I was encouraged by the news coming out of Iraq yesterday, although I knew the cheerleading and overly optimistic numbers (you mean that 8 million voters figure is just a guess?) coming out wouldn't hold up at the end of the day.  Since most American journalists never really leave their hotels in the Green Zone, it may be awhile before we have the full picture, probably sometime after the next declared turning point in our occupation of Iraq.  As much as we have to applaud the Iraqi people (ie. Kurds and Shiites), I think we need to take a look at this post over at Kos before we start patting ourselves on the back too strenuously.

What comes around, goes around.....  

Today's headline in the Washington Times: Joy Explodes Across Iraq. 

It just takes a minute to think about what you are about to put on your front page, fellas.

Let's hear it for the Iraqis, who, despite the bungling of the last two years by the Bush Administration, seem to be hell-bent on taking the reins of their own country away from the idiots who have held it regardless of the dangers.

I miss the Ramones.

Cheney at Auschwitz:

Bonzo at Bitburg:

The torch passes.

This Iron Mouth Editor lives in Washington, D.C.  Here in D.C. rumors of a pending draft in April have begun to swirl.  Rumor has it that the draft will be from the ages of 22-37(?!) and that it will start in April.  If it happens, you heard it here first.

A letter from the Jarrar's:

Friday, January 21st, 2005
Good evening….
These are the days of Al- Adha’a Feast, I wish you many happy returns… and hope the next feast would arrive, with Iraq in the best condition, and all Iraqis would be in peace, security, and welfare. I see this as a far-off dream….but I shall never stop praying, working, and waiting, to fulfill this dream….
I cried on the eve of the Feast, while I was in my hotel room, at the Dead Sea, to attend a Conference about Iraqi Societies and their Funding. I remembered the preceding years, when were a whole family, Azzam and I, and the boys; Raid, Majid, and Khalid… we used to go shopping before the Feast, to buy new clothes, sweets, chocolates, and juice, to present to our guests… and Azzam used to distribute the “I’diaa = Feast Pocket Money” to the family members, on the morning of the Feast… then we would gather at the house of the elder brother, exchanging greetings, then, on the other days we would visit more friends and relatives…until the Feast vacation would end… but today…Azzam is in America, on business with a company, Raid is visiting the U.A.E. with his Fiancé, Majid is in Canada, I am in Amman, and Khalid is in Baghdad… I cried bitterly, sadly… I miss my family, my house, and my neighbors. I miss my friends and colleagues at work, my naughty cat, and everything there…
I do not know when I’ll be back, and when we will all gather again, in a secure, settled country, with a clear, shiny future.

Please Read: Across Baghdad, Security Is Only An Ideal.

Bush, today: 

And it's exciting times for the Iraqi people.

Iraqis Agree:

The second-in-command at the neighboring Iraqi Army base called Camp Chindit, Colonel Hassan Mazzid, thinks the real problems will not emerge until the results of the poll are released.

"We think some people want to win the election by force," he noted. "Some lists will succeed at the polls and some will fail. We think some who fail in the election might make trouble because, as you know, democracy is new to Iraq."

Shuffle Play Wisdom:
Commando - The Ramones

they do their best,they do what they can
they get them ready for viet nam

from old hanoi to east berlin
commando - involved again
they do their best, they do what they can
they get them ready for viet nam

first rule is: the laws of germany
second rule is: be nice to mommy
third rule is: don't talk to commies
fourth rule is: eat kosher salamis

Uncle Tupelo - Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down

Satan, your kingdom must come down
Satan, your kingdom must come down
I heard the voice of Jesus say
Satan, your kingdom must come down

If I was a religious man, I'd say were living in the end times.  Unfortunately we're not that lucky.

With today's horrible day in Iraq, where 36 soldiers and Marines died, over 1400 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.  That's means that 90% of the troops killed so far in Iraq fell after the “end of major combat operations.”  This includes 43 soldiers and Marines killed in the last two days alone.  Time to go.

Update: Now 37 killed today.

I was caught in front of the television last evening as part of one of our house's weekly dinners.  I was forced to watch 24, a show whose shaky cam around-corners-Glock action has never attracted me.  As I watched the first half hour, I got upset at the portrayal of the Muslim family at the core of the terrorist cell that ex-heroin-addict-crack-shot-sleeping-with-SecDef's-Daughter protagonist Jack Bauer was tracking down.  Seems they were so dedicated to their cause that they would acquiesce in the death of their own child.  My roommates and I railed at evil Fox perpetuating the worst stereotypes of Muslims in this country. 

