Monday, July 31, 2006
Condisleeza Rice: " A hasty cease-fire would not be a good thing"W: "Not a FAKE PEACE"
600 people have died in Southern Lebonon because three Isreali soldiers were killed and two were captured. It's against all morality and it's real W. Anything that stops the senseless killing is good. We can work out the long term details after we stop the killing. Do it the Bill W. way... "I will not kill, just for today."
I don't see why a hasty cease-fire wouldn't be a good thing if it would keep people from dying, Condi ? Maybe your new Prada shoes are too tight and you can't think clearly.
I don't see why a hasty cease-fire wouldn't be a good thing if it would keep people from dying, Condi ? Maybe your new Prada shoes are too tight and you can't think clearly.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
I OWE MY MOTHER
1. My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE .
"If you're going to kill each other, do it outside. I just finished cleaning."
2. My mother taught me RELIGION.
"You better pray that will come out of the carpet."
3. My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL.
"If you don't straighten up, I'm going to knock you into the middle of next week!"
4. My mother taught me LOGIC
" Because I said so, that's why."
5. My mother taught me MORE LOGIC.
"If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you're not going to the store with me."
6. My mother taught me FORESIGHT.
"Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you're in an accident."
7. My mother taught me IRONY.
"Keep crying, and I'll give you something to cry about."
8. My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS.
"Shut your mouth and eat your supper."
9. My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM.
"Will you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!"
10. My mother taught me about STAMINA.
"You'll sit there until all that spinach is gone."
11. My mother taught me about WEATHER.
"This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it."
12. My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY.
"If I told you once, I've told you a million times. Don't exaggerate!"
13. My mother taught me the CIRCLE OF LIFE.
"I brought you into this world, and I can take you out."
14. My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION.
"Stop acting like your father!"
15. My mother taught me about ENVY.
"There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who don't have wonderful parents like you do."
16. My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION.
"Just wait until we get home."
17. My mother taught me about RECEIVING.
"You are going to get it when you get home!"
18. My mother taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE.
"If you don't stop crossing your eyes, they are going to get stuck that way."
19. My mother taught me ESP.
"Put your sweater on; don't you think I know when you are cold?"
20. My mother taught me HUMOR.
"When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don't come running to me."
21. My mother taught me HOW TO BECOME AN ADULT.
"If you don't eat your vegetables, you'll never grow up."
22. My mother taught me GENETICS.
"You're just like your father."
23. My mother taught me about my ROOTS.
"Shut that door behind you. Do you think you were born in a barn?"
24. My mother taught me WISDOM.
"When you get to be my age, you'll understand."
25. And my favorite: My mother taught me about JUSTICE.
"One day you'll have kids, and I hope they turn out just like you"
1. My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE .
"If you're going to kill each other, do it outside. I just finished cleaning."
2. My mother taught me RELIGION.
"You better pray that will come out of the carpet."
3. My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL.
"If you don't straighten up, I'm going to knock you into the middle of next week!"
4. My mother taught me LOGIC
" Because I said so, that's why."
5. My mother taught me MORE LOGIC.
"If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you're not going to the store with me."
6. My mother taught me FORESIGHT.
"Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you're in an accident."
7. My mother taught me IRONY.
"Keep crying, and I'll give you something to cry about."
8. My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS.
"Shut your mouth and eat your supper."
9. My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM.
"Will you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!"
10. My mother taught me about STAMINA.
"You'll sit there until all that spinach is gone."
11. My mother taught me about WEATHER.
"This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it."
12. My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY.
"If I told you once, I've told you a million times. Don't exaggerate!"
13. My mother taught me the CIRCLE OF LIFE.
"I brought you into this world, and I can take you out."
14. My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION.
"Stop acting like your father!"
15. My mother taught me about ENVY.
"There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who don't have wonderful parents like you do."
16. My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION.
"Just wait until we get home."
17. My mother taught me about RECEIVING.
"You are going to get it when you get home!"
18. My mother taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE.
"If you don't stop crossing your eyes, they are going to get stuck that way."
19. My mother taught me ESP.
"Put your sweater on; don't you think I know when you are cold?"
20. My mother taught me HUMOR.
"When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don't come running to me."
21. My mother taught me HOW TO BECOME AN ADULT.
"If you don't eat your vegetables, you'll never grow up."
22. My mother taught me GENETICS.
"You're just like your father."
23. My mother taught me about my ROOTS.
"Shut that door behind you. Do you think you were born in a barn?"
24. My mother taught me WISDOM.
"When you get to be my age, you'll understand."
25. And my favorite: My mother taught me about JUSTICE.
"One day you'll have kids, and I hope they turn out just like you"
Monday, February 20, 2006
Friday, January 27, 2006
This week Army Chief Warrent Officer Lewis Welshofer, Jr. was convicted negligent homocide in the death of Iraqi detainee General Abid Maoush. Officer Welshofer put the detainee head first into a sleeping bag, wrapped the detainee and the sleeping bag very tightly with an electrical cord all around his body, and sat on his chest. This detainee died of asphyxiation as a direct results of these actions.
Welshofer was fined by the military court $6000 and required to spend 60 days of house arrest (restricted to home office and church).
Only 60 days for murder.
Army Reserve Specialist Lynndie England received three years for "maltreating detainees" for her part in the actions at Abu Gharib Prision. Hardly seems appropriate for his crime.
Welshofer was fined by the military court $6000 and required to spend 60 days of house arrest (restricted to home office and church).
Only 60 days for murder.
