Stephen Colbert Roasts Chevy Chase

Maybe They'll Try Waterboarding Next

Yep. Corporal punishment is back. In a post 9/11 world, if you spare the rod, you appease the terrorists. Its total war people, somebody has to make sacrifices. Bush has already mortaged their future, why not beat the crap out them to boot? Oh, and no surprise, James C. Dobson encourages the practice.

EVERMAN, Tex. — Anthony Price does not mince words when talking about corporal punishment — which he refers to as taking pops — a practice he recently reinstated at the suburban Fort Worth middle school where he is principal.

“I’m a big fan,” Mr. Price said. “I know it can be abused. But if used properly, along with other punishments, a few pops can help turn a school around. It’s had a huge effect here.”

George Bush Does Teletubbies

Smackdown

Trent Lott: Mother F*****G Racist A*****E

Lott: Bush barely mentioned Iraq in meeting with Senate Republicans
From CNN's Ted Barrett

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush barely mentioned the war in Iraq when he met with Republican senators behind closed doors in the Capitol Thursday morning and was not asked about the course of the war, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, said.

"No, none of that," Lott told reporters after the session when asked if the Iraq war was discussed. "You're the only ones who obsess on that. We don't and the real people out in the real world don't for the most part."

Which world is that Mr. Loot, er excuse me, Mr. Lott? Of course, in Bushworld, where, it's, only, a, fucking, comma.

Read more from Paul the Spud at Shakespeare's Sister.

White & Nerdy

Music video by "Weird Al" Yankovic from the album "Straight Outta Lynwood"

3 Is A Magic Number

Comma Splice

Battle Breaks Out in Media Over Bleak NIE Iraq Assessment

A pitched battle over an intelligence assessment, covered first by The New York Times and then The Washington Post, broke out across the media today. Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig went so far as blame the whole fuss -- over the negative view of the war in Iraq and the war on terror -- on liberal journalists. CNN aired an interview with President Bush in which he declared that one day the Iraq war will look like "just a comma."

If Iraq is a Comma

Punctuation Plus

A Period, Not A Comma

Otto René Castillo

You have a gun
And I am hungry

You have a gun
Because I am hungry

You have a gun
Therefore I am hungry

You can have a gun
You can have a thousand bullets and even another thousand
You can waste them all on my poor body
You can kill me one, two, three, two thousand, seven thousand times
But in the long run
I will always be better armed than you

If you have a gun
And I
Only hunger.

When the enthusiasm
of our time
is recounted
for those
yet to be born,
but who announce themselves
with a kinder face,
we will come out winners,
we who have suffered most.

To be ahead
Of one's time
Is to suffer much.
But it is beautiful to love the world
with the eyes
of those
still
to be born.

And splendid
to know oneself already victorious
when everything around
is still so cold, so dark.

Otto Rene Castillo was a Guatemalan poet "brutally tortured for an extended period, and then burned alive [by US-backed forces].

20 Years of Experience

“You know, to suggest that if we weren’t in Iraq we would see a rosier scenario, with fewer extremists joining the radical movement, requires us to ignore 20 years of experience,” Mr. Bush said. He added: “My judgment is: The only way to protect this country is to stay on the offense.”

Full article here.

From a radio interview with Noam Chomsky, September 18, 2001
A Saudi Arabian millionaire, Bin Laden became a militant Islamic leader in the war to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan. He was one of the many religious fundamentalist extremists recruited, armed, and financed by the CIA and their allies in Pakistani intelligence to cause maximal harm to the Russians -- quite possibly delaying their withdrawal, many analysts suspect -- though whether he personally happened to have direct contact with the CIA is unclear, and not particularly important. Not surprisingly, the CIA preferred the most fanatic and cruel fighters they could mobilize. The end result was to "destroy a moderate regime and create a fanatical one, from groups recklessly financed by the Americans" ('London Times' correspondent Simon Jenkins, also a specialist on the region). These "Afghanis" as they are called (many, like Bin Laden, not from Afghanistan) carried out terror operations across the border in Russia, but they terminated these after Russia withdrew. Their war was not against Russia, which they despise, but against the Russian occupation and Russia's crimes against Muslims.

The "Afghanis" did not terminate their activities, however. They joined Bosnian Muslim forces in the Balkan Wars; the US did not object, just as it tolerated Iranian support for them, for complex reasons that we need not pursue here, apart from noting that concern for the grim fate of the Bosnians was not prominent among them. The "Afghanis" are also fighting the Russians in Chechnya, and, quite possibly, are involved in carrying out terrorist attacks in Moscow and elsewhere in Russian territory. Bin Laden and his "Afghanis" turned against the US in 1990 when they established permanent bases in Saudi Arabia -- from his point of view, a counterpart to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, but far more significant because of Saudi Arabia's special status as the guardian of the holiest shrines.

