THIS MODERN WORLD

This interview Mr. Tomorrow found with Daniel Pipes —:

Q: What is the biggest lesson you have learned from the Iraq war?

PIPES: The ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them.

— raises an important question: have the wogs always been this ungrateful? The historical evidence indicates they have. Henry Morton Stanley knew this; here’s what he wrote about his 190 African servants on his 1871 trip to find Dr. Livingstone:

“The blacks give me an immense amount of trouble; they are too ungrateful to suit my fancy.”

Also like Iraqis, Stanley’s servants had a tendency to die in copious, ungrateful quantities.

FURTHERMORE: Seymour Hersh:

The Patai book [“The Arab Mind”], an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force…”

Henry Morton Stanley:

“The savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision…”

“Bush was Right” — the music video.

Sample lyrics:

Democracy is on the way, hitting like a tidal wave
All over the middle east, dictators walk with shaky knees
Don’t know what they’re gonna do, their worst nightmare is coming true
They fear the domino effect, they’re all wondering who’s next

* * *

Cheney was right, Condi was right,
Rummy was right, Blair was right
You were right, We were right, “The Right” was right
and Bush was right…
Bush was right!
Bush was right!
What We’re About
What We’re Fighting For

Full lyrics here.

On April 1, the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ran an interview with Daniel Pipes (found via docstrangelove.com, which also has a handy neocon rundown at the top of the page). Some notable excerpts:

Q: What is the biggest lesson you have learned from the Iraq war?

A: The ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them — to release them from the bondage of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. They have rapidly interpreted it as something they did and that we were incidental to it. They’ve more or less written us out of the picture.

Q: How will we know when the occupation or the invasion of Iraq was a success or a failure?

A: Oh, it was a success. We got rid of Saddam Hussein. Beyond that is icing.

Here’s the latest icing.

Having just devoted a week of my life to flogging the book, it’s gratifying to get an email like this one:

I bought “Hell in a Handbasket” this weekend, and I love it. I was a little reluctant to buy it, since I had read all of the cartoons when they came out. I’m guessing many of your readers might feel the same way. However, reading them consecutively rather than weekly adds a lot to the enjoyment. Also, it’s great to see proof that liberals were making prescient arguments at the time the events were unfolding and that we really aren’t just criticizing in hindsight (this is, of course, how I remember it, but memory can be tricky). Also, the quality of the printing is great and there are a lot of classic strips in there.

My wife loved it, too. She loved it so much she suggested that I buy one for my mom for Mother’s Day. (My mom “Yoostabee” a Republican, but Bush has turned her into raging liberal.) So, in addition to being great political satire, it also makes a great Mother’s Day gift.

Ad’s to your left.

(Still recuperating from five cities in five days. Real blogging will commence eventually.)

… also: many thanks to the generous reader who sent the Fantagraphics Complete Peanuts volumes off the Wish List for my birthday (which falls this year on the oddly sequential date 04-05-06…)

One exciting thing about America today is we all get to experience quantum mechanics on a huge scale. Just as Schrodinger’s cat is both alive and dead at the same time, the United States is simultaneously at war and not at war.

For instance, here’s the Assocated Press just now on Jose Padilla:

A divided Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Jose Padilla, held as an enemy combatant without traditional legal rights for more than three years, sidestepping a challenge to Bush administration wartime detention powers.

It’s not surprising they’d put it this way. After all, Bush & co. tell us we’re at war and he’s a wartime president every two seconds.

But here’s the thing: according to the Attorney General of the United States, the person prosecuting Padilla, Congress has not declared war:

GONZALES: There was not a war declaration, either in connection with Al Qaida or in Iraq.

It’s easy to understand why the Bush administration wants it both ways: we’re at war because that gives them more power…but we’re also not at war because they would then have treaty obligations, such as under the Geneva Conventions.

Meanwhile, the AP, the rest of the U.S. media, and the Democratic party say nothing whatsoever about this. No one asks Bush the obvious question: “Is the United States at war?”

I guess everyone intuitively senses that the war’s quantum superposition, in which it exists and does not exist at the time, can only be sustained as long as we don’t observe the issue. If we did, the war’s wavefunction would collapse and it would be either one or the other.

And who wants that? It’s much more enjoyable to live inside a gigantic thought experiment.