The "Filipino Monkey" Strikes Again

(This whole story would be very funny if it didn't bring to mind the Gulf of Tonkin bullshit that got us into a fighting war in Vietnam. A "prank?" Holy crap.)


There is the Fog of War and then there is this. The oddest pretext for an international incident one could possibly imagine. And there was our "President" wandering around the Gulf States spouting nonsense, based apparently on the prank of an idiot with a shipping-band radio.

Arthur

Flexible Ethics

Okay, so here is this caucus scheme that has been in place for several months, put into place by the Nevada Democratic Party. Who the Union in question would endorse remained in doubt, it could have been Edwards (who courted it vigorously and has good Union cred) or Clinton (who has strong Union ties) but in the end it went to Obama. The week that the Union endorsed Obama a lawsuit was filed, claiming that the caucus precinct structure that had been known about for some period of time was a terrible thing, just terrible, so unfair.

Okay, politics as usual, but isn't that what we are all trying to get beyond? Aren't we trying to create an even playing field, instead of a new uneven playing field that a new team gets control of? The timing of this lawsuit, rightly or wrongly, gives the impression that the supporters of one campaign would not have objected to the caucus structure if their candidate had won the endorsement, but since another did, they are shocked, shocked, and they strenuously object to its unfairness. I am disappointed and troubled by the timing. I expect better from our candidates and their allies. Becoming our enemy in order to defeat our enemy seems problematic. I am tired of being governed by weasels, thanks anyhow.

Arthur

Los Dos Miscreantos

(Arthur wrote this in response to this article by Mark Morford.)


The boys, aka Los Dos Miscreantos, developed a taste for "Raki" in Istanbul. Each of them purchased a bottle, Charlie's had several traditional cups with it, Robert, swank dude that he aspires to be, bought one said to be the "Johnny Walker" of Raki. Whatever Raki is. High proof windex, perhaps. They were using a phone card and bubbling with delight over their purchases and the trip, having the night before wandered the streets with a phrase book asking "where are women?" If you even wondered the meaning of the term "Innocents Abroad", this is it. Robert said Charlie was pretty seriously drunk, but since he is so big nobody probably would mess with them. Probably. I believe that there is an entire class of angels who hover around young people who have more nerve than common sense, snatching them away from the terrible things in life that any reasonable person assumes should finish them off. Some children have angels that have pulled muscles and plan to apply for disability when they are done protecting their charges when the youths they are assigned to turn 30.

My oldest, the brilliant idiot, told me some years ago that he had been practicing the best way to jump off a fifteen foot wall, if one needed to do that to escape pursuit. Now, as a parent, and one who blundered through life in his own time, one immediate question springs to mind: Who exactly did he believe he would need to escape from by jumping off a convenient fifteen-foot high wall without injuring himself? A wise parent, one learns that certain questions are best not asked.

Anyhow, so there the two world travelers were, ready to catch a plane from Istanbul to Dulles Airport, on their own, feeling quite the WT (World Traveler) and generally suave and oh-so-international. Ahem, and also nineteen and twenty. Every once in a while a father has really got to step in and deliver some really bad news. Lucky for them they have a nice mother (sometimes) so a DHL box just arrived, which from its weight and gurgle I believe is very likely to contain two bottles of vintage Raki.

A local wilderness supply store has a large bottle of used Swiss Army knives, $5 each. The owner buys them in bulk from Homeland Security. Meanwhile the ports permit forty-foot long containers to enter, often without any inspection. In England they recently discovered that some of those containers in fact have up to thirty people in them, behind a false layer of pineapples or something. An entire room, with cots, etc. But do our Homeland Security laddies think to investigate containers? Nope, sorry, too busy ruining the lives of travelers and making them take their clothes off, the better to sow fear and obedience in the American public. My older lost his Driver's License. Well, okay, he did not actually LOSE it so much as had it pulled from his fingers and torn in two, just because he sort of drove his car off the road a tiny wee bit and refused, refused on Constitutional Grounds to lower himself to the indignity of a Breathalyzer Test. I mean, what would Thomas Paine have thought of a Breathalyzer? Franklin? Jefferson? Not much, thanks anyhow.

