.

The Vietnam-era saying was "When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."  This seems to be the Bush administration's attitude toward everyone on the planet.

(Thanks to Dock for pointing out the Economist editorial.)

...the Turks do not propose to help guarantee [the Turkey-Iraq] border or to protect those who live within it. Rather, they propose to cross the frontier for no better reason than to aggrandize themselves and to prolong the subjection of their own Kurdish population. This doesn't just disgrace the regime-change strategy. It actually destabilizes it. And it's humiliating to see the president begging and bribing the Turks to do the wrong thing and to see them in return reject his offer.

--Christopher Hitchens in Slate

Well, guess what, Hitchypoo? The process of begging and bribing the Turks to do the wrong thing is clearly still going on.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Hitch: You can't just support the war you wish Bush would fight. There's only one war -- his -- and either you have to support that war or you have to oppose it. There just isn't another choice.

Sometimes pointing out the hypocrisy and shamelessness is just too easy:

Frist: Veterans May Have to Sacrifice

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist pledged Tuesday to support veterans concerned about President Bush's health care proposals, but also said veterans and others will have to make sacrifices should the nation go to war with Iraq....

...he later told reporters that the costs of the Iraq war would mean "we all have to sacrifice in various ways as we likely engage in military conflict, which we could not have anticipated a year ago, which is not fully budgeted and which ultimately will have to compete with what many of us want.

"It applies to me in terms of domestic priorities and it applies to groups like the veterans today as they lobby," Frist said.

...Bush proposed a 7.7 percent increase, to $27.5 billion, for veterans' medical care in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. But the budget request also proposed fee increases and limits on access, which are unpopular with veterans and have been rejected by the House Veterans Affairs Committee.

Bush's budget also proposed charging veterans who earn about $24,000 a year or more an annual enrollment fee of $250. And it proposed increasing copayments for higher-income patients, from $15 to $20 for outpatient primary care and $7 to $15 for prescription drugs....

--Newsday

House Panel Enlists Military Bill In Cause of Business Tax Breaks

Days before the House Ways and Means Committee took up an innocuous military bill last month, Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) made an offer to other Republican committee members at their weekly luncheon: prepare a wish list of tax breaks under $100 million each, and they could add them to the measure.

"It was Mr. Thomas's idea," said panel member Jim McCrery (R-La.), adding that Democrats declined the same offer. "Everybody in the meeting agreed there were a lot of little tax items we had not [been able to enact] the last couple of years. This was something that was going to move."

...If the House accepts the committee's version, and it survives an eventual conference committee with senators, then racetrack owners and horse breeders would have an easier time enticing foreigners to bet on their races; an alternative type of diesel fuel would get a tax break, and U.S.-made bows and arrows would sell for less....

--Washington Post

Let's slam, punch, kick, pummel. gouge, and otherwise cause the maximum hurt on Saddam.

LET'S ROLL!!!!!!

--comment in a Lucianne.com discussion

TERRORISTS BEWARE -- RUGBY PLAYER ONBOARD

--bumper sticker approvingly noted by InstaPundit

I'm sorry -- these people are children. Either they don't know what war is or they just don't care to think about it. Support the damn war if you want, but grow up -- acknowledge the true nature of what you're supporting:

"People are going to die. As hard as we try to limit civilian casualties, it will occur. We need to condition people that that is war. People get the idea this is going to be antiseptic. Well, it's not going to be." -- General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

In a serious challenge to the Bush administration, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Russia said in a joint declaration today that they would not permit passage of a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of armed force against Iraq. -- New York Times

Russia officially joins the Axis of Weasels!

So does this mean that horny war boosters have to boycott t.A.T.u.?

"Pro-war"? Bite your tongue! No one is pro-war. All those people you think are pro-war are actually pro-liberation.

It's one thing to learn that political pros -- Newt Gingrich, say, or his pollster, Frank Luntz -- are urging fellow Republicans to play Orwellian word games like this. But now the amateurs are doing it. And the creepy thing is, they're proud of it.

"This is all about the recognition that North Korea may decide that the next few weeks are their best shot at starting to build a nuclear arsenal and getting away with it," a senior official said today. "That's what we've got to stop — if we can figure out how."

--New York Times

"If we can figure out how." Well, that certainly inspires confidence, doesn't it?

