“Not only is what the American forces are doing damaging the archaeology of Iraq, it’s actually damaging the cultural heritage of the whole world.” Archaeologists of the British museum fault US forces for damaging what’s left of ancient Babylon, currently a base for US and coalition marines. While our troops did originally work to prevent the looting of artifacts, later attempts to construct parking lots and a helipad at the site apparently caused all kinds of needless wear and tear.
Category: The Dubya Era
Blowback.
“Sometimes, words have consequences?” So do actions, Mr. President. The CIA has at last uncovered an indisputable link between Iraq and terrorism…Unfortunately, we created it. “[A]s instability in Iraq grew after the toppling of Hussein, and resentment toward the United States intensified in the Muslim world, hundreds of foreign terrorists flooded into Iraq across its unguarded borders. They found tons of unprotected weapons caches that, military officials say, they are now using against U.S. troops.” (Apparently, we were too busy not finding WMD to spend any time securing these conventional caches.) My, oh my, this administration has really done a bang-up job of making Americans safer, haven’t they? Just think how safe we’ll be after four more years.
In my country, there is no problem.
Somebody tell Tuscon. “The State Department is insisting that, contrary to the impression you might get from all that vitriol spewed by Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat Sagdiyev on ‘Da Ali G Show,’ Kazakhstan is not a ‘a wild den of misogynistic dog-shooting Gypsy- and Jew-haters,’ as faux Kazakh journalist Borat once put it, but rather a perfectly nice country with little record of anti-Semitism.”
No Right-Wing Flunky Left Behind.
By way of a friend of mine, the Dubya education department gets busted subsidizing conservative commentator Armstrong Williams for good press on NCLB. I mean, really, wasn’t Fox News enough?
Ostrich Simplicity.
As a US general cautions of “spectacular” attacks prior to the Iraq election, the commander of our forces declares that 4 of 18 Iraqi provinces are not secure enough to hold the vote, and even Bush I consigliere Brent Scowcroft warns of an “incipient civil war” to follow them, what does Dubya do? Well, what do you expect? “‘Democracy is hard,’ Mr. Bush said in a brief question-and-answer session…’I know it’s hard, but it’s hard for a reason. And the reason it’s hard is because there are a handful of folks who fear freedom.’” Dang them evildoers, always making foreign affairs so needlessly complex.
Dubya’s Man at Justice.
“Alberto Gonzales has paved the way of his own advancement with memos that are intellectually slovenly, that impute definitive powers to the executive, and whose attempts at shirking the basic moral precepts of international humanitarian law are not very skillful. If he is confirmed as attorney general, our nation will be shamed, shunned and endangered.” As the Gonzales hearings begin on Capitol Hill, Salon does an able job of exposing his egregious yes-man tendencies in both the torture memos and, previously, in managing Governor Dubya’s execution sprees. Update: Yet, the Dems roll over.
The Other Shoe Drops.
Surprise, surprise. “The Bush administration has signaled that it will propose changing the formula that sets initial Social Security benefit levels, cutting promised benefits by nearly a third in the coming decades, according to several Republicans close to the White House.” Administration officials claim the deficit caused by this “price-indexing” change — pegging first-year benefits to inflation rather than the rise in wages — will be made up by, you guessed it, “personal investment accounts,” a.k.a. the Bush privatization plan. Funny how Dubya neglected to mention this cut only a few weeks ago…I doubt the plan was formulated over Christmas.
Capitol Thunderdome.
No doubt anticipating some kickback-heavy sessions in 2005, Tom DeLay and the Congressional GOP aim to eliminate several House ethics rules, among them the procedures for investigating complaints and the restrictions on free trips for relatives. “Government watchdog groups called the proposals startling and unjustified. If the proposed rules are adopted next week as GOP leaders suggest, they would amount to ‘the biggest backtracking on House ethics rules that we have seen,’ said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21.” Update Sensing a PR nightmare on Day 1 of the new Congress, the GOP back down and void the recent Save-DeLay rule. Good for them.
Tang-tungled Rummy.
In a boon for conspiracy theorists the world over, Rumsfeld refers to the 9/11 Pennsylvania plane as “shot down.” Said Rummy during one of his usual rambling Two Minutes Fear-type screeds, “I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples’ heads on television to intimidate, to frighten — indeed the word ‘terrorized’ is just that.” Freudian slip or slip of the tongue? Either way, it was a bonehead mistake.
Preying on (Social) Insecurity.
Dubya starts the hard sell on his plan for privatizing Social Security, claiming such a move will reassure financial markets. “Mr. Bush never mentioned the near certainty that without raising taxes, which he has ruled out, any plan to add personal investment accounts to Social Security and improve its financial condition would include a reduction in the guaranteed retirement benefit.” Hmmm…that doesn’t sound very reassuring.