Karl Rove vs The Democrats
By FRANK RICH
Published: June 18, 2006

IF theater is in your blood, you just can’t resist the urge to put on a show. After the good news arrived about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, administration officials at first downplayed any prospect of a new “Mission Accomplished” to hype the victory. But that restraint didn’t last a week. In sync with Barbra Streisand, who this month announced a new concert tour to cap her 1994 farewell tour, the White House gave in to its nature and revved up its own encore.

Given our government’s preference for spectacle over substance, “Baghdad Surprise 2” was more meticulously planned than security for post-liberation Baghdad. The script was a montage of the administration’s greatest hits.

As with the prototype of Thanksgiving 2003, there was a breathless blow-by-blow of how President Bush faked out his own cabinet, donned a baseball cap and slipped into his waiting plane. In cautious remembrance of “Top Gun,” White House photos were disseminated of the fearless leader hovering in the cockpit. Once on the ground, Mr. Bush made much of looking into the eyes of Nuri al-Maliki, our third post-Saddam Iraqi leader, and finding him as worthy as he did Vladimir Putin after a similarly theatrical ocular X-ray. This bit of presidential shtick is now as polished as Johnny Carson’s old burlesque psychic, Carnac the Magnificent..

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There are few things in lfe I truly need. My iPod is one of those things. Please say it isn’t so.

As Mac fan sites buzzed with debate over the report, Apple issued a statement saying it is investigating the matter.

“Apple is committed to ensuring that working conditions in our supply chain are safe, workers are treated with respect and dignity, and manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible,” the company statement said.

Apple said it is “investigating the allegations regarding working conditions in the iPod manufacturing plant in China.” It added, “We do not tolerate any violations of our supplier code of conduct.”

IPod factory workers are employed by Taiwanese contract manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known by the brand Foxconn Electronics Inc. The relationship between Apple and Hon Hai is typical in the electronics industry, where manufacturing is frequently handled by contract builders.

Apple had better move fast. Microsoft is about to launch its own version of the iPod (as always, late to the game), and this could be a great PR platform to woo socially minded customers. Steve Jobs must be having a hard time getting to sleep tonight.

Update: This article (via ESWN) says the hype over the sweatshop charge is just that – hype. It’ll all come out in the wash, I suppose.

You can accuse the Taipei Times editorial writers of many things (I almost never cite it here, as I find them shamelessly biased, like Epoch Times and China Daily). You can’t, however, accuse them of not being outspoken. Today’s editorial is an example of their going over the top.

All in all, it seems, the Iranians are fundamentalists and the Chinese are godless pragmatists. Yet the present Iranian regime is more of a Beijing soul mate than perhaps Beijing would want the US to realize.

Iran is only interested in the fate of the Palestinian territories to the extent that it involves the humiliation or worse of Israel; the fortunes of Palestinians as a nation-in-waiting or individual Palestinians are of as much interest to Tehran as they are to Israel-lobby hardliners in Washington.

Iran’s dealings with China also turn a blind eye to the sufferings of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Iran’s would-be championing of the interests of Islam and Muslims rings terribly hollow the moment that it rubs up against Iranian national interests. In this, Tehran is not that different to the much more secular Iraqi regime under former president Saddam Hussein.

China, meanwhile, is doing everything it can to portray itself as a can-do country with economic clout and unlimited growth potential. But it is also delighted to do deals with the most vicious governments imaginable — Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Sudan, North Korea and many others.

There is an ugly truth that underlies this amorality. China has an object of zeal that is as fundamentalist and intractable as anything Iran can come up with: a race-based dream of global pre-eminence and a belief that it is entitled to far more than it is capable of achieving for itself. Taiwan is merely one of the non-negotiable elements in this sickly fantasy.

When we read of the Chinese president giving his Iranian counterpart a “warm welcome,” we can be sure of this: there was genuine warmth. Therein lies the strongest possible warning signal for the US and other nations who do not swallow the “peaceful rise” of the Central Kingdom.

