The wheel of time is a carney’s wet dream. So, yes, come on up, folks and place your bets. Round and round and round she goes – and where she stops…
…well, we’ll just take it right from the top – and in alphabetic order, no less. So, here’s our top ten of weird and wonderful expats, brought to you, from the bowels of time and all contrary points of the compass.
Hell, let’s make it a very odd eleven – with no extra charge!
ADAM;
Father of the species - which explains quite a lot, in fact. He had to move away from where he was created, following a dispute with the local grocer. Something to do with the price of fruit.
BRAUN, WERNHER VON;
German born rocket scientist. Made a rather smart career move in the mid-forties and left Germany for the USA. Made himself very popular with his new bosses. Hence: Braunie points.
COLUMBUS;
Nitwit. Went out for a curry, ended up with a big Mac.
DOROTHY;
Left Kansas for a better place. But then again, who doesn’t?
FLIPPER;
Left a shark-infested ocean for a steady job in the shark-infested world of TV. Where he had to put up with an obnoxious, red-haired, Australian kid - and lots of reruns. Smart move, Flipper!
HANNIBAL;
Moved from Africa to Italy, by way of the Alps, riding an elephant. There is one born every minute.
PLATH, SYLVIA;
American poet who moved to England and was exposed to the English weather, all types of disgusting, English food and an English husband. Subsequently committed suicide.
SCHWARZENEGGER, ARNOLD;
Austrian born muscle model, turned thespian. Moved to the USA, when the European Union seriously started to crack down on the illegal administration of steroids to live stock animals.
SUPERMAN;
Migrated from planet Krypton to the USA, where he changed his name and, like so many other hapless immigrants, came to grief. In the end he practically lived out of phone booths.
No-one beats the Brits at writing columns. No other geographically based collective of journalists have the necessary wit, the style, the acerbity – or if need be, the glorious peevishness to beat the Brits at this game.
‘But what about the arguments, the contents, expertise etcetera?’, I hear the rest of the world moan.
Well, they can do that too, of course – if they must.
Still, a columnist has this short space and distance to cover: he or she will only ever have so many words, so many inches to play with.
So, it’s not merely about contents, or the arguments. Style and presentation are as important – maybe more important even, in order to grab and hold the attention of the reader. Newspapers and blogs are filled with arguments and chock-full with content, some of which even (somewhat) close to factual.
In other words, you need something extra to pull the punters – and the Brits have it.
Here’s just a few examples – just five of them, haphazardly collected.
1) food & TV columnist, A.A. Gills:
Just when you thought you couldn’t swallow another soupçon, three new autumnal cookery shows are plonked on the already groaning board. First, the moreish Nigella Express (Monday, BBC2), offering speedy things to do in the kitchen. As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t anything like enough Nigella or voluptuous coquetry on television. She has developed a sort of gastronomic Method preparation, a sort of Stanislavsky cooking. Before our eyes, she becomes the thing she’s making: a slinky-fingered dish of baby squid dipped in mayonnaise, a darkly sumptuous and tempting chocolate mousse, a brazen splayed poussin. Nigella is an ingredient shape-shifter, an organic transformer. One minute, it’s merely bread and butter pudding; the next, it’s the goddess’s heaving breasts.
Sadly, much the same is true of Raymond Blanc to the Manoir Born, the man who brought us the joy of baby vegetables tied up with parsley stalks. He’s now fronting The Restaurant (Wednesday, BBC2), the hospitality version of The Apprentice. He looks and sounds like Peter Sellers crossed with a small carrot, and speaks the sort of effortless accented bollocks you generally find in the mission statements of overpriced menus in country restaurants.
2) Sports writer, Giles Smith:
We’re four days into the rugby union World Cup, but it will be a lot longer, I hazard, before any of us can say with confidence that we fully understand what is going on in ITV’s credits sequence. So many questions. What, for instance, is that woman doing up a tree in her underwear? Who are those men in white underpants and why are they turning cartwheels? And what, in the name of Scott Quinnell’s battered ears, has any of this got to do with rugby?
Also, does that look like France to you, in the background of these strange, underdressed tumblings? To me it looks like Nevada after an atomic test. Either that, or the set for a truly unwatchable production of King Lear.
Sometimes one tires of seeing the Eiffel Tower sent out on the big sporting occasions to serve as a cover-all emblem of Frenchness. At the same time, there is only so much incomprehensible ballet in a post-apocalyptic landscape that viewers can take before they start pining for reassurance in the form of a shot of a Paris landmark or two, or even an old bloke in a stripy jumper with onions around his neck. Help us out here, ITV.
