TOBY PETZOLD

What the fuck?! Anderson Cooper makes the same fucking spiel he’s made at least eight times in the past 90 minutes about how CNN doesn’t want to surprise or upset anybody with pictures of Saddam’s hanging —and then his producers go straight into unannounced footage of the gassing victims at Halabja?!

What fucking nonsense! I just saw little babies in rigor mortis on the steps of their own homes —and Anderson Fucking Cooper is going to protect me from seeing Saddam’s broken neck?!

Balls!

I find Anderson Cooper’s self-important and extremely repetitive insistence that upper management, the Three Magi, and whoever the fuck else are going to take a good, long look at any video or photos of Saddam’s execution before they air them on CNN to be annoying and condescending.

Your network, Mr. Cooper, apparently has no problem broadcasting al-Qaedist snuff films of the murder of American soldiers in the streets of Iraq, so go fuck yourself with your Peter Arnett-shaped lug wrench and shut up about what CNN will or will not broadcast.

You’ll broadcast whatever you can get your hands on, tough guy.

al-Arabiya says Saddam is dead.

Whatever’s been said before, the fact is that the world will demand visual proof. They are going to have to show the hanging on TV.

There’s no need for anybody to know in whose custody Saddam Hussein is at this very moment or the exact time or place of his hanging or anything else. Stir rumors and take guesses all you want, folks. He’s dead. He’s not dead. It happened a while ago. It will happen in a few hours.

Draw it out.

If there were a dam and if it would break, better to have it crack and crumble than burst and overwhelm.

I have no idea how the Iraqis will react. I could guess that the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs and the Shia will rejoice in the streets, but they may not bother with it. I hope they do, though, so that for the first time in many, many months, the American People might have a conspicuous occasion to see the Iraqi people on their TVs, being happy human beings and not just abstractions.

Joseph Rago, in making his well-received criticism of the blogosphere, observes:

The right now is partially a function of technology, which makes instantaneity possible, and also a function of a culture that valorizes the up-to-the-minute above all else. But there is no inherent virtue to instantaneity. Traditional daily reporting–the news–already rushes ahead at a pretty good clip, breakneck even, and suffers for it. On the Internet all this is accelerated.

There may be “no inherent virtue to instantaneity,” but it’s certainly not the place of someone in the news business to say so.

Just look at the commercial news culture in this country and how much store it places by having the scoop and by being first on the scene and in breaking that latest bit of news. They depend on this stuff. They do not, as Rago says, “suffer” for it.

The public’s understanding and judgement may suffer for this obsession with getting the news out first and fastest, but it’s silly for an assistant editor for the Wall Street Journal —a publication that was using the Westar communications satellites back in 1974 to transmit the most recent market data possible for printing its regional editions— to dismiss the virtues of being current.

Thanks to Jim Hoft, I came across this report from IRINNews.org, which is a propaganda arm of the United Nations. (The standard disclaimer at the tops of their reports is not to be missed, either: “This report does not necessarily reflect the view of the United Nations.”)

But I’m not so sure about that. This report is about how “pro-Taliban militants” have taken up bombing girls’ schools in western Pakistan because the schools’ administrators do not require these little girls to wear the veil.

What makes this report so interesting is that it never once, despite its length and purported subject, directly names the perpetrators of these acts of terrorism. One of the photo captions references ”pro-Taliban militants” and, in the text of the report itself, there is a daringly judgemental “militant extremists” thrown in, but this dispatch from the UN Ministry of Some Information does not name names, except to scapegoat. It takes nine or so paragraphs to even come to this passive-voice account:

Over the past two months, at least two schools in the area have been bombed. They include the Government Girls’ High School at Akharwal in Darra Adam Khel, which suffered damage after a bomb attack at the end of November and the under-construction Girls’ Degree College Sheraki, whose boundary wall was damaged in another bomb attack.

What the hell do “militant extremists” care about women wearing burqas? Oh, maybe it’s because they’re Muslims? Well, then, one might expect that this piece of information would be relevant to an understanding of the rationale of these brave childkillers. But does that word even appear in this report? No references to Islam or Muslims or the Koran? Nope. None of the above.

So where does the fault lie? With the repressive and psychotic ummah of Peshawar? No way.

My guess? The answer lies somewhere in the world of Faye Resnick George W. Bush.

