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The United States demands that other countries provide witnesses to United Nations inspectors and investigators and allow the witnesses to be questioned in private, but when the UN asks for private visits with Guantanamo detainees, the Bush administration said no.

As the BBC reports the UN rejected Guantanamo visit offer, because the US refused to allow the private visits.

More and more the US is being compared to Iraq under Saddam, and from the point of view of an outsider, we are looking worse and worse.

Having already broken the unwritten rule about partisan attacks while speaking at military bases, the Shrubbery is now doing it while on a foreign trip. The man has absolutely no class, and is an embarrassment to the country. The only thing that would help his abysmal poll numbers would be to act “Presidential”, but he has chosen to be a candidate in a non-existent campaign.

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It is a matter of sheer coincidence that the day a purported post by his hoppiness shows up announcing a Thanksgiving trip to Paris by the marsupial master of miniscule and spouse, the BBC reports that the Australians are beginning to market a line of products made from kangaroos, including possibly SKIPPY STEAK.

Developing…

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John McKay has a post on the introduction of the cardboard box into Strong Museum’s Toy Hall of Fame.

After reading about FEMA’s pre-Christmas present to hurricane evacuees, an attempt to force them out of hotels, I think the refrigerator carton may become the new FEMA standard for housing.

While I can understand that it is much cheaper to live in a rental unit than a hotel, there are many fewer rental units available after the hurricanes, and the FEMA requirement that landlords have to accept amount of the FEMA voucher as the monthly rent doesn’t correspond to reality. FEMA’s estimate of the rental price for a market would seem to be on the low side and further restricts choices in an already tight housing market.

Cardboard cartons may well be in the future for many evacuees.

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Culture Ghost has a post regarding a wish to be on O’Reilly’s “Enemies List”, which many may have read, but go back and look at the side-by-side pictures of Joe McCarthy and O’Reilly.

Maybe it’s something the bile does to your features, a warning sign, like the garish colors on venomous reptiles.

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There are a lot of comparisons around between the war in Iraq and Vietnam, but, at the command level, the mistakes are older.

Karen at Dark Bilious Vapors goes back to the Peninsula War of the early 19^th century for Murdering Officers, an allusion to the Sharpe’s Rifles series.

The Crimean War continued the tradition with The Charge of the Light Brigade, of which French General Pierre Bosquet said: “C’est magnifique, mais il n’est pas la guerre.” [It’s magnificent, but it isn’t war.]

Ambrose Burnsides is a Civil War example of this type of officer at the The Battle of Fredericksburg, as was, uncharacteristically, Lee with Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.

But the concept reached its zenith in the Great War, which lead to many remarkable antiwar books, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque perhaps the best known.

The Battle of the Somme which was fought from July 1^st until November 18^th, 1916 resulted in 420,000 British casualties, 200,000 French casualties, and 500,000 German casualties and only altered the front line 12 kilometers. Approximately 20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day alone, but General Haig continued to send waves of troops to be mown down by machine guns.

This is the probable setting for Stanley Kubrik’s Paths of Glory in which the character, General Broulard says: “There are few things more fundamentally stimulating that watching another man die.”

This administration is filled with Broulards, sacrificing the children of others to justify their obsessions and unwilling to admit their failures.

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If the Republicans would really like to “support the troops”, instead of asking a bunch of politicians if the US should withdraw immediately, why don’t we sponsor a vote among the troops in Iraq?

We should be sure that those wearing the 18,000 body armor vests that have been recalled as defective are included in the vote.

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