So much of our Memorial Day coverage is focusing on WWII and Iraq, and a bit on Vietnam. It's eerie, how little we hear about Afghanistan, our jewel in the crown, proof of the success of our little "war on terror."

For months Afghanistan was all we heard about, and suddenly, as if by magic, it all morphed into Iraq. We can scarcely remember the pudgy little Mullah Omar and his cronies. We hear snippets: the Taliban are re-emerging, the opium trade is back. But how many of us actually has a clear picture of what's going on in Afghanistan now?

Bob Novak is one of America's journalists I admire the least, but like so many other conservative/reactionary pundits who've been sucking at Bush's teat since 2001, he's come full circle and is consumed with pessimism about our holy war. As I read his update on Afghanistan, I could feel his indignation, his contempt.

The handful of valiant American warriors fighting the ''other'' war in Afghanistan is not a happy band of brothers. They are undermanned and feel neglected, lack confidence in their generals and are disgusted by Afghan political leadership. Most important, they are appalled by the immense but fruitless effort to find Osama bin Laden for purposes of U.S. politics.

This bleak picture goes unreported because journalists are rarely seen there. It was painted to me by hard U.S. fighters who are committed to the war against terrorism but have a heavy heart. They talked to me not to undermine policy but to reveal problems that should and can be corrected.

Afghanistan constitutes George W. Bush's clearest victory since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The Taliban regime has been overthrown, eliminating al-Qaida's most important base. But the overlooked war continues with no end in sight. Narcotics trafficking is at an all-time high. If U.S. forces were to leave, the Taliban -- or something like it -- would regain power. The United States is lost in Afghanistan, bound to this wild country and unable to leave.

The situation in Afghanistan, as laid out to me, looks nothing like a country alleged to be progressing toward representative democracy under American tutelage. Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-sponsored Afghan president, is regarded by the U.S. troops as hopelessly corrupt and kept in power by U.S. force of arms.

Lost...hopeless...bleak...failure...disgusted...fruitless. What a description. It closes not with any optimism, but with a wail:

I am told that one discouraged and now discharged Special Forces officer, who always has voted Republican and admires Bush, thought about contacting a former military colleague now advising John Kerry. He decided that would accomplish nothing and would inject him in politics. Being lost in Afghanistan transcends politics and is a long-term American burden.

You have to see this in perspective. Novak has been known for decades as a ruthless right-wing hatchet man. You would think that with an election approaching, Novak would be holding his nose and using every chance he could to sing Bush's praises. But he's not, and neither are other members of the right-wing media chorus.

Bush's chief leg up on Kerry is his at times brilliant use of propaganda. (No praise to Bush intended -- it's all thanks to Karl Rove and Karen Hughes.) I still worry he will use some spectacular PR event to win back the undecided. In fact, he tried to do it last week, with Ashcroft's outrageous press conference, which was met with all the contempt it deserved. (And read the article -- it's a classic.) Finally, the fish didn't take the bait.

PR tactics only work when you have transmitters like Novak to spread the word. Yes, there's still Matt Drudge and Fox News and lots of others in the wings, but this sudden collapse, or at least crippling, of the Bush propangda machine is going to make it much more difficult for Bush's soundbytes to be heard amid all the criticism. (Matthew Yglesias is doing a masterful job keeping track of former Bush supporters who are now thoroughly disillusioned. This recent addition was among the most devastating.)

Of all the calamities that could befall Bush, I believe this will be the most devastating. Now that the media are finally calling him to account and not sucking up, we all get to see the real Bush and what he has achieved. And there's nothing there. Nothing. To the contrary.

Remember, our "success" in Afghanistan is the very foundation of the appeal to re-elect Shrub. It is representative of all those qualities Bush doesn't possess but that he wants you to believe he does: Strength of purpose, indomitable will, a brilliant strategy for winning the "war on terror," and the courage and skill of a "wartime president."

When you read a column by Robert Novak about Afghanistan that leaves you wondering whether he might vote for John Kerry, you know Bush is in serious trouble.

UPDATE: A commenter just pointed me to this article, which begins with a priceless reminiscence and a return to reality:

In December, 2002, a year after the Taliban had been driven from power in Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld gave an upbeat assessment of the country’s future to CNN’s Larry King. “They have elected a government. . . . The Taliban are gone. The Al Qaeda are gone. The country is not a perfectly stable place, and it needs a great deal of reconstruction funds,” Rumsfeld said. “There are people who are throwing hand grenades and shooting off rockets and trying to kill people, but there are people who are trying to kill people in New York or San Francisco. So it’s not going to be a perfectly tidy place.” Nonetheless, he said, “I’m hopeful, I’m encouraged.” And he added, “I wish them well.”

A year and a half later, the Taliban are still a force in many parts of Afghanistan, and the country continues to provide safe haven for members of Al Qaeda. American troops, more than ten thousand of whom remain, are heavily deployed in the mountainous areas near Pakistan, still hunting for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-backed President, exercises little political control outside Kabul and is struggling to undercut the authority of local warlords, who effectively control the provinces. Heroin production is soaring, and, outside of Kabul and a few other cities, people are terrorized by violence and crime. A new report by the United Nations Development Program, made public on the eve of last week’s international conference, in Berlin, on aid to Afghanistan, stated that the nation is in danger of once again becoming a “terrorist breeding ground” unless there is a significant increase in development aid.

What was the great achievement of our wartime president? Where is our victory? Where and how have we been made more safe? How are our lives better today than they were four years ago, under America's last legally elected president? How much stronger are our alliances with our partners? How much more respsect has America garnered throughout the world? How much prouder are we all to be Americans?

There is not a single reason to vote for George Bush. Not one. And don't reply, "John Kerry." He may not be perfect, but the man is a hero, an intellect, a leader and a liberal. Yes, a liberal is a good thing, and it's high time we get one back into the White House.

Sorry for the rant, but Bush has got to go.

The media pipeline, not surprisingly, is glutted with stories about Tiananmen Square as the 15th anniversary of the June 4 massacre approaches. One article in CNN looks at how despite the progress and change of recent years, the ghosts of June 4 haunt us even today.

The political repression continued. But for most ordinary Chinese, there was more hope, and greater personal liberty, than at almost any other time in Chinese history....

Mothers who lost their sons are harassed and prevented from mourning in public and their demands for the government to reexamine the tragedy are rebuffed.

For the Chinese Communist Party, "reversing the verdict" on Tiananmen would be like pulling a bandage off a still-unhealed wound.

Because in the end, for all the progress since then, Tiananmen showed that the party still rules by repression and by fear.

That's why, while for ordinary Chinese Tiananmen is now largely forgotten, for the ruling elite -- and for many of those who were there -- the ghosts have not gone away.

"The party still rules by repression and fear."

More than any other event that I "witnessed" from a distance, I felt that I was there as the Tiananmen Square saga unfolded. I was as far away as I could be, in my new apartment in Arizona, but I stayed glued to the news, as much as I did on September 11th, and I thought we were watching one of the great revolutions of history. And we were.

I don't know why I was so obsessed. I suppose it was the shock of having hopes raised to such a high level, and then being so terribly disappointed. Who could have believed it -- all of Beijing, it appeared, joining mass protests for democracy. The government couldn't just march in and shoot their own people for peaceful demonstrations, could they? I never felt such impotent rage as the army "restored social stability" to Beijing. And I couldn't get the image of the "tank man" out of my head (and I still can't, and probably never will).

I guess the one satisfaction to be had as June 4 nears is the knowledge that, as much as the government strives to silence the activists and the TS mothers and anyone who dares even raise the topic, memories of Tiananmen Square are as alive and as vivid as they were 15 years ago, both for those who saw it with their own eyes and those who saw it on videotape thousands of miles away. It hasn't been forgiven and it hasn't been forgotten, no matter how much Li Peng and his colleagues (those who are alive or burning in hell) wish otherwise.

More posts about Tiananmen Square:
Tiananmen Square revisited
Tiananmen Square re-revisited
The story behind the Tiananmen Square "tank man" photo

You simply have to read this letter. I was shaking.

Letter to the Editor by Sharon Underwood, Sunday, April 30, 2000 from the Valley News (White River Junction, VT/Hanover, NH)

As the mother of a gay son, I've seen firsthand how cruel and misguided people can be.

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I've taken enough from you good people.

I'm tired of your foolish rhetoric about the "homosexual agenda" and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.

He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called "fag" incessantly, starting when he was 6.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn't bear to continue living any longer, that he didn't want to be gay and that he couldn't face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don't know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn't put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it's about time you started doing that.

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won't get to choose. Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don't know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I'm puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that's not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I'll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for "true Vermonters."

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn't give their lives so that the "homosexual agenda "could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn't the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can't bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.

How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage.

You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.

The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about "those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing" asks: "What ever happened to the idea of striving...to be better human beings than we are?"

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

All the Randall Terrys and Rick Santorums and other haters out there should be forced to read it. Not that it would do any good; they're probably too far gone by now. Oh, and George W. Bush should read it too, as he prepares to sully the constitution with a new amendment, the sole purpose of which is to discriminate against a huge group of Americans.

Link via Atrios. Thank you, sir.

It sounds too good to be true. And looking more possible every day.

Graphic stolen from Kevin.

As the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre approaches, none of us is surprised to see China cracking down on political dissidents and outspoken students. In fact, they've set up a special task force just to monitor student activities.

"The universities are under strict control and there are several kinds of restrictions and regulations dealing with the anniversary," a Beijing academic said.

"For the universities, there is a special organ run by the State Security Ministry. They are responsible for a wide range of monitoring in the university district."

The 1989 massacre in the streets of Beijing has remained a highly sensitive topic, with students on the capital's campuses strongly discouraged from discussing the issue.

"The students don't dare to speak about this because they know they will get in trouble. They can discuss these things in an abstract way, but specific discussion will only lead to trouble," the academic said.

While police are monitoring Beijing campuses, they have also placed a group of known dissidents under house arrest or strict surveillance.

The 70-year-old leader of the Tiananmen Mothers, Ding Zilin , whose son was killed in the 1989 massacre, has been put under surveillance and told not to accept visitors in the lead-up to the anniversary.

Funny, to see the great leaders of the world's fastest growing nation trembling at the thought of a 70-year-old woman accepting visitors.

It's so important, as some are quick to give Hu and Wen credit as reformers, to remember that simply discussing the topic of what went on the night of June 4, 1989 is still enough to get you in deep trouble on China's college campuses. China's changing and improving and growing. But it's important to see this in perspective. It's still a dangerous place for anyone foolish enough to bring up certain unutterable truths.

Last night I watched in slack-jawed wonder as Fox News "political analyst" Ann Coulter debated the Iraq war with Bill O'Reilly. She insists it's going "magnificently" and that we've found lots of weapons of mass destruction. It was bizarre, and I intended to write about it at length when I saw that a superb blogger had done it for me. If you hate Ann Coulter, and if O'Reilly gives you the creeps, it is truly must reading. I'm blogrolling World O'Crap right now.

Why do we do it? Why do we get addicted to it? How many others out there are going through the same thing? What would the effects of withdrawal be like if we were to just stop cold turkey? The New York Times looks at the growing phenomenon of compusive blogging disorder.

I swear, I was rolling out of my chair laughing when I read this. (Especially the Lileks spoof, although comments seemed to find Kaus the funniest). Is this guy a genius or what? Obscene, hilarious and brilliant. Of course, if you don't read InstaPuppy, Lileks or Kaus it won't mean very much.....

(Link via that anonymous Philly blogger.)

Update: I forgot, he parodies Steven DenBeste and Tacitus, too.

It seems that the Chinese government's always engaged in one crackdown or another, whether it's corrupt officials, Internet essayists, tax evaders, you name it. Now they say they're going after officials who violate human rights.

China has decided to launch a year-long clean-up campaign to probe human rights infringement crimes committed by government officials across the country, the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP) announced here Wednesday.

The sweeping investigation, starting this May, will focus on crimes like inquisition by torture, extorted confession, illegal detention, interference with citizen's voting rights, and other crimes that lead to human rights infringement.

"China launches the campaign to practice the principle of 'respect for and protection of human rights' that has been newly written into the Constitution and to better protect people's legitimate rights and interests," said Wang Zhenchuan, deputy procurator-general of the SPP.

From 2001 to 2003, China's procuratorates at all levels investigated 4,029 cases of human rights infringement crimes and punished a group of government officials whose dereliction of duty had caused great loss of people's lives and assets.

The SPP has ordered local procuratorates at all levels to publicize their telephone numbers and e-mail addresses to accept supervision from the public.

Why do they need to give out an email address? All they need to do is look at the foreign papers to see examples of human rights violations being perpetrated by Chinese officials every day.

Apparently they don't want him visiting an "AIDS village" at the same time as an American delegation.

Hu Jia said police began a round-the-clock watch on his Beijing home last weekend. At least six or seven officers are present all the time, he said.

"When I tried to get out of my home on Monday, they physically stopped me," Hu said. "They grabbed my neck and used their elbows to prevent me from leaving."

The activist said he had been hoping to meet with a U.S. delegation on Friday in Shangcai, a village in Henan province.

Parts of Henan have some of the world's highest rates of AIDS infection. Tens of thousands of people there were infected in the 1990s because of an unsanitary blood-buying industry, and in some villages nearly every family has a member with the virus.

Hu, 30, said the police told his mother on Wednesday that they didn't want him to go to Henan and that they had arranged for him to go on a trip to the neighboring province of Anhui from May 29 to June 10. He said two officers would be accompanying him the whole time.

The US embassy is sending a delegation to Shangcai on those dates.

China is doing a lot to deal with the AIDS crisis, finally, and they could use this to help improve their image. Why then do they screw it up with stunts like this, reminding the world that for all the progress there's still plenty of paranoia to go around?

