Put this in the News of the Weird category. German art students in Xi’an do the darndest things.

A German art student briefly took up a place among China’s famed Terracotta Warriors over the weekend — only to be discovered, disrobed and sent home.

Pablo Wendel snuck into a pit housing around 2,000 ancient lifesize pottery warriors and horses on Saturday afternoon, donned the military costume he had made himself, and took up a position on a small pedestal he had brought along.

He stood there, motionless and unblinking, for a couple of minutes until police found him, the Xinhua news agency said. The 26-year-old had his costume confiscated and was sent from Xian, the World Heritage site where the warriors are located, back to the eastern city of Hangzhou, where he studies performance art.

What would the first emperor say?

That’s the actual title of today’s NYT editorial – the kind of piece we’re seeing more and more frequently as the media finally start to shed their 911-generated fear of dissent and rediscover their intended role as watchdog and critic. The piece’s thinly veiled message will be missed by no one who possesses minimal gray matter: our president is an out-of-control egomaniac who believes he can do whatever he chooses, with no legal restraint, in the name of national security.

Watching the president on Friday in the Rose Garden as he threatened to quit interrogating terrorists if Congress did not approve his detainee bill, we were struck by how often he acts as though there were not two sides to a debate. We have lost count of the number of times he has said Americans have to choose between protecting the nation precisely the way he wants, and not protecting it at all.

On Friday, President Bush posed a choice between ignoring the law on wiretaps, and simply not keeping tabs on terrorists. Then he said the United States could rewrite the Geneva Conventions, or just stop questioning terrorists. To some degree, he is following a script for the elections: terrify Americans into voting Republican. But behind that seems to be a deeply seated conviction that under his leadership, America is right and does not need the discipline of rules. He does not seem to understand that the rules are what makes this nation as good as it can be.

The debate over prisoners is not about whether some field agent can dunk Osama bin Laden’s head to learn the location of the ticking bomb, as one senator suggested last week. It is about whether the United States can confront terrorism without shredding our democratic heritage. This nation is built on the notion that the rules restrain our behavior, because we know we’re fallible. Just look at the hundreds of men in Guantánamo Bay, many guilty of nothing, facing unending detention because Mr. Bush did not want to follow the rules after 9/11.

Bush really believes in Presidential Infallability, even after Katrina proved to us all that our president is grossly incompetent. (Sure, proof was already abundantly available to those who for many months had been carefully watching the disintegrating situation in Iraq. But Katrina brought it closer to home, and made the president’s ineptitude and callousness undeniable – the only positive side of the tragedy.) I’d like to think that after the Republican contingent led by John McCain forces Bush to compromise on the interrogation laws it will force the little man to be more humble and to face the fact that laws apply to the president, too. But that won’t happen; Bush has already proven time and again he will do whatever he chooses, led on by a higher authority. I always cringed when over-zealous liberals claimed Bush was as bad as Osama Bin Laden – and I still do. No, it’s a false statement, but increasingly I can see that there are nevertheless some strking similarities between the two men in regard to their perception of good and evil and of how far one can go to achieve one’s ends. In this regard, in their highly simplistic and narcissistic worldviews, these similarities cannot be denied.

Joe was never a favorite of mine. The former Republican congressman turned MSNBC newsman succeeded in turning me off again and again with his conservative outlook and occasional tirades against all things progressive. But credit where due: in recent weeks he has joined the ranks of Republicans who dare stand up against The Worst President Ever, and to finally tell it like it is. This is going to hurt, comng at a moment when the president is trying frantically to draw the war-torn GOP together in time to keep the Dems from sweeping the elections a mere eight weeks from now.

I can’t help but feel sorry for my old Republican friends in Congress who are fighting for their political lives. After all, it must be tough explaining to voters at their local Baptist church’s Keep Congress Conservative Day that it was their party that took a $155 billion surplus and turned it into a record-setting $400 billion deficit.

