The Mandarin

Sad News

2007-06-07T19:25:00.001-07:00

The Mandarin passed away very suddenly last week. He enjoyed delighting us with his wit and sense of humor and that is something we will always be able to keep with us. We will miss him very much.

Monica redux

2007-05-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin was reminded of the Stepford Wives watching Monica Goodling testify the other day, particularly this exchange:

REP. ROBERT C. SCOTT (D-VA): In your testimony, you indicate that you, quote, "may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account on some occasions." Do you believe that those political considerations were not just in appropriate but in fact illegal?

MS. GOODLING: That's not a conclusion for me to make. I know I was acting --

REP. SCOTT: Do you believe that they were legal or illegal for you to take those political considerations in mind? Not whether they were legal or illegal. What do you believe? Do you believe that they were illegal?

MS. GOODLING: I don't believe I intended to commit a crime.

REP. SCOTT: Did you break the law? Is it against the law to take those political considerations into account? You've got civil service laws. You've got obstruction of justice with any laws that you could have broken by taking political considerations into account, quote, "on some occasions."

MS. GOODLING: The best I can say is that I know I took political considerations into account on some occasions.

REP. SCOTT: Was that legal?

MS. GOODLING: Sir, I'm not able to answer that question. I know I crossed the line.

REP. SCOTT: What line -- legal?

MS. GOODLING: I crossed the line of the civil service rules.

REP. SCOTT: Rules -- laws? You crossed the line of civil service laws. Is that right?

MS. GOODLING: I believe I crossed the lines, but I didn't mean to.

The Mandarin doesn't know what kind of law they teach at Ms. Goodling's alma mater, wingnut televangelist Pat Robertson's Regent University ("Christian leadership to change the world"), but in admitting to a blatant violation of the law, Ms. Goodling provided a quote the Mandarin's readers should feel free to use the next time they are pulled over for speeding or summoned into the IRS audit room: "I believe I crossed the line, but I didn't mean to."

That one will take its rightful place alongside "The dog ate my homework," and "The Devil made me do it" in the Lame Excuse Hall of Fame.

And no points for guessing the name of the handsome dude on her arm in the photo above.

Update: John Sherffius nails it in a cartoon here.

Will Maotai soon be just a memory?

2007-05-18T18:09:00.000-07:00

Here’s another chapter in China’s incessant drive to ruin its environment through unrestrained commercialism.

China’s most famous liquor, beloved of both Chinese and expats over the years, is called Máotái 茅台 (web site). It falls into the general category of clear spirits, called báijiŭ 白酒 “white spirits” or in the Beijing slang the young Mandarin learned, báigānr 白干儿 “white dry.” It was probably the taste of Maotai that produced the unforgettable prune-faced look on Richard Nixon when he toasted Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai on his trip to China in 1972.

The taste of Maotai is difficult to describe to someone who has never tasted it, partly because – at about 110 proof – the drinker’s taste buds are quickly scorched into a pleasant numbness. “Chinese moonshine” is probably a reasonable synonym for báigānr. A description for Maotai’s “bouquet” is equally elusive – it changes subtly from the first sip to the last. And, a few hours later, when the Maotai drinker is safely back in his hotel, yet another subtle aroma begins to pour from every pore on his body, in what the Mandarin called – when he first experienced it in 1981, the dreaded “Maotai sweats.”

Actually, truth be told, in those days the Mandarin was partial to a rarer Sichuan cousin, brewed in Yibin (Maotai is brewed about 200 miles farther south, in Guizhou – see below) called Wŭliángyè 五粮液 “liquid essence of the five grains.” Wuliangye was a much subtler, more refined variety of moonshine. Smoother, at only 104 proof, and less reminiscent of turpentine or cat urine than Maotai. Also, the odor of Wuliangye in the inevitable night sweats was less obnoxious.

At the other end of the Mandarin’s personal quality scale were two truly nasty (but cheap!) clear liquors: from Beijing, a 110-120 proof concoction called Èrguōtóu 二鍋頭 “top of the second pot” – presumably a reference to being distilled twice, and from the town of Jiujiang, "Nine Rivers," in Jiangxi, the slightly milder (only 64 proof) Jiŭjiāng shuāngzhēng jiŭ 九江雙蒸酒“Nine Rivers Double-distilled Wine”), made from rice.

