George Bush is enjoying a typical European welcome in Rome these days, and for some reason he gave the Pope the "American Medal of Freedom." All right, the Pope's opposition to communism was important, and nobody can take away from him his contribution to freeing eastern Europe, including his homeland Poland, from despotism.
Which is why it is so unbelievable that the Pope used the opportunity to reiterate his opposition to freeing the Iraqi people from a dictator even worse than most of those that plagued eastern Europe at the time the iron curtain fell.
The Pope, who has Parkinson's Disease, struggled to speak clearly as he addressed the US president.
He reiterated the Vatican's opposition to the war in Iraq and said everyone wanted the situation to be normalised as quickly as possible "with the active participation of the international community and in particular the United Nations".
No, no, no! Nobody in their right mind wants the situation in the Middle East to "normalise." Normality in the Middle East is despotism, genocide, mass graves, religious fanaticism, poverty, secterism, corruption, clan warfare, oppression of women, endless cycles of violence. We don't want this at all!
The Pope did, however, praise Mr Bush's "commitment to the promotion of moral values in American society, particularly with regard to respect for life and the family".
Oh great. Bush has actually freed more people from oppression than any US president has achieved in decades, and the Pope chides him for it. But he praises Bush for his continued attempts to oppress gays and minimise women's reproductive freedom, no matter what consequences it has for women's and children's health worldwide.
The Vatican's attempt to pretend to hold the rhetorical moral high ground is looking worse every day.
Umar Baziyani, a senior aide to top terrorist leader Abu Misaab al-Zarqawi, was arrested by Iraqi police on May 30 and is now being interrogated, the US military has disclosed.
Good news, on at least two counts. First, that a murderer has been arrested. Second, that the new Iraqi police and security forces are doing a good job.
PS: Actually, Google finds exactly no hits on the web for Umar Baziyani. That is about to change!
Nothing like criticising leftist icon Michael Moore for dragging the leftie wingnuts out of the woodwork. I have noticed in the past that most moderate weblogs have some wingnuts hanging around. Being located where I am, mines are far left, and they feel immense pain whenever their fat hero is criticised.
My house wingnut is named Michel Wuck... Vujk... Vuijlsteke, ah, it's pronounced "fucker" or something close enough anyway. He is a big blogger in Belgium, which is like saying someone is a great ice skater on the pacific islands of Tuvalu. His great claim to fame is blogging in a language that sounds like a fatal disease to the throat. He's from the Dutch part of Belgium, you see, as opposed to the French part, writing away about Belgian reality TV and Belgian celebrities with big tits. Don't laugh; there is a huge market for such things.
When you see postings that have the distinct feel of being written by some card carrying Euro-weenie, it's actually best to look for domain names in .be (Belgium), .se (Sweden) or .nl (Holland) first. You see, the French and Germans typically don't read or write English. The Belgians, apparently, are more French than the French themselves, which is why their proud invention pommes frites are not called Belgian fries, but they sometimes communicate in English. The people, I mean, not the fries.
My recent writings about Michael Moore dragged Vuj..fucker out of the woodwork again, to defend his hero. And what a brilliant defence it was! Yes, he conceded, Michael Moore may be a dishonest liar, but there are other people lying too, on the other side (like Ann Coulter), ergo it is a waste of time to expose any of Moore's lies and dishonesty. Michel proudly stated that he is just honest (!) about choosing which lies he likes to believe.
This is of course where leftists go badly wrong. Leftists are herd animals. You attack one, be it Michael Moore, George Galloway, Saddam Hussein or anyone else, and the rest feel it as a personal attack on their very beings. Before you know it, you have a lengthy tirade of incoherent leftist-babble in your comments, where neocons, Halliburton, WMDs and Abu Ghraib are bound to be mentioned a lot.
Michel's "logic" is known from kindegarten by the statement "but he did it first." At a more mature level, it is known by the Latin name tu quoque ("you too"), a logical fallacy. The word fallacy, in case Michel fell off there, means it is logically unsound to use that form of argument.
There are people on both sides of the political divide (often arbitary anyway) who are dishonest, and they should all be exposed as such. The antidote to rightist lies and distortions should not be leftist lies and distortions (or vice versa), but truth and facts. Unfortunately, while most moderate bloggers understand this, leftist bloggers do not. What rightist bloggers do, I cannot say, since I haven't found many, oddly enough, but I have my suspicions.
To true leftists like Michel, the "truth" is an illusion, which is very convenient for someone who builds his argument on fabrications. Since this argument is sadly self-defeating, any debate with these leftists quickly collapse into metadiscussions about form. Since I am a big fan of calling assholes as I see them, and Michel breaks down and cries when he sees nasty words like "fuck," namecalling is his convenient excuse for immediately reclusing himself from any attempt at defending his positions. Which is just as well; coming up against the 101 Airborne armed with a catapult is unlikely to last you very long. So instead of debating, he turns around and proclaims victory right away, Iraqi information minister style.