I don’t know what’s going on with this American-backed Ethiopian Proxy War story, but it sounds very interesting. Especially since it elicits comments like the following. From the ass of one Salim Lone, as splayed in the op-ed pages of the International Herald Tribune:

NAIROBI: Undeterred by the horrors and setbacks in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, the Bush administration has opened another battlefront in the Muslim world. With full U.S. backing and military training, at least 15,000 Ethiopian troops have entered Somalia in an illegal war of aggression against the Union of Islamic Courts, which controls almost the entire south of the country.

As with Iraq in 2003, the United States has cast this as a war to curtail terrorism, but its real goal is to obtain a direct foothold in a highly strategic region by establishing a client regime there. The Horn of Africa is newly oil-rich, and lies just miles from Saudi Arabia, overlooking the daily passage of large numbers of oil tankers and warships through the Red Sea. General John Abizaid, the current U.S. military chief of the Iraq war, was in Ethiopia this month, and President Hu Jintao of China visited Kenya, Sudan and Ethiopia earlier this year to pursue oil and trade agreements.

Speaking of wars —”illegal” or otherwise— one must keep in mind while reading anti-American opinions like this one that China is itself funding the Janjaweed militias in the Darfur region of the Sudan. You know: the place where all the pesky locals are being massacred to move them off of China’s oil concessions?

Mr. Lone never gets around to mentioning that. Why? Because Bush lied and people died.

I was trying to fall asleep last night when I saw on TV that President Ford had passed away.

Nixon I remember vaguely as President, but Gerald Ford was the first one of whom I have definite memories. He was, for instance, our President in the Summer of 1976, when my family traveled up the Eastern Seaboard and visited all the original thirteen states. It was Ford’s Washington that I visited that magical year. I remember the stupid Chevy Chase skits and the two half-assed assassination attempts. I remember the flat, plodding, and earnest timbre of his voice.

I would later come to associate Ford with the expedient monstrosity of the Warren Commission, but however that is held against him, I rather doubt to guess.

Ford lived a good and very long life, filled with accomplishment, service, loyalty, and principle. I salute him and send all his family and friends my warmest regards.

I like this bit from Jody Rosen’s obituary of James Brown at Slate:

Listen closely, with a good pair of headphones, and the thousand pointillist details of Brown’s genius open up to you: the shifting accents and registers, the variations in dynamics and attack, the disconcerting spaces and silences, the beats piled atop beats. But, of course, that genius is never more apparent than when the headphones come off and you lose yourself in the steamy blur of a packed dance floor.

I have always been fascinated by James Brown. Either because I enjoyed his music or because his personal life was so damned weird. But, like all truly great American artists, Brown’ s contribution to his culture is beyond question. His music is beautiful (dig the cavernous sounds of “It’s a Man’s World”) and fun (”Sex Machine” is actually infectious). Sometimes, you’ve got to —as the once-great Eddie Murphy knew— jump back and kiss yourself.

The incoherent poet. The Mercury on rims, flinging sparks, rubber, and mad grooves. The outsized motor and the overboard man of passion, motion, and funk. Thank you for making the engagement, James Brown, and so to make the bridge.

While flipping through the channels earlier today, I noticed —in the space of fewer than ten seconds— that the four major cable news networks were all airing discussions of how the death toll for our military in Iraq now officially exceeds the number of people lost in the atrocities of 11 September 2001.

Never mind, for the moment, that this comparison is irrelevant. Try, instead, to picture how the filthy cocksuckers who determine the editorial and “news” content of Big Media’s cable broadcasts actually receive their instructions. What is the medium through which these wretched propagandists are programmed to raise such [interesting issues]?

Satan’s minions draw on his hose all day because they are moral and intellectual degenerates.

Satan is the Associated Press. Or Reuters. Or the New York Times. Or whatever the fuck it is that feeds the rest of the little cocksuckers who, in turn, presume to determine what gets flushed into the homes of the American People.

Still: the death toll for the American military in Iraq is now higher than the number of people “lost” —never murdered anymore— on “9/11″? What does that even mean? It’s not news in any meaningful sense, so why was it the subject of simultaneous discussion on the four major cable news networks this afternoon?

Because it’s a pair of numbers that the anti-American Left can put together and make “significant.” It is a point of insinuation intended to mean something to people who do not think. It is the superficial rebuke of assholes who have no respect for America or America’s military. It is worse than intellectual laziness to compare those two numbers: it is intellectual degeneracy.