Road Warrior Days As the US prepares for yet another war in the Middle East, this time against an adversary with ballistic missiles and the potential for nuclear power, should we be heading out to gear up with arm-mounted crossbows and American football shoulder pads or hockey masks?

The System Reading the latest New Yorker (the latest I’ve received to date, delivery being somewhat more delayed than it would be if I were still a local), I encountered an article by Adam Kirsch, ”The System”, reviewing two new books on the Nazi concentration camps, both of which sounding quite excellent and quite terrifying. I was struck by the final paragraph, in a more contemporary context: Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers. ”The impulse to separate some groups of people from the category of the human is, however, a universal one. The enemies we kill in war, the convicted prisoners we lock up for life, even the distant workers who manufacture our clothes and toys – how could any society function if the full humanity of all these were taken into account? In a decent society, there are laws to resist such dehumanisation , and institutional and moral forces to protest it. When guards at Rikers Isalnd beat a prisoner to death, or when workers in China making iPhones begin to commit suicide out of despair, we regard these as intolerable evils that must be cured. It is when a society decides that some people deserve to be treated this way – that it is not just inevitable but right to deprive whole categories of people of their humanity that a crime on the scale of the [concentration camp] ecomes a possibility. It is a crime that has been repeated too many times, in too many places, for us to dismiss it with the simple promise of never again. Australia, it seems, has decided, and we deserve every condemnation for it.

Seriously I'm not sure who has less shame, the Republicans and their racist supporters or the media for reporting on such stupidity. The suit looks o.k., I thought. Creeps, cretins, idiots - and this is what passes for international news? Lift your game, morons.

Punditry Fail

Gerard Henderson writes a regular column in the Sydney Morning Herald, and he is, like many of his ilk, dependably predictable.

The fashionable left-wing view of former president George W. Bush is he invaded Muslim lands and instituted draconian national security legislation - the embodiment of which is the Guantanamo Bay military prison. According to the leftist line, all this was a manifestation of a world view labelled neo-conservatism.

Of course, al-Qaeda's attacks in the US - which culminated in the events of September 11, 2001 - took place before the ''coalition of the willing'' (US, Britain, Australia and Poland) invaded Iraq. Also, Bush was never a neo-conservative since he has been a political conservative all his adult life. But facts rarely suffice to diminish a convenient theory. And Bush - war monger overseas and human rights oppressor at home - is a phenomenon widely referred to at universities and within sections of the media.

Well, Gerry, how was it not a manifestation of Bush’s policies – which were disingenuously referred to as “neo-liberalism”, not neo-conservatism – when he was the architect (ostensibly; Cheney was the brain[-in-a-jar] behind the administration, after all) of the actions, when it was his Defence Secretary’s bungles that screwed up first Afghanistan and then Iraq?

As for al-Qaeda’s “attacks’ [sic] “in” the US, can you enlighten me as to which ones occurred before [culminating] “in the events of September 11, 2001”? If you mean the USS Cole, that was not “in” the US, and if you mean the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Centre, that wasn’t al-Qaeda. As you damn well know.

Apologists for Bush like to point out that Obama has ordered more drone strikes than his predecessor, and they like to claim that there are no general protests being raised against them. That, too, is false.

Conflating the actions of France’s President Hollande in Mali with Bush’s actions in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn’t help the argument either. In Mali, after all, there is a legitimate government being supported by European efforts, not toppled. And adding Algeria to the mix again points to a fundamentally different set of conditions as if it was equivalent.

That’s the kind of fuzzy thinking that got Bush into trouble and America mired in wars that have made getting out of the financial crisis it’s in significantly more difficult, as well as making any effort to help others nearly impossible. It’s also the kind of misdirection that left many people believing that Saddam Hussein was involved in September 11 and believing that letting Osama get away wasn’t a big deal.

It’s flat-out ignorant. It certainly doesn’t deserve a paycheck.

Fixing Cat
I don’t see any good reason to deny the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens a visa. I also don’t see any reason to reward him by attending any of his concerts or buying any of his music, past, present or future. He supported the fatwa on Salman Rushdie no matter what he claims now. He wasn’t joking, he wasn’t taken out of context, but he is an ass for trying to avoid saying he was wrong and apologizing. Let him go where he wants, but let him play to an empty hall.

Playing Politics
Anyone who doesn't understand that the Nobel Peace Prize is political is deluded. Hell, the Literature prize is political. (Who's the last American who won that? Toni Morrison? And her body of work is superior to Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike? Think about why she got it.) So picking Obama this year as for the Prize Committee to exert influence in the world isn't new, isn't really surprising, and probably isn't worth of the wroth and derision it's getting some places. ZOMG, what next? Professional athletes in the Olympics? Steroids in the Tour de France? Save the confected outrage and recognise that the current President of the U.S. may not have saved the world and can't, but he has changed the terms and tone of the debate about America and international relations in ways you haven't and won't, and hasn't even been in office for a year. Congratulations, Mr. President; along with the Committee, I hope you live up to it, even just a little.

ContinuedRemarkable how many people think they know better than the administrators of the prize what the prize "has to be" awarded for, what rules should apply, and who is or isn't an eligible recipient.