According to emailer ChrisR, on page 7 of the transcript of today’s OBL magnum opus, the grand wizard says, “There are no taxes, but rather there is a limited alms totaling only 2.5%.” Which I guess means he’s calling for a flat tax.

So Steve Forbes isn’t off the hook, either.

In the wake of a day in Iraq worse than six Virginia Techs, this first-person narrative also caught my eye:

There used to be about 80 psychiatrists in Iraq, now there are just 20 to 25…

Iraqi people are living in difficult times. Most of us have been exposed to aggression: attacks in the street, car bombings, kidnappings.

Most Iraqi people now deal with each other in an aggressive way; they show disturbed behaviour; they have lost their civility.

We don’t know how to treat these problems really.

But I can’t leave Iraq. If I and my friends leave, who will help our people?

80 psychiatrists for 27.5 million people. Now 25 psychiatrists for 27.5 million people. If there aren’t 25 psychiatrists on the campus of Virginia Tech right at this moment, I’ll be very surprised.

It was suggested in comments that rather than a gun ban, we need more mental health care. I’d agree with that, even as it’s revealed that the gunman had a psychiatric history including, at one point, institutionalization. Was the necessary followup done? Was the care personalized to his specific constellation of symptoms? No amount of second-guessing can possibly be helpful.

What is worth thinking about is what happens to people who are, on a daily basis, subjected to far worse trauma than most Americans will ever imagine, who are currently being “served” by one psychiatrist for every 1.1 million people?

Most of the children are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, especially those who have been exposed to kidnapping.

Most of the children I see are bedwetting. They have disturbed behaviour or epilepsy.

We treat them with simple medication; it is very difficult.

Most of the families come here for help and sometimes we can do nothing for them, except offer support and advice.

Twenty years from now, this BBC article will be worth remembering.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

A survey released yesterday found that

the most common view is that tensions between Muslims and westerners arise from “conflicts about political power and interests” - endorsed by 52% overall.

These results hold true in almost all the countries polled, “Western” and “Muslim” alike (the notable exception being Indonesia), and the results in the US are particularly striking:

Twice as many Americans believe that Muslim and Western cultures can find common ground than say that violent conflict is inevitable. A large majority (64%) feels the two cultures can find areas of agreement while just 31 percent believe that violence is inevitable. Nearly half (49%) of Americans believe the tensions between Islam and the West result from conflicts about political power and interests, yet a significant number (38%) also say that these tensions arise from “differences in religion and culture.� Asked whether fundamental differences or the intolerance of minorities was the main cause of current tensions between Islam and the West, nearly three-quarters (73%) of Americans blame intolerant minorities, whether on both sides (54%), Muslim (12%) or Western (7%). Only 17 percent say that “fundamental differences� between the two are responsible.

This is important to remember, especially given the fact that if one believes the media, one could easily come up with a distinctly different impression of public opinion.

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Our policy is blowing up in our face. The very people who snatched private citizens from the streets in their home countries are now being charged with kidnaping by German prosecutors.

This kidnaping charge stems from the extraordinary rendition of Kaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin who was kidnaped and taken to Kabul, where he was abused and tortured for five months, with no contact with the outside world. The US disappeared him. He was finally let go when the CIA realized that ooops! They had the wrong guy. He’s tried to sue the CIA over this, but was denied because of security concerns. We can’t tell state secrets in courts dont’cha know. Sorry old chap. Terrible mix up, indeed. Do forgive us, chum!

The AP report says that al-Masri was “abused.” That’s a pretty sanitary word considering what was done to him in the name of national security.

He was eventually brought to another room where, according to his affidavit, “I felt two people violently grab my arms. . . . I then felt someone else grab my head with both hands so I was unable to move. . . . Finally they stripped me completely naked and threw me to the ground. . . . I felt a boot in the small of my back. I then felt a stick or some other hard object being forced in my anus. I realized I was being sodomized. Of all the acts these men perpetrated against me, this was the most degrading and shameful.”

For his flight to Afghanistan, Masri was blindfolded, “my ears were plugged with cotton, and headphones were placed over my ears. A bag was placed over my head and a belt around my waist. They put something hard over my nose. Because of the bag, breathing was getting harder and harder for me. . . . I began to panic.”

