Wherein your humble blogger’s motives are reconsidered

Headline of the day: “Rushdie ‘Humbled’ by Knighthood.” Er, isn’t that rather missing the point of the whole knighthood thing?

Kurt Waldheim, in a document released after his death yesterday, still denies having committed any war crimes, but does acknowledge having taken an “unambiguous position far too late on Nazi crimes,” because, he says, of the “hectic pace of an overloaded international life.” Busy busy busy, what with running the UN and covering up his past, there just weren’t enough hours in the day. He even reached out to the people who hounded him: “I pay respect to all those who confronted me critically and ask them to reconsider their motives and, if possible, grant me reconciliation.” Hmm, let me reconsider my “motives.” Reconsidering... Reconsidering... Reconsidering... Nope, I still don’t like Nazis or torture or mass murder, so I would have to say no, Kurt.

Current UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon managed to come up with this to say about his predecessor: “He was a man who had lived history.” Yeah, that was kind of the problem.

Speaking of war crimes, the Haditha hearings continue. Sharratt’s lawyer says he should get a medal. Sharratt says the reason he went into the house with guns blazing was that he saw male Iraqis repeatedly “turkey peeking” at him over a wall. Clearly they were asking for it.

The Haditha massacre is the subject of a forthcoming motion picture by the director of the documentaries (although the Haditha film is a dramatization) “Kurt & Courtney,” “Biggie and Tupac,” and “Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam.” Which may just make him uniquely qualified to make sense of the Iraq war.