It’s a hard thing to do, since they’re now a monopoly. But after reading this post, I know that something needs to be done. I mean, what if Movable Type or Blogger decided they didn’t like what you were linking to, and shut down your blog?

The best Asian site (not really a blog – definitely in a class by itself) offers some choice quotes uttered by our president at yesterday’s press conference. They speak for themselves.

“Our strategy is to help the Iraqis help themselves. It’s important that we train Iraqi troops. There are nearly 100,000 troops trained. The Afghan national army is a part of the army. By the way, it’s the Afghan national army that went into Najaf and did the work there.”

“It’s hard work in Iraq. Everybody knows that. We see it on our TV.”

“See 9/11 changed everything. September the 11th meant that we had to deal with a person like Saddam Hussein.”

“I think that the Iraq theater is a part of the war on terror. That’s what the prime minister said as well. He believes the same thing. He understands what’s going on there; after all, he lives there.”

“I’m not the expert on how the Iraqi people think, because I live in America where it’s nice and safe and secure. But I’d talk to this man. One reason I’m optimistic about our ability to get the job done is because I talk to the Iraqi prime minister.”

ESWN sums it up, “That man is unqualified and incompetent to be the president of the most powerful nation on earth; if anything, he is the greatest menace to peace on earth. How can someone who can’t tell between Afghans and Iraqis be the commander-in-chief of the greatest military power?”

He can’t. He can only be a puppet, and he can only make us the laughingstock of the world.

Update: Kevin Drum on the same subject, in one of his smartest posts ever:

It’s no longer clear if George Bush is merely a cynical, calculating politician — which would be bad enough — or if he actually believes all the happy talk about Iraq that his speechwriters produce for him. Increasingly, though, it seems like the latter: he genuinely doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on. What’s more, his staff is keeping him in a sort of Nixonian bubble, afraid to tell him the truth and afraid to take any positive action for fear that it might affect the election.

So things will just get worse, since no one is willing to admit the truth and no one is willing to propose serious action to keep things from deteriorating further — at least not until after November 2nd. But by then it will be too late. And when the Iraqi elections fail, what happens then?

The plight of China’s Uygur Moslems has become more visible in the US lately. Yesterday there was an immense article with photos in USA Today (by that paper’s standards, the size of the article was biblical). Today another syndicated piece appeared, this time in the Kansas City Star (requires registration).

Under the guise of a “war on terrorism,” China has launched such an implacable campaign of repression on its Muslim Uighur minority that it’s stopped cold nearly all violent attacks.

Not so long ago, far western China was roiled by more than 200 bombings and assassinations. More recently, a brutal crackdown reported by human rights groups has ushered in a measure of calm to remote, oil-rich Xinjiang.

China has shrugged off criticism and pledged anew to obliterate any glimmer of separatist sentiment within the ethnic Uighurs, who number about 8 million.

Today, the Uighurs (pronounced Weegers), who live in arid dun-colored towns and cities on the edge of the forbidding Taklimakan Desert, dwell in resentful coexistence with migrant Han Chinese flooding their homeland. They bristle at how China has restricted their religious freedom, yet fear to speak out amid the pervasive presence of security agents.

Communist Party leaders sound triumphant in describing their efforts to quash Uighur separatists, linking them to a global network of al-Qaida terrorism.

A great thing, this war on terror. I wonder how we’ll look back at it a few years from now, when we’re able to determine how many of those killed were terrorists, or just innocent victims caught in the vortex.

Kos asked his readers to come up with the best questions to throw at bush, and this was my very favorite:

“If Andrew Card came to you in that Florida classroom and told you that your family had been carjacked on September 11, would you still have sat there for seven minutes and done nothing?”

Brilliant. No real leader, no real president would have just sat there doing nothing. Only our own very special, very fortunate son. No one holds him to the traditional standards of leadership (intelligence, compassion, taking command and responsibility). Lucky, lucky little man.

I’ve thought about this quite a bit lately, how to maintain sanity if the princeling of darkness gets elected (can’t say “re-elected,” as he wasn’t elected the last time). Yeah, it’ll be hard and it’ll be sad and it’ll be heartbreaking. But there really is a serious reason for wanting to see shrub get stuck for another 4 years in the White House: He’s screwed things up so horrifically that they are literally unfixable, and whoever takes the prize is guaranteed four years of pure hell.

Another pundit stated this argument nicely today:

BUSH HATERS FOR BUSH

Once you’ve absorbed the chutzpah, it’s a pretty powerful argument. It’s a bit like Bush saying, after bankrupting our fiscal future in three short years, that we cannot afford Kerry’s big spending instincts. No shit, brother. So we’re torn between holding Bush accountable and re-electing him. But here’s another brilliant Bush counter-argument: wouldn’t we actually be holding him accountable by re-electing him? For the first time in his entire life, Bush may actually be forced to take responsibility for his own actions if he is re-elected and becomes the LBJ of the Iraq war. I wonder why Bush-haters haven’t thought of this: that the way to punish Bush is to force him to live through the consequences of his own policies. Why, after all, should Kerry take the fall? If he gets elected, can you imagine what Fox News and NRO are going to do to him the minute he brushes his teeth in January? He’ll be destroyed by the chaos in Iraq, whatever he does. The right will give him no lee-way at all. Maybe this is simply another version of the notion that we shouldn’t change horses in the middle of a cliche. But there’s an upside: if Bush fails in Iraq, at least he will be punished for his own failures; if he succeeds (and, of course I hope he does), we all win. Am I persuading myself to endorse Bush? Or am I finding some kind of silver lining in the increasingly likely event of his re-election? I blog. You decide.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Iraq I don’t think bush can succeed. Success in Iraq — at least the kind of success we were promised before the war, the beacon of democracy — is no longer an option. I also disagree with Sully about a bush victory being “an increasingly likely event.” I almost believed it last week, when the warbloggers were going at fever pitch about Kerry’s “implosion” and “collapse.” And now, surprise, he’s actually ahead again.

