War, famine and natural disasters. It's been a particularly bad week for the citizens of planet Earth.

In Iraq, the deadline for the constitution came and went. And came and went. The Sunnis are still pissed and the Shia and the Kurds have decided to bypass them altogether. I was quite surprised to hear the media actually put out a relevant fact concerning the constitution's ratification, though: if any three provinces veto it during the plebiscite, then the entire process begins anew. Considering the media has been trying to prop up Bush (and the war they helped to sell to a gullible American public), I find this a breath of fresh air.

That's unlike the stale and pedantic words of Bush, who tried to link the Iraqi National Assembly's work to that of the Continental Congress. Yeah, okay, they are both so alike they could've been separated at birth. Only the Continental Congress didn't have an "insurgency" to deal with, much less weren't occupiers of a foreign country. But, since this Administration is all about linking apples and oranges and declaring them one and the same, why am I surprised?

And then there was the wall-to-wall coverage of Hurricane Katrina's wall-to-wall fury. Over the weekend, I kept pondering how the media must've been thanking Allah for the opportunity to distract us from Iraq and the Natalie Holloway story. And this story promises just as much destruction, I swear I could see tent poles in the pants of several on-the-scene reporters standing out in the howling wind describing how the wind was howling. That and the inevitable clip of those who elect to remain behind and ride out the storm. I wish reporters would go back and see how they fared as a lesson to others: "Mr. Smith stayed behind to defy Katrina. He died."

And let's not forget Darfur and the rest of Africa. Never a shortage of war and famine stories there, replete with an endless supply of stick-thin children with swollen bellies and no one to save them. You would think that Africa's former colonial rapers would expend as much effort to combat the suffering there as they did "civilizing" the darkies. Instead, it's just merely fodder for white guilt.

Kiddies, it's been a swell month. See you in September.

In yet another pathetic effort to shore up the debacle that is our Iraqi Expedition, and to tell protesting mother Cindy Sheehan to shut the fuck up, Fearless Leader Bush had this to say at a rally:

There are few things more difficult in life than seeing a loved one go off to war, and here in Idaho, a mom named Tammy Pruett…knows that feeling six times over.

Tammy has four sons serving in Iraq right now with the Idaho National Guard -- Eric, Evan, Greg, and Jeff. Last year, her husband Leon and another son Aaron returned from Iraq where they helped train Iraqi firefighters in Mosul.

Tammy says this -- and I want you to hear this -- “I know that if something happens to one of the boys, they would leave this world doing what they believe, what they think is right for our country. And I guess you couldn’t ask for a better way of life than giving it for something you believe in.”

America lives in freedom because of families like the Pruitts.

And let me counter such bullshit, such annoying garbage with this:



Let's see if Mrs. Pruitt, who thinks her sons dying is a good thing at the behest of this war-mongering president, will feel the same way if this were a shot of one of her kids.

Mr. Bush, American families are suffering because of people like you.

Well, boo hoo for the Israeli settlers in Gaza. They’re being forced to return back to “Israel” even though they were never wanted in Gaza from the outset, and decided that it was worth their childrens’ lives to stay in one of the most densely packed regions on Earth, surrounded by a hostile population. I’m supposed to cry for this?

I don’t think the media knows exactly how to package this story, and maybe because there’s a general feeling in the world that it’s only for Jews quitting Gaza that seems so "traumatic." Sure, I know the religious arguments that fundamentalist Jews make, but you know what? It sounds a lot like the other arguments religious nuts make when they want everything for nothing, and too bad for those who think otherwise.

I have no sympathy for the settlers who were living on Palestinian land. They came here as conquerers and tried to live out their biblical fantasies at the expense of other people. They surrounded themselves with barbed wire, turrets and constant military patrols. They lived in a region where their presence alone could affect the lives of hundreds of thousands, most symbolically by the stopping of traffic. Palestinians in their own land couldn’t travel down the road because if a movement was occuring in a settlement, all traffic had to cease. And let’s not hurry up, let’s take our sweet time because these damn Palestinians have nothing to do.