How exactly does one convince the teeming masses that Republicans deserve to stay in power despite botching a war, doubling the national debt, keeping company with Jack Abramoff, fumbling the response to Hurricane Katrina, expanding the government at record rates, raising cronyism to an art form, playing poker with Duke Cunningham, isolating America and repeatedly electing Tom DeLay as their House majority leader?

How does a God-fearing Reagan Republican explain all that away?

Easy. Blame George W. Bush.

Escaping political death by attacking an unpopular president is hardly new — especially since most endangered politicians have the loyalty of a starving billy goat. But this is Dubya’s Washington, where the White House has pushed around, bullied and betrayed GOP lawmakers for years.

Republican House members and senators always believed that this White House took them for granted. But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, most of them had no choice but to sulk in their cloakrooms, listen to Debby Boone on their iPods and take it like a man. Bush was a rock star among the party faithful through the 2004 election, so crossing this popular commander in chief was not an option. That’s not to say that Old Bulls didn’t privately growl about how they were treated better when their old nemesis was still frolicking with an intern. So what if Bill Clinton misbehaved? At least that president found time to personally negotiate terms of subcommittee markups — even if he was defiling the Oval Office at the same time.

There is much more very funny, biting stuff in this column. Read it all and pass it along to your Republican friends.

Of course, it’s tempting to ask Joe where he was in 2001 when BushCo was given rock-star status. But no matter – better late than never. This is all part of a long-overdue avalanche of damnation falling upon the Cheney administration. And it’s a Republican avalanche. Is there something cynical about it? Of course. There’s little that they know today that wasn’t known over the past five years. But as Joe says, it was impossible to turn on the president when he was riding high after 911 and in the early days of Mission Accomplished. Now he’s not so popular and he threatens his party’s electability, so he’s fair game.

The piece de resistance, of course, occurred when earlier this week the GOP Gang of Four (John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham and Colin Powell) rejected Bush’s sleazy efforts to obfuscate the Geneva Conventions so that America can define torture however we choose. The four were all actual soldiers who understand just how terrible Bush’s meddling would be for the boys on the ground. This was to be Bush’s great act of unity, to bring all the Republicans together making a loud noise over the “War on Terror” in order to deflect attention from the disaster in Iraq. There’s a certain poetic justice seeing his efforts torpedoed by his own party. Words cannot express just how vile and deceitful Bush is being on the issue of torture – so deceitful that one former Bush worshipper says Bush must eventually be charged with war crimes.

First, let’s take the House, then move on to war crimes. As I now say with just about every post on domestic politics, the only thing that can keep us, the people of the United States for whom this government exists, from winning back the country is the bickering, message-free Democratic Party. If they let this slip through their fingers, I will declare them defunct, dysfunctional and utterly useless. This is their last chance. If they blow it, time for a new party.

I’m taking it easy this weekend. Instead of blogging, I’m just going to point readers to two interesting and related articles, You Can’t be Lei Feng All the Time and China Discourages Teenage Heroism. Enjoy.

The Longer the War, the Larger the Lies
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 17, 2006

RARELY has a television network presented a more perfectly matched double feature. President Bush’s 9/11 address on Monday night interrupted ABC’s Path to 9/11 so seamlessly that a single network disclaimer served them both: ‘For dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression.””

No kidding: The Path to 9/11 was false from the opening scene, when it put Mohamed Atta both in the wrong airport (Boston instead of Portland, Me.) and on the wrong airline (American instead of USAirways). It took Mr. Bush but a few paragraphs to warm up to his first fictionalization for dramatic purposes: his renewed pledge that ‘we would not distinguish between the terrorists and those who harbor or support them.’ Only days earlier the White House sat idly by while our ally Pakistan surrendered to Islamic militants in its northwest frontier, signing a ‘truce’ and releasing Al Qaeda prisoners. Not only will Pakistan continue to harbor terrorists, Osama bin Laden probably among them, but it will do so without a peep from Mr. Bush.