But then I was shocked.  The writers of 24 decided to let us inhale a whiff of reality.  The Secretary of Defense, ably portrayed in slicked-hair fashion by “with extreme prejudice” king William Devane - ordered his own hippie son tortured in order to get potential information from him regarding the terrorists' last atrocity - a kidnapping and trial of the SecDef himself. 

Fox's bow to reality included a closing shot of the longhaired son being tortured by some sort of salad bowl and silver ski-goggle apparatus and crying out in pain. 

I must say I was impressed.  They showed how we can be bad guys.  If only the rest of America could admit that. 

A search of the show's website shows that the forum participants are now involved in a big debate over torture and whether it should be used in a democracy.  Bravo 24!

 

Recently, there has been interest in the new art form of Amazon customer reviews.  The greatest of these weave pop-culture knowsits humor and downright insanity into a compelling tapestry which transcends both the item reviewed and the E-commerce inanity of Amazon. 

One of the greatest practitioners is “vnggh”  who gives his location as Kenya, Getmeapepsi.  vnggh's command of the language and the pop-culture idiom surpasses all other Amazon reviewers.  Take, for example, his review of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde:

Approximate to what Milan Kundera dubs "the lyrical phase" in LIFE IS ELSEWHERE, and not incommensurate with recent studies concerning myolin in the human adult and how it relates to language centers in the brain, there seems to be a phase which many young artists go through which, in simplified terms, goes from (a) in love with language and too explodent therewith to really be controlling it, to (b) in touch for the first time with mortality and therefore momentarily bereft of language (because it expresses the living but seemingly cannot go past our ends, to (c) returning to life with some conscious inkling of death and thereby a far more prudent way with language (i.e., why say it, if you can't prove it at least to yourself?) -- stipulating that facility with the vernacular can be directly proprotional to ignorance of mortality might be a bit too heavy-handed for an amazon.com review (even if Bob's lyrics would probably somewhere vindicate me in this, just as they could probably somewhere vindicate just about anybody with anything), but I have to maintain that in my own scatterbrained opinion, "Blonde on Blonde" is the last outpouring of a man more in love with what words can do than with he himself can do (and the motorcycle accident would rear him out of that dilletante mindset forthwith). Above and beyond that, though, it's one of the most emotionally tweaking albums ever made, there's not a bad song on here, and I hope I'm never so broke again that I have to sell my copy.  

vnngh's breadth is also amazing:  He reviews books with equal aplomb:  Take his review of Pynchon's Vineland:

 Not as awful as everyone said..., April 11, 2000
...or perhaps all those years of amyl nitrate poppers have compromised my sense of smell. But I don't think so. The 70s and 80s were in many ways defined by their ambiguities, their polylayered deceits which hid still more deceits, and the pertinent sense that a sort of cultural rubicon had been crossed -- people were supersaturated, viewing the ten million options for What To Do Next from the rictus of a rec-room sofa

Poetry does not escape him either.  Here he review's a translation of Rimbaud:

Though her translations are flawed and somewhat dated, Louise Varese still has not been topped as a the bringer-into-English of lil' Arther R.'s thorny prose-poems. Her versions remain closer in spirit to the originals than any of the later translations, most of which (if you'll pardon my French) suck, from the bland lazy word-for-word of the Penguin Classics edition, to the innumerable "interpreters" (Paul Schmidt and his shameless ilk) who make of his poems what they will (sometimes to further lengths than JR Ullman did with "The Day On Fire") and then call their work "translations."

vvngh's best work however, is in his rips--his review of The Apple Dumpling Gang is a case in point:

A gut-wrenching tour de force of latterday film noir, February 11, 2000
Like being kicked in the head by the Budweiser Clydestale team, one at a time, then stretched out on a makeshift rack and tattooed with the indisputable evidence of one's own sins ala Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony." Knotts is, literally, among the cinema's most spine-chilling villains in his role as the pederasst/rustler kidnapping innocent young boys from the rustic frontier town and selling them into brute harem slavery aboard a renegade Chinese junk, then slinking home to the seedy Burroughsian morph habit which is the only thing keeping his oily, tortured conscience at bay... Small wonder that John Cassavetes numbered this film among his Top 5, despite the weak supporting cast who seem, to a one, unable to do ought but pale and shrimble in the long dark shadow cast by Knotts. That said, I cannot call this film a pleasurable viewing experience -- but an educational one, undoubtedly, it remains, even unto the brave new century in which we all suddenly find ourselves.

