Zorro developments through May 25, Capítulos 60-73

There's a new witch in town - Selenia may be even cooler than Yumalai

Since my last weekly summary of the Zorro telenovela, I've been on vacation. I've been keeping up and catching up through the Telemundo Web site, with tapes of the episodes and especially through the Caray Caray blog, which provides details summaries of each episode in English. I've been watching the episodes from May 29 in real time, there being no May 28 episode due to the Miss Universo contest. I'm not at all sure about my episode count. But I'm sticking with my own, for now. Only the DVD release will reveal the truth on the episode count.

A large part of the plot those three weeks has turned around the dual deaths and resurrections of Esmeralda and Sara Kalí. In Sara Kalí's case, she wound up captured by Pizarro and kept in an isolated house with Agapito, the town surgeon/dentist/undertaker. Agapito concocted a Romeo-and-Juliet potion that made her appear dead, and Pizarro was convinced. Agapito buried her and then dug her up and revived her, though he barely got her out in time.

Esmeralda's "death" was accomplished by a funeral which el Comandante Montero set up with the body he bought from an impoverished fisherman. They had a funeral, whose high point was Almudena's denouncing Montero in front of the wedding party.

I'm not quite sure where they're going with the resurrection theme, but they're beating us over the head with it, so I'm assuming it's going somewhere. Sara Kalí was "dead" and "buried" in the El Callao prison for 20 years or so. Now she's had another "death" and "resurrection", and is hiding out in a leper colony. This all will presumably make her an empathetic queen if she ever claims the throne. Or maybe it will make her vindictive and savage,who knows? I'm pretty skeptical of the whole benign monarchy business, at least the 19th version. But let's assume the best for now.

Esmeralda is doing her "death" and "burial" in the dungeon and her "death" and "burial" in the graveyard all at once. Hopefully not requiring 20 years to resolve. One of the more intriguing scenes from this period is a dream of Diego's which picks up the Dracula motif. Diego walks into a room where Esmeralda's body is lying dead on a table. Her skin is still flawless. Not surprising given her genetic heritage from Sara Kalí, whose skin was still in remarkably good shape despite being deprived of sunlight for 20 years, what with the dungeon and the iron mask and all. Actually, the hair genes must be pretty strong, too. Because after weeks in the dungeon and even a couple of torture sessions, Esmeralda's skin and hair both are remarkably beautiful.

But I digress. Diego walks over to Esmeralda's body and kisses her. When he straigtens up and looks at her, she opens her eyes. Even though I knew it was just a dream, I couldn't help but thinking they were about to go all Dark Shadows on us and that Esmeralda was going to plunge her fangs into Diego's neck. But Diego woke up before that happened.

Esmeralda returns from the dead

So we have seen a kind of resurrection of Esmeralda already: a dreamy, sexy, Dracula-esque version. Maybe after this one is over, they could do a follow-up novela where Diego/Zorro becomes a vampire. But we'll have to wait to see on that one.

The most intriguing new character is a witch named Selenia, apparently modeled on Marie Laveau, who appears in Isabel Allende's Zorro novel. Selenia is more of a witch for the aristocracy, though, not the steamy-dancing-in-the-swamps type. She came over from Spain. Olmos thinks she cursed his mother and made him be born with his hunchback. But it hasn't stopped him from going to her for a love potion to snag Mariángel - who the folks at Caray Caray have nicknamed "Mangle".

Selenia agrees to do it, for a hefty fee. But he has to get some of her tears for the potion, which promises to be tricky. She also warns him that Mangle will be a nightmare for him, that Mangle will make him cry "tears of blood". Yow!

Selenia shows up at the local tavern one night and belts back some stiff liquor. Witches, it seems, have a high tolerance for alcohol because it doesn't phase her. She's come there to entice el Gobernador Fernando into asking for her help.

Of course, he wants her help with María Pia, with whom he has recurring scenes that generally cover the same ground: I love you I can't live without you, save me, yadda, yadda. María Pia begs him to leave her alone, which he never does. So at she's plotting to get away from him some way.

And you thought the witches on Charmed were something!

Zorro/Diego has fully regained his memory and is carrying on a constant series of attacks and provocations against el Comandante Montero. In a swordfight, he carved a "Z" onto Montero's chest. None of this Walt Disney, carve-the-Z only in their clothes business for the Telemundo Zorro.