If you're a fan of this racy Chinese magazine that caters to a niche audience, you won't want to miss Danwei's latest post, complete with a very ballsy photo.

Danwei's now officially back. If you haven't been there before, go now. It's the most interesting blog in China.

Always living up to his reputation as a crude, foul-mouthed racist (and then some), radio talk show tyrant Mike Savage just went on a rant about the Chinese.

SAVAGE: [apparently reading from an article in USA Today] "Researchers have surprising news about what breeds of dogs came first and which dogs are more closely related." What do I give a rat's behind about which dog is related? Why is this study done? All I know is we treat dogs very well here, and the great originators of the dog eat them. How come they don't put that in their story about 'em, the Asians still chew 'em up? In China they're in cages waiting to be cooked. Yeah, I know, you're not supposed to say that. All the quiet, sacred soy eaters over there.

Of course, this is just one more example of Savage's loathing of anyone who isn't white. And to think, MSNBC gave him his own TV show not that long ago. (They fired him after he expressed glee at the idea of gays dying of AIDS; what a charming man.)

No, it's not a song by Air Supply, it's a description of Fox News.

Tonight, brain-dead viper Sean Hannity trotted out a 19-year-old photo of John Kerry shaking hands with former Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega, and used it to conjure up all the old images of Kerry as a commie-lover, a man who's always going against America's interests and a general scoundrel.

Hannity alluded to Kerry shaking hands with the "brutal communist dictator." I have bad news, Sean: Under lots of international pressure, Ortega called national elections, lost and gave up his power to the winner. Brutal dictators, communist or otherwise, do not just step down following an election. If they do, they're not a dictator. I'm not giving Ortega any praise -- he committed plenty of sins. But in a world of truly repressive monsters, Ortega's profile is very slender.

That aside, what about the photos of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein 20 years ago? What about other high-ranking Republicans selling drugs to the Iranians (then our bitterest foes) to buy arms for the contras? The sheer hypocrisy and hubris is staggering.

There was no Fox News when I left America for Asia, or if there was it was in its nascent stages. Coming home to Fox News has been a major source of culture shock for me. That they have the gall to put such slanderous shit on the air at all is astounding -- that they do so under the rubric of being "fair and balanced" is repulsive. I could blog all day just about Fox News and its sins. I've never seen anything like it, and if someone told me a few years ago that such garbage would be watched by millions of Americans I wouldn't have believed it.

That's what forensics expert Joseph Bosco concludes, and I'm perplexed why the mainstream media have been silent on the subject. When the video was first discussed, our venerated journalists at Fox told us over and over how Berg shrieked as his head was slowly and agonizingly sawed off. Looking at the video, which I finally did, I'd have to conclude the shrieks were edited in.

This may not be very significant. Whether Berg was alive or not, the action was grotesque and disgusting and unforgivable. But our professional media are supposed to be more inquisitive than this, and their silence on the subject is peculiar. I'd also like to hear more about how they can be so sure it was al Zarkawi who wielded the knife.

I find this far-fetched on more than one level, but an entire aticle in the CSM is dedicated to the question of whether China will follow the Singaporean model of socio-political evolution.

As the government [of Singapore] tweaks its social policy, civil society groups are sprouting here, airing views on gay rights, artistic freedom, and the environment. Their mild dissent has resonated among youth raised on a global diet of pop culture and consumerism.

For observers trying to gauge the spread of democracy in Asia, Singapore's cautious steps show how a maturing economy can embrace social and political change. While there's no exact correlation between prosperity and freedom, social scientists posit that democracy usually blooms after economic development creates a stable middle class that demands a greater say.

No where does this idea matter more than in China, where the Communist Party has unleashed an economic dynamo that threatens to undercut its long-term grip. Free-traders argue that bolstering China's middle class is more likely to bring political change than bashing Beijing's repressive rule, citing the Party's growing emphasis on its legitimacy as a provider of economic growth. Some China-watchers say members of the Communist hierarchy are taking note of Singapore's model of tightly controlled democracy and economic efficiency.

Luckily the article notes early on the huge differences in the countries' size and population, but I still think its analysis of Singapore's evolution is misleading -- and that may derail much of the theory.

The premise is that Singapore's wealth and prosperity have led the way to greater freedoms and social tolerance. It especially singles out the government's new willingness to hire gays as evidence.

Having lived there when the government made this very controversial decision, I can safely say it was not an act of social enlightenment, but of practicality based on economics. (This is no secret, and was stated in many articles that came out at the time.) As China's shadow lengthens, Singapore's great dread is losing foreign investment, and it's determined to do anything and everything it can to lure Western companies to set up shop there. It was afraid Western countries were being turned off by the government's intolerance toward gays, so the law was changed.

In other words, the new-found toleration stemmed not from burgeoning prosperity but from a fear that the economy was at a dangerous precipice, and all the stops had to be pulled to keep it from going down. Suddenly Singaporeans were allowed to dance on the bar, and it was announced that Cosmopolitan would be sold in the country for the first time.

There's no doubt that as Singapore's wealth rose, it loosened up along the way. But not to the extent the article would have you believe.

I would love to embrace the premise that China will follow this path. In the broadest sense, it's doing so already: wealth is expanding and social freedoms are, too. But what Singapore had that sets it apart is, of course, Lee Kuan Yew who, for all his nannying ways, was something of a genius, a visionary who managed to make his vision happen. (Never mind that his vision resulted in the most asphyxiatingly boring place on earth; that's nother conversation.) It takes a man with a rare mix of ruthlessness, brilliance and integrity to do what Lee did.

The reason Singapore works so well is that people are confident in their government. Some may not like their leaders, but they know the trains will run on time, and if things don't go right they know where they can go to complain. The law is taken seriously, and public servants do their work efficiently; there are no potholes in Singapore, the passport line at the airport moves quickly, and no one runs red lights. Oh, and there is no corruption. Graft-free government is the very cornerstone of Lee's plan. Bribery is all but unheard of in Singapore, and if it happens the punishment is swift and severe.

So why am I boring everyone with facts they already know about Singapore? Mainly to underscore how wildly different the mentality is between the two countries.

If China wants to strive for a Singapore-type model, with a strong but beneficent ruler at the helm of a semi-democracy that slowly but steadily loosens its grip on personal freedoms as the country grow richer, that's fine. But remember, the reason it works in Singapore is trust in the government.

Right now, with graft and bribery a staple of doing business in China, I don't think the country's anywhere near establishing the kind of trust that makes thhe Singapore system work. Everyone needs to know they will be taken care of and protected from injustices. Everyone needs to agree that the government is so good, it's okay if they can't read Cosmopolitan or dance on the bar.

Maybe China will be able to offer its people such assurances, but not while corruption rules and the little guy has no voice. The time may not be right for a long while to come.

There's nothing positive to say about what's happening in Iraq, except that it may be Bush's undoing:

President Bush's job performance ratings have fallen to new lows, largely a casualty of the Iraq war, ABC News reported Tuesday.

According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll fewer than half of U.S. respondents, 47 percent, approve of Bush's overall job performance, while 50 percent disapprove.

Bush's rating for handling the situation in Iraq registers a 58 percent disapproval. His handling of the prison abuse scandal gets a 57 percent disapproval, and his stewardship of the U.S. economy gets a 54 percent disapproval.

The president's approval ratings, the lowest since the war in Iraq, match Gerald Ford's in the spring before his narrow loss in the 1976 presidential election.

The CBS poll earlier this week was even worse for Bush, with his approval rating hitting just 41 percent.

We all know where we're sent when we do an "I'm feeling lucky" Google search for "miserable failure." Now, the Bushies have their revenge, making the John Kerry campaign site the No. 1 hit if you search for the word "waffles."

But Kerry's team has taken a creative approach to the situation and might actually capitalize from it:

The campaign has purchased Google AdWords, sponsored links that come up beside results when certain words are searched. The short links also refer to Kerry's website, but suggest users "read about President Bush's Waffles."

"When we heard people were linking the word 'waffles' with John Kerry, our thought was, 'This is ridiculous,'" said Morra Aarons, Internet grass-roots coordinator for John Kerry for President. "But our solution was to fight fire with fire."

This is really smart. The list of Bush's waffles is staggering, but its been drowned out by the noise about Kerry's alleged flip-flops. Nothing like fighting fire with fire; it's the only way the Dems can possibly compete with the ruthlessly media-savvy GOP.

Unlike Gore, Kerry will not go gentle into that good night. So come on George, bring'em on.

No one will dispute that. ShanghaiEye has some precious anecdotes on how the Chinese do democracy that really drive the point home. Funny, strange and totally Chinese.

There's an intriguing post at China Letter that tries to put into perspective just how mammoth China's socio-economic challenges are. I especially admire Stephen's ability to clarify the issues using examples and comparisons.

To the uninitiated statistics in China are mind boggling. One hears figures and attempts to relate them in some orderly way to known things. China’s population at the end of 2003 was estimated at 1.29 billion people, 21% of the population of the whole world. 64 times the size of Australia (20m) 21 times the size of Great Britain (60m) and 4 times the size of the United States (290m). It is estimated it will grow to 1.448 million by 2020 and 1.6 billion by mid century.

China’s population over the age of 16 will increase by the staggering number of 5.5 million people annually for the next twenty years, a number many times the size of most large cities. What does it take to provide an infrastructure and an economy to absorb and support a new State of Victoria, Australia (4.64m 2001) or Minnesota, USA (5.01m 2002 est), or two Greater Manchesters U.K. (2.48m 2001) every year, year in an year out for the next 20, all working aged people?

And we think we've got problems? And that's just one of many cited in the post. Like the situation in Iraq, China's challenges seem insurmountable, and yet somehow the world keeps moving along and takes these impossible situations in its stride, and they all get worked out one way or another. It will be intriguing to see how China copes, but given its history of dealing with the impossible, I suspect it will emerge intact and relatively healthy.

I'm not in the mood to write right now, sorry. It's a strange time here in America, and I'm trying to absorb it all and make sense of it. I've never seen the country so split, and figuring out what's true has never seemed so difficult. Over the past two weeks there's been an avalanche of information and accusations and counter-accusations over Iraq and the upcoming elections, and once I get my arms around it all, I'll be back. Probably in a day or two. Thanks for your patience.

It's good to see that questions are being asked by the mainstream media. Blogs have gone crazy with this story, and this intriguing link is now everywhere (thanks to the commenter who pointed it out to me; I'd hold it in higher esteem if the writer weren't so blatantly anti-Israel). For all the hysteria, there are some points here that appear legitimate, or at least worthy of an explanation from the government. Now, Asia Times raises yet more doubts.

[A]ccording to what both a leading surgical authority and a noted forensic death expert separately told Asia Times Online, the video depicting the decapitation appears to have been staged.

"I certainly would need to be convinced it [the decapitation video] was authentic," Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, said from New Zealand. Echoing Dr Simpson's criticism, when this journalist asked forensic death expert Jon Nordby, PhD and fellow of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators, whether he believed the Berg decapitation video had been "staged", Nordby replied: "Yes, I think that's the best explanation of it."

The article goes through many other questions one by one, and I don't see how anyone can one can read this without concluding there are some big puzzle pieces missing. And that there may be much more to this story that we still don't know, but that the government does.

This is the juiciest conspiracy scenario since the JFK assassination. There may be nothing to it, but the story is so full of holes and bizarre coincidences, it's irresistible to conspiracy theorists. I suspect the American public will swallow what it's spoon-fed by the government and the story will just fade away from lack of interest.

Joseph Kahn of the NY Times casts a critical eye on the hiring practices for public sector jobs in China and he clearly sees a lot of discrimination and unfairness. Short people and those who are less than beautiful are especially disadvantaged.

Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and began interacting more with the outside world, it has worked to project a positive global image. Government departments are being told to raise their stature and put their best face forward. Some have been following the instructions literally.

"They are trying to attract the tallest or the prettiest people, because it makes them look good," said Ms. Chen, who at 5 feet 1.3 inches is just below average for adult women in China. "But it is completely random and unfair to everyone else."

The standards are a sign of how far China has drifted from the Communist Party's stated socialist values. Officials are no longer selected based on the basis of ideological fervor or working-class background, but rather in ways that seem more reminiscent of China's imperial history.

Now as then, Chinese officials reject popular elections as unsuitable. Instead, they intimate that they are naturally selected to lead. They try to recruit the best, the brightest and, sometimes with surprising frankness, the most beautiful people to hold public positions.

Short people, overweight people, people who test positive for hepatitis B and non-debilitating illnesses, people who aren't beautiful enough -- all stand a good chance of rejection when they apply for a government job, even if they have all the qualifications.

Fifty-five years of Communist rule never eliminated the idea that mandarins are supposed to act like an aristocracy, and look the part. Zhou Enlai, the longtime prime minister, has remained an iconic figure nearly 30 years after his death in part because his good looks inspired rapture in women and men alike, including foreign visitors.

With unusually round eyes, a nose that had just the right lift and a hairline that held fast into old age, he met the standard of "wu guan duan zheng," or five perfect features. He stood 5 feet 7.

Exceptions are made. The father of China's economic reforms, Deng Xiaoping, was only 4 feet 11. Today he would not qualify for a job in the army or bureaucracy he once commanded.

It's a great article. When you read of the woman who's fighting to get a government job but can't because she's half an inch too short -- even though height is totally irrelevant to the job -- you can't help but feel for her. And you can't help but marvel at the maddening obtuseness of China's officials.