Anyway, at the banquets that are indispensable parts of building relationships in China, it is (or was in the pre-commercial 1980s anyway) de rigeur to have round after round of toasting, usually with Maotai. It was possible for the faint-hearted to toast with beer, or one of the early Chinese grape wines served at that time, or - Heaven forbid! - Kěkǒukělè 可口可樂 "Coca Cola," but it revealed a certain lack of courage, like not eating the obligatory sea slugs ("good for your blood pressure") or duck tongues.

The Mandarin word for “study” – as in, “We’ll have to study your proposal further before deciding to do business with you” – is yánjiū 研究 , which sounds suspiciously close to the phrase yānjiŭ 煙酒, “cigarettes and liquor.” So, it was no coincidence that the foreign guest at these banquets was often expected to bring the Maotai, which was rather expensive by the Chinese standards of the day, and sometimes a few packs of duty-free Wànbăolù 萬寶路 cigarettes ("Marlboros") to pass around.

At these banquets, the Mandarin was told many times that his pŭtōnghuà (a/k/a “Mandarin”) became much more fluent after a few Maotais loosened him up. The Mandarin never danced on any tables (as far as he can remember) but did recite a few 8th century poems from memory and once received a memorable compliment: “Shào wài (young foreigner), when you get drunk, your accent reminds me of my grandfather.” The Mandarin’s original teacher spoke a very pure and precise old-fashioned Beijing dialect, as it turned out.

Anyway, to the point: When Maotai was designated China's official liquor, Premier Zhou Enlai - to preserve the purity of the water used to make it - banned any development or competing distilleries for a hundred or so kilometers upriver of the Maotai distillery, located in the northwestern part of the province of Guizhou, on the Chìshuĭ 赤水 "Red River."

With a Starbucks operating in the Forbidden City these days, should it surprise the Mandarin's readers that Zhou Enlai's ban is no longer enforced? A recent news story [link] reported:

The water purity of a river tapped to make China's national liquor is being threatened by uncontrolled building of other drinks factories along its banks, the official Xinhua news agency reported Monday.

Kweichow Moutai, maker of the fiery Maotai drink served at Chinese state banquets and used to toast guests ranging from Margaret Thatcher to Kim Il-sung, draws water for the brew from the Chishui River in remote southwest Guizhou province.

But authorities are investigating how 39 illegal alcoholic drinks plants have sprung up by the river, polluting both the air and water, Xinhua said.

[The Mandarin suspects the water of the Red River may at last be living up to its name....]

"It seriously threatens the environmental security of the Chishui River and the production base of Maotai," it added.

The illegal factories have been fined and ordered to close, the report said.

Well, given the track record of the Chinese government in enforcing such environmental orders in Beijing itself, never mind in a fairly remote corner of a fairly backward province in the southwest, the Mandarin isn't holding his breath (as he used to when downing shots of Maotai).

So, it looks like the taste and bouquet of China's national drink may be changed forever by unwanted chemical additives flowing down the Red River. But true Maotai aficionados need not despair. The distillery also sells, at some astronomical prices, Maotai aged 30, 50, and even 80 years. And if you believe the stuff in that bottle of 80-yr-old Maotai was distilled in 1927, the Mandarin has a bridge he would like to sell you. We can toast the sale by trading shots from that 80-year old bottle.

Postscript: the next installment of the Mandarin's tasting notes may deal with liquor distilled with special ingredients specifically aimed at ensuring the potency of older gentleman, among them Guīshéjiŭ 龜蛇酒 "Turtle and Snake Wine," and the granddaddy (pun intended) of them all: Sānbiānjiŭ 三鞭酒 "Three-Penis Wine." And the answers to your obvious next questions are: 1) yes, in powdered form, and 2) deer, dog and seal (apologies to Heidi Klum).

"Unclear on the concept" - an occasional series

2007-05-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

When the Mandarin moved back to California in 2000 after many years in Hong Kong (we'll just leave out the short stint in Charlotte), he rented the first nine months in the posh L.A. bedroom community of La Cañada-Flintridge, which sits north of the city in the foothills of the Angeles Crest mountains and adjacent to a national forest. One charming thing about LCF, as locals often shorten the name, is the frequent sight of deer and other wildlife wandering the lanes at certain times of the year.

One morning, the Mandarin noticed a pair of notices stapled to a phone pole near his house. The top one, slightly weathered, showed a drawing of a mountain lion and read:

ATTENTION: MOUNTAIN LION SIGHTING

A mountain lion was sighted in your neighborhood.

