Year: 2005

I was going to update this post when Jarvis made a correction, but even though he slashed his original Blair number in half, he still uses a false number in his post, so Jarvis stays on the hook for this one. Also, Jeff “news is a conversation” Jarvis has ignored both my comments and posts since he made his lame-o noncorrection, so I guess I’ll just have to point out that he’s a hypocrite on that issue, too, in the future.

We won’t even talk about how hypocritical it is to sanctimoniously write a pledge calling for civility in blog discourse and then turn around write a series of demented rants calling Professor Juan Cole “Professor Pondscum” on your blog.

The IDF is now fighting a two front war against Palestinian children and deranged settlers.

They’re also scoring the occasional journalist, as well.

Of course, this solution is just too sensible:

I’ve been thinking that since the Gaza withdrawal is unilateral, should it not be unilateral from the settlers as well? Why give the settlers the chance to obstruct the withdrawal? Why shouldn’t the army just dismantle all its bases, and just leave?

The Poorman throws a cyber-bucket of icewater on John Derbyshire’s head.

These NRO Corner people are evil. If anyone called Derbyshire on his comments, I couldn’t find it. It’s implausible to imagine that they haven’t seen the photos.

From NYT magazine:

I hear one of the balls will be reserved for troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Yes, the Commander-in-Chief Ball. That is new. It will be about 2,000 servicemen and their guests. And that should be a really fun event for them.

As an alternative way of honoring them, did you or the president ever discuss canceling the nine balls and using the $40 million inaugural budget to purchase better equipment for the troops?

I think we felt like we would have a traditional set of events and we would focus on honoring the people who are serving our country right now — not just the people in the armed forces, but also the community volunteers, the firemen, the policemen, the teachers, the people who serve at, you know, the — well, it’s called the StewPot in Dallas, people who work with the homeless.

How do any of them benefit from the inaugural balls?

I’m not sure that they do benefit from them.

Then how, exactly, are you honoring them?

Honoring service is what our theme is about.

via wonkette

Via James Wolcott, we have an article from The Economist detailing the American military’s tactics in the insurgent hotbed Al Anbar Province:

In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching within 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: “If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,” says a bullish lieutenant. “It’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.”

Read the whole thing.

Jeff Jarvis attempts to compare Saddam Hussein to the tsunami disaster. In a post titled Catastrophic equivalencies, he says:

By the latest count, 160,000 people have died in this tsunami.

A month ago, Tony Blair said that 400,000 victims of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and murder have been found in mass graves in Iraq.

Both are humanitarian tragedies, humanitarian issues, humanitarian needs.

In Jeff’s rush to come up with a number documenting what he thinks he already knows, he grabs, off the US Aid website, a quote by Tony Blair that Blair himself admitted was false long ago.

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ‘400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves.

In that publication – Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: ‘We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.’

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: ‘The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.’

The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports ‘to the outer limits’ in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.

I find it rather repulsive that Jarvis, who vocally supported the Iraq invasion on his widely-read blog, is using the tsunami disaster to opportunistically ride his pro-war hobby horse, but to repeat such a widely discredited factoid as Blair’s mass-grave numbers is simply irresponsible. Not only did he fail to research the discredited quote but he attributed it to Blair in the wrong year.