When the Whig Party was dying...

...did people say that they "needed to retool" or "find themselves" or... well, of course they wouldn't have said "reboot". But to what extent can we draw parallels between the Whigs and the Republicans of late? I've been on record for the better part of three years as thinking the Republicans were dead standing up, are we seeing the corpse begin to tilt groundward?

Back to Basics

Watching right now the McLaughlin Group: would like to read the results of Monica's push poll that shows a mere 42 percent of Americans approving of this stimulus bill, or her Fox News poll that shows that "Americans prefer tax cuts to new spending." They also disapprove of handouts for the perverted arts, I hear.

And Johnny Mac is wishing a little too hard, methinks, when he calls House passage of any Obama bill a failure. BHO reached out, people know he reached out and all GOP soundbites make them sound like petulant prep school ninnies -- I'm looking at you, Paul Ryan. So who had the better PR week? The stimulus will come back, amended in conference, and everybody can get on board, or else lose in 2010. And we will get you Mike Pence.

But the GOP "rediscovered its manhood" and "got its groove back"? Not this week. Not after a "bruising five-way fight" for the RNC chairmanship gets you a doctrinaire laissez-faire conservative who warns his enemies that they will be "toppled." Policy matters. The face you put on it matters less. Americans will look at this Hoover-retread fiscal conservatism and turn up their noses. So much for the Tim-Pawlenty-big-tent theory of a return to dominance...and back to the drawing board...
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Who's Got the One-and-a-Half?

Muammar's got the one-and-a-half state solution. Now, when the unelected leader of Libya promotes this, it doesn't have the same aura as when Eyal Weizman does. If Muammar had actually been able to say something like "Shoah and Naqba are flip sides of the same coin...there are not two catastrophes, but one shared catastrophe," then we might have believed him.

Quick read: it sounds like Qaddafi is out to sugarcoat the idea of a Palestinian majority in Israel by explaining that, don't worry folks, Arab Israelis will still be in the fields picking dates. The implicit trade for a one-state solution is some kind of political second-class citizenship, and this is because Muammar is obsessed with right-of-return. Right-of-return means Palestine becomes minority-Jewish; with voting rights for all, that puts Hamas in the Knesset, that makes the IDF defunct. Now, without voting rights for all, we're talking about a minority-rule state with an all-minority police force, like the RSA. And that's one and a half states, not one.
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...Swallowed a Bug...

NYT gets down on the kibbutz, where folks is scared:

Out in the fields abutting the Gaza border fence, Mr. Katzir, the potato grower, predicted that within two years, the Hamas rockets "will get to Tel Aviv."

Now this interested me. I understand that farmers' opinions may not be indicative of the populace at large, but this is at least one member of the populace expressing his concerns, and what politician would not listen?

It's clear that this war wasn't a response to a credible threat; it was a panic attack. The Israeli populace doesn't trust Kadima to run shit; Kadima reinforces their bloodthirst trustworthiness by means of a small war. Ehud Barak and senior Israeli military officials get to think up cool metaphors -- latest: "cutting the grass"! -- and generally do the Brando


and all is well, except that Mr. Katzir, the potato farmer is not appeased. He thinks Hamas will be able to hit Tel Aviv in two years. Is he right?

To hit Tel Aviv, 75 kilometers from Gaza, you need an Iranian Fajr-5 rocket or better, Cf. this 2006 piece on aerospaceweb.org. No one has offered more than speculation as to whether Hamas has the Fajr-5, has asked Iran for the Fajr-5, etc.

Thing is, evidence would be easy to find. See, the Fajr-5 is 2 by 3 by 10 meters long. It's mounted on a Mercedes chassis two-thirds the size of a semi-trailer, and probably comes with friends, as it started life as an MRLS. This is not the sort of thing that 6 dudes shove through a tunnel. Saying Hamas has this is like saying Osama's going to bomb our lunar colony.

Now, if by "Hamas will hit Tel Aviv" our friend on the farm meant "Palestinians will hit Tel Aviv from the West Bank," that's a whole other kettle of fish. From right across the wall, you can hit Tel Aviv with a katyusha. Of course, this hasn't happened for some time, as Palestinians in the West Bank have Fatah sturmers busting down doors in order to defend Israel. West Bankers haven't allowed upstart terrorists to shoot so much as a spitball in a couple years. And they're divided now.