Take proper precautions and keep an eye on children and pets. Bring your pet food inside. When you venture outside, make plenty of noise to alert the animal if it is near. If the lion is sighted, do not run or turn your back on it. Make yourself appear as large as you can and walk away slowly. If attacked, do not play dead as you would with a bear. You must be aggressive.

NOTIFY THE POLICE DEPARTMENT OR HUMANE SOCIETY IF YOU SIGHT THE ANIMAL - 626-792-7151

Stapled below was a much newer flyer, with a grainy photograph of a Burmese cat, that read:

LOST CAT

"Fluffy" is a neutered, short hair, large, slightly fat cat, with yellow eyes and hopefully a red/pink collar.

REWARD!!

Please call (818) 414-xxxx (24 hrs.)"

Hence the title for this occasional series: "Unclear on the Concept."

Next in the series: "Shotgun" Cheney goes to Iraq to tell them to run an open and honest government and be fair to political opponents or risk further polarizing and possibly destroying their country. Tom Toles nails it.

Have the Italians forgotten where they got the idea for spaghetti and ravioli!?

2007-05-08T06:41:00.000-07:00

When the Mandarin read this, he saw patriotic Maoist red:

The local government in Treviso has ordered the northern Italian city's Chinese restaurants to remove red lanterns from their windows because they look too "oriental."

"It's spoiling the appearance of the city," the head of the council's town planning department, Sergio Marton, told Corriere della Sera daily.

"The Chinese put up all sorts of stuff: lanterns, lions, dragons, there's even one (establishment) that did its whole front in oriental style."

Treviso, just outside Venice in the north-eastern Veneto region, is run by the populist, anti-immigrant Northern League. ...

"Treviso is a city of Veneto and Padania, it's certainly not an oriental city," deputy mayor Giancarlo Gentilini said, justifying the order to take down the lanterns within 10 days. ...

"From now on we'll be making regular checks and after the lanterns we'll be looking at all the other decorations around the entrances of the oriental restaurants," Marton warned.

Oh, the horror! What's next? Sushi bars with plastic sushi in the window?

Have those Italians forgotten where they got the idea for noodles and ravioli in the first place!? After all, it was the Chinese -- well, actually the Mongols who conquered China in 1280 and ruled it until 1368 -- who were nice enough to load Marco Polo up with lamian 拉麵 (Japanese: ramen, Italian: spaghetti) and jiaozi 餃子 (Japanese: gyoza, Italian: ravioli) so he wouldn't starve on the long trip back to Venice.

And this is the thanks they get?

What if China had put up a high fence along its border with the barbarians and kept Marco Polo and all the other illegal immigrants out. What would the Italians be eating now? Probably just boiled cornmeal (polenta) and a primitive grain called farro. Yummy.

Curious George misses the point

2007-04-24T18:33:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin is continually amazed at the absolutely intractable density of our Decider-in-Chief. Especially his tantrum today:

I strongly reject the artificial timetable for withdrawal and/or Washington politicians trying to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their job.

Listen, former 1LT Shrub, TxANG (click here to see how he dishonored his uniform), those politicians, not to mention the voters who sent you a Democratic Congress, are not telling your Generals how to do their jobs, they are telling YOU (a Washington politician) how to do YOUR job. Get it?

How do you say "Duh!" in Mandarin?

Cross-posted at Watching Those We Choose.

China's domestic car makers - heading the wrong way?

2007-04-22T19:56:00.000-07:00

Here's another in the Mandarin's continuing series of letters to the editors of the Wall Street Journal that they won't print:

The Mandarin couldn't help laughing when he saw the articles in the March 20, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal on Roewe and Wuling, two up-and-coming Chinese car makers who are challenging the US and European majors in the Chinese home market.

In an era where no piece of intellectual property seems safe in China, trademarks are no exception. "Wuling" 五菱means "five diamonds" (well, literally "five water chestnuts," but you get the idea) and the name and logo are obvious rip-offs of Mitsubishi 三菱, which means "three diamonds" (san ling in Mandarin). If three diamonds are good, then five diamonds must be better.

And Roewe 荣威 is not just an obvious imitation of "Rover," it is also another of those notorious Chinese malapropisms: the two Chinese characters used to write Roewe are pronounced in Mandarin as rong wei. Another target for Beijing's pre-Olympic language police?

