Month: June 2007

My media contacts in Britain have all had a cow about Tony Blair’s Al Gore impersonation this week. The prime minister began his premiership by slavishly sucking up to the media, creating the world’s biggest spin operation, and subsequently didn’t like it when a few saw through the blather. The Blair government is also knee-deep in corporate sleaze, something not so well known among Blair’s American fans. Simon Jenkins lets it rip today on Blair’s anti-media chutzpah, in a review of the latest corruption scandal:

As the onion skins peel back, al-Yamamah emerges as not a defence contract at all but a vehicle for financial "skimming" by rich Saudis (and Britons such as Mark Thatcher). While British governments could argue that before the 1998 convention such payments were legal, that has not been so since and they were specifically outlawed in 2001. Whitehall has been complicit in a colossal, secret and illegal act of bribery to win a grossly inflated contract. That is why Goldsmith had to suppress the SFO inquiry and why BAE dare not let Lord Woolf near the stinking trough. And Blair has the gall to call the press cynical.

I like Blair, but I haven’t had to live with him this past decade. My own view is that Enoch Powell was right: politicians who complain about the press are like sailors complaining about the weather.

James Joyner sees the sense in tough love for fat kids. Megan McArdle isn’t buying all the obesity hype.

Marc Ambinder creates a fake anti-Obama ad in order to help Obama refute a looming smear. Others, meanwhile, are making freelance Obama ads as well. I swear I have nothing to do with this one:

A reader adds:

Somewhere in America, Ron Paul Girl is finishing up her video, which centers around the gold standard.

And somewhere in America, K-Lo is dusting off her Romney lyrics. Eww.

The blogosphere tries to figure out Fred Thompson. I’m not convinced there’s anything to figure out. The Hill editorializes:

There comes a point, and Thompson has surely just about reached it, when a candidate needs take the plunge or look indecisive and unserious. Buzz is wonderful, but it’s like an automobile — it cannot run on fumes indefinitely.

Joe Gandelman worries that Thompson is not planning to appeal to independents. Chris Cillizza sees him as an empty vessel for thwarted Republican dreams:

Need evidence? Just 4 percent of Republican primary voters in the L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll said they would not vote for Thompson under any circumstances. Compare that with the 22 percent who said they could never support McCain and the 12 percent who said it would be impossible for them to back Romney.

Thompson also seems to be the unannounced Bush successor, if the Bush and Cheney dynasties are any indicator. I’m inclined to agree with Michael Stikcings that Romney is still, in the long run, a more plausible consensus figure for the GOP (despite evangelical anti-Mormon bigotry). It helps that Romney has no fixed beliefs or principles. What he’ll need to win the nomination may have to be junked as soon as he gets it. For Romney: no sweat.

A cicada sits on a twig in a forest preserve June 11, 2007 in Willow Springs, Illinois. The cicada is one of millions in the area that have emerged from the ground and taken to the trees during the past couple of weeks, part of a 17-year hatch cycle. By Scott Olson/Getty Images.

Yes, they’re lies – repeated and knowing recitation of an untruth:

Are you saying that detaining people who are plucked off the battlefields is an assault on democracy? Are you kidding me? You’re talking about the people who were responsible for supporting the Taliban, somehow detaining them is an assault on democracy?

Scott Horton reminds Snow of reality:

The battlefield that Al-Marri was "plucked off of" was an apartment complex in West Peoria, Illinois, where he had been living, under constant observation, for many months.

The battlefield is your living room. And King George can enter, arrest, and torture at any time. This, one recalls, is what the first Americans defined themselves as opposed to. Two centuries from freedom to despotism.

The latest from Mike Gravel:

Q: You left public office in 1981. Over the years, have you often wished to be back in the Senate?

Gravel: Only on the 11th of October, 2002, when the Senate approved the Iraq War resolution. I’d have filibustered that sucker and stuck it up their nose with a pitchfork.

Q: How come nobody did that?

A: No guts. No guts. No guts.

Q: Why?

A: No guts.

Can someone get Abe Simpson to run?

A grim report from the annals of illegal immigration in America: an archived 1995 Atlantic story on the Californian strawberry-picking industry. Plus: a screed against scruffy, Latin-looking illegals – from 1896. Money quote:

The question today is not of preventing the wards of our almshouses, our insane asylums, and our jails from being stuffed to repletion by new arrivals from Europe; but of protecting the American rate of wages, the American standard of living, and the quality of American citizenship from degradation through the tumultuous access of vast throngs of ignorant and brutalized peasantry from the countries of eastern and southern Europe.

And lepers everywhere! I tell you: the nineteenth century was one frigging amnesty after another. And the seventeenth century! We had no control of the borders whatsoever.

The NYTBR gets with the program, and Clive approves. Congrats, Sam! Others in the blogosphere respond like the feral beasts we are. Grrrr.

Here’s a stunning little find: from 1943 a guide to Iraq for GIs. Beyond poignant; and extremely wise. The PDF is here. Money quote:

You can usually tell a mosque by its high tower. Keep away from mosques. If you try to enter one, you will be thrown out, probably with a severe beating.

There are four towns in Iraq which are particularly sacred to the Iraq Moslems: Kerbala, Najaf, Samarra, and Kadhiman. Unless you are ordered to these towns it is advisable to stay away from them.

Moslems here are divided into two factions something like our division into Catholic and Protestant  denominations – so don’t put in your two cents when Iraqis argue about religion.

There are political differences in Iraq that have puzzled diplomats and statesmen. You won’t help matters any by getting mixed up in them.

How did we get so much dumber in fifty years? And, yes, I am not exempting myself from this assessment. I guess we panicked, didn’t we?