Alejandro's bigamous arrangement has had its crisis moments. Yumalai went back to the tribe to consult with Búfala Blanca for a while. But she came back, much the relief of Almudena and the joy of Alejandro. Almudena has become emotionally dependent on Yumalai and Yumalai has come to love her. But during the week of May 25, Almudena had a pretty but ominous dream, in which Toypurnia/Regina appeared to her in Regina clothing and told her that death was nothing to be afraid of, and that Regina herself would come to lead Almudena over the river when the time came. Almudena has been alternatively fainting and bed-ridden ever since the supposed death of Esmeralda.

One of the quirkier moments was a scene in which Alejandro is sitting at a chess board, apparently playing chess with himself. This was just before he confessed to Dolores that he had slept with Yumalai the night of his wedding to Almudena.

Renzo, handsome but generally useless, got caught with Sor Suplicios and Camba the escaped African slave by a group of slave traders who planeed to sell them all. Suplicios got raped by the slave-traders, but the three of them managed to escape. Suplicios now has a civilian name, Ana Camila, which she revealed to Renzo. There's major chemistry between her and Renzo now. Camba is still tagging along, still not speaking a word of Spanish, and his demon takes over ever now and then.

The demonology in this series is a bit mysterious. But I guess that part of the idea of using invisible demons as plot devices. This one apparently bounces from one person to the other. So when Aaron the Exorcist drove it out of Suplicios/Camila, poor Camba caught it. As if he didn't have problems enough already. But when he's in full possession mode, his eyes get all white and his face thoroughly insane-looking, which is a cool touch. The demon took over in time to stop a slave-hunter from raping Camila after they had escaped, but not soon enough to stop the hapless Renzo from getting shot. Exactly why a demon would want to interfere with a slave trader is unclear; wouldn't they be on the same side?

The Marquesa's not a witch, but she's a pretty tough cookie

The political plot is also moving forward, though fairly slowly. Unseating the Spanish Queen can take some time. And the Marquesa Carmen Santillana de Roquette is back on the scene, not only helping her friends the De la Vegas but also helping Sara Kalí to take her rightful throne as Queen of Spain. We also see the current Queen talking to the evil Duke Jacobo, who so far is the biggest villain of them all. But we see that the current Queen has her suspiciosn about Jacobo, too. She insists on making that New World trip and Jacobo has been stalling. El Comandante Montero is one of Jacobo's allies. It figures.

(All the photos this week are my screenshots)

Tags: zorro, zorro telenovela

Remembering the Six-Day War

June 5 (Tuesday) will be the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria. It was that war that left Israel occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with consequences that are far from being at an end. As David Remnick writes in The Seventh Day: Why the Six-Day War is still being fought New Yorker 05/28/07:

The Israeli victory changed the country in nearly every aspect. The response, both within the country and among Jews abroad, ranged from the joyful to the distinctly messianic — a messianism that helped lead to the occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Sinai, and the Golan Heights, and the establishment of one settlement after another. It was a war that Israelis regarded as existential in importance––defeat could well have meant the end of the state after less than twenty years––and yet winning had Pyrrhic consequences. Out of it came forty years of occupation, widespread illegal settlements, the intensification of Palestinian nationalism, terrorism, counterattacks, checkpoints, failed negotiations, uprisings, and ever-deepening distrust. What greater paradox of history: a war that must be won, a victory that results in consuming misery and instability.

A number of retrospectives are coming out. Here are some others that I've come across:

First A victor - then 40 years of stalemate by Matthew Kalman San Francisco Chronicle 06/03/07. This article mentions something that is not well understood in the current politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Israel's policies have produced some disastrous errors, among them the decision to nurture a religious Islamic group called Hamas in the mid-1980s asa counterweight to Fatah and the PLO.