Of course, on the off chance that the WSJ actually does print the Mandarin's letter, then his cover will be even flimsier. Unless his loyal reader(s) can keep a secret....

Alberto's "Eagleton Moment"

2007-04-20T06:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, after a performance in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee described by one anonymous White House insider as "like clubbing baby seals," attorney General Alberto Gonzales had his Eagleton moment. Shrub's acting Press Secretary Dana Perino was asked:

Q Dana, does Attorney General Gonzales's testimony on Capitol Hill have any bearing whatsoever on his job status?

MS. PERINO: As I've said many times, the President has full confidence in the Attorney General. The Attorney General looked forward to the hearing that is taking place right now. Of course, the President has not seen any of that testimony....

Q So is it fair to say that no matter what the testimony, no matter what the back-and-forth, that the President plans to stick with Attorney General Gonzales?

MS. PERINO: I think -- yes. I think the President has full confidence in the Attorney General and whenever that changes for any public servant, we'll let you know, and I see no indication of that.

This reminded the Mandarin of 1972, when George McGovern gave a ringing endorsement of his initial Vice-Presidential running-mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, when Eagleton revealed he had once been treated for depression: he was behind Eagleton "one thousand percent." Three days later, Eagleton was a footnote to history.

There are also obvious echoes of Shrub's steadfast support of Donald Rumsfeld right up to the eve of his firing the day after the 2006 mid-term elections.

Also, Alberto has clearly satisfied the requirements of the "Galbraith Rule" (anyone who denies four times that he will resign, will resign).

Alberto is clearly toast.

Something tells the Mandarin that John Ashcroft is sitting by the phone somewhere, tanned, rested and ready. And if his phone rings, we better raise the threat level to ultra-violet.

Cross-posted at Watching Those We Choose.

Counting Bodies

2007-04-16T18:16:00.000-07:00

The story of the 32 people shot today at Virginia will unfold in its full horror over the next few days. There will be inevitable comparisons to Charles Whitman, who killed 15 people on August 1, 1966, of whom 13 were shot from the emblematic Texas Tower on the University of Texas campus in Austin. Today’s killer has more than doubled Whitman’s body count.

Fifteen then and 32 today are both shocking numbers. And while the Mandarin has no personal connection to Virginia Tech, he had been a member of the Austin High School class of 1966 before moving away the year before. So he was not in Austin that day, by the grace of God not hanging out on “the Drag” like his friends and classmates Paul Sonntag and Claudia Rutt, who were bodies #12 and #13.

The murder of 15 or 32 people all at once seems shocking in a supposedly peaceful country like ours, but consider two things.

First, there were approximately 10,000 people killed by guns in the U.S. in 2005. That works out to one Virginia Tech every 28 hours. Not all in one place, not all killed by the same person, but on average, in our country, one person is killed by a gun every 50 minutes, day in, day out. And the Mandarin wagers that very few of the killers were part of “a well-regulated militia,” thus Constitutionally permitted to keep and bear arms.

We need gun control in this country, and we need it now. Write your Congressional Representatives and let them hear your voice.

Second, look at Iraq. Iraq’s population is about one-twelfth of the U.S. In the four years since Shrub’s 2003 invasion, perhaps 64,000 civilians have been killed by us or by each other. That is an average of about 45 a day. The impact of death at that rate would be like the U.S. suffering almost 800,000 civilian deaths: 530 a day, day in, day out, for four years.

Or one Virginia Tech every 90 minutes.

We to get our troops out of Iraq now. Write your Congressional Representatives and let them hear your voice.

Cross-posted at Watching Those We Choose.

Well, it had to happen: the Mandarin is banned in China

2007-04-13T06:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the Mandarin was browsing some of the other blogs in a grass-roots group called "Out of Iraq Blogroll." Scroll down a bit and you'll see the list on the right-hand side of this page.

One of them, "Real's World," displayed a banner that said it had been banned in China. There was a hot-link on that banner to a web site called Red Firewall of China where anyone can test a web link to see if it will get through the firewalls run by the censors of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Well, sure enough, the Mandarin is banned in China, along with such other subversive sites as Wikipedia, CNN, IMDB, the BBC, the Vatican, the list goes on and on.

It must have been the Martin Scorsese review.

Name, rank, serial number and date of birth

2007-04-05T18:16:00.000-07:00

Not to be mean to our gallant British allies or anything , but the Mandarin was stuck in a time warp during the recent captivity of the "heroic" British sailors and marines in Iraq. The time warp was a trip down memory lane to the summer of 1969, when Private Mandarin (not Lieutenant Mandarin yet, that came later) was in basic training at Fort Bragg, NC.

