Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: ‘In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country’.

US Military: ‘In the army we don’t have homosexuals like in your country’*

* Via The Daily Show

Yay UK! Yay us! Yay Gordon Brown! First! First! First! First! First! First! First! We’re back! We’re number one! Revel in it, bathe in it, gloat in it. Up yours, Angela Merkel! Hop off, Nicholas Sarkozy! In your face, Berlusconi! Our man gets to Obama first!

Although talks will be dominated by the recession, the two leaders are also expected to discuss the situation in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

They’re vital, Earth-shaking issues, to be sure, that can only be resolved between two political titans. You can see why Gordon felt compelled to get on a plane and travel all that way in an undignified scramble for face to face talks with Obama.

It’s money well spent even in these times of thrift. No doubt they’ll throw off their jackets, roll up their sleeves and talk deep into the night about how they will re-fashion our broken world…

The prime minister will hold half an hour of personal talks with Mr Obama…

Ahem. Ok. Sorry, everyone. As you were. But what’s this…?

Writing in the Sunday Times, Mr Brown said the two leaders would discuss a deal “whose impact can stretch from the villages of Africa to reforming the financial institutions of London and New York”.

Maybe they communicate using mental telepathy – exchanging their massively complex and detailed ideas at the speed of thought, perhaps?

No?

Look, I’m sure something meaningful will get said and done in half an hour, you know, after the handshakes and the introductions and the small talk and the photocall. Hopefully the photographs will be nice. Obviously pictures of Gordon skyping the new president wouldn’t have looked as good on the Number 10 website or sounded as glamorous on the Downing Street Twitter feed…

Still, first, eh? First! First! First! First! First! First! First!

Update: Oh no! We’re not even going to get a proper photo opportunity. Downing Street should think about taking an official photoshopper with them on foreign junkets, just in case.

This Donald Rumsfeld character sounds like one messed-up dude…

In the case of Abu Ghraib, there is again a trail of evidence showing it was Rumsfeld who personally decreed and monitored stress positions, individual phobias, such as fear of dogs, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. One US army officer, Janis Karpinski, has described finding in Abu Ghraib a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators. It was a memorandum signed by defence secretary Rumsfeld, authorising techniques such as use of dogs, stress positions, starvation. On the paper, in Rumsfeld’s handwriting, was the terse instruction, “Make sure this happens!!”

Alexander Cockburn thinks there might now be a good chance that Rumsfeld along with Bush, Cheney and the rest ‘will be the target of public war crime hearings and even criminal prosecutions, here in the United States’. We’ll see.

If I was Rumsfeld’s lawyer I’d push for a ‘diminished responsibility’ defence (or whatever the American equivalent is). They’d have a good chance with it, I’d say. It looks very much as if an extremely disturbed person ran the Pentagon during those years.

I think we can all agree by now that the war in Iraq was defined by incompetence, hubris, stupidity, and corruption. Remember this?

The US has lost track of about 190,000 weapons issued to Iraqi security forces since the 2003 invasion, some of which will have ended up in the hands of insurgents, according to an official report published in Washington. Among the missing items are AK-47 rifles, pistols, body armour and helmets.

Still, life’s a learning curve, isn’t it? Once we re-trained our sights on Afghanistan, our leaders and tacticians could obviously be expected to have learned from their experiences and mistakes made in Iraq, couldn’t they?

Oh. No, no they couldn’t…

The US military has failed to keep track of thousands of weapons shipped to Afghanistan, leaving them vulnerable to being lost or stolen, a report says.

[...]

It found that, in the four years up to June 2008, the US military failed to keep complete records on some 222,000 weapons entering the country.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world’s only superpower.

Like… wow. Meet the new boss, not the same as the old boss:

Barack Obama embarked on the wholesale deconstruction of George Bush’s war on terror, shutting down the CIA’s secret prison network, banning torture and rendition, and calling for a new set of rules for detainees. The repudiation of Bush’s thinking on national security yesterday also saw the appointment of a high-powered envoy to the Middle East.

[...]

“We are not, as I said during the inauguration, going to continue with the false choice between our safety and our ideals,” Obama said at the signing ceremony. “We intend to win this fight. We are going to win it on our own terms.”

[...]

As expected, Obama made good on his campaign promise to shut down Guantánamo, issuing an executive order to close the camp within a year. He also ordered a taskforce, led by the attorney general and the secretaries of defence, state and homeland security, to review the intelligence and information on each detainee and to determine whether they can be released or put on trial.

Fantastic stuff. All we need now is for Obama to open the files and reveal the level of New Labour’s collusion in all of this.

(Normal cynicism will resume shortly.)

Barack Obama has requested the suspension of all military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, in his first major action as the new US president.

