Donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to oil-for-palaces scandal bigs; transactions being scrutinized by law enforcement.

I have to say I doubt very much that Jimmy Carter and/or his wife were involved in any sort of criminal way (except, perhaps, in the sense of criminal naivete, which alas you can't be charged for, else Tim Robbins would be in and out of jail more frequently that Robert Downey Jr.).

But this is so illustrative of the left-wing mindset that no NGO and no developing-world cause can possibly be less than scrupulous and noble.

Sort of like the observation of one juror in one of Sideshow Bob's numerous trials: "No one who speaks German could be a bad man."

Posted by: Ace at 11:18 AM | Comments (6)
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But not in quite the way our reporters expected... or wanted.

Bringing down a government isn't necessarily the start of anything, but...

Lebanon's Prime Minister Omar Karami has announced he and his government are resigning, two weeks after the murder of former PM Rafik Hariri.

The move came as crowds protested in Beirut, calling for Syrian troops to leave the country.

The Lebanese parliament was also debating an opposition-sponsored motion of no-confidence in the government.

"I am keen the government will not be a hurdle in front of those who want the good for this country," Mr Karami said.

"I declare the resignation of the government that I had the honour to head. May God preserve Lebanon."

His announcement came after a break in the parliamentary debate, which was being televised live.

A cheer went up among more than 10,000 protesters who had gathered in Martyrs Square to demand the resignation of the government and the withdrawal of Syrian troops.

They had defied a ban on demonstrations, which Interior Minister Suleiman Franjieh said had been made on the grounds of "supreme national interests".

I remain skeptical, but... what if it actually works?

What if the elections of 30 January actually spark a demand for democracy, and a Middle East more concerned about improving its own future than blaming its failures on the "Zionist entity" and "US foreign policy"?

Update-- Chris Hitchens Wonders Why No One Uses the Term "the Arab Street" Anymore: Except, perhaps, ironically:

The return of politics to Iraq has had many blissful secondary consequences, one of them apparently minor but nonetheless, I think, important. When was the last time you heard some glib pundit employing the phrase "The Arab Street"? I haven't actually done a Nexis search on this, but my strong impression is that the term has been, without any formal interment, laid to rest. And not a minute too soon, either.

In retrospect, it's difficult to decide precisely when this annoying expression began to expire, if only from diminishing returns. There was, first, the complete failure of the said "street" to detonate with rage when coalition forces first crossed the border of Iraq, as had been predicted (and one suspects privately hoped) by so many "experts." But one still continued to hear from commentators who conferred street-level potency on passing "insurgents." (I remember being aggressively assured by an interviewer on Al Franken's quasi-comedic Air America that Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army" in Najaf was just the beginning of a new "Tet Offensive.") Mr. Sadr duly got a couple of seats in the recent Iraqi elections. And it was most obviously those elections that discredited the idea of ventriloquizing the Arab or Muslim populace or of conferring axiomatic authenticity on the loudest or hoarsest voice.

The London-based newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi, which has for some time been a surrogate voice for "insurgent" talk in the Arab diaspora, polled its readers after the Iraqi elections and had the grace to print the result. About 90 percent had been favorably impressed by the sight of Iraqi and Kurdish voters waiting their turn to have a say in their own future. This is a somewhat more accurate use of the demotic thermometer than the promiscuous one to which we have let ourselves become accustomed. Meanwhile, the streets of, say, Beirut have been filled with demonstrators who are entirely fed up with having their lives and opinions taken for granted by parasitic oligarchies.

Per Capita Update: Taking the protests to be of about 25,000 people, as some have reported, Ray Midge calculates that, proportionante to the US population, that would be about 1,350,000 people protesting here in America.*

Which would be quite a protest.

Heck-- as CNN considers it headline news when 60 people gather to protest the war (no word yet on whether or not they'll begin providing major coverage when 80 people gather to drink at a bar and watch sports), one would imagine they'll be quite vigorous in reporting this story and its ramifications.

* Are his numbers accurate? No idea. I was assured there would be no math required on this blog.

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (7)
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Eh, pretty good.