Remaking the world in six days by Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East Los Angeles Times 06/03/07

Mideast Timeline compiled by Chronicle Librarian Lois JermynSan Francisco Chronicle 06/03/07

Peace package may require piece-by-piece assembly by Anna Badkhen San Francisco Chronicle 06/03/07

Israel's wasted victory: Six days of war followed by 40 years of misery. How can it ever end? The Economist 05/24/07

Forty years on The Economist 05/24/07

Looking at the Middle East, Four Decades after the Six-Day War: Israel's Pyrrhic Victory by Christoph Schult Spiegel International Online 06/01/07

The six-day war, forty years on by Hazem Saghieh OpenDemocracy.net 05/18/07

Seis Días y 40 años sin salida de Juan Miguel Muñoz El País 02.06.07

The war's seventh day by Michael Ben-Yair, Israeli Attorney General 1993-96 Ha'aretz 03/03/2002

The 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War by Daphna Berman Ha'aretz 06/01/2007

It's not the war, stupid - it's the occupation by Shmuel Rosner Ha'aretz 06/01/2007

The 'gold mine' on the border by Amir Oren Ha'aretz 06/01/2007

The battle for Jerusalem is in our hands by Anshel Pfeffer Ha'aretz 05/31/2007

Surprising conversations by Ze'ev Schiff Ha'aretz 06/01/2007

War put Israel on communal map for a proud American Jewry by Ben Harris, Jewish Telegraph Agency 06/01/07

Tags: israel, six day war

G-8 summit: There's a riot going on...

Sounds like there was quite a rumble at the G-8 protests on Saturday. Here's a minute-long video from El Mundo: Violentos enfrentamientos en la marcha contra el G-8 06/02/07. The formal meeting doesn't start until June 6.

This article reports 146 police injured on the first day, 25 seriously: El primer día de protestas contra la cumbre del G-8 en Alemania deja 146 policías heridos El Mundo/EFE 06/02/07. No word included on how many demonstrators may have been injured.Der Spiegel has more photos: Rostock: Steine, Stinkefinger, brennende Autos.

And they're reporting more than 300 or more police injured: Randale in Rostock - 300 verletzte Polizisten. These initial reports are blaming "Autonomen", or "autonomous" groups - anarchists, more-or-less. It's worth noting that in this article, reporting prior to the riot, that the German police union was criticizing US demands on security measures, particularly the notion that protesters should be completely out of sight of the G-8 participants: Polizeigewerkschaft kritisiert US-Sicherheitsvorgaben Der Spiegel 02.06.07. Bush doesn't want to see the demonstrators, hear them, or think about them. The police union chairperson said, "Es ist mir eine Herzensangelegenheit, dass Menschen demonstrieren dürfen, dass der Protest deutlich sichtbar ist. Das ist wichtig für unsere Demokratie." ("It is my heart's desire that people be allowed to demonstrate, [and] that the protest is clearly visible. That is important for our democracy.")

For the demonstrators to initiate violence at these things is pointless, especially if the police themselves are demanding greater freedom for peaceful demonstrators. I haven't seen any credible reports yet on provocateurs in this case. But given everything we know about how the Cheney-Bush administration handles things, the chances of them sending in provocateurs is something around 100%, I would guess.

Tags: g-8 summit

Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's ideal German woman

I see that the New York Review of Books currently has pulled out from behind subscription the article by Susan Sontag from its 02/06/1975 issue on the infamous Leni Riefenstahl, Fascinating Fascism. If you're under the misimpression than the nasty old pro-Nazi propagandist somehow repented her enthusiastic support for her Führer later in life, check out Sontag's article.

Of course, Riefenstahl lived for some three decades beyond that. But she defended her noxious role in the Third Reich until the end.

Sontag gave this description of Riefenstahl's best-known work, Triumph des Willens:

Although Triumph of the Will has no narrative voice it does open with a written text that heralds the rally as the redemptive culmination of German history. But this opening commentary is the least original of the ways in which the film is tendentious. Triumph of the Will represents an already achieved and radical transformation of reality: history become theater. In her book published in 1935, Riefenstahl had told the truth. The Nuremberg Rally "was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting—but as a spectacular propaganda film…. The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras." How the Party convention was staged was determined by the decision to produce Triumph of the Will. The event, instead of being an end in itself, served as the set of a film which was then to assume the character of an authentic documentary. Anyone who defends Riefenstahl's films as documentaries, if documentary is to be distinguished from propaganda, is being ingenuous. In Triumph of the Will, the document (the image) is no longer simply the record of reality; "reality"has been constructed to serve the image.

