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Wednesday, May 24, 2006 |
M&CNews: "Guenter Grass, the German novelist who won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1999, attacked US President George Bush as a 'hypocrite' Tuesday, telling a writers' congress in Berlin that Washington had nurtured terrorism.
In a speech to the annual International PEN meeting, the 78-year-old leftist author said Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were 'like priests who have blessed the guns and carried death along with the Bible into distant lands'.
He charged that Washington had arbitrarily declared some dictatorships to be 'rogue states', saying this was part of a 'fundamentalist structure of power'.
'Politics does not get more stupid and more dangerous than this,' said Grass, who charged that the United States was war-mongering, flouting the rules of the civilized world and encouraging terrorism.
He said it was 'even threatening to repeat a war crime' by using nuclear weapons. To applause from an audience of 450 writers from 80 nations, he charged that the rest of the world was 'pretending it could do nothing about this'.
He said both the United States and Britain were 'hypocrites' whose policies encouraged terrorism when they said they were were opposed to it. They had 'nurtured' al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and now wanted to defeat him by force."
His speech (in German).
5:46:06 PM 
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AmericaBlog: "The Voice of America's bureau in Baghdad has been closed for the past six months, ever since the government-funded agency withdrew its only reporter in Iraq after she was fired upon in an ambush and her security guard was later killed."
Which simply means the US troops cannot guarantee safety at all. They have no control in Iraq.
10:44:10 AM
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AP: "A reverend who introduced Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist during a breakfast with other pastors Monday said the Lord came to him in a dream two years ago and told him Crist would be the state's next governor.
'The Lord Jesus spoke to me and he said 'There's something I want you to know',' said Dozier, pastor of the Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach. 'Charlie Crist will be the next governor of the state of Florida.'"
Jesus Crist!
10:39:52 AM
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On Simple Human Decency
(Ben Metcalf in Harper's Magazine June 2006)
"Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?
Let me be clear that I have no wish to perform such a deed in fact, nor do I want anyone else to destroy bodily what is, at least in the technical sense, a fellow human being. (Let me be equally clear that the above qualification, although true, is intended primarily as a legal ploy and should in no way be attributed to my claimed pacifism, which today's prosecutor might find a way to use against me. I would also like excused from the proceedings my personal feelings for George W. Bush, embarrassment and rage, as they could probably be turned to my disadvantage as well.) In truth, I bring neither a message nor a promise of violence. I seek only to gauge what level of discourse is still acceptable in this country by asking, in the hope that I might someday participate in that discourse, whether I am free to posit that it would probably be great fun, and a boon to all mankind, if I were to slaughter the president of the United States with my bare hands."
Everybody knows the answer to this hypothetical question. No, nobody would be allowed to write that they would like to kill the president of the United States. Nevertheless, George W. Bush has reserved for himself the right to kill whomever he thinks deserves to be killed, and that also includes people who are just bystanders and happen to be in the wrong spot at a certain moment.
It's needless to say that some presidents, only if they are democrats of course, are impeached for a personal peccadillo, while others get away with murder. Some presidents, democrats of course, are shot and the real killers have not been named yet.
To kill or not to kill is, indeed, a matter of simple human decency.
10:33:17 AM
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