What's the difference?

Click image for full Eric Lewis/DailyKos cartoon.

Not funny

... but true.

Click image for full Tony Auth cartoon. Don't expect funny.

Making a living instead of a dying

Could attacks on unpatched vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer include good news?

Microsoft noted the upswing in attacks on the company's Malware Protection Center blog late Saturday. "The trend for now is going upwards," said researchers Ziv Mador and Tareq Saadecom on the blog. "We saw a huge increase in the number of reports today compared to yesterday."

Jew and Arab working together on security. (O.K., I'm guessing from their names, but it's a plausible guess.) It's their job, nothing more noble.

It's not a coincidence that peace took root in Northern Ireland at a time when the economy was booming on the whole island. For a change, there was plenty to go around, so anti-Catholic job discrimination no longer appeared to make even short-run sense. Much of the demand was from overseas, and we didn't give a damn which side of the wall that lilting Irish broque lived on. Most of us couldn't even tell the quite distinct accents apart.

Duhbya and the neocons tried a broad-strokes military solution to the Middle East. It didn't work.

The solution I'd like to see tried in Israel and Palestine is bottom-up, start-small economics. People who have worked hard and have a lot to lose don't blow each other up. They're also sleeping at night for the next day's work instead of conspiring.

The radical Palestinians know this. That's why their people remain in refugee camps after sixty years.

The Israeli security forces know this. They cut off border crossing during security crises, in part to squeeze the working Palestinians. I don't blame them for securing their borders, but we all need to find a way to help the Palestinians make a living, instead of making a dying.

Savagery

The Mumbai terrorists tortured their victims, especially the Israelis.

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: "Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again," he said.

Yes, these animals are (were, actually) vile, nasty, bigoted, vicious war criminals. It's hard to feel bad about the response of Indian security forces:

The doctors who conducted the post mortem said ..., "Their faces were beyond recognition."

There was no way of identifying them," he said. Asked how, if this is the case, they knew the bodies were indeed those of the terrorists, he said: "The security forces that brought the bodies told us that those were the bodies of the terrorists," he said, adding there was no other way they could have identified the bodies.

An intelligence agency source added: "One of the terrorists was shot through either eye."

It's a sad and mirthless irony that the Islamist terrorists were defaced like the Buddhas at Bamiyan and many other ancient statues.

Savagery begat more savagery in Mumbai. Nor are our hands clean.

In Afghanistan, we did not pick out civilians for torture the way the Islamists in Mumbai did. What we did, however, was to outsource that to our surrogates on the ground, and they chose whoever they wanted for internment at Bagram or Guantánamo. But, other than by hopeless and indefinite confinement, we (probably) didn't torture the low value sources. We can be so proud that we picked our torture victims for cause, rather than randomly - or racistly (right, no anti-Muslim bigotry here!).

Then again, at Abu Ghraib, we tortured widely, including some who were obviously guilty of nothing more than petty crime. Including some for whom no guilt could be established to even a low standard. The Bushist myth is that this torture was not a matter of policy, but it's clear from the spread of techniques that the violated policy was the policy against photography. A few bad apples, my ass. But that's our rationalization.

Of course, at Guantánamo, Don Rumsfeld specifically approved escalating tortures to be used against individual prisoners. But at least he unleashed them narrowly.

Those who required more torture than that we outsourced again, bagging them and tagging them for rendition. We didn't know for sure what would happen to them. Of course, we're such innocents of the evil men can devise to break other men that we can't be held accountable for that. Which is why we had to render them to the torturers.

Our claims of national virtue in the Bushist age are very small and hang by very thin reeds of rationalization. In other more dangerous times, this was not always so. I'm not urging that all these acts have moral equivalence, but they're much closer to each other than I'm used to having to own up to.

Human beings are capable of savagery, not just some of us, but most, maybe all. I believe that I am, too. Deep inside there's a place of pain and fear that overrides sweet reason and sympathy and the morals we've been taught. That's why we have laws. Had.

That's why the least Obama can do is close Guantánamo.

Not a rubber stamp for Likud

Jesse Jackson's choice of right now to put words into Barack Obama's mouth seems a little like cutting off his balls. Even so, I would be happy with a pro-Israel policy that stops well short of approving whatever Likud wants. Israel is an important ally and friend, but friends don't let friends choose perpetual war over continued readiness for peace.

John McCain, of course, pretends to have such a Judea and Samaria policy, and that's much worse.

Legacy fluffing didn't work

Duh! Everyone with two brain cells to rub together knew that Duhbya's Israel/Palestine peace plan had zero chance from the moment it was announced.

Of course, Obama was just there, wasn't he? It must be his fault! Yeah, that's the ticket.

Rats, we were sure it would be blank

Wingnuts everywhere are cursing their bad luck that Obama's Wailing Wall prayer was not blank. Now, they're looking for any opening to criticize his supposedly confidential prayer.

How low is too low for them? We're not there yet.

Drudge exaggerates - stop the presses

It's a mystery why Drudge continues to have any credibility whatsoever, but his propagandizing still has to be tamped down.

Of course, by the snoozer standards of a McCain rally, Obama's visit to the Western Wall probably did seem like a mob scene.