And to think, only months ago he was Bush's staunchest cheerleader:

What Bush doesn't seem to understand is that in any war, people need to be reminded constantly of what is going on, what is at stake, what our immediate, medium-term and ultimate objectives are. The president has said nothing cogent about Karbala; nothing apposite about al Sadr; nothing specific about what our strategy is in Falluja. Events transpire and are interpreted by critics and the anti-war media and by everyone on the planet but the president. All the president says is a broad and crude reiteration of valid but superfluous boilerplate. This is not war-leadership; it's the abdication of war-leadership.

Quoting a senior official who said the US was trying to "extricate itself" from Falluja as quickly as possible, Sullivan remarked pointedly:

So the initial goal of removing the insurgents has been abandoned. Meanwhile, the president says: "My resolve is firm. This is an historic moment. The world watches for weakness in our resolve. They will see no weakness. We will answer every challenge." So is the president telling the truth or is the anonymous "senior administration official"? Or has the administration official declined to inform the president?

Sullivan is making a lot of sense. Are the "war bloggers" listening? Is it seeping through their heads that Americans are tired of the image Bush is constantly seeking to convey of strength of purpose and resolve -- an image that is proven false by what's actually taking place on the ground?

Du Daobin achieved worldwide fame last year when he lobbied for the release of fellow cyber-dissident Liu Di (aka Stainless Steel Mouse) and was then arrested himself for subversion. His crime: posting some essays on the Internet that were critical of the CCP.

Now, in a move that appears to be pretty shabby, the authorities have scheduled the trial on a day they knew his attorney was unavailable. And it'll be a secret trial.

Former government official Du Daobin was detained in October 2003 and charged with incitement to subvert state power after posting several essays critical of the Chinese government on the Internet.

Du's trial was scheduled at the Intermediate People's Court at Xiaogan City on May 17, a day on which Du's lawyer Mo Shaoping had previously said he would be unable to attend, the New York-based nonprofit Human Rights in China (HRIC) said in a statement.

“The court normally would accommodate an attorney’s scheduling conflict, which happens often but would normally be resolved through coordination with the court,” Du’s lawyer, Mo Shaoping, said in an interview. “I haven’t encountered such an uncompromising stance before. Perhaps [the court] was in a difficult situation that was hard to express.”

Had he been able to attend, Mo said he would have told the court that Du “had written online articles containing a total of more than 1500,000 characters, but they selected a few thousand characters deemed as having problems. One should look at an issue as a whole and not garble statements.”

Not much that's new to say here. It's just important to remember that as certain freedoms expand, others are going nowhere, and even moving backwards.

After long weeks of silence, Danwei is letting us know that the site is "nearly back." That's certainly good news, though I wish they would give us a bit more information. ("Nearly back" can mean tomorrow or six months from now.)

For those of you who aren't familiar with Danwei, it's one of the most interesting and informative of the niche China blogs, letting us know what's going on in the world of Chinese media, advertising, marketing and more. It went offline shortly after China started blocking all Typepad sites. We miss it, and hope it reopens soon (as in very soon).

This is a wonderful new blog I came across today (via TalkLeft), dedicated to uncovering the corruption and hypocrisies of the Bush administration. It's smart, well written and scathing. Have a look.

I tend to approach conspiracy theories with a large grain of sea salt, knowing how ridiculous some can be. That said, I'll look at them seriously if I think the evidence is sound.

I've just read two mind-blowing posts on the death of Nick berg, and I have to admit I'm looking at them seriously. Here's one, and here's the other.

It's the latter that I'd put in the must-read category (the former is far more shaky), as it raises no fewer than 50 inconsistencies regarding Berg's death. Some are compelling, others not. But there are enough amazing questions to make me wonder what's going on here. For example:

11. Berg is killed before torture photos released but video tape refers to photos? To quote "Fishy Circumstances and Flawed Timelines Surround American's Beheading": "me and a friend were discussing recent news events and trying to piece together the information presented to us, thought you might want to look into this further, they said in the news that Nicholas Berg was killed 2 weeks ago (i think), however in the video the culprits who killed him said they were "avenging iraqi prisoner abuse" but those photos weren't released until last week, so my question is how is that even a possible motive if he was killed prior to the abuse photos being released?? maybe i am misinformed but thought id ask the question to someone who would look into it."

12) Text with video mentions "shameful pictures"
The text posted to the website along with the video the translation of the Arabic statement, cites "shameful pictures." Here is a translation of the Arabic statement (at the Northeast Intelligence Network) made with the video: "And the shameful pictures and the news of the evil humiliation of the Islam people men and women in Ghareb 's father prison then where the jealousy and where the zeal and where the anger about the Allah's religion and where the jealousy for the Muslims sanctities and where the revenge for the honors of Muslims and Muslims is in the crosses prisons."

13) Wag the dog timing
There is extremely convenient 'wag the dog' timing at the height of furor regarding U.S. torture of Iraqis.

14) Torture photo timing
CNN poll question: 'Is the Berg killing a reason for withholding any remaining Iraq prisoner abuse pictures?' Bush has been reported to be struggling with question of whether the Pentagon should release additional torture photos. Given that the alleged decapitation of Berg was allegedly prompted by the first wave of torture photos, Bush could now cite 'national security' issues for withholding additional materials.

I don't want to jump to conclusions. But something seems weird. I'll hold off on drawing conclusions until I understand it better. But there certainly are a lot of questions here and, unfortunately, a lot of contradictory, murky answers.

My comments are not accepting certain HTML commands at the moment; my new MT Blacklist program is prohibiting them (not sure why). If your comment is not accepted, please try it without the html, or send it to me as an email. Thanks for your patience.

For weeks I've been watching in wonder as one by one America's conservative pundits (and I mean the true conservatives, not radical windbags like Rush Limbaugh and Oliver North) entertain the notion that the Iraq war may have been a mistake and that Bush may be handling it in a less than ideal way.

I've been stockpiling a list of these columns, but I now see that my friend in Beijing, Joseph Bosco, has beaten me to the punch. Check out his laundry list of conservative writers and how they're changing their tunes. It's significant -- these are the shapers of mainstream opinion.

This is a tectonic shift: they are not lapping up Bush's lies the way they used to. (The NY Post and Fox News are still lapping it up, but the fact that they're now on overdrive underscores their desperation.) It says Bush may have to brace himself for the media scrutiny he's deserved, and somehow escaped, for the past three years. I never thought I'd see it happen, but it has -- Bush has no one left to lie to.

I live in a conservative state, and when I talk with my neighbors and hear their disdain for Bush and their horror at Iraq, I know who they're not voting for come November. And the passion this topic arouses! People are mad. They feel betrayed. And when they see gas prices eat into their savings, they get madder. It really appears today that the election is Kerry's to lose.

UPDATE: Speaking of lies....this just in from ABC News: "It's a cover-up." This is big. Out goes the "bad apples" theory. This was policy. Who initiated it? How far up does the trail of deception go?

Over the past week I've been neglecting the Chinese stories I usually cover because the news in the US has just been so overwhelming. So let me take a moment to point you to an important post over at EastSouthWestNorth on the new film, To Live is Better Than to Die, a documentary on an "AIDS family" in Henan Province.

This is an amazing story. It's not just the lives of the family that are remarkable, but the story of how the film was made against all odds. Needless to say, the Chinese government fought the producer Chen Weijun at every step of the way, confiscating the film and forcing him to start all over. But he persevered, and the world is better for it.

The article consists mainly of an interview with Chen, as well as some background on how he made the film. It is achingly sad, and an important reminder of "the other side of China," the side that the government doesn't want us to know about.

The "tsunami" to which Fred Kaplan refers in the previous post is gaining momentum today. Here's a clip from UPI in total, which drives home this point. I recommend reading every word.

Efforts at the top level of the Bush administration and the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense to contain the Iraq prison torture scandal and limit the blame to a handful of enlisted soldiers and immediate senior officers have already failed: The scandal continues to metastasize by the day.

Over the past weekend and into this week, devastating new allegations have emerged putting Stephen Cambone, the first Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, firmly in the crosshairs and bringing a new wave of allegations cascading down on the head of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when he scarcely had time to catch his breath from the previous ones.

Even worse for Rumsfeld and his coterie of neo-conservative true believers who have run the Pentagon for the past 3˝ years, three major institutions in the Washington power structure have decided that after almost a full presidential term of being treated with contempt and abuse by them, it's payback time.

Those three institutions are: The United States Army, the Central Intelligence Agency and the old, relatively moderate but highly experienced Republican leadership in the United States Senate.

None of those groups is chopped liver: Taken together they comprise a devastating Grand Slam.

The spearhead for the new wave of revelations and allegations - but by no means the only source of them - is veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. In a major article published in the New Yorker this week and posted on to its Web-site Saturday, Hersh revealed that a high-level Pentagon operation code-named Copper Green "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation" of Iraqi prisoners. He also cited Pentagon sources and consultants as saying that photographing the victims of such abuse was an explicit part of the program meant to force the victims into becoming blackmailed reliable informants.

Hersh further claimed in his article that Rumsfeld himself approved the program and that one of his four or five top aides, Cambone, set it up in Baghdad and ran it.

These allegations of course are anathema to the White House, Rumsfeld and their media allies. In a highly unusual step for any newspaper, the editorially neo-conservative tabloid New York Post ran an editorial Monday seeking to ridicule and discredit Hersh. However, it presented absolutely no evidence to query, let alone discredit the substance of his article and allegations.

Instead, the New York Post editorial inadvertently pointed out one, but by no means all, of the major sources for Hersh's information. The editorial alleged that Hersh had received much of his material from the CIA.

Based on the material Hersh quoted, his legendary intelligence community contacts were probably sources for some of his information. However, Hersh has also enjoyed close personal relations with many now high-ranking officers in the United States Army, going all the way back to his prize-winning coverage and scoops in Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

Indeed, intelligence and regular Army sources have told UPI that senior officers and officials in both communities are sickened and outraged by the revelations of mass torture and abuse, and also by the incompetence involved, in the Abu Ghraib prison revelations. These sources also said that officials all the way up to the highest level in both the Army and the Agency are determined not to be scapegoated, or allow very junior soldiers or officials to take the full blame for the excesses.

President George W. Bush in his weekly radio address Saturday claimed that the Abu Ghraib abuses were only "the actions of a few" and that they did not "reflect the true character of the Untied States armed forces."

But what enrages many serving senior Army generals and U.S. top-level intelligence community professionals is that the "few" in this case were not primarily the serving soldiers who were actually encouraged to carry out the abuses and even then take photos of the victims, but that they were encouraged to do so, with the Army's well-established safeguards against such abuses deliberately removed by high-level Pentagon civilian officials.

Abuse and even torture of prisoners happens in almost every war on every side. But well-run professional armies, and the U.S. Army has always been one, take great pains to guard against it and limit it as much as possible. Even in cases where torture excesses are regarded as essential to extract tactical information and save lives, commanders in most modern armies have taken care to limit such "dirty work" to very small units, usually from special forces, and to keep it as secret as possible.

For senior Army professionals know that allowing patterns of abuse and torture to metastasize in any army is annihilating to its morale and tactical effectiveness. Torturers usually make lousy combat soldiers, which is why combat soldiers in every major army hold them in contempt.

Therefore, several U.S. military officers told UPI, the idea of using regular Army soldiers, including some even just from the Army Reserve or National Guard, and encouraging them to inflict such abuses ran contrary to received military wisdom and to the ingrained standards and traditions of the U.S. Army.

The widespread taking of photographs of the victims of such abuses, they said, clearly revealed that civilian "amateurs" and not regular Army or intelligence community professionals were the driving force in shaping and running the programs under which these abuses occurred.

Hersh has spearheaded the waves of revelations of shocking abuse. But other major U.S. media organizations are now charging in behind him to confirm and extend his reports. They are able to do so because many senior veteran professionals in both the CIA and the Army were disgusted by the revelations of the torture excesses. Now they are being listened to with suddenly receptive ears on Capitol Hill.

Republican members in the House of Representatives have kept discipline and silence on the revelations. But with the exception of the increasingly isolated and embarrassed Senate Republican Leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, other senior mainstream figures in the GOP Senate majority have refused to go along with any cover-up.

Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Richard Lugar of Indiana, Pat Roberts of Kansas and John Warner of Virginia have all been outspoken in their condemnation of the torture excesses. And they did so even before the latest, most far-reaching and worst of the allegations and reports surfaced. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, lost no time in hauling Rumsfeld before it to testify.

The pattern of the latest wave of revelations is clear: They are coming from significant numbers of senior figures in both the U.S. military and intelligence services. They reflect the disgust and contempt widely felt in both communities at the excesses; and at long last, they are being listened to seriously by senior Republican, as well as Democratic, senators on Capitol Hill.

Rumsfeld and his team of top lieutenants have therefore now lost the confidence, trust and respect of both the Army and intelligence establishments. Key elements of the political establishment even of the ruling GOP now recognize this.

Yet Rumsfeld and his lieutenants remain determined to hang on to power, and so far President Bush has shown every sign of wanting to keep them there. The scandal, therefore, is far from over. The revelations will continue. The cost of the abuses to the American people and the U.S. national interest is already incalculable: And there is no end in sight.

Finally, the little bratty boy who thought he could run roughshod over the Constitution is getting his comeuppance. The floodgates are opening, and this is all we're going to hear about. Instapundit can shrug his shoulders all he wants and stick to his 7 bad apples excuse (as he's still doing!), but that won't stop the Watergate-like investigation that's about to be set in motion.

This is usually the point when the worms crawl out of the woodwork, calling the media to tell their stories to make sure they don't get implicated themselves. At the risk of being called an alarmist, I'm going to suggest we all hold on tight. It's going to be a summer to remember.

There are a lot of must-read articles and posts out there at the moment on Abu Ghraib, but this one by Fred Kaplan gets my vote for must-read article of the week. If anyone thinks this scandal is going to go away, with blame falling on "a few bad apples," I suggest you check it out now.