A race-based dream of global pre-eminence – are those fighting words or not? Sorry, but accusations like that, where you compare China rather obviosuly to those very bad people who ruled Germany for 12 years in the last century, need to be backed up. I’m not posting this because I agree with it, but rather because I’m a bit blown away by the unvarnished vitriol. It reads like a call to arms.

China’s most dizzying progress continues to be seen in the area of social reforms. The changes in attitude and policy toward gays and lesbians in just a few short years has been absolutely astonishing. Today there’s proof of furhter progress,

China’s first hotline for lesbians is set to open following the success of a service for gay men in a country where homosexuals still face stigma and discrimination, a local newspaper reported.

The hotlines, which operate in China’s booming coastal cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou where social change outpaces the rest of China, are run by the Hong Kong-based Chi Heng Foundation, which oversees AIDS-related projects.

The new line will be staffed by lesbians, just as the volunteers for the existing one are all gay men, said one of the hotline’s counselors, adding that the organization had had trouble recruiting enough qualified volunteers.

“To have female counselors at the center will make the women callers feel more secure,” hotline staff member Shen Yiwu told the Shanghai Daily.

During the Mao era, homosexuals were persecuted, especially during the Cultural Revolution when prison terms and death sentences were meted out. Homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder in China until 2001.

This is a huge step forward in a land where social pressures and fears of stigmatization can make being a lesbian an experience of near unbearable loneliness. So credit where it’s due. Now I’m just waiting for some prominent member of the CCP to come out of the closet.

Why on earth would anyone think the Chinese media and educational system (and, perhaps to a lesser extent the Korean media as well) are using this as a propaganda slogan? (See this post for context.)

“Heh.”

And don’t get me wrong. It was a war of aggression. I’m just saying the peculiarly looooong and emotionally loaded name used to refer to it seems to serve as a trigger to keep the outrage flowing. Whether the outrage should or shouldn’t be kept flowing is another conversation. I know of no other parallel in the history of war. The Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Bulge, the Battle of the Somme, the Sino-Japanese War, the Opium Wars, even “the War on Terror” – none is larded with propaganda against the enemy. As someone who is perenially fascinated with the way words are used to play on people’s emotions, I can’t help but be fascinated by this phenomenon.

(It’s also interesting to see how Japanese communists critical of their government use the term. It’s almost as if they’re mouthpieces for the CCP)

Her publisher should pull her book. Being an evil bitch is one thing, being caught red-handed plagiarizing is quite another. Why do we let her get away with it? Why do we allow a freak of nature to dominate the airwaves? Stop her now.

Or so claims Reporters without Borders, which can be prone at times to hype. I think it would be fairly simple for users in China to test out its claims.

Reporters Without Borders said it found Yahoo! to be the clear worst offender in censorship tests the organisation carried out on Chinese versions of Internet search engines Yahoo!, Google, MSN as well as their local competitor Baidu.

The testing threw up significant variations in the level of filtering. While yahoo.cn censors results as strictly as baidu.cn, search engines google.cn and the beta version of msn.cn let through more information from sources that are not authorized by the authorities.

While Microsoft has just said it does not operate censorship, Reporters Without Borders found that the Chinese version of its search engine displays similar results to those of google.cn, which admits to filtering its content. Searches using a “subversive” key word display on average 83% of pro-Beijing websites on google.cn, against 78% on msn.cn. By contrast, the same type of request on an uncensored search engine, like google.com, produces only 28% of pro-Beijing sources of information. However, Microsoft like Google appears not to filter content by blocking certain keywords but by refusing to include sites considered illegal by the authorities.

The press freedom organisation is particularly shocked by the scale of censorship on yahoo.cn. first because the search results on “subversiveâ€? key words are 97% pro-Beijing. It is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu. Above all, the organisation was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or “Tibet independence”, temporarily blocked the search tool. If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond. It takes one hour before the service can be used again. This method is not used by any other foreign search tools; only Baidu uses the same technique.

Censoring more than China’s own search engine? Shutting down for an hour? It sounds like Yahoo is working overtime to please its masters in Beijing. As I’ve said in the past, I take RSF’s reports with a grain of salt, but some of these claims seem fairly simply to test if you’re in China (and if you don’t mind being shut out of Yahoo for an hour).

