THIS MODERN WORLD

… no one is going to get a blogging Pulitzer for being the fastest to post what they just saw and heard on the TV.

And yet, they try.

You know what makes me mad? When people don’t realize I’m busy and don’t need my brain cluttered up with lots of superfluous names and dates and numbers. That’s why I’m grateful to Frederick Jones:

More than 600,000 Iraqis have died by violence since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to a study released today by researchers at Johns Hopkins University…

Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council said “many experts” found that a 2004 study by the same group “wildly inflated the findings.” That study said the war had caused 100,000 Iraqi deaths.

You see? Mr. Jones could have blathered on and on for hours, naming the specific thousands of extremely qualified experts who came to that conclusion about the earlier study. But he knows I don’t have time for that kind of nonsense! All I need to hear is that these many experts are out there, showing we haven’t killed any Iraqis during this war. In fact, I suspect these very same experts have found we’ve actually caused several hundred thousand dead Iraqis to be resurrected.

Thanks, National Security Council—for keeping my brain secure!

A lovely slapdown of a really stupid right wing talking point from a journalist on the ground:

I’m more puzzled by comments that the violence isn’t any worse than any American city. Really? In which American city do 60 bullet-riddled bodies turn up on a given day? In which city do the headless bodies of ordinary citizens turn up every single day? In which city would it not be news if neighborhood school children were blown up? In which neighborhood would you look the other way if gunmen came into restaurants and shot dead the customers?

Day-to-day life here for Iraqis is so far removed from the comfortable existence we live in the United States that it is almost literally unimaginable.

It’s almost impossible to describe what it feels like being stalled in traffic, your heart pounding, wondering if the vehicle in front of you is one of the three or four car bombs that will go off that day. Or seeing your husband show up at the door covered in blood after he was kidnapped and beaten.

I don’t know a single family here that hasn’t had a relative, neighbor or friend die violently. In places where there’s been all-out fighting going on, I’ve interviewed parents who buried their dead child in the yard because it was too dangerous to go to the morgue.

Imagine the worst day you’ve ever had in your life, add a regular dose of terror and you’ll begin to get an idea of what it’s like every day for a lot of people here.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, journalists were conned into believing that saying what they know to be true is not “objective.” I suppose it’s because, as either Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert once said, the facts have an anti-Bush bias. The create-your-own-reality crowd doesn’t have to win arguments as long as they can raise doubts and confuse the issue. It’s good to see someone standing up and calling bullshit on them.

(Via.)

Here:

What is most striking and accomplished about Tom Tomorrow’s cartoons is that they convey how ludicrous and extreme our political dialogue has become without veering much at all from what that dialogue actually is. He is able to incisively capture the idiocy and deceit that lies at the heart of our political debates without distorting what is being said. Unlike most cartoonists, he relies very little on hyperbole, unstated inferences or cheap insult in order to mock his subjects because his subjects are sufficiently ludicrous and corrupt on their own and do not need to be exaggerated in order to be exposed.

The format of the cartoon can make anything seem somewhat frivolous and absurd. For exactly that reason, it is an ideal format for examining the political events and political debates of the last five years. Our political dialogue has degenerated well into the realm of the absurd, and the cartoons in Hell in a Handbasket convey that absurdity in a visceral though highly accurate way.

Well….North Korea tested a nuke. As Josh Marshall says, this is further proof that the Bush Administration’s foreign policy is a complete failure :

President Bush came to office believing that Clinton’s policy amounted to appeasement. Force and strength were the way to deal with North Korea, not a mix of force, diplomacy and aide. And with that premise, President Bush went about scuttling the 1994 agreement, using evidence that the North Koreans were pursuing uranium enrichment (another path to the bomb) as the final straw.
. . .
Threats are a potent force if you’re willing to follow through on them. But he wasn’t. The plutonium production plant, which had been shuttered since 1994, got unshuttered. And the bomb that exploded tonight was, if I understand this correctly, almost certainly the product of that plutonium uncorked almost four years ago.

So the President talked a good game, the North Koreans called his bluff and he folded. And since then, for all intents and purposes, and all the atmospherics to the contrary, he and his administration have done essentially nothing.

I wouldn’t use the word “nothing”. At least one member of the Administration has been doing something, though it would probably be described as too much carrot, not enough stick :

Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sat on the board of a company which three years ago sold two light water nuclear reactors to North Korea – a country he now regards as part of the “axis of evil” and which has been targeted for regime change by Washington because of its efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Mr Rumsfeld was a non-executive director of ABB, a European engineering giant based in Zurich, when it won a $200m (£125m) contract to provide the design and key components for the reactors. The current defence secretary sat on the board from 1990 to 2001, earning $190,000 a year. He left to join the Bush administration.
. . .
Many members of the Bush administration are on record as opposing Mr Clinton’s plans, saying that weapons-grade nuclear material could be extracted from the type of light water reactors that ABB sold. Mr Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and the state department’s number two diplomat, Richard Armitage, both opposed the deal as did the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, whose campaign Mr Rumsfeld ran and where he also acted as defence adviser.

One unnamed ABB board director told Fortune magazine that Mr Rumsfeld was involved in lobbying his hawkish friends on behalf of ABB.
. . .
The type of reactors involved in the ABB deal produce plutonium which needs refining before it can be weaponised. One US congressman and critic of the North Korean regime described the reactors as “nuclear bomb factories”.

North Korea expelled the inspectors last year and withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in January at about the same time that the Bush administration authorised $3.5m to keep ABB’s reactor project going.

Give it a second for those last few paragraphs to sink in. One of the biggest enemies of the United States just joined the nuclear club over the weekend and our secretary of defense was involved in selling them the technology to do it. I won’t even bother to speculate about the ulterior motives that have surely shaped our policies towards North Korean non-proliferation, but I’d love to know how much money Donald Rumsfeld has made helping Kim Jong-il make a nuclear bomb. Between Rummy and North Korea, the Bush family’s close ties to the Saudis, and our nuke-selling, Bin Laden-harboring “close allies” Pakistan, I can’t help but look forward to 2008 when our country has another chance to choose a leader who isn’t all chummy with the bad guys.

UPDATE : As commenters and emailers have pointed out, Rumsfeld’s chumminess with the North Koreans is a little more complicated than I let on. The nuclear reactors that Rumsfeld helped sell Kim Jong-il likely weren’t the source of this weekend’s nuclear test. So Rummy isn’t arming rogue leaders, he was just doing business with them. Or as it was put in the Guardian article :

Critics of the administration’s bellicose language on North Korea say that the problem was not that Mr Rumsfeld supported the Clinton-inspired diplomacy and the ABB deal but that he did not “speak up against it”. “One could draw the conclusion that economic and personal interests took precedent over non-proliferation,” said Steve LaMontagne, an analyst with the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington.

Sounds like the kinda guy you want running the Pentagon, huh?