The White House is about to get hit by the biggest tsunami since the Iran-Contra affair, maybe since Watergate. President George W. Bush is trapped inside the compound, immobilized by his own stay-the-course campaign strategy. Can he escape the massive tidal waves? Maybe. But at this point, it's not clear how.

This is the grimmest piece I've seen yet on just how serious a mess Abu Ghraib is. "Read the whole thing," as bloggers like to say. As much as Fox News wants you to think it's all about 7 bad soldiers indulging in a little horseplay, there's no way around the fact that this is going to dominate the news right up to election day. And as Kaplan notes more than once, there is nothing Bush can do; the wheels are in motion, and there's no place to hide.

Update: Don't miss Josh Marshall's take on the Kaplan article. This was certainly the talk of the blogosphere today. Snippet:

The whole progression of the story has an odd doubled-up quality. On the one hand we have repeated claims from top officials insisting that the abuses were the isolated work of a few miscreants. Then, simultaneously, we have numerous stories showing specific policy decisions (often confirmed on the record by slightly lower-level officials) which sanctioned pretty close to all the stuff we're seeing in those photos, even if not quite practiced with the same relish and glee.

You'd have to see Fox News to believe it. We all knew Saddam had used poison gas in the past, and that doesn't even count as a weapon of mass destruction. But now that they've found some sarin gas in an artillery shell, it's as though we've discovered nuclear missiles. Fox announcers are having multiple orgasms, interviewing crusty Republicans who are exclaiming how this justifies everything. It proves Bush was right all along. Now we know what a threat Saddam posed. Thank God for our brilliant invasion.

Of course, anyone who's not severely intellectually challenged will have to wonder, if they have such awful weapons, how come they never used them against us over the past year? If this is as terrifying as Saddam's mythological weapons get, the Fox News people have very little solid ground to stand on.

Update: Fox just interviewed their "military consultant," convicted liar Oliver North on this startling news. He says the other media are ignoring it, possibly because it would force them to concede Bush was right about WMDs in Iraq. In that disarming Fox way, North also says he's heard talk about new huge stockpiles of chemical weapons that "may" be buried in northern Baghdad. It's just some BS gossip, but the way North couches it, he's offering us exclusive insider information, and the gullible listener could easily walk away thinking it's the truth. I've never seen anything quite like this -- a news network that strives to elevate gossip and lies (if, of course, they serve to make Democrats look bad and Republicans look good).

North also referred dismissively to "the so-called Abu Ghraib scandal." So-called? That's lilke referring to President Kennedy's "so-called assassination."

Is the pot calling the kettle black or what?

More countries joined the international community during the last few days in condemning the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers and urging the punishment of the perpetrators.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Saturday described the United States as "the world's worst human rights violator and a graveyard of human rights for its violation of international law and the Islamic ethics and culture."

It said the United States should settle all its human rights issues before acting as the "world judge of human rights."

Goodness. The US is the world's worst violator, over Syria and Burma and Sudan? Maybe Kim Jong Il knows something I don't. (And come to think about it, I'd heard that North Korea ranked pretty poorly when it comes to human rights itself. But that may just be a rumor.)

Among the other nations damning us in the article for our abysmal human rights record are Egypt, Morocco and Peru, none of which have won any recent awards in the human rights category, to the best of my knowledge.

What a mess.

New York Times pundit David Brooks, whom I recently cited for a fine column on what motivated Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to murder 13 classmates and teachers at Columbine High School some 5 years ago, has pulled a real coup with his new article, in which he actually interviews Klebold's parents.

One thing that I -- and I suspect everyone else who followed the case -- wondered about endlessly was how the parents of the two teenagers felt when they heard the news. What went on in their minds? How did they cope? Did they blame themselves? Were they shocked or was it a fuilfillment of their worst nightmare?

Finally, Brooks takes us into the minds of Klebolds parents, if only briefly. The column is an outgrowth of the earlier one, which elicited an email from the Klebolds and led to this interview. Brooks tells us:

That first night, their lawyer said to them, "Dylan isn't here anymore for people to hate, so people are going to hate you." Even as we spoke this week, Tom had in front of him the poll results, news stories and documents showing that 83 percent of Americans had believed the parents were partly to blame. Their lives are now pinioned to this bottomless question: Who is responsible?

They feel certain of one thing. "Dylan did not do this because of the way he was raised," Susan said. "He did it in contradiction to the way he was raised."

After the shooting, they faced a simple choice: to move away and change their names, or to go back and resume their lives. Susan thinks about leaving every day. "I won't let them win," Tom said. "You can't run from something like this."

So they live in the same house and work at the same jobs. Susan works in the community college system. "It's amazing how long it took me to get up and say my name at a meeting, to say, `I'm Dylan Klebold's mother,' " Susan says. "Dylan could have killed any number of the kids of people that I work with."

More than anything else, they blame the bullying nature of Dylan's classmates, but I find that inadequate. Lots of kids were bullied (including me), but they don't conspire to kill en masse, let alone execute their sinister plan. Yet its clear that the Klebolds are truly mystified, and are secure in the belief that they did not fail their son as parents. And I'm convinced they are completely sincere.

Brooks ends:

My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them. Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior. Now his parents have been left with the terrible consequences. I'd say they are facing them bravely and honorably.

My heart has to go out to them. How does it feel to have your whole world come crashing down on your head? How do you carry on, knowing that all eyes are on you and hating you? I have to thank David Brooks, with whose political views I nearly always take issue, for his compassionate and revealing article.

UPDATE: Apparently the parents of the slain students aren't showing the Klebolds nearly as much compassion as Brooks:

The Klebolds' comments was criticized late Saturday by some of the victims' parents.

"I'm horrified," Dawn Anna, whose daughter Lauren Townsend was killed at Columbine, told The Associated Press. "I wanted an apology. I wanted a contribution to help us understand why it happened, so that it would never happen again. I didn't hear it."

Brian Rohrbough, father of victim Daniel Rohrbough, said he was outraged that the Klebolds likened the day of the shootings to a natural disaster in the interview with Brooks.

"This was murder," he said. "In my opinion, what went on in their home led to Columbine."

I certainly understand how they feel. Should the Klebolds have apologized? I don't know.

It's out, and it's ugly.

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

So much for the "bad apples" theory, which every thinking person knew from the start was a load of crap. Hersh outlines how this program started, and how Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld's Under-Secretary for Intelligence, helped codify it. No, this story isn't going away, and eventually some heads will have to roll. Cambone is dead meat and he knows it.

I'm a bit surprised, but that's what the survey says.

Jung Chang's epic family saga Wild Swans has been named Britain's best-loved work of non-fiction after more than 5,000 participants in The Telegraph's Real Read survey - held in conjunction with the book chain Ottakar's - voted for their favourite non-fiction books. Readers were given a list of 100 titles when voting opened last month, but could select any others they preferred.

The rest of the top 10 favourites were, in order of votes received: Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson; Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie; Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals; The Diary of Anne Frank; Stalingrad by Antony Beevor; Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes; James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small; Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom; and Dave Pelzer's A Child Called 'It'.

"I'm absolutely thrilled and very grateful to the readers," Jung Chang said yesterday.

The popularity of Wild Swans, the Chinese-born novelist's first book, has been more than borne out by its sales history. Subtitled Three Daughters of China, it has sold more than two million copies since its publication in 1991. It is believed to be Britain's fastest selling non-fiction book.

With some reservations, I enjoyed Wild Swans, which I "reviewed" here last year. I wouldn't put it on my Top 10 list for nonfiction, but I would strongly recommend you read it if you want to learn what life in China was like from the 1920s through the Cultural Revolution. (It certainly taught me just how awful a practice footbinding was, as I detail in my review.)

The topic -- that China should end its controversial one-child policy -- seems to be gaining traction.

China should change its one-child policy to allow couples to have two children as one of the ways to resolve the problems of a rapidly ageing society, a population expert has suggested.

That would slow down the ageing of the population at the macro level, according to Professor Gui Shixun. More important, it also meant that families would be better able to look after their aged elders financially and care for them.

His proposal, made at a conference on healthy ageing and socio-economic development, comes at a time when Chinese policy-makers are increasingly worried about the country's ageing population.

On Wednesday, officials warned that China's becoming an ageing country well before it had become affluent was creating pressures for both policy-makers and society.

Gui's argument is based on an increasing concern that a huge surge in China's greying population might soon offset economic development and place "an unsustainable burden on public budgets and extended families."

I find this a very interesting topic, based on my converations with Chinese people who see the one-child policy as a necessity. Are we on the verge of witnessing a major shift in this attitude?

I've been wondering about that for some time, and this new article helps shed some light on their reaction to Abu Ghraib. It looks at what China's Netizens are saying on the country's message boards, and it's very interesting.

The graphic images of Iraqi prisoners being abused have evoked condemnation of the US from almost every corner of the globe. That too would have been the predictable reaction from China. As a country which has been on the receiving end of regular American criticism for its human rights violations, the torture revelations present a clear opportunity to return the 'favor'.

China's official media and many of its citizens have lived up to that expectation. Surprisingly, however, many of China's internet users have turned the Abu Ghraib prison scandal into a lesson in the value of a free press and government accountability - two features of the US system that are sorely lacking in China.

....[A]lthough the People's Daily network chose to publicize only those internet postings that fit this established pattern of anti-U.S. criticism, the postings as a whole show a wide diversity of opinion among Chinese netizens. Many people have derided the US as hypocritical, but others have taken this opportunity to hint at China's own difficulties in this area....

Far from eliciting a simple, one-sided anti-US stance, the US torture revelations are providing fodder for wide-ranging discussions on human rights, democracy, and the role of the media.

In the more than 500 comments on the Iraqi prisoner torture posted in the past week, about 45 percent expressed a clear anti-American sentiment. Yet one-fourth of the postings praised the US media for its role in exposing the abuse and criticized China's press for not being able to do the same on problems at home. What's more, over a third of all postings included some sort of praise for America's democratic political system.

Lots of the posts were also highly anti-US, the article says, but that's not surprising. And it was refreshing to read how many are responding to such comments by noting that at least in America the truth can come out and the government be held accountable.

If you haven't heard about the contest over at MaxSpeak I recommend you get over there now. Some of the comments are beyond all belief. It certainly paints a most vivid picture of the company Professor Reynolds keeps. What an ingenious idea.

All day we're hearing from the government spokespeople that Nick Berg was absolutely not held in US custody, while the angry parents insist that he was. No, the US asserts, he was in the custody of the Iraqi police prior to his capture and beheading by terrorists. He was never detained by the US military.

But emails between the US consulate and Berg's family contradict this claim:

Text of e-mails from Beth A. Payne, a U.S. consular officer in Baghdad, to members of the family of Nicholas Berg. Copies of the e-mails were provided to The Associated Press by the Berg family.

April 1, 1:26 a.m. (To Michael Berg, Berg's father)

I have confirmed that your son, Nick, is being detained by the U.S. military in Mosul. He is safe. He was picked up approximately one week ago. We will try to obtain additional information regarding his detention and a contact person you can communicate with directly.

April 1, 5:23 a.m. (To Suzanne Berg, Berg's mother)

I have been able to confirm that your son is being detained by the U.S. military. I am attempting to identify a person with the U.S. military or FBI here in Iraq who you can contact directly with your questions.

There are more, all repeating that he's in the custody of the US military.

Can we wonder why the Bergs are incensed, and why the story everywhwere is being described as "murky" and "confusing"? Something's definitely rotten in Iraq, and the military had better clarify things fast. Loose ends like this can provide breeding grounds for conspiracy theorists.

Or so says this reporter, who contends that it's just around the corner.

The one-child policy in China is coming to an end.

It has a few years left to run yet in most of the country, but Shanghai's city government announced in mid-April that divorced people who remarry can have a child together even if they each have a child from a previous marriage.

It's just the first crack in the dam, but more will follow.

"The one-child policy was never intended to last forever," explained sociology professor Guo Zhigang of Beijing University, predicting that Beijing would follow Shanghai's example within three years and that other provinces would follow.

The world's largest experiment in social engineering by government fiat is going to be shut down - and seeing what is happening elsewhere, you wonder how necessary it all was.

She sees this as a profoundly good thing because a.) the ensuing drop in femal infanticide will help correct China's unwieldy gender imbalance, and b.) it will also help eliminate the "population bulge" of Chinese who are now in middle age, ensuring there'll be enough people working to support them when they retire.

I don't have enough command of the birth statistics to offer informed comment. What I do know -- and it was a big surprise to me -- is that most if not all the Chinese people I discussed this with were strongly, even fervently in favor of the one-child policy.

They all said, in almost the same words, that China's overpopulation problem threatened to crush the country in a sea of bodies, and that mandatory birth control and enforced abortion, as unattractive as they are, were absolutely necessary to deal with the huge threat of way too many mouths to feed.

When you consider that between 1949 and 2000 the population in China grew by more than 750 million people, I can understand where they're coming from. Is it a time to end the controversial one-child policy? I just don't know.

Related post: It's raining men in China

Just go there. (For the transcript, go here.)

David Brock has certainly hit the ground running, and Media Matters is now my third stop each morning, right after TPM and Andrew Sullivan.

And people still believe in the "liberal media" myth? As Instapuppy would say, Heh. Indeed.

Too disgusting for words:

1. The Abu Ghraib "scandal": Good. Kick one for me. But bad discipline in the military (taking the pictures, I mean). Let's have a couple of courts martial for appearance's sake. Maximum sentence: 30 days CB.

2. The US press blowing up the Abu Ghraib business: Fury at these lefty jounalists doing down America. They just want to re-live the glory days of Vietnam, when they brought down a president they hated. (PS: They hated him because he was an anticommunist, while they themselves tought communism was just fine.)