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The reasons for the colossal, insurmountable, life-draining mess that is today’s Iraq is right there in front of our faces. We really did have a windown of opportunty. Whether we could ever have “won” along the lines of Bush’s original promises (a cost-free and easy-to-implement beacon of democracy, Sunnis and Shiites living and working in partnership, the end of torture and oppression, etc.) remains highly questionable. But there was no reason it had to result in the total meltdown we are wtnessing today. You can trace the meltdown to various key decisions made by our war-time president, namely the shock-and-awe approach based on using few forces armed with star-wars weaponry; the abrupt dissolution of the Iraqi army and with it any means to maintain order (not to mention creating immeasurable ill will); Bremer’s delay of elections, the decision to focus on oil pipelines over drinking water and electricity – well, we all know the list by now.

But there’s another factor that isn’t as widely discussed that should go at the very top, and that is Bush’s choice to put all rebuilding operations in the hands of hacks and cronies, the very least capable people. This strategy was exposed in regard to Katrina, but the world has yet to understand just how lethal the same process proved to be in Iraq. It literally guaranteed our failure. This is so appalling.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans — restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O’Beirne’s office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O’Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn’t need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What they needed to be was a member of the Republican Party.

O’Beirne’s staff posed blunt questions about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

Many of those chosen by O’Beirne’s office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004, lacked vital skills and experience. A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration’s gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation that sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people.

Digby writes a powerful post about this relatively unknown story today, and I wish there were a way I could force every independent and on-the-fence Republican to read it.

The Republicans are telling us that they should be re-elected because the Democrats aren’t serious about national security and only they can be trusted to keep the terrorists from killing us in our beds.

But the way the administration went about creating the CPA illustrates everything you need to know about the childlike sciolism of these so-called grown-ups. They insisted on invading a well contained country of 25 million people, ripped its society to shreds, and then put a bunch of low level cronies and inexperienced schoolkids in charge of creating a Club for Growth wet dream in the desert. And they spent billions and billions of dollars failing to do anything but lay the groundwork for civil war. I don’t know if it’s possible to screw up on a grander scale than that.

Here’s the question for the American people. Let’s, for the sake of argument, say that you don’t like Democrats. You have the vague feeling in the pit of your stomach that they just don’t have the cojones to do “what needs to be done.” You can’t get over the feeling that they aren’t serious enough.

But if you are a thoughtful person of any political persuasion who is concerned about national security or the economy, you simply cannot read that story above and have even the slightest faith that such people can be trusted to continue to run the government with no oversight.

Well, it’s true, but the key word in that last graf is “thoughtful.” Thoughtful people aren’t the ones to worry about, but rather the naive, the blindly faithful, the poorly educated, those who see Bush as the Second Coming, those who take Karl Rove seriously, those who get their news from FrontPage – and tragically, that’s a hefty chunk of the population.

Which brings me to my latest fear. As long as Karl and Karen wage an ingenious propaganda war that the Dems cannot effectively counter, none of us is safe and the GOP may well surprise us all once again in November. We will see the same strategy as 2004, when Rove gave up on independents and focused only on the base – the herd animals who can be manipulated with slogans and smears and Swift Boat Veterans and 15-second character assassination commercials. I want to think that 2006 has to be different, because Bush has so alienated so many Americans. But look at all he’s gotten away with to date, with nary a word of criticism for such obscene misdeeds as jamming the effort to buiild Iraq with Heritage Foundation flunkies. And I really fear he might still get away with it again.

Time to match Karl and Karen’s wave of propaganda with a wave of our own. You’d think we’d have learned something after 2000 and 2004, but the Dems never cease to amaze me with their political imbecilities. All the evidence is on the table; the article above exposes the sheer incompetency and stupidity that is the effort to rebuild Iraq. How can Rove use a piece of nonsensical, irrelevant, 30-year-old innuendo like “Christmas in Cambodia” and destroy the Democratic Party, while the Democrats can’t use red-hot, huge smoking guns like this to put even a nick in the infamously thick skin of the GOP? If we can’t win in November with all the devastating tools the Republicans have handed us on a Tiffany silver platter, then I have to give up on the Dems, maybe forever. It means we are destined to live in a GOP world, maybe for the rest of our lives. And that is scarier than hell.