So the question becomes, what happens when you give the people of the West Bank a reason?
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The Boss Has Lost It

WHEREAS we have no real notion of what the Gaza campaign has wrought in any terms other than the purely humanitarian, and since newspapers anyway are in the business of refusing to speculate on geopolitical motives for barbarity, choosing instead to project a humanitarianism-beyond-politics, with no system of beliefs beyond the overriding imperative of the lower body count,

Clearly it's time for the Process Story, whereby our crack team of researchers gets the inside story from the architects of the operation. And don't get me wrong, I'm thankful for the tidbits:

The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: “baal habayit hishtageya,” or “the boss has lost it.” It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.

“This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.

It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.

Couple things: this is clearly a retread of Nixon's "Mad Bomber." Retribution should be feared; fear deters aggression; everyone goes back to the bargaining table. It's just not a very good retread. "Mad Bomber" threats arguably did less to maintain the balance of terror than did rapprochement with China, crumbling Soviet infrastructure, aging bureaucracy on both sides; the miracle is not that the Soviet Union ever fell, it's that it stuck around so long. Detente did not emerge fully formed from the head of "Mad Bomber" tactics.

But even if we accept that the model worked in that case, there is no analogy here. US:CCCP::Israel:Palestine does not fly. The US and USSR were fighting for spheres of influence. Neither populace was in the condition of Gaza's. Israel might see itself as fighting for influence -- thus the pompous military attache comparing the IDF to Nixon -- but it's fighting for soil. And its presumptive partner at the bargaining table is no Brezhnev: two governments, no contiguous territory, no economy, no transport, nothing that Israel wants and also nothing to lose.

"The Boss Has Lost It," in another Nixonian echo, casts foreign policy as work for a failing used-car salesman. Probably this is the kind of thing to fall on deaf ears, as, you know, there are not that many retail opportunities in the Strip.

These are, for the record, the best military metaphors I've heard in a long time. Cribbed from common folks' usage, full of connotative spurs and branches, and utterly accurate. "Cast lead" is for toys and bombs, presumably like the cluster munitions dumped on South Beirut last time around. "Crazy Boss" covers all the bases: we are your Boss, first of all, and this is the last time you'll see these prices, and you never know what's next.

But the kicker for me is that in the haste to gloat about the IDF's clever language, their spokesperson led the NYT reporter to "It is a calculated rage," which, you know, is what we said here on Day One. Forget "this is not a proportionate response," it wasn't even a response. The long Gaza blockade was not -- as the unfortunately-isolated Brian Eno would have us believe, our hearts bleeding -- an "experiment in provocation," since the assault appeared on 27 Dec 2008 to be all but unprovoked. Gazans did not respond to the bait that Eno thinks was laid. And now it's all clear, the rage was calculated.

Now what that means is anyone's guess. If the IDF has to concoct from thin air a passion for fighting, whereas Hamas has blood on the ground to motivate it, what does that mean for Israel's chances the next time around? And if the IDF knows that this is the last time in a generation that it might see deep support for actions against the Palestinians, mightn't that mean it's time to strip the Strip totally? That Gaza Redevelopment Authority is gonna need some room, after all. Doesn't a pullout at this point mean that Ehud Barak is more concerned about keeping Bibi Netanyahu out of power than he is with cleansing redeveloping Gaza? And if it turns out that the motivation for this exercise in terror was provincial Israeli politics, then the boss has lost it for real...
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Die Cast

Oferet Yetzuka, named for a Hanukkah gift, a cast-lead dreidel, has paused its gift-giving.

Perhaps only part of the strip will now become Gaza Beach Redevelopment District / Business-Opportunity Zone.

And if Abbas/Fatah have any balls at all, they will listen to Dion Nissenbaum at Foreign Policy: Abbas can't walk back into Gaza as its Israeli-appointed viceroy. We've known this since June 2007. He is a politician without constituents.

If Abu Mazen is more than a Vichy turd, he will resign rather than reign over a broken Gaza. Dissolve the PA's fake parliament, call new elections, and demand the release of Marwan Barghouti.

