THE MUSEUM

A British documentary gets to the nub of the issue. The Guardian’s David Aaronovitch explains further:

Cruikshank also tackled George directly on events leading up to the looting. The Americans had said that the museum was a substantial point of Iraqi resistance, and this explained their reticence in occupying it. Not true, said George, a few militia-men had fired from the grounds and that was all. This, as Cruikshank heavily implied, was a lie. Not only were there firing positions in the grounds, but at the back of the museum there was a room that seemed to have been used as a military command post. And it was hardly credible that senior staff at the museum would not have known that. Cruikshank’s closing thought was to wonder whether the museum’s senior staff – all Ba’ath party appointees – could safely be left in post.
Furious, I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that – these days – you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.

Yep. And Wolfowitz said we did it for oil, didn’t he?

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Hillary said that when she first set eyes on Bill Clinton back in college he had a beard and he reminded her of a Viking – which is perfect because she reminded him of Iceland,” – Jay Leno, the Tonight Show.

THE BBC AND RADIOHEAD: How did Radiohead’s Thom Yorke come up with the title for their new CD, “Hail To The Thief”? By listening to our old favorite, the BBC, of course:

Rolling Stone: When did you first hear the phrase “hail to the thief,” and what made it appealing as an album title?
Thom Yorke: It was a formative moment – one evening on the radio, way before we were doing the record. The BBC was running stories about how the Florida vote had been rigged and how Bush was being called a thief. That line threw a switch in my head. I couldn’t get away from it. And the light – I was driving that evening with the radio on – was particularly weird. I had this tremendous feeling of foreboding, quite indescribable, really. To me, all the feelings on the record stem from that moment.

The BBC was running stories about how the Florida vote had been rigged. Well of course they were, weren’t they?