The current (06/14/07) issue features another article about Riefenstahl, Fascinating Narcissism by Ian Buruma, which opens with this paragraph:

That Leni Riefenstahl was rather a monster is not really in dispute. And if it ever was, two new biographies provide enough information to nail her. Bad behavior began early. Steven Bach, in his excellent Leni, tells the story of Walter Lubovski, a Jewish boy in Berlin who fell madly in love with Riefenstahl after meeting her at a skating rink. In a fit of teenage cruelty, Leni and her girlfriends tormented the boy so badly that he slashed his wrists at the summer cottage of Riefenstahl's family. To stop her father from discovering what had happened, she shoved the bleeding boy under the sofa. He survived and ended up in a mental institution before escaping to America, where he went blind. All Riefenstahl had to say when she heard was: "He never forgot me as long as he lived."

He also gives us this little anecdote: "The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards once turned up in an SS uniform while Leni was photographing Mick Jagger." Yuck! And, yuck!

I have to admit that I'm neither enough of a film buff, nor familiar enough with film criticism (much less aesthetic philosophy, Good Lord, who is?), nor informed enough about Riefensthal's work (though I've seen several of her films) to make any confident judgment about the nuances of "fascist" art in the context Sontag and Buruma discuss them. The main value of Sontag's piece for me is her factual debunking of Riefenstahl's lying defenses of her enthusiastic collaboration with Hitler and the Nazis.

Buruma also gives us some similar analysis. Here was the slimy woman's reaction to first seeing her Führer speak:

I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.

In general, I tend to think all that talk about Hitler's hypnotic powers over his listeners is about 99% horse-poop. But that's a broader issue. But the fact that Riefenstahl would express her support this way is a notable fact in itself, whether it was an "honest" impression or not.

Buruma writes about Triumph des Willens:

Although she denied it, we know from various witnesses, quoted in the biographies, that several scenes were reconstructed after the rally in a Berlin studio. We also know that far from being ordered to make the film, Riefenstahl longed to make it, indeed lobbied for it. As with Speer's architectural plans, Hitler took a personal interest in the project. He was the ultimate producer of his own spectacle (the title was his choice). As a result, whatever Riefenstahl wanted, she got. Triumph of the Will was made with the resources of a major Hollywood production: thirty-six cameramen, nine aerial photographers, a lighting crew of seventeen, and two still photographers, one of whom shot nothing but pictures of Riefenstahl herself. She was the only filmmaker in Nazi Germany who answered directly to the Führer and not to Goebbels's propaganda ministry.

This became very irritating to Goebbels, especially when Riefenstahl treated her budgets as though she had a direct line to the national treasury, which in effect she did. His exasperation was later used as evidence by Riefenstahl that he hated her because she wouldn't sleep with him. But no matter. Many great filmmakers go over budget, and annoying Goebbels was no sin. Triumph of the Will is a stunning achievement. She used all the editing techniques and camera work learned from Arnold Fanck, but also came up with ideas of her own: cameras held by men on roller skates or installed in an elevator behind Hitler's podium, the brilliant cross-cutting between crowds and performers, the extraordinary choreography of a cast of thousands. The problem is that her genius, in this film, is purely technical, applied to an unworthy subject.

Buruma partially challenges Sontag's arguments about Riefenstahl's "fascist" art. But he basically argues that she exhibited technical brilliance in some aspects - something that seems to be generally conceded, especially on her filming of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin - but that artistically it's pretty dull:

Perhaps the Faustian bargain she struck with Hitler was her only shot at immortality. Even if we leave aside her personal views and sensibilities, her talents were a perfect match for Hitler's grand project of turning his murderous vision into a mass spectacle [in Triumph des Willens], a kind of musical of death. But it was too kitschy, in the sense of false and misplaced emotion, to be great art. In Riefenstahl, Hitler had found his perfect technician.

And he writes:

The problem with Riefenstahl, and the main reason for her limitations as an artist, is that she was not just an erotic frigidaire, but an emotional one too. Her lack of human understanding, or any feeling for human beings apart from pure aesthetics, does not matter so much in a film like Olympia. It matters hugely in a feature film about love, rejection, and intrigue. Tiefland, which took Riefenstahl more than a decade to finish, and was finally released in 1954, is exactly what [Steven] Bach says it is, "a kitsch curiosity, as nearly unwatchable as any film ever released by a world-class director."

