Who’d’a Thunk The Belgians Would Be So Creative?

Young Frankenstein homage, exhuming the Belgian archbishop with ties to the child abuse scandal..

The Belgians thought it would be better to hire local labor to exhume the Cardinal...

Well, it has been an eventful week. General MacArthur shot his mouth off again to the press and Harry Truman was forced to sack him. Oooops, I mean General McChrystal shot his mouth off to a reporter from Rolling Stone and Obama, after months of McChrystal’s badmouthing and leaking, was finally forced into firing him. McChrystal’s boss and predecessor, General Petraeus, will take over operations in Afghanistan that, suprise! surprise! we’ve been told will probably take even longer. After all, those 50 al-Qaeda in the mountains need to be kept from rejoining the rest of their crew … in PAKISTAN. Yeah, yeah, I know, we’re trying to keep out the Taliban too so we can keep our friend Karzai in power–who, it has been speculated, has already joined the Taliban. Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows, but the United States will continue to waste money and troops there because we won’t accept defeat in a war that lost its meaning 5 years ago.

Anyway, on to the real story…no, not the one about Fox and Friends wondering what that BP robot was thinking when it accidentally knocked the cap off the Gulf gusher–Jon Stewart already handled that. Hey, guys, The Terminator was just a MOVIE. No, I’m talking about the latest development in the ongoing story of Churchly pederasty. Holy Hercule Poirot! The Belgian fuzz raided church offices to seize evidence about priestly child abuse and its coverup. You gotta hand it to those Belgians. They ain’t sitting on their hands with this one. But the icing on the cake was the opening of two Cardinal’s tombs–what, did they think they were going to catch them in a smoking erection? Evidently, somebody thought that evidence might have been buried with the prelates, instead of being burned like anyone with half a mind would have done. On the other hand, the Church is full of bureaucrats, better photocopy those papers before you burn them, just in case we need them again!

While giving the Belgian police high marks for energy, initiative and creativity, I have to ask what they were smoking. Did someone read/watch The Da Vinci Code one too many times? How about Young Frankenstein? In any case, Our Holy Father is in a state of Righteous Dudgeon–something he forgot about doing while HE was in charge of investigating priestly child abuse–How DARE they act like the Church was full of bankers? I mean, criminals! “Huff! Huff!” he huffed, “Thou Shalt Not Hear the end of this!” And the former Hitlerjugend member from Bavaria (in what was to become WEST Germany) called the Belgian cops worse than Communists!

The Belgian church is now thinking of suing the Belgian police if the Jesuits can torture out a legal basis for the suit.

Finally, as we heard this morning. Robert Byrd, longest serving Senator in US history, passed away last night. Byrd was a living example that you CAN teach an old dog new tricks, having turned from a member of the KKK to one of the most reliably liberal members of the Senate. He will be missed. Our condolences to his family, the Senate and the people of West Virginia.

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Blaming the Victims for BP’s Negligence

Bert opines that if we had less regulation, BP would have had fewer corners to cut while drilling Deepwater

Explosion is CG--No Squirrels were hurt in the production of this cartoon

Yup, that’s right, it isn’t Biggish Petroleum’s fault that the Gulf of Mexico is turning into La Brea East. After all, they have such a lovely service record with hundreds of safety violations … in the last 2 years! So it couldn’t possibly be THEIR fault for being in such hot … errr … water. How dare President Obama shake them down for damages when it manifestly is not their fault.

It’s the Democrat’s fault for allowing themselves to be bullied into toothless regulation. It’s the fault of those damn liberals who forced them to drill so far off-shore. It’s the fault of the American people for buying those gas guzzlers and not forcing the auto manufacturers to make electric cars. It’s their fault for not throwing away their incandescent light bulbs and replacing them with mercury-filled CFLs that are 10 times as expensive and require a HAZMAT team to come clean up if one breaks. It’s their fault for keeping on using gas and oil instead of smoke-belching coal, since they don’t have any other viable alternatives. Except ultra-safe nuclear! It’s the fault of the alternative energy folks for not developing their technologies on a shoestring while Congress is giving subsidies to the oil folks who are already making the largest profits in history. It’s the fault of that guy in all the emergency contact documents who had the temerity to die without informing the oil companies of the need to update their plans. It’s the fault of the turtles in the Gulf for being so delicious that they’re endangered.

