Joseph Heller meets Franz Kafka

The Bush Administration and the Pentagon find yet another creative way to support the troops. Wounded Iraq War vets are being ordered to return their signing bonuses because they can’t complete their tours of duty.

No more Friedman units?

YouTube killed the clip of Tommy Friedman explaining that “we hit Iraq because we could” and that we needed to have our soldiers go house to house and tell Arabs to “suck on this” because we would look weak otherwise. Truly a loss. But what’s really interesting is that YouTube may have pulled it because Tommy was embarrassed about it.

Nothing to fear

This column and the rhetoric to which it refers combine to remind me of an Oingo Boingo classic:

Hey, neighbor, let me give you some advice
The Russians are about to pulverize us in our sleep tonight
That is if the crazy Arabs or the riots don’t get us first
And the fire will rain down from the sky
The fire will rain down from the sky

People will die
People will die
People will die
People will die

But go ahead sleep tight in your beds
Remember what the wise man said
There’s nothing to fear
There’s nothing to fear but fear itself
There’s nothing to fear
There’s nothing to fear but fear itself
There’s nothing to fear (but fear itself)
There’s nothing to fear (but fear itself)
There’s nothing to fear

Temperature’s starting to drop now…

Can’t wait for 2008.

Sy Hersh does journalism

Curious about the Cheney Bush Administration’s planned Iraq strike? Seymour Hersh has plenty to keep you awake at night.

“Cheney’s option is now for a fast in and out—for surgical strikes,” the former senior American intelligence official told me. The Joint Chiefs have turned to the Navy, he said, which had been chafing over its role in the Air Force-dominated air war in Iraq. “The Navy’s planes, ships, and cruise missiles are in place in the Gulf and operating daily. They’ve got everything they need—even AWACS are in place and the targets in Iran have been programmed. The Navy is flying FA-18 missions every day in the Gulf.” There are also plans to hit Iran’s anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile sites. “We’ve got to get a path in and a path out,” the former official said.

A Pentagon consultant on counterterrorism told me that, if the bombing campaign took place, it would be accompanied by a series of what he called “short, sharp incursions” by American Special Forces units into suspected Iranian training sites. He said, “Cheney is devoted to this, no question.”

Great.

The details

Once again, Sidney Blumenthal draws on phenomenal access to inside information and blends it with Robert Draper’s biography of Bush to paint a devastating and frightening portrait of a president in denial, in over his head, out of touch with reality and proud of it.

Blumenthal quotes one passage from Draper’s book that is particularly illuminating:

“History would acquit him, too. Bush was confident of that, and of something else as well,” writes Draper. “Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs.”

This explains so much. I’ve often wondered if Bush really believed the WMD line or if he was a willing participant in cynical manipulation. Finding out that he really believed it, and apparently still does, now strikes me as the more depressing of the two possibilities.

AWOL

Suck. On. This.

The wisdom of Tommy Friedman.

If he refused to believe it, is that still ‘knowing’?

Hmm…What Sidney said. Passed along without comment.