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Kaki King: “Playing With Pink Noise”
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Haditha, In their Own Words
Preliminary hearings began at Camp Pendleton for a Marine sergeant accused of seventeen counts of murder.
“When I opened the door there was just women and kids, two adults were lying down on the bed and there were three children on the bed … two more were behind the bed,” [Lance Corporal Humberto] Mendoza said.
“I looked at them for a few seconds. Just enough to know they were not presenting a threat … they looked scared.”
After leaving the room Mendoza told Tatum what he had found.
“I told him there were women and kids inside there. He said ‘Well, shoot them,’” Mendoza told prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Sean Sullivan.
“And what did you say to him?” Sullivan asked.
“I said ‘But they’re just women and children.’ He didn’t say nothing.”
Mendoza said he returned to a position at the front of the house and heard a door open behind him followed by a loud noise. Returning later that afternoon to conduct body retrieval, Mendoza said he found a room full of corpses.
This is the ugly face of war—scared people terrorized by scared people, devoid of sense and pity.
Shakespearean Daily Diss
“Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest, and despair most fits.”
—All’s Well That Ends Well, 2.1.145-47
Shakespearean Daily Diss
“Nothing can come of nothing: speak again.”
—King Lear, 1.1.92
Offensive Portrait
British artist Jonathan Yeo has assembled a collage depicting President Bush, using clippings from porn mags:
The work was unveiled yesterday at London’s Lazarides gallery, which explains the motivation behind the thought-provoking piece: “Yeo was commissioned to undertake a portrait of US President George W Bush, but was later told his services were not required. He decided to continue the commission on his own…”
According to the Sun, Republicans have reacted with predictable indignation. A spokesman for Republicans Abroad International said: “This will cause outrage in America. Some people will think it’s funny - but personally I think it is a cheap stunt.”
A spokesman for the Texas tentacle of the Republican Party chipped in with: “This picture is very distasteful. Why would anyone want to make a picture of our President from pornographic material?”
He’s right. Why debase pornography by using it to portray the most dangerous and incompetent president in living memory?
Why We Fight, Part 875
Thanks to Kerry for the link to Rolling Stone’s sharply-worded rebuke of the war profiteers who drove us into Iraq.
Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you’ve been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good — four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.
A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that’s supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.
You’ve done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: “We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate,” they write, adding that “the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles” and that “during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member’s shirt.” The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.
When Congress gets wind of the fiasco, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill — after all, you’re a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.
You blink. Fuck if you know. “I have some conjecture, but that’s all it would be” is your deadpan answer…
They did it for the money. You didn’t buy all that crap about freedom or weapons, did you? There is profit to be made from the deaths of hundreds of thousands, not to mention the thousands of American service members who died to enrich the war pigs.
Shakespearean Daily Diss
“O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!”
—Hamlet, 1.5.106
Gonzales Top Ten Redux
Letterman had funnier top ten reasons why Gonzo had to go:
10. Felt he wasn’t incompetent enough for the Bush Administration.
9. Secretly ordered himself to fire himself.
8. Was offered the John Travolta role in the touring production of Hairspray.
7. Trying his hand at failing miserably in the private sector.
6. Didn’t want to be around for transition of Kucinich Administration.
5. Instead of terrorism, trying to keep Lindsay and Paris off the streets.
4. Got a sweet new job at Kinko’s.
3. Letterman has a guy making a sand sculpture of Biff Henderson.*
2. Ran out of laws to circumvent.
And the number one reason…
1. Why not go out on top?
*I can’t explain this one, either.
Gratuitous Video Feed
Carlos Vamos: “Little Wing”
Compare to Monte Montgomery’s fiery electrified acoustic version.
Top Ten Reasons Gonzales Had to Go
Avenging Angel on DailyKos counts the ways:
- Lying Under Oath
- Purging Prosecutors
- Misusing the Patriot Act’s National Security Letters
- Authorizing Illegal NSA Domestic Surveillance
- Enabling John Yoo and Unchecked Presidential War Powers
- Rendering the Geneva Conventions “Quaint”
- Supporting Military Commissions and the End of Habeas Corpus
- Blessing Unprecedented Expansion of Presidential Signing Statements
- Facilitating a CIA Leak Cover-Up
- Gutting Minority Voting Rights
We will be decades cleaning up the myriad messes left by the Bush Administration.
