Article in Guardian Timothy Garton Ash: If we miss this last chance, then our soldiers will have died in vain, has incited a flurry of robust commentary, including this (apparently from poet Sydney Bernard Smith):

October 26, 2006 02:42 AM

December 1998: Blair - Having Bombed Baghdad, again! - Speaks from the Doorway of No. 10.

“The world’s a safer place tonight!”
- with babies in their graves,
& some of them in more than one...
Resourceful paleface braves
fire off their missiles, & recoil
at twice the speed of light
to wash their hands. They’ve made the world
a safer place tonight.

Scroll down the page for another slab of Smith.

 

The Year Of Playing Dirtier

Negative Ads Get Positively Surreal
By Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 27, 2006; A01

Rep. Ron Kind pays for sex!

Well, that's what the Republican challenger for his Wisconsin congressional seat, Paul R. Nelson, claims in new ads, the ones with "XXX" stamped across Kind's face.
It turns out that Kind -- along with more than 200 of his fellow hedonists in the House -- opposed an unsuccessful effort to stop the National Institutes of Health from pursuing peer-reviewed sex studies. According to Nelson's ads, the Democrat also wants to "let illegal aliens burn the American flag" and "allow convicted child molesters to enter this country."
To Nelson, [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/26/AR2006102601811_pf.html|that doesn't even qualify as negative campaigning].
"Negative campaigning is vicious personal attacks," he said in an interview. "This isn't personal at all."
By 2006 standards, maybe it isn't.
On the brink of what could be a power-shifting election, it is kitchen-sink time: Desperate candidates are throwing everything. While negative campaigning is a tradition in American politics, this year's version in many races has an eccentric shade, filled with allegations of moral bankruptcy and sexual perversion.
-----------------
Gus: In the US, most TV, from cable to free to air, that has anything to do with what one calls news is actually more than 90 per cent advertorials, propaganda or even directly paid advertising full of lies that become the whole program... proper analysis or understanding of politics? forget it, everyone is fed a hamburger of news-mince and that shall suffice to form an opinion on the delicacies of French cooking... Frightening attitude...

From the new York Times

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/world/middleeast/29iraqwomen.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all|“Oh open-handed Tigris!”] it says. “Our ambitions have fallen so low that even the simplest among them is not promised.”

From The Independent

Baghdad is under siege

By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil, Northern Iraq
Published: 01 November 2006
[http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1945769.ece|Sunni insurgents] have cut the roads linking the city to the rest of Iraq. The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the capital.
As American and British political leaders argue over responsibility for the crisis in Iraq, the country has taken another lurch towards disintegration.
Well-armed Sunni tribes now largely surround Baghdad and are fighting Shia militias to complete the encirclement.

 

From our Glass-House-less ABC Leaked US report shows Iraq close to 'chaos' A leaked military report shows the US Central Command believes Iraq is one step closer to what it describes as "chaos". The classified material includes a colour-coded bar chart with the word "peace" in green at one end and "chaos" in red at the other. The level of sectarian violence is marked with an arrow close to the word "chaos". A Pentagon spokesman says it is "regrettable" the classified briefing has been leaked. White House spokesman Tony Snow says the situation in Iraq has since changed. "If you got the same report last week you would have found out the national sectarian incidents from the 21st to the 27th dropped 23 per cent," he said. Opinion polls show the Iraq war is the number one concern of voters ahead of next week's US mid-term elections. ------ Gus: Fantastic how Mr Snow does his snow job... "national sectarian incidents from the 21st to the 27th" are very precisely framed 336 hours in which less bloodshed happened possibly because various insurgent "armies" are repositioning themselves against each other and against the US presence... This and other small but clear indices show that the chaos is getting better organised...