3. GWB apologizing to some barbarian chieftain for Abu Ghraib: Disgust. Correct approach: "Mind if we film some footage in YOUR jails?"

4. Revelations about sexual hanky panky in US armed forces: Outrage. I want to see someone cashiered -- a general, at least. This is no way for soldiers to behave when on active service. Gross, unpardonable violation of military ethics. Whose damn fool idea was it to mix men and women in the same units?

Well, No. 4 isn't as disgusting as the others. But this list confirms my long-standing opinion that Derbyshire, despite some good commentary he's written about China, is deranged. I wish he'd go through recent newspaper columns from hawk columnists like David Brooks and George Will and see how horrified they are over the Abu Ghraib revelations, and how they are now questioning the Bush administration's ability to win this war.

So much for this being a publicity stunt conceived by "lefty journalists."

(Link via Pandagon.)

Sorry that I'm not able to post much today. Yesterday one of my two cats (the only children I'm ever going to have) got terribly sick, and today it got progressively worse. An hour ago my friend and I force-fed her with pedialyte and it seemed to help a bit. But not much. My friend is more sanguine than I am, and is hoping it's just the flu. I'm worried, though; she's just sitting in the same spot, breathing fast and not moving.

We've had her since 1991. The week we adopted her she got violently sick, and we took her to the vet who recommended we put her to sleep. She had feline leukemia, and they said she'd most likely die in a few days. There was no way she could live more than a few months, they said.

I couldn't do it, I couldn't let her die, and then the miracle happened: Within a few says she recovered her strength, and for the past 14 years she has been in perfect health. But I suppose it couldn't last forever.

Meanwhile, she's hanging in there, and she even got up for a few minutes tonight and ate some food. Maybe there'll be another miracle, and she'll live another ten years. But she looks so weak and helpless, and I feel totally depressed. We'll see how she's doing tomorrow, and if there's no improvement I'll have to consider once again putting her to sleep.

It's funny, how attached we get to our little pets. I can't really imagine waking up without her jumping up to on the bed to say good morning....

I couldn't watch the Nick Berg beheading, but the Memory Hole has it for those who are still undecided whether Al Qaeda terrorists are animals or not. (They are.)

I watched the video of the beheading of Daniel Pearl in 2002 and still cringe when I think about it. Once was enough. But I disagree with those who say these things shouldn't be made public. As Andrew Sullivan said yesterday, let the world see just how vile and low Al Qaeda is. Why not show them at their very worst?

UPDATE: The link above is being swamped with hits, so it may not function. You can also view the graphic photos here.

Glutter is getting some great press today, her excellent article on the oppressive nature of the Chinese government appearing here. Great work.

My only question is in regard to a footnote where she writes that the Tiananmen Square "tank man" was Wang Weilin and that he was executed in 1989. I had thought these were rumors, and that there is no documentation that he was arrested or executed, or that his name was definitely Wang Weilin. (Jan Wong wrote in Red China Blues that he is still in hiding). But maybe the riddle has been answered and I just didn't read about it.

Hilarious little article in The Register highlights the text of a spam message that brought back to mind the English subtitles I'd often see in pirated Chinese CDs.

It is a pearlite goods factory of Hebei province of China, the main variety that the speciality produces: Pearl mere sands, pearlite( 2. 5 mm-7mm),it regulate explosives densities because pharmaceutical( hate pearlite water), hate water keep pearlites warm board of, The cement pearlite keeps the board warm, the pearlite is helped and strain the pharmaceutical. The price is favourable , welcome old and new customers to consult the business, but process and made according to different needs, Hope to cooperate with you!

No, I don't know what "pearlite" is either, but the article gives some helpful links if you're curious.

As I heard Oklahoma Senator Inhofe question Major General Taguba today in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee I wanted to sink into the floor.

Sen. Inhofe (R-OK): First of all, I regret I wasn't here on Friday. I was unable to be here. But maybe it's better that I wasn't because as I watch this outrage that everyone seems to have about the treatment of these prisoners I have to say and I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment.

The idea that these prisoners -- they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents, and many of them probably have American blood probably on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.

Funny that according to Seymour Hersh and the Red Cross, as many as 80 percent are there due to random arrests and were guilty only of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

This was a sick, nasty, ugly performance that shows the world America at its very worst -- reactionary, holier than thou, always right, vitriolic, sneering at truth and justice, and willing to paint anyone as an enemy or a terrorist if that will effectively silence and invalidate them. Time for some big changes come November.

Update: Kevin Drum was as horrified as I was:

As near as I can tell, Inhofe's only regret is that we went too easy on the guys at Abu Ghraib. And the Geneva Convention is for pussies.

I know for a fact that most Republicans find this kind of sentiment abhorrent, so how is it that.

Needless to say, Fox News played the clip again and again, portraying Inhofe as some kind of hero.

Just last week I wrote, "McCain must hate Bush with a fierce passion. I would love to see him jump ship and join Kerry, impossible though it may be. Then we'd have an election campaign for the books."

It was a fantasy, but now Andrew Sullivan is making a passionate argument for a Kerry-McCain ticket.

There is no one better suited in the country to tackle a difficult war where the United States is credibly accused of abusing prisoners than John McCain. He was, after all, a victim of the worst kind of prisoner torture imaginable in the Hanoi Hilton. His military credentials are impeccable but so are his moral scruples and backbone; that's a rare combination. As a vice-presidential candidate, he would allow Kerry to criticize the conduct of the war and occupation, but also to pursue them credibly. He would give Kerry credibility on national defense, removing the taint of an "antiwar" candidacy headed by a man who helped pioneer the antiwar forces during Vietnam. He would ensure that a Kerry victory would not be interpreted by America's allies or enemies as a decision to cut and run from Iraq. ....

McCain could say that this national crisis demands that he put country ahead of party and serve. His loyalty to his party would therefore be trumped by loyalty to his country. Kerry could also say that his impulse is to be a "uniter, not a divider," and that, unlike Bush, he will actually show it in his pick for the vice-presidency. Their platform? Winning the war, cutting the deficit, reforming corporate excess. A Kerry-McCain ticket, regardless of the many difficulties, would, I think, win in a landslide. Will it happen? Still unlikely. But Abu Ghraib has shortened the odds; and the arguments for such a dramatic innovation just got a lot stronger.

In normal times the idea of a split ticket would be absurd. But these aren't normal times, and some real out-of-the-box thinking is called for. It still sounds like a fantasy, with a hundred reason why it's not practical. But stranger things have happened. It would almost certainly spell a Kerry victory and ensure the end of the Bush dynasty. It's a truly thrilling notion.

Update: Now Kevin Drum chimes in, supporting the idea. Can we raise the noise level on this and create a shift, from fantasy to possibility?

One of the founding fathers of the American conservative movement blasts China in a new article claiming that nothing's changed much since Tiananmen Square in terms of human rights and religious freedom. He also points to Yahoo and Cisco for aiding and abetting China's Internet censorship industry, and strongly implies that Yahoo helped the censors tweak its search engine to forbid taboo searches like "Taiwan independence."

I don't have a lot of respect for Weyrich, who is off-the-charts when it comes to being right-wing. (He coined the phrase "Moral Majority" back in the 80s.) But he does command a large and faithful audience, and is a good barometer for how the right sees things.

Wouldn't you know it? The Chinese government, that paragon of respect for human rights, universal brotherhood and the rule of law, is shocked (shocked, I tell you) by the current US scandal over the Abu Ghraib prison abuses. They can barely contain their outrage.

CHINA today expressed shock at the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers and told Washington it must abide by international conventions.

"We are shocked by the fact that Iraqi prisoners have been ill-treated and condemn this kind of acts which go against international conventions," the foreign ministry said in a statement.

"Complete investigations should be carried out into this affair and the suspects should be punished according to law."

China, at loggerheads with Washington over its own human rights record, said it was imperative that the Bush administration abide by international laws and respect human rights.

"The US government should scrupulously abide by the international conventions such as the Geneva Convention and guarantee the basic human rights of the Iraqi prisoners," said the foreign ministry.

I'm touched by the CCP's new-found concern for basic human rights, and I'm also made a bit nauseous by their unrestrained hubris. China, lecturing others about human rights??

On the other hand, there is a sad message here, one that's really depressing: We will have a hard time for years to come claiming the moral high ground again when it comes to human rights. China may be is one of the worst offenders when it comes to actual human rights, but due to the catastrophe of the past few weeks America can no longer criticize them without raising charges of hypocrisy. The ammunition we have given to our enemies and our critics is absolutely staggering. It makes me sick.

For a while I was very sympathetic to the claim that China wasn't ready for democracy because it's people weren't educated enough, it's too big, it would create chaos and all the usual arguments the CCP trots out when it's challenged on the topic.

Not anymore. I've decided, in fact, that it may be one of the worst arguments out there. A recent article I cited by Joseph Kahn helped shake me free of any delusion in its opening sentences:

When asked why China, with its surging economy and rising power, has not yet begun to democratize, its leaders recite a standard line. The country is too big, too poor, too uneducated and too unstable to give political power to the people, they say.

The explanation is often delivered in a plaintive tone: China really would like to become a more liberal country, if only it did not have unique problems requiring the Communist Party to maintain its absolute monopoly on power for just a while longer.

The case of Hong Kong suggests it could be a great deal longer.

If I still had lingering doubts, today I read something that will keep me forever immunized against the "illiteracy" argument. This delightful new article takes a cool, cynical look at such claims and gives them the pulverization they deserve. It's a long piece, bristling with irony and wit. Here's a healthy, hilarious snippet:

You have to feel sorry for the Chinese, because they are just not ready for some of the good things in life. But don't say that directly unless you want to make enemies of 1.3 billion people. However, if they tell you that they are not yet ready for some beautiful and advanced things, the proper thing is to nod emphatically, or even applaud if you happen to be Chinese. For they will get angry if you beg to differ. Forget that Mao Zedong famously once said: "The Chinese people have the determination and ability to stand tall and proud among the nations of the world."

It doesn't matter that from ships to chips, from water dams to dot coms, China is striding fast and furious toward modernization. It is nothing that to date no less than eight Chinese have won the Nobel Prize, from physics to peace to literature, and another brave Chinese has rocketed into outer space.

Still, there is something, however desirable, that is simply beyond the reach of the great Chinese people. This "something" may not be as complicated as lunar exploration or as high-tech as splitting the nucleus of an atom. It requires no more than signing one's own name, after ticking somebody else's name, on a piece of paper. Yes. That is called casting a vote, a ballot, a cutting-edge attainment beyond the capabilities of the Chinese, or so the Beijing government says.

In an interview in September 2000 with CBS' Mike Wallace, China's then-president Jiang Zemin explained why Chinese people can't be allowed to have universal suffrage at this time: "The quality of our people is too low." There, in a simple statement, the people - supposed masters of the country - were deemed not fit for democracy, because once the ignorant, the unqualified, acquire the right to choose their government, "chaos will ensue," Jiang predicted. So the people are too stupid to know what is good for them. Only Papa, the Communist Party of China, knows best.

How's that for a dry sense of humor?

I now see the "Chinese aren't ready for democracy" argument to be a profound insult to one of the world's most industrious, creative and brilliant people. Worse, it's a lie. Take a look at the article to see how in the 1940s illiterate Chinese peasants were voting, and there was no chaos. Imagine that. In fact, it went remarkably smoothly.

The article is a small masterpiece, and it ends as bitingly as it begins:

The truth is that Beijing thinks many Hong Kong people are not "patriotic" enough to run the island.

Of course. We Chinese are never good enough, one way or another.

In conclusion, let us consider another editorial exhortation from the Xinhua Daily mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China: "How is democracy possible without ending one-party rule, without popular suffrage? Return the people's rights to the people!" - September 27, 1945.

And even earlier:

"They [those who oppose the CPC] think the implementation of democracy in China is a matter not for today, but a number of years later. They want to practice democracy only after the Chinese people are as knowledgeable and educated as in democracies in Europe and America ... But it is under a democratic system that a better education and training will be available to the people." - February 24, 1939.

Is anybody here literate enough to spell "hypocrisy"?

This story from the Straits Times has got to be one of the creepiest yet on Beijing's browbeating the feisty SAR of Hong Kong. I found out about it from a post at Crooked Timber, and she puts it better than I can, so here it is:

Currently appearing in the Straits Times is one of the least compelling arguments I’ve ever heard. Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing stooges are running candidates in the geographical constituencies in the next election, as well as in the “functional” constituencies, which are decided by a small group of hand-picked voters. As the Straits Times dryly notes, “Pro-democracy candidates tend to sweep directly elected Legco seats [i.e., the geographical constituencies] because they enjoy support from the population.” Oh, that. But Mr. James Tien, chairman of the pro-government Liberal Party, thinks that should change.

Mr Tien said: ‘If the central government sees a willingness among Hong Kong people to vote too for conservative businessmen, it will then have more confidence in the territory and might allow Hong Kong people universal suffrage earlier than is otherwise the case.’

And Mr. Ma Lik, of the reassuringly-named Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong (democratic in the “Democratic Republic of Congo” sense, it seems), agrees: ‘The central government would become more apprehensive about speeding up democratic development in Hong Kong if the democrats won a landslide victory.’

So, Beijing won’t let you vote, because they know you won’t vote the way they want. But, if you vote the way they want, maybe they’ll let you vote again later, and for more things, at which point you can…um…vote the way they want again, or risk the dreaded “instability”. If this is an advertisement for “one country, two systems”, then don’t expect to see Taiwan rushing to sign up.

Did you get the inanity (insanity?) of Mr. Tien's quote?? If we in HK show China we are willing to vote for the people they want us to vote for, maybe they'll let us vote.

Only in China, as I'm fond of saying.