Back to the herd animals... and that is the true distinction between the collectivist mindset of the left and the individualist mindset of moderates. Look at the typical left-wing blogs, or institutions like MoveOn or Indymedia. From their perspective, the difference between John Kerry and George Bush is about one nanoinch. Yet, Bush is the evil villain, worse than Hitler, and Kerry is the divine saviour hero who comes in shining armor to save the world from Mordor's forces. Kerry is defined to be in their flock. Politically, practically everything they hate about Bush, Kerry mirrors, with some very minute differences.
After the discussion, if that is what we call it, Belgian blog hero Michel then runs back to his own blog, whines in his own cancerous language about how mean I was to him here, and tries to get some sympathy from his Euroweenie reality TV fans. He also shows what a great fan of Michael Moore he is by very carefully avoding to link the actualy debate, and quoting extremely selectively and deceptively from it. Oh, and if you're tempted to answer his diatribes in his own blog, he will delete your comments, smugly stating no law demands he puts up with being "insulted" in his own blog. True, fucker, it is better that it be done here.
PS: For your daily dose of healthy Michael Moore bashing, go to Tim Blair's blog.
William A. Mayer has written a spot-on newspaper report in modern style, showing how the BBC and others would have reported on D-Day if they had been equally self-hating 60 years ago.
Tragic French Offensive Stalled on Beaches (Normandy, France - June 6, 1944) - Pandemonium, shock and sheer terror predominate today's eventsin Europe.
In an as yet unfolding apparent fiasco, Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower's troops got a rude awakening this morning at Omaha Beach here in Normandy.
Due to insufficient planning and lack of a workable entrance strategy, soldiers of the 1st and 29th Infantry as well as Army Rangers are now bogged down and sustaining heavy casualties inflicted on them by dug-in insurgent positions located 170 feet above them on cliffs overlooking the beaches which now resemble blood soaked killing fields at the time of this mid-morning filing.
Bodies, parts of bodies, and blood are the order of the day here, the screams of the dying and the stillness of the dead mingle in testament to this terrible event.
Morale can only be described as extremely poor--in some companies all the officers have been either killed or incapacitated,leaving only poorly trained privates to fend for themselves.
Things appear to be going so poorly that Lt. General Omar Bradley has been rumored to be considering breaking off the attack entirely. As we go to press embattled U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt's spokesman has not made himself available for comment at all, fueling fires that something has gone disastrously awry.
The well-renowed German magazine Der Spiegel writes about Ray Bradbury's harsh words for Michael Moore, giving some (but not all) of the juicier bits from the Swedish interview.
"Michael Moore ist ein dämlicher Drecksack."
That sounds like "stupid shitbag." There are many ways to translate Swedish "korkad skitstövel", and we can just speculate what Bradbury said originally, in English. I chose the extremely direct translation "screwed", but it would probably be more correct to translate it "stupid" or "dumb." Very literally, "skitstövel" means "shit boot" which, to the best of my knowledge, is no known English language expression.
The headline is the other juicy sound bite:
"Michael Moore ist ein fürchterlicher Mensch"
A "horrible human." Pretty straighforward.
Ah, the finer philological details of insults. There is a particular schwung to insults in German, isn't it?
PS: The Washington Post has also learned about this interview, and gives it a brief mention. They translate it "dumb [expletive]" which highlights the advantages of blogging compared to family friendly newspaper journalism. As far as I can see, no other English-language news source has written about the interview.
Under "peace" umbrella, far left is becoming far right
For people who have been following warblogs, it is important to remember that most people are completely in the dark about how an alliance of extremist marxists and Islamic fundamentalists have taken control of the so-called peace movement. Naturally, only a minority of the millions who marched against the Iraq war were aware of the extremist positions of the leaders and organisers. While most politicians who opposed the war made it very clear they found Saddam Hussein's regime disgusting, the march leaders were open supporters of the Baath regime. And why were the marchers kept ignorant about this fact? Because the press, like the BBC, suppressed that kind of information.
Just before the war against Iraq I began to receive strange calls from BBC journalists. Would I like information on how the leadership of the anti-war movement had been taken over by the Socialist Workers Party? Maybe, I replied. It was depressing that a totalitarian party was in the saddle, but that's where the SWP always tries to get. Why get excited?
Oh there are lots of reasons, said the BBC hacks. The anti-war movement wasn't a simple repetition of the old story of the politically naive being led by the nose by sly operators. The far left was becoming the far right. It had gone as close to supporting Ba'athist fascism as it dared and had formed a working alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain, which, along with the usual misogyny and homophobia of such organisations, also believed that Muslims who decided that there was no God deserved to die for the crime of free thought. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, would allow themselves to be organised by the opponents of democracy and modernity and would march through the streets of London without a flicker of self-doubt. Wasn't this a story?
It's a great story, I cried. But why don't you broadcast it?
We can't, said the bitter hacks. Our editors won't let us.
Radio silence was imposed on the sinister and in many ways right-wing behaviour of the far left and has continued into the campaign for this month's elections. With the exception of the New Statesman and Tribune - and the Harry's Place website at hurryupharry.bloghouse.net - no one has found it worth noting that, for the first time since the Enlightenment, a section of the left is allied with religious fanaticism and, for the first time since the Hitler-Stalin pact, a section of the left has gone soft on fascism.
There is much more, including discussing our old friend George Galloway.