I tried my best to continue in vnngh's footsteps.  My review of the JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank is below:

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

Saved My Job, January 14, 2005

Reviewer:

Don "Don H." (Washington D.C.) - See all my reviews

Been having some problems lately. Seems a lot of people are criticizing me for not having provided enough armor or thinking through things generally. But we're sort of tapped out, having given all of our money away to our rich friends. So Con suggested that I try Amazon. So I said what the hell.  I was surprised. "These things are so cheap Dick!" I said. So I bought 1500. [...] They'll be so happy, and I'll get to keep my job.

Rolling Stone, which is one of my all-time favorite magazines, says it won’t carry an ad for a new version of the Bible being published by HarperCollins. The ad would have pictured a man gazing at the sky and these words:

“In a world of almost endless media noise and political spin, you wonder where you can find real truth. Well, now there's a source that's accurate, clear and reliable. It's the TNIV -- Today's New International Version of the Bible. It's written in today's language, for today's times -- and it makes more sense than ever.“

I’m sure Rolling Stone’s decision had to do with its overall format. An issue of Rolling Stone typically runs ads for new music, technology, fashion and adult products, among other things. So how would an ad for a Bible fit Rolling Stone?

Music is described by many people as a nearly religious experience. It is ecstatic and passionate and even at times inspires questions of belief. Many artists in their music and as they are quoted in Rolling Stone do make references to God, spirituality, faith, biblical texts and so on.

Such an ad would simply show a product to people who may very well want to know more about the Bible. It’s not proselytizing. It’s just an idea. Rolling Stone, in its vocabulary and subjects, has long been on the forefront of free expression. This, however, is a step backward.

Art and music often enough bring up questions of faith. They’re just questions, and attempts to address those questions should not be censored. I am disappointed that Rolling Stone won’t run this ad.

--E.K.

BUSH AND FIRST WIFEY TODAY IN CHURCH (FOR A CHANGE). DO THEY LOOK JUST A LITTLE OVERSTRESSED?

 

--E.K.

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”

--Pericles, 430 B.C.

Reaches out to ruin George W. Bush's inauguration.

 

Update: Although this is not Indiana Jones level biblical wreaking, it at least qualifies as a sign from God.

Last week Slate's Charles Pierce wasted nearly 1200 words ripping the career and retirement of Michael Jordan.  Why were his words a waste?  Because the real story of the NBA is turning out to be the Chicago Bulls.  Not a misprint, the Bulls.  The young team from the West Side started out the season a pathetic 0-9.  But once they started winning, they started winning.  They are now 17-18.  That's 17-9 in their last 25 games.  They won their seventh in a row this evening in Madison Square Garden.  That makes them the hottest team in the NBA.

And not a moment too soon.  The secret?  Like the Bulls of old, it is defense and plenty of it.  The Bulls lead the league in opponent's field goal percentage and haven't given up 100 for 21 games.

   

“We're a good team” remarked Bulls' point guard and new star Kirk Hinrich.  This Chicagoan hopes it continues.

During the Watergate scandal, the two reporters at the center of the storm, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein coined a term for any Administration denial of facts which did not come out and say the story was abjectly false: the “Non-denial denial.”  When you get one of these in response to a story, you know you are on to something.

Case in point--Sy Hersh's new piece in the New Yorker magazine which claims that U.S. Special Forces have been operating within Iran in preparation for taking out Iranian nuclear production facilities.  Our old buddy Larry DiRita, who last graced the Iron Mouth during the Al Qaa Qaa scandal responded today to Hersh's piece:

Hersh's article, published on Sunday, was "so riddled with errors of fundamental fact that the credibility of his entire piece is destroyed," DiRita said.

Hersh reported that President Bush (news - web sites) had signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces military units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.

DiRita did not comment on that assertion.

Instead, he said, Hersh's sources fed him "rumor, innuendo, and assertions about meetings that never happened, programs that do not exist and statements by officials that were never made."

Asked whether U.S. military forces had been conducting reconnaissance missions in Iran, Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable said, "We don't discuss missions, capabilities or activities of Special Operations forces."

Looks like it will be a long three years before the impeachment proceedings.

The European Space Agency has just announced that its Huygens probe has landed on the surface of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and was still transmitting at least two hours after landing.  This means that it landed on dry land and was not destroyed on landing or by Titan's atmosphere. 

Follow more here and here.

Scientists confirm that any life on Titan is liable to be smarter than George W. Bush.

Really?