The theme of a child of nature (Riefenstahl), persecuted by the wicked denizens of decadent civilization, is familiar. The sight of Riefenstahl doing a pastiche of flamenco dancing surrounded by Spanish-looking extras is beyond camp; it is plainly embarrassing. That the extras were in fact Gypsies plucked by Riefenstahl from a camp in Salzburg, where they were imprisoned before being sent to Auschwitz, added to her monstrous reputation. She lied about them too, claiming that they all happily survived the war. Most didn't. But the film fails artistically, not because it is fascist, but because it is clumsily staged like a bad silent movie, with histrionic gestures (echoing Riefenstahl's expressionist dancing days) making up for plausible human emotions. It was as though nothing had changed since the 1920s.

Leni Riefenstahl: an awful, awful human being.

Tags: leni riefenstahl, susan sontag

The 2006 election

I haven't inflicted any out-and-out political-science geekery on the readers in a while. So what better way to remedy that than linking to the lead article from the Spring 2007 Political Science Quarterly, Referendum: The 2006 Midterm Congressional Elections by Gary Jacobson?

As the title indicates, Jacobson is looking at the 2006 elections and the "message", if any, that voters were sending.

The primary source of the pro-Democratic tide in 2006 was public unhappiness with the Iraq War and its originator, George W. Bush. Figure 3 [p. 7 of the PDF document, p. 6 of the magazine] displays the trends in support for the war and approval of Bush’s job performance through October 2006. The two trends track one another closely and move in similar ways in response to events in Iraq. Cross-sectional analyses also find a close relationship between opinions on Bush and the war; respondents give consistent responses - approve of Bush and support the war, or disapprove of Bush and oppose the war - an average of 84 percent of the time in polls spanning this period. These opinions are far more tightly linked than they were for Bush’s predecessors in comparable situations - Harry Truman with the Korean War (60 percent consistent), and Lyndon Johnson with the VietnamWar (64 percent consistent). In any single survey, the direction of causality is ambiguous - prior attitudes toward Bush shape reactions to the war, assessments of the war shape evaluations of Bush - but there seems little doubt that growing disillusionment with the war has dragged down Bush’s approval ratings over time. (my emphasis)

He describes the Karl Rove's strategy of focusing on Terror in the 2006 election and demonizing Democrats as allies of The Terrorists. In later years, Republicans are likely to deny that they and their candidates ever did such a thing. It's important that the rest of us remember it:

Thus, during the summer, the administration orchestrated a coordinated, no-holds-barred counterattack against Democratic critics of Bush and the Iraq War. Taking advantage of the public’s attention to events commemorating the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Bush and his allies sought not only to reinforce the idea that the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism were one and the same, but also to elevate the conflict to the equivalent of World War II and the Cold War. The President drew cautionary parallels between Osama bin Laden’s anti-U.S. fulminations and Lenin’s What Is To Be Done and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, claiming the mantle of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as presidents who stood fast in the face of global threats. In addresses delivered around the same time, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld also variously quoted Roosevelt, took the fight against Nazism and fascism as precedent, and, more to the political point, charged that critics of the administration’s policies believed that "vicious extremists can be appeased" and that "retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone".

The central message was that Islamic jihadists were as profound a threat to the existence of the United States as the Axis powers and the Soviet Union had once been. Democrats [the charge went], by questioning the wisdom of the Iraq War or the administration’s conduct of the fight against terrorism more generally, revealed themselves as appeasers who were blind to the terrorist threat and, if given control of Congress, would put the security of the United States at grave risk. As Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee put it, "The president’s effort to keep Americans safe will grind to a halt with Democrats in control ..." Later in the campaign, Bush told a Republican rally that "however they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: the terrorists win and American loses." The campaign was, in short, a concerted effort to use the specter of jihadist terrorism to frighten enough voters into voting Republican in 2006 to keep the Party in control of the House and Senate, replicating at the congressional level Bush’s successful strategy against John Kerry in 2004. (my emphasis)

He also gives a brief account of the Republican legislative agenda designed to put Democrats in the position of voting against bills that the administration would claim were essential in the fight against The Terrorists:

If anyone doubted the terrorism agenda’s electoral motivation, Republican leaders' comments after passage laid them to rest. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist: "Do [voters] want to be voting for a party that does unabashedly say, 'We’re going to have victory in this war on terrorism,' or a party that says, 'We’ve got to surrender?' House Speaker Dennis Hastert: Democrats "were so bent on protecting criminals ... they’re not allowing us to prosecute these people. The 130 most treacherous people probably in the world, and they want to ... release them out into the public eventually." (The Democrats who advocated surrender to terrorists or releasing them from custody naturally went unnamed, as they were wholly imaginary.)