Settlements vs. settlement

If you were an Israeli, why would you want to build more settlements in the West Bank?

1. West Bank? Where's that? We're building our birthright in Judea and Samaria. This is the Zionist fanatic's answer. It assumes that YHWH granted the land in perpetuity to his chosen people. There is no prospect of peace down this path.
2. The settlers are an important coalition partner. This is the domestic politician's answer. It trades electoral success now for more difficulty in the future. In the long run - is there any other? - it condemns Israel and the Palestinians to perpetual conflict.
3. We're creating facts on the ground. This is the statesman's (Risk-player's) answer. What they're not saying is that these facts will eventually have to be traded away for the Palestinian right of return, which for Israel is a never-happen, non-starting method of slow suicide. But see #2.
4. It's our answer to terror. Settlement expansion provides a goad to the Palestinians to seek peace whenever they choose war ... or vote for Hamas. Uh, how's that working out so far?
5. What have I missed?
   

I used to think without any claim of particular insight that the shape of an eventual settlement between Israel and Palestine was obvious:

• Palestinians give up right of return.
• Israelis give up the settlements. They'd probably have to retrench the wall to the 1967 border, too, but I have no problem with the wall itself.
  
• Palestinians get the old Arab Quarter in Jerusalem for their capital.
• Palestinians commit to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
  
• Compensation and economic aid for both sides from the U.S., Europe, and Russia (yeah, sure). After all, we midwifed this problem by expiating our guilt over the Holocaust onto contested land.
• No heavy weapons for the Palestinians, but outside military guarantees, probably from Europe since neither the U.S. (too pro-Israeli) nor the U.N. (too pro-Palestinian) would be seen as an honest broker.

As time passes, though, I'm much less sure that a lasting Israeli majority or anyone on the Palestinian side would make any kind of deal other than the unconditional surrender of the other side. And that just isn't going to happen.

If Duhbya bought the PNAC program that intervening militarily in Middle East religious conflicts could solve the Israel-Palestine problem, and it appears he did, maybe he invaded the wrong place. Yeah, sure.

Maybe a solution has to bubble up from the bottom? How about two changes:

• A guaranteed job for every Palestinian male between 17 and 65. Help them have something to lose and keep most of them too tired for conspiracies.
• The end of blanket military deferments for all groups in Israel, notably the ultra-orthodox. Help them have something to lose, too.

Ideas? Anyone? Because what we've had so far sure as hell hasn't worked.

Update (6/24/2011) - minor editorial improvements.

Impunity

Does Duhbya even know what 'impunity' means? Of course he does! He's lived all his life without consequences.

I would think that at least he would be outraged that a parvenu like Osama bin Laden would have the same deal. Duhbya's granddaddy didn't give a shit about Jews before there even was a (modern) Israel. It's pretty rich that Duhbya gets to lecture the Knesset about how traitorous the Democrats are (h/t Eschaton), when Duhbya couldn't smoke Osama if he were a cigar.

Let's pretend!

Not one of these three men is in a position to make a peace deal for Israel and Palestine.

Duhbya is about as popular as a bullshit sandwich and has less political capital. Olmert feels the hot breath of the law on his neck. Abbas is even worse off - he feels the hot breath of Hamas on his neck.

But Ed Henry of CNN is happy to lend them an air of breathless urgency.

Duhbya is looking for his legacy, but half of it got married a few days ago. Politically, there's nothing he can do.

This is hopeless window dressing.

Bullshit comes due

Only people paid to believe and people insanely infatuated with Duhbya believed he could possibly broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace as the lamest duck ever. Sure enough, both governments would fall from a deal.

That and five bucks...

... will get you a coffee at Starbucks.

That's not peace that's at hand.

When theocrats collide

Ahmadinejad and Duhbya have a lot to agree on - if they could just get past the Allah vs. God question:

Mr. Ahmadinejad has devoted his talk so far to arguing that God is the source of knowledge. The Almighty is the ultimate “teacher of human beings, who taught human beings what they are ignorant of,” he said, adding that the Prophet Muhammad was “appointed as their prophet to ‘read for them the divine verses, and purify them from ideological and ethical contamination.’”

No evil-ution here! Just scripture and purity and prophecy.

And if Ahmadinejad really does want to destroy Israel, wouldn't that hasten the end times that our home-grown would-be theocrats want?

Why is bin Laden still alive?

The Bushist and neocon target was always Iraq. Their goal was always permanent bases in the Middle East but outside of Saudi Arabia. (Relocating our bases outside of bin Laden's oyster was actually a rational desire among PNAC wishful thinking.) Iraq has the perfect location, had it only been empty of those pesky and fractious Iraqis.

The purpose of invading Iraq was not to spread democracy - that was pure marketing - or to topple Saddam Hussein - beneficial ceteris paribus but also a marketing feature. The true purpose was the projection of American power into this region so essential to our economic security without any consideration of change in our policy with respect to Israel.

I still have trouble understanding why the Bushists didn't fear the voters enough to make sure they got bin Laden anyway. It would have made their GWOT cover story more credible.

I guess they thought they could manipulate opinion however they needed to. That worked for a while, too.

(On Philosoraptor.)