He can, in effect, become the most popular man in Palestine only if he no longer wants to be its most powerful.

Burn This MF Down

Paul Ging and Christopher Gunness have called the IDF and Ehud Olmert liars. Ging, who, it turns out, was in contact with the Israeli Army up until the moment his warehouse was bombed,

questioned why Israeli liaison officers had never mentioned Hamas activity in the area[...]

which is sort of begging the question. If I tell you there's Hamas in your building, and you flee, does not the Hamas also flee? Ging's point, of course, is that there were no militants in the building, thus no need for either the bombing or the forewarning of a bombing. And since he was in "constant contact" with IDF before the bombing, Ging has another problem: he has Israeli bomb-spotters working for him. He has a mole.

Gunness backs up Ging, saying that Israeli Army officers had "privately admitted" bombing the wrong site. That accounts for yesterday's confusion. Then Gunness ups the ante, saying three white phosphorus shells hit the UN warehouse. And that accounts for why the whole place, hit with three shells, is on fire in all the photos.

Just a refresher: we used white phosphorus on civilians in Iraq. Fine as a flare, but as an anti-personnel weapon, white phosphorus use will get you a date in the Hague. This is largely because it's such an effective anti-personnel weapon:

White phosphorus results in painful chemical burn injuries. The resultant burn typically appears as a necrotic area with a yellowish color and characteristic garliclike odor. White phosphorus is highly lipid soluble and as such, is believed to have rapid dermal penetration once particles are embedded under the skin.

I think it's part of our shared humanity to kill things, to kill them personally, on a human scale, with what weapons we can wield. The thing about WP is its indiscriminate nature: it binds to lipids, anybody's lipids; it seeks out fat and turns it into light. Humans, to Willy Pete, are so much candle wax. So, my point is that anyone who says eradication of most of the population of Gaza for the dual goals of security and leisure is not Israel's goal here is taking you for a ride.
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Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

Olmert has given Ban Ki-Moon the explanation for today's bombing he so gravely demanded: Hamas was in your compound. We know this, because that's where our bombs landed. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Probably this rhetorical device came out in the Iraq lessons-learned briefings. The US's real problem was not that there were no mobile bio-chem weapons labs, no centrifuges, just a bunch of yellow pigment in a baby-food plant, no no, our problem was that we kept trying to find evidence. Every overturned semi-trailer was inspected for anthrax; every general's lawn was cut up in the hunt for radiation.

Why not just say the bombs got it? It worked with the phantom Syrian nuclear program, right? "Trust us, it was there. Of course, there's no evidence of that now. But it surely was there because that's where our bombs went."

Also, for the record, Hosni, if you're listening, Fatah is dead. Don't wait for the return of Fatah. And also, anyone watching this knew in advance -- in advance of the New York Times' crack news analysis staff, anyway -- that Fatah was dead.

On second glance, this part was news to me. Possibly it is real news, as opposed to analysis:

Israel is proposing, with the tacit agreement of Egypt and the United States, to place the Palestinian Authority at the heart of an ambitious program to rebuild Gaza, administering reconstruction aid and securing Gaza’s borders.

A Palestinian pro calls Fatah's involvement "silly" and "naive."

Odds are he called it worse than that, you know, something like "a royal fist-fucking of the Palestinians by a bunch of Vichy turds in BMWs"

But the interesting part is that Israel floated the idea to Fatah at all. I mean, if you're going to pull some Robert Moses shit on a million and a half people, which come to think of it is Moses' scale, you need obstacles cleared. Israel needs to make sure that Fatah sees its chances of survival as related to Israel's chances of success. What's really being said is, "We're going to make Gaza into prime beachfront property, you can get on board or get out of the way."

There isn't going to be a role for Fatah beyond "shut the fuck up." A truce still hinges on commercial traffic into and out of Gaza being restored. And Israel has no intention of allowing that. After all, why stop now? From a PR standpoint, there is no difference between "a little bit monstrous" and "monstrous." It is a binary condition. Since a truce is going to cost something, namely opening Rafah, or else it won't hold, why not choose annihilation?
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Denial, Anger, Acceptance, Cash!