3) political columnist, Mike Hume:
Hard as it may seem to believe, I was a Direct Action Man in my time. In the 1980s I went on many a march, protest, picket line, blockade and occupation – in support of striking miners, nurses and students, against wars, invasions and police brutality, in defence of abortion rights, immigrants and free speech. And I would not apologise for any of it. Anybody with an idealistic bone in his youthful body ought to have taken some direct action, along with the drugs.
However, at the risk of sounding like a grey talking head on the “Grumpy Old Marxists” show, I feel obliged to point out that young eco-protester puppies today don’t know they are born, are degrading the good name of direct action, and would not know a police state if they found one in their muesli.
There’s nothing in the Koran to stop a Muslim dyeing his beard, or even adding minxy blond highlights for his next important video appearance. Allah, PBUH, seems uncharacteristically indulgent on the whole issue.
Have to say his skin was looking a bit sallow and tired, though. My girlfriend recommends Clarins Beauty Flash Balm. Gay? Nobody said gay, Osama. Don’t worry about it.
5) ‘confessional’ columnist, Ariel Leve (writing as ‘Cassandra’):
There’s nothing better than having the man you love be sick with a cold. Some of the best times I’ve ever had are nursing boyfriends who are unwell. They’re usually bedridden, so they’re in one place. I know where they are and they’re reachable at all times.
They listen to me because they have no choice. I can talk about anything I want and they’ll pay attention. And even if they’re not paying attention, they can’t move. I can get away with asking the same question twice and not have to worry about being snapped at. They don’t have the energy to argue.
Also, they need me. And they’re grateful. When else would getting a glass of water be considered a charitable act?
The perfect situation is when a man is mildly ill. A serious illness is a different matter. Ideally, he should have a slight fever — no more than 101. Any higher than that and all they do is sleep.
Even better is when they’re on antibiotics. Handing him a pill makes me look useful. Being nauseous is also a plus. No matter what I feed him, I’m Martha Stewart. But he can’t be nauseous to the extent he’s vomiting — that’s too much work.
As you may have noticed, all of these columnists write for the Times. I’ve chosen to concentrate on one online newspaper for two reasons:
1) Because I’m lazy.
2) To drive home my earlier point about Brits being the best columnists. So, all of the examples above come from just the one newspaper, and all of them were written in the last few days…
I rest my case.
(P.S.: I know it’s a stretch: from columnists to ghost writers to ghost riders… Okay, more than a stretch, or a stretch limo even but I don’t give a damn. I just like this clip, so there:)
There’s an amazing article by Martin Amis in The Times.
Just read it:
Gathering what we can from the works of such thinkers as Sayyid Qutb, Abul Ala Mawdudi, and Abu Bakr Naji (the author of The Management of Savagery), and from various pronouncements, fatwas, ultimatums, death threats, and suicide notes, we may compare radical Islam with the thanatoid political movements we know most about, namely Bolshevism and Nazism (to each of which Islamism is indebted). Of the many affinities that emerge, we may list, to begin with, some secondary characteristics. The exaltation of a godlike leader; the demand, not just for submission to the cause, but for utter transformation in its name; a self-pitying romanticism; a hatred of liberal society, individualism, and affluent inertia (or Komfortismus); an obsession with sacrifice and martyrdom; a morbid adolescent rebelliousness combined with a childish love of destruction; “agonism”, or the acceptance of permanent and unappeasable contention; the use and invocation of the very new and the very old; a mania for purification; and a ferocious antiSemitism.
But these are incidentals. Thanatism derives its real energy, its fever and its magic, from something far more radical. And here we approach a pathology that may in the end be unassimilable to the nonbelieving mind. I mean the rejection of reason – the rejection of the sequitur, of cause and effect, of two plus two. Strikingly, in their written works and their table talk, Hitler and Stalin (and Lenin) seldom let the abstract noun reason go by without assigning a scornful adjective to it: worthless reason, craven reason, cowardly reason. When those sanguinary yokels, the Taleban, chant their slogan, “Throw reason to the dogs”, they are making the same kind of Faustian gamble: crush reason, kill reason, and anything and everything seems possible – the restored Caliphate, for instance, presiding over a planetary empire cleansed of all infidels. To transcend reason is of course to transcend the confines of moral law; it is to enter the illimitable world of insanity and death.
