Iraq as a Pentagon Construction Site
How the Bush Administration “Endures”
By Tom EngelhardtThe title of the agreement, signed by President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki in a “video conference” last week, and carefully labeled as a “non-binding” set of principles for further negotiations, was a mouthful: a “Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America.” Whew!
Words matter, of course. They seldom turn up by accident in official documents or statements. Last week, in the first reports on this “declaration,” one of those words that matter caught my attention. Actually, it wasn’t in the declaration itself, where the key phrase was “long-term relationship” (something in the lives of private individuals that falls just short of a marriage), but in a “fact-sheet” issued by the White House. Here’s the relevant line: “Iraq’s leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America, and we seek an enduring relationship with a democratic Iraq.” Of course, “enduring” there bears the same relationship to permanency as “long-term relationship” does to marriage.
Some guy with a website
Our friend August Pollak is auctioning off a strip for charity. Go bid.
Reviewing National Review
You may have seen National Review has gotten in trouble for publishing some glaringly false stories about Lebanon. If not, Thomas Edsall has written up the basics here; there’s also more from Glenn Greenwald and Ken Silverstein.
Now I’ve posted my own complaints at Mother Jones: first, about my personal experience with National Review online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez, and second, about the Arab “tendency to lie”.
Olbermann channels Tomorrow…
… channelling O’Reilly:
Heads up
Tom Tomorrow fans will want to watch (or record) Keith Olbermann tonight.
Update: that was fun — Olbermann read a huge chunk of the cartoon live on the air, in the voice of O’Reilly, and I have to say, with a perfect sense of timing. Usually when someone tries something like this with my work they end up mangling it, but KO really nailed it.
Hopefully someone will put a video up soon …
(Reminder: the full cartoon is here.)