No doubt the craving of 66 percent of the American populace for a contrite Bush has colored the coverage of the President's final news conference. "More contrite than usual" is apparently good enough.

But the conference's head-scratchers reveal what the Bush Legacy Project is all about.

His chief mistake -- pushing privatization of Social Security after the 2004 election, the "I've got political capital, and I'm going to spend it," assault, in ignorance of the metaphor's real meaning, see because you spend cash and you invest capital. Spending political capital is like eating your seed corn -- turns out to be a pivot on his pet domestic issue.

The problem with his failed bid to put Gramps into the thresher of the stock market was not, it turns out, that he should have been paying attention to Iraq as it spiraled into an unrivalled shitstorm, no no no, it was that the PSA putsch set back his work on immigration.

I believe that running the Social Security idea right after the '04 elections was a mistake. I should have argued for immigration reform. And the reason why is, is that -- you know, one of the lessons I learned as governor of Texas, by the way, is legislative branches tend to be risk-adverse [sic]. In other words, sometimes legislatures have the tendency to ask, why should I take on a hard task when a crisis is not imminent?

Why indeed? Looks pretty smart from this vantage, tho'.

The point is this: though the president tacked toward the Pawlenty-big-tent faction, saying that he should have made immigration reform -- whatever that means in reality, its connotation is "immigration crackdown" -- a top priority, more serious than fixing Iraq in 2004, is music to the ears of those in the Hensarling Quasar.

The point of the Bush Record, among other PR salvos, is that 43 was competent. Why else would anyone publish "The Policies of the Bush Administration," than to say, "See, we did too have policies..." And we shouldn't have let some of them slip through our hands. Circumstances beyond our control.

What all this means is that Bush denies responsibility for any ethically consequential decisions. His one mistake was a mistake of political calculation. The rest of the bad stuff that happened to him is exactly that, stuff that happened. "Disappointments," as the man says. WMD, Abu Ghraib, chaos in Iraq, Bin Laden free, all "disappointments." Other failures of conscience aren't even disappointing: Katrina, for instance. And let's not start on 43's essential bloodthirst regarding Gaza. On a day when 90,000 civilians were marched out of Gaza, during a week where the 900th civilian death was announced, the President had this to say:

And a definition of a sustainable cease-fire is that Hamas stops firing rockets into Israel. And there will not be a sustainable cease-fire if they continue firing rockets. I happen to believe the choice is Hamas's to make. And we believe that the best way to ensure that there is a sustainable cease-fire is to work with Egypt to stop the smuggling of arms into the Gaza that enables Hamas to continue to fire rockets. And so countries that supply weapons to Hamas have got to stop. And the international community needs to continue to pressure them to stop providing weapons.

Hamas, obviously, if they're interested in a sustainable cease-fire, needs to stop arming. And then, of course, countries contingent to the Gaza need to work to stop the smuggling.
[snip]
The challenge, of course, has been to lay out the conditions so that a peaceful state can emerge -- in other words, helping the Palestinians in the West Bank develop security forces, which we have worked hard to do over the past years. And those security forces are now becoming more efficient, and Prime Minister Fayyad is using them effectively. The challenge is to develop -- help the Palestinians develop a democracy -- I mean, and a vibrant economy in their -- that will help lead to democracy.

And the challenge, of course, is always complicated by the fact that people are willing to murder to stop the advance of freedom. And so the -- Hamas, or for that matter al Qaeda, or other extremist groups, are willing to use violence to prevent free states from emerging. And that's the big challenge.

And so the answer is -- will this ever happen? I think it will. And I know we have advanced the process.

I'll probably be coming back to that piece later.

Suffice it to say, Denial is in full effect in the Bush White House, years after it became cliche. The man showed Anger when contradicted, particularly about Katrina. He has Accepted that, even though he made no bad decisions, certain calculations, "Mission Accomplished" among them, were wrong.