Army Reserve Specialist Lynndie England received three years for "maltreating detainees" for her part in the actions at Abu Gharib Prision. Hardly seems appropriate for his crime.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Two Gay Cowboys Hit a Home Run
By FRANK RICH (The New York Times)
WHAT if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot? That's the
compelling tale of "Brokeback Mountain." Here is a heavily promoted American movie depicting two men having sex - the precise sex act that was still a crime in some states until the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws just two and a half years ago - but there is no controversy, no Fox News tar and feathering, no roar from the religious right.
"Brokeback Mountain" has instead become the unlikely Oscar favorite, propelled by its bicoastal sweep of critics' awards, by its unexpected dominance of the far less highfalutin Golden Globes and, perhaps most of all, by the lure of a gold rush. Last weekend it opened to the highest per-screen average of any movie this year.
Those screens were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco - hardly national bellwethers. But I'll rashly predict that the big Hollywood question posed on the front page of The Los Angeles Times after those stunning weekend grosses - "Can 'Brokeback Mountain' Move the Heartland?" - will be answered with a resounding
yes.
All the signs of a runaway phenomenon are present, from an instant parody on "Saturday Night Live" to the report that a multiplex in Plano, Tex., sold more advance tickets for the so-called "gay cowboy picture" than for "King Kong." "The culture is finding us," James Schamus, the "Brokeback Mountain" producer, told USA Today. "Grown-up movies have never had that kind of per-screen average. You only get those numbers when you're vacuuming up enormous interest from all walks of life."
In the packed theater where I caught "Brokeback Mountain," the trailers included a
National Guard recruitment spiel, and the audience was demographically all over
the map. The culture is seeking out this movie not just because it is a powerful,
four-hankie account of a doomed love affair and is beautifully acted by everyone,
starting with the riveting Heath Ledger.
The X factor is that the film delivers a story previously untold by A-list Hollywood. It's a story America may be more than ready to hear a year after its president cynically flogged a legally superfluous (and unpassable) constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage for the sole purpose of whipping up the basest hostilities of his electoral base.
By coincidence, "Brokeback Mountain," a movie that is all the more subversive
for having no overt politics, is a rebuke and antidote to that sordid episode.
Whether it proves a movie for the ages or as transient as "Love Story," it is a landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality. It brings something different to the pop culture marketplace at just the pivotal moment to catch a wave.
Heaven knows there has been no shortage of gay-themed entertainment in recent years. To the tedious point of ubiquity, gay characters, many of them updated reincarnations of the stereotypical fops and fussbudgets of 1930's studio comedies, are at least as well represented as other minorities in prime-time television.
Entertainment Weekly has tallied nine movies, including "Capote" and "Rent," with major gay characters this year. But "Brokeback Mountain," besides being more sexually candid than the norm, is not set in urban America, is not comic or camp, and, unlike the breakout dramas "Philadelphia" and "Angels in America," is pre-AIDS.
Its heroes are neither midnight cowboys, drugstore cowboys nor Village People cowboys. As Annie Proulx writes in the brilliant short story from which the movie has been adapted, the two ranch hands, Ennis Del Mar (Mr. Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), are instead simply "high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life."
They meet and fall in love while tending sheep in the Wyoming wilderness in 1963. That was the year of Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington and Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique," but gay Americans, and not just in Wyoming, were stranded, still waiting for the world to start spinning forward.
Over the next two decades of sporadic reunions and long separations, both Ennis and Jack get married and have children; it barely occurs to them to do otherwise. In their place and time, there is no vocabulary to articulate their internal conflicts, no path to steer their story to a happily-ever-after Hollywood ending. Before they know it, they are, in Ms. Proulx's words, "no longer young men with all of it before them."
Ennis's and Jack's acute emotions - yearning, loneliness, disappointment, loss, love and, yes, lust - are affecting because they are universal. But while the screenplay, by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, adheres closely to the Proulx original, it even more vividly roots the movie in the rural all-American milieu, with its forlorn honky-tonks and small-town Fourth of July picnics, familiar from elegiac McMurtry works like "The Last Picture Show."
More crucially, the script adds detail to Ennis's and Jack's wives (as do Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway, who play them) so that we can implicitly, and without any on-screen oralizing, see the cost inflicted on entire families, not just on Ennis and Jack, when gay people must live a lie.
Though "Brokeback Mountain" is not a western, it's been directed by Ang Lee with the austerity and languorous gait of a John Ford epic. These aesthetics couldn't be more country miles removed from "The Birdcage" or "Will & Grace."
The audience is forced to recognize that gay people were fixtures in the red state of Wyoming (and every other corner of the country, too) long before Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney were born.
Without a single polemical speech, this laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective "agenda" concocted by conspiratorial "elites" in Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay proselytizers would have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not for what gay baiters pejoratively label a "lifestyle."
But in truth the audience doesn't have to be coerced to get it. This is where the country has been steadily moving of late. "Brokeback Mountain," a Hollywood product after all, is not leading a revolution but ratifying one, fleshing out - quite literally - what most Americans now believe.
It's not for nothing that the proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage vanished as soon as the election was over. Polls show that a large American majority support equal rights for gay couples as long as the unions aren't labeled "marriage" - and given the current swift pace of change, that reservation, too, will probably fade in the next 5 to 10 years.
The history of "Brokeback Mountain" as a film project in itself crystallizes how fast the climate has shifted. Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana bought the screen rights to the Proulx story after it was published in The New Yorker in 1997.