In 2006, though, it wasn't enough to hold onto their Congressional majorities:

Moreover, surveys turned up little evidence that ordinary citizens were swayed by the administration’s rhetoric; it appears, at most, to have simply reinforced existing (highly partisan) views. In doing so, it may nonetheless have helped the Republican cause by reviving support among Republican voters who had been showing signs of disillusionment with the war and thus the President (see Figure 6 [p. 9 of the PDF document, p. 10 of the magazine]). Democrats and independents were a much harder sell; most of them had long since stopped believing what Bush and his allies were saying about the war and its justifications. The greatest obstacle to the administration’s attempt to change the subject, however, was the steady stream of bad news coming out of Iraq; during October, American battle deaths exceeded 100 for the first time since January 2005, and sectarian violence produced the highest Iraqi monthly civilian death toll recorded to that date.

This last point is important. I've argued before that the notion that says opposition to a war is a direct result of American casualties and basically nothing else, is a deeply flawed one. At best, it's misleading in the extreme. But Jacobson's observation about the news from Iraq keeping the issue on voters' minds focuses on a particular moment, and is a different matter than the argument that opposition to war is driven only by American casualties. He's saying that events near the time of the election kept the Iraq War much in the minds of the voters. He's not saying that they caused an upsurge in opposition to the war; that opposition had been long established, as he shows in other figures he cities.

Unfortunately, in his conclusion, Jacobson retreats to the safe position of High Broderism:

The consensus of postelection punditry that Democrats will succeed politically only if they pursue popular centrist policies, resisting any impulse toward a hard left turn, seems well founded. Among the mass public, self-described conservatives outnumber liberals by a wide margin, and moderates outnumber both. Elementary arithmetic makes it plain that Democrats will have to retain the support of the centrist, swing voters who were essential to their victory in 2006 if they are to have any chance of repeating it in 2008.

Tags: 2006 election, iraq war

A dark cloud for the Dark Lord?

John Dean on the push by Fred Thompson and other rightwing Republicans for a pardon for Scooter Libby: The Bush Administration's Dilemma Regarding a Possible Libby Pardon - And How Outsiders Such as Fred Thompson Appear to Be Working on a Solution Findlaw.com 06/01/07.

Next Tuesday, June 5, the judge is expected to make a decision on whether to send Scooter to jail immediately or let him out on bail while he appeals his conviction.

Dean points out that in the Watergate trials "the March 1, 1974 indictment of Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Chuck Colson (who pled guilty, rather than risk a trial) charged each of them with a conspiracy to obstruct justice by offering to provide clemency to those involved in the Watergate break-in." Dean:

If Libby had been acting on his own behalf, a pardon would present no problem; Bush and Cheney could feel it was the humanitarian thing to do, given his long service to the government. However, no one I know believes Libby was acting simply for himself, nor does the evidence suggest it.

Dean observes that if Scooter was covering for Dark Lord Cheney, it would be obstruction of justice for Cheney to request Bush to pardon his boy Scooter:

No wonder then, that Special Counsel Fitzgerald remarked during the Libby trial that there was "a cloud" over the Vice President.

Come Tuesday, that cloud could get much darker for Cheney.

Tags: dick cheney, john dean, scooter libby

What we've come to

The pro-torture fans of the Christian Republican White People's Party see a (they don't call it "Jewish" in public) media conspiracy to minimize torture by "Al Qaida". Why, some of them are demanding in outrage, do the Liberal Media not more prominently report the "torture manuals" that the US recently discovered in Iraq? Glenn Greenwald has more details in Al-Qaida does it, too Salon 06/01/07.

Leaving aside the question of whether the manuals found were directly connected to the Al Qaida run by Osama bin Laden, John Cole has an appropriate response, to which Greenwald links, Dear Newsbusters and the MRC Balloon Juice blog 05/31/07:

It isn't news because they are terrorists, you [Cheney]ing simpletons. Yesterday, my cat scratched himself then s*** in a box. The media didn’t report that, either.

After the Abu Ghuraib perversion-and-torture scandal broke, defenders of torture defended it on the grounds that at least it wasn't as bad as what Saddam did. Now it's down to, Hey, we're no worse than Al Qaida!

I think that qualifies as "lowering the bar". Lowering it so far that it's buried.

Tags: torture