The Straits Times piece highlights, among other things, the CCP's charming tactic of smearing and discrediting Hong Kong liberals to "help make Hong Kong accept its ruling against direct elections." I wonder if Karl Rove is consulting for them.

Update: I edited this post to clarify that Tien is an HK politician, not a CCP higher-up. Also, there's a good reaction to the Crooked Timber post here.

Yet another addition to my compulsory daily cyber-reading is Media Matters in America, created by David Brock, the former conservative reporter who helped ignite the Monica Lewinsky scandal but who finally saw the light and became a liberal. Brock keeps tabs on the excesses of the conservative media, and though he's been at it only a few days now, he is already going full-speed ahead. I'm blogrolling it now.

Its mission statement:

In the column below, Media Matters for America will document and correct conservative misinformation in each news cycle. Media Matters for America will monitor cable and broadcast news channels, print media and talk radio, as well as marginal, right-wing websites that often serve as original sources of misinformation for well-known conservative and mainstream media outlets.

It's about time.

Related Post: Media Matter's Rush Limbaugh Ad

Tell us Rush, does this look like a frathouse hazing to you?

As everyone here knows, it's very easy to go completley numb beneath the veritable deluge of information raining down about Abu Ghraib prison abuses and how the Bushies' line that "it was just a handful of bad apples" is an obscene lie.

Still, there's going to be a lot more to come -- pictures, videos, courtmartials, confessions, senior military officers saying we are now losing the war badly, renewed calls for Rumsfeld's resignation, etc.

The next big thing is the release today of Seymour Hersh's second New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib, which will add more fuel to the fire. Its focus is the incompetence of Rumsfeld and the Defense Department, though it also prepares us for what the next round of phtos will look like.

One of the new photographs shows a young soldier, wearing a dark jacket over his uniform and smiling into the camera, in the corridor of the jail. In the background are two Army dog handlers, in full camouflage combat gear, restraining two German shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the camera’s view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner, is naked. His hands are clasped behind his neck and he is leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away.

Other photographs show the dogs straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner. In another, taken a few minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him, knee pressed to his back. Blood is streaming from the inmate’s leg. Another photograph is a closeup of the naked prisoner, from his waist to his ankles, lying on the floor. On his right thigh is what appears to be a bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger wound on his left leg, covered in blood.

There is at least one other report of violence involving American soldiers, an Army dog, and Iraqi citizens, but it was not in Abu Ghraib. Cliff Kindy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a church-supported group that has been monitoring the situation in Iraq, told me that last November G.I.s unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah. At first, Kindy told me, “the soldiers went house to house, and arrested thirty people.” (One of them was Saad al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, who told Kindy about the incident.) While the thirty detainees were being handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight broke out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into a house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then “turned the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten.”

If you're following this story, you have to read it all. There's no way Rumsfeld can survive this, but if you think about it, it's not hard to see why they can't let him go now. As Rummy himself cleverly warned us, the worst is yet to come, and it will make last week's pictures pale in comparison. It would be a nightmare to fire Rummy now, and then bring on someone new, only to have to immediately face the next deluge of photos and videos and damning articles.

No, let Rummy continue to be the punching bag (not that he doesn't deserve it). Let him take all the flak for the scandal. When all the bad stuff is out, then get rid of him so his successor can come onboard with a relatively clean slate. Not that it will matter -- we've lost the war, in every respect. It's over, no matter who replaces Rumsfeld.

Be sure to read the last graf of Hersh's article to capture the exquisite irony of this mess. The most noble player of all, Major General Antonio M. Taguba , who scrupulously and thoroughly documented the horrors going on in Abu Ghraib, is now despised by his peers, who give short shrift to whistleblowers. (I read earlier that he's been called back to DC, where he'll be sitting at a desk job.) Oh, what a strange and startling episode....

UPDATE: Seymour Hersh's 3rd article is just out, and it's merciless.

It's not hard to see why Instapundit is one of the Internet's brightest stars. Like many netizens, he has a strong libertarian streak, leans toward the left-center on social issues and toward the right on fiscal and national security issues. He's succinct, witty, offers copious links and he never seems to sleep (though he's out sick at the moment).

But Instapundit also brings out the worst in Republicans, stirring up storms over the inconsequential (if it can hurt Kerry) and blithely glossing over the truly significant (if those things can hurt Bush). He has consistently minimized, for instance, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the outing of Valerie Plame, while posting voluminously about the stuff that really matters -- like John Kerry owning an SUV.

I stumbled onto a post today (via Atrios) that lays this argument out far more logically and thoroughly than I ever could. It is priceless, and I'm including the whole thing. Anyone interested in how "the other side" thinks and works has to read it.

Meanwhile, in the Alternate Universe ... I can't read all the rightwing blogs out there (Oy!) so I cruise over to Instapundit on occasion to gauge the general drift of things in Wingnut World. And let me tell you ...

Amid the demands for Teresa Heinz's tax returns (This just in: She's rich), misspellings of John Kerry's last name ("Kerrey" is a popular variation) and nostalgic posts about the UN's oil-for-food pseudo-scandal, they have actually taken some time to address that little problem in Abu Ghraib.

The verdict? The Instapundit gang is bored, frankly, by all this talk of torture and the steady drumbeat of voices calling for Rummy to go. It has become a distraction from the more entertaining debate over whether John Kerry threw his medals or his ribbons over the White House fence in 1971. They believe there's a "lynch mob" forming around Rumsfeld, part of a "partisan, crass, politically-motivated campaign" on the level of the Starr investigation (Wait -- now conservatives think Starr was a political hack? Finally!). And, as usual, there are dire predictions for the Democrats, who, in the minds of the Instapunditry, wouldn't be so bad if they would just, you know, start acting more like Republicans. (Paging Senator Leiberman!)

Kerry, they argue, is walking into a minefield, once again precipitated by his misguided decision to serve in Vietnam when he could have escaped to Europe or served in the Massachusetts National Guard. Did you know that war crimes were committed in Vietnam? By U.S. soldiers? Whoa! That, says the Instapundit crew, pretty much negates anything Kerry might say about the atrocities in Iraq, a country more than 30 years and thousands of miles removed from Vietnam. Thank goodness President Bush avoided that little conflict of interest.

At Instapundit, every move Kerry makes is a potential disaster for his campaign.

At Instapundit, every member of Bush's administration who jumps ship is a disloyal Judas in search of a book contract.

At Instapundit, every time a cabinet member is hauled before Congress to answer for the latest screwup, it's a dignified and statesmanlike performance. (If we get much more of this "statesmanship," we're really going to be f--ked.

At Instapundit, every time a former ally criticizes the U.S., it's a cold political gambit. (I'm shocked. Shocked! Did you know that some of these countries actually believe their opinions matter?)

At Instapundit, every time the U.S. botches something else in Iraq, we are reminded that Saddam killed little babies and once shared a cab with Osama bin Laden's third wife's fourth cousin.

At Instapundit, every time the media shows flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, it could be running stories about that school Halliburton painted (for a mere $100,000).

They believe this because they must believe it. Once they concede the point -- any point -- the dam will break. They, like the president, are ardent believers in the continuum that drives the GOP strategy -- 9/11=Muslim=Patriot Act=Saddam=war=orange alert -- to the point that it is a mantra to be repeated ad nauseum, a quasi-religious statement of belief, an article of faith long past the need for any empirical evidence.

Instapundit is a veritable festival of equivocation, which is always the last line of defense. America's infantile (and toxic) obsession with firearms is rationalized by the occasional (and truly unusual) gun murder in Europe. Strom Thurmond's recalcitrant racism is negated by Robert Byrd's youthful (and long since disavowed) association with bigotry and the Klan. The daily death toll in Iraq is likened -- favorably -- to the risks incurred by drivers on California's Interstates. The Bush administration has gutted the EPA and sold out to Big Oil, but John Kerry owns an SUV.

The current crisis is no different. Iraqis are being abused, tortured and murdered in Abu Ghraib? Well, did you know that a jailer in Germany abused some inmates in his lockup? So there you go. Bad things happen everywhere, and everyone is a hypocrite. It makes one wish that Professor Reynolds would take this (inadvertantly ironic) advice offered by James Lileks, his favorite folksy-fascist blogger:

"Go away for a week. Blog not. You’re not a public utility! We won't call our city councilman if the tap's dry for a while."

Yes, a nice long break. We can't help but agree.

It was refreshing, even therapeutic to read this. Turns out I'm not the only one who gets apoplectic reading InstaPuppy's grandiose pronouncements and maddening dismissal of stuff that really matters. If he's proven wrong enough times -- and when it comes to my earlier examples of Abu Ghraib and Valerie Plame he's going to be proven very wrong -- will his star burn any less bright, will it peter out any time sooner? Not likely, as he's achieved cult status, but we can keep our fingers crossed.

There's nothing else in the news, only Abu Ghraib. From today's NYT:

…the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system.

Yikes. There seems to be a miles-high mountain of evidence that we screwed up big time, in every way. I wonder if the public will be over-saturated with the horror stories. It's easy to become numb.

And it's just starting. Yesterday Rumsfeld tried to soften the coming blows by constantly warning of new photos, videos and horror stories soon to be made public (not by the government, but the media; I suspect he knows that some reporter has the material and will be releasing it at any moment). We need to brace ourselves for a fresh wave of anti-Americanism unknown in our history. Matt Drudge has already hinted that the mysterious video shows US soldiers raping female and male prisoners, and beating prisoners right to the brink of death. [Update: Details here. Unbelievable.]

This entire circus comes to us thanks to our leaders, who could have squelched this entire thing -- or at least considerably softened it -- by taking action months ago when they first learned a scandal was brewing. In January, they put out a blandly worded press release saying the government was investigating alleged abuses of Iraqi prisoners, and that was that. Rumsfled is trying to point to that as evidence that "We told the whole world," but it's obvious the release was merely a cover-your-ass device in case the full extent of the abuse ever surfaced. That Rumsfeld is trying to hide behind the short, detail-free release as proof of his openness is pathetically unconvincing.

According to this article, China's elders are distressed that Hong Kong schoolchildren are so woefully ignorant of China and its history.

A RECENT poll by the Chinese University found that nearly half, or 45 per cent, of some 400 students in four different universities could not name the Chinese Communist Party's General Secretary, a position held by Mr Hu Jintao since 2002.

Twenty-three per cent did not know that the People's Republic of China was established in 1949.

....

All these examples suggest that Hong Kong people lack understanding or identification with the motherland.

In fact, mainland officials complain that Hong Kong residents act selectively by insisting that the territory and the mainland are one country in economic matters but two systems in politics.

Therefore, the article says, China's leaders are a bit bent out of shape and intent on instilling a new sense of patriotism in Hong Kong and make it clear that HK and the PRC are one country, in every way, period.

I've been out of HK for more than two years now, but I'm going to venture a guess that this patriotism drive will fall on its face. What with last year's 500,000-man march and the recent outrage over free elections, is Hong Kong bursting to demonstrate patriotism to the mainland? Hard to believe.

Shanghai Eye offers a beautiful post on his trip to Yunnan, including some fine pictures. Such great writing, and some real wisdom, too.

....[D]espite the pontifications of our fellow travellers, we wonder how much anyone can really know about China. All kinds of foreigners produce all kinds of theories to explain the vastness of China's territory, and the variety of its peoples. Worst still, their habits, their errors and faux pas, are sometimes reduced to little more than a consequence of the evils of the government. Wandering around some of the markets in Kunming and Dali, one sees what one sees everywhere, from the bazaars of Baghdad to the prairies of Mongolia – the ordinary activities of communities trying to function, and the chaos of individuals trying somehow to get ahead in a changing, challenging world. The changes and challenges in China have been more perilous than most.

There's definitely talent here.

Travelling to Yunnan was the one thing I wanted to do before I moved away that I never got around to. SARS stopped me last year, lack of time stopped me this year. Thanks to a good friend of mine from a farming village outside of Kunming, I feel that I know it better than anyplace else in China; he loves Yunnan and always talks about it, the land of perpetual springtime. After reading Shanghai Eye's post, I feel I know it even better.

I won't try to steal the thunder from this excellent post. Suffice it to say I was tempted to do a "reverse fisking" of it -- take it apart line by line and say how good each line is. Be sure to take a look.

The article she (he?) he links to -- Let's stop abetting dictatorship in Beijing -- is essential reading for CCP watchers. (I may do a separate post on it later tonight if I have the energy.)

A lengthy Newsweek article paints a dramatic picture of the growth of Christianity in China and the work missionaries are performing to swell the ranks -- and to get around the governemnt's repressive policies toward religion.

All across China, more and more people are turning to Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior. The numbers have been growing for years, encouraged by the personal freedoms that have slowly accompanied the country's economic reforms. Protestantism—and especially evangelicalism—appeals to many Chinese in rural areas that have been left out of China's economic miracle. Now China has at least 45 million Christians, the majority of whom are Protestant, according to Chinese academics. Western observers say the numbers are much higher. Dennis Balcombe, a preacher from California who has made hundreds of mission trips to China since the late 1970s, and Western researchers put the number at closer to 90 million.

Either way, the movement now has a momentum of its own. Centuries after Westerners flocked to the Middle Kingdom in search of souls, Chinese missionaries have taken over from their Western mentors and are proselytizing directly. And for the first time, they are making serious plans to spread the good word beyond their borders. "I wouldn't be surprised if Christianity has grown faster in China than anywhere else in the world in the last 20 years," says Daniel Bays, a historian of Chinese Christianity at Calvin College in Michigan.