That was the same year the religious right declared a fatwa on Disney because Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet in her ABC prime-time sitcom. In the eight years it took "Brokeback Mountain" to overcome Hollywood's shilly-shallying and at last be made, the Disney boycott collapsed and Ms. DeGeneres's star rose. She's now a mainstream daytime talk-show host competing with Oprah. No one has forgotten she's a lesbian. No one cares.
ANOTHER startling snapshot of this progress can be found in a culture-war kirmish that unfolded just as "Brokeback Mountain" was arriving at the multiplex. The American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., a leader in the 1997 anti-"Ellen" crusade, claimed this month that its threat of a boycott had led Ford to stop advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover lines in glossy gay magazines.
Last week Ford, under fire from gay civil-rights organizations and no doubt many other mainstream customers, essentially told the would-be boycotters to get lost by publicly announcing that it would not only resume its Jaguar and Land Rover ads in gay publications, but advertise other brands in them as well.
As far as I can tell, the only blowhard in the country to turn up on television to declare culture war on "Brokeback Mountain" also has an affiliation with the American Family Association. By contrast, as Salon reported last week, other family-values ayatollahs have made a conscious decision to ignore the movie, lest they drum up ticket sales by turning it into a SpongeBob SquarePants cause célèbre.
Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America imagined that the film might just go away if he and his peers stayed mum. Audiences "don't want to see two guys going at it," he told Salon. "It's that simple."
So he might wish. The truth is that the millions of moviegoers soon to swoon over the star-crossed gay cowboys of "Brokeback Mountain" can probably put up with the sight of "two guys going at it." It's the all too American tragedy of what happens to these men afterward that neither our hearts nor consciences can so easily shake.
By FRANK RICH (The New York Times)
WHAT if they held a culture war and no one fired a shot? That's the
compelling tale of "Brokeback Mountain." Here is a heavily promoted American movie depicting two men having sex - the precise sex act that was still a crime in some states until the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws just two and a half years ago - but there is no controversy, no Fox News tar and feathering, no roar from the religious right.
"Brokeback Mountain" has instead become the unlikely Oscar favorite, propelled by its bicoastal sweep of critics' awards, by its unexpected dominance of the far less highfalutin Golden Globes and, perhaps most of all, by the lure of a gold rush. Last weekend it opened to the highest per-screen average of any movie this year.
Those screens were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco - hardly national bellwethers. But I'll rashly predict that the big Hollywood question posed on the front page of The Los Angeles Times after those stunning weekend grosses - "Can 'Brokeback Mountain' Move the Heartland?" - will be answered with a resounding
yes.
All the signs of a runaway phenomenon are present, from an instant parody on "Saturday Night Live" to the report that a multiplex in Plano, Tex., sold more advance tickets for the so-called "gay cowboy picture" than for "King Kong." "The culture is finding us," James Schamus, the "Brokeback Mountain" producer, told USA Today. "Grown-up movies have never had that kind of per-screen average. You only get those numbers when you're vacuuming up enormous interest from all walks of life."
In the packed theater where I caught "Brokeback Mountain," the trailers included a
National Guard recruitment spiel, and the audience was demographically all over
the map. The culture is seeking out this movie not just because it is a powerful,
four-hankie account of a doomed love affair and is beautifully acted by everyone,
starting with the riveting Heath Ledger.
The X factor is that the film delivers a story previously untold by A-list Hollywood. It's a story America may be more than ready to hear a year after its president cynically flogged a legally superfluous (and unpassable) constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage for the sole purpose of whipping up the basest hostilities of his electoral base.
By coincidence, "Brokeback Mountain," a movie that is all the more subversive
for having no overt politics, is a rebuke and antidote to that sordid episode.
Whether it proves a movie for the ages or as transient as "Love Story," it is a landmark in the troubled history of America's relationship to homosexuality. It brings something different to the pop culture marketplace at just the pivotal moment to catch a wave.
Heaven knows there has been no shortage of gay-themed entertainment in recent years. To the tedious point of ubiquity, gay characters, many of them updated reincarnations of the stereotypical fops and fussbudgets of 1930's studio comedies, are at least as well represented as other minorities in prime-time television.
Entertainment Weekly has tallied nine movies, including "Capote" and "Rent," with major gay characters this year. But "Brokeback Mountain," besides being more sexually candid than the norm, is not set in urban America, is not comic or camp, and, unlike the breakout dramas "Philadelphia" and "Angels in America," is pre-AIDS.
Its heroes are neither midnight cowboys, drugstore cowboys nor Village People cowboys. As Annie Proulx writes in the brilliant short story from which the movie has been adapted, the two ranch hands, Ennis Del Mar (Mr. Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), are instead simply "high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life."
They meet and fall in love while tending sheep in the Wyoming wilderness in 1963. That was the year of Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington and Betty Friedan's "Feminine Mystique," but gay Americans, and not just in Wyoming, were stranded, still waiting for the world to start spinning forward.
Over the next two decades of sporadic reunions and long separations, both Ennis and Jack get married and have children; it barely occurs to them to do otherwise. In their place and time, there is no vocabulary to articulate their internal conflicts, no path to steer their story to a happily-ever-after Hollywood ending. Before they know it, they are, in Ms. Proulx's words, "no longer young men with all of it before them."
Ennis's and Jack's acute emotions - yearning, loneliness, disappointment, loss, love and, yes, lust - are affecting because they are universal. But while the screenplay, by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, adheres closely to the Proulx original, it even more vividly roots the movie in the rural all-American milieu, with its forlorn honky-tonks and small-town Fourth of July picnics, familiar from elegiac McMurtry works like "The Last Picture Show."
