Iraq Five Years On:

I just watched No End In Sight, the Academy Award nominated documentary about the Iraq war. It's a remarkable film, and will no doubt bolster the already robust case that the people that sent American troops into Iraq really had no plan (or at the very least, a severely flawed plan) and no clue of what to do once they had won the war.

My guts were in knots watching the anguish on the face of the former Colonel and CPA official talk about how his Iraqi counterparts greeted Jerry Bremer's de-Ba'athification order and the disbanding of the Iraqi army with chagrin and disbelief. No wonder. The movie point to those two measures, among others, as catalysts for the Iraqi insurgency and while this is probably an oversimplification, it is obvious in hindsight that no good could come from firing a million able-bodied Iraqis from their jobs and setting them loose on the streets with weapons within reach.

The movie has its flaws, of course, and it must be viewed with a critical eye --nary a mention is made of the animals that came to call themselves Al-Qaeda in Iraq, for example, and the Iranian infiltration is also glossed over. The eye-rolling and smugness of Obama's now shitcanned policy advisor Samantha Power becomes tiresome, particulary when during an interview she smirks annoyingly as she offers an anecdote about a Lebanese diplomat referring "bullets in the eyes" of American representatives -- botching it, according to my wife, who knows the actual expression in Arabic.

It is particularly tragic to think that some of the logical measures advocated in those early days and weeks are only now, five years on, being implemented in that tortured land with almost startling success, those ideologues who opposed them (Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld) having been consigned to ignominy, and the dustbin of history.

For what it is worth, I think this gets the Iraq narrative right, even though the tinfoil hat brigade will still squeal “it's all about oil!"

If that is the case, my only question is

What the HELL happened?


***

9-2?

Way to run up the score, jerks!

Did Probert feed some poor bombardier his jersey too?

I'm kidding. Classy move by some NHL greats to play road-hockey with the boys.

Muy Blanco


I don’t like Anne Coulter most of the time, but every once in a while, she writes something like this piece about Elliot Spitzer, and I can't help but chuckle.

One shudders to imagine the sepulchral gloom pervading the Spitzer home this week. At least Hillary would liven the place up with some lamp-throwing.

***

I was recently directed to this site, which offers a helpful anthropological primer designed to assist “ethnic” people in their dealings with Caucasians, ostensibly by offering insights into the habits, beliefs cultural practices and customs of the caucasoids with whom they must share the planet.

I decided to peruse this site thoroughly and see how many of these articles apply to me in order to discover how white I actually am, relative to other crackers.

Turns out I am moderately white.

How did I figure this out? I deployed all my grade 12 math skill to come up with a mathematical formula I call the Whiteness Quotient. How does it work?

Step one: Get over yourself, honky.

Step two: Read each of the entries in this blog, and as you go, make note of how many apply to you, how many could apply to you somewhat, or in some circumstances, and how many are completely foreign to your experience.

Step three: Deal with your reality – You are a hopeless cliche

Step four: Divide number of positive responses by number of total items (currently 90 or so, but they are constantly adding new articles), giving half marks for an equivocal or noncommittal response. That will give you your whiteness quotient.

I have created the following scale of whiteness:

0.0-0.9 low risk of blancmange
0.1-0.29 somewhat prone to caucasianisms
0.3-0.49 Moderate WASPishness
0.5-0.69 Significant hipster contamination
0.7-0.99 Full blown whitey douchebaggery


My Whiteness quotient is: 0.297 ... I have been found to have trace elements of Donnie Osmond:



***

I don't know what the creepiest website out there is, but I know photoshop disasters sure creep me out! How about you?

Alistair Cooke

Most people know Alastair Cooke as the host of Masterpiece Theatre, but I'll always think of him as the author of the book that first kindled my interest in American History, the companion tome to his famous 1970s miniseries of the same name: Alistair Cooke's America.

Cooke was a journalist who spent his years chronicling life in the U.S. with his American Letters. He lived through and reported on the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam and Watergate, and was only yards away from RFK when he was assassinated in 1968.

When he first arrived in the US in the 1930s, Alistair Cooke met the famous jurist and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Holmes, who was a young Union officer during the Civil War, had once met Abraham Lincoln (he called the President a fool for standing up in battle).

So until he died at age 95 in 2004, when Alastair Cooke met a young person he was fond of saying "You have just shaken the hand of a man who shook the hand of a man who shook hands with Lincoln."

Cooke had a long and distinguished career as a media personality, but perhaps the ulitmate tribute to this cultural giant is that one of the best recurring parodies that Sesame Street did was based on his show:



Oh yeah, and his bones were stolen after his death by criminals involved in the illegal body-part trade. Yuck!

***

An Irish Blessing for Saint Paddy's Day:

May your shillelaigh be all knotted with boils

OK, you got me...It's from the Aristocrats.