He spent five months in a filthy secret prison set up by the CIA and guarded by Afghans. He was made to drink water so putrid it made him vomit. He slept on a single blanket, shivered through the cold months and was fed chicken bones and skin. He was beaten and interrogated many times, sometimes by people he believes to be Americans. He went on a hunger strike, lost 60 pounds.

The aftermath was just as bad–Masri was still tied with terrorist groups in news reports (even though he has absolutely no ties to any such organizations). He became fearful. He withdrew. He suffers flashbacks. One of the times he went to the US to attend his court hearing, he received a, shall we say, hostile reception.

The last time Masri tried to come to the United States to listen to his court case, he and his attorney had walked off the plane in Atlanta and found 20 security guards waiting for them, both men said. He didn’t have a visa because German citizens don’t need visas to enter the United States. Instead of letting him in, one of officers drew his gun and threatened to shoot the lawyer if he did not put away his cellphone.

The US put on a more welcoming face the next time he went. Why not, after all? We weren’t going to be held accountable by our own courts. Germany finally had enough of its “ally’s” antics and decided to issue warrants.

I’m sure we’ll hear lots of yelping on the part of the neocons who’ll insist that Germany is overstepping its bounds; that the US is a sovereign nation. Which is exactly my point, and, I suspect, the point of the Germans. If you cannot rouse yourself to respect human rights and dignity, at the very least respect the sovreignity of another country. We do seem to lose track of all that once the scope widens beyond our borders, however. It’s an odd, annoying quirk that leads to disaster all to often.

People love to trot out the usual trope about how much we need torture, that without it, we’d never get the information that is vital to stop terrorist attacks. I call BS on that one. You torture someone, and they’ll tell you whatever you want to hear just so you’ll stop the pain. They’ll tell you what you want to hear, whether it’s true or not. You take a look at police interrogations and how, without extreme torture, they manage to get people to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. They don’t even have to use torture to do it–just psychological tactics such as isolation, intimidation, and lying about the evidence they have. People are so invested in authority that they start to believe they must be guilty, they must deserve this.

No, torture has zero to do with security. It has everything to do with keeping everyone in a climate of fear. Americans have shaken off the fear of being blown up by terrorists–it gets tedious after awhile. But targeting foreign nationals, some of whom are outspoken, and outsourcing them for torture is an effective way to silence and intimidate an entire population. Torture doesn’t punish terrorists or protect the people–it punishes the people. Specifically in this case, brown Arab people. You are constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering if you’ll be whisked off to some undisclosed location in the name of protecting America, the all-mighty.

Had this happened to an American citizen at the hands of a foreign power, we’d be spitting nails and getting ready to invade. But we’re Americans! We’re special! The laws of the land don’t apply to us–magic fairy dust makes us immune to such things.

It’s becoming clear to me how people in the past who were under leaders who were obviously losing their minds didn’t find the heart to rebel. Tristero’s post about Bush’s madness today really brings it home. The opening line in the WaPo article today:

President Bush is weighing a range of options in Iraq, including a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from violence-plagued cities and a troop buildup near the Iranian and Syrian borders, his top security aide said today.

The evil and, in a way more disturbing, the sheer insanity of BushCo’s foreign policy is breathtaking. They have decided to justify “withdrawal” using their usual “blame the victims” logic. You know the routine—the poor are only hungry because they’re lazy and if we starved them out, they might be bothered to lift a finger to work. The more I see this line trotted out, the more convinced I am that it’s a belief that is racist to the core. To believe both that you and everyone you know is hard working and deserves all your luxuries while some other people are so inherently lazy that they can’t be bothered to do a thing without some kind of whip across their back requires you to believe that those other people are different from you in some fundamental way. And for the racist, that’s easy to believe, that someone of a different nationality or skin color is somehow born lazy while you’re born hard-working. Anyway, I mention this, because the Bushies, unable to face up to the fact that they made this mess themselves out of sheer stupidity, have fallen back on their usual racist line that some group of people Not Them is fundamentally unable to care about their own self-interest without the whip across their back.

Hadley said the president is considering a “laundry list of ideas” from a Nov. 6 memo by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who announced his resignation two days later — just after Republicans lost control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections. The options include the redeployment of substantial U.S. forces to areas near the Iranian and Syrian borders, withdrawing U.S. troops from especially vulnerable positions and starting modest drawdowns of American forces to encourage Iraqis, as Rumsfeld wrote, “to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.”