But I digress... so he sort of doesn't really have the best ID in the world, since we impound his Passport to keep him from losing it. But you can fly with a Student ID card, except then you have to go through a super-special high-risk security check for badass people. They shoot a blast of compressed air at you an analyze it to try to spot chemical residue. Stupid, stupid, stupid government. Will no one deliver me from these fools?

Arthur

A Gift for the New Year

I am indebted to dailykos for calling attention to what they describe as a GBCW (Good Bye Cruel World) posting on Redstate.com, a passionate conservative blog. The author of this piece and I would not see eye-to-eye on many issues, but he's a good writer. And boy is he an unhappy camper right now. All those news items about how the GOP events in Iowa are drawing about half the numbers the Democratic campaigners are? You know, Iowa, the Heartland of the Homeland? What ought to be secure Republican bastion?

If this post at Redstate is generally reflective of the mood on the hard right, it sucks to be them. I agree that their candidates are either idiots or worse, but I thought their advocates would be willing to overlook all that in the interests of electing someone, anyone, who claimed to be a Republican. It seems that it is not working out that way right now: Here

Conservative blogs really are different, aren't they? One of those who responded to this posting just wrote "Jeremiah 17:9". Say what? Is everyone on that site supposed to know all the sub-sections of the Bible by heart? So fine, I looked it up.

Jeremiah 17:9. When the scripture says, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," its ramifications to life are profound. It becomes clearer when we add synonyms: Human nature is dishonest, underhanded, untrustworthy, misleading, crooked, and insincere besides. To appease an appetite or receive instant gratification, it craftily tricks us into discounting plain truths as unworthy or unnecessary.

What a warm and charitable view of human nature! That section of the Bible argues that we are all garbage, that our essential nature is to be conniving crud. When I read something like that I am inclined to reflect, once again, that I got lucky by missing out on a strict Christian upbringing. My father studied to become a Methodist Minister, then decided that he'd really rather not, and set foot in very few churches during the rest of his life. I regret that he and I never spoke about it, but he was big on letting others draw their own conclusions about life. I assume that he did not believe the human heart is "deceitful... and desperately wicked".

Now here is a riddle for all of us. What the heck is this Biblical quote doing in the comments section of a political blog? Does the poster believe that the writer of the piece is "desperately wicked"? or that the Republican candidates are, or that... ? no, I just can't make sense of it.

What I do know is that I would like religion to be extracted from American political life, like pulling a tooth. It strikes me that confronting religious extremism in the Islamic world will be a lot harder if we ourselves are behaving like religious zealots. My clear sense is that much of the Muslim world is fairly moderate and deeply troubled by what is going on. I've had three different conversations with Muslim acquaintances recently where they were at pains to argue that extremism and fundamentalism is foreign to Islam, an aberration that they abhor. I'd like our next President to be someone who keeps their religious life fairly private and well out of the office of the President, so that he could more easily connect with the rational center of the 1.2 billion strong Muslim world. Please.

Arthur

Weekend Update - January 12th

(Sorry you haven't heard from us for a while, but Bad Hat took a little vacation to let everyone get well. We're back stronger than ever and ready to rock and roll. Here we go....)

• This is great. Mark Morford gives us 12 "Top Ten" lists of 2007.
• We all have heard of bad kids, but Mike Huckabee's boy seems to be extraordinary. He likes to kill dogs for fun?
• And here they are: Factcheck.org gives us "The Whoppers of 2007."
• Well this'll keep about 1 billion Catholics busy. The Pope has called for "continuous prayer" to rid the church of ... well, you know.
• Turn in your coins! The New Bush Coins are coming!
• Is prayer good for your health? (I withhold comment)
• If any Democrat can't beat any of the Battling Bickersons in the Fox News debate last night, then the oldest political party in the world might as well fold its tent in permanently whipped humiliation. p.m. carpenter comments.
• Space Invaders: Five Million Aliens for Hillary. Greg Palast.
• Dirty tricks by Hillary? Say it ain't so.