And now, as a competent, ideologically sound and successful ex-president, George Walker Bush can go back to doing what he does best: raising Cash. Immigration top priority, Palestinians die, Iraq no problem, Cash rules everything around me. Give him a few years for the dust to settle, and we'll see him in Oklahoma City or Sugar Land TX, pimping his memoirs on behalf of Jeb Hensarling, or in Richmond's West End pimping Eric Cantor. Wait for it.
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Why Can't Hosni Mubarak Play Hardball?

My apologies, Dear Reader; what I thought was expert analysis-in-advance turns out to be little more than conventional wisdom come a few days early. For instance, see the 8 January piece:

Egypt has to come out of negotiations with a truce that opens Gaza, or Mubarak risks losing his country to the Muslim Brotherhood just when he wants to pass control to his son.(emphasis added)

Now comes the NYT on the mental state of folks in Cairo:

Nowhere in the Arab world is the gap between the street and the government so wide as here in Egypt, which has a peace treaty with Israel and has refused to allow free passage of goods and people through its border with Gaza, a decision that has been attacked by Islamic and Arab leaders and proved deeply troubling to many Egyptians.

Same as it ever was: Mubarak cannot be trusted, his government came out early against Hamas, the MB is attracting new support, and now government-puppet imams are being told to go on and let off some steam at the Jews.

That was one of the funny parts about Mubarak's apparent response to his street problem: that he sees it as a PR crisis, rather than a failure of policy. Instead of taking the direct route and opening Rafah unilaterally, or sending out Egyptian bulldozers to tear down chunks of wall, or working indirectly and just using the threat of unilateral action in negotiations to get the border open, he's decided that all his people really want is to hate the Jews, and that the cathartic experience of listening to Friday prayers at the state-run mosque will ease their pain.

Is Mubarak loath to jeopardize US aid to Egypt? It is a lot of aid, after all. (Christian Science Monitor has $50B as the figure.) Less than gov't aid to AIG, but a lot per year, billion-plus. Thing is, Hosni's been telling US presidents for 28 years that he's their only shot at peace in the Middle East's largest nation. He's warded off local and national elections, rephrased our appeals for help on terrorism into political street-sweeping, etc. He can tell the US that either he gets what he needs, or he dissolves parliament, Egypt has free elections tomorrow and a Muslim Brotherhood plurality the day after that.

But the really interesting thing is that Mubarak longs for Fatah supremacy, in the way that one would bring '88 back. Seriously, throwback politics will destroy Egypt's tranquility. So here are some notes for the Premier, or the Generalissimo, whatever Hosni calls himself:

Yasser Arafat is dead,

Even if he were alive, Fatah would still be a corrupt edifice with a PR-savvy former revolutionary as its figurehead, like Mandela and the ANC,

And decades of one-party government, anywhere in the world, except perhaps Russia where people have vodka instead of ambition or hope (sorry), causes people to "seethe" as you no doubt read in the NYT today

You cannot simultaneously blackmail the US (as I've basically urged you to do) with the spectre of an MB takeover of Parliament and yet pine for the return of Fatah to Gaza, as if Palestine hasn't already shown its preference, as if it doesn't already have a "street" to be appeased or broken.


And I guess that's the thing. Mubarak wants Israel to break the Gaza street. He expects Fatah to step into a void. And he's wrong. If there is a void in Gaza, Israel will step into it. And the Gaza street won't disappear, it will move somewhere, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, maybe Egypt.

See what I'm saying, Hosni? Either you play hardball now and get your borders open, or next year when the IDF is resettling one and a half million Gazans, you become their unwilling host and they your unwilling guests. And I wonder what kind of wack-ass speeches your trained imams will have to give out then...
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Read This One More Time...

...and see if you don't agree that the United Nations has reason to believe that its relief and welfare operations in Gaza are the target of the Israeli offensive. Accordingly, UN spokespersons have been authorized to describe in detail the mass deaths of civilians that have occurred in the past 48 hours.

Ban Ki-Moon is calling for an investigation into the deaths of 40 Palestinians at a UN-run school that was shelled by the IDF. One of its drivers was killed at Kerem Shalom Thursday; two trucks were bombed Monday. The Red Cross was fired on at Netzarim Thursday during the second 3-out-of-48-hour ceasefire, and has halted relief operations.

