Can you guess who said this?

After criticizing Israel's assault on Lebanon, he told assembled Western officials: "Just get your hands off Iraq and the Iraqi people and Muslim countries, and everything will be all right," and
"What has been done in Iraq is a kind of butchery of the Iraqi people."


Another report of the remarks included these telling statements.

"If a reconciliation project is going to work it has to talk to all the people," he said. "It must go through our Iraqi beliefs and perceptions. What we need is reconciliation between Iraqis only, there can be no third party."

To underscore his distaste for US forces in Iraq, he related an anecdote about how US soldiers keep people waiting in lines at checkpoints for hours because they insist on resting their bomb-sniffing dogs.

"The sleep of American dogs is more important than people being stopped in the street for hours," he said, evoking chuckles among Iraqi delegates.

The author of these statements? Speaker of the Iraqi's parliament, that's who.


Could it be that our puppets are beginning to pull their own strings?

Call me stupid

but there was a lot in this essay about money that I didn't know.

Our fearless leader

or should I say stupid leader?

Drown them in blood

Okay, I've decided: I want all of them--the Iraqi "army" and "police," the Iraqi insurgents and "terrorists," its civilians and innocents, the Sunnis and Shias and Turkomans and Kurds--all of them to die. I want the Israelis and Hamas and Hizbollahs (sp?) and Iranians and Syrians and Lebanese to die. I want the Egyptians and Saudis and Afghanis to die, as well as all Indians and Pakistanis and Chinese and Koreans (North and South) and Indonesians and Phillipinos and--you've got my drift. (Lately, I include in the list the Venezuelans, the Chileans, the Bolivians and Brazilians and Cubans, maybe the Mexicans, too.)

Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were no people on Earth, no nations, that didn't oppose the US version of the world? We'd be free to suck oil from wherever we wanted, to cut down timber, net all the fish, mine all the minerals, exploit all the workers. We could drive our SUVs at whatever speed we wanted, borrow all the money we needed, buy anything we desired.

Yup. That's what I want. Maybe then I can stop blogging. I'll be too busy buying and spending and speeding.

A query

I'd like my (numerous) readers to tell me of one thing--one thing--that's improving (a) in America, and (b) on Earth. Just asking.

My thoughts on Al Gore's candidacy for President

are captured precisely here.

The sad story of Mr. Wilson

This AP story of a Ramadi man is touching, tragic. "Destroying a village [in this case a city] in order to save it," just like in VietNam.

In the middle of the piece is an illuminating quote. After telling of Mr. Wilson's plight (and, presumably, the thousands of other Iraqis who've abandoned the city), the writer says, "In the vast scale of suffering and displacement the country has experienced, Mr. Wilson's departure is the tiniest of blips. But it's a vivid symbol of the hardships faced by the U.S.-led coalition and the elected Iraqi government in restoring peace and quiet for the countless other Mr. Wilsons of Iraq."

Hardships faced by the coalition?

Condi's free pass

Our Secretary of State was asleep at the switch during pre-9/11 when she was, supposedly, our security chief; she was the mouthpiece for Bush in the Iraq warmup (recall her "mushroom cloud" reference?), and since then has been a main shill for Bush's failed policies, including in this outrageous appearance on TV. Note how she continues to conflate the madness in the Middle East with 9/11, hoping that the sheeplike American media and citizenry will continue to endure Bush's "policies" in Iraq and his blind support of Israel as part of his "war on terror." Indeed, her terming of criticism of those policies as "grotesque" is grotesque.

It's time we called her the militaristic whore she is, an evil force in our international relations, and stop giving her allowances because of her race/gender. If you think I'm off base here, just consider how her recent words would be treated by the media--especially the liberal media--if uttered by Rummie or Cheney. There's be a howl of protest. But when spoken by Condi, they raise barely a ripple.

This could get interesting, verrry interesting

The prosecution (by us, not them) of the Marines who're charged with rape/murder of that teenager and her family. The Bushies are hoping like crazy that they can fry all of the accuseds to show how just America is. But they can't get DNA from the victim's body because under Islam the exhumation of a dead body isn't permissible. So, the Army prosecution (the only prosecution that our occupancy laws allows) may misfire.

Wouldn't that be the Ritz? The Muslims rise up in outrage when the rape-murdering Marines are given a light sentence (or are acquitted) because of a "technicality," when all Iraqis know--absolutely, they know--that the Marines are guilty and should pay the ultimate price.

We reap what we sow. Madness.

It's a madhouse, a goddam madhouse

During the "clamp down" of Baghdad, a group of militants who, according to a witness, were driving military vehicles, kidnapped the Iraqi Olympic committee, its body guards and various visitors who were filming the meeting.

Yup--you read that correctly. A total of more than fifty people kidnapped in the heart of curfew-closed Baghdad by armed men wearing uniforms. Or something like that. Nobody knows why, nobody knows who. And I sure wanna know--with all of our, and Iraqi, forces closing down the city: How?

Update: Some of the captives were released, but scores are still being held by the gunmen. Still--nobody knows whazzup. The word anarchy applies, so does chaos. And it's still only the middle of the summer.