your daily daily show

Youtube wins again. Watch Jon Stewart explain what Bush thinks his job is. This is yet more brilliant stuff, even by their standards, and it's not just about some small scandal, it gets to the heart of one of the problems with Bush.

And yes, I realise this is turning into an all-daily-show thing. Eh. I'm busy and stressed, and this stuff makes me laugh, so I figure may as well share it.

Watch if only for the visual demonstration showing how to connect the War in Iraq with the War on Terror.

( behind the cut again )

(no subject)

So it looks like the North Korean nuclear test was a dud. This is a small amount of good news, but only very small. They still have a lot of plutonium, and they can just try again. There's no reason not to do it from the leadership of North Korea's point of view - what, there will be even more sanctions, leading to more massive starvation? They don't care. No-one is even vaguely likely to threaten them militarily, not while they have a vast amount of weaponry pointing at Seoul and at the nearly 30,000 US troops in South Korea. China won't push too hard, because if North Korea falls over badly, guess which is one of the two countries who'll be overrun with starving desperate refugees? Refugees with a whole shitload of weapons, I should note.

So how did we get to this point?

Fred Kaplan, back in 2004, explained the problem very well in the Washington Monthly in a piece called Rolling Blunder.

Glenn Greenwald lays out the basic problem. Once you've eliminated diplomacy as an option (North Korea == Evil. Evil means no diplomacy, ever), you can either invade (not practical with North Korea, even before Afghanistan and Iraq), or you can ignore it. Guess which option they chose?

But who on earth would have helped North Korea with it's nuclear program anyway? I mean, that's just insane. You'd have to be completely amoral and insane to do that, right? Only someone like Swedish company ABB would be so stupid. Those damn swedes - why didn't someone there stop it? Someone like board director Donald Rumsfeld (1990-2001). Oh, wait - the Guardian, May 9 2003:

One unnamed ABB board director told Fortune magazine that Mr Rumsfeld was involved in lobbying his hawkish friends on behalf of ABB.

Quite an effort - he was all buddy-buddy with Saddam in the 1980s (we've all seen the photos), and helped the batshit crazy North Koreans with their nuclear program. Heckuva job, Rummy.

(this all reminds me of the old Ron Tandberg cartoon - "We know Saddam has WMD - we kept the receipts!")

Finally, Greg at Belgravia Dispatch succinctly sums up:

From Bush's 2002 SOTU:

We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.

Bush Doctrine, RIP.

(I saw the Guardian piece linked from somewhere tonight, but fucked if I can remember where, or find it again. Sigh)