Collateral Damage

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf,” Bush said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

My head hurts from this quote.

Dear George, you want to show solidarity with these families? How about you visit each and every one of them. Maybe explain why neither you nor your children have served in this or any other war. How about adequate funding and administration for the Veterans Administration? How about not being an idiot? How about not starting wars on fictitious grounds?

Good Lord.

McCain? Hillary? Obama?

I’ll take any of them over this fool.

Not Huckabee, though. I can’t live through another administration that views facts as malleable.

Guards are required to search detainees’ possessions for contraband and seized the box of documents because it contained items Khadr was not permitted to have, including the “Lord of the Rings” script, pictures and Internet news articles, the spokesman, Lt. Col. Ed Bush said.

Dude, you sooooo totally have to read the books.

“I must say, I’m a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed… It must be exciting for you … in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger.” — The Clueless One during a video conference with civilian & military personnel who are facing real danger in Afghanistan. At no time did he say, “Dang, I knew I should have gone to Vietnam.”

From a Washington Post story:

The Bush administration announced yesterday that it intends to bring capital murder charges against half a dozen men allegedly linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, based partly on information the men disclosed to FBI and military questioners without the use of coercive interrogation tactics.

The admissions made by the men — who were given food whenever they were hungry as well as Starbucks coffee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — played a key role in the government’s decision to proceed with the prosecutions, military and law enforcement officials said.

“So which will it be: waterboarding or a venti latte with extra cinnamon on top?”

I want someone to use this in an ad campaign!!!!

Damn you, BOROWITZ!!!

After successfully sponsoring several of the presidential debates, Facebook is spreading its wings once more, announcing today that it would become the official co-sponsor of the United States’ war on terror.

In snagging the coveted anti-terrorism sponsorship, the popular networking site beat out two of its rivals, MySpace and YouTube, who had also vied to co-sponsor the global struggle against Islamic extremism.

As if that wasn’t enough to piss me off, he’s also written:

Obama Wins Country Music Entertainer of the Year … Coming off a weekend in which he racked up victories in Nebraska, Washington, Louisiana, the Virgin Islands and Maine, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) extended his amazing winning streak today by being named the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year. For Mr. Obama, who is not a country music entertainer, the award represents a significant upset since it had been expected to go to longtime country favorite Kenny Chesney.

Oh, hell … stop reading me and go read him. I surrender. This blog will now be devoted to knitting and those few other topics I know even less about than politics, marketing & humor.

File under: Declare victory and go home.

The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27. Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.” The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.” … His remarks signal a change in emphasis across Whitehall, where the “war on terror” language has officially been ditched. Officials were concerned it could act as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, which is determined to manufacture a battle between Islam and the West.

NO WAR ON TERROR? But what brand will you use to scare the electorate with????

The war on terror gets ugly, Part 2

Last week I made fun of the CIA for its terrible anti-terror graphic. And rightfully so. However, in the interests of fairness, let me say that the pro-terror groups aren’t going to win any design competitions either.

Al Qaeda generally uses two symbols … a badge and a flag.

The badge has all the key brand qualities in it — death, God, the Holy Book and a finger in the universal symbol of “we’re #1″ — BUT it is way, way too busy. Graphic clean up on aisle 666, please.

The flag.

Qaeda’s flag really has nothing that makes it distinctive. This could be any Arabic phrase on a black background. For all I know this is an ad for a McDonald’s in Baghdad. If you’re a multi-national — of any sort — your logos have to be easily identifiable to foreigners or the illiterate (or, in my case, foreigners who are illiterate).

Compare Qaeda’s badge and flag with the logo of the United Liberation Front of Asom:

Like the Al Qaeda symbols, the ULFA logo also contains text in a language that is totally unknown to me but the overall effect is clear and easily recognized from a distance. (Image via IronicSans which has a great article on trends in the logos of terrorist organizations) It’s clean and the use of the crossed doa gives it a visual hook that an ignoramus like myself can quickly recognize. Remember, while its important for your emblems to appeal to your base, it also has to be easily ID’d by outsiders. It’s not just enough to kill people and destroy things, you’ve got to market it!

When all else fails, bring out the bad graphics.

Matthew Yglesias found the following on the CIA’s website:

I still prefer the board game.

(Thanks to Skott Klebe for the tip!)