Emphasis mine. It’s not really a “thought” Rumsfeld is having here so much as a long-standing ritual of dehumanization that authoritarians in our society have indulged in since the slave days when it was literally believed that slaves wouldn’t pick cotton because they were inherently lazy. The deep, sick irony of all this is evident, because it’s clear that the bemoaning of this suddenly discovered Iraqi irresponsibility is all a show so that the Bushies don’t have to own up to their responsibility for this mess. Take that and extrapolate it backwards to every other occasion you hear some racist bemoaning Group X’s inability to take basic responsibility and it doesn’t take long to find out what responsibility the white racist is evading with his oh-so-responsible self.

Anyway, I digress. Bush is almost out there trying to get attention paid to the fact that he’s lost what little grip he had on basic human empathy and, if Tristero’s retort to his commenters is to be believed, even a lot of liberals are sort of whistling in the wind. “Surely he can’t be crazy enough to do an end run around the wishes of the entire country and the entire military brass and just start throwing nuclear bombs at Iran!” But yes, he is crazy enough, I’d say. Tristero outlines the entire scenario they’re probably laying out in hopes that they “get” to throw a nuclear bomb at Iran.

The question I ask myself when I start to wonder if it’s possible that Bush and his crew are batshit enough to deliberately arrange things so that they “get” to kill god only knows how many innocent people with a nuclear bomb is this: What is the likelihood that he can be convinced to let go of the dream of being the President with the balls to do it? I know it sounds stupid and immature to frame refraining from full scale massacre as some sort of emasculation, but before you write that off, take a moment to consider how, at every turn, the Bushies have demonstrated that they think that anything short of being a nasty, brutish bully is a sure sign you’ve turned into a girl. Let’s just hope the Democrats can find a way to stop him.

In the biggest non-surprise of the century, Republicans are getting bolder about just dropping the pretense that they give two shits about Afghanistan.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government.

You heard it—5 years later and the plan is, essentially, just to let the Taliban have it back. Of course, not a word one is being spoken about how BushCo completely fumbled the ball from day one, how the plan to invade Iraq meant that the U.S. half-assed any attempt to actually catch Osama Bin Laden, and how they blew off the most important thing that needed to happen, which was financing a Marshall Plan-esque plan that would actually help the workaday people in Afghanistan get the fundie wackos under control for themselves. I have no idea if there was any good way to invade Afghanistan, but if there was, BushCo didn’t do it. I opposed this invasion from day one, because I knew that BushCo wasn’t physically capable of actually helping anyone, because their instincts are all tyrannical.

Anyway, the funny part of this is watching the wingnuts lose it (well, especially since the rest of it is a existential crisis-causing parade of despair). They bought the line that BushCo gave a shit about putting a halt to “Islamofascism” or whatever the newest term for it is today and this is coming across as a personal betrayal. Massive asshole AllahPundit is putting up pictures of 9/11 victims as if that was an argument about anything at all. Ace of Spades is acting like Bill Frist personally cut his balls off. Like Roxanne said, if you’re touring the right side of the ’sphere, wear a raincoat because heads are exploding everywhere.

The timing is especially fortitutious as conservatives everywhere try to grapple with the fact (again, completely unsurprising to non-wingnuts) that Republicans apparently didn’t give a shit that one of theirs was propositioning teenage boys in the most stereotypical “creepy uncle” way you can imagine. Human Events is calling on Hastert to resign after it was revealed that he participated in the cover-up. I’m almost touched; apparently someone somewhere actually thought that all the blather about “family values” meant something and wasn’t just an empty campaign commercial.

It’s got to suck, though, for conservatives. I mean, we’ve been telling them for years they’re suckers and stooges, falling for a bunch of transparent Republican lies about how they’re going to spread democracy by force while somehow wiping out sex itself, whether it’s evil, non-consensual Foley stuff or just married couples having a little non-procreative fun. To finally realize that you’re a sucker is bad enough, but to realize those liberals were right all along? That’s got to hurt.

