Let’s get this straight: US presidents have been invading other countries on and off and bombing civilians in Viet Nam, Kosovo, Africa, Mexico, and Germany for that matter for over a century. We sponsor and train foreign terrorists secretly. Reagan’s Alzheimer’s kicked in just in time to save him from being impeached for that crap. Bin Laden himself is a product of the CIA mixed with the cold war. There has not been a President in a long time, maybe Carter, who was not a war criminal by the standards outlined in the Geneva conventions.

You don’t have to take my word. You can just consult any attempt made at instantiating an international war crimes tribunal since Nuremberg. While most of the first world nations have tried to establish such an authority, the United States has always blocked it; refused to allow one to form. We never have had to answer for things like fire-bombing civilians in 67 Japanese cities because we’re the US. We’re too powerful to fuck with. Our executives have always got away with almost anything they wanted. Nixon was just too bat-shit-paranoid or he would have skated too. Well, thanks to Ford, he did skate.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. WB Yeats, “The Second Coming”

So, that the Bush administration is compelled to make some of the criminal actions explicitly legal is a sign of two things.

1. They are scared, AKA “weak.”
2. They are stupid, i.e. unintentionally announcing to the world and their own citizens they are scared and weak.

While these two points don’t speak well for the fate of America’s foreign relations, they do speak somewhat clearly to real American patriots about better days. The kind of American who is willing to die, or kill, to protect the ideas in the Bill of Rights. The kind of American who isn’t a loud-mouthed bully, but a taciturn thinker, slow to anger and impervious in resolve when faced with threats that are not imaginary. The kind of American devoid of affect who stands up in emergencies and does the right thing even when it means going against a crowd, or two. The kind of American like me.

This is a box of Sculpey®. It’s a really fabulous polymer clay. It’s easy to work and hardens with a short trip to a regular oven. No kiln necessary.

I salute the makers and marketing department of Sculpey® for their honest packaging. You can see some of the things possible with it on the box, including the blond fairy in green dress. The cross-eyed, dumpy, thick legged, mitten fisted, example of Bavarian inbreeding passed off as a fairy in a dress that would embarrass even the most fashion blind Junior Prom goer. This is a realistic—or what I would even call an optimistic—portrayal of what you’ll be able to do with Sculpey®.

They did not have to be so up front. They could just as easily have paid the superlative Katherine Dewey to use one of her figures made from Sculpey®. While her work is possible—obviously, she’s doing it—it would be the worst kind of lie to put pictures of it on the package. Like, for instance, substituting her version of the blond fairy with butterfly wings. This time—thank you, Katherine—sans parochial vestment.

“We couldn’t love him more,” say the proud paleontologists.

Nebraska Baseball Game Lasts 30 Hours

Take that, cricket. Oh… you say cricket matches regularly go over 30 hours. …Um, take that, Princess Di.

Blair expected to set a date for exit

World expected to pretend to care for upwards of six months.

Bush says secret CIA jails “necessary and effective tools”

Stalin remarks via medium in Sedona séance: Atta boy!

BRODER: Media Owes Karl Rove an Apology

POND: America Owes Karl Rove a Rope and a Footstool

Austrian discusses years of captivity

Assures world there was some kind of mix-up as she is not a “Hebe.”

Feds may ease limit on painkillers

Sunday liquor sales in Washington? ’Bout fucking time.

The paradoxes of the Bush presidency

Pat M Holt, a former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, offers three of them.

1) Campaigning in 2000 GW said he would be very careful about using America’s military for nation building. After Autumn of 2001, he was pretty whole hog about it.

2) To spread democracy abroad GW is doing things like suspending it at home.

3) To further national security GW is adopting fictional presidential powers not given by any laws of the United States of America.

Okay, Pat, you used to work in government so I’m sure you’re a little slow. Still…

Those are not paradoxes. They’re lies and contradictions. There is no such thing as a paradox in the real world excepting perhaps in the hemp-addled minds of philosophy students at MIT half-way to emigrating to Cuba if it’ll get them a pat on the back from the gnarled claw of the linguistics department chair.

No less than 9 of the last 10 US presidents were natural born liars who nudged the office higher and higher above the law every term they served.

I thought I had something funny to say about it. There’s another paradox for you.

Iraq deaths multiply in new August count

Associated Press writer Rawya Rageh reports:

Baghdad recorded more than 1,500 violent deaths in August … nearly three times the preliminary figure … released last week. The figure is a sharp contradiction of U.S. and Iraqi claims that a security crackdown led to a steep drop in deaths in the capital.

Um… Is this the part where I say, I told you so?

Ahmadinejad offers Bush debate at UN General Assembly

Bush counters with an offer of exile to neighboring Islamic nation before invading Iran. But that’s just something I made up. An American president would never do something like that.

NASA to decide when to launch shuttle

Plans to stop letting Mrs Neusbaum, the handsome astronaut’s mother, choose launch times based on her bridge club.

Bush to bin Laden: “America will find you”

America to Bush: “Give it a rest, sparky.”

When, at the next State of the Union address, you are able to produce his head from a tote bag bearing the presidential seal, you can crow all you want. Till then, shut your fumbling trap. You should take less time reminding us that the single corpse every American—red, blue, green, or polka-dots—agrees you should have been able deliver out of this mess is not only not dead but living the semi-retired high life in the hills of Pakistan.

JULIE

I can’t believe there are four beds in this room and you have to sleep on the floor.

