"I am angry that so many sons of the powerful and well placed . . . managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to our country."
-- Colin Powell in his 1995 autobiography, An American Journey
"If we know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction - and we do - does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him?
It [the Iraqi regime] possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons ... we know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, and VX gas."
George Bush
7 October 2002
Bill O'Reilly experiences a road to Damascus moment. Welcome back to reality, Bill.
And then there's still the small matter of Dubya's military records.
I watched Dubya's appearance on Meet the Press on MSNBC not knowing whether to laugh or cry. This guy is running the country? Worth watching if you missed it. Moby has homed in on the best bits. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Then vote Kerry/Edwards in November.
Just before the Macworld Expo last month, I speculated about what new product Apple would or would not unveil in SF. I guessed it wouldn't be the mini iPod. I was wrong, but since that day, I've been getting loads of visitors to this blog who came via a search engine (usually google), searching for the words "mini ipod". It's now become the top referrer to ridey.net. Very weird, as I come way down the results for such a search. So either something very strange is going on, or else Steve Jobs has done it again. I reckon it's the later.
The second leading referrer is also Apple related. Many come here searching for panther and perl. I somehow come top of the list of 50,500 results. Which is nice for me, but not such good news for Mr Jobs.
Meanwhile, here in Blighty, while all of America was getting bent out of shape about a breast, John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten, lead singer of the Sex Pistols), has been a contestant on the UK version of I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! The other night, Lydon reacted to his not being voted out by viewers by loudly and clearly saying: "the f---ing c---s". On live television. With 11 million people watching. ITV, the broadcaster of the show, received a total of 70 complaints.
The longer I spend living outside America, and it's now been more than 14 years, the harder it gets to defend my country when it is criticised, or perhaps worse, laughed at by the rest of the world. And the world is howling with laughter again.
And who could blame them? How could anyone fail to laugh at a country where in the same week that the Bush administration was forced to admit that Saddam Hussein had posed no threat to America, and did not possess any so-called weapons of mass destruction (thus exposing as entirely fraudulant its motives for going to war in Iraq), is it possible that the event which has outraged the nation be Janet Jackson's breast being exposed on national TV? How could the latter be considered an obscenity but not the former? How could a brief glimpse of a woman's breast be taken as evidence of the nation's moral decay, but not that same nation's slaughter of innocent men, women and children for no other reason than George W Bush wanting to go one better than his father?