Friday, January 14, 2005

As Reagan said, facts are stupid things


Charles “I love to make a grown man piss himself” Graner’s defense rested without Graner testifying in his own defense. For a blogger, that’s like the circus being cancelled.

Did the Bushies really think that not announcing they’d stopped looking for Iraqi WMDs would stop the news from getting out, albeit several weeks late? Normally you’d expect them to try to spin the news themselves, but I guess there was no way of doing so. Powell was on McNeil-Lehrer today, saying over and over that what he said two years ago was the best “facts” and “intelligence” available at the time. Given that none of it was true, you can’t really use the word “facts,” now can you? Rumor, innuendo, Chalabi fabrications, but not “facts.”

LA Times story: “Guantanamo Gets Greener With Wind Power Project.”
Four new windmill towers and turbines rising from the crown of John Paul Jones Hill will begin powering the U.S. Navy base here next month, saving $1.5 million in annual oil imports, reducing pollution and showing energy-starved communist neighbors what they are missing.
What they’re missing? Windmill-powered genital shocking?

The WaPo has another heavily slanted anti-Venezuela editorial, complete with sarcastic quote marks: “Venezuela’s ‘Revolution.’” As I said the last time the Post urged the US government to act against Venezuela, the US lost its moral standing to say anything about Venezuela when it supported a coup attempt there. The Post says Chavez is reorienting his “foreign policy away from the United States and other democracies.” The US’s domestic democracy is irrelevant to its foreign policy in Latin America. The impetus for the latest attack on Chavez (who I’m no fan of either) is his attempt at land reform. I don’t know the details of Chavez’s plans in this area, but I don’t see land reform as “undermining the foundations of democracy and free enterprise,” as the Post puts it. And if they’re so concerned about land seizures, they might ask how so much of Venezuelan property is in the form of huge haciendas held by an oligarchy of light-skinned folks. Finally, they accuse Christopher Dodd of caring more about oil than Venezuelan democracy (he expressed this contempt for Venezuelan democracy by saying that land confiscation is an internal matter), when their own opening paragraph inserted the seemingly irrelevant fact of V. being an “oil-producing country” into its diatribe against the “assault on private property.”The casually arrogant sense of American superiority is as strong in the “liberal” Washington Post as in the Bush cabinet.

The piece also mentions Venezuela’s current dispute with Colombia, “which recently arrested a senior leader of the FARC movement -- designated a terrorist organization by the United States -- who had been given sanctuary in Venezuela.” Actually, after first lying about it, Colombia has had to admit that its agents/bounty hunters kidnapped Rodrigo Granda and spirited him over the border. Colombia never asked that he be extradited, so “sanctuary” doesn’t enter into it.

Speaking of fomenting coups, Mark Thatcher’s admission of involvement in the coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea continues to garner one-millionth of the ink in the British press as Prince Harry’s little... what’s the German for faux pas? The Indy says the royal family had hoped joining the military would straighten the boorish Harry out. Obviously they needed to be more specific about which military.


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