I ddin't bother reading this beyond the headline, because really, who cares what Kofi Annan says?

Mickey Kaus thinks that maybe Kofi is just feeling the heat from his oil scams and is trying to appease Bush. And he wonders-- maybe Bush would prefer keeping Kofi Annan as a discredited, and compromised, SecGen.

Except he uses potty-language to express that thought, which I think is pretty classless, really.

Posted by: Ace at 08:07 AM | Comments (10)
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Mark in Mexico uncorks a great headline:

CIVIL WAR BREAKS OUT IN IRAQ

It's the long-anticipated (long-desired?) civil war in Iraq the media and the anti-America rump left has been waiting for... but I don't suppose they'll say too much about it.

Posted by: Ace at 08:03 AM | Comments (3)
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So, Dick tried to wax eloquent in his pseudo-apology by quoting Lincoln.

Confederate Yankee has another Lincoln quote for him:

"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged."

Okay, that's a little over the top, I admit.

I apologize for anyone offended by the clumsy phraseology that suggests that those who deliberately provide Al Qaeda with a public relations coup should be hanged.

Posted by: Ace at 07:56 AM | Comments (14)
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Well, early afternoon at least.

The post about there being a seal on the re-typed Downing Street Memos was wrong.

The picture came from Reuters, but, as Say Anything explains, they mis-labled a picture of a (real) document which should bear the seal as the Downing Street Memo re-typed document.

Durbin-Style Apology Update: I apologize if anyone was offended by this error.

Note I'm not apologizing for the error per se. Just if you were offended by it.

Posted by: Ace at 07:41 AM | Comments (2)
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First he was sorry that he was "misunderstood." Now he takes another step closer to confessing actual error on his own part:

WASHINGTON — Sen. Dick Durbin (search) went to the Senate floor late Tuesday to offer his apologies to anyone who may have been offended by his comparison of treatment of detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Nazis, Soviet gulags and Cambodia's Pol Pot.

"More than most people, a senator lives by his words ... occasionally words fail us, occasionally we will fail words," Durbin, D-Ill., said.

"I am sorry if anything I said caused any offense or pain to those who have such bitter memories of the Holocaust, the greatest moral tragedy of our time. Nothing, nothing should ever be said to demean or diminish that moral tragedy.

"I am also sorry if anything I said cast a negative light on our fine men and women in the military ... I never ever intended any disrespect for them. Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line to them I extend my heartfelt apology," Durbin said, choking on his words.

Durbin said in the course of his remarks on June 14, he raised "legitimate concerns" about U.S. policy toward prisoners and whether their treatment makes America safer.

Still not anything close to a retraction, or an apology for saying such things. He's confessing only to a poor choice of words which may have caused offense to some people. Not for the basic thrust of his screed.

A genuine apology would disavow the Nazi-Khmer Rouge-Soviet comparisons. A genuine apology would distinguish between those hellish regimes and our own. A genuine apology would actually confess true error, not just in clumsy phraseology (an error of happenstance). A genuine apology would confess that his words were intentionally grandstanding and slanderous, and that these words were deliberately chosen for effect, not blundered into by some sloppy draftsmanship.

Straight-talker John McCain was right there, however, to deem his semi-apology close enough for government work and thereby gain even more media-love:

"I don't want anything in my public career to detract from my love for this country, my respect for those who serve it and this great Senate. I offer my apologies to those who were offended," he said.

Immediately after his remarks, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he thought Durbin made a "heartfelt statement" and he was satisfied with the apology.

"He did the right thing, the courageous thing and I think we can put the situation behind us," McCain said.

Thanks for letting us know, John. I found the apology insufficient and face-saving and very calculatedly blame-avoiding, but hey, if you say everything's jake, I guess that settles the issue.

Senator John McCain

The "maverick," "independent-thinking" Republican whose New York Times-friendly comments are always knee-jerkedly predictable.

Because real "independent-thinkers" always have perfectly-predictable thoughts.

Thanks for the heads-up to brak.

Posted by: Ace at 02:56 PM | Comments (29)
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Much of it is true. But I think he missed the part about periodic blog burnout and blog-funks.

