I’m trying really hard not to post a venomous diatribe about how the world is ending over the whole “el presidente can torture whomever he likes” bill that passed yesterday, so here’s something with a slightly higher funny-to-scary ratio. I give you Senator Trent Lott, philosopher of the human condition:
Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.
Now that’s the kind of cultural sensitivity it takes to win the hearts and minds, know what I mean? And it’s the kind of aphorism a man is proud to have next to his name in the history books. I predict many repetitions of this phrase in Senator Lott’s next reelection campaign. His constituency will love it; there’s just something about the phrase “they all look the same to me”, delivered in a down-home Mississippi drawl, that really does it for some folks, electorally speaking.
(p.s.: The world is ending over the presidential torture bill. Oops! Sorry. That just slipped out.)
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Remember that high-pitched squeal that was supposed to act as a “teenager repellant”, since people over 25 supposedly can’t hear it?
Well, somebody made it into a dance-club song.
Go ahead, click the link and have a listen. If you’re an old fart, you’ll hear a run-of-the mill throbbing electro-Euro-crap tune. But if you’re a sprightly young-’un, or just blessed with teenage ears like I apparently am, you’ll hear a run-of-the-mill throbbing electro-Euro-crap tune with squeaky bits.
It’s perfect for teens, tweens, and the college set, since, as we oldsters are well aware, the youth of today just listen to noise, anyway. Now you kids get the hell out of my yard!
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I feel like relating a couple of much-needed pockets of reasonableness that I ran into this week. They’re so rare; one must treat them like precious gems.
First: Rumsfeld delivered an appalling speech (the latest in a long-running series) in Salt Lake City recently, in which he let on that those who criticize the Bush admin (err, most of the people in the country, then) are just like Neville Chamberlain criticizing Churchill before WWII.
Now for the reasonable part: Keith Olbermann, in response, decided to channel Edward R. Murrow. Not bad.
And although this was related to the event in general and not to Rumsfeld’s speech in particular, it’s heartening to see that the mayor of Salt Lake City took the opportunity to vent some frustration against the Bush admin. I kinda wish I’d been there to see it; Rocky can be pretty entertaining. I haven’t found a transcript of the speech, but the author of the article describes it as “…orders of magnitude more powerful than any critique of Bush I’ve seen by an elected political figure.”
And in a rare turnaround, Rumsfeld has apparently apologized for comparing Democrats to Chamberlain. Better than not, I suppose. I have to say, I’m just in love with the first paragraph of that article:
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reached out to Democrats late Friday, opening up the door for them to retract their stinging indictment of him as Pentagon chief.
Um. Why the hell would they want to retract anything? He sucks.
Second: Matthew Yglesias gets all reasonable about Iran. This reminds me of a lot of sober analyses of the threat posed by Iraq, written by earnest liberals and real (not Republicans in drag) libertarians prior to the invasion in 2003. I’m more cheered to see this kind of thing this time around than I was the last, because the general public is in a much more skeptical mood these days.
But then, I was sure, up until a couple of weeks out, that we would not really be so stupid and evil as to invade Iraq, so I oughtn’t to be trusted as a barometer.
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