The buck stops elsewhere. The sight of heads rolling in Washington will not alter the fact that Dubya is a big baby, pretending that the responsibility for his myopic, maniacal march to invade Iraq belongs to someone else, namely CIA Director George Tenet.

Iraqgate, Yellowcakegate, Whatever-you-want-to-call-it-gate — the entire executive branch needs to be swept out and disinfected before the chickenshit virus spreads any further.

{ 4:04 PM }

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Abstinence: the newest form of greed. "No sex, please, we're American," may be the motto of the newest gimme-gimme hypocrite — the "abstinence consultant." In Las Vegas Weekly, Richard Abowitz's pleas for rationality fall on deaf ears as abstinence activists invade Sin City:

I tell one of the protesters about a study done in a Nevada brothel showing just how surprisingly effective condoms can be at preventing disease transmission when handled by users as expert as hookers. She informs me that I am mistaken, and then has a reverie about filing product-liability suits against condom manufactures on behalf of pregnant and STD-ravaged teens led astray by school nurses and left-wing sex-ed teachers.

It is worth pointing out that abstinence advocates are now themselves reaching out for public dollars from a friendly Bush administration. "There are federal dollars for abstinence right here in Nevada," [president and founder of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, Leslee] Unruh told me.

Despite having brains small enough to fit inside a condom, Unruh and her cross-legged comrades have open arms when it comes to the public till. The smell of federal money is so much sexier to them than any human pheromones — their libidos consist entirely of greed.

⇒ This great article from the Washington Post a couple weeks ago on born-again virgins is well worth your time.

And then there's always the abstinence greed of Christian felon Chuck Colson, no stranger to fraud in the White House.

{ 12:14 PM }

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I know entertainment, and that's no entertainment. Odd how the "Shut up, lowly entertainer" rhetoric consistently levelled at Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks manages never to apply to Arnold Schwarzenegger, even when he attends a multibillion dollar fireworks display and filet mignon barbecue in Baghdad. But inconsistent logic, presented as inarguable truth, now pops up everywhere and is indeed a hallmark of these times. Even among the grunts in the embattled town Arnold visited:

"You think about it every day. You know they don't want us here," said [Army Spc. Irvin] Spencer, sitting on a concrete block with a pack of Newport cigarettes tucked into his waistband. "I don't get these people. We're here to help and they shoot at us."

Spencer's friend, Spc. Byron Aiken, 27, of Converse, Texas, said he had no problem putting his life on the line for the sake of the U.S. mission here. But he wished the Iraqis appreciated his work.

"It's time for us to go," Aiken said, an M-16 rifle propped between his knees. "As long as we stay here, we'll keep dying. They just don't want their country run by Americans."

The hostility to Sean Penn and the warm welcome for Arnold Schwarzenegger have nothing to do with their status as entertainers. They reflect the growing American inability to think consistent thoughts of any kind — about entertainers and other frauds in politics, about tangible reasons for war, about the vested interests and commercial motivations of those in office, about the value of soldiers' and civilians' lives, about impeachable offenses.

We are losing the war on stupidity.

{ 7:20 AM }

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Kenya advises against travel to US. This opinion piece by C.Y. Gopinath in Outlook India argues that travel advisories ought to be a two-way street:

...Nairobi does have its share of crime, and is certainly not the safest of places. My compound has electrical fencing, and my home has safe havens, motion detectors, and panic buttons.

But while petty theft, burglaries and carjacking are common, killing is not the norm. Some of my friends have been carjacked by polite and cheerful young unemployed men of reasonable education, who have been at pains to explain the dire circumstances that have forced them into such diversions.

There is another city where I was cautioned, just a year ago, to exercise extreme caution, and it was Washington DC. I was told that its crime rate was horrifying, and that I should be specially careful not to venture into certain marginal areas of the city, such as where the blacks and latinos live. In Nairobi, you will be similarly warned not to move around in Eastleigh and certain colonies in the industrial belt.

I was struck by another similarity with Nairobi - just as the US Embassy in Nairobi was the target of an Al Qaeda terrorist attack in 1998 (in which mostly Kenyan bystanders perished), the Pentagon in Washington DC was hit, on September 11, 2001, by an aircraft manned by Al Qaeda terrorists.

I made enquiries to find out if there was a travel advisory out against Washington DC, or against other cities in the United States. I was told that Washington's gates remained wide open to tourism (and other isms, like neoconservatism). Indeed, it transpired that there is no travel advisory out against any US city at all, though reliable sources such as CNN and BBC routinely report that people there live under constant threat of unexpected attack by viruses, microbes, Kalashnikovs, snipers, serial killers, shoe bombs, water supply poisoning, anthrax, truck bombs, nuclear strikes, radiation leaks, surveillance, loss of civil liberties, and so on.

The similarities between Washington and Nairobi are multiplying faster than the differences. Makes you wonder if Kenya's Department of State should start issuing travel advisories similar to this one.

{ 12:05 PM }

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Six hours for Botswana, 3,864 hours for Crawford, Texas.

Botswanans are not necessarily impressed:

Bush is not the first U.S. president to visit Botswana.

Bill Clinton took a two-day trek through the country in 1998. At about six hours, Bush's visit is much shorter.

[...]

"I'm scared of Bush coming," said 19-year-old Keneilwe Sebonye, an office assistant making her way to work in downtown Gaborone. "He will kill us."

For the 40% of the Botswanan adult population infected with HIV, it might be a bit late for the Texan to preach abstinence.

{ 8:40 AM }

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Is there a market for anti-stupidity in America? In a brilliant, counter-intuitive business move, the UK paper The Guardian is looking to bring its unique brand of intelligence to the US market in the form of a magazine:

Rather than a lot of readers at a small price, the idea is fewer readers at a greater price (whereas most U.S. magazines discount their subscription price as much as 80 percent). Rusbridger figures that the American Guardian, charging a hefty subscription price, will be in safe financial territory at a 100,000-level circulation. (Advertising, in this approach, is welcome but not the main driver.) In other words, against the trend of all other commercial media (wherein the price the consumer needs to pay or is willing to pay gets progressively lower), the job here is to make the magazine—the writing, the attitudes, the opinions, the content—worth more by being better, smarter, more exclusive.

Better and smarter may not turn out to be quite as exclusive as they predict. The record-breaking sales of Hillary's book proves that there is indeed pent-up demand for intelligent narratives as an antidote to the shrillness of the right wing's more simple-minded screeds (Coulter, Savage, et al.).

Link via the glorious Cursor.

{ 10:34 AM }

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