Call It A Comeback
More bad news for J-Ry. Apparently Blagojevich is leading in most categories. It is very strange. J-Ry, despite being fun to ridicule over the name confusion, isn’t a bad guy. He may look the other way from time-to-time, but he has no worse of a reputation than Blagojevich.
Who knew, Blago would have the more attractive name….
The Washington Post has an op-ed by Karen Armstrong. I’ve schlepped for her before and I’ll do it again. Read it and love it. And then be critical of it. I think her writing is some of the best when it comes to religion, but there are two problems with her article.
First, Iraq’s children haven’t been victimized by the embargo. They have been victimized by a fascist dictator who has chosen to spend money on weapons and refused to allow a market economy. I will certainly agree the perception is present that the embargo has killed children in Iraq, but that is a different question than what has caused the actual problem. The Kurdish zone is doing quite well under the same sanction regime. The problem is Saddam Hussein.
The above is not meant to absolve the US of years of backing despots in the region and she is correct in that criticism.
Second, attacking Iraq may be necessary. I would prefer to look at increasing aid to domestic resistance groups, but the current President doesn’t seem to want to even acknowledge the possibility. Hussein has attacked American interests and he will do so again. He is (probably) not responsible in any way for September 11th. However, trying to kill a former President of the United States is an act that should have clued us in to this guy.
It is true that we must deal with the Arab perception of our actions and the way to do that is with UN sanction. However, the President bungled this by allowing the debate to drift while he was on vacation. Going it alone would be disastrous. However, approaching it from a multilateral position focused on previous promises by Hussein gives us the ability to force him out while setting a reasonable precedent for future actions. Her point that we need other nations is essential, but also we must act.
And we must change how we interact with the Arab world. Fundamentalist dictators are never friends of democracy no matter how much oil they have underneath them.
Here is an exammple of what is wrong with Mollly Ivins these days. She writes a decent column about Bush claiming credit when he doesn’t deserve it, but she doesn’t tie it back to his past history of doing so. Like she documented in the friggen’ book she wrote!
Bears win, Illinois loses. Looks like Champaign might have a good season, just with an unusual team…
Ryan should be careful about aboutbadrod.com or it might backfire. I’m all for airing the claims made as John Kass did back in February, but this sort of back handed attack has a way of raising more questions about the one doing the insinuation than the subject.
How bad are things in Illinois for the Republicans? This article seems to indicate the Rs are losing endorsements they should be winning. Topinka is competent and reasonable. If the Ds are rolling over everyone this hard, pulling out the Treasurer or AG race are going to be damn hard in the fall for the Rs.
Zell Miller is one of my least favorite Democrats, but he voices my position nearly perfectly on Iraq. One caveat–I’ve convinced myself that action needs to be taken to remove Saddam. I’m open to the type of action, but the current administration can’t convince me of anything until they convince themselves of something, anything.
I suppose it is hard to point out that Hussein tried to take out a former President of the United States, when that former President is your father.
In referencing another blog, Counterspin Central carries a story about DFS in Florida. Jeb ran against the utter incompetence of the agency 4 years ago. One would think he would have figured out that not cleaning up the agency might leave a challenger an opening now.
Rich Miller provides some good counterbalance to Birkett’s ads in the Trib. Oh wait, those are news stories. Actually they are and those stories are important. However, a bit of balance is in order. Madigan is far from perfect and her ties to her father’s machine are entirely legitimate for news stories. However, Birkett’s issues are just as relevant and this story is revealing. Too bad the Sun-Times and the Trib have left the work to Rich Miller.
Hitchens has a good article on exactly who the radical islamists are. Andrew Sullivan picked out the key paragraph,
“It is also impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and who managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and to erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare. If they would do that to Afghans, what might they not have in mind for us? In confronting such people, the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they can get started.”
The second great paragraph is here:
“I repeat what I said at the beginning: the objective of al Qaeda is not the emancipation of the Palestinians but the establishment of tyranny in the Muslim world by means of indiscriminate violence in the non-Muslim world, and those who confuse the two issues are idiots who don’t always have the excuse of stupidity.”
The Palestinians are just being used as tools for another movement of fascists. The US must address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for both moral and practical reasons, but al Qaeda is just another Middle Eastern fascist movement. Different in underlying ideology compared to the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, but just another group of fascists.
I wonder if Shrub would like to take on this line though:
“morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein”
He wouldn’t want to alienate the Base, now would he–oh wait, that is base lower case…
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