The Goon Show Appears Onstage in South Carolina

When I watch, listen to or read transcripts of the 2008 Republican debates I am struck, again and again, at what a group of blithering dolts have come together to contest the Republican primary races. I wondered where they found these guys... until I realized that they sound almost exactly like the current administration. It may be through a sort of negative Darwinian selection the entire Republican Party has selected for the traits of foolishness, jingoism, insensitivity and a propensity to respond to uncertainty by wanting to kill someone. Preferably someone belonging to another culture or race, if one is handy, but absent that, anyone will do.

As evidence for the existence of this phenomena I offer the following exchange (below) during the recent GOP South Carolina debate. I am unaware of Fred Thompson or Mike Huckabee having any military experience. That did not seem to prevent either of them from falling into the trap set for them by a small group of Iranians with five fiberglass speedboats. What this group of aquatic pranksters thought they could accomplish by playing chicken with an American naval convoy in the Strait of Hormuz is open to conjecture. Had they come close to any of the vessels they clearly would have been blown out of the water. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow, crowded and important shipping lane. It is important as the conduit for Iraqi oil to be exported, it is equally critical to Iran, to permit their oil exports. Iran is in the midst of an internal debate over the value of continuing to poke at the west with sharp sticks to cause a ruckus, or finding a more reasoned way forward that would permit the lifting of sanctions and an increase in trade. President Ahmadinejad campaigned on a platform of economic growth and distribution of Iran's oil revenues to the poor, who are struggling with inflation in the cost of basic goods in Iran. To date the opposite has happened and he has become widely unpopular inside Iran, both among the public and also among the ruling committee of Mullahs who wield ultimate political power in Iran, under the terms of the post-Shah Constitution.

What is challenging is to sort out which governing faction in Iran is in control of which branch of Iran's military. The Iranian army appears to have five or more sections, with a somewhat erratic command structure. One of them is called the "Iranian Revolutionary Guard" and that is the faction recently voted on by 75 Senators (including Hillary Clinton) as being a "terrorist group". Except, that would be like voting that the US Marines are a terrorist organization. By definition, any actions taken by any branch of a government are the actions of that government. Governments are (again, by definition) not normally seen as "terrorists". They may be seen as warlike nations, or warlike actions done by a nation, or acts of war, but terrorist acts? No. One of the difficulties of dealing with Iran is that different military units appear to be answerable to different factions within the Iranian government. Some are more moderate, some seem inclined toward confrontation and political theater. It serves the purpose of the most radical factions in the Iranian government to maintain a heightened state of hostility with the United States. The calculation seems to be that the people of Iran will side with their unpopular President against any perceived threat from the US, so a steady level of testing, rhetoric and provocation serves that faction's interests. It is a dangerous game, because the ruling Mullahs are growing increasingly tired of the acrimony. The most important thing for our country to do is not overreact or get sucked in to someone else's political posturing. For that we need political leaders with at least a minimal sense of how to respond to events, and when not to. The rhetoric of a couple of these guys is as overheated and addle-pated as the goofiest things a zealot like Ahmadinejad says to ratchet up anti-western hostility among his own people, to try to stay in office. The key thing for us to do, given the situation, is to not play into his game, to not give him stupid quotes to use to demonize us. I believe the Democratic candidates instinctively have the sense that their comments already are being taken as representative of our country. And they should.

My wife is in Egypt, after nine days in Istanbul, Turkey. She and her childhood friend Gail are on an adventure to someplace they've never been. And learning a lot. The report from Istanbul is that the Turks are warm and surprisingly funny, the food is astoundingly good, and although it is a Muslim culture there are no signs of people frothing at the mouth. Cynthia's report from Egypt is as follows:

The Egyptian people appear abrupt and serious, although they can be so kind and helpful. My first response flying in from Istanbul was one of anxiety, not the case now. Daily we saw sites dating from 3000-1000 BC. It became "old", like seeing cathedrals in Europe. Cairo is big, most of it reddish in color made of sand bricks. Along the Nile and the delta are 20-30 story hotels and buildings. From the airplane, all seemed reddish or white sand bricks. Flying from Aswan to Cairo was desert, miles and miles, with small paved roads that looked like they went from nowhere to nowhere. Most of the women on the street have chadors and the men gray or light-brown long robes with white headdress. In this hotel, the Four Seasons, it is different. Sitting having tea were two Arabic couples, the women wearing western dress (rather short and see-through) and at the adjoining table was the scarf-covered nanny with the children. Other tables appeared to have wealthy, rather arrogant looking Arabs, Europeans, or Africans. The common language in meetings was English - definitely sounding as though it is the universal language...

