Obviously Tha Bush Mobb's strategy is to saturate the media with so much fecal matter that some of it's bound to stick. Hence Mr. Rumsfeld's labeling of the majority of Americans "appeasers," and hence Ms. Rice's bizarre suggestion that folks who don't want to see Iraq through to the bitter end are like folks who didn't want to see the Civil War, and thus emancipation, through to the bitter end (what a shame the Iraqis have exchanged a Simon Legree named Saddam Hussein for a slew of Simon Legrees with names like Halliburton, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin). And hence Mr. Bush's sudden admission that, yes, the CIA uses secret prisons overseas, though he's being coy about whether we torture prisoners there. I'm stunned to read, in paragraph 14 of this article, that the nefarious John Yoo claims that "the Geneva Conventions are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights." If memory serves, the Senate ratified the first four Conventions (including the Third Convention, which specifically covers treatment of prisoners of war) by a two-thirds vote, meaning that, yes, they are the law of the land in precisely those instances the Conventions cover. To assert that courts (including the Supreme Court) can't enforce them because of some blanket assumption that America shouldn't be hamstrung by international laws isn't "bold," it's dumb -- especially when America willingly submitted to these Conventions per Article II Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. But what do I know? I just work for a living; I don't get paid to mystify the populace into giving up its freedoms.
Mr. Bush himself opines that we don't take Mr. bin Laden's intentions seriously enough. The reason some three-fifths of Americans are now against your war, George, is not because we don't take Mr. bin Laden seriously enough. It's because you lied about our reasons for going, and it's also because you're screwing it up. It's because the war is costing hundreds of billions of dollars more than you said it would. It's because American soldiers die more as the war goes on and because the war is obviously breaking them psychologically. It's because we can barely hold our supply lines in Iraq. It's because the Iraqi government is barely treading water. It's because there are more al-Qaeda in Iraq now there than there were before. It's because Iraqis still don't have nearly as much water and electricity as they did before the invasion while Halliburton is still charging the taxpayer a hundred bucks to do a bag of laundry. As for not taking bin Laden's intentions seriously enough, I don't grade on intentions, I grade on actions. Mr. Hitler had an army, a navy, an air force, a strong economy; Mr. Stalin had the Russian steamroller. But Mr. bin Laden's major asset has been Tha Bush Mobb's ability to stoke fear of him in every American's heart. Mr. bin Laden can still be caught, just as the 1993 World Trade Center bombers were caught, and al-Qaeda can still be destroyed, without Mr. Bush also destroying everything that makes America worth loving. These blunderers disgust me more every day.
In other news, Village Voice Media recently fired five senior arts editors at the Voice, including the great pop music critic Robert Christgau, who writes a paragraph about ten times better than I do. Ownership characterizes the firings as part of an effort "to reconfigure the editorial department to place an emphasis on writers as opposed to editors." Hear the giant sucking sound coming out of that explanation? Paying fewer editors and then shoving the displaced editing functions on the writers (not necessarily Village Voice writers, of course, since Village Voice Media, nee New Times Media, owns other papers now)? The only "efficiency" in that course of action is the "efficiency" with which money will flow upward to ownership. All praise the new economy!
One more thing: go Eagles!
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