Rush Limbaugh goes wawee wawee wawee

• You know, I wouldn't be surprised if aliens have reached and contacted Earth, just not the US. They might have contacted people in other countries and established relations with them, on the grounds that we don't have interact with those crazy Americans.
  
  Yes that's right, Rush Limbaugh is at it again. It's not enough that he refers to soldiers who don't agree with him as phony, but when Harry Reid rightly criticizes him, he comes back like a third-grader who's just been hit in the head at dodgeball. Say it to my face? He could say it to your face, but it'll be a ways from you because of that big belly between you and the Senator. If you wanna see a couple good smackdowns of this pomposity, here's one from a vet, and here's another from the veteran advocacy group Vote Vets.org. This is all despicable. These guys, most especially Limbaugh, play rhetorical games while soldiers die. Forget the fact that the policy itself is a disaster, let's argue about how polite we are in talking about how disastrous the policy is.



• Hadn't found a translation of Bush's comments to then Spanish PM Jose Maria Aznar as printed in El Pais so hadn't commented about this, but it's pretty dreadful. Well, it's really not too surprising I guess; it's about in keeping with what he said to Blair last year in terms of his awarness of the world and international relations. At that time, as Juan Cole says so well above, he displayed the lack of mastery of international relations which bedevils our relations with the rest of the world, suggesting that the Syrians "need to cut this shit out." It's as though he was telling his 8 year old son to stop poking his seven year-old sister or something. Ah, yeah, cut that shit out-thanks W-now we know how to stop this gruesome hemorrhaging in the Middle East. If no one had told us that before, we would just have continued bombing and killing each other. But now we know.....why didn't someone tell us that in 1949? So many lives could have been saved.....
  
  And here Bush goes again, this time with then Spanish PM Aznar, saying that waiting for Saddam was like "Chinese water torture", that there was "no guarantee" Saddam wouldn't be assassinated as an alternative to going into exile (which he had offered to do), said that he was running out of patience with Saddam and said that he didn't think he could wait for the UN too long. He also says makes the sort of thuggish, bullying suggestions for which he is now known, suggesting not-so-subtly that those world beaters Angola, Chile, and the Cameroon, if they attempt to hold Bush back, might be dealt with punitively. This is a 6th grader pounding on a 2nd grader. And then when Aznar mentions waiting until March 14, Bush demurs, saying maybe he can handle the 10th. This guy's megalomania, while well-established, becomes just more appalling by the minute.