Horrid sight. . .

Clearly, the administration is losing ground there. Nevertheless, why alter strategy? Mere repetition seems sufficient to convince most Americans, intellectually challenged as they are, that if you just keep looking on the bright side then everything is just great.

But even if the majority don’t quite swallow the noble lie, when comes election time, all you need to do is convince the faithful you are doing the work of the gods and bob’s your uncle. Remember, the gods work in mysterious ways. The perception things are going badly won’t matter at all.

Like the German Philosopher Leibniz first then the French philosopher Voltaire in Candide (something you guys should be reading!)argued, no matter how evil things get, because God created it, this must be the ‘best of all possible worlds.’ You guys are in serious trouble. You need to start thinking about action; about just how you are going to change the medieval course your country is now firmly headed on. Why not a revolution or something like that?

This story was summed up for me by a colleague who takes the Sun on those days when the London Review of Books isn’t out. He said:

“Page 3 is going right downhill these days.”

I’m also somewhat biased because I think that leaking these kinds of pictures is a much more effective anti-terrorist tool than lots of other objectionable measures (e.g. torture). Going to Iraq and ending up a martyr is one thing; going to Iraq, having pictures of yourself in your underwear showing up on the web, and coming home in disgrace is something else entirely.

Finally, my money is on the source of these pictures being some guard. He could sell them for good money in the knowledge that he’d get at most a slap on the wrist, wheras higher-ups have to pay at least lip service to political considerations.

I think the solution to the double-bind is that the insurgents are more anti-American than pro-Saddam. (which is basically in fact what Bush said, but more euphemistically).

yeah, that’s a reasonable point. It was just odd to see two media incidents get spun in opposite directions in the space of 48 hrs, given that in the first case the administration wanted to make Newsweek look as bad as possible and in the second case wanted to make themselves look as good as possible.

More broadly, it truly was a day of Bush flexibility. We go from God writing it in everyone’s soul the desire for freedom to “I think they’re inspired by an ideology that is so barbaric and backwards that it’s hard for many in the Western world to comprehend how they think.”—apparently there really is something different about people in the Middle East after all.

And on stem cells, he’s against “destroying life to save life” except for the death penalty and being on offense abroad in the War on Terror to save lives at home. The party of ideas, indeed.

And a large number of people the people who would take offense at pictures of Saddam in his underwear are already blowing shit up anyway, unlike the people who were rightly offended by the Koran-flushing.

Today was my longest and last day of extended volunteer work at Mr. Man’s school for this academic year. Today I had to keep an eye on the boys from his class as we took a tour of Seattle’s harbor. Many people – and this is very unfair- say that…