The religious upwelling presents a serious challenge to the Chinese Communist Party, which still allows only atheists in its ranks and has always viewed religion, especially Western-imported Christianity, as a potential source of dissent. The government forbids evangelicalism and requires Christians to worship in officially sanctioned churches, but is struggling to keep up with the skyrocketing numbers. Already there are about 6 million members of the official Roman Catholic Church and 15 million Protestants. But because of government limits, there's a severe shortage of clergy and churches. In Beijing alone, people pack the 100 existing official churches, overflowing into basements to watch sermons on closed-circuit television.

The article looks at how the bravery of activist Christians "terrifies" the CCP, which sees Christian churches as a major factor in the fall of Communism in Europe. With the Falun Gong effectively silenced in China, it's now the Christians who are giving the party nightmares. The reporters note the supreme irony of this attitude:

A flourishing church could solve a lot of problems for China's leaders—in some places officials look the other way as churches open orphanages, elder-care homes and other badly needed services. But even if Beijing doesn't allow real religious freedom, Chinese Christians will continue to spread the word, at home and abroad.

I guess it would be too logical for the CCP to try to benefit from this movement, actually using it to ease some of China's huge burdens, instead of worrying about how to supress it.

It's fascinating to see how different commentators are interpreting the abuses carried out by Americans against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. I'd just like to contrast what three right-leaning bloggers/pundits had to say about it. They are in different camps, but they all suffered a blow when this story broke, as they were all strongly in favor of the war and claimed America went into Iraq with a high moral calling, a calling we would live up to.

From Little Green Footballs (caution -- brown people not welcome):

I’m really surprised (and increasingly irked) at how widespread the label of “torture” is becoming, to describe what took place at the Abu Ghraib prison. I expect this stuff from places like CounterPunch and Indymedia and buzzflash, but even some people who ought to know better are starting to use the term. As despicable as the acts were that these MPs are accused of, this is not torture.

If you believe otherwise, I’d like to know how you can equate the Abu Ghraib mistreatment with Saddam Hussein’s rape rooms, or with the iron maiden used by Uday to torture the Iraqi soccer team if they lost, or with the bastinado (caning on the soles of the feet) that was a regular punishment for Saddam’s underlings if they fell into disfavor, or with the countless acts of sheer horror that are perpetrated every day under Arab regimes.

From the prince of darkness, Rush Limbaugh (via Pandagon):

Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You've heard of need to blow some steam off?

And finally, from Andrew Sullivan, who begins by listing the abuses -- the tortures -- highlighted in the Taguba report (and many certainly do fall under the category of torture). He's to be congratulated for actually facing up to what happened instead of minimizing the crimes under a cloak of generalities. He then comments.

Like most of you, I've had a hard time coming to grips with the appalling abuses perpetrated by some under U.S. command in, of all places, Abu Ghraib. We can make necessary distinctions between this abuse and the horrifying torture of Saddam's rule, but they cannot obliterate the sickening feeling in the pit of the stomach. Those of us who believe in the moral necessity of this war should be, perhaps, the most offended. These goons have defiled something important and noble; they have wrought awful damage on Western prestige; they have tarnished the vast majority of servicemembers who do an amazing job; and they have done something incontrovertibly disgusting and wrong. By the same token, this has been - finally - exposed. We have a chance to show the Muslim and Arab world how a democracy deals with this. So far, the punishments meted out have not been severe enough; and the public apology not clear and definitive enough. It seems to me that some kind of reckoning has to be made by the president himself. No one below him can have the impact of a presidential statement of apology to the Iraqi and American people. Bush should give one. He should show true responsibility and remorse, which I have no doubt he feels. I can think of no better way than to go to Abu Ghraib itself, to witness the place where these abuses occurred and swear that the culprits will be punished and that it will not happen again. It would be a huge gesture. But frankly there is something tawdry about a president at a time like this campaigning in the Midwest in a bus. His entire war's rationale has been called into question. The integrity of the United States has been indelibly harmed on his watch. He must account for it. Soon. And why not in Iraq?

Sullivan's impatience and frustration with his former idol, George W. is palpabe. Rush Limbaugh's blithe dismissal of the whole thing as horseplay is despicable. LGF's attempt to minimize it by saying, "Well, Saddam did worse things," is foolish and cowardly; didn't we go there on a moral high ground?

On Fox News, Sean Hannity, who I'm inclined to say is the most dangerous man on television today, also bristled at the word "torture," though he wouldn't spell out what his definition of the word is. Somehow I suspect that for Hannity it's only torture when a brown person does it to a white person. When we're doing it, it becomes "lack of familiarity with the Geneva Convention" or shit like that.

Making frequent comparisons to Nazi Germany, Beijing University professor Jiao Guobiao continues to blast China's propaganda machine for censorship he says has covered up government ineptitude and has been used to persecute the populace for more than 50 years.

Mr Jiao called for the abolition of the state's propaganda machinery, which he said was guilty of shielding corrupt officials and whitewashing the country's darkest moments.

"The character of its work is the complete opposite of that of a modern civilisation," he wrote. "Where else can you find propaganda departments? Not in the US, the UK or Europe. But you did find them in Nazi Germany, where Goebbels said 'a lie that is repeated 1000 times becomes the truth'."

Ignoring the caution that usually typifies public criticism of state institutions in China, Mr Jiao dished out the sort of vitriol for which the propaganda department was once famous.

"Their censorship orders are totally groundless, absolutely arbitrary, at odds with the basic standards of civilisation, and as counter to scientific common sense as witches and wizardry," he wrote. "They take money from the parties referred to in reports. They distort the media's sense of right and wrong and justice. They are killing the constitution."

He lays the blame primarily on Jiang Zemin's henchmen who control the propaganda apparatus. But he also expresses deep dissatisfaction with Hu Jintao, who had raised people's hopes last year with his self-styled "man of the people" reformist image.

One has to wonder how long Jiao will be permitted to speak so freely. Luckily, his story has now been told in newspapers (and web sites) all over the world, making him a celebrity. The eyes of the world are on him now, and China has already shown that it's reluctant to take action against figure who have won world-wide sympathy. (Recall the release a few months ago of Liu Di, aka "Stainless Steel Mouse.")

As the article says, such vocal critics are usually jailed. This could be an important test, but right now the outcome is anybody's guess. Remember, Mr. Hu, the whole world is watching.

Related post here.

This is certainly encouraging:

About 80 gays and lesbians from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan had taken four days off work and spent hundreds of dollars to attend the first Tongzhi Conference held in Hong Kong since 1999.

....

Donning rainbow necklaces on which they hung their name badges, the attendees listened to lectures on coming out, safe sex and same-sex dating, among others. These are routine topics for gays and lesbians in the West, but for this audience -- mostly people from mainland China who were able to travel to Hong Kong because of recently relaxed travel restrictions -- the gathering is an important, if primitive, step toward earning equality.

The article describes young Chinese people coming out to their parents, and how the Internet has provided the medium for gays in China to communicate with and meet one another. There are now more than 300 gay web sites in China, according to the article.

I found this especially moving:

It might have sounded like Homosexuality 101 to American ears, but when Rager Shen told his story, his listeners were stunned.

"I came out to my mother recently," the 21-year-old from Shanghai said plaintively to an audience of about 40 other Chinese tongzhi, or homosexuals. "I always wanted to tell her that I am gay, and, finally, I did it. She was very upset, but I told her the purpose was so that gays like myself could someday live more easily. She has calmed down a lot now."

Many sat in awe as Shen described his experience, insisting later that they could never do such a thing. Others pestered the slight, spiky-haired college freshman in a bright orange polo shirt about whether his act was selfish and whether he had merely unbur- dened himself by burdening his mother.

Shen argued that despite her anguished response -- she confined him to their home and confiscated his cell phone for a time -- he is "quite certain I did the right thing because she is my mother, and I want her to know me."

In a country where bad news about censorship is only getting worse, it's extremely encouraging to witness the progress that's being made in gay rights. It was only three years ago that the government took homosexuality off its list of mental illnesses, and things are continuing to improve, slowly but steadily.

Related post: The plight of China's gays

Check out Kevin Drum's post. You have to see the game the WSJ plays with a loaded and highly misleading "quote." It's an assault on journalistic ethics and a sign of how desperate they are to tear Kerry down. I'm sure it gave James Taranto a hearty chuckle.

Get ready to witness one of the most insidious, calculated and choreographed smear campaigns ever, as a group of Vietnam vets prepares to denounce Kerry as a coward and a liar who is unfit to serve. This is a replay of a similar scheme from three decades earlier, with the same cast of characters leading the charge.

John Kerry's old nemesis - a fellow Vietnam vet picked by President Richard Nixon to discredit Kerry 30 years ago - is resurfacing today to declare him "unfit to be commander in chief."

John O'Neill, who succeeded Kerry as commander of the same Navy Swift boat, will announce the formation of a new political group called Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, dedicated to undermining Kerry.

O'Neill says he has a letter signed by hundreds of Navy vets, including many who served with Kerry, saying he is not commander-in-chief material. O'Neill's main beef is Kerry's charge that U.S. troops committed atrocities in Vietnam.

"Our mission is to provide solid factual information relating to Mr. Kerry's abbreviated tour of duty," he wrote.

Kerry campaign spokesman Chad Clanton said, "The group behind this is the same group that smeared Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the 2000 Republican presidential primary."

The new attack comes as Kerry launched $25 million in new ads stressing his Bronze Star and Silver Star and featuring a veteran whose life he saved.

Bush has spent $40 million on ads tagging Kerry as soft on defense, and Republicans have orchestrated a wide-ranging attack on his Vietnam record - including questioning the three Purple Hearts that sent him home early.

While it may seem counterintuitive to go after Kerry's war service, the tactic worked against McCain. Sources in Bush's 2000 operation said the idea was never to sway voters but to infuriate the candidate.

McCain reacted furiously in 2000, helping to derail his campaign. Kerry, meanwhile, was reduced to angry stammering when challenged about his medals on ABC last week.

O'Neill, a Houston lawyer, is emerging to spearhead the new attack, just as he did for the Nixon White House in the 1970s.

Nixon's secret tapes captured him fretting with aides about the political threat Kerry posed and plotting to "destroy" him. O'Neill, an articulate young vet who had criticized Kerry's anti-war speeches, was invited to the White House in 1971 and encouraged to debate Kerry.

"Give it to him, give it to him," Nixon told O'Neill.

O'Neill says he is not coordinating with the White House this time around.

This is a brilliant tactic, in a depraved sort of way. Don't go after the enemy's perceived weakenesses -- no, instead go straight for his perceived strengths and then cut him off at the knees.

Kerry's trump card is his stellar military service, which cannot be questioned. Well, it can be, but only with the most scurrilous of methods: Having compulsive liar Karen Hughs say how "troubled" she is by quetstions of whether Kerry threw down medals or ribbons in protest of the Vietnam War 30 years ago; raising asinine questions about whether he deserved his purple hearts; accusing him of betraying his fellow soldiers when he did no such thing, etc.

Despite the wave of assaults, Kerry's record cannot be so easily blackened. So you've got to hit harder, meaner, in a way that gets the message across to voters. What better way than having a group of other Vietnam vets all stand together and rip Kerry's record, denounce him as a man and as a leader, and declare him unit for office? These guys were all eyewitnesses to Kerry's incompetence. How can they all be wrong?

Or at least that's what they'll try to convey. They'll do it well. They'll all be "on-message," as Karen Hughes and Karl Rove have taught them to be. It will be a gang bang the likes of which we've rarely seen in American politics. And it will illustrate once more just how low the Bush campaign people can go, and how free of moral scruples they are. And tragically, it just may work. (Never mind that so many other vets have described Kerry as a true leader and hero.)

Too bad that this type of character assassination is status quo for Bush & Co.

McCain must hate Bush with a fierce passion. I would love to see him jump ship and join Kerry, impossible though it may be. Then we'd have an election campaign for the books.

UPDATE: I just saw the latest Kerry campaign ad, and it cleverly points out how Kerry worked with John McCain to find out the fate of US POWs and MIAs in Vietnam. Brilliant, in several ways.

After spending the better part of my weekend deleting comments hawking penis enlargement pills, online casinos, XXX-rated CDs, levitra, cialis, viagra, xanax, oxycontin, sex toys, hair-loss treatments and escort services, I finally contacted Jay Allen, the creator of MT-Blacklist. His plugin is easy to install and to use, and it really works.

Now I'm going to have to figure out what to do with all the time Blacklist is saving me.

Zona Europa posts some amazingly powerful images of children in Iraq. I recommend you have a look.

It's all here. It may be a bit more than you wanted to know, and you may not want to read it too close to mealtime. Consider yourself forewarned.

Thanks to a comment from Eric of Wo Bu Mingbai, I've learned that the US propaganda people are playing their own games with Internet site blocking.

The U.S. government concocted a brilliant plan a few years ago: Why not give Internet surfers in China and Iran the ability to bypass their nations' notoriously restrictive blocks on Web sites? Soon afterward, the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) invented a way to let people in China and Iran easily route around censorship by using a U.S.-based service to view banned sites such as BBC News, MIT and Amnesty International.

But an independent report released Monday reveals that the U.S. government also censors what Chinese and Iranian citizens can see online. Technology used by the IBB, which puts out the Voice of America broadcasts, prevents them from visiting Web addresses that include a peculiar list of verboten keywords. The list includes "ass" (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), "breast" (breastcancer.com), "hot" (hotmail.com and hotels.com), "pic" (epic.noaa.gov) and "teen" (teens.drugabuse.gov).

"The minute you try to temper assistance with evading censorship with judgments about how that power should be used by citizens, you start down a path from which there's no clear endpoint," said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard University law professor and co-author of the report prepared by the OpenNet Initiative.

How stupid can we get?

In the abstract, the argument is a reasonable one. If the IBB's service had blocked only hard-core pornographic Web sites, few people would object.