There’s another sublime essay over at China Daily Watch, this time on the way the erstwhile rag covered (and didn’t cover) the 30th anniversay of Mao’s death. I don’t agree with all the points he makes in this lengthy post, but his criticisms of the paper are to die for.

With every SOE that comes crashing down, every foreign company that invests, every administrative process that becomes incentive-based, every new shop that opens and every personal blog that gets written, China moves away from Mao. This conformist society is moving away from the collective to the personal. It is replacing communism with nationalism, the Red Detachment of Women with the Rolling Stones. Surely there is something positive that can be taken from this? Surely even in this time of giddy advance there is a moment to catch one’s breath and look back at where the country has come from?

Not at China Daily there isn’t.

The paper had one short piece on the 30th Anniversary of the death of Chairman Mao, placed on the bottom of Page 1. (There was no editorial, no opinion piece, and not even a Features story.)

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2006-09/09/content_684952.htm
Quite frankly it was repellent twaddle.

‘Time passes,’ was the opening sentence, and somehow it got worse from there. The reporter interviewed several ‘experts,’ none Chinese, who opined such gems as: ‘I didn’t know it was the anniversary on Saturday. Mao is a hero, but in a very vague sense.’ Why print that? If he doesn’t know it’s the goddam anniversary, what the hell can he say that is of any importance? Also the writer made a major mistake, which somehow the editors failed to catch, that ‘Seek Truth From Facts’ was a Mao Zedong slogan. No it wasn’t! Sure, it’s an expression that has been around for long time and may well have been used at some stage, but it is above all a Deng slogan. It’s like saying Deng would accuse people of being ‘left in form but right in essence!’ Truly shocking.

And then he really rips into China Daily. Funny, smart and written with the acerbic wit that I hitherto thought only I myself possessed. Damn, competition.

This is from last week, but it just came to my attention. It’s written by Jonathan Zimmerman, a history professor at my alma mater NYU, who fears Chinese language courses for US college students may have embedded propaganda in their curricula, a trick used by Mussolini back in the 1930s. China’s government developed the Adanced Placement course for Chinese language and culture to be administered by the US college board, and Zimmerman’s not happy about that.

The same regime that has brought us public executions, forced labor camps, and Internet censors will soon be funding a language and culture class in a school near you.

…The regime, I suspect, will probably follow Mussolini’s model and try to use the new AP course to play up China’s economic achievements and play down its crimes. But if any Chinese citizens protest, they’ll risk prison, or worse.

So it’s up to the rest of us to monitor the program. Any school district offering this course should also make its textbooks and lesson plans available in English, so parents and other concerned citizens can read them. What, if anything, will the texts – officially, written by the College Board – say about the Tiananmen Square massacre? About the jailing of Chinese journalists? The abuse of psychiatric patients? We have the right to know.

Of course, American students desperately need to study non-English languages. Everyone who cares about our national future should consider this appalling fact: Less than half of American high school students even take a foreign language. Compare that with almost every other developed nation, where foreign-language study is compulsory. Our problem is especially embarrassing when it comes to Chinese, which is spoken by 1.5 billion people around the globe – and studied by fewer than 50,000 Americans. More than 1 million American students study French, by contrast, while only 70 million people in the world speak it.

So yes, absolutely, more Americans should take Chinese. Our economy, our cultural life, and our national security all demand it.

But we should study the subject on our own terms, making sure that it also reflects our best civic language of freedom, open discussion, and democracy. Now, more than ever before, it’s a tongue that we all need to speak.

Mandarin on OUR terms. I like that. (Is there a copyright infringement here?)