The comedy of terrors continues…

Joppatowne High School in Harford County, Maryland, is first in the nation to offer a 75-student magnet program centered on homeland security. The program, called the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness Magnet Program, focuses on “preparing high school students for careers in disaster response, high-level computer science and law enforcement” and begins in the fall. Students “will be given limited security clearances to enable them to perform internships at nearby Aberdeen Proving Ground, where the military develops and tests conventional and biological weapons.” Selected students will study “public safety, border control, religious ideology, geospatial technology, cybersecurity, and threat identification.”

What’s the school mascot? A microphone? A metal detection wand?

Anyone who plays on the football team is guaranteed a job in the N.E. Patriots front office.

Oklahoma, the state that was the site of the worst case of domestic terrorism in US history, has a new license plate commemorating the current offensive against a concept. I’m looking forward to the follow up: Tags that show support for the Global War On Extremism, Gen. Petraeus’s current cause celebre. How about one that says “My country invaded Iraq and all I got was this lousy recession”? There’s definitely a market for it. Recent polls show 2/3rds of the people in the US now expect a recession.

In an interview on NPR Gen. David Petraeus showed that logic is not a required course at the Army War college:

Q: A simple question that many in America are now wrestling with: Who is the enemy and what is the U.S. fighting for?

A: The enemy is extremism, we think, and it is extremism that comes in various forms.

I forget, is it the infantry or the artillery who are trained in extreme combat?

Isn’t moderation the best weapon against extremism? But if you do it too well you run the risk of being extremely moderate.

If the enemy is extremism does this mean we’re about to attack the X Games?

Maybe we could attack marketers who use the word extreme when ever they want to appear “hip” and “down” with the kids these days?

I look forward to the Armed Forces blowing up statues of Sen. Barry Goldwater who famously said that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

Isn’t going to war a very extreme act?

One definition of extremism is “any political theory favoring immoderate uncompromising policies.” Invade the vice president’s office immediately.

This reminds me of something George Bush the elder said during the first Iraq contretemps: “We are fighting to prove that might does not make right.”

The war on extremism makes the war on terror look good.

Habamus War Czar! Gen. Douglas Lute has been named caddy for the George Bush Desert Classic. Going out on a limb here but I don’t think Lute’s name will wind up in the history books next to George C. Marshall or Henry “Old Brains” Halleck — the best that he can hope for is that it doesn’t end up next to Custer’s. Why not take the job? There’s no real downside. The blame has already been laid. They must be rejoicing in Baghdad tonight.

The banana peel on the slippery slope of corporate wrongdoing.

It’s not just the US that’s having problems waging the war on terror. As loyal readers may recall last July I wrote about the new boardgame version of the War On Terror called, appropriately enough, The War On Terror: The Boardgame. (Writing in the pages of the august publication that chooses to employ me, I described it as what would happen if Randy Newman had designed Risk.) Since then the two Brits behind it have hit a PR jackpot as their game has been denounced by two members of Parliament and been rejected by the toy industry.

Quoth the Cambridge Evening News:

“We went to the London Toy Fair and we were a bit green and didn’t really know the drill. They expected us to be buyers but we turned up wearing balaclavas and holding a mock up copy of our box. So we were kindly removed from there, but that was because we hadn’t paid to exhibit, which was fair enough.

“More recently though, we tried to go down the correct route and exhibit. We applied to do a couple of very large German toy fairs, and got rejected from both. With the first, our application went a long way and we paid for our booth and everything and then, when we submitted our press release, we were told there was no way we could exhibit there, and that our money would be refunded.

“There wasn’t much of an explanation, so I phoned them up and the woman in charge kind of flipped over it - she said it was sick and ridiculous. She couldn’t believe we were making a board game about terrorism. But Germans are a bit touchy about war.”

The controversy has also been featured on the BBC and The Sun. That really is the kind of publicity you can’t buy. But you can buy the game, if you live in the UK. For some reason they haven’t found a US distributor yet. Which is too bad because the game, which costs about 26 of whatever it is they call money in the UK, comes with a balaclava emablazoned with the word evil and a “Suicide Bomber Gift Certificate,” bearing the legend “thank you for funding the War on Terror.” If that’s not worth buying then what is?

New York transport authorities shut down part of the city’s main bus terminal when someone spotted an object that resembled a hand grenade but was in fact a bottle of perfume.

I expect this means NYC will now join Oslo in banning L’Oreal’s Flowerbomb perfume bottles. I repeat, how drunk do you have to be to think this is a handgrenade?

L’Oreal’s Flowerbomb, the official scent of the Penguins of Irony.