One of the favored right wing rhetorical strategies, as has been well-documented at Orcinus amongst other places, is projection. Their favorite targets for this are their fellow Americans, of course—claiming that Christians are being persecuted so they can freely persecute, claiming the moral high ground while supporting leaders who starve the poor and start needless wars. But wingnuts don’t do a great job of distinguishing between their political opposition and our actual enemies, so I’ve been watching the wingnutteria cling ever-tighter to the bullshit phrase “Islamofascism” with interest. Well, this morning’s front page at Townhall made the subtext pretty damn clear in regards to how the term is standard issue projection—it only took me two seconds to do a quick fix to “correct” the front page and demonstrate what criticism the phrase “Islamofascism” is trying to deflect.

Apparently Bush has been desperately dropping the phrase, though slightly modified so he didn’t sound like the 100% wingnut he is. According to Chuck Colson at Townhall, the first people to flip out were, surprise surprise, the leadership of the nation that is most like what “Islamofascists” would look like—our allies in Saudi Arabia. Why is the House of Saud the frontrunners is the “Who’s really an Islamofascist?” sweepstakes? Fascism, contrary to the hopes and dreams of the wingnutteria, isn’t just a meaningless word you can slap on anyone you like. A quick look at the dictionary will show that it’s a rather specific term.

A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

Now I have no love for any fundamentalists of any religion and I think that all Muslims who belong to organizations that want to bomb or terrorize anyone can shove it up their asses. But as it currently stands, the loosely defined group of terrorists that we call Al Qaeda and other groups like Hezbollah or Hamas are a lot of things, but they’re simply not fascists. They’re not centralized and they don’t have the vision of a corporate-government power merger that people like Mussolini advocated. Colson claims that liberal insistence on using words for what they mean is “political correctness”, another phrase that seems to mean whatever conservatives want it to. (Rush Limbaugh is always fond of saying, “Words mean things,” which is another case of conservative projection, since it’s obvious what side of the political divide prefers to empty words of all denotative meaning so that they can project whatever meaning they want on them.)

Even Colson can’t manage to slap together a definition of “fascism” that doesn’t manage to describe the American right as accurately as it does anyone else.

As Stephen Morris of Johns Hopkins recently wrote, fascism’s goal is to “achieve national greatness� through totalitarian control of both political and social life; it seeks to create an empire; and it “aspires to re-create a mythical past.�

Granted, the mythical past that our wannabe fascists want to enforce is either the 19th century or the mythical 1950s available on Nick at Night, but Morris’ definition would make most of the Republican party de facto fascists. Now I don’t think they are. I think most of the party (if not most of the leadership anymore) respects diversity and freedom and separation of powers on one level or another. But I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that the invocation of the term “Islamofascist” is an attempt to get criticism off the Christofascists here at home.

It’s a real shame, too, because as a chauvinist for Western secularism, I think if we had any political acumen at all, we could do a bang-up job of luring people in the Middle East away from Islamic fundamentalism. We would just have to let go of our pride and our racism and learn to actually reach out and be generous to people. Yesterday on NPR and today a quick Google search confirmed my worst suspicions that we are being outstripped by fucking Hezbollah in the P.R. department—they are actually buying homes and businesses for people in Beirut who lost theirs in the recent war with Israel. I nearly banged my head against the steering wheel—we’re the ones who invented the Marshall Plan and they’re stealing our idea! The utter unwillingness of our leadership to do what it would take to acheive our supposed goals in the Middle East tells you all you need to know about the real priorities of Republicans, which is to keep the hate and anger here high and keep people voting their anger and hate at the polls.

If you haven’t read it yet, get thee to The Nation to read this artice by Max Blumenthal about how much power to shape foreign policy the Christian Zionists have. Religious wingnuts, under the leadership of a San Antonio minister who’s close to Tom DeLay and pulls himself quite a bit of cash in the business of feeding right wing politics and fairy tales to the sheep, have formed a political organization called Christians United for Israel. CUFI has had multiple meetings with the White House to offer foreign policy advice. From the article, it appears that on top of the usual motivations behind Christian Zionism—hatred for Muslims, a desire to bring the end of the world, political opportunism and a chance for ministers to make their congregations feel like they are a part of something dramatic and important so their pocketbooks fall open—is seems to bug John Hagee, the founder of CUFI, that he most powerful lobby is D.C. is a Jewish organization, not a Christian one.

