sfarber

What a week this has been for the GOP AMERICA! Today’s spectacular news is that terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has been killed in an airstrike north of Baghdad. This was “confirmed” by the Iraqi government, but actual confirmation appears on the Islamist web-site of his “organization”, “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”. In short, it might actually be true. There is no doubt that this will be the greatest day in the long march toward winning the key battle in Iraq in the global war against swarthy-people’s extremism since the fall of Saddam, or the toppling of his statue, or the deaths...

Oooohhh!!! All hail the latest urinating contest between the United States’ outspoken ambassador to the United Nations (and advocate of its destruction) John Bolton and the United Nations Secretariat, notably Mark Malloch Brown of Britain, the U.N. Undersecretary General. Malloch Brown gave a speech suggesting that the United States “plays” the U.N. by convincing the moron masses in the heartland that the U.N. is utterly irrelevant and to be despised while engaging with it from Bosnia to East Timor to Kosovo to Pakistan to Palestine to Iraq, etc. Worst of all, he suggested that people who listened to Rush Limbaugh...

Talk about “rhymes with witch”! Hillary Clinton is forced to take to the floor to condemn the latest rhetorical outrage by Ann Coulter, whose latest literary atrocity refers to four particularly outspoken 9-11 widows as “the witches of East Brunswick”, and insisting that the ladies “were enjoying their husbands’ deaths”. Condemning 9-11 widows for having the audacity to speak out against the government whose incompetence killed their husbands and rendered their children fatherless. This is the “kindler and gentler” nation that Poppy Bush envisioned. This is the “compassionate conservatism” of George Dubya Bush at its best. Only a fool would...

Bruce the veep forwards us this LA Times piece, discussing plans that are afoot in the Department of Defense to change the Army Field Manual to delete that part about avoiding degrading and humiliating prisoners (a/k/a compliance with the Geneva Conventinos on some things), in the interest of “flexibility” to “interrogate” terrorist suspects. The State Department, which has to deal with other countries, is duly outraged. The JAG Corps of military attorneys are apoplectic. But the Vice-President’s office wants these changes, and damn the torpedoes. Look for tortured-while-a-prisoner-of-war Senator John McCain, who introduced an anti-torture bill that became an “inadvertent”...

And so, with OBL (who?) still out there now four years and nine months after 9-11, with the war in Iraq generating over two thousand dead American service personnel, tens of thousands wounded, untold thousands of dead Iraqis, and hundreds of billions in costs of the war, with the federal deficit at record levels and only poised to get worse (as Congress debates eliminating the “Paris Hilton” tax, a/k/a the fairest, most efficient tax on the books, i.e., the estate tax), with National Guard troops being rushed to our Southern border, with terrorists apparently operating just north of our Northern...

Happy birthday to TD Mother-in-law, who is now 75 years young.

The facts are far from in, and in the end, as horrible as the events that took place in the Iranian town of Halitha (where it is alleged that American Marines massacred at least two dozen Iraqi civilians last November), we really don’t yet have a full picture of what has happened, and let’s just say in the fog of war, there are lots of grey areas… Still and all, new Iraqi PM Maliki has no choice but to demand a full investigation of the American forces even as they are propping his fragile government up, which he did… Needless...

One is hard-pressed to see the logic in the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to slash homeland security spending to… wait for it… New York and Washington (and to a lesser extent because it got so much to start with, New Orleans) so that more funds are available to “smaller cities” (to wit, places more likely to vote G.O.P.) Oh wait… the mid-terms are in November, D.C. doesn’t yet have a House seat (and when it does, its going Democratic) and New York, while it has some Republican House members (including that kvetch Peter King), none are likely to be...

In an interesting response to the loathsome Rev. Fred Phelps of Kansas, who enjoys traveling around the country and disrputing funerals of fallen servicemen as his own special way of gay-bashing, the President signed a law restricting protests of military funerals today (Memorial Day). At a knee-jerk level, one wonders why Mr. Phelps shouldn’t just be picked up, right now, and shipped to the brig as an “unlawful combatant” as were Jose Padilla and Saleh Al-Mari… frankly, Phelps is probably doing more to undermine the morale of American troops and their families than all of the detainees held in the...