A lot of us had orders for Vietnam at that point, so we were taught that we were expected to do everything humanly possible to avoid capture, including, believe it or not, fighting back unless we were out of bullets or something. If captured, we were expected to reveal only our name, rank, serial number and date of birth. Beyond that, we were to say nothing. We were to resist our captors to the maximum extent possible, and to make every reasonable attempt to escape. Cooperating with our captors in any way, no matter how small, was, as the British say, right out.

Now, the Mandarin was not present when these British sailors and Marines were captured a couple of weeks ago, so his comments are in the realm of the hypothetical, but if we were still in the simpler world of 1969, and if some hypothetical American sailors and Marines had been released after behaving as this lot did in captivity, they would not have been welcomed home as heroes.

They would have been in deep and serious trouble.

Oh, by the way, here is the quaint little litany we had to memorize back then. We also got it on little laminated wallet cards, although we weren't supposed to take our wallets into combat and the Viet Cong would probably have taken them away from us anyway...

It was called the "Military Code of Conduct:"

1. I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.

2. I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist.

3. If I am captured I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.

4. If I become a prisoner of war, I will keep faith with my fellow prisoners. I will give no information or take part in any action which might be harmful to my comrades. If I am senior, I will take command. If not, I will obey the lawful orders of those appointed over me and will back them up in every way.

5. When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number, and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country and its allies or harmful to their cause.

6. I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free. I will trust in my God and in the United States of America.

Leaving aside whether the war in Iraq satisfies the condition of article 1, the fighting in defense of our way of life bit, the way the Brits handled themselves seems to have been as the Brits say, a bit dodgy.

But that was then and there. And this is here and now.

Crossposted at Watching Those we Choose.

Calm down, little Shrub, or Mommy spank!

2007-03-29T18:39:00.000-07:00

Shrub seems a little nervous, even though Speaker Pelosi had told him earlier that day to "Calm down with the threats, there's a new Congress in town."

Anyone know where the Mandarin can get a "Nancy for President" bumper sticker?

Original photo caption: U.S. President George W. Bush (R) reacts as he listens to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner at a hotel in Washington March 28, 2007. REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES)

Crossposted at Watching Those We Choose.

Daddy's little girl

2007-03-22T07:10:00.000-07:00

Here's one kinky lifestyle innovation for which the Mandarin and his fellow boomers can't claim credit: purity balls.

No sex please, we're daddy's little girls

It has all the ingredients of a wedding. The proud tuxedo-clad father, the frosted white cake, the limousines and an exchange of vows.

But there is no groom and the girl in the long gown is no bride. She's daddy's little girl, there to take a vow of chastity.

In what is becoming a trend among conservative Christians in the United States, girls as young as nine are pledging to their fathers to remain virgins until they wed, in elaborate ceremonies dubbed "Purity Balls."

The gala affairs are intended to celebrate the father-daughter relationship.

The highlight is when the fathers and daughters exchange vows, with dad signing a covenant to protect his daughter's chastity by living an unblemished life and the daughter promising not to have sex until marriage.

Many fathers at the ceremonies also slip "purity rings" around the finger of their misty-eyed daughters or offer them "chastity bracelets" and other jewelry that the girls can entrust to their husbands on their wedding night.

Well, as long as Daddy is slipping a ring or a bracelet on his little girl, why not just cut to the main event: the chastity, oops, "purity" belt? She can add the key to the wedding night swag bag she's saving for her future husband.

Oh, it gets better:

Mike Parcha, who recently attended one of these balls with his 11-year-old daughter Lora in the western state of Colorado, said the events reinforce his family's Christian beliefs.

"We realize that purity is a lifestyle, not an event, and this is just a celebration of that lifestyle and of that relationship that I have with my daughters," he said. ...

His two older daughters, aged 11 and 18, have attended the balls while the youngest, aged 4, must wait a few years.

Let's do some purity math. How old will a four-year-old girl be in "a few years?" The Mandarin has to ask his loyal readers, does the mental image of an adult man standing next to his pre-pubescent daughter in a wedding dress, taking a vow together and slipping a ring on her finger give any one else the creeps?

