a hard rain

I found this article linked at Daily Briefing and, although the link looked legit, as I started to read it it I thought, "this has got to be a piss-take." By the time you've waded through any number of non-sequiturs to the "hero" Donald Rumsfeld, you're reeling. And then George Bush "has to bomb Iran" before he leaves office. Because Iran's "rulers are religio-ideological fanatics."

Earlier in the piece, he writes "Our intellectual contributions helped to defeat communism in the last century and, God willing, they will help to defeat jihadism in this one." Doesn't "God willing" more or less equal "Insh'allah?" So, who are the "religio-ideological fanatics?"

And I particularly liked this bit:

This defense should be global in scope. There is a crying need in today’s ideological wars for something akin to the Congress for Cultural Freedom of the Cold War, a global circle of intellectuals and public figures who share a devotion to democracy. The leaders of this movement might include Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel, and Anwar Ibrahim.

Now, which acclaimed conservative global leader is missing from the list?

What, doesn't Australia count? After all the Coalition of the Willing propaganda that the stainless steel rodent and that buffoon of a foreign minister have rammed down our throats for the last four years?

Anyway, you get to the end and see it's by someone at the American Heritage Institute and you realise he's utterly serious. So, on this advice the US bombs Iran. Simple, it has that capability, no doubt. But then what? Has the AE learnt nothing from Iraq? And these are the self-styled new global intellectuals? We're in deeper shit than I thought.

'nuff for now. I am still processing the weekend in Sydney. Long lost distant relatives, stories of Europe, of dispossession and loss of identity, of unfortunate marriages, the weird things that happen in families. It'll take me a while to sort it into something that any reader might relate to. But suffice to say, I have a new appreciation of the value of oral histories and the people who guard and disseminate them.