Thanks to Fat Kid, who finds that Willis has made it to the dictionary.

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (7)
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Funny little prank about attempting to recruit four tough fugitive mercenaries with hearts of gold:

Provoking funny responses, including this one:

Jeff G.? Surely... not... our Jeff G.?

Thanks to Qu'ran Pundit.

Update: This one is cluelessly funny:

A joke? Heaven forfend. What on earth would make you think that trying to re-unite the cast of a 1980's action series was a joke?

It's on Craigslist, baby. That's the gold standard for authentic mercenary-recruitments.

Posted by: Ace at 10:25 AM | Comments (8)
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The old joke was that you had to be a racist to oppose Martin Luther King Jr. Day, because who else but a racist would turn down an extra holiday?

Well, you've got to be pretty damn anti-semitic to turn down an extra 52 days off a year.

As Toht (or was it Dietrich?) would say: "I am not comfortable with this... Jewish ritual."

Posted by: Ace at 10:07 PM | Comments (9)
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"Forgive my compromised sense of humor, but to answer our host's question about the chicken: the chicken is among our most talented, gifted, and generous of all domesticated fowl, and everyone in Hollywood appreciates his tremendous contributions to the performing arts."*

* Apologies to Jeff Goldstein. This is his sort of his schtick.

Okay, So I Watched a Bit of the Oscars Update: Hey, there's not a damn thing on.

It doesn't make me Scandanavian.

All of Hollywood Is Afraid of Clint Eastwood Update: Now, of course I'm a big fan of Clint Eastwood's, particularly of his earlier, funnier films, like High Plains Drifter.

But this is getting ridiculous. Clint Eastwood wins like four Oscars every other year.

Are all of these f'n' Hollywood pussies so afraid of Clint Eastwood they can't finally give Scorcese his damn Oscar already?

Posted by: Ace at 08:26 PM | Comments (28)
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I used to post quite a bit in The Perfect World. One of my favorite past-times there was to insult Europeans and Canadians.

If you'll indulge me, I wrote this not at all fair-and-balanced reply to a European correspondent whining about American power and unilateralism:

Europe is safe because you are a weak-willed, disarmed, defeated people who have are in the strange position of not needing a military only because America has served as your defacto army for 50 years.

You have the childish idea that your freedom and safety come through your "enlightened views" and "diplomacy" and "mutually-reassuring treaties." Nope. Your freedom and security derive from the United States.

You think that your fairy-land solutions can work for us. No, they can't work for us. We are not born appeasers like you are; we have not been emasculated by living for 50 years as client states. You gave up your sovereignty and nationhood long ago; we held on to ours, and we intend to keep it.

Canada, like Europe, puts great faith in being a "soft power." A "soft power" is dependent on the power and strength of America for its freedom and security; and it also doesn't have enough military force (or economic force, for that matter) to make a difference in the world. Hence, Canada is safe. Who would think of attacking Canada?

Who, for that matter, would notice if Canada were attacked?

We do not have the luxury, as you do, of being not-worth-attacking. We ARE worth attacking (as was rather demonstrably proven through the nineties, culminatinat on 9/11), and our thinking must of course be shaped by this reality.

Our reality. Our reality in which we are the First and Last Targets of Terrorism.

Not your pitiful, wretched, ultrafeminized reality, in which no one would bother attacking you at all, because frankly, you don't stand for anything at all. Destroying you would advance no cause, for you neither champion nor thwart any cause.

You simply continue to live in your socialist, America-subsidized dream-world. And that's fine.

But do me a favor. Stop telling Americans to join you in that dream-world. We don't have the fucking luxury.

Edit: I thought better of reposting something else. Funny, yeah, but bound to be taken the wrong way by some.

Posted by: Ace at 01:06 PM | Comments (118)
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They say it's an expression of "goodwill."

Now, perhaps if that "goodwill" would extend to not assisting mass-murderers making war against Iraq.

Perhaps Syria is coming to understand that the assassination of Harrari was an outrage too far.