Each country has its own rituals. Once a year in Spain, for instance, they open a few cans of live bulls and let them run out in the streets. In Belgium, every once in a while, they have an election and then call for the dissolution of their country. Germany used to send out its army from time to time to conquer the world – a tradition the USA seems to have taken over from them, with even less success.
Meanwhile, in England… No bulls, or dissolution – or real dreams of world dominance. Still, they do have this one seasonal ritual: The hunting of the Snark – or more prosaically, for the BBC licence fee, and all the excuses that people come up with for why they haven’t paid, of course:
One man said he had not renewed his licence because his wife had flushed the old one down the lavatory - along with his wallet.
A woman told investigators: “I couldn’t make my last payment as my baby was sick on my shoulder and I didn’t want to go to the shop smelling of sick because the guy I fancy works there.”
Another man said: “I don’t watch TV because I’m too busy having vigorous sex with me wife.”
Quite. You can either have a TV licence, or sex. Both would indeed be overdoing things a very British tad.
Talking about overdoing things (or people really needing to get a life) prime minister Gordon Brown has been working so hard that he’s seeing things - in the mirror. He’s not quite insisting that people call him ‘Maggie’ but maybe it is time that he slows down a bit.
(And wouldn’t it be fun if old Maggie would look in the same mirror and decide it was time for a come back…? The Return of the Dragon Bitch…?! Well, maybe ‘fun’ would not be the right word…)
Anyway, people who really should get out more – and yes, indeed, we’ve found ourselves a real running theme here, called ‘Get a life’ – are the desperate souls who have so little to live for that they are restricted to turning the pages of Facebook.
Which can lead to very weird and obsessive behaviour:
There’s currently a minor storm on Facebook because of a group or groups called Fuck Islam — there are several with the same name, but this one currently has 769 members. According to The New York Times:
In the month or so since the group was created, the reaction has been building across Facebook. As of the weekend, more than 58,000 Facebook members had joined a group that said that unless the anti-Islam group was removed, “we r quitting Facebook.”
Oddly enough, there doesn’t seem to be a similar furore about groups such as Fuck Christianity, Fuck Jews, Fuck Israel, and many more.
More serious – and much more depressing – is what happened in Israel this week:
Israeli police have broken up a neo-Nazi cell that had been carrying out attacks on religious Jews, homosexuals, drug addicts and workers, in a case that has shocked the Jewish State.
The youths, who had Nazi tattoos and allegedly celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday, belonged to Soviet Jewish families who had immigrated to Israel under its law of return, which allows people with at least one Jewish grandparent to become Israeli citizens.
Israel’s law of return is based on the Nazi definition of what constitutes a Jew, as laid out in Nuremberg in the 1930s, on the grounds that if a person was considered Jewish enough to be murdered by the Nazi regime, they are Jewish enough to live in Israel.
Under its rules, more than a million people from the former Soviet Union flocked to Israel in the 1990s. But according to the immigration and absorption ministry, more than 300,000 of them do not consider themselves Jewish.
The neo-Nazi group was allegedly headed by 19-year-old Eli Buanitov, known within the cell as “Eli the Nazi”. He and his acolytes are believed to have been in regular contact with neo-Nazi groups abroad.
These people you would almost wish to put in a time machine, to let them try and get a life in Nazi Germany, under the Nuremberg rules.
Enough of these depressing madmen though. Let’s end with some fun stuff:
People working in 38 pubs in Horsham, Sussex will be trained to approach drinkers displaying suicidal tendencies.
Pubs will also display posters and information cards which advise suicidal people to call the Samaritans.
Yes indeed. You’ve had a really hard day: some idiot from the licencing bureau didn’t buy your ‘but I was having sex’ excuse, you just read that piece about the Jewish nazi scum - so, all you want to do now is to go to your local, have a few pints, try and wind down a bit, and…
“Excuse me, sir, but you do seem to be a little bit depressed. I’m not sure you should have another beer but here you have a leaflet about the Samaritans…”
So, to top off a really lousy day, now you’ve just gone and topped the bloody barman as well.
On the plus side, no sane judge would ever convict you. He’d probably dismiss the case right out of hand and advise the team for the prosecution not to ask for life but to get one instead.
Which of the following do you think is, or are, the more satanic: football, the Royal College of Music, taking the dog for a walk, or Jews? I’m looking for spiritual guidance here, please.