So let’s not write him off. And even though we shouldn’t wish the next presidency on our worst enemy, let’s hope Kerry wins anyway. I can’t see surviving four more years of this.

I felt a real chill as I read these lines from a speech Edwards gave last year, and remembered what it was like to have a president who could talk, who could use rhetoric to touch something in his people’s souls and move them to think and to feel. Isn’t it time to banish the vacuous platitudes and dreary slogans that so epitomize the age of bush? Don’t we deserve leaders who can engage us in a meaningful dialogue? Isn’t it time?

This man can talk.

Look at the choices they make: They have driven up the share of the tax burden for most working people, and driven down the burden on the richest few. They got rid of even the smallest tax on even the largest inheritances on earth.

This past month, in a $350 billion bonanza of tax cuts on wealth, they couldn’t find $3.5 billion to give the child tax credit to poor people who work. Listen to this: They refused to cut taxes for the children of 250,000 American soldiers who are risking their lives for us in Iraq, so they could cut dividend and capital gains taxes for millionaires who were selling stocks short until the war was over.

[…]

It is wrong to reward those who don’t have to work at the expense of those who do. If we want America to be a growing, thriving democracy, with the greatest work ethic and the strongest middle class on earth, we must choose a different path.

Our economy, our people, and our nation have been undermined by the crony capitalists who believe that success is all about working the angles, working the phones, and rigging the game, instead of hard work, innovation and frugality. And these manipulators find comfort in an Administration which, through its own example, seems to embrace that ethic. We will never turn this country around until we put our economy and our government back in line with our values.

[…]

It’s time for a new approach that trusts people to make the most of their own lives and gives them the chance to do so. It’s time to stop emboldening entrenched interests and start empowering regular people. Above all, it’s time to end the failed conservative experiment and return to the idea that made this country great: Instead of helping wealthy people protect their wealth, we should help working people build their wealth.

I can’t tell you how that last line moved me. A simple point expressed in simple language, and yet infinitely more eloquent than anything our puppet-in-chief could even dream of uttering.

Inspired by a post by Digby, one of the three or four truly must-read-every-day bloggers.

Just when things were quieting down between Conrad and me, my friend Jeremy in Beijing rips the wound open again and pours salt into it. Thanks a lot!

And please, don’t waste your time trying to compare Conrad and me. I am a serious and scholarly blogger. Conrad’s just a….Republican! Enough said.

(All in fun, of course.)

I guess a country isn’t developed or modern until it’s fully adopted the best of Western culture, like Jerry Lewis movies and Walt Disney. The latest proof: Disney is actually going to youth centers in China to teach young CCP-members-in-training the wonders of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy.

China’s future Communist Party cadres are learning about Mickey Mouse along with Mao.

Walt Disney Co. said it had partnered “Youth Palaces” run by China’s Communist Youth League to build awareness of its stories and characters in the mainland ahead of the opening of a Hong Kong Disneyland theme park in late 2005 or early 2006.

“It’s one part of an overall brand-building process,” Jay Rasulo, president of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, told a small group of reporters in Hong Kong on Thursday.

Mickey Mouse and other Disney representatives visited 500 children at two youth centers in Guangzhou, in southern China, in July, a spokeswoman said.

The California-based entertainment giant plans similar outreach programs, with story-telling and interactive games, elsewhere in China ahead of its Hong Kong Disneyland opening.

Other efforts to build the Disney brand include story-telling in public libraries, tours of shopping malls by the famous mouse and other characters such as Goofy and Donald Duck, and programs on Hong Kong television, which can be viewed in southern China.

The company said it is fine-tuning its program for youth centers. Some 70 million young Chinese are members of the Communist Youth League.

“In one session, we teach them to draw Mickey Mouse — they’re all amazed by that,” said Irene Chan, vice president for public affairs at Hong Kong Disneyland. “We hope we can expand to more cities and provinces.

As a public relations coup, this is beyond belief. All those little kiddies, bugging mom and dad to buy them Goofy dolls and Pluto memorabilia. I guess there’s no stopping progress, and in today’s world progress seems to mean Americanization. What would Mao say?

This time it’s from Deutsche Welle. I’m not quite sure how this one works, and I don’t put a lot of faith in these beauty contests — but it’s a good way to discover new blogs.

I’ve been wanting to post this for a long time, but Juan Cole has beaten me to the punch and says it better than I ever could. It’s so important that we see what is occurring through the eyes of the Iraqis, and that we be honest with ourselves — would we really tolerate such a thing?

President Bush said Tuesday that the Iraqis are refuting the pessimists and implied that things are improving in that country.

What would America look like if it were in Iraq’s current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.

And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?

….

What if all the cities in the US were wracked by a crime wave, with thousands of murders, kidnappings, burglaries, and carjackings in every major city every year?

What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target “safe houses” of “criminal gangs”, but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and even pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial over on the Mall? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?….

What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?

And we wonder, even for an instant, why they want us to go?