This is a white house desperate for good news if I ever saw one. Just as public attention was beginning to light on Haditha and other similar incidents, a one-two punch of “progress” saved Dubya from another bad round — Zarqawi killed and a new Iraqi government fully manned within the same news cycle. Eager to capitalize on this… well… not bad news, Bush convened a round table of top advisors at Camp David — Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, etc. — to discuss the Iraq project. I’ll just bet a lot of new ideas were tossed around that room. And if anyone needed convincing that Karl Rove was back on top of his game, they weren’t kept waiting very long. Dubya affected to retire, then padded off to a waiting aircraft (so the story goes) for a surprise visit to Baghdad’s green zone, where he met 
with the new Iraqi Prime Minister. A little theater for the folks back home, whose attention need not be drawn to the fact that Baghdad remains so dangerous after 3 years of “nation building” that the President of the United States still has to scurry in and out of there like a rat. That’s progress.
Actually, they’re probably quite pleased with how things are going. After all, they’ve got an Iraqi government that wouldn’t even think of repealing Bremer’s various decrees and executive orders virtually (and illegally) transforming the Iraqi economy into a free market free-fire zone. They’ve got kleptocrat Ahmed Chalabi in charge of the oil ministry, at least on a temporary basis. They’ve got the “Salvador” option — indigenous death squads — in full swing, bumping people off left and right as the ghost of William Colby (mentor of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam) smiles down approvingly. Check it out — that mess is success in their anti-matter world, just like New Orleans after Katrina washed away so many of those inconvenient poor people and left the Big Easy whiter, richer, and more Republican than before.
The only wrinkle for them is that the people are not with them — neither here at home, in Iraq, nor anywhere else in the world, it seems. Of course, all they even marginally care about is domestic opinion, and that they feel they can probably game enough to stay in complete control, particularly now that it appears Rove (a.k.a. Turd Blossom) won’t be indicted for pig-fucking a CIA agent. They will attempt to prevail by visiting upon their opponents the death of a thousand cuts — baiting elections with hot-button issues like gay marriage and immigration, having their allies in the state election apparatuses depress turnout and limit access to voting in opposition districts every way from Tuesday (see Ken Blackwell), discard as many ballots in minority precincts as the law will allow, and so on. It may be just enough again this year… or something else might happen. People might just turn them out. So after a certain point, all they can really do is just look busy and hope for the worst.
Israeli prime minister Olmert says Israel will not go back to its 1967 borders because they are “indefensible.” Funny – that’s just the word I would use to describe almost forty years of denying an entire people national rights, basic dignity, and in many cases, life itself.
Guess we’ve got that old travelin’ blues. Ain’t that how the song goes? (There seem to be a lot of old songs on my mind these days, I must admit. Please forgive me.) Anyway, you’d have them too if somebody blew a big hole in YOUR squat-house. Crikey, the whole place smells like charcoal and old hammer-stock splinters. Old anti-Lincoln can’t even make himself a plate of anti-matter toaster waffles without nearly yakking all over his stew. Intolerable, I tell you. Just the sort of situation that would drive normally reasonable derelicts such as ourselves to thoughts of the road… of performing before throngs of adoring fans (many of which have two or even THREE heads)… of visiting exotic ports of call in undiscovered galaxies. Of… of…. of escape, damn it, escape!
Robots of Marvin’s general classification don’t frown, exactly, but they do have subtle ways of letting you know that they are not too pleased with what you’re demanding of them. Lookit — when professor Mitch Macaphee builds a robot, it’s bound to be more than just a soulless servo-mechanism. Our Marvin has feelings, you know? And opinions, lots of opinions. Only thing is, he’s programmed to be somewhat reticent, in an automatonic sort of way. (I keep thinking one of these days he’s just going to EXPLODE. Or join “
musician, as such, though he does pick up an instrument every once in a while – banjos, guitars, drums, the occasional bagpipes, etc. As you might imagine, out in the great beyond there isn’t always a whole lot of difference between holding an instrument and actually doing something with it. (Yeah, that’s right. It’s a lot like planet Earth.)