I have no idea if Zimmerman’s claims have any merit or if he is a chest-thumping Cold Warrior who still thinks the Commies are trying to compromise “our precious bodily fluids.” But I’d love to have a look at the curriculum to make my own judgement.

Update: As a side note, this is a most unusual blog I stumbled upon while searching for what other blogs are saying about the Zimmerman column. And you think I have issues with the CCP?

He is one of the best writers I know of, and he was a speechwriter for GHW Bush and a staunch Republican. You have to read Buckley’s exquisite column, of which I will snip only a brief portion.

I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. In 2004, I could not bring myself to pull the same lever again. Neither could I bring myself to vote for John Kerry, who, for all his strengths, credentials, and talent, seems very much less than the sum of his parts. So, I wrote in a vote for George Herbert Walker Bush, for whom I worked as a speechwriter from 1981 to ’83. I wish he’d won.

Bob Woodward asked Bush 43 if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq. The son replied that he had consulted ‘a higher father.’ That frisson you feel going up your spine is the realization that he meant it. And apparently the higher father said, ‘Go for it!’ There are those of us who wish he had consulted his terrestrial one; or, if he couldn’t get him on the line, Brent Scowcroft. Or Jim Baker. Or Henry Kissinger. Or, for that matter, anyone who has read a book about the British experience in Iraq. (18,000 dead.)

Anyone who has even a passing personal acquaintance of Bush 41 knows him to be, roughly speaking, the most decent, considerate, humble, and cautious man on the planet. Also, the most loving parent on earth. What a wrench it must be for him to pick up his paper every morning and read the now-daily debate about whether his son is officially the worst president in U.S. history. (That chuckling you hear is the ghost of James Buchanan.) To paraphrase another president, I feel 41’s pain. Does 43 feel 41’s? Does he, I wonder, feel ours?

…What have they done to my party? Where does one go to get it back? One place comes to mind: the back benches. It’s time for a time-out. Time to hand over this sorry enchilada to Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid, who has the gift of being able to induce sleep in 30 seconds. Or, with any luck, to Mark Warner or, what the heck, Al Gore. I’m not much into polar bears, but this heat wave has me thinking the man might be on to something.

It gets better and angrier, with each line. Remember, this is Christopher Buckley, a conservative Republican, a speechwriter for Bush Senior. This isn’t MoveOn.org talking. I think we’re going to see a swarm of independents making a beeline away from Bush in November. If this is where conservative Republicans are, what about the independents? At the risk of creating bad luck, I can’t see how the Dems can possibly lose this time (although, trust me, I won’t put anything past the Dems when it comes to political ineptitude).

Long ago, before anyone was reading this blog, I wrote about how China’s media loved to show how happy the Chinese people are. Just bubbling with mirth. Now we have further proof: they’re actually going to quantify the people’s happiness level, providing a new and valuable measurement tool for economists. Say hello to The Happiness Index.

China will formulate a new “happiness index” this year to include living conditions, the environment and salary, state television said on Wednesday.

“The Happiness Index will include ordinary people’s feelings towards their own living conditions, such as their income, employment, social welfare and the natural environment,” China Central Television cited statistics chief Qiu Xiaohua as saying.

“The more they feel satisfied about their lives, the higher the index will be,” he said.

Indices for “innovation” and “social harmony” would also be added, it said.

The report did not make clear if the happiness index would be incorporated into an existing indicator, or stand on its own.

Can you hear the reporter snickering as he typed that out? That last line is a classic example of stone-faced humor.

Thanks to the reader who emailed this to me.

Update: Here’s more, via the aforementioned email; not sure exactly which media it’s from, but it’s definitely from a Chinese pub.
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This year, China’s National Bureau of Statistics will include a new figure in its reports — the “happiness index.” National Bureau of Statistics chief Qiu Xiaohua explained that the “citizen happiness index” is an indicator of the populace’s overall satisfaction with a number of everyday factors, including income, employment, social security, and the environment.

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