You have to hand it to him.

'We'll be there in a second, Mr Vice President'

They said he was in a wheelchair as he’d hurt his back moving stuff out of his house.

Yeah, right. We all know he has a legion of winged monkeys in waistcoats and fezes to do all the menial stuff. Dick Cheney carrying boxes? And George Bush is retiring to write a new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu.

The real reason is Cheney’s finally, inexorably, curling up into a ball of pure evil that will eventually become super-dense. The world will then collapse in on the infinitely dense centre of his black heart. You read it here first.

Amnesty are making a list. And checking it twice. Will Obama be naughty or nice?

Sign the petition.

Exit George Walker Bush, 43rd President of the United States. Off he goes, back to his pretzels and his bourbon and the confines of his tiny, incurious mind. What is there left to say? There isn’t much of a feeling of elation when it comes to it, is there? There’s too many shattered lives, too much broken trust, and too many trampled rights.

Photographer: Jean-Marc Bouju

It’s a vain hope that Bush might have it in himself to reflect on the fact that, despite all the jokes, insults and hate thrown at him, he was treated with far more dignity than he deserved, given far more respect than he gave, and shown far more humanity than he showed.

Mr Miliband regrets:

The idea of a “war on terror” is a “mistake”, putting too much emphasis on military force, Foreign Secretary David Miliband has said.

Brave words coming, as they do, five days before George Bush steps down and from a man who’s been at the centre of a government guilty of unprecedented assaults on the citizenry of Iraq and Aghanistan since 2001 (and who used the phrase himself in a speech as recently as two months ago). As Quarsan says:

Seven years of policies that New Labour instigated. Where was Miliband’s conscience then? It was in the Aye lobby.

To be honest, it’s not the most fulsome mea culpa ever written. He seems more worried about the label applied to what the US and UK governments have done in the last seven years rather than what they did and how they did it. It’s a bit like calling murder ‘involuntary suicide’.

Nobody with even the most rudimentary powers of observation thought that The War Against Terror had some detailed over-arching strategy with any possibility of an ultimate victory. It’s clear that the coalition of the willing, such as it is, has been making it up on the fly, lurching from one foreign policy disaster to another.

And you hear Miliband say…

We must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, for it is the cornerstone of the democratic society. We must uphold our commitments to human rights and civil liberties at home and abroad.

…and you think, ‘Oh, where to begin with that and where to end’. Iraq, BAE, Yarl’s Wood, SOCPA, ID cards, collusion with torturers, databases, databases and more databases…

Is this an implicit admission by Miliband that all this is going to stop? What exactly are New Labour’s ‘commitments to human rights and civil liberties’ anyway? Are they written down anywhere (you suspect it’d be quite a short list) or are they simply what a government minister says they are when giving a self-serving speech?

Send Pretzels to the President. You’ve just about got enough time if you’re quick about it. Farewell gift or assassination attempt? You decide.

Patton Oswalt on George Bush:

“George Bush is not stupid. He’s evil. OK? There’s a huge difference between stupid and evil.

“George Bush can speak perfectly well, just not when he’s being caring or compassionate or concerned about human beings. That’s when he stutters and says shit like ‘Hey it’s hard to put food on your family.’ Which he actually said, he said it’s hard to put food on your family. Do you know why he said that? ‘Cause he couldn’t give a fuck how hard it is for you to put food on the table for your family. But you know when he gets really downright poetic and articulate and focused is when he’s talking about war and death and murder and retribution. All of a sudden he’s Dylan Thomas.

“Here’s the thing, if you gave Darth Vader a big basket of puppies he’d look like a fucking imbecile. ‘Hey Darth, how do you like those puppies?’ ‘Uh, well they’re round…furry…to, uh, pet…here I don’t really like puppies, here, take these.’ ‘What are you gonna do to Alderaan?’ ‘WE WILL DESTROY YOUR PLANET, YOU WILL BE DUST BENEATH THE HEELS OF OUR BOOTS!’ That’s George Bush! I know a supervillain when I see one!”

He is scheduled to deliver what his transition office called a major speech on the economy today at 11 a.m. New York time at George Mason University, in the Washington suburb of Fairfax, Virginia.

What happened to ‘one president at a time‘ and ‘right now, President George Bush, as president of the United States, speaks on behalf of the US government and the American people’?

I see George Bush is spending the last precious seconds of his presidency giving out gongs:

In his last week in office, President Bush will award the [Presidential Medal of Freedom ] medal to Mr Blair, former Australian PM John Howard and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

Bleurgh. Imagine being stuck in a room with that crew as they frottage each others’ egos. If only we could harness the abundant unctuous self-satisfaction produced by those four in order to generate electricity, the energy crisis would be over. Still, victor’s justice, eh? I wonder if Blair will freeze momentarily as the cord goes around his neck.