I’ve tried ringing Sheikh Riyadh ul Haq, the eminent Muslim scholar, to find out but no reply. I think, reading between the lines of his various speeches, it’s Jews. But one can’t be sure. For example, “Jews” and “music” are sort of synonymous; music is part of the “satanic” web by which Jews spread their filth through the world, as I am sure you’re aware. So pointless to distinguish between them, really.
Aside from music, football, walking the dog and Jews, Riyadh also takes a pretty tough stance on Hindus, homosexuals, Christians and immodest women.
His favourite things, meanwhile, seem to be long beards, armed jihad, martyrdom, the Muslim Council of Britain (which quite likes him, in return) and marrying lots of women.
What’s with Ron and the beards, anyway? He seems quite obsessed about them:
There’s nothing in the Koran to stop a Muslim dyeing his beard, or even adding minxy blond highlights for his next important video appearance. Allah, PBUH, seems uncharacteristically indulgent on the whole issue.
Have to say his skin was looking a bit sallow and tired, though. My girlfriend recommends Clarins Beauty Flash Balm. Gay? Nobody said gay, Osama. Don’t worry about it.
Yeah, Osama, gay? Come off it. The guy’s as straight as a lumberjack…:
A man is accused of being under the influence of crack cocaine and inhaling a computer keyboard cleaner while he was driving.
Police say he hit a car in Middlesex and later went off the road and struck a rock ledge, causing his vehicle to ignite into flames.
Oh, and another thing, personal hygiene is importance, yes – and so is potty training, and cleaning up after yourself. However, you can overdo it. Really, you can…:
School officials said the field has been disinfected and no matches should be disrupted.
The field has been disinfected… So, what’s next? Oh yes, of course.
News flash: birds shit while they fly – let’s cling wrap the planet!
Honestly, those school officials should just have done what they do in Switzerland, when stupid creatures piss or shit on the grass. Here’s a cute picture of it:
Two cows on a pitch marked into with 750 squares play cow droppings bingo in Ruswil, Switzerland. Spectators bet on which square cow droppings will land on.
Now, that would be the kind of school sports event that could really draw the punters.
Cleanliness also means not fouling up the public space, of course. Which would include most kinds of boring & obscene graffiti.
That goes without saying, you say? Well, maybe, but some people are really thick:
Burglar Peter Addison was nabbed by police - because he scrawled “Peter Addison was here” at the scene of his crime.
The 18-year old wrote his name in black marker pen on a wall as he and pals raided a campsite and went on a boozy wrecking spree.
Cleanliness could also bear on other aspects of your physical appearance, like clothes. Not necessarily smelly, torn or disturbingly foul-looking clothes but maybe also certain types of outfits. Personnel and owner of this arcade seem to think so anyway:
A four-year-old girl was asked to take down the hood of her cardigan while visiting a seaside amusement arcade.
The girl was with her granddad playing on the 2p machine when a worker made the request because of “security”.
The arcade owner has defended the decision saying that his employee was only following instructions.
Enter another bit of offence-giving clothing…:
A man spotted wearing a T-shirt bearing an “offensive” slogan in a city centre has been warned he risks an £80 fine if he is caught again.
Forklift driver David Pratt was told by street wardens in Peterborough he could cause offence or incite violence.
The slogan on the garment read: “Don’t piss me off! I am running out of places to hide the bodies.”
Do I really have say I’m totally behind Mr Pratt and his T-shirt on this one?
You’ve heard the expression, The fact that you are paranoid doesn’t mean no-one is out to get you.
You’ve also heard of George Orwell’s book 1984 – and if you haven’t, you will still, at least, know the phrase (or the TV-show) ‘Big Brother.’
Now, when Orwell was still alive even his friends thought that the writer had been as paranoid as the book that made him and the idea of state surveillance famous.
Well, maybe Orwell was indeed paranoid – but maybe not…:
According to some of his friends, George Orwell was paranoid. In the mid-30s he thought Catholics were spying on him; during the Spanish Civil War he thought communists were shadowing him. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, relentlessly scrutinised by Big Brother, embodies that sense of persecution.
But Orwell’s paranoia, it seems, was justified. The Soviet secret police were watching him in Barcelona in 1937, and now, thanks to documents just released, we know he was also under surveillance by Special Branch and MI5 as early as 1929, while living “down and out” in Paris.
There is, of course, another saying that is even more popular than the one about paranoia. It is, in fact, its kissing cousin and it goes, Truth can be stranger than fiction.
No doubt it can be – but sometimes there is no obvious winner and then truth and fiction just have to settle for a tie:
A Polish pulp fiction writer was sentenced to 25 years in jail yesterday for his role in a grisly case of abduction, torture and murder, a crime that he then used for the plot of a bestselling thriller.
In the novel, the villain gets away with kidnapping, mutilating and murdering a young woman.
In real life, however, Bala got his comeuppance, even though it was seven years after the disappearance of the advertising executive whose murder confounded detectives until they read the book.
There are also occasions whereupon fiction – or any fantasy – can become reality. Sometimes, this can have somewhat unfortunate consequences: Widower Donald Warren had organized a fake wake for his 80th birthday. He had even hired a coffin to lie propped up in to watch “mourners”.
But the wake had to be cancelled … because he died for real the day before, from a heart attack.
Sometimes though, it seems that nothing we think we know, is based on actual fact. For every Holy Book and every elegant Big Bang theory we see glimpses of something that’s so grotesque that we can’t help but wonder if planet Earth can be anything else than a tasteless amusement park, built by Gods or aliens with a strange sense of humour and a quite demented taste for old-fashioned Rock ‘n’ ‘Roll’:
Sir,
I have just returned from New York where, as usual, the two most enduring icons of that great country are Elvis and the Statue of Liberty.
However, a photograph of Liberty’s face during construction in 1885 indicates that she and “the King” must be related and are possibly one and the same.
Have we misunderestimated the impact of cloning? Shall we tell the President?
(Or, as the man himself would have said: We can’t go on forever with suspicious minds. So, that statue? Well, Return to sender!)
“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
H. L. Mencken wrote that, in 1917. It was true enough then – and I’m not sure he would have been pleased to know this, but it’s even truer now, almost a century later.
So, if I (with the columnist’s usual laziness) would equal ‘our civilization’s democratic, political system’ with that of the USA, as personified by the 43rd president of the US of A – yes, indeed, old Double Duh himself – then you would think that Bush could indeed not be happier when newspapers focus on the weird eating habits of pensioners: Fast food fanatics Lee and Mary Humphrey are really Lovin’ It at McDonald’s - eating at their local branch every day for the past 17 years.
The pair have eaten the same meal - a double hamburger each with a shared large fries - more than 6,000 times and have vowed never to dine out anywhere else.
Mary said: “The staff all know us and have our food waiting when we come in.
The president must feel that it is much better for the people to read what pensioners have been eating the last two decades than that they would talk about what drunk coke-head George did – or didn’t do – about three decades ago…
That, and the occasional terrorist scare story, of course.
Still, in terms of distraction, nothing beats the continuing saga of celebrities doing stupid and/or repugnant things – especially if there are cute & furry animals involved:
Babyshambles frontman and junkie Pete Doherty has been photographed, appearing to give his kitten crack — from a mini-pipe he made specially for it.
Sickened pals who leaked the picture claimed the warped rocker regularly gets the pet smashed.
They said it passes out with its paws in the air, suffers mood swings and even thinks it can fly.
One added: “In Pete’s mind it is the only one who understands him now.”
Yes, with stories like these, you don’t need terrorist bogeyman tales – or another actual 9/11 – to keep people distracted, to the point of forgetting that their president is a bungling fool who started a war for no good reason, and fucked things up in such a disastrous manner that he’s now forced to say any damn stupid thing to distract the public from these sorry facts.
So, following the old Mencken model, we have Cheney and other bullies to scare us so badly that we don’t notice that the emperor wears no clothes.
But, post-Mencken, we also have all these silly tabloid stories to keep us so preoccupied that we don’t even worry all that much about the fact that the emperor is not just naked, but an incompetent, gibbering, born-again buffoon to boot.
Such a pity that this emperor is not like all the other Napoleon wannabees. He’d look ever so much better in a strait-jacket.
So, you’re sick and tired of hearing about the horrors of the Iraq war, or the failed wars on drugs & terror, the venality and stupidity of politicians – and, while we’re at it, the depressing shenanigans of the Celeb Anonymous crowd?
Fear not. There is, occasionally, other and maybe even more depressing news:
The Pentagon is investigating how a B52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear warheads last week and allowed to fly 1,500 miles across America before anyone noticed the weapons were missing.
A squadron commander in charge of the warheads, each of which has up to ten times the destructive power of the Hiroshima atom bomb, has been relieved of his duties while crews responsible for the error have been banned from handling munitions.
Not to worry though.
Enter Air Force spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Thomas:
“Standards are very exacting when it comes to munitions handling. All evidence we have seen so far points to an isolated mistake.
It is important to note that munitions were safe, secure and under military control at all times. The error was discovered by airmen during internal Air Force checks.”
Ah yes, nothing to worry about then.
Dream on:
The history of U.S. nuclear weapon accidents is as old as their introduction into the American military arsenal. The first known, officially acknowledged accident occurred in February 1950, when an American B-36 bomber jettisoned a bomb into the Pacific Ocean. The record of these accidents, however, has been beset with mysteries and inconsistencies due to a lack of documentation available to the public. The paucity of publicly available data is largely the result of the highly classified nature of information regarding nuclear weapons and their location. To maintain this opacity, the U.S. military’s policy is to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons in most accidents.
Despite claims that the U.S. nuclear stockpile is safe and reliable, the number of accidents involving America’s atomic arsenal is a matter of concern. The Department of Defense (DoD) first published a list of nuclear weapon accidents in1968 which detailed 13 serious nuclear weapon accidents between 1950-1968. An updated and revised list released in 1980 catalogued 32 accidents between1950-1980. However, this second compilation failed to include some of the accidents covered in the 1968 list.
Even the updated estimate does not tell the entire story, for no additional list of nuclear weapon accidents acknowledged by the Pentagon has been released since 1980. Moreover, the list included only those instances that were judged severe enough to fit the Pentagon’s conservative definition of a nuclear weapon “accident.” Many more mishaps which could have been catastrophic were excluded as “nuclear weapons incidents.”
Still, it’s almost a comfort to realize that it could well be that our short-sighted greed and things like global warming won’t kill us – and that, in the end, it doesn’t matter how stupid the straw men are that we elect as presidents and whatever mad wars they decide to wage on ouija board based evidence.
It might still be that we do as Samson did and bring down the whole bloody temple on ourselves – by accident.
It could have been made for Hollywood or maybe for a Bollywood movie, with lots of song and dance – and no nudity or kissing. A story of an airplane, one God and two goats.
A little bit like ‘Ghostbusters’, maybe, but without the ghosts (or perhaps two disgruntled ghosts of goats, yes, very good…) and without New York’s skyline, but with the Nepalese mountains being almost as photogenic and majestic (and yes, with those two goats. Now, shut up about those bloody goats already, will you?)
Anyway, it is a lovely story:
NEPAL’S troubled national carrier has taken a spiritual approach to recent maintenance troubles with one of its Boeing 757s by sacrificing two goats in front of the plane to appease a Hindu god.
The carrier was forced to suspend international flights for around 10 days in August as both the aircraft it uses for foreign flights were grounded due to technical problems.
“Nepal Airline Corporation officials worshipped the aircraft by sacrificing two goats to avoid technical glitches while flying,” an airline spokesman, Raju Bahadur K.C., said yesterday.
“The goats were offered to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu god of sky protection, whose symbol is printed on all of our aircraft,” he explained.
It does make you wonder why George Bush won’t try this in Iraq. God knows he’s tried almost any other irrational approach.
Now his staunch (if paunchy) ally, Gordon Brown, is turning his back on this doomed endeavour and even his own Government Accountability Office seems to have given up on the war:
A bleak portrait of the political and security situation in Iraq released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office sparked sharp protests from the top U.S. military command in Baghdad, whose officials described it as flawed and “factually incorrect.”
The controversy followed last-minute changes made in the final draft of the report after the Defense Department maintained that its conclusions were too harsh and insisted that some of the information it contained — such as the extent of a fall in the number of Iraqi army units capable of operating without U.S. assistance — should not appear in the final, unclassified version.
The GAO rejected several changes proposed by the Pentagon and concluded that Iraq had failed to meet all but two of nine security goals Congress had set as part of a list of 18 benchmarks of progress.
Surely it’s time for old Double Duh to order the Pentagon to fly out a couple of sacrificial elephants to Baghdad and offer them to one God or the other.
Since Nepalese Gods seem to come through more quickly than the president’s own Son of Man, we’d suggest Bishamonten, the Nepalese God of war.
He is also a dispenser of wealth, which will please any Republican with greedy friends - and even more importantly, given the job at hand, Bishamonten is a dab hand at dispensing
good fortune, and he is also considered a God of healing, with the power to save emperors from life-threatening illness and to expel the demons of plague.
With all those job qualifications, surely Bishamonten should be able to cure this president’s gross stupidity as well?