Hagee recently united America’s largest Christian Zionist congregations and some of the movement’s most prominent figures–including the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer and Rod Parsley, an Ohio preacher instrumental in launching Republican Ken Blackwell’s gubernatorial campaign–under the banner of CUFI, creating the first and only nationwide evangelical political organization dedicated to supporting Israel. Hagee says he would like to see CUFI become “the Christian version of AIPAC,” referring to the vaunted pro-Israel group rated second only to the National Rifle Association as the most effective lobby in Washington.

Hagee is also pushing for a nuclear showdown with Iran. He’s got a solid taste for drama and violence, which is typical of the leadership of the fundie right. And of course, though it causes all sorts of defensive squawking on the right when I point out the obvious, Christian Zionism is genocidal at its core. Lobbing nuclear weapons at an unarmed Iran is basically a mass execution of thousands, possibly millions, of innocent people for the crime of being Iranian. Thought I doubt very seriously that the Republicans are actually listening to his more extreme suggestions, the fact of the matter is that we have a foreign policy advisor running around the country suggesting that we decimate Iran. If we don’t want Iran developing nuclear weapons, we would be well advised not to make them think they have no choice because American leadership wants to kill them all.

The article also covers the involvement of David Brog, a Jewish Republican lawyer who used to be Arlen Specter’s chief of staff and who can put the smiley face on the front of an organization that most of us rightly suspect is, despite its Zionism, anti-Semitic at its core. The truth of the matter is I do understand why it’s tempting for people who lean to the right on the issue of Israel to make political alliances with fundie Christians, even though they know that said Christians have less than pure hearted intentions on this, since their main goal is ushering in Armageddon.

Brog might be well-intentioned, but his willingness to gloss over the fact that Christian Zionist view Israel as both a way to bludgeon Muslims in the Middle East and as sacrificial lamb in their road to Rapture is troubling, to say the least.

Brog dismisses concerns about the Christian Zionists’ fixation on end times as a “misreading of Christian theology. “One sign of the Second Coming is that there will be widespread moral decay in society,” Brog told me. “If Christians really thought they could speed the Second Coming, then why aren’t Christians out there opening brothels and selling drugs? Quite to the contrary and quite to the chagrin of many liberals, they are doing the opposite.”

This is a disingenous statement, and unless he’s completely brain dead, he knows it. You don’t get Raptured if you’re a sinner in their mythology and if there’s one thing your average fundie is counting on, it’s avoiding the big war that they want other people to fight. They want to hurry it along, but they aren’t going to take the chance of not getting sucked into heaven beforehand. It’s probably really tempting for a lot of people who lean right on the topic of Israel to welcome the Christian Zionist support. I’m sure they seem harmless, that while they’re undoubtably anti-Semitic (with their belief that all Jews are hellbound), their plan for Israel to be the battleground for the end of the world isn’t actually going to happen, so it probably seems fine to indulge their fantasies in exchange for political support.

However, it’s not harmless. The truth of the matter is that this disdain and disregard for actual Israelis infects the Christian Zionist worldview and makes them very eager to sacrifice Israeli lives to fulfill their two missions of ushering in Armageddon and killing off Muslims. They view Israelis as “free” lives (non-American) they can “spend” to get these goals so Americans don’t have to get our hands dirtier than necessary. In every way, their myth of the coming Armageddon is shaped so that believers can be stoked by the drama of it without ever experiencing genuine fear that they themselves might die violently. They believe that they’ll miss the final battle because of the Rapture. Hagee advocates nuking Iran because he’s not interested in warfare that has a cost to Americans that could reduce its popularity. And that extends to Israel.

And that’s why it’s best for people on both the left and the right to condemn Christian Zionists and withhold our support from any politician who listens to them. Christian Zionists do not care how many Jews die from warfare in the Middle East. They are chickenhawks and de facto untrustworthy.

Lindsay’s probably not got a lot of access to a computer right now, so I’m swiping her observation that she made a couple of times while I was in New York about the news coverage of Israel waging war on Lebanon. The fear of the Wingnutteria whining has turned the mainstream media into the biggest bunch of cowards you ever saw; meanwhile the right wing press is unafraid and this has made them less constrained on the subject of this war. Case in point—today the NY Times is using weasel words like “fight” in headlines, but the NY Post happily uses the more accurate word “battle”. The Post is also unafraid of the word “invasion”. Meanwhile, as Lindsay noted over the weekend, the “objective” press was using vague language like “Border draws Israeli troops“, a phrasing that makes the border the subject and troops merely a passive object.

