Creepy Behavior, Odd Decisions
July 19th, 2006Lyndon Johnson was famous for urinating in potted plants and asking people to carry a conversation with him while he used the washroom. Bill Clinton had an insatiable lust for women other than his wife. Ronald Reagan insisted on being allowed to makeup stories no matter who he was talking to, most famously illustrated when he told the Israeli Prime Minister that he’d been shot out of a plane during World War II. These things are all odd, creepy character traits, but not one of them is as creepy as this, which is a clip of George W. Bush giving Angela Merkel an unsolicited and apparently unwelcome neck massage. For all the knocks against Clinton’s libido, at least he never gushed that Vladimir Putin’s eyes betrayed a beautiful soul, and he certainly didn’t molest a foreign leader.
Aside from Tony Blair.
Our right-wing Senate decided yesterday to pass a bill that the House had already pushed through: a lifting of the federal ban on stem-cell funding. George Bush is expected to veto it, and use his first ever veto on it at that. All I have to say is that George Bush is no champion of science, and no Grover Cleveland. It’s absolutely disgusting that in the era of big, bloated government, deficit spending and the Rise of the Pork Barrel, Bush’s first veto is going to be used against stem-cell research. While George W. Bush won’t give the greenlight to stem-cells, he has no problem giving the green-light to war. The Guardian reports a bit that is good news, I think, and that is that Bush gave the green light for a limited war in Lebanon, meaning Israel has one week left.
The US is giving Israel a window of a week to inflict maximum damage on Hizbullah before weighing in behind international calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, according to British, European and Israeli sources. The Bush administration, backed by Britain, has blocked efforts for an immediate halt to the fighting initiated at the UN security council, the G8 summit in St Petersburg and the European foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels. “It’s clear the Americans have given the Israelis the green light. They [the Israeli attacks] will be allowed to go on longer, perhaps for another week,” a senior European official said yesterday. Diplomatic sources said there was a clear time limit, partly dictated by fears that a prolonged conflict could spin out of control.
I think that a one-week window of retaliation is defensible, although the war instantly spun out of control as soon as Israel decided to destroy Lebanon’s infrastructure. If it is just a “one week window,” then at least we know that the offensive onslaught of Israel will be over soon. Not soon enough, though.