Bin Laden is also bitterly opposed to the corrupt and repressive regimes of the region, which he regards as "un-Islamic," including the Saudi Arabian regime, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist regime in the world, apart from the Taliban, and a close US ally since its origins. Bin Laden despises the US for its support of these regimes. Like others in the region, he is also outraged by long-standing US support for Israel's brutal military occupation, now in its 35th year: Washington's decisive diplomatic, military, and economic intervention in support of the killings, the harsh and destructive siege over many years, the daily humiliation to which Palestinians are subjected, the expanding settlements designed to break the occupied territories into Bantustan-like cantons and take control of the resources, the gross violation of the Geneva Conventions, and other actions that are recognized as crimes throughout most of the world, apart from the US, which has prime responsibility for them. And like others, he contrasts Washington's dedicated support for these crimes with the decade-long US-British assault against the civilian population of Iraq, which has devastated the society and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths while strengthening Saddam Hussein -- who was a favored friend and ally of the US and Britain right through his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds, as people of the region also remember well, even if Westerners prefer to forget the facts. These sentiments are very widely shared. The 'Wall Street Journal' (Sept. 14) published a survey of opinions of wealthy and privileged Muslims in the Gulf region (bankers, professionals, businessmen with close links to the U.S.). They expressed much the same views: resentment of the U.S. policies of supporting Israeli crimes and blocking the international consensus on a diplomatic settlement for many years while devastating Iraqi civilian society, supporting harsh and repressive anti-democratic regimes throughout the region, and imposing barriers against economic development by "propping up oppressive regimes." Among the great majority of people suffering deep poverty and oppression, similar sentiments are far more bitter, and are the source of the fury and despair that has led to suicide bombings, as commonly understood by those who are interested in the facts.

The U.S., and much of the West, prefers a more comforting story. To quote the lead analysis in the 'New York Times' (Sept. 16), the perpetrators acted out of "hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage." U.S. actions are irrelevant, and therefore need not even be mentioned (Serge Schmemann). This is a convenient picture, and the general stance is not unfamiliar in intellectual history; in fact, it is close to the norm. It happens to be completely at variance with everything we know, but has all the merits of self-adulation and uncritical support for power.

It is also widely recognized that Bin Laden and others like him are praying for "a great assault on Muslim states," which will cause "fanatics to flock to his cause" (Jenkins, and many others.). That too is familiar. The escalating cycle of violence is typically welcomed by the harshest and most brutal elements on both sides, a fact evident enough from the recent history of the Balkans, to cite only one of many cases.

Full interview here.

How Lucky We Are

Back in the USSR

1. The Real Friends of Terror.
2. United "Soviet" States of America.
3. Impeachable.
4. GI's in Iraq. Maintaining an Even Strain.
5. Proud To Be An American.

Reich der Träume (Nico)

Time

McSweeny's

AMERICAN
GIRL DOLLS WRITE
TO PRESIDENT BUSH.

BY KATE HAHN

- - - -

Felicity
A COLONIAL GIRL

It's 1774 and I am learning penmanship at Miss Manderly's school. I hope you find my quill scribblings legible, as I have a serious question about the inevitable War of Independence. The Patriots say we must fight in order to have a democratically elected leader, privacy rights, and freedom of speech. Yet I understand that you, along with Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld, are dismantling these very things. This vexes me. When I am riding my realistically rendered chestnut mare, Penny, or sitting in my scaled-down Windsor writing chair, I ask: Why must our fittest young men die if the Revolution will prove meaningless? If you will make yourself king, should we not avoid the bloodshed altogether? Please write back to me at Merriman Farm, the Commonwealth of Virginia. Lives are at stake.

More here.

AN OVERHEARD
CONVERSATION
AT THE SUBURBAN
NEIGHBORHOOD POOL,
IF THE SUBURBAN
NEIGHBORHOOD POOL
WERE IN DEADWOOD.

BY KARI ANNE ROY

- - - -

MOM 1: Fucking Homeowners Association cocksuckers. Are they so slow in the ass-fucking cerebrum as to not allow a goddamned simple, commonplace, gullet-pleasing peanut-fucking-butter sandwich on the premises of their fucking pool patio?

MOM 2: Fucking power-hungry vulturine twats is what they are, that Homeowners Association you speak of.

MOM 1: I mean, fuck me if I'm gonna take the three angelic fucking spawn of my hooch and force them to hunker their tiny selves down in the back of the sweltering cocksucking Odyssey just to masticate a PB&J and imbibe some goddamned Mott's. Fuck.

MOM 2: Want I should write a letter to the HOA fuckers and invite them to a civil fucking sit-down where we can discuss this fucking asinine and irritating issue face to face?

More here.

Around the 'Sphere

1. You can find a link to an interesting interview with Hunter S. Thompson over on the Owl Farm Blog. He talks about journalism post 9/11 and what was then the upcoming first anniversary of the attacks. Not that any of us need to be reminded that Bush & Co. are the most vile form of swine ever to walk upright.
2. Charles Bernstein discusses the phenomenology of Bob Dylan here at the Brooklyn Rail. If you haven't read Dylan's Chronicles, I highly recommend it.
3. History of Rum.
   
4. So Rummy thinks critics of the Iraq War suffer from moral confusion. How does he explain the troops who are AWOL after completing tours in Iraq?
   
   

Work in Progress

Noah Takes A Picture of Himself Everyday for Six Years