The mainstream position is to avoid even the hint of criticism aimed in Israel’s direction. The problem with that is when Israel does something so obviously odious as killing innocent civilians and holding them culpable for what an unsanctioned organization does, well, even just straightforward reporting is going to seem critical. It’s not just the media, either. There was a bit of a dust-up on Punkass Marc’s post on how he thinks Ned Lamont is going to be politics-as-usual because of his refusal to criticize Israel openly for what seems to be obviously wrong, which is, of course, killing innocents with such a slim excuse. In the comments, Zuzu and Norbizness rightfully pointed out that Lamont has a good reason to fear being called an anti-Semite if he does criticize Israel, and while this is certainly true, it mostly shows that Lieberman is a sleazy bastard if he’s so happy to pull out obviously untrue assertions to tar Lamont.

The problem is—if I’m free to say so without dredging up the operant conditioning debate—is that whenever the fear of having right wingers equate criticism of Israel with being an anti-Semite makes a liberal or even just a journalist engage in self-censorship, that emboldens the right and undermines our position. The short term gains (not getting deluded with email, avoiding the inevitable attempts of your opponent to ruin your reputation) are causing, or at least enabling, serious long term problems. And I would characterize this invasion as one of those problems. Right now there’s a general feeling that the two views on this “conflict” are “Kick some ass, Israel!” and “Some fringe elements seem to think it’s a shame that innocent civilians will have to suffer while Israel kicks some righteous ass.” Far be it for me to be a party pooper and wish that we could broaden the discourse just a little so that a viewpoint that allows that there’s something terribly wrong about killing innocent people could be included.

August has more. Ezra has found how those who want brainless support for Israel are going to accuse those they can’t tar as anti-Semites—apparently, they’re nihilists. This continues that process of conservatives calling everyone they don’t agree with “nihilists”, which makes me wonder if that’s a euphemism for saying they’d like to annihilate us all.

I haven’t said much over here about the complete chaos going on in the Middle East — Kate (for readers who don’t venture over to my pad, my wife is half Lebanese) hasn’t heard any more information about her relatives who live over in Lebanon. Her family members from the U.S. — and other Alabamians they know — who were caught over there made their way out a few days ago, over land by car to Jordan, flew from there to Paris, then on to the States. (I was in Birmingham visiting when a lot of this was going on, see posts here and here).

For her relatives who live there, as Lebanese Christians, it doesn’t look good. They are caught in the crossfire, their homes being obliterated as Hezbollah and Israel duke it out — and the runways, bridges, ports in Beirut are being destroyed, preventing escape.

Lebanese men walk past the smoldering rubble and debris of destroyed buildings in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon. (AP Photo/Issam Kobeisi)

The Maronite Catholic Patriarch of Lebanon, Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, met with Condi Rice to plead for some kind of intervention; he has since returned to Lebanon and is expected to chair an emergency meeting of the Maronite Bishops Council.

He couldn’t have left this meeting with Rice feeling very confident about what was going to happen to the Christians there (they only make up about a 1/4 of the population) after this feeble exchange, after the flip.

(more…)

We queers are a powerful lot! Look at the mayhem being caused by the homos that want to get together for World Pride in Jerusalem. Instead of partying on, apparently the fags and dykes have been secretly working in concert with Hezbollah to create all the havoc. Who knew? (WND):

Are Israel’s troubles in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon and the Hezbollah rockets slamming daily into major Israeli population centers here a result of the Jewish state’s tacit support for a homosexual parade slated for next month in Jerusalem?

Some rabbis seem to think so, and they are attempting to block the event from taking place in Judaism’s holiest city.

“Why does this war break out this week, all of sudden with little warning? Because this is the exact week the Jewish people are trying to decide whether the gay pride parade should take place in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv,” Pinchas Winston, a noted author, rabbi and lecturer based in Jerusalem told WND.

…”This [parade] is an attack against God himself,” Winston said. “God has told the Jewish people, ‘If you are not going to fight for my honor, you will be forced to fight for your own honor.’”