It’s also interesting to note that the Presidential Medal of Freedom doesn’t actually confer any power or privilege. Not even the right to pasture sheep on common ground. I bet Tony and his wife, with their love of a freebie, will be disappointed by that. Cherie will have to settle for filling her handbag with sausage rolls at the reception afterwards.

In this instance, the medal’s a meaningless bauble presented in a empty gesture when the time should be spent on more important matters. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

So, George Bush takes having shoes thrown at him in his stride and says its ‘a sign of a free society‘.

If that’s the case, that Iraq is now ‘a free society’, let’s hope this isn’t true:

The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush has been beaten in custody, his brother said today.

Muntadhar al-Zaidi suffered a broken hand, broken ribs, internal bleeding and an eye injury, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC. He has since been handed over to the Iraqi judiciary, a step that normally heralds a criminal case.

Or would George like to tell us that that’s fair game in a free society as well?

And to think we always said George was a bit slow…

He’s certainly quick enough when he wants to be.

‘So what if the guy threw a shoe at me?’, said the President. You get the feeling he’s entirely ignorant of the cultural significance of having footwear thrown at you in that part of the world.

You have to admit that this, if it’s true, is great…

A former communications intercept operator says U.S. intelligence snooped on [...] British Prime Minister Tony Blair. David Murfee Faulk told ABCNews.com he saw and read a file on Blair’s “private life”…

It seems we may have underestimated Tony’s best mate, George. Even he didn’t trust the slippery little get.

Judging by the article the Prime Minister’s had ghost-written for him in the Observer this morning, you’d think it was he who was newly-elected and not, rather, running hard to keep up with the Obama bandwagon.

This is a man who’s been pulling the levers of the UK’s financial and economic machinery for the last fourteen years eleven years. The man in charge of city and financial regulation. So then, it takes a mighty pair of cojones (or possibly a staggering lack of self-awareness) to declare ‘markets need morals’ and ‘we are seeing not just the collapse of failed institutions but the collapse of a failed laissez-faire dogma’.

Did Gordon slap his head after watching Obama’s victory speech the other night and shout ‘My God! Markets do need morals! What was I thinking?’ This of course, has nothing to do with Brown being perfectly happy with a lack of morals in the markets and a glut of failed laissez-faire dogma until they went tits up and threatened his own job prospects.

And ‘while the very privileged can look after themselves in times like these, the rest of us need to know we’re not on our own,’ says Brown. Who’s this ‘us’? Who’s this ‘we’? You’re the Prime Minister, for crying out loud. You don’t get much more ‘very privileged’ than that. Does anybody feel better for this ‘I feel your pain’ schtick? Where was this spirit when he was abolishing the 10p tax rate?

Still, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who don’t need to repent. Not that’s he’s really repenting, mind.

…read BenSix’s roundup of why Obama’s not the messiah. He might just be a very naughty boy. There’s no mention of Henry Kissinger yet but give it time.

Right here.

Farewell Karl Rove. May all your children have tiny dicks. Including the girls.

Via Jamie we find out now it’s open season on George Bush for right-wing newspapers.

The Telegraph’s photo collection is actually quite sweet. He looks quite a fun guy in a doofus kind of way. That’s how we should remember him. As an utter prick. Forget all the shrapnelled kids and how international politics are in the toilet.

If you read a more depressing paragraph than this today please let me know:

“Barack Obama’s election makes you realise we may have been operating with one hand tied behind our back for the past few years . Everything is now energised.” That somewhat bittersweet verdict by one Downing Street staffer yesterday underlies the unbridled relief in Labour circles that Obama has indeed made history. In the words of one former Foreign Office minister, British Labour foreign policy can breathe once again.

That’s a crawling, skulking admission on so many levels. Look at the imagery of extreme sexuality. Bondage. Subservience. Asphyxiation.

Who tied that one hand behind our back? I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t done against our will. I think you’ll find that Blair and Brown were/are the willing submissive participants in a fully consensual sado-masochistic relationship. Tony thought the Iraq war would spice up his ’special’ relationship with George. When Tony got bored Gordon joined in.

Clearly, we are now to believe that the safeword is ‘Obama’. Can we take the ball-gag out and the gimp mask off now, please?

Oh, blimey. Yeah, ok. Watching this, the hairs came up even on my stone-cold flesh.

I think I have something in my eye. I really hope he’s not going to be too disappointed.

On Channel 4 News, they’ve just shown a brief clip of a post-election interview with Sarah Palin. The ‘you betcha, golly gee whizz’ schtick and accent have completely disappeared.

Funny that.

Update: Here we go. Forward to two minutes in…

Compare and contrast: