Slow-panning retrospectives (somber horns and violins accompany) lovingly presented every detail before cutting to the advertisement chaser: life insurance, banking, and indigestion.

Then we were treated to the falling twins (rhythmic bass line, synth arpeggios accompany) before another cluster of ads: political campaign, car insurance, and indigestion.

So why were the ads suddenly more relevant than the editorial pabulum the networks served up?

No link love this time. The media have had enough to eat already.

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Guess we learned a lesson from our stunning victory over Cuba. Meantime–and here’s the really interesting part–Khaled Meshal, head of the political bureau of Hamas, delivers a lucid address on his party’s stance on world affairs:

Our message to the Israelis is this: we do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion “the people of the book” who have a covenant from God and His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him) to be respected and protected. Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us – our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people.
(via Electronic Intifada)

I never thought it would come to pass, but even Hamas makes the State Department sound like a band of petulant thugs.

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“The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the ISF and all of Iraq. They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists,” said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified.

Unfortunately, the military’s PR machine had suffered from what Lt. Col. Clifford Kent, spokesman for the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, classified as an “administrative error.” Namely, the quote was virtually identical to a quote released my the U.S. military on July 13:

“The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the children and all of Iraq,” said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified. “They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists.”

It’s easy enough to claim that the jingoese vomited from the U.S. war machine’s jabbering maw would surprise no one. To the contrary, Americans not only buy (in both senses of the word) into the government’s homespun fiction, but actively defend conquest thinly-veiled as a pursuit of freedom. Having to choose between righteous ignorance and so-called terrorism is no choice at all.

Actually, Donald Rumsfeld said it best:

…We’re dealing with people that are perfectly willing to, to lie to the world to attempt to further their case and to the extent people lie of, ultimately they are caught lying and they lose their credibility and one would think it wouldn’t take very for that to happen dealing with people like this.

Testify! From your clicking skull jaw to the war crimes tribunal’s ears, my brother.

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Senate Democrats have used the filibuster for only 10 of Bush’s 204 judicial nominees, while one-third of Clinton’s appeals court nominees from 1995 through 2000 were kept off the bench, some delayed for as long as four years.

So when Hatch classifies the use of filibusters as “unfair, dangerous, partisan and unconstitutional,” and says they create a “constitutional crisis,” he is succumbing to a particularly pitiable brand of hypocrisy.

(via AlterNet)

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