One of my readers said: “I thought the new gay-beam from the new gay-satalite for the Middle East was turned up a little too high. I’ll speak to gay-central-command and have them turn it down a tad…”

H/t to Eliot of News Fit to Post

Through Digby, I found that Billmon has explained why it’s quite plausible that not only will we nuke Iran, few will care that Bush is committing mass murder in an attempt to get right with Jeebus while raising his sperm count.

After all, the corporate media complex has already shown a remarkable willingness to ignore or rationalize conduct that once would have been considered grossly illegal, if not outright war crimes. And the right-wing propaganda machine is happy to paint any atrocity as another glorious success in the battle for democracy (that is, when it’s not trying to deny it ever happened.) Why should we expect something as transitory as a nuclear strike to change the pattern?

Let’s be honest about it: For both the corporate and the conservative media, as well as for their audiences, a air campaign against Iran would make for great TV – a welcome return to the good old days of Desert Storm and Shock and Awe. All those jets soaring off into the desert twilight; the overexposed glare of cruise missiles streaking from their launch ships; the video game shots of exploding aircraft hangers and government buildings, the anti-aircraft tracers arcing into the night sky over Tehran – it would be war just the way we like it, far removed from the dull brown dust, raw sewage and multiple amputees of the Iraqi quagmire.

And to keep things interesting, we’d have the added frisson of nuclear weapons – a plot twist that would allow blow-dried correspondents to pose in borrowed radiation suits, give Pentagon flacks the opportunity to try out new euphemisms for killing people, and encourage retired generals to spice up their on-air military patter with knowing references to blast effects, kilotons, roentgens and fallout patterns.

What I’m suggesting here is that it is probably naive to expect the American public to react with horror, remorse or even shock to a U.S. nuclear sneak attack on Iran, eve n though it would be one of the most heinous war crimes imaginable, short of mass genocide. Iran has been demonized too successfully – thanks in no small part to the messianic delusions of its own end-times president – for most Americans to see it as a victim of aggression, even if they were inclined to admit that the United States could ever be an aggressor. And we know a not-so-small and extremely vocal minority of Americans would be cheering all the way, and lusting for more.

I wasn’t joking yesterday when I compared Bush to Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove–well, I was, but it was kidding on the square. And while I’m referencing Al Franken, I will add that I agree 100% with Franken that Bush thinks that he’s the hero of an action movie. Things going downhill for him doesn’t mean he needs to learn to scale back, show restraint. No, he’s an action movie hero and when things are the darkest in an action movie, what does the hero do? He does something that everyone else thinks is batshit crazy but it turns out he was right and at the end, when the smoke clears, the hero emerges from the destruction behind him, covered with ashes and glory as Laura Bush–20 years younger suddenly–runs up and jumps in his arms. “We should have never doubted you! Nuking an entire other country was the right thing to do!”

I am dead serious when I remind everyone that Bush grew up basically a pipsqueak compared to his illustrious father, at least in his eyes. Now he’s got his chance, you see–even his Dad’s boss Reagan never had the brass balls to nuke untold numbers of innocent people to death just to show that he could. He’s got a lot to overcome if he wants to best Senior. His dad was in the White House when the Soviet Union collapsed. That’ll be hard to beat without killing a shitload of Iranians.

Digby has this to say:

This president has asserted a doctrine of presidential infallibility. He does not believe that he can be stopped. And the way things are going I think he may think he has nothing to lose. There has been a sense of craziness in the air ever since 9/11, but it’s just taken a very, very surreal turn.

I’m thinking the “nothing to lose” part is the major part of this. Having determined that he’s on the cusp of becoming a far larger failure at being President than Senior ever was, Bush probably has lost all sense of proportion. Anything less than insane action will result in him being a smaller man than Daddy, a villian in the history books. Why not make a last ditch effort at being the action hero? He’s got nothing to lose–it’s other people entirely that have to die for this.

Title inspired by the fact that I finally got around to watching Dr. Strangelove for the first time last night.

It’s been one of those movies you mean to see but don’t get around to for a long time. The timing was distressing, since I wasn’t cognizant of the fact that Seymour Hersh is claiming that BushCo wants to nuke Iran until this morning. Maha has the best post I’ve read on it, listing the top ten reasons that this article should be scaring you and can’t be dismissed out of hand. The juxtaposition of her post and the movie fresh on my brain was what you might call clarifying. This in particular sewed it up:

9. Our President, George W. Bush, has a messiah complex and is convinced that “saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

Well, and this one:

7. U.S. military planners believe that bombing Iran will cause Iranians to rise up and overthrow the mullahs who rule them. Most Middle East experts think this notion is right up there with Cheney’s “Iraqis will greet us with flowers” delusion.