20-odd dead aid workers per 200 dead Hamas fighters is a ratio indicative of targeting. The UN and Red Cross are targets, and are fighting back in the press. Whether that works, whether a media blitz has any sway at all over Ehud Barak, who's having the time of his life, is another question entirely.
I'm pretty sure we're past the point where language wars, negotiations, etc. have any relevance. The talking cure is dead. And if it's grim enough to convince the Vatican to use the phrase "concentration camp," yeah, no one's getting talked down from this war.

As soon as the first aid convoy was struck, that's when Israel's intentions were made plain. NGOs are the last barrier to Israeli supremacy in Gaza; they are the last people watching, as journalists are still verboten; absent Hamas, they are the only people who teach children, deliver water and take out the trash. When they disappear, Gaza disappears.

So look for more UN spokespersons to tell us more stories of children with their mothers' corpses, but don't look for any cease-fire until Gaza is swept and cleared.
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Hezbollah is in the Game?

From AP:

The rockets from Lebanon raised the specter of renewed hostilities on Israel's northern frontier, just 2 1/2 years after Israel battled the Hezbollah guerrilla group to a 34-day stalemate. War broke out between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006 as Israel battled Palestinian militants in Gaza, on Israel's southern borders.

No group claimed responsibility. Lebanon's government condemned the attack, and Hezbollah — which now plays an integral role in Lebanon's government — denied any responsibility for the rocket fire, which lightly injured two Israelis.

If Hezbollah can't be scared back into sitting on its hands in Parliament, then Egypt and Jordan have problems -- as neighbors to the Palestinians with a long history of screwing the Palestinians who are not currently in the game -- Egypt in the near term, Jordan at one remove.

Egypt has to come out of negotiations with a truce that opens Gaza, or Mubarak risks losing his country to the Muslim Brotherhood just when he wants to pass control to his son. If Hezbollah distract the IDF enough to take the heat off Gaza (witness 2006, where the Gaza tit-for-tat was occluded by war in the north) Mubarak could be weakened enough to allow slightly more free elections. That's the foot in the door for the MB, and Egypt's days as a tidy little dictatorship are done.

Jordan will have a problem first when refugees from this conflict end up in the West Bank, and start reminding people of how the Palestinians got screwed by their brether'n and sister'n across the River. Jordan will have another problem later when Israel starts to move settlers to a more-easily-managed version of the 1967 border and slowly prepares an assault on the West Bank. Expect a restless West Bank for the three years before Israel declares "all-out war" on all Palestinians, a timeframe I'm thinking will be mid-2010 to end of 2013, during which period expect multiple suicide attacks in Amman, and a spectacular bombing of the Port of Haifa.

On 27 December, ds wrote:

Egypt has no further incentive to keep Rafah closed. Ditto Syria and a tight leash on Hezbollah.

which, you know, we think of here as an obvious conclusion. When the balloon goes up, etc. But, you know, not everyone sees things this way. Today the NYT lede is "Hezbollah is not a problem; peace is being brokered in Cairo; we're done here." The same article contains the terms of this miraculous peace:

The senior Israeli official raised the possibility of reaching “tacit agreements” with Hamas to end rocket fire, while also persuading Egypt to allow American and perhaps European army engineers to help seal its border with Gaza above and below ground.

Hamas is insisting that any new arrangement include the reopening of border crossings for trade with Israel and the reopening of the Rafah crossing into Egypt for people.

Clearly, I jumped the gun on calling the end of NYT's wishful thinking. This shit is candyass.

To translate: first, walking out of Cairo with a real truce is not important, because Israel can always draw up "tacit agreements" with Hamas. Please provide examples of such. Second, this truce must contain a hermetically sealed Egypt-Gaza border AND an open Rafah crossing. That's not some merely onerous diplomatic task; it's an antinomy.

These discussions are a joke. Mubarak will realize this soon enough. The only question I have is, Does anyone in the Arab world have the balls to open Rafah?
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No More Wishful Thinking at NYT

How indeed to square "ground invasion is a course no one is advocating," with

This time, Israeli military commanders are leading from the front, not trying to direct the infantry from television screens. This time, the military has clear plans, in stages, drawn up with a year’s preparation. This time, there is no illusion about winning a war only from the air.