The three girls, along with their three brothers, are all home schooled. Parcha's oldest daughter Christy, who recently graduated from high school, is now working on a fictional book about "the emotional purity of a young girl as she grows up."

[Cue Homer Simpson's voice] "Hmmm... Fictional book...."

UPDATE (24 Mar 07) - The Mandarin was amused to see Bill Maher making the same joke a day later on his show. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Bill....

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: "I shot Buckwheat"

2007-03-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

As part of his recent rambling confession to almost every real or imagined terrorist plot, attack, or pipe-dream of the last dozen years, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (affectionately known as "KSM" to his CIA jailers at their secret prison in Poland over the last few years) has confessed to the last major unsolved crime of the 20th century: Who Shot Buckwheat.

Whether KSM really shot Buckwheat, or is just feeding his allegedly massive ego, or is simply padding his resume in anticipation of immanent martyrdom down at Guantanamo, or is trying to draw attention away from the real jihadist mastermind who planned the assassination of Buckwheat, well,... we may never know.

Harvesting organs from prisoners moves closer to home

2007-03-10T10:49:00.000-08:00

As an update to the Mandarin's recent post on the Chinese government's practice of harvesting organs for transplant from prisoners, especially those imprisoned for merely practicing their religion, here is a recent headline from our own, more enlightened country:

South Carolina lawmakers may cut jail time for inmates who donate organs

COLUMBIA, South Carolina: Inmates in South Carolina could soon find that a kidney is worth 180 days.

Lawmakers are considering legislation that would let prisoners donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for time off their jail sentences.

A state Senate panel on Thursday endorsed creating an organ-and-tissue donation program for inmates. But legislators postponed debate on a measure to reduce the sentences of participating prisoners, citing concern that federal law may not allow it.

"I think it's imperative that we go all out and see what we can do," said the bills' chief sponsor, Democratic Sen. Ralph Anderson.

Well, this isn't the same thing as killing prisoners to harvest organs for a profitable transplant business, as in China. And, the Mandarin (who had his own kidney disease as a child) would love to see more people donate organs, but somehow the quid pro quo here just doesn't seem right. Does it?

Crossposted at Watching Those We Choose.

Cheney chooses outpatient treatment for his clot

2007-03-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

rather than check into Walter Reed, as he always used to do when he had these little health issues, like heart attacks, etc.

And the Mandarin has been down with some kind of pesky flu-bug for a week, but will be back on top of his form soon.

Cheney finally hears a shot fired in anger

2007-02-27T07:20:00.000-08:00

Vice President Cheney managed to avoid military service back in the 60s when many of us could not swing five consecutive student deferments. As he put it on April 5, 1989: "I had other priorities in the sixties than military service." (Source) Yeah, right.

Yesterday in Afghanistan, Cheney "was whisked into a bomb shelter immediately after a Taliban suicide bomber struck the main American military base he was visiting in Afghanistan on Tuesday."

So, we'll have to add a new Cheney quote to our growing list: "At 10 a.m. I heard a loud boom."

Original photo caption: A U.S. soldier shouts, as he tries to control the crowd after a suicide attack at the main U.S. air base of Bagram, north of Kabul, Afghanistan on Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007. A suicide bomber killed at least 14 people and wounded about a dozen more outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday, during a visit by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. The Taliban claimed responsibility and said Cheney, who was not injured, was the target. (AP Photo/Musadeq Sadeq)

Nixon in China: Nobody said it had to make sense....

2007-02-22T18:56:00.000-08:00

This week, at least on NPR, is the 35th anniversary of Nixon's famous 1972 trip to China. That year, the Mandarin was in his second year of the PhD program in Chinese at Indiana University, having completed his military service the year before. The Mandarin can recall several people that week congratulating him on having chosen the right field of study. Now that Nixon (the arch-Red baiter of our time) and his puppeteer Kissinger had "opened China," the sky would be the limit for prescient guys like the Mandarin who had chosen to study the language and culture of Nixon's new best friends.

But there was irony, and irony can sometimes be bitter. That year the Mandarin was half-way through a prized three-year government-sponsored National Defense Language Fellowship (NDFL), paying a princely $2,500 a year. Remember munchkins, this was 1972 and a gallon of gas cost 35¢ and $2.00 at the White Castle would buy you four sliders (small square cheeseburgers), three small fries and two Cokes. Don't ask the Mandarin how he knows this....