I’m having trouble believing military planners really believe this. BushCo has exploited 9/11 since it basically happened to get national support for their colonialist adventure wars, so it’s not like they aren’t familiar with the concept that attacks from outsiders creates incentive, not disincentive, for people to gather around and support their leaders, no matter what idiotic religious delusions those leaders might be under. I have to conclude, therefore, that it’s more that BushCo doesn’t care what the actual results are of nuking Iran. Whooping ass is something that’s done for its own sake and all discussion of consequences is irrelevant because it’s not their pasty white asses that will be going up in a mushroom cloud.

Some messiah Bush makes. It’s easy to be the messiah when the lives you’re sacrificing in your holy mission don’t belong to you. The factors that are leading into the nuke Iran option appear to be this:

• More popular idea than a draft
• It’s not fair that Truman got to use a big bomb–he was a Democrat!
• That’ll show my dad who has the big brass balls in our family.
• Maybe they’ll finally quit mocking me for being a cheerleader.

Lindsay has a good round-up post.

Angelica points us to some wise words from a Josh Marshall reader on the Iranian situation with the nuclear bombs and whatnot.

You know I’m one of your biggest fans, but I have to disagree with your early throat-clearing on the “Iran Question.” Why? Because it really is not a question. That is how the GOP and the White House want it framed, and I’m afraid you are buying into that framing. The truth is much simpler: Iran will have the bomb if they want it. It’s a done deal. There is no realistic military option. None. We’re stretched too thin. There are no good sites to bomb that would insure we could deny them the bomb. Their program is too hidden and dispersed. It would be an endless campaign of bombing and lead to endless war and terror attacks on us. The question is not how to stop Iran. They will get it. The question is: Who lost Iran? How did it come to this? Who left us in the position? Who ignored the REAL threat? That’s what the White House doesn’t want you asking. Please don’t become Joe Leiberman on this “Iran Question.” There is no question. They will get the bomb and there’s nothing we can do except learn to live with them and contain them, as we did the Soviets.

Though I’d point out that containing ‘em “like we did the Soviets,” is both overstating and understating the case. Cuz it’s like, Iran isn’t exactly going to build an arsenal of nukes like the Soviets did. They can likely really only afford one or two, and last I heard, they lack the capacity to launch a missle that could reach the U.S. Which isn’t to understate the threat they pose to their neighbors or the possibility that they might be crazy enough to deliver such a detonation to the U.S. through other means. But I think clearly it’s a much different threat then what the Soviets posed, who to our eternal shame, we’ll have to admit, did in fact beat us to space.  On the other hand, Iran is filled with muslims, aka suicidal jihadists hell bent on destroying freedom, and what’s a better symbol of freedom then the United States? Nothing. So of course, they’d love to nuke us, and the fact of the matter is, they are just crazy enough to do it.

 I guess some might say it’s inappropriate to joke about Iran and the bomb. They say, “boy jedmunds, you’ll have egg on your face five years from now, when Milwaukee is nothing but a pile of radioactive ash and stuff.” To which I respond: hit it girls.

“A cloud appears above your head;
A beam of light comes shining down on you,
Shining down on you.
The cloud is moving nearer still.
Aurora borealis comes in view;
Aurora comes in view.
And I ran, I ran so far away.
I just ran, I ran all night and day.
I couldn’t get away.

Reached out a hand to touch your face;
You’re slowly disappearing from my view;
Disappearing from my view.
Reached out a hand to try again;
I’m floating in a beam of light with you;
A beam of light with you.
And I ran, I ran so far away.
I just ran, I ran all night and day.
I couldn’t get away.”

Â

Kick some ass, ladies!

No surprises there.
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71-year-old Turkish man detained for not serving in the army. 51 years ago.

A bit more on Turkey’s criminal system, courtesy of Amnesty.

Kuwaiti women denied the right to vote by conservative Islamic lawmakers. The good part is that the government supports the idea - it’s conservative/Islamist lawmakers that are holding it back, mainly by not taking a position on it.