Instead, the list unintentionally reveals its author's views of what's appropriate and inappropriate. The official naughty-keyword list displays a conservative bias that labels any Web address with "gay" in them as verboten--a decision that affects thousands of Web sites that deal with gay and lesbian issues, as well as DioceseOfGaylord.org, a Roman Catholic site.

More to the point, the U.S. government could have set a positive example to the world regarding acceptance of gays and lesbians--especially in Iran, which punishes homosexuality with death.

18 months after waiting for things to improve under the new leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabo, two professors at Beijing University tell Joseph Kahn of the NY Times that censorship in China is worse than ever, and compare the censors to Nazis.

I don't see how anyone can come away from this superb article feeling much hope for increased fredom of speech in China. Jiao Guobiao, a journalism professor at Beijing University, says that as in the days of the Cultural Revolution, censors still stifle free speech, and it's getting worse, not better.

"Their censorship orders are totally groundless, absolutely arbitrary, at odds with the basic standards of civilization, and as counter to scientific common sense as witches and wizardry," he wrote in the article - which has been widely circulated by Internet in Beijing despite, not unpredictably, being banned by the Communist Party's propaganda department.

Such explicit outbursts of dissent are still rare in China. But Mr. Jiao is not alone in expressing frustration that, even after a long-awaited transition to a new generation of leaders some 18 months ago, China's political scene remains stultifying. Intellectuals, Mr. Jiao said, are "supposed to act like children who never talk back to their parents."

The leadership team headed by the president and party chief Hu Jintao that many hoped would tolerate more open debate has instead slapped new restrictions on free speech and the press that some say remind them of the repressive years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

State security agents have been scouring the Internet and pressing charges against people who use it to distribute information or express opinions deemed unfavorable. The authorities harassed scholars who took part in a debate about constitutional changes, disappointing some who believed that Mr. Hu had once invited discussion about how to strengthen the rule of law.

It's another of those articles where I'd like to quote just about every line. Jiao's scorn for the censors is palpable, and his outspokenness refreshing.

His [Jiao's] treatise mocks the 10 "forbiddens" and 3 "musts" style used in propaganda orders and describes "14 diseases" and "4 cures," one of which is abolishing censorship.

Among his criticisms: propaganda officials "protect thugs and corrupt officials" by banning reports on corruption. The reason, Mr. Jiao wrote, is that the propaganda officials "use the media administration power granted them by the Party to enrich themselves" with bribes.

During SARS, Mr. Jiao wrote, propaganda officials used the excuse of "social stability" to prohibit reporting about the disease. In fact, he argued, social stability was threatened because reporting was so inadequate, panicking people who felt they could not trust official sources of information.

"There's not a shadow of scientific rigor in their brains,'' he wrote. "They simply follow their own ignorant feelings.''

I keep seeing examples of individual bravery like this, and look for a sign that they are making a difference. Kahn, too, is obviously exasperated, referring to the "glacial pace of change" and noting that more topics have recently become forbidden for the media to discuss, like corruption.

When it comes to censorship, there's no getting around the fact that Hu and Wen have brought the country backwards, badly disappointing those (like me) who foolishly took their initial overtures of reform and openess at face value.

What next?

A government commission is recommending to President Bush a series of measures to cut U.S. dollar flows to Cuba as part of a broader policy to hasten the end of the country's communist system, an administration official said Sunday night.

....Last October, Bush announced the creation of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba and set a May 1 deadline for completion of a report. The concept and the timing appeared to be linked to maintaining in the November elections the solid support Bush received in 2000 from Cuban-Americans in Florida. Without their backing, the election would have gone to Democrat Al Gore.

Four of the five chapters in the 500-page report deal with ways to assist a post-Castro government that seeks to establish democracy. The other chapter focuses on ways to end Castro's government.

I don't like the sound of this at all. The timing smells, and besides, haven't we learned that trying to build nations in our own image is a dangerous business that can backfire on us big time?

What can we do to bring about regime change where it's needed most, i.e., the US? Today I started looking into doing volunteer work for the Kerry campaign. I can't just blog about it anymore, I have to contribute. The very idea of four more years makes me nauseous.

This site has been so bombarded with spam comments over the past few days that I may have a nervous breakdown. I had to close many of the comment threads in earlier posts because the deluge was overwhelming.

I've looked into MT plugins for comment spam and they all require a knowledge of basic code that I don't possess. If anyone knows a truly simple solution, please share it with me. Thanks.

UPDATE: I really appreciate the offers, here and in emails, to help me fix this nightmare. I don't want anyone going out of his way to work on this, so I am having one of the creators of an anti-spam program check out my directory and install the program at a small charge. This morning I got 45 separate spam comments, all from an "enlargement" site. What a waste of my time.

Having lived in Singapore for the past year, where China is the theme of nearly every business article, I can attest to the fact that Friedman is exactly right:

Here's what I learned in Tokyo: If you're the leader of Japan, America, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines or the European Union and you're not going to bed each night saying the following prayer for China, then you're not paying attention:

"Dear Heavenly Father, please keep the leader of China, President Hu Jintao, healthy and on an even keel. Please see to it that he moves steadily and carefully toward restructuring the Chinese banking system and ridding it of its huge overhang of bad loans and corruption, before there is a real meltdown that would be felt around the world. Give him the wisdom to cool the overheated Chinese economy without creating a recession that would prompt China to stop importing like crazy and start just exporting like crazy. And Father, forgive us for all the bad words we used in recent years to describe China's leaders — terms like `Butchers of Beijing.' We did not mean it. We meant to say `Bankers of Beijing,' because their economy is now fueling growth all over Asia, bolstering Japan and sucking up imports from everywhere. May China's leaders live to 120, and may they enjoy 9 percent G.D.P. growth every year of their lives. Thank you, Father. Amen."

....If the China bubble bursts, it will be the mother of all burst bubbles. Which is why we need to pray that China's leaders will have the skill to cool things down, just enough but not too much, without some wheels falling off.

The overheating Chinese economy and whether the country can finesse a soft landing as opposed to a spectacular crash is now the hottest topic in town. The fate of Asia, at least in the short term, depends on the answer. Friedman looks at just how difficult China's problem is, mainly because it's trapped in the tentaclces of its own system (SOEs, free-wheeling banks, reliance on foreign investment) and it really doesn't have many options.

Everyone's got a different opinion about whether or not China can come out of this relatively unscathed, so I'm steering clear of making predictions. So is Friedman:

One can only say three things: 1. They've done a pretty good job so far. 2. The job gets harder every day. 3. No one will be immune to the fallout. The relationship of the world to China right now reminds me of that old banker's rule: If a client owes you $1,000, that's his problem. If a client owes you $1 million, that's your problem. China's stability is our problem.

If you live in Singapore, one thing you do not want to do is get on the bad side of "senior minister" (read that to mean "President for Life") Lee Kuan Yew like this poor bastard.

BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson writes a scathing column accusing the UK and other world powers of turning their backs on China's subversion of its "One Country, Two Systems" promise.

Last Monday the convenient fiction on which Britain handed over Hong Kong to China ("one country, two systems") came to an end. The Standing Committee of China's parliament, the National People's Congress, declared that the inhabitants of Hong Kong could not elect their chief executive in 2007, nor vote for more than half the seats in the territory's legislature in 2008. Was there a wave of public outrage in Britain? What do you think? Some newspapers ran the kind of short, worthy column that only means one thing: the foreign editor can't ignore the subject completely, but wants to get rid of it as fast as possible. The BBC's Ten O'Clock News ran a stylish and intelligent report on the subject from its Beijing correspondent.

Otherwise there was a big public silence. The Foreign Office called in the Chinese ambassador to complain. The Americans, who to their credit have shown more concern for Hong Kong than the British, condemned the Chinese move publicly.

But that's the extent of it. Seven years after the hand-over, the spirit of the Chinese-British deal has been destroyed, and we prefer to ignore it. In slightly menacing celebration, eight Chinese warships sailed into Hong Kong harbour last week, the biggest show of Chinese naval strength there since 1997.

He makes the case that the UK is appeasing China in the worst way, and that someday it may have to pay a heavy price for refusing to stand up to China while it still could.

UPDATE: This must-read article (and I mean it, if this subject interest you, you've got to see it) tells a somewhat different, more terrible story.

Well, I'm glad that puts an end to the uproar:

Top U.S. military officer Gen. Richard Myers said Sunday there is no widespread pattern of abuse of Iraqi prisoners and that the actions of "just a handful" of U.S. troops at a Baghdad prison have unfairly tainted all American forces.

Now Iraqis can sleep soundly tonight, knowing they're safe in the hands of the occupying forces. The same article refers to Amnesty International's report of a widespread "pattern of abuse" of Iraqi prisoners, but they must have got it wrong.

Actually, most Iraqis probably are safe under the protection of the occupiers. But if we honestly believe statements like Myers' are going to restore trust and peace of mind to Iraqis who've been horrified by the recent photos from Abub Ghraib prison, we're deluding ourselves. It's going to take a supreme display of goodwill and repentance on our part if we're ever going to rebuild that trust -- like showing them that the people at the very top, those responsible for overseeing the catastrophe -- are held accountable, and not just a handful of people on the ground who, it appears, were encouraged by their superiors to commit the acts of cruelty.

Even then, I'm skeptical that we can ever recover from this, at least in terms of the Iraqi occupation. As Joseph Bosco eloquently states today, America's position as a leading advocate of human rights has been dealt a serious blow, one from which it won't recover easily.

Now, quite sadly, current events have risen their so often ugly heads and presented all Americans with one of the most shameful lessons regarding the truth of what I have written and what so many military officers, historians and scholars have always known. I am writing of the truly heartbreaking proof of what American troops have done to Iraqi "detainees" in the Abu Ghraib prison just west of Baghdad. I am writing of something so ugly and so calculated and so systemic that I offer that it may be decades--if ever--before the Republic I love beyond measure can ever again have the moral authority to speak of human rights, human abuse or war crimes to even the most repressive regimes.

America, my country, in the name of freedom, liberation and democracy has treated detainees--within their own country, within the same prison where so many of them had been tortured and murdered by the regime we took it upon ourselves to overthrow largely because of its brutality to its citizens--with a sickening level of beastly violence upon their bodies and souls that is almost without precedence in American military history. There can be understanding, even sympathy, albeit grudgingly, when in the heated blood of combat and comrades lost that "enemies" are spontaneously lined up against a wall and machine-gunned. But deliberate torture? Much of it acts of sexual perversion and depravity to make even this old crime reporter reel and gag from the utter baseness of it?

I shed very real tears this day as I looked at the pictures and read the articles excerpted below. I did so for two reasons: One, just basic human compassion for any man--and the victims were all men--forced to undergo such soul-crushing indignities as seen in the pictures; two, because I know that we Americans may never be able to live this down, that perhaps never again can I lecture in my classes abroad about the basic goodness of the American process.

Be sure to check Joseph's epic post, and understand how the stories exposed last week in Iraq will affect his role as an American professor in China for years to come.

Once again, George Bush's excellent adventure as president has ripped a gaping hole in America's image, and thrown gasoline on the flames that inspire our enemies to hate us. And this, from a man who will run on the platform of national security! I'd be shocked if this week's events haven't led to a surge in al Qaeda's membership, and renewed their vows to destroy America, the great enemy.

Veteran muckracker Seymour Hersh has a devastating account of the abuses performed by Americans at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad.

The abuses have been going on a long time. Hersh got hold of a 53-page secret Pentagon report that lists the abuses in some detail:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

Many of these Iraqis apparently had nothing to do with the insurgency, and were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Forget for the moment all the arguments about whether the abusers' acts were right or wrong or justified or in accord with the Geneva Convention, etc. All that matters right now is what this means for America as we continue to pretend Iraqis view us as liberators and saviors.

Obviously these acts of stupidity and depravity can't hold a candle to what Saddam used to do. But at a time when we are right on the verge of losing the support of the population we fought to liberate, this is as awful as it could get. How supportive would you be of a government that took US prisoners and urinated on them and tortured them and humiliated them, with the "security team" cheering and laughing in the background? And that's how its perceived -- it wasn't a bunch of untrained fools who committed the torture, it was America.

And it looks like the only ones who'll be punished will be the little people, none of the officers who are supposed to be responsible (they're just going to be relieved of duty, it seems).

It's been a bad few weeks for our little adventure in Iraq, but I won't be surprised if this turns out to be pivotal. How on earth do we win back the trust of the man on the street in Iraq after he's seen these images?

Most Americans in Iraq, I believe, want to see the operation succeed and want to build a better Iraq. But the entire prinicple of nation-building is founded on trust. Right now, any trust that had remained has been pretty well obliterated.

All the king's horses and all the king's men....

UPDATE: Seymour Hersh's 3rd article is just out, and it's merciless.

The article speaks for itself:

Thirty-five miners are reported dead and another 16 missing in two coal mine accidents in northern China that underscore the dismal plight of many Chinese workers on International Labour Day.

The accidents came as China pledged to improve worker's rights and as a Hong Kong-based labour rights group warned that a total lack of independent worker's organizations was contributing to the appalling safety record in Chinese mines.

A gas explosion ripped through a mine in northern Shanxi province on Friday leaving 35 dead and one missing, while 15 miners were feared dead after a flood in an illegally operating mine in neighboring Inner Mongolia, officials and press reports said Saturday.

Shanxi governor Zhang Baoshun was overseeing rescue operations and the investigation into the blast at the Liangjiahe state-owned mine near Linfen city, Hou Jieyan, a spokesman for the Shanxi Coal Mining Safety Inspection Bureau told AFP.

Although the governor interrupted his holiday to direct operatons at the accident site, before the blast the mine had intended to work through the week-long labour holiday to avoid costly safety procedures.

One of the mines had been closed down days earlier for safety reasons but was operating clandestinely.