More crucially, the script adds detail to Ennis's and Jack's wives (as do Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway, who play them) so that we can implicitly, and without any on-screen oralizing, see the cost inflicted on entire families, not just on Ennis and Jack, when gay people must live a lie.
Though "Brokeback Mountain" is not a western, it's been directed by Ang Lee with the austerity and languorous gait of a John Ford epic. These aesthetics couldn't be more country miles removed from "The Birdcage" or "Will & Grace."
The audience is forced to recognize that gay people were fixtures in the red state of Wyoming (and every other corner of the country, too) long before Matthew Shepard and Mary Cheney were born.
Without a single polemical speech, this laconic film dramatizes homosexuality as an inherent and immutable identity, rather than some aberrant and elective "agenda" concocted by conspiratorial "elites" in Chelsea, the Castro and South Beach, as anti-gay proselytizers would have it. Ennis and Jack long for a life together, not for what gay baiters pejoratively label a "lifestyle."
But in truth the audience doesn't have to be coerced to get it. This is where the country has been steadily moving of late. "Brokeback Mountain," a Hollywood product after all, is not leading a revolution but ratifying one, fleshing out - quite literally - what most Americans now believe.
It's not for nothing that the proposed constitutional ban on same-sex marriage vanished as soon as the election was over. Polls show that a large American majority support equal rights for gay couples as long as the unions aren't labeled "marriage" - and given the current swift pace of change, that reservation, too, will probably fade in the next 5 to 10 years.
The history of "Brokeback Mountain" as a film project in itself crystallizes how fast the climate has shifted. Mr. McMurtry and Ms. Ossana bought the screen rights to the Proulx story after it was published in The New Yorker in 1997.
That was the same year the religious right declared a fatwa on Disney because Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet in her ABC prime-time sitcom. In the eight years it took "Brokeback Mountain" to overcome Hollywood's shilly-shallying and at last be made, the Disney boycott collapsed and Ms. DeGeneres's star rose. She's now a mainstream daytime talk-show host competing with Oprah. No one has forgotten she's a lesbian. No one cares.
ANOTHER startling snapshot of this progress can be found in a culture-war kirmish that unfolded just as "Brokeback Mountain" was arriving at the multiplex. The American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., a leader in the 1997 anti-"Ellen" crusade, claimed this month that its threat of a boycott had led Ford to stop advertising its Jaguar and Land Rover lines in glossy gay magazines.
Last week Ford, under fire from gay civil-rights organizations and no doubt many other mainstream customers, essentially told the would-be boycotters to get lost by publicly announcing that it would not only resume its Jaguar and Land Rover ads in gay publications, but advertise other brands in them as well.
As far as I can tell, the only blowhard in the country to turn up on television to declare culture war on "Brokeback Mountain" also has an affiliation with the American Family Association. By contrast, as Salon reported last week, other family-values ayatollahs have made a conscious decision to ignore the movie, lest they drum up ticket sales by turning it into a SpongeBob SquarePants cause célèbre.
Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America imagined that the film might just go away if he and his peers stayed mum. Audiences "don't want to see two guys going at it," he told Salon. "It's that simple."
So he might wish. The truth is that the millions of moviegoers soon to swoon over the star-crossed gay cowboys of "Brokeback Mountain" can probably put up with the sight of "two guys going at it." It's the all too American tragedy of what happens to these men afterward that neither our hearts nor consciences can so easily shake.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY. Int'l law. A brutal crime that is not an isolated incident but that involves large and systematic actions, often cloaked with official authority, and that shocks the conscience of humankind. # Among the specific crimes that fall within this category are mass murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts perpetrated against a population, whether in wartime of not. See Statute of the International Criminal Court, art. 3 (37 ILM 999).
Note that crimes against humanity are not restricted to wartime nor to the direct violent murder of people.
Here is the standard adopted by the International Criminal Court (which the United States refuses to recognize):
Article 7
Crimes against humanity
1. For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
(a) Murder;
(b) Extermination;
(c) Enslavement;
(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
(f) Torture;
(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;
(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;
(j) The crime of apartheid;
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
2. For the purpose of paragraph 1:
(a) "Attack directed against any civilian population" means a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts referred to in paragraph 1 against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack;
(b) "Extermination" includes the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population;
(c) "Enslavement" means the exercise of any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person and includes the exercise of such power in the course of trafficking in persons, in particular women and children;
(d) "Deportation or forcible transfer of population" means forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law;
(e) "Torture" means the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, upon a person in the custody or under the control of the accused; except that torture shall not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to, lawful sanctions;
(f) "Forced pregnancy" means the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population or carrying out other grave violations of international law. This definition shall not in any way be interpreted as affecting national laws relating to pregnancy;
(g) "Persecution" means the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity;
(h) "The crime of apartheid" means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;
(i) "Enforced disappearance of persons" means the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time.
Note that crimes against humanity are not restricted to wartime nor to the direct violent murder of people.
