The Damnation of Ashley Todd

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: Little need be said here. What does a Texas Republican know about stigmata? What could an Anglo-Saxon understand about self-mutilation? (more…)

Statement of the Grand Inquisitor: Self-hatred is a dangerous game when practiced by Anglos. The danger is not that they will take self-hatred too far but, on the contrary, that in their capable hands it will quickly warp into coy self-adoration.  An entire demographic of underemployed aging youth of the dominant tribe devotes itself with brahmanic intensity to this cultural massage, under the guise of policing the borders of cultural territories among nerdy hipsters. (more…)

Zia ul-Haq: the Pakistani Dracula with the dead raccoon eyes.

Well, time to ease out of my chair and get back to work, because people have been yelling at me to finish off that “Islamablog” series I started about the hotel bomb in Islamabad. I warned you it was going to be a sample of what real-time war-nerding is about, and this time, durn it, it turned to be about me getting frustrated with how many possible angles there were here. I started to feel like it’d be easier for me to make a short list of everybody who definitely didn’t have a reason to bomb the Islamabad Marriott instead of trying to decide which of the two zillion good reasons was responsible for the bombing.

In fact, why not? Here’s my short list of who didn’t bomb the Marriott and why:

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The fix was in. There’s no other way to explain the disconnect between Sarah Palin’s performance in last night’s debate–which made me cringe so much that my forehead started to cramp–and the post-debate analysis, in which everyone in punditland agreed on the happy Hollywood ending: Sarah Palin has redeemed herself. Seeing pundits all agree about this was terrifying.

What I saw in the debate wasn’t the hyper-confident, polished, prom-queen bully from the GOP Convention, but a woman desperately in need of beta-blockers: a nervous, wobbly-voiced contestant in a County Fair amateur show trying her darndest not to forget her lines. I was sure that her performance had McCain kicking his dog and calling his wife unprintable names, and that Palin would be announcing her withdrawal from the race “for personal reasons” by breakfast time. (more…)

This is my third entry on the big blast at the Islamabad Marriott. God, the name says it all: “Islamabad Marriott.” Talk about two words that don’t fit together very well. The town just wasn’t big enough for “Islamabad” and “Marriott,” especially when you see pictures of Marriott’s big sign, in fancy Disney letters. You can have an Islamabad or you can have a Marriott, but you can’t have both—not for long.

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Here’s the deal: I’m going to blog this Islamabad blast every day for a while, try to talk honestly about how to sift through the crap to try to figure out what’s really going on.

It should be a good case study, because there are all sorts of rumors flying around, and I’ve already learned some surprising stuff, found out I was wrong in the guesses I made from the first reports.

Of course, if you’re really slow anything’s a surprise. There was a headline today, “Al Qaeda suspected in Islamabad Blast.” No, ya think? Sure it wasn’t the Basques? Maybe the Corsican Liberation Front?

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America’s chickenhawks are ready to turn Georgia into a nation of missing-relative-seeking refugees.

I’d hate to be Georgia right now. So many American pundits have plans for the Georgians, brilliant schemes designed to get Georgia into a big war with the Russians. “Here’s what you oughta do….” It’s like listening in on bar talk—some drunk trying to talk a 98-pound weakling into a rematch with the hulking thug who just put him on the floor. Funny thing, they never want to prove their theory themselves.

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It’s been tons of funs watching the dust settle over South Ossetia, watching everybody go crazy and do their best to avoid the fact that Putin kicked our proxy ass. If you’ve ever wondered how countries deal with military defeat, wonder no more, because you’ve just lived through it, and if you watched any tv, you saw loser propaganda in action 24/7.

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Here’s some more cool combat vids for you desk casualties. This time it’s Georgian troops shooting the Hell out of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, on the day they rolled in to retake the province after Bush and Cheney promised them the Russians wouldn’t dare do a thing. So it didn’t work out all that great, but on that first day, when it was Georgian upgraded T-72s vs. Ossetian civvies with AK-47s, our little allies had themselves a real barnburner of a time, and luckily, one of them took these vids to show his little Facebook friends. (more…)

There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

For me, the most important is #3, the sheer beauty of the video clips that have already come out of this war. I’m in heaven right now.

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In honor of today’s coup in Mauritania, EXILED ONLINE is reprinting a War Nerd classic about a previous Mauritanian coup in 2005, one of scores of coups that this War Nerd-friendly nation has been churning out since independence. (more…)

Today, we sifted through a buttloads of your fan letters and picked the first ones that floated to the top, including three letters from Iranian terrorists, a knee-scraping nightlife tool from Moscow, another cheap-ass reader, and much, much less… (more…)

A few years ago I wrote a column on how the Iran-Iraq War was the war nobody watched.

Well, thank God I was wrong. Maybe the US networks ignored that war but it turns out there were a lot of Iranian wannabe directors right there on the front line, getting it all on video. And thanks to the miracle of YouTube, you toobs can watch it all.

This is my absolute favorite clip so far. It’s shot from the very front of the Persian lines as Iraqi armor (T-55s, I think) advance toward them. (more…)

One of the best things about war is that it’s a huge IQ booster. The only people who use their brains in peacetime are the suits: salesmen, real-estate agents. The rest of us just slog along for the paycheck, get home and get on the computer so we can have a virtual war. But once real war comes to town, every guy turns into MacGyver, thinking up ways to convert harmless civilian items like alarm clocks and remotes into killing devices.

The Shia militias in Iraq have just demonstrated this kind of killer ingenuity by finding a new way to say “thank you” to their American friends using nothing but a few unguided 107mm rockets, propane tanks, and a used truck. It’s like the kind of problem they give you in those online intelligence tests: how can you use a crummy unguided rocket, a lowly propane tank, and a junker of a truck to blast a heavily-defended US base in Baghdad?
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Here’s another great war graphic, courtesy of Yasha Levine at eXile. This one shows every coalition casualty as a red drop, so like Yasha wrote me, you see this blood rain falling on a map of Iraq as the days click by from the invasion in the spring of 2003 right through 2007. And it really is like rain: first the storm front comes through, up from the Gulf dripping through Basra and up the river valleys all the way to Mosul. But once the occupation settles in—you may remember that was when we were getting out our suntan lotion and expecting fine weather—the rain started falling hard. (more…)