...we are both worn out. Tomorrow we have a full day visiting the pyramids, Sphinx and the Egyptian Museum. I am told the average wage of a bus driver is 600 Egyptian pounds per month, a coffee 1 Egyptian pound, a donkey 1000 pounds. Before coming I did not realize the biggest industry in Egypt is tourism, second is the Suez Canal and third are the foreigners living in Egypt. The country is crawling with tourists, Americans definitely in the minority. I am bringing home a few newspapers, one from Turkey and one from here. The US election is being watched, the Bush administration is definitely not liked. People seem to think very highly of Bill Clinton and mention his name in reverence. Surprise registers when Obama's name is mentioned, I believe in quite a favorable way.

All of that suggests to me that our world standing can be recaptured by electing the right man, or woman, as President. But again, I fear that none of these guys qualifies. And for cross-cultural insensitivity and saber-rattling, these comments by Thompson and the oh-so-Christian Huckabee (aka "Huck Thin") are right up there with the stupid racist comments one heard in the 19th and early 20th century. I'm sorry to have to put it so bluntly, but these guys are really clueless dumbasses. Huckabee's assumption that he knows who will be assigned to "hell" and who will not is breath-taking to me. The more I get to know him, the more I have come to loathe him. James Dobson of the "Focus on the Family" seems to think Huck farts perfume, which confirms all my suspicions about Dobson.

Asked about last weekend's Persian Gulf incident in which Iranian speed boats harassed U.S. warships, none of the presidential rivals found fault with U.S. naval commanders on the scene. But several took the opportunity to stress their determination to take stronger steps against Iran in the future.

"I think one more step, you know, and they would have been introduced to those virgins that they're looking forward to seeing," said Thompson.

Huckabee said if it happened again, the Iranians "Should be prepared to see the gates of Hell."

McCain, the only candidate with experience in the Navy, refused to second guess the actions of the commander of all the battle groups.

"I believe Iran represents a very serious threat," said Romney. He added he believes the incident was a calculated one to test U.S. defensive responses and was a "diversionary action ... It points out that we have in Iran a very troubled nation," he added. Romney drew mixed boos and applause from the audience when he criticized Texas Rep. Ron Paul for saying the United States must avoid another war. Romney said Paul had been reading "too many press releases by (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad," the Iranian president.

"Make fun buddy," muttered a clearly irritated Paul.

Arthur

New Years Update - 2008

• First of all, here's that New York Times editorial "Looking at America," published on New Year's Eve. It pretty much says it all, doesn't it?
• Here's the Huckster saying he won't run negative ads against Romney, for example this one. What a putz.
• Here's p.m. carpenter's take on Huckabee's press conference.
• It seems that John McCain has been taking more than his share of lobbyist money. He pleaded with the NYT not to publish the article. Turns out it was the Washington Post who had the story.
• More about the "Christian Warrior" campaign in the U.S. Army.
• Whoa. Apparently Robert Novak ran out of whatever he takes to make himself so delusional, and wrote something intelligent. Go figure.
• 77 year old Sara Jane Moore, the woman who attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford, was released from prison yesterday. You say you don't care? Oh, come on.
• Did any of you have to endure flying on an airplane this holiday season? Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The Airport Security Follies.
• Corn-pone aw shucks Mike Huckabee has had enough of all the nasty things Mitt Romney is saying about him, and gosh darn it, he's not going to take it any more. I was curious to see if Huckabee has registered cannottrustmccain.com or thompson.com, but apparently he hasn't had enough money to do so yet. Stay tuned, the circular firing squad is just warming up. Meanwhile the "Minutemen", America's answer to sectarian militias, has endorsed Huckabee. Great. Along with his belief that crime in inner cities would be reduced if EVERYONE carried a gun, Huck apparently now believes that the best way to secure our "broken borders" is to support armed and stupid vigilante groups. What next? How can Rush Limbaugh NOT like this guy? Isn't he crazy enough, or is he, amazingly, even too crazed for Rush? - Arthur