THIS MODERN WORLD

— Small format change: I’ve moved the links to the sidebars on each side of the main page. I’ll leave the old links page up for awhile for those of you who have it bookmarked, but I won’t be updating it any more.

— Thanks to the generous readers who recently sent a couple items off the wish list. Those unexpected presents are always a treat.

…oops, one more: been meaning to post an update on the Sparky and Blinky figurines, which are shipping much more slowly than initially promised. The short story is, they’re being produced by a very small company which has had a run of crazy bad luck this summer (including a basement flooded with sewage). I’m not making any excuses for them — I’m not terribly happy about all of this myself. But if you haven’t received your order yet, I’d still encourage patience — the finished product is really cool and you will get them eventually.

This week’s featured perverse product:

Book Description
This full-color illustrated book is a fun way for parents to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. Written in simple text, readers can follow along with Tommy and Lou as they open a lemonade stand to earn money for a swing set. But when liberals start demanding that Tommy and Lou pay half their money in taxes, take down their picture of Jesus, and serve broccoli with every glass of lemonade, the young brothers experience the downside to living in Liberaland.

From the Publisher
Would you let your child read blatantly liberal stories with titles such as “King & King,” “No, George, No,” or “It’s Just a Plant”?

Unless you live in Haight-Ashbury or write for the New York Times, probably not. But with the nation’s libraries and classrooms filled with overtly liberal children’s books advocating everything from gay marriage to marijuana use, kids everywhere are being deluged with left-wing propaganda.

“Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed” is the book conservative parents have been seeking. This illustrated book — the first in the “Help! Mom!” series from Kids Ahead — is perfect for parents who seek to share their traditional values with their children, as well as adults who wish to give a humorous gift to a friend.

Hailed as “the answer to a baseball mom’s prayers” by talk radio host Melanie Morgan, “Liberals Under My Bed” has already been the subject of coverage in The Wall Street Journal and Harper’s magazine. Written by a self-proclaimed “Security Mom for Bush” and featuring hilarious full-color illustrations by a Reuben Award winning artist, it is certain to be one of the most talked about children’s books of the year.

I would add some snark, but I think this one speaks for itself.

A paragraph from the NY Times’ lead editorial this morning:

Most Americans believed that their country had invaded Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, but we know now that those weapons did not exist. If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion would have been stopped by a popular outcry, no matter what other motives the president and his advisers may have had.

A couple of problems here. First: if most Americans really did believe that Iraq had WMD’s, the Times itself bears no small responsibility for that regrettable misapprehension — Judith Miller’s front-page channelling of Ahmed Chalabi’s unsubstantiated propaganda points surely helped convince more than a few fence-sitters of the imminent danger Saddam allegedly posed.

And second — as for the popular outcry that could have arisen, if only the sensible readers of the New York Times had understood that the Administration was lying…well, in this case a picture (from mid-February, 2003) really is worth a thousand words:

Update: I posted this before reading Billmon’s latest, below, and unwittingly reposted some of the same source material. Sorry about that.

Secular Iraqis,, who presumably have some passing familiarity with the situation, are concerned about the new constitution for any number of reasons:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 23 – Some secular Iraqi leaders complained Tuesday that the country’s nearly finished constitution lays the groundwork for the possible domination of the country by Shiite Islamic clerics, and that it contains specific provisions that could sharply curtail the rights of women.

The secular leaders said the draft, which was presented to the National Assembly on Monday, contains language that not only establishes the primacy of Islam as the country’s official religion, but appears to grant judges wide latitude to strike down legislation that may contravene the faith. To interpret such legislation, the constitution calls for the appointment of experts in Shariah, or Islamic law, to preside on the Supreme Federal Court.

The draft constitution, these secular Iraqis say, clears the way for religious authorities to adjudicate personal disputes like divorce and inheritance matters by allowing the establishment of religious courts, raising fears that a popularly elected Islamist-minded government could enact legislation and appoint judges who could turn the country into a theocracy.

The courts would rely on Shariah, which under most interpretations grants women substantially fewer rights than men.

Language reserving a quarter of the Assembly’s seats for women has been relegated to a section of the constitution labeled transitional, which is of uncertain legal force and duration. Another phrase declares that education is mandatory only through elementary school. Women’s rights groups, which expressed concern about lower levels of literacy among women here, wanted middle school to be declared mandatory as well, but were defeated.

Right wing bloggers, meanwhile, are busily burning up the keyboards, explaining — from the comfort of their various suburban abodes — why the secular Iraqis are wrong to be concerned, because from their reading of the draft constitution, it looks like everything is going to work out great.

These are, of course, the same people who burned up previous keyboards discussing the indisputable fact of Saddam’s WMD’s, the inevitable rose petals with which our troops would be greeted, etc., etc. — not to mention all the reasons that people who opposed the war were wrong, wrong, wrong (even as the passage of time has inexorably proven us right, right, right).

You’d think they’d be embarrassed at some point. Or at that very least, you’d think they’d learn to start using a few cautious qualifiers. But you’d be thinking like a reality-based person, and as we all know, war proponents have nothing but contempt for that sort of thing.

I get some variation on this several times a week:

I liked the Averting Their Eyes (cartoon). For this American living in Sweden though, it seemed a bit solipsistic. What about starting this aggressive war in the first place? W’s dishonest claim of weapons of mass destruction or his continuing conflation of Iraqi resistance with Al Queda terrorism? Or what about the Iraq dead? Or the war’s effect on terrorist recruitment? I know one can only fit so much into one page – but still….

Relevant, if slightly dated, cartoon here. I’ve been doing this a long time.

But remember: it’s not an ongoing body of work. Previous cartoons may have addressed the various topics mentioned — ad nauseum, some might say — but if each individual cartoon does not contain every relevant fact, argument, and counterargument conceivable…well, it is a failure, I tell you, a failure.