Couple days ago, no one was preparing for the shit, today they've been preparing for a year.

The scales fall from the eyes of the NYT Jerusalem bureau...We're all men now...
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Personal Best for the IDF

Israel is allowing aid into Gaza. For three hours a day. Journalists are still verboten. But this is the lede in a story that goes on the parrot the IDF's cover for shelling civilians. IDF says a Hamas mortar team was inside the UN-run (although I suppose everything in Gaza that is administered at all is UN-run) school in Jabaliya. McClatchy had an anonymous source (which we might as well assume is the IDF) saying that the mortar crew (two dudes) was in the school. NYT identifies its source and says one of the men was "in the area."

Also, butchers prefer Pepsi. Can that piece be real?

640 at this point, though as NYT says, "no reliable and current figures in recent days."

The magic number here is 1,191, the UN count of civilian dead in Lebanon in the 2006 war. Let's add about 500 (the world's best guess at the number of Hezbollah fighters killed then) for a total of 1,691. At 60 dead a day, Gaza's going to smoke that record.

And with 4 dead IDF by friendly fire, Israel can boldly claim another personal best, beating Hamas at its own game.

Much mazel!
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Covering All My Bases; Murderers Who Should Be Clubbed To Death

From the Dispatch on New Year's Day:

"Israel has the moral right and responsibility to defend its citizens," wrote Marsha F. Hurwitz, president and chief executive officer of the Columbus Jewish Federation, in a statement to The Dispatch.

"It is reacting as any nation would that is under constant attack. Imagine if there were terrorists in Worthington firing missiles that were falling at Broad and High streets. What would we as citizens demand from our government in order to protect us?"

This is why Israel has carte blanche to conduct actions verging on genocide. Among those Americans who have any reason to care about the Middle East (admittedly few, and people can and should care about whatever they want, not judging) cunts like Marsha outnumber real human beings 5-1.

If there were terrorists in "Worthington" firing "missiles" at Broad and High, I would expect them to be rooted out. On this Marsha and I agree.

What we don't agree on, obviously, is the facts. Namely, that Worthington OH is closer to a densely populated territory (downtown Columbus) by a factor of 2 than anywhere in Gaza is to any dense Israeli population. Second, Gazans have glorified bottle rockets, not "missiles". This is why, not to belabor a point, up until the current fighting, 2 count them two Israelis had been killed by katyushas in the past year. And third, if my government were responsible for locking the people of Worthington inside their city because of how they vote, if the people of northern Franklin County were bound by treaty to shoot anyone from Worthington trying to escape, if Worthington by virtue of the lockdown had 100 percent unemployment, I would damn well expect violence.

Anybody ever been to Columbus' East Side? If Marsha Hurwitz wants to have a discussion, I know a halal joint on Cleveland Avenue. Or the Pita Pit on N. High.

Peace
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Amateur Hour

Billy Rich is done, no hay oficia, and never trust a man with a neck like a pale hamster. A California company paid the governor $110,000 and received contracts worth $1.4 million. This was presumably something BHO and Co. knew about and just ignored.

For the new appointment, I vote for Ed Markey. Anyone from New Mexico is now verboten, Schweitzer and Sebelius are heartland Democrat governors who need to stay put for party-building, Ed Rendell though I love him is another man with a hamster-like neck and thus untrustworthy (seriously, you think Chicago politics is old-school? Try Philadelphia), ditto anyone with hands in pockets of Oil or Coal.

So the questions are two: Are all America's governors desperate for cash? And, What does an Obama administration possibly stand to gain by hiring all these Clintonites?

What was it that Billy Rich brought to the table? His exaggerated Hispanicness, even if it exists and accrues a political benefit, has nothing to do with the rational execution of the administration's energy policy; at Homeland Security or HHS it might, maybe. It's not a payoff for Billy Rich's endorsement, since getting that was like pulling shark teeth. Surely those allegedly numerous but really just very vocal Hillary-or-the-Highway, Limbaugh Democrats would have been appeased by Hillary's own appointment; Rich does nothing for them.
This was a lazy choice, made in haste, and it's coming back to bite BHO on the ass. I'm going to go watch Philadelphia vs. Minnesota...