This blog used to be one of my very favorites, but I stopped reading after he left Asia. Today I stumbled upon it again, and was reminded of just how funny and original Harry is. (This post in particular had me laughing. There’s lots more.)

Quite a post.

We’re told that tens of thousands of foreigners are paying for transplant surgery in China. The problem is those organs may be cut from an executed death row prisoner without consent. That’s not all. Some organs are said to have been removed before the prisoner took his last breath in order to keep the organs as fresh as possible.

“I can still hear the sounds of those people shouting when they’re having their organs harvested while they are still alive,” one former prisoner told me.

You’re probably asking yourself by now: How is this allowed to happen?

Well, China executes more prisoners than all other nations combined. More than 4,700 men and women were executed in the last two years, according to Amnesty International. People there can be executed even for white collar crimes like tax fraud, embezzlement and bribery.

The harvesting method is cold and calculating: A single shot to the head if chest organs are needed; a shot to the body if the brain or eyes are needed. Recently, China started using “death vans” where lethal injection is administered on the road so all of the organs can be harvested.

I find that last contention interesting. I know about the death vans and the lethal injections. But would you want to buy an organ harvested from someone’s body right after it had been flooded with enough poison to kill the guy?

Meanwhile, not to worry: Cooper tells us China’s deputy health minister assured him all the prisoners whose organs were sliced out and sold for obscene profits had given their prior consent. I’ll bet.

A blogger at Travellers Tales, the blog of the once mighty Far Eastern Economic Review, has a rather shocking post on his recent visit to The Dreaded Shrine. I knew its museum was a sickening cesspool of revisionism, but I admit I didn’t think it was this extreme.

Yasukuni’s Filth
TT visited the infamous Yasukuni shrine today, where Japan honors not only the footsoldiers who fought valiantly and died for their country, but also the war criminals who led the country into war and were responsible for appalling atrocities against civilians and prisoners of war. The highlight of any visit to the shrine is the Yushukan Museum which seeks to justify all of Japan’s aggression around Asia as self-defense. Like many propaganda efforts, the museum is most remarkable for what it omits from the historical record. But it also includes some rather disgusting revisionism. Here are a few highlights which show why so many Chinese, Koreans and Southeast Asians are justifiably upset when Japanese prime ministers visit the shrine:

Nanking Incident
After the Japanese surrounded Nanking in December 1937, Gen. Matsui Iwane distributed maps to his men with foreign settlements and the Safety Zone marked in red ink. Matsui told them that they were to observe military rules to the letter and that anyone committing unlawful acts would be severely punished. He also warned Chinese troops to surrender, but Commander in Chief Tang Shengzhi ignored the warning. Instead he ordered his men to defend Nanking to the death, and then abandoned them. The Chinese were soundly defeated, suffering heavy casualties. Inside the city, residents were once again able to live their lives in peace.

Roosevelt’s Strategy and U.S. Entry Into World War II
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt first took office, the U.S. was in the throes of the Great Depression; the economy had still not recovered when his third term began. Early on, Roosevelt had anticipated a major conflict. In 1939, he had resolved to join Great Britain in the war against Germany, but was hampered by American public opinion, which was strongly antiwar. The only option open to Roosevelt, who had been moving forward with his “Plan Victory,” was to use embargoes to force resource-poor Japan into war. The U.S. economy made a complete recovery once the Americans entered the war.

I’ve said before (many, many times) I wished Koizumi would stop visiting this place. To balance that, I’ve also said (many, many times) that these visits don’t merit the hysteria they evoke from today’s Japan-crazed Chinese fen qing.

As a sidenote, when I was in China a few weeks ago there were lots of news stories on CCTV about the Japanese occupation. (It must have been some anniversay of some glorious victory.) Many historians and victims of the occupation were interviewed, and I found it so interesting that virtually every single one of them referred to it as “the Japanese war of aggression against China.” They never referred to it as World War II or even “the war.” It was always the same seven-word mouthful, as though the war were solely against China. So interesting.

Link via Frisko Dude.