What worries me right now are trigger happy assholes wanting to exploit the evacuation and start a mini-war. And it also remains to be seen if the Palestinian Authority can actually have any authority once the Israelis are gone, what with the Hamasniks continuing their bellicose rantings about keeping the resistance alive. That’s all the Palestinians need, to give a pretext to the Israelis to re-invade the Strip.

But, in the meantime, unfurl those flags, Gazans. The Israelis are going and let’s hope they never come back.

I just want to remind all the chickenhawks and blind supporters of this unjustified war of something:



Forty soldiers killed within the past two weeks, while fuckers like Rice and Rumsfeld keep telling us that the “insurgency” is dying down and that we’ll be rounding the corner any day now. Well, here’s some well-deserved invective for the scores of mindless, moron Americans who supported this fucking carnage: had enough yet? Over 1,800 families shattered. Over 1,800 sons and daughters killed because this government lied and lied and lied about the reason for war. Over 1,800 Americans sent to their deaths while the so-called “commander in chief” takes yet another marathon vacation at his phony ranch and reminds hand-picked audiences about all the hard work our Iraqi Expedition takes.

Where are all you cowardly, lickspittle lovers of death when your nation needs you? Surely the invasion of Iraq is an opportunity to prove your devotion to your country. After all, questioning other’s patriotism just doesn’t cut it anymore; times have changed. Sign up, join up, do whatever you can to support your nation and get your white asses to Iraq.

What was that? Oh yes, I’m sure the lily white fuckers who like sending darkies to do their dirty work have other priorities.

I like a sense of drama just like everyone else, but I hate it when the drama comes in the form of breathless, just-this-close-to-hysterical “reporting” by the media.

I couldn’t escape the creepy feeling that the intense scrutiny of the Discovery mission didn’t have a sense of waiting for disaster. Every little detail was blown up in media reports as potential danger, as though everything merited a glaring spotlight. I’m sure all of this made NASA uneasy, and contributed to shaping peoples’ opinions that the space agency couldn’t find its ass with both hands. At one point, I started considering the coverage as The Countdown to Disaster.

I just wonder how much shit falls off a shuttle when it’s being catapulted into space. The way the media reported it, you would think that nothing ever fell off the shuttle, or all those foam pieces never budged at all. It’s an amazing thing that the shuttle even makes it into space, much less carries out missions and delicately re-enters the atmosphere. In this respect, I can honestly say that it’s a monumental achievement that’s taken for granted by the public.

But, we’re talking about the media here, and they were breathless to report a disaster, so they kept hyping up everything that Discovery went through as a prelude to an explosion. I don’t think NASA is a blameless agency at all, and I’m often skeptical about the feasibility of sending people in aging shuttles to perform experiments that accomplish things we won’t benefit from in the short-term. But at the same time, I felt sorry for NASA being made out to look like incompetent fools by professional incompetent fools just ready to cue up the graphics over The Discovery Tragedy.

I wonder if they had already booked the talking heads in advance.

So King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has gone on to meet his maker. Although the country has been run under de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah, the Saudis get to take center stage on the Dead Leader Parade and suspend all reality and receive dignitaries and spur analysts to yak their heads off about What This Means for the cable networks.

One person who won’t be shedding tears is Usama bin Laden (remember him), whose citizenship was revoked by King Fahd during the 1990s. In fact, for Islamists like bin Laden, the very concept of monarchy is completely anti-Islamic and needs to be dispensed with. In a country with over 5,000 princes, that’s no small feat, but this is the same country that’s been funding scores of madrasas throughout the region as ideological centers promoting Wahhabism, the "brand" of Islam that forms the religious center of Saudi identity. Along the way, these Saudi-funded schools have acted as a bulwark against the Iranians and their Islamic Revolution, whom many find suspect.

So I do expect a statement to emerge from wherever bin Laden is hiding (are we still looking for him, by the way? What about the anthrax terrorist?) denouncing him or the corrupt Saudi royal family and all that good stuff. But I just thought I would take few minutes to remind American readers that the passing of King Fahd isn’t going to shake the Arab Muslim world to its knees. In fact, it’s going to make more than a few people happy.