You guys have hobbies?

You don't do them every day, do you? (Well, apart from dirty-hobbies, which really aren't hobbies.)

Yeah. It's the every day thing that gets to you.

Thanks to Man of Substance.

Posted by: Ace at 02:44 PM | Comments (14)
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Correction/Retraction: This story is all wrong. Reuters used a picture taken from a website and labled it a picture of the actual memos. So there seal just comes from a web-site's mock-up. (Actually, it's a picture of another report, an official one, mis-labled as a pic of the Downing Street memo.)

Thanks to Say Anything for ferring this out, and actually calling Reuters about it.

It's too early to call them fake. (It's also rather unnecessary to do so, as they're insignificant.)

But...

The reporter who got hold of these trivial memos -- reflecting the opinon of one left-wing Brit government bureaucrat (see what I mean about insignificant?) -- says he destroyed the originals, and had his secretary re-type the memos.

Why is still unclear. Perhaps so that handwritten notes-- which might compromise the source -- would not be displayed.

What's also unclear is that IF these are re-typed copies of destroyed originals, how come the re-typed copies bear an offical government seal at the top?

One can only speculate. Perhaps the seal was stamped on to make the non-originals look more authentic. But if that's the case, then the reporter involved was trying to mislead his readership, and that doesn't lend credence to the rest of his tale.

Posted by: Ace at 02:40 PM | Comments (5)
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One of the very few reporters to actually bother covering the Swift Vets' story during the election, and has been a bear on John Kerry's promise (finally satisfied-- we think) to sign the Form 180 releasing all military records. Lipscomb is a favorite of the Powerline boys, and we think he's pretty cool too.

We'll be talking with him about Dick Durbin and Linda Foley-- head of the newspaper guild, who claims that the "US military" is targeting journalists "for real" in Iraq. The rest of the media seems "intellectually incurious" about the head of the print newspaper union's unbeleivable charge against our soldiers, but Thomas Lipscomb is very interested indeed, and he's not afraid to say so.

He'll never win any popularity contests among his colleagues, but we like him an awful lot.

Tune in at 4 Eastern Time to hear our interview with him (look for "Channel One-- Now Playing" at 4), as well as a guest blogger commenting on the news with us.

Posted by: Ace at 11:45 AM | Comments (43)
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Call in if you've got a question or something to say. We'd love to hear from you.

PS, our guest-blogger, sitting in with us on the news segment, is John From Wuzzadem.

Posted by: Ace at 11:34 AM | Comments (3)
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The enemy of my enemy is my friend... kinda-sorta.

Now this is the sort of realpolitik that really gives me a chubby.

From Winds of Change's quote of the New York Times:

Late Sunday night, American marines watching the skyline from their second-story perch in an abandoned house here saw a curious thing: in the distance, mortar and gunfire popped, but the volleys did not seem to be aimed at them. In the dark, one spoke in hushed code words on a radio, and after a minute found the answer. "Red on red," he said, using a military term for enemy-on-enemy fire.
Marines patrolling this desert region near the Syrian border have for months been seeing a strange new trend in the already complex Iraqi insurgency. Insurgents, they say, have been fighting each other in towns along the Euphrates from Husayba, on the border, to Qaim, farther west. The observations offer a new clue in the hidden world of the insurgency and suggest that there may have been, as American commanders suggest, a split between Islamic militants and local rebels.
A United Nations official who served in Iraq last year and who consulted widely with militant groups said in a telephone interview that there has been a split for some time.

"There is a rift," said the official, who requested anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks he had held. "I'm certain that the nationalist Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want against innocent civilians."

Best. Story. Ever.

There are Sunnis who resent being pushed out of power by the Americans; their motivations for committing murder might be partially mitigated by the understandable objection to being invaded by a hostile foreign power.

On the other hand, there is the nihilistic murder-cult called Al Qaeda, which kills just to express its disatisfaction with the sorry state of much of the Islamic world.

It is good that the not-so-crazies are turning on the batshit-crazies. That's the key to political victory, after all-- co-opting the only-partially-crazy and turning them against the certifiable psychopaths.

Posted by: Ace at 11:03 AM | Comments (17)
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