...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Friday, March 19, 2004
      ( 12:44 PM )
 
From The "Doesn't Anybody Like Us Anymore?" Department

Reporters walked out on Colin Powell during his press conference in Iraq this morning (ha, betcha didn't see that on the mainstream media reports) in protest of the killings of two Iraqi journalists by US soldiers. The CNN report is interesting in that it even mentions the walk out. But more telling, for me anyway, is this paragraph further down:

Powell's visit was preceded by a week of what has
become almost routine violence in Iraq, capped by
reports that U.S. troops shot and killed two Arabic-TV
network journalists Thursday night.

One year after we illegally and immorally bombed and invaded a country, violence against human beings in that country has become "routine." And we accused Saddam of abusing his people...

In other Rats from a Sinking Ship News, South Korea is the latest to balk on sending its troops over to join the Coalition of the Willing Bribed and Coerced.

South Korea promised to eventually dispatch the
3,600 troops earmarked for Iraq, but only after it
finds a safer location.

Isn't that sort of like saying "I'll visit L.A. once they take care of that smog problem." This announcement from South Korea comes a day after Poland's leader, while not saying he would remove Polish troops, did publicly complain that he now believes he was "misled" into joining the "Coalition."

Oh, and for an update on the Spain situation, it has now been revealed that after the Spanish ruling party (at the time) lied to its people and the world after the bombings that it must certainly be ETA that committed the attacks, and then our government, in a rush to back up one of its few actual allies, forced the UN to condemn ETA a day after the attacks, the UN isn't so happy with us OR Spain, and neither is Germany:

Its federal criminal bureau said the Spanish authorities
intentionally withheld information and misled German
officials over the explosives used in the Madrid bombings.
The Spanish conservative government had insisted the
Goma 2 Eco dynamite for the explosives had been
frequently used by Eta, the Basque separatist movement.
On Monday, it admitted that was not the case.

Yet, in embarrassing predictability, US government officials and pundits continue to call the Spanish voters "appeasers" and say that terrorists "won" because of that election. Exactly the opposite. The Spanish voters saw that their government was lying and cheating and didn't listen to them anyway, so they took care of business. The terrorists LOST because democracy won, and Spain will now be able to use its resources more wisely in their fight against terrorism. The US, on the other hand, continues to lose... its friends, its allies, its excuses and even its wits.

Well, at least Namibia is still on the team.

UPDATE: Krugman's Excellent Column (tm) today leaves no doubt that our ability to make friends and influence people isn't winning any awards:

"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." So
George Bush declared on Sept. 20, 2001. But what was he
saying? Surely he didn't mean that everyone was obliged to
support all of his policies, that if you opposed him on anything
you were aiding terrorists.

Now we know that he meant just that.

[...]

But the bigger point is this: in the Bush vision, it was
never legitimate to challenge any piece of the
administration's policy on Iraq. Before the war, it was
your patriotic duty to trust the president's assertions
about the case for war. Once we went in and those
assertions proved utterly false, it became your patriotic
duty to support the troops — a phrase that, to the
administration, always means supporting the president.
At no point has it been legitimate to hold Mr. Bush
accountable. And that's the way he wants it.

Well, not everyone always gets his way, do they?

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