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NEWS BRIEFLETS
* Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, optimist: “Hopefully from meeting us, these politicians can see that we’re not these crazy, wild-eyed radicals that some people like to think we are.”
* An Investor’s Business Daily editorial: “Those who equate Haditha with My Lai, and Iraq with Vietnam, would do well to remember the last time we gave peace a chance. For millions of innocents, it was the peace of the grave.”
* Acidman catches the travel bug: “I want to go to Australia, even though I think the airplane ride would KILL my bony ass today. Plus, if I ever got there, some deadly critter probably would bite me or sting me and give me an agonizing death.” Oh, sure; come all the way to Australia and never leave your hotel room.
* Somalia’s Sharia courts forbid viewing the World Cup. Fair enough.
* Phillip Adams suffers memory failure: “There wasn’t much anti-Americanism in Australia or Europe during the Kennedy era, or when Bill Clinton was in the White House. There was very little after 9/11. The problem was and remains George W. Bush and will largely evaporate with a new administration.”
* Speaking of Phil, Mike Carlton reports that lawyer John Marsden once “threatened, with the usual solicitors’ boilerplate bombast, to sue me for libel on behalf of that champion of free speech, Phillip Adams.”
* Hank Reardon notes that we’re eleven days into the month and Webdiary has still failed to provide its usual management update: “How can Webdiary claim to be ‘Independent, Ethical, Accountable and Transparent’ if these crucial updates are not forthcoming?”
* Australia—the new East Germany?
* Civil war latest: “Gunmen shot dead a Palestinian security officer loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday ... Inter-factional fighting has become commonplace in the Gaza Strip since Hamas, an Islamic militant group dedicated to Israel’s destruction, assumed power after crushing Abbas’s long-dominant Fatah faction in a January election.”
* Canadian views on terrorism have changed for some reason.
* Senator Andrew Bartlweet finds a new online home.
* Tex uncovers further crazy Zark reactions, including: “Bush must really need a boost to his popularity rating for them to kill off this useful imaginary character.”
* Also via Tex, this obvious explanation for those Canadian terror arrests: “I understand a police sting tricked a young teenage muslim into ordering three tons of fertilizer online.”
* Real men bake.
First Thom Lyons, now Kangarooistan. Tex really does have a knack for finding loons.
Posted by HisHineness on 2006 06 11 at 05:57 AM • permalinkPhillip Adams suffers memory failure: “There wasn’t much anti-Americanism in Australia or Europe during the Kennedy era, or when Bill Clinton was in the White House. There was very little after 9/11
Has Phillip Adams ever actually read a newspaper? Anti-Americanism under the guise of anti globalisation was very big in the mid to late 1990s. The hatred of America displayed by many on the left after 9/11 shocked a lot of people, the New Statesman’s first editorial after the event declared.
American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privilege of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the US often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.
I just read some Webdiary, for the first time. Apparently Australia is a Fascist nation!. I probably shouldn’t even be talking about it, what with all those spy-cams, phone-taps and secret police I might end up in one of our gulags.
Posted by Daniel San on 2006 06 11 at 08:05 AM • permalinkOh, there certainly was no anti-americanism in the 80s, either. All those big paper mache puppets in europe were part of a cultural festival.
Posted by Mr. Bingley on 2006 06 11 at 08:16 AM • permalinkThe problem was and remains George W. Bush and will largely evaporate with a new administration.”
Philip Adams is just parrotting the usual line. Things are actually in good shape:
Even though recent headlines have portrayed a rift between Europe and the US regarding terrorism issues, one shouldn’t jump to conclusions. While the CIA “black sites” (unofficial jails installed mostly in Eastern Europe) issue has somewhat poisoned the public debate in Europe, as with many issues, such is often posturing by European politicos for the sake of the public. Indeed, behind the scenes, European governments are still by and large quietly cooperating with the US. This trend has actually accelerated since the London bombings of July 2005.
Posted by walterplinge on 2006 06 11 at 08:22 AM • permalink...and will largely evaporate with a new administration.”
He’s gonna love Condi as President!
Posted by nofixedabode on 2006 06 11 at 08:55 AM • permalinkI can understand not watching the World Cup. Turned on the TV this morning and had the choice of rooting for Iran or Mexico. Oh, yeah, baby, watch me jump for joy…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 06 11 at 01:36 PM • permalinkI can understand not watching the World Cup. Turned on the TV this morning and had the choice of rooting for Iran or Mexico. Oh, yeah, baby, watch me jump for joy…
Did you catch that England-Paraguay game? The only goal was by a Paraquayan into his own net.
Wow. What a great sport. The fact that it’s the world’s most popular game and barely rates a yawn in the US only reinforces my American parochialism.
You Aussies are sensible enough not to give a rat’s ass about this waste-of-grass sport, right?
This might buck you up a little, Richard: Iran team face mass protest (does the word “team” really take the plural verb form?)
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 06 11 at 04:17 PM • permalink“Those who equate Haditha with My Lai, and Iraq with Vietnam, would do well to remember the last time we gave peace a chance. For millions of innocents, it was the peace of the grave.”
Head at Yearly KOS — “But they weren’t us! As long as they weren’t us, that’s a price I’m willing to pay!”
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 06 11 at 05:24 PM • permalinkPhillip Adams suffers memory failure: “There wasn’t much anti-Americanism in Australia or Europe during the Kennedy era, or when Bill Clinton was in the White House. There was very little after 9/11
Oh. So who invented the word ‘Seppo’ then? Plenty of Aussies have looked down at America, and they haven’t all been lefties, either.
Get the right sort of Aussie right-winger drunk and start feeding him cues like ‘Gee, the US Army sure has a lot of equipment, don’t you think?’
Sit back, relax, and enjoy a 20-minute rant about how Yanks ‘can’t fight’ without cooked meals and air conditioners.
Posted by David Jackmanson on 2006 06 12 at 04:41 AM • permalinkBTW, does anyone else remember Max Gilles’ classic send-up of Phillip Adams in The Gilles Report?
“When I was a young boy in Anecdote, Victoria, I thought God was a big jam doughnut. But then I realised that God had just made himself in my image”.
Posted by David Jackmanson on 2006 06 12 at 04:45 AM • permalink
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Webdiary is currently not half the site it used to be, which is very sad considering that it always used to be the intellectual equivalent of putting your hand in a bucket full of warm camel sputum.
It seems they are keeping the nervous meltdowns off-line, which means that the long periods of tedium are coming to us uninterrupted.