ASHLEY

I prefer to think that there are five beds in this room and I’ve chosen to sleep in the comfortable one.

In Safeway last night. Two carts cruising through the vegetables, mine and his, crossed and we saw our daughters together.

Mine, with storm-cloud-blue eyes and hair long enough to reach her waist when wet but so curly it barely passes her shoulders dry. His, less than half my girl’s age, with tight black curls and hazel eyes. The futures of both obviously complicating their father’s lives greatly in 10 years.

We exchanged mutual admiration.

He asked, “Where am I from?”

I looked carefully at him. I’m good at this game. Like it or not, some of us can, just by looking at you, tell with fair accuracy, all the borders implied by the sordid grab-ass your maternal line invited or survived. I know, however, that not everyone likes the conclusions. Especially when you’re off by one racial hair; say tribe “14” instead of “12.”

He looked slightly Egyptian but I had a feeling he wasn’t. Too fine boned. Nose was wrong. I knew Egyptian, if the wrong answer, was truly the wrong answer. I began to scan North Africa in my mind for matches.

He said, “Here’s a clue. I’m from the first country to recognize the independence of the United States.”

Well, that was a terrible clue because it only suggested France to me. France, deplorable as their government and blind intolerance has become, was America’s fast friend since back when the Lobster Backs had the OG on the run. There are so many North Africans in France, he wrecked any chance at guessing right.

I said, “France?”

“No. They were fourth.”

Predictably, it takes an African to teach me the finer points of American history.

“Morocco,” he said.

The Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship is the oldest non-broken friendship treaty we hold. Our oldest, most steady friends a sultanate turned constitutional monarchy. Muslims. How do like that?

We talked a bit more about our girls. No wrong answers possible there.

Then away from the vegetables and tofu and into the sauces and durum, litter and nip, tortilla and gyoza, vanilla and cardamom, stimulants and depressants, sustenance and diversion. The bazaar.

Simultaneously back at the checkout. He asked me what I thought about the Lebanon business.

I said, “It certainly makes it hard. How can one be pro-Israel while being anti-Israeli government?”

Eager, cautious chatter.

“Shameful,” was the conclusion. We both clucked and shook our heads at the situation and where it landed all spectators while I lined up my goods on the conveyor to the cashier.

Then, in the parking garage beneath the Safeway, after belting the kids down, putting the groceries in the car I asked myself, “Wait, wait, wait. Wait. Why are you even pro-Israel? When exactly did you decide you were?”

I take pride in that my opinions are never ready made; even while my art history cliché references sometimes are. I think about things before I choose a side; decide a moral position. I think about why I do everything. It’s, frankly, the only thing that elevates me. I don’t fly blind. I don’t “just do” shit unless I know everything that is going on behind it. I care not about looking right but about being in the right.

At the age of 10, maybe, I saw, for the first time, films of the many-pronged genocide that the Nazis undertook. It wasn’t just Jews. That’s easy to gloss. Jews made up about 60% of those sacrificed to the State of Deutschland. Poles, Czechs, homosexuals, and gypsies. The last being entirely ironic. Roma gypsies are Aryan. No statist regime has ever run on facts though. Not then, not now.

Corpses, in black and white, so emaciated that they could be flung with rakes and shovels. A body thrown with a single hand. Piles of pseudo-rubber. Bad special effects. Millions of naked sexless dolls; no longer anatomically correct. Robbed first of their identity, then humanity, gender, and finally breath.

Of course I was on their side. Anyone who could survive that deserved sponsorship. Anyone against it is a certifiable monster. Still…

The Holocaust was two and more generations ago. Almost everyone involved is dead. Both my grandfathers who participated in the war as Air Force officers are dead. The few children survivors of the camps are in their 70s and 80s. The last won’t die for another 30 years but there are few enough left compared to the weight of guilt that hangs on Germany and neighbors still.

(Japan at least had a clean path out. They suffered what none has. They were purified of many sins in the heat of crumbling isotopes. They could begin fresh and make it stick.)

The id of Israel, if you will, is the kibbutz. No longer very relevant, at the time the US was laying waste to Viet Nam with surplus ordnance because they were red, Israel was barely a faded pink.

There is archaeological and genetic evidence that the Palestinians have, if not superior, a roughly equal historical claim to the space Israel fills on modern maps.

No religion has any evidence or clean history behind it. They’re all superstitious nonsense that have cost centuries of progress; and lives beyond counting. Judaism being slightly more offensive to reason, even, at its root than Christianity. A state based on a religion, founded with intensely socialist practices, in a location held by other peoples on and off since Lucy’s grandsons staggered north, recently on a 1,000 year jag.

Why am I pro-Israel? Well, the opposition is deplorable but that’s the case in so many conflicts. Simply picking a side because the other offends you is not reasonable. It’s emotionally satisfying but it’s morally incorrect. Property rights based on religion is the worst kind of nonsense.

So why? Guilt insinuated via atrocities I had nothing to do with. That’s about what it boils down to. I admire the military they had 50 years ago. They had the power to carve a state out of a mountain of would-be destroyers. Still, if aggression is all it takes, then another match with any and all comers seems fair.

Today, I can’t say much for Israel. I certainly can’t imagine why the fate of the United States should be tied to it in any way whatsoever. I can’t imagine why billions of dollars of American money should be going there as foreign aid as if they were Cuba and we were the goddamned USSR. How did we get here? I have a feeling it was the same way I did. By not thinking about it. Letting pity decide.