Posted by: Ace at 12:49 PM | Comments (12)
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Great article from Prospect Magazine excerpted by Normblog:

January 30th turned out to be a better day for Iraqis than it was for reporters.

The failure of "hotel journalism" might be forgivable if it were truly about prudence or even laziness. But there has been something wilful about the bad reporting of this story. It is weirdly personal: Iraq must fail. It is in fact the press that failed, on a scale for which I cannot think of a precedent. Will the big media outlets demand the same accountability of themselves that they demand of everyone else? They should, for the success of these elections was not so surprising to those who dug below the surface of Iraq.

Thanks to JimW for tipping me to the story; more thoughts at Instapundit.

Another Trend?: Strange Women notes Jack Kelley is making the same demands for MSM accountability.

An Oldie But A Baddie: One of the clearest admissions of leftie reporters rooting for our enemies came from Gary Kamiya, an executive editor at Salon.com, writing shortly after the fall of Baghdad:

I have a confession to make. I have at times, as the war unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen.

I'm not aloneÂ…more casualties would have been a preferred alternative to the larger moral negative of a victory.... Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world.

When this hateful confession appeared, letters poured in from Salon readers congratulating Kamiya on his bravery and honesty, and admitting, too, that others had shared the same hopes for American failure.

Rooting for more casulaties? For the Arab world to "rise up"?

Can it be doubed that Kamiya is quite right that he is "not alone" in these wishes, and that this hope for American deaths and humiliation permeates much of the media's reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan (and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo)?

He wasn't alone, as The Nation proved:

Or take Jonathan Schell, writing in the Sept. 22 issue of the Nation: "[Democratic Senator Joe] Biden says we must win the war. This is precisely wrong. The United States must learn to lose this war a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time."

Conservatives are sometimes criticized, fairly I think, for wanting things to go right and letting that hope color their analyses of the situations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe, and the world at large.

But, as Kamiya "bravely" admitted, there are others who have quite the opposite hopes and desires. And they don't all work for Al Jazeera. (Or, let us say, they don't draw a paycheck from Al Jazeera.)

Letting hopes for American victory cloud a dispassionate analysis of the facts is dangerous.

But letting hopes for an American tragedy do the same is vicious, hateful, and, yes, fundamentally, and inarguably, un-American.

Posted by: Ace at 11:22 AM | Comments (17)
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I'm starting to think that maybe this really is a paradigm shift:

Academics and members of the appointed consultative council in the United Arab Emirates came out in favor of elections in the Persian Gulf state, arguing that it could not stay out of the regional trend toward elected bodies.

When millions of Arabs in Palestine, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have gone to the polls, the UAE cannot continue to lag behind, Professor Abdul Khaleq Abdullah of the UAE University told the English-language daily Khaleej Times.

...

Atiq Daka, a professor of political science at the UAE University, told AFP: "Our country is now the only member of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (PGCC) which has yet to catch up with the political opening up under way in the Arab world. Even countries we thought incapable of political change, such as Saudi Arabia, are now ahead of us."

...

"We are certainly ahead (of other countries in the region) at the economic and trade levels. But we should also lead the way on the political front," Daka said.

"How come that we encouraged Iraqis to take part in elections and hosted Iraqi elections on our soil while even officials of sports clubs in our country are appointed?" Daka asked.

...

"We need not just municipal and legislative elections, but also transparency in terms of freedom of expression and total independence of the judiciary," said Abdullah Shamsi, also a political science professor.

"Political institutions must be given real powers ... if elections are not to be worthless," he told AFP.

Geeze... what if it works?

Thanks to JimW and Protein Wisdom for the tip.

And Now Egypt: Via Insty:

In a surprise announcement Saturday, Egypt's long-ruling president, Hosni Mubarak, ordered constitutional changes that would open the door for the first-ever multiparty presidential elections in the world's most populous Arab country. The move is the latest indication of a cautious democratic shift under way in the Arab world.

This is starting to get crazy.

I have to say that at the beginning of this effort, I harbored hopes that Iraqi democracy would spark a wildfire of pro-democratic reforms throughout the Middle East. Since then, I've become far less sanguine.

But maybe... maybe.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (12)
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