Boorish God-bothering American know-nothings with lapel flags? European denunciations of the new yokel hegemon? ’Twas ever thus. Read Simon Schama's history of European resentment of Americans in this week's New Yorker. Highly entertaining, and probably just what you need to confirm your nastiest stereotypes -- whether of sneering Euros or of overly self-satisfied Yanks.

If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.” -- Frances Trollope

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is being tortured.

According to Pakistani and U.S. officials, Mohammed is beginning to crack after three days of unspecified rough treatment by Pakistani interrogators.

"If you are dealing with a terrorist you hardly go to them with a rose and a bowl of soup and say you come with good intentions," Pakistani Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told ABCNEWS in Islamabad.

"He is holding out, but I don't think he'll be able to hold out much longer," Hayat said. "There is always an end to human endurance."

--ABC News

Then again, maybe you don't have a problem with that.

Right-Thinking from the Left Coast may be the right-wing blog for people who think Crank Yankers is too erudite, but I appreciate the fact that Right-Thinking linked this story from the Korea Times:

NK Missile Warhead Found in Alaska

The warhead of a long-range missile test-fired by North Korea was found in the U.S. state of Alaska, a report to the National Assembly revealed yesterday.

``According to a U.S. document, the last piece of a missile warhead fired by North Korea was found in Alaska,’’ former Japanese foreign minister Taro Nakayama was quoted as saying in the report. ``Washington, as well as Tokyo, has so far underrated Pyongyang’s missile capabilities.’’...

Lee at Right-Thinking asks, "Firstly, how did the United States not detect this missile as it entered US airspace, and wipe North Korea off the face of the earth? And secondly, why is the first we are hearing of this in the Korea Times?" Interesting questions. What exactly is our plan to (a) deter North Korea and (b) avert a cataclysm? And does our press think this story is not credible or just not, on the administration's terms, "on message"?

Janeane Garofalo is a smart anti-war entertainer; needless to say, this makes Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online nuts. Here's Goldberg trying to debunk one of Garofalo's arguments:

So let us put aside the question of the messenger and take a look at Garofalo's message. On a recent edition of Fox News Sunday, Tony Snow asked her about Saddam Hussein: "Has he been a mass murderer? She responded, "Yes, there's been a lot of people who have been mass murderers. And I think Turkey also, who we've been negotiating with, has one of the worst human-rights records in the world. Also, the sanctions, you could say, have been responsible for mass murder."

He asked, "Do you think he is eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction?" She responded, "Yes, I think lots of people are eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction."

Sigh. This is the "Everybody does it" argument. According to this logic, we shouldn't stop any one serial killer if we aren't willing to stop all of them.

I'm a bit confused. What's Goldberg saying here? Is he saying we don't try to stop all serial killers? Is he saying we are (to use his word) not willing to do so, as a matter of policy? Is he saying we practice police realpolitik and try to stop only the serial killers whose incarceration serves our criminologico-strategic ends, while sensibly letting others go on killing?

If you can't bear to read Peggy Noonan's current column, let me just sum it up:

Apparently she doesn't vote Democratic now, in 2003, because of what Democrats -- or some Democrats, or some people she assumed were Democrats -- believed or said in the disco era. Apparently she thinks Democrats hate Republicans but Republicans feel for Democrats nothing but the highest respect, a belief she has presumably sustained by placing her fingers in her ears every time a Republican in the past decade has uttered a sentence with the name "Clinton" in it. Apparently she believes only the Democratic Party has a preferred position on abortion -- a belief I will second when she (or anyone else) provides me with a complete list of powerful elected Republican in D.C. over the past two decades who have been pro-choice.

LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND (REALLY SIMPLE) STATISTICS

You have had only one two-term Democratic president in the 35 years since Vietnam. This is because in the end you looked extreme, bought and paid for, and weak.

--Peggy Noonan, addressing Democrats in her latest column

Quick quiz: How many Republican presidents have served two terms in the last 35 years?

Answer: One. Just Ronald Reagan.

Michael Savage's Savage Nation was #1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list. It just got knocked off the top of the chart by ....

...Michael Moore's Stupid White Men.

Heh heh heh.

UPDATE: I learn from Ted Barlow that the Drug Enforcement Administration's museum has a new exhibit: Target America: Traffickers, Terrorists & You. Um, guys, let's review that BBC story (based on a U.S. State Department report) once again:

Afghanistan retook its place as the world's leading producer of heroin last year, after US-led forces overthrew the Taliban which had banned cultivation of opium poppies.

I'd like to state for the record that I find the DEA museum's simulated World Trade Center debris display utterly tasteless.