Hm. I was going to post this as a response to Dickerson's piece, but it's just as appropriate here, I guess. When I read that Obama isn't black because he isn't a descendant of Western African slaves, I was overjoyed. You see, this means that I am not white, because I am not a descendant of Western European slave-owners! Instead, I am a descendant of Eastern European serfs and Middle Eastern Semites. I felt... light. Happy. Absolved.

When I came to this country, I saw myself as a member of the perpetually persecuted minority, the Jews. Within weeks, I found myself reinvented: I was white. Though the Ku Klux Klan would still identify me as an enemy, at first glance I appeared like a full-fledged member of the master race. I could tell, sometimes, that the black kids at my high school viewed me with the same distrust as they viewed all other white people. I wanted to grab one of them by the collar, shake him and scream: "I didn't do this! I'm not guilty! My ancestors never enslaved your ancestors! We were serfs! We were prisoners of the Inquisition! Stop looking at me like that!"

But now, if Dickerson is right, I am absolved! I'm not white because Obama is not black. Do we, the recent immigrants, really get off that easy? Alas, no. You see, when the Klan looks at Obama, they see a black man. When black folks look at me, they see a white man. We can talk about removing quotation marks all we want, we can have fun with semantics until the cows come home but folks, racial hatred is not rooted in intellectual exercise. It is rooted in the old, time-honored xenophobia, that fear of the Other, whoever it might be. We won't be rid of it for a good long while.

I'm not holding my breath.

Fundamentalist Shia lesbians. Now THAT just blows my mind, folks.

Seriously, I don't think there are enough lesbians amonst the insurgent ranks to make a squad, let alone a platoon. Then again, I could be wrong.

"Today, Sadr City -- despite the presence of the Mahdi Army -- is one of the calmest areas of Baghdad."

I'd say not "despite" but "because". And lest you think I'm some kind of genius, there were at least two NY Times articles saying the same thing, though I'm too lazy to hunt for links. Think of it this way: who would you much rather trust, a bunch of infidel occupiers with guns or a bunch of your brothers in faith with guns? Who would you much rather have to police the streets of, say, Los Angeles, good ol' American cops or, Booji forbid, the Mahdi Army?

I think the overall mood of Iraqis towards Americans at the moment can be summed up as follows: "Thanks for nothing, assholes."

Hm. I've not been keeping track: has anyone even called for Cheney's resignation? It's what a former co-worker of mine used to call the BSG-2000 ("BSG" = bullshit generator), when you get the "everything is fine" speech from the leadership even though nobody is worried just yet. And as was noted before, we heard this about Rumsfeld as well as some minor officials.

I would sell a valuable organ if only that would buy a proper trial of the whole junta (Junior, Cheney and the rest) that got us into this mess and would guarantee them a conviction for their crimes and a nice long sojourn in Guantanamo Bay. With the right of habeus corpus, of course. We don't want to become them, per se, do we?

"Is there anything wrong with that? The Clinton White House, when it arrived on the scene, discharged EVERY Reagan-Bush era U.S. Attorney, not just 5 or 6, and appointed all new ones. Ronald Reagan, I presume, replaced most, but maybe not all, of the Carter-era appointees."

Yes, when you take the action out of context, you can make it look completely innocuous. The White House merely fired a bunch of US Attourneys whose performance was not satisfactory. Innocuous: every administration does it, right? However, let's add some context to this.

First of all, let's include this administration's well-known and well-publicised habit of appointing officials based not on their experience but on their support of the administration's policies. The most prominent case in point: "Brownie, you're doing one heck of a job." Harriet Miers' nomination for the Supreme Court is another. There are numerous others that I'm too lazy to look up at the moment. In that light, any personnel reshuffling by the White House is suspect by default. After six years of this, it is safe to assume, I think, that if anyone is fired from a position in the Justice Department, it's likely because they're getting in the way of some nasty political game the White House is playing.

Second, this administration is under investigation for a variety of possibly criminal activities. The Scooter Libby conviction is merely the latest and the most prominent. The Jack Abramoff case is, hopefully, still waiting to come home to roost. Remember, one of the attourneys has successfully put Duke Cunningham in jail, and the threads from that particular case lead to Abramoff and from Abramoff radiate all over the place. The sudden firing of eight attourneys, at least one of whom was involved in a criminal investigation connected with the White House is also suspect.

So yeah, people get fired from jobs all the time. That's a fact of life. That's not the point here, Elephantman. The point here is WHY they were fired, and given this administration's record at screwing around with American values (not to mention American Constitutional Law), I think "why" is a valid question.