Thanks!

Thanks to James Wolcott, over at Vanity Fair, for the plug about our fundraiser — I have a taste for the kind of acerbic wit on display at his blog and I check it out daily. Also, thanks to Wally Conger over at Out of Step (a great name, btw): I didn’t know we had those cool coffee mugs!

While I’m on the subject: thanks again to all you people out there for making our Spring 2005 fundraiser a success. I’m grateful, amazed, and indeed overwhelmed. We’re building a grassroots movement against the Madness.

Look Who’s Talking!

President Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia on the Yalta agreement, as recently repudiated by George W. Bush:

“Keeping small nations enslaved because of the deals between the great nations or because of any pragmatic considerations that might have been there are totally inacceptable,” Saakashvili told CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.”

I have one word to say to President Saakashvili, even as he basks in the reflected glory of a visit from Bush: Abkhazia!

UPDATE: Oh yeah, and here’s another two words: South Ossetia.

Earth to Arianna: Back to the Drawing Board, Dah-link!

The much-touted breathlessly-anticipated Huffington Post — a blog-site edited by Arianna Huffington, neo-con socialite-turned-socialist, where the Hollywood glittterati blog speak to the Huddled Masses — debuts this morning, and all I can say it ….. Yawn! Here’s Ellen DeGeneres, who gives us a re-cycled Sixty Minutes story about how those Big Bad Corporations cut up government-owned horses for food, not to mention the natterings of Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld fame and her husband Brad Hall (who he?) about gay marriage that starts out unpromisingly:

“Look around and you’ll see the gays getting gay-married all over the place, and, to quote, well, everyone: gay marriage destroys real marriage. “

All over the place? Well, as my old Auntie Gay once told me: Just don’t scare the horses. Or it that just horse-sh*t?

Anywho, it’s onward and downward to Gerald Posner’s “exclusive” book excerpt about how the Saudis have their oil empire rigged to — yikes! — “self-destruct”:

“Based on National Security Agency electronic intercepts, the Saudi Arabian government has in place a nationwide, self-destruction explosive system composed of conventional explosives and dirty bombs strategically placed at the Kingdom’s key oil ports, pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, offshore platforms, and backup facilities. If activated, the bombs would destroy the infrastructure of the world’s largest oil supplier, and leave the country a contaminated nuclear wasteland ensuring that the Kingdom’s oil would be unusable to anyone. The NSA file is dubbed internally Petro SE, for petroleum scorched earth.”

Yes, the Saudis are primed to bomb themselves, and turn their country into a nuclear wasteland — but that’s only when holding their collective breath until they turn blue doesn’t work.

Puh-leeeze! Are we supposed to read this with a straight face? But perhaps this Gotterdammerung scenario is a metaphor for the fate of the Huffington Post itself. If it doesn’t succeed — that is, if the idea of Hollywood airheads (most of whom I confess to never having heard of) nattering on about nothing ad infinitum causes us all to go back to bed and pull the covers over our heads, as it ought to — rumor has it that Arianna’s head (which is already puffed up beyond human ken) is rigged to explode, along with the empty heads of her “columnists.”

Speaking of dirty bombs: the only columnist of any substance in this morning’s Huffington Post is David Frum, who berates Vladimir Putin for not building monuments to the evils of his own country and wallowing in guilt for the crimes of the Soviet era. The piece is aimed at the kind of airhead liberal who thinks that Putin is a Bad Guy because he’s roughing up those cute cuddlely Chechens, and seems never to smile. The Frum is mad because of “continued kid-gloving of Josef Stalin by senior leaders” — never mind that Stalin is long dead. Beating a dead horse is exactly what the neocons are all about — and what’s with the horse metaphor this morning? Is it because of all the horse-manure that seems to be clinging to our shoes as we traverse the highways and by-ways of the Internet this dreary Monday morn…..?

For a bracing antidode to Frum’s cold war rhetoric — we are supposed to believe that a broken-down country with a Third World economy and a declining population is “rapidly reverting to the authoritarian and expansionist past” (I think Frum is projecting here) — check out my column.

As for the verdict on Arianna’s much-heralded “blog” — back to the drawing board, dah-link!

“Intelligence” leads Marines into a trap?

This report of a botched raid is so bizarre that I had to read it repeatedly while trying to piece together the information it contains.  So, let’s see.  We read that, operating on the theory that "foreign fighters" are "flowing into Iraq" from Syria, 1,000 Marines are sent "north of the Euphrates" on what James Janega, reporting for the Chicago Tribune calls "Sunday’s elaborate mission, planned for weeks."

However, "a combination of bad luck and insurgent counterattacks quickly disrupted the plan."  The plan was to send  the Army’s 814th Multi-Role Bridge Company ahead to build a pontoon bridge across the Euphrates.  But! "The trucks were forced to use their headlights to allow them to spot land mines along the route."

There were landmines in the road?  OK, so this landmine problem forced the convoy to employ the "routine safety practice" of turning on their headlights.  Everything went downhill from there. 

But the routine safety practice apparently alerted area residents to the convoy’s presence. An entire town along the route switched off its lights all at once, a move Marines believe is used to send signals from one river town to the next.

As the bridging unit approached the river crossing early Sunday, they switched off the truck headlights even though many soldiers lacked night-vision goggles. In the gloom, one truck rolled off the road and into a ditch, bringing the column to a dead halt in the darkness.

The soldiers soon discovered another problem: The river banks, sodden after recent rains, might have been too wet to support the oncoming American tanks.

"I hope security keeps us safe all day," Capt. Chris Taylor of the 814th said as officers tried to find other ways to get troops and equipment across the river.

But when dawn broke, the column came under mortar fire from Ubaydi, the nearest town. Two mortars dropped within feet of the Marines’ command post and an officer’s Humvee. The insurgents the Marines expected to find north of the river were on the south side as well.

Marines and soldiers scrambled into a ramshackle building on a bluff overlooking the river, then devised a new strategy: They would not cross the river Sunday. They would attack Ubaydi.

Apart from information that the area is so hostile that before the Marines even got to the river, they came under attack from the locals, causing the Marines to call in F/A-18 fighter planes and helicopter gunships, we have another amazing revelation about why they had blundered into this situation in the first place.

While some American units were able to conduct limited raids north of the Euphrates on Sunday, most of the rest were trapped south of the river while Army engineers struggled to build a pontoon bridge across it.

U.S. military officials in Baghdad said forces that crossed the Euphrates had killed six insurgents and captured 54 more, using information gleaned from a captured aide to terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Well, no wonder there were landmines in the road.

Meanwhile, Maj. Steve Lawson of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines led his troops through the north end of Ubaydi in tough fighting that lasted until after sunset.

Marine officers would not release casualty information, saying their policy requires families to be notified first. But during the day, evacuation helicopters swooped repeatedly to the emergency landing zone set up near the intended river crossing.

"We thought the enemy was north of the river," Lawson said. "Obviously, they were here too."

Yeah, obviously they were.  Almost like they knew the Marines were coming.