Anyway, while Nixon was literally (and the Mandarin means that literally) on the ground in China, with the bruises from all that congratulatory back-slapping still stinging on the Mandarin's 23-year-old back, he got a letter from the government canceling his fellowship eighteen months early. The explanation came later: now that China was our bosom buddy, the Defense Department didn't need so many of us studying that particular potential enemy's lingo. The big winners: students of languages of the next big strategic focus. Arabic you say? Foreshadowing our recent liberation of Iraq? Russian? Farsi? But no. Au contraire, that year's big winners were students of African languages, especially Swahili. Go figure.

Another memorable shot from that trip shows the ebullient Pat Nixon touring something-Maoist-or-other:
Since this is "The Mandarin," here is what the signs say.

Left side: Haidian district of Beijing city, Sijiqing People's Commune, REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEE.

Right side: Chinese Communist Party, Beijing city Haidian district, SIJIQING COMMUNE COMMITTEE.

Sijiqing 四季青 (literally "four seasons green") is a neighborhood in Beijing's Haidian District, in the northwestern suburbs of the city. In those days, it was a so-called "model commune" and every international visitor was dutifully trooped through it to see Mao's better way. At least until the commune system was abandoned in the 1980s as a colossal failure....

A sharp-eyed reader may also notice a younger Helen Thomas in the right part of the doorway, the only female journalist among the dozens of big-name reporters that accompanied the Nixons on their trip.

The characters on the red sign visible through the opening are the 人民公 part of 人民公社, the Chinese for "People's Commune," in Chairman Mao's own glorious calligraphy. The Mandarin's knees grow weak at the memory.

Ah, boys and girls, those were the good old days....

Curious George goes to Peoria

2007-02-10T07:40:00.000-08:00

For a little change of pace from the depressing Falungong Organ Snatcher, here is the latest in the Mandarin's long-running collection of "Curious George" shots.

Well, Mouseketeers, did he play in Peoria?

Original photo caption: U.S. President George W. Bush speaks about the economy during a visit to Caterpillar Inc. in Peoria, Illinois January 30, 2007. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Religious freedom in China and the Falungong body snatcher

2007-02-05T19:00:00.000-08:00

Well, not the whole body,... The headline reads, “Chinese army harvesting parts from Falungong inmates.” The article begins, “China's military is reportedly harvesting organs from prison inmates, mostly Falungong practitioners, for large scale transplants including for foreign recipients, a study said.”

Falungong is a new religion that originated about fifteen years ago in China. It appears to be a fairly harmless (as religions go these days) pastiche of various elements of popular Buddhism, emphasizing Qigong-style breathing exercises, healthy living, and meditation. Fà lún 法輪 is the Chinese translation of Sanskrit dharmacakra, “Wheel of the (Buddha’s) Law” and gōng 功 means, in this context, “exercise,” or “practice.” [For reasons known only to the Mainland geniuses who cooked up the currently-fashionable Pinyin Romanization scheme, “lun” and “gong” have the same vowel sound - both rhyme with “book”.]

The founder, or “revealer” as he prefers to be known, of Falungong – perhaps “the decider” was already taken by then – is a 55-year-old Chinese man named Li Hongzhi 李洪志. Depending on whom you believe, Li’s life from early childhood until his 1992 revelation of Falungong was spent either in almost forty years of intensive study and practice of esoteric Buddhism, or consisted of a ne’er-do-well childhood, followed by a tour as a trumpet player in an Army band and a later career as part-time security guard at a cereal factory.

Article 36 of the Chinese Constitution [English 中文 ] guarantees freedom of religion, unless its believers “disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state.” Whatever its merits or demerits as a religion, it appears that Falungong practitioners quietly doing breathing exercises in public parks have somehow fallen afoul of one of those exclusions.

For reasons that have not been adequately explained, membership in Falungong is now deemed a serious political crime. The religion is officially banned in China (except in Macau and Hong Kong) and its members subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment without due process of (Chinese) law.

According to the study cited in the article linked above, once the Falungong believers are locked up in military prisons, they are all “systematically subjected to blood tests to match their organs with recipients.” That information is stored in a database so that when rich foreigners come to China for transplant surgery, perhaps to bypass long waiting lists at home or because the surgery in Chinese military hospitals is much cheaper, they sometimes receive organs from what are demurely called “executed prisoners” in official press releases.

What the globe-trotting transplant shoppers may not know is that the execution may have occurred only a few minutes earlier in an adjacent operating room and the prisoner’s only crime may have been joining the wrong church.