Yeah. And as the bank robber said to the security guard:

Damn you! if you hadn’t gotten untied and started screaming, I wouldn’t have had to shoot you.

See. It’s YOUR fault.

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Keeping the Gulf Crisis in the Short-Range View

David Cameron explains to President Obama how the needs of British pensions outweigh the loss of the Gulf of Mexico.

In Saturday's talk, Obama assured David Cameron that BP is important to the US

WASHINGTON (IVC)–President Obama and British Prime Minister met by phone on Saturday to discuss the ongoing crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. Cameron expressed his deep regret that billions of barrels of British oil were being lost in the Gulf of Mexico and that it was unfortunate that it might destroy an entire international eco-system. The President and Prime Minister reaffirmed the “special relationship” between the US and UK and expressed how they’d like to meet in person soon to administer the official special reach-arounds. Cameron reminded Obama how important BP was to the world’s economy, which, he added, “includes the USA.” According to Robert Reich, 12% of British pensions are invested in BP. Cameron continued that while BP was a British company, the problem is strictly an American one. “It’s not as if the oil will enter the Gulf Stream and head out across the Atlantic,” he noted. Obama, for his part, apologized for the emphasis everyone seemed to be placing on called BP “British” Petroleum, which was merely an unfortunate accident from the fact that BP happens to be a British company. Obama further said that he understood that this accident was not an act of war and that we would do everything possible to avoid invading Britain any time soon. The rest of the conversation was devoted to talk about their families.

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Piracy On the High Seas

60 kilometers out into the sea, the Israeli navy boards an aid ship to Gaza from Turkey and kills 9 unarmed civilians. Let's turn public opinion in our favor, boys.

Aaaaaarrrrrrrrr, this load of medical rubber hoses could be used to make giant slingshots to use against us!

I am somewhat loath to discuss Israel’s latest examples of aggressive self-defense. I belong to an online political discussion group with some friends. We have virtually stopped any discussion of Israel because it immediately devolves from a discussion into an emotion-filled argument with unspoken charges of anti-Semitism directed at any criticism of Israel. Let’s just say for the record that Arabs are Semites too, the cousins of the Jewish race if you believe your Bible stories…or your Qu’ran.

Doesn’t Israel have the right to defend itself? Of course it does. But that right falls a bit short of piracy on the high seas and the murder of civilians (I’m going to keep my criticism to the issue at hand rather than get into any kind of hoohah). Uri Avnery made some interesting points in his own critique on his news site. The arrival of this aid ship wasn’t any surprise to Israel. They’d had months, nearly a year, to prepare a response. And basically, they had three choices. Let the ship go without incident, and undermine their own blockade by doing so. Stop the ship and inspect it for articles of military use…and then let it go, affirming their right to blockade but giving a measured response to a humanitarian effort. Or put their knives between their teeth, drop onto the ship in the middle of the night like a swarm of pirates 35 miles out to sea and when the unarmed civilians aboard try to defend themselves with deck chairs and other improvised weapons, mow them down rather than throw a few canisters of tear gas. Guess which they chose? Arrrrrrrrr, right you are, matey!

Avnery compares the situation to the Exodus incident (a MAJOR motion picture by Otto Preminger from the book by Leon Uris, with Paul Newman as the handsome Israeli!) from Israel’s formative years. Why had the British done something so completely stupid? They weren’t stupid people. No, their actions came from arrogance, Avnery suggests, and that arrogance turned public opinion against them. Israel’s arrogance (and bunker mentality) is fast turning the world against them and they stand to lose their only Islamic ally, the Turks, because of it. Pretty soon, all that will be left to them is the US and as had been noted (in an article I can’t find right now because the net is acting wonky), the new generation of American Jews is not as solidly gung-ho behind Israel as the previous one. Only the Christian right (Glenn Beck IS Christian, isn’t he? We’ll find out when he reveals God’s Plan later this summer) in unquestioning in their support and heck, they’re seeking Armageddon!

The only problem will be finding a replacement for Paul Newman. Hey, Jake Gyllenhaal makes a great Persian!

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