Here is the standard adopted by the International Criminal Court (which the United States refuses to recognize):
Article 7
Crimes against humanity
1. For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
(a) Murder;
(b) Extermination;
(c) Enslavement;
(d) Deportation or forcible transfer of population;
(e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
(f) Torture;
(g) Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity;
(h) Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph 3, or other grounds that are universally recognized as impermissible under international law, in connection with any act referred to in this paragraph or any crime within the jurisdiction of the Court;
(i) Enforced disappearance of persons;
(j) The crime of apartheid;
(k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
2. For the purpose of paragraph 1:
(a) "Attack directed against any civilian population" means a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts referred to in paragraph 1 against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack;
(b) "Extermination" includes the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population;
(c) "Enslavement" means the exercise of any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership over a person and includes the exercise of such power in the course of trafficking in persons, in particular women and children;
(d) "Deportation or forcible transfer of population" means forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law;
(e) "Torture" means the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, upon a person in the custody or under the control of the accused; except that torture shall not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to, lawful sanctions;
(f) "Forced pregnancy" means the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population or carrying out other grave violations of international law. This definition shall not in any way be interpreted as affecting national laws relating to pregnancy;
(g) "Persecution" means the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity;
(h) "The crime of apartheid" means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;
(i) "Enforced disappearance of persons" means the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
From this month's Atlantic Magazine
http://www.theatlantic.com
If America Left Iraq
The case for cutting and running
by Nir Rosen
.....
A t some point—whether sooner or later—U.S. troops will leave Iraq. I have spent much of the occupation reporting from Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the country, and I can tell you that a growing majority of Iraqis would like it to be sooner. As the occupation wears on, more and more Iraqis chafe at its failure to provide stability or even electricity, and they have grown to hate the explosions, gunfire, and constant war, and also the daily annoyances: having to wait hours in traffic because the Americans have closed off half the city; having to sit in that traffic behind a U.S. military vehicle pointing its weapons at them; having to endure constant searches and arrests. Before the January 30 elections this year the Association of Muslim Scholars—Iraq's most important Sunni Arab body, and one closely tied to the indigenous majority of the insurgency—called for a commitment to a timely U.S. withdrawal as a condition for its participation in the vote. (In exchange the association promised to rein in the resistance.) It's not just Sunnis who have demanded a withdrawal: the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is immensely popular among the young and the poor, has made a similar demand. So has the mainstream leader of the Shiites' Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who made his first call for U.S. withdrawal as early as April 23, 2003.
If the people the U.S. military is ostensibly protecting want it to go, why do the soldiers stay? The most common answer is that it would be irresponsible for the United States to depart before some measure of peace has been assured. The American presence, this argument goes, is the only thing keeping Iraq from an all-out civil war that could take millions of lives and would profoundly destabilize the region. But is that really the case? Let's consider the key questions surrounding the prospect of an imminent American withdrawal.
Would the withdrawal of U.S. troops ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites?
Advertisement
No. That civil war is already under way—in large part because of the American presence. The longer the United States stays, the more it fuels Sunni hostility toward Shiite "collaborators." Were America not in Iraq, Sunni leaders could negotiate and participate without fear that they themselves would be branded traitors and collaborators by their constituents. Sunni leaders have said this in official public statements; leaders of the resistance have told me the same thing in private. The Iraqi government, which is currently dominated by Shiites, would lose its quisling stigma. Iraq's security forces, also primarily Shiite, would no longer be working on behalf of foreign infidels against fellow Iraqis, but would be able to function independently and recruit Sunnis to a truly national force. The mere announcement of an intended U.S. withdrawal would allow Sunnis to come to the table and participate in defining the new Iraq.
But if American troops aren't in Baghdad, what's to stop the Sunnis from launching an assault and seizing control of the city?
Sunni forces could not mount such an assault. The preponderance of power now lies with the majority Shiites and the Kurds, and the Sunnis know this. Sunni fighters wield only small arms and explosives, not Saddam's tanks and helicopters, and are very weak compared with the cohesive, better armed, and numerically superior Shiite and Kurdish militias. Most important, Iraqi nationalism—not intramural rivalry—is the chief motivator for both Shiites and Sunnis. Most insurgency groups view themselves as waging a muqawama—a resistance—rather than a jihad. This is evident in their names and in their propaganda. For instance, the units commanded by the Association of Muslim Scholars are named after the 1920 revolt against the British. Others have names such as Iraqi Islamic Army and Flame of Iraq. They display the Iraqi flag rather than a flag of jihad. Insurgent attacks are meant primarily to punish those who have collaborated with the Americans and to deter future collaboration.
Wouldn't a U.S. withdrawal embolden the insurgency?
No. If the occupation were to end, so, too, would the insurgency. After all, what the resistance movement has been resisting is the occupation. Who would the insurgents fight if the enemy left? When I asked Sunni Arab fighters and the clerics who support them why they were fighting, they all gave me the same one-word answer: intiqaam—revenge. Revenge for the destruction of their homes, for the shame they felt when Americans forced them to the ground and stepped on them, for the killing of their friends and relatives by U.S. soldiers either in combat or during raids.
But what about the foreign jihadi element of the resistance? Wouldn't it be empowered by a U.S. withdrawal?
The foreign jihadi element—commanded by the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—is numerically insignificant; the bulk of the resistance has no connection to al-Qaeda or its offshoots. (Zarqawi and his followers have benefited greatly from U.S. propaganda blaming him for all attacks in Iraq, because he is now seen by Arabs around the world as more powerful than he is; we have been his best recruiting tool.) It is true that the Sunni resistance welcomed the foreign fighters (and to some extent still do), because they were far more willing to die than indigenous Iraqis were. But what Zarqawi wants fundamentally conflicts with what Iraqi Sunnis want: Zarqawi seeks re-establishment of the Muslim caliphate and a Manichean confrontation with infidels around the world, to last until Judgment Day; the mainstream Iraqi resistance just wants the Americans out. If U.S. forces were to leave, the foreigners in Zarqawi's movement would find little support—and perhaps significant animosity—among Iraqi Sunnis, who want wealth and power, not jihad until death. They have already lost much of their support: many Iraqis have begun turning on them. In the heavily Shia Sadr City foreign jihadis had burning tires placed around their necks. The foreigners have not managed to establish themselves decisively in any large cities. Even at the height of their power in Fallujah they could control only one neighborhood, the Julan, and they were hated by the city's resistance council. Today foreign fighters hide in small villages and are used opportunistically by the nationalist resistance.
