Nice Blumenthal

From today's Guardian:

Washington, just weeks ago in the grip of neoconservative orthodoxy, absolute belief in Bush's inevitability and righteousness, is in the throes of being ripped apart by investigations. Things fall apart: the military, loyal and lumbering, betrayed and embittered; the general in the field, General Sanchez, disgraced and cashiered; the intelligence agencies abused and angry, their retired operatives plying their craft with the press corps, seeping dangerous truths; the press, hesitating and wobbly, investigating its own falsehoods; the neocons, publicly redoubling defence of their hero and deceiver Chalabi, privately squabbling, anxiously awaiting the footsteps of FBI agents; Colin Powell, once the most acclaimed man in America, embarked on an endless quest to restore his reputation, damaged above all by his failure of nerve; everyone in the line of fire motioning toward the chain of command, spiralling upwards and sideways, until the finger pointing in a phalanx is directed at the hollow crown.

JAG

The JAG corps seems to be the group that had its "hair on fire" the most ("hair the most on fire?") over the prison torture situation in Iraq. Normally there's always a JAG officer involved in war prisoner interrogation, so that nothing goes awry Geneva Convention-wise. But they were cut out of the interrogation process at Abu Ghraib.

So what I want to know is: are they back overseeing interrogations now or are they still out of the torture loop?

Anyone? Anyone?

"Oh honey. They're just JEALOUS is all."

Can someone, anyone, explain the right's obsession with Hillary? Does it collectively just want to fuck her or what??

Nation's goldfish population prove world's oceans in great state.

Unbelievable. Fully believable expected:

Three years ago, Mark C. Rutzick was the timber industry's top lawyer trying to overturn fish and wildlife protections that loggers viewed as overly restrictive. Back then, he outlined to his clients a new strategy for dealing with diminishing salmon runs. By counting hatchery fish along with wild salmon, the government would help the timber industry by getting salmon off the endangered species list, Mr. Rutzick wrote.

Now, as a high-ranking political appointee in the Bush administration who is a legal adviser to the National Marine Fisheries Service, Mr. Rutzick is helping to shape government policy on endangered Pacific salmon. And in an abrupt change, the Bush administration has decided for the first time to consider counting fish raised in hatcheries when determining if some species are going extinct.

Can't someone please rip a hole in the space-time fabric and zip us forward to November, like, now, please?

Though I don't...

...normally go in for the "Bush is dumb" thing (not because I don't think he is dumb, but because it absolves him of responsibility for all the dumb things he does), this article in Slate at least takes the thought and fleshes it out a bit:

George W. Bush has governed, for the most part, the way any airhead might, undermining the fiscal condition of the nation, squandering the goodwill of the world after Sept. 11, and allowing huge problems (global warming, entitlement spending, AIDS) to metastasize toward catastrophe through a combination of ideology, incomprehension, and indifference. If Bush isn't exactly the moron he sounds, his synaptic misfirings offer a plausible proxy for the idiocy of his presidency.

Go.

Cognitive Dissonance.

From today's New York Times:

President Bush on Wednesday chastised his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, for Mr. Rumsfeld's handling of a scandal over the American abuse of Iraqis held at a notorious prison in Baghdad, White House officials said.

The disclosures by the White House officials, under authorization from Mr. Bush, were an extraordinary display of finger-pointing in an administration led by a man who puts a high premium on order and loyalty. The officials said the president had expressed his displeasure to Mr. Rumsfeld in an Oval Office meeting because of Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to tell Mr. Bush about photographs of the abuse, which have enraged the Arab world.

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Bush is taking charge. Right?

Mr. Bush said that he learned the graphic details of the abuse case only when they were broadcast last Wednesday on the CBS program "60 Minutes II." It was then, one White House official said, that Mr. Bush also saw the photographs documenting the abuse. "When you see the pictures," the official said, "it takes on a proportion of gravity that would require a much more extreme response than the way it was being handled."

Bush is angry. He's just been informed about something that happened last year. Why didn't he know sooner?

Pentagon officials said that Mr. Rumsfeld was first notified about the pictures in mid-January, after a soldier turned them over to Army officials, prompting the opening of an investigation. A senior Pentagon official said that Mr. Rumsfeld was told of the allegations of abuse and given a general description of the photographs.

Within weeks, the Pentagon official said, Mr. Rumsfeld told the president about the case. But it is not clear, the official said, whether Mr. Rumsfeld mentioned the photographs or their basic content to Mr. Bush at that point.

Um, oh. Wait.

So Bush knew about the torture of Iraqi prisoners "within weeks" of mid-January, but only became outraged when he found out there were pictures.

Nice job of the NY Times, burying the lead.

No words.

I've been remiss in keeping this blog up to date. For weeks it was that I was just too damn busy.

But now that I have a little time on my hands, events in Iraq have become so disturbing, so depressing, so out of control, that I can't really comment. I lack the skill with words, or at least the time to hone my words to write something meaningful. The image of that woman, cigarette dangling, doing the thumbs-up while an Iraqi prisoner is forced to masturbate in front of her has haunted me since I saw it.

I have no words to explain why.

And even though I am increasingly convinced that Kerry will win in a landslide in November (barring the imposition of marshall law or voting machine irregularities), that conviction doesn't help me.

What do we do between now and then? What the fuck can we do between now and then? This is human, not political. It is torture, not a public relations nightmare. And I fear that people on the right and the left will be prone to reducing it to a referendum on freedom, or on Bush, or on our will to fight, when in fact it is primarily a referendum on the souls of the people who did this, and on our collective soul as a country.