During a round-table interview with reporters from 14 newspapers, Bush acknowledged that his tough language "had an unintended consequence."

“Sometimes, words have consequences you don't intend them to mean," Bush said Thursday. "'Bring 'em on' is the classic example, when I was really trying to rally the troops and make it clear to them that I fully understood, you know, what a great job they were doing. And those words had an unintended consequence. It kind of, some interpreted it to be defiance in the face of danger. That certainly wasn't the case."

"I want justice," Bush said. "And there's an old poster out West, that I recall, that said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive.'"

Recalling that remark, Bush said Thursday: "I can remember getting back to the White House, and Laura said, 'Why did you do that for?' I said, 'Well, it was just an expression that came out. I didn't rehearse it” 

No shit.

Dear Tony:

I see that the Bush Administration refuses to foot the bill for security and other parts of Bush's own inauguration.  Now I know that you must provide security for everyone--you can't protest by skimping on that.  But they also want you to spend $3 million on reviewing stands.  I sure think it would be funny if all of those Republican bigwigs had to stand on the sidewalk like the rest of us little people.

Sincerely,

The Iron Mouth

From the Comments section of Grammar Police, J. Scott Barnard offers up a terrifying view of moral ambivalence in a discussion of the “Death Squads“ option now being put on the table by the Pentagon: 

Negroponte is a hero of the Americas for his contributions in the struggle against murderous marxists. And if his contributions against terrorists are as effective, we'll all be safer because of his involvement in the middleeast.

I don't want to live in a world where communists who murder Mosqito indians indiscriminately or islamists who blow up men standing in line for a job are coddled by guilt-ridden liberals from the security of their desktops.

Negroponte. American Hero.

I reply with a rant:

J. Scott: I see you read Instapundit. Iran-Contra has everything to do with it. First off, the background briefer was the person connecting El Salvador to the new plans being thrown around.

As I'm sure you know, the death-squads program operated in both Honduras and El Salvador. Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras during this period. Honduras was where the Contras were being trained and where the money from Iran-Contra was going.

The problem with the program is that it doesn't work and pours gasoline on the fire. As we have already seen, locals "informing" on suspected insurgents in both Afghanistan and Iraq have used the U.S. military as an unwitting tool of revenge against people they don't like. Nothing will increase this problem like a Phoenix Project-style assassination squad program designed to eliminate suspected insurgents in Iraq.

Needless to say this doesn't help us combat what the Iraqi Interior Minister described this week as a 40,000 strong insurgency supported by 160,000 helpers, not to mention the many tens of thousands of others who look the other way.

Like all moral questions, at bottom it isn't in our interest to behave like the terrorists who attack Americans and Iraqis. This is exactly what they want: moral equivalence between themselves and the Americans. Then the argument gets real simple for them: "We may use bad methods, but so do they and they are foreign devils." We can't win against that argument. Ever. And if we don't have the support of the populace in Iraq, we cannot win. For all of your yapping about "guilt-ridden liberals," you fail to ask the first question needed: Will this work? The answer, of course, is no.

Finally, however we have to ask ourselves: Is it morally right to engage in torture and semi-random killing in order to reach our goals? Are we to be completely unmoored from our own values in order to subjugate another country? At some point, we must either acknowledge and follow our professed values or frankly admit that they are no longer the principles we follow.

Conservatism used to provide the country with important moral reminders about the fact that our exercise of power at home and abroad must be tempered with a thorough understanding of how good intentions can result in a human disaster. Now it merely consists of Liddy-style posturing to soothe the anxieties of those who dislike change and bad news.

I see now that J. Scott is heaping more effusive praise on the masthead of his blog, Burton Terrace.

 

Here they come, the parade of former Republican Hawks who are now saying that the war is unwinnable: 

Start with one Andrew Sullivan, who heaped bile and scorn on those of us who opposed the war from the start.  Now Andrew is posting snippets from Stratfor, (Subscription) “Your Source For Actionable Intelligence” which now tell us that the war is lost.

According to Andrew:

We have to hope and pray that a democratic miracle really will emerge. There have been darknesses before dawn in history before. And then there have just been darknesses.

Try “I was wrong.“  Works a lot better than the Lord of the Rings speech.

Following Andrew is Rep. Howard Coble, a former GOP hawk, now calling for a pullout:

Coble voted to grant Bush the sweeping war-making powers believing that the administration had a "post-invasion strategy." Apparently, there was none, he said.

"If there was, I wish someone would tell me what it is or show it to me," he said. "I'd like to see it."