Whoa -- State News Update

Fear not, concerned citizens of both Russia and Syria, your leaders are going through an incredible period of ball-growth...together!

State news in Syria has Medvedev and al-Assad meeting to discuss the violation of treaties and agreements. Perhaps also they will play with their dolls, and have tea.

Gaza Beer-League Assessment Piece

I understand that events outpace our ability to make sense of them, but really: "Is the end of Hamas rule Israel's real aim?" By the time this story was up, Israel was in Gaza, boots on the ground. By the time I had read it, the IDF owned Gaza City. And yet, as of 11AM Sunday, no edits to this:

Implicit in Mr. Benn’s argument, however, is that the only way to stop Hamas from gaining legitimacy is for Israel to fully occupy Gaza again, more than three years after removing its soldiers and settlers. That is a prospect practically no one in Israel or abroad is advocating.

Somebody was advocating invasion because troops were massed on the border all weekend; Israeli diplomats when asked about a truce were pondering the nature of language instead of working on one; and oh right, women and children continued to die. Are we to believe that the men who said "all-out war" on a Tuesday are going to revise their comments on Saturday?

This is some slo-pitch, beer-league bullshit. With evidence to the contrary mounting, we are meant to believe Israel's motivations to be sincere? That this isn't the last part of a years'-long land-grab? That this isn't a model for how the West Bank will be won? That somehow, protection from the strategic equivalent of bottle rockets requires aerial bombardment of densely-packed civilian areas?

"Hamas rule" is what's being attacked, not Palestinians? I don't think Bin Laden resorted to that kind of craven, self-exculpatory language when he last killed American civilians, you know, "We are against the rule of Bush," "The rule of Clinton in America must end," etc.

The sooner we stop sugar-coating this thing, and start talking about where refugees will go, how to get doctors into the region, how Hamas will gain political power in the West Bank, etc., the better.

"Who will lead Gaza when Hamas is gone?" Try, "Who will lead Hamas when Gaza is gone?"
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Quickly, now...

Quick. First, the fact that Israel is "running out of targets," leads MSNBC to conclude that "Diplomacy Gains Steam." Once there's nothing left to argue over, then we can argue. Can we talk about Proportional Response? Can we talk about the average pothole a Katyusha leaves in the street? Let's leave the President out of this one, though, because he seems to believe that kids cowering in basements are committing acts of terror...

AP has hundreds of Palestinians allowed to leave Gaza, as though that were somehow magnanimous. Isn't the point to rid Palestine of Palestinians? Isn't that what checkpoints, doubled roads, the long wall, the spread of Jewish settlements, what all that is for?

Civilians leaving is the worst thing possible for Hamas. The threat of civilian casualites (Again, a distinction whose goalposts move. Is a Hamas parliamentarian asleep in his home a combatant? When a fourteen-year-old throwing rocks is killed by IDF small arms fire, it's a combat fatality. When he is bombed to death alongside his mother and sisters, it's civilian. The only sure non-combatants, according to the UN, are women. How much you wanna bet that distinction changes once there is no Gaza for those women to return to?), like I said, the threat of civilian casualties, we presume, is the only thing holding Israel back. They leave, and all bets are off. I mean, if we assume that this is something other than the apocalypse.

Which is the funny part about Nasrallah's allegation of a grand Arab plot against the Palestinians, whereby the leaders of the softie Arabs (Egypt, Jordan, Turkey i guess) give Israel carte blanche until Monday. At which point, Nasrallah says, the tanks turn back into pumpkins. Hassan Nasrallah may be the Islamic world's premiere satirist. How much more could he shame the Arab governments, so obviously powerless to come to Gaza's aid? Well, by mocking their pretension to power. "Oh yeah, I heard it from Mubarak, he's gonna give the Israelis 5 days, and then he's gonna bring the hammer down. You know, really fuck 'em up. Ha."

So Nasrallah knows this is the end, that Israel is going to wipe the map clean, that the first step was pulling its settlers out, that the ultimate intent is to resettle Gaza with Israelis. Pretty coastline, great weather. You can grow excellent strawberries there. Somebody check my Leviticus, what's the Hebrew for cleanse?