When the Americans depart and Sunnis join the Iraqi government, some of the foreign jihadis in Iraq may try to continue the struggle—but they will have committed enemies in both Baghdad and the Shiite south, and the entire Sunni triangle will be against them. They will have nowhere to hide. Nor can they merely take their battle to the West. The jihadis need a failed state like Iraq in which to operate. When they leave Iraq, they will be hounded by Arab and Western security agencies.
What about the Kurds? Won't they secede if the United States leaves?
Yes, but that's going to happen anyway. All Iraqi Kurds want an independent Kurdistan. They do not feel Iraqi. They've effectively had more than a decade of autonomy, thanks to the UN-imposed no-fly zone; they want nothing to do with the chaos that is Iraq. Kurdish independence is inevitable—and positive. (Few peoples on earth deserve a state more than the Kurds.) For the moment the Kurdish government in the north is officially participating in the federalist plan—but the Kurds are preparing for secession. They have their own troops, the peshmerga, thought to contain 50,000 to 100,000 fighters. They essentially control the oil city of Kirkuk. They also happen to be the most America-loving people I have ever met; their leaders openly seek to become, like Israel, a proxy for American interests. If what the United States wants is long-term bases in the region, the Kurds are its partners.
Would Turkey invade in response to a Kurdish secession?
For the moment Turkey is more concerned with EU membership than with Iraq's Kurds—who in any event have expressed no ambitions to expand into Turkey. Iraq's Kurds speak a dialect different from Turkey's, and, in fact, have a history of animosity toward Turkish Kurds. Besides, Turkey, as a member of NATO, would be reluctant to attack in defiance of the United States. Turkey would be satisfied with guarantees that it would have continued access to Kurdish oil and trade and that Iraqi Kurds would not incite rebellion in Turkey.
Would Iran effectively take over Iraq?
No. Iraqis are fiercely nationalist—even the country's Shiites resent Iranian meddling. (It is true that some Iraqi Shiites view Iran as an ally, because many of their leaders found safe haven there when exiled by Saddam—but thousands of other Iraqi Shiites experienced years of misery as prisoners of war in Iran.) Even in southeastern towns near the border I encountered only hostility toward Iran.
What about the goal of creating a secular democracy in Iraq that respects the rights of women and non-Muslims?
Give it up. It's not going to happen. Apart from the Kurds, who revel in their secularism, Iraqis overwhelmingly seek a Muslim state. Although Iraq may have been officially secular during the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam encouraged Islamism during the 1990s, and the difficulties of the past decades have strengthened the resurgence of Islam. In the absence of any other social institutions, the mosques and the clergy assumed the dominant role in Iraq following the invasion. Even Baathist resistance leaders told me they have returned to Islam to atone for their sins under Saddam. Most Shiites, too, follow one cleric or another. Ayatollah al-Sistani—supposedly a moderate—wants Islam to be the source of law. The invasion of Iraq has led to a theocracy, which can only grow more hostile to America as long as U.S. soldiers are present. Does Iraqi history offer any lessons?
The British occupation of Iraq, in the first half of the twentieth century, may be instructive. The British faced several uprisings and coups. The Iraqi government, then as now, was unable to suppress the rebels on its own and relied on the occupying military. In 1958, when the government the British helped install finally fell, those who had collaborated with them could find no popular support; some, including the former prime minister Nuri Said, were murdered and mutilated. Said had once been a respected figure, but he became tainted by his collaboration with the British. That year, when revolutionary officers overthrew the government, Said disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape. He was discovered, shot in the head, and buried. The next day a mob dug up his corpse and dragged it through the street—an act that would be repeated so often in Iraq that it earned its own word: sahil. With the British-sponsored government gone, both Sunni and Shiite Arabs embraced the Iraqi identity. The Kurds still resent the British perfidy that made them part of Iraq.
What can the United States do to repair Iraq?
There is no panacea. Iraq is a destroyed and fissiparous country. Iranians and Saudis I've spoken to worry that it might be impossible to keep Iraq from disintegrating. But they agree that the best hope of avoiding this scenario is if the United States leaves; perhaps then Iraqi nationalism will keep at least the Arabs united. The sooner America withdraws and allows Iraqis to assume control of their own country, the better the chances that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari won't face sahil. It may be decades before Iraq recovers from the current maelstrom. By then its borders may be different, its vaunted secularism a distant relic. But a continued U.S. occupation can only get in the way.
http://www.theatlantic.com
If America Left Iraq
The case for cutting and running
by Nir Rosen
.....
A t some point—whether sooner or later—U.S. troops will leave Iraq. I have spent much of the occupation reporting from Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the country, and I can tell you that a growing majority of Iraqis would like it to be sooner. As the occupation wears on, more and more Iraqis chafe at its failure to provide stability or even electricity, and they have grown to hate the explosions, gunfire, and constant war, and also the daily annoyances: having to wait hours in traffic because the Americans have closed off half the city; having to sit in that traffic behind a U.S. military vehicle pointing its weapons at them; having to endure constant searches and arrests. Before the January 30 elections this year the Association of Muslim Scholars—Iraq's most important Sunni Arab body, and one closely tied to the indigenous majority of the insurgency—called for a commitment to a timely U.S. withdrawal as a condition for its participation in the vote. (In exchange the association promised to rein in the resistance.) It's not just Sunnis who have demanded a withdrawal: the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is immensely popular among the young and the poor, has made a similar demand. So has the mainstream leader of the Shiites' Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who made his first call for U.S. withdrawal as early as April 23, 2003.