Coble said that if he had known there was no post-invasion strategy at the time of the vote on the war-powers resolution he would have "insisted that we keep our powder dry while we do some probing and planning."

Coble said he simply assumed that the administration had a post-invasion plan.

Isn't it the place of pundits like Sullivan and Congressmen like Coble to ask the right questions before the war?  Guess not.

Death Squads.  That's right, Rumsfeld's newest solution to the Iraq problem are “Salvadoran“ style death squads.  Crazy tinfoil hat conspiracy theories from nutjob leftist websites?  No, its straight from Pentagon background briefers to the pages of Newsweek:

[O]ne Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

Desperation at work.  The Phoenix Project, redux.  That program really worked well as well.

I'd start setting up the cameras pointing at the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad right now for the shot of the last U.S. helicopter out.

From blogger The Conservative Cajun:

I've never been afraid to admit when I've misjudged or have been wrong about a situation, and the Iraq War is no different. Now, I'm not saying I was wrong about going there in the first place. We needed to take out Saddam Hussein, and we did. We needed to take out his barbaric and disgusting sons, and we did. We needed to go in there and eliminate any current WMD program. I believed that Saddam did have an existing WMD program, so did Bush, so did Clinton, so did Tony Blair and Putin. Who really knows if I, and the other mentioned men, we wrong? Who's to say Saddam didn't destroy the programs or move some across the border during the build up to the war?

Whose to say?  Everyone in touch with reality.

 

The thought processes of a wingnut:  From Andrew Sullivan's E-mail of the Day yesterday--a winger with a brother who served in the Fallujah area lets us know how he weighs information on Iraq.

My brother was a reservist near Fallujah (who thankfully came home just this past year, although he is still technically under contract until December), who reports that coercion was encouraged, and abuse (not the same as coercion) was greeted with a blind eye. Now, he and I don't see eye-to-eye on Iraq, because I pay attention to Chrenkoff's reporting in addition to what I hear from my brother and from the MSM. Thanks to Chrenkoff, I know that there are large areas in Iraq where things are going right. Thanks to my brother, I also don't automatically discount everything that MSM says (even a stopped clock is right twice a day).

Who is Chernkoff?  Some reporter on the scene in Baghdad?  Of course not!  He's a wingnut blogger in Australia! 

So, let me get this straight--you'd rather trust the analysis of some person who you have never met, who lives on another continent, who as far as we know, has never been to Iraq, and who is a mere casual observer, over the views of your own brother, who was there and saw with his own eyes the state of war?

Not to mention the fact that this pro-war nut is “thankful” his own brother is no longer there.

I do not make this shit up people.  

 

Tom Riley, the spokesman for the Administration's Drug Czar, John Walters, commented on the retirement of Keith Stroup, longtime leader of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) by quoting the Big Lebowski:

 "The '60s are over, Lebowski. The bums lost. My condolences."

I'm not sure Riley really got the quote--the speaker in the film was  the millionaire Lebowski, a guy who moralized all of the time and got all of his money despite having never worked a day in his life.

Then again, maybe Riley did get the quote.

I have not read a better description of what it is to write than this, from Richard Wright’s lecture on his Native Son, “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” (both works 1940). If one isn’t writing like this, physically like this, I can’t see how one is writing:

“That was the deep fun of the job: to feel within my body that I was pushing out to new areas of feeling, strange landmarks of emotion, tramping upon foreign soil, compounding new relationships of perceptions, making new and — until that very split second of time! — unheard-of and unfelt effects with words. It had a buoying and tonic impact upon me; my senses would strain and seek for more and more of such relationships; my temperature would rise as I worked. That is writing as I feel it, a kind of significant living.”

And then, the writer’s devil-and-angel appears — why Dionysus was god of wine and art:

“The book was one-half finished, with the opening and closing scenes unwritten. Then, one night, in desperation — I hope that I'm not disclosing the hidden secrets of my craft! — I sneaked out and got a bottle. With the help of it, I began to remember many things which I could not remember before.”

And all of this left the world changed utterly:

“True, we have no great church in America; our national traditions are still of such a sort that we are not wont to brag of them; and we have no army that's above the level of mercenary fighters; we have no group acceptable to the whole of our country upholding certain humane values; we have no rich symbols, no colorful rituals. We have only a money-grubbing, industrial civilization… if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.”

I am waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer. A new rebirth of wonder. Yours — E.K.

The year 2004 was one of the worst in living memory for the Republic.  Let us move forward with the hope that 2005 will be a year of national renewal and political change.