If the people the U.S. military is ostensibly protecting want it to go, why do the soldiers stay? The most common answer is that it would be irresponsible for the United States to depart before some measure of peace has been assured. The American presence, this argument goes, is the only thing keeping Iraq from an all-out civil war that could take millions of lives and would profoundly destabilize the region. But is that really the case? Let's consider the key questions surrounding the prospect of an imminent American withdrawal.
Would the withdrawal of U.S. troops ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites?
Advertisement
No. That civil war is already under way—in large part because of the American presence. The longer the United States stays, the more it fuels Sunni hostility toward Shiite "collaborators." Were America not in Iraq, Sunni leaders could negotiate and participate without fear that they themselves would be branded traitors and collaborators by their constituents. Sunni leaders have said this in official public statements; leaders of the resistance have told me the same thing in private. The Iraqi government, which is currently dominated by Shiites, would lose its quisling stigma. Iraq's security forces, also primarily Shiite, would no longer be working on behalf of foreign infidels against fellow Iraqis, but would be able to function independently and recruit Sunnis to a truly national force. The mere announcement of an intended U.S. withdrawal would allow Sunnis to come to the table and participate in defining the new Iraq.
But if American troops aren't in Baghdad, what's to stop the Sunnis from launching an assault and seizing control of the city?
Sunni forces could not mount such an assault. The preponderance of power now lies with the majority Shiites and the Kurds, and the Sunnis know this. Sunni fighters wield only small arms and explosives, not Saddam's tanks and helicopters, and are very weak compared with the cohesive, better armed, and numerically superior Shiite and Kurdish militias. Most important, Iraqi nationalism—not intramural rivalry—is the chief motivator for both Shiites and Sunnis. Most insurgency groups view themselves as waging a muqawama—a resistance—rather than a jihad. This is evident in their names and in their propaganda. For instance, the units commanded by the Association of Muslim Scholars are named after the 1920 revolt against the British. Others have names such as Iraqi Islamic Army and Flame of Iraq. They display the Iraqi flag rather than a flag of jihad. Insurgent attacks are meant primarily to punish those who have collaborated with the Americans and to deter future collaboration.
Wouldn't a U.S. withdrawal embolden the insurgency?
No. If the occupation were to end, so, too, would the insurgency. After all, what the resistance movement has been resisting is the occupation. Who would the insurgents fight if the enemy left? When I asked Sunni Arab fighters and the clerics who support them why they were fighting, they all gave me the same one-word answer: intiqaam—revenge. Revenge for the destruction of their homes, for the shame they felt when Americans forced them to the ground and stepped on them, for the killing of their friends and relatives by U.S. soldiers either in combat or during raids.
But what about the foreign jihadi element of the resistance? Wouldn't it be empowered by a U.S. withdrawal?
The foreign jihadi element—commanded by the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—is numerically insignificant; the bulk of the resistance has no connection to al-Qaeda or its offshoots. (Zarqawi and his followers have benefited greatly from U.S. propaganda blaming him for all attacks in Iraq, because he is now seen by Arabs around the world as more powerful than he is; we have been his best recruiting tool.) It is true that the Sunni resistance welcomed the foreign fighters (and to some extent still do), because they were far more willing to die than indigenous Iraqis were. But what Zarqawi wants fundamentally conflicts with what Iraqi Sunnis want: Zarqawi seeks re-establishment of the Muslim caliphate and a Manichean confrontation with infidels around the world, to last until Judgment Day; the mainstream Iraqi resistance just wants the Americans out. If U.S. forces were to leave, the foreigners in Zarqawi's movement would find little support—and perhaps significant animosity—among Iraqi Sunnis, who want wealth and power, not jihad until death. They have already lost much of their support: many Iraqis have begun turning on them. In the heavily Shia Sadr City foreign jihadis had burning tires placed around their necks. The foreigners have not managed to establish themselves decisively in any large cities. Even at the height of their power in Fallujah they could control only one neighborhood, the Julan, and they were hated by the city's resistance council. Today foreign fighters hide in small villages and are used opportunistically by the nationalist resistance.
When the Americans depart and Sunnis join the Iraqi government, some of the foreign jihadis in Iraq may try to continue the struggle—but they will have committed enemies in both Baghdad and the Shiite south, and the entire Sunni triangle will be against them. They will have nowhere to hide. Nor can they merely take their battle to the West. The jihadis need a failed state like Iraq in which to operate. When they leave Iraq, they will be hounded by Arab and Western security agencies.
What about the Kurds? Won't they secede if the United States leaves?
Yes, but that's going to happen anyway. All Iraqi Kurds want an independent Kurdistan. They do not feel Iraqi. They've effectively had more than a decade of autonomy, thanks to the UN-imposed no-fly zone; they want nothing to do with the chaos that is Iraq. Kurdish independence is inevitable—and positive. (Few peoples on earth deserve a state more than the Kurds.) For the moment the Kurdish government in the north is officially participating in the federalist plan—but the Kurds are preparing for secession. They have their own troops, the peshmerga, thought to contain 50,000 to 100,000 fighters. They essentially control the oil city of Kirkuk. They also happen to be the most America-loving people I have ever met; their leaders openly seek to become, like Israel, a proxy for American interests. If what the United States wants is long-term bases in the region, the Kurds are its partners.
Would Turkey invade in response to a Kurdish secession?
For the moment Turkey is more concerned with EU membership than with Iraq's Kurds—who in any event have expressed no ambitions to expand into Turkey. Iraq's Kurds speak a dialect different from Turkey's, and, in fact, have a history of animosity toward Turkish Kurds. Besides, Turkey, as a member of NATO, would be reluctant to attack in defiance of the United States. Turkey would be satisfied with guarantees that it would have continued access to Kurdish oil and trade and that Iraqi Kurds would not incite rebellion in Turkey.
Would Iran effectively take over Iraq?
No. Iraqis are fiercely nationalist—even the country's Shiites resent Iranian meddling. (It is true that some Iraqi Shiites view Iran as an ally, because many of their leaders found safe haven there when exiled by Saddam—but thousands of other Iraqi Shiites experienced years of misery as prisoners of war in Iran.) Even in southeastern towns near the border I encountered only hostility toward Iran.
What about the goal of creating a secular democracy in Iraq that respects the rights of women and non-Muslims?
Give it up. It's not going to happen. Apart from the Kurds, who revel in their secularism, Iraqis overwhelmingly seek a Muslim state. Although Iraq may have been officially secular during the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam encouraged Islamism during the 1990s, and the difficulties of the past decades have strengthened the resurgence of Islam. In the absence of any other social institutions, the mosques and the clergy assumed the dominant role in Iraq following the invasion. Even Baathist resistance leaders told me they have returned to Islam to atone for their sins under Saddam. Most Shiites, too, follow one cleric or another. Ayatollah al-Sistani—supposedly a moderate—wants Islam to be the source of law. The invasion of Iraq has led to a theocracy, which can only grow more hostile to America as long as U.S. soldiers are present. Does Iraqi history offer any lessons?
The British occupation of Iraq, in the first half of the twentieth century, may be instructive. The British faced several uprisings and coups. The Iraqi government, then as now, was unable to suppress the rebels on its own and relied on the occupying military. In 1958, when the government the British helped install finally fell, those who had collaborated with them could find no popular support; some, including the former prime minister Nuri Said, were murdered and mutilated. Said had once been a respected figure, but he became tainted by his collaboration with the British. That year, when revolutionary officers overthrew the government, Said disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape. He was discovered, shot in the head, and buried. The next day a mob dug up his corpse and dragged it through the street—an act that would be repeated so often in Iraq that it earned its own word: sahil. With the British-sponsored government gone, both Sunni and Shiite Arabs embraced the Iraqi identity. The Kurds still resent the British perfidy that made them part of Iraq.
What can the United States do to repair Iraq?
There is no panacea. Iraq is a destroyed and fissiparous country. Iranians and Saudis I've spoken to worry that it might be impossible to keep Iraq from disintegrating. But they agree that the best hope of avoiding this scenario is if the United States leaves; perhaps then Iraqi nationalism will keep at least the Arabs united. The sooner America withdraws and allows Iraqis to assume control of their own country, the better the chances that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari won't face sahil. It may be decades before Iraq recovers from the current maelstrom. By then its borders may be different, its vaunted secularism a distant relic. But a continued U.S. occupation can only get in the way.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
"Mr. President, this job can't be fun for you any more. There's no more
money to spend--you used up all of that. You can't start another war
because you used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your
term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people. Listen
to your Mom. The cupboard's bare, the credit cards maxed out. No one's
speaking to you. Mission accomplished.
"Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and
walk away. Like you did with your military service and the oil company
and the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next
fantasy job. How about cowboy or space man? Now I know what you're
saying: there's so many other things that you as President could
involve yourself in. Please don't. I know, I know. There's a lot left
to do. There's a war with Venezuela. Eliminating the sales tax on
yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social
Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote.
"But, Sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you
govern like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised
that you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks
like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never
conceded an entire city to rising water and snakes.
"On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four
airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of
New Orleans. Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love
this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were
on the other side.
"So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: 'Take a hint.' "
-- comedian Bill Mahr
money to spend--you used up all of that. You can't start another war
because you used up the army. And now, darn the luck, the rest of your
term has become the Bush family nightmare: helping poor people. Listen
to your Mom. The cupboard's bare, the credit cards maxed out. No one's
speaking to you. Mission accomplished.
"Now it's time to do what you've always done best: lose interest and
walk away. Like you did with your military service and the oil company
and the baseball team. It's time. Time to move on and try the next
fantasy job. How about cowboy or space man? Now I know what you're
saying: there's so many other things that you as President could
involve yourself in. Please don't. I know, I know. There's a lot left
to do. There's a war with Venezuela. Eliminating the sales tax on
yachts. Turning the space program over to the church. And Social
Security to Fannie Mae. Giving embryos the vote.
"But, Sir, none of that is going to happen now. Why? Because you
govern like Billy Joel drives. You've performed so poorly I'm surprised
that you haven't given yourself a medal. You're a catastrophe that walks
like a man. Herbert Hoover was a shitty president, but even he never
conceded an entire city to rising water and snakes.
"On your watch, we've lost almost all of our allies, the surplus, four
airliners, two trade centers, a piece of the Pentagon and the City of
New Orleans. Maybe you're just not lucky. I'm not saying you don't love
this country. I'm just wondering how much worse it could be if you were
on the other side.
"So, yes, God does speak to you. What he is saying is: 'Take a hint.' "
-- comedian Bill Mahr
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