When we give a country “Most Favored Nation” (MFN) status, it means we won’t assess a tariff on any of their goods that is higher than we assess against the hypothetical “most favored nation.” China’s MFN status was revoked by President Truman in 1951, after China invaded its sovereign neighbor Tibet, and incorporated it into the People’s Republic by force.

China decided to wait us out, doing nothing significant to improve conditions in occupied Tibet, while flagrantly abusing the international tariff system. By the early 1970s, with our legendary geopolitical short attention span, we provisionally reestablished China’s MFN status -- now renamed the more harmless-sounding “Normal Trade Relations” (NTR). In 1999, under a Republican Congress and a Democratic President, it was permanently restored so China could apply for membership in the World Trade Organization.

Bills to repeal China’s Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status surface every few years in Congress. Repealing it would be a good way to curb the disgusting trade in organs from executed prisoners of conscience. On the other hand, it might also drive up the cost of organ transplants, Happy Meals and athletic shoes.

Ask your Senator or Representative how they would vote on a tough choice like that.

Crossposted at Watching Those We Choose.

Note: The illustration is the Falungong depiction of the "Falun" or Wheel of the Buddha's Law. The swastika is an ancient Buddhist symbol.

Cluster****

2007-01-29T18:22:00.000-08:00

If you thought the unexpurgated title was "clusterbomb," give yourself a point.

It turns out that a significant part of those Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (a/k/a cluster****s) the Mandarin wrote about recently were made in the good old U S of A and sold to Israel on the condition they not do exactly what they ended up doing after all: firing them into civilian areas.

Leaving a lot of unexploded bomblets that look like the photo - the kind of
brightly-colored thing that a kid might pick up. With allies like these, who needs enemies?

Yes, Yogi, its déjà vu all over again.

Why is this man smiling?

2007-01-25T17:44:00.000-08:00

I get the feeling he knows something we don't know. Jeez, I hope the word "Iran" isn't in there anywhere....

Bizarro Condi Rice: Bizarro President! The situation in Iraq is hopeless!

Bizarro Shrub: Excellent news! Send in more troops!

Bizarro Condi Rice: That will make Iran very happy!

Bizarro Shrub: Just what I didn't intend! Time for me to wake up from my nap! [falls asleep with loud thunk as his head hits his desk]

Apologies to Saturday Night live. And to my reader(s) for using Bizarro twice.

Original photo caption: President Bush arrives on the South Lawn of the White House, January 22, 2007. REUTERS/Jason Reed

Chuck Hagel said it best....

2007-01-24T15:54:00.000-08:00

What a speech. Click me.

Oh, lovely. China can shoot down satellites now.

2007-01-19T18:14:00.000-08:00

The newspapers are reporting that China shot down one of its old weather satellites last week with a ground-launched missile, something only the US and the former Soviet Union had managed to do until then. The satellite was in orbit about 500 miles up.

As a grad student in Chinese Classics back in the early 1970s, the Mandarin learned an important lesson about China from an old professor. The professor, referring to the year the Mongols conquered China, said: “Remember, young Mandarin, in China, everything after 1280 is journalism.” China takes a very long view of history and the place of “the present” in history. What happened yesterday or last week may not ring the kind of alarm bells for them that we hear in the West.

So, keeping in mind that “too soon to tell” has a long fuse in China, there are a couple of worrisome points to consider. One is the threat from such a weapon in China’s active arsenal, and the other is the threat of future sales of that weapon to others. Iran comes to mind.

China’s military forces are large, but generally regarded to be poorly equipped, at least when compared to first-world forces like ours or Britain’s. A lot of our military advantage is based on advanced technology. A missile that can shoot down our spy or communication satellites would be an effective way to partially blind our theater forces and make the battlefield more level for the Chinese, with millions of infantrymen fixing their bayonets. Public information sources suggest the elliptical orbits of our recon satellites have maximum and minimum altitudes of about 600 and 160 miles respectively. So a missile like the one the Chinese fired is right in that ballpark.

China is thought to export about $1 billion in arms a year, though sophisticated weapons may not make up a large portion of that. Chinese weapons performed poorly during the Gulf war, which hurt their reputation. In the particular case of Iran, however, China has been a major supplier of missiles over the years, beginning with anti-ship cruise missiles like the NY-2 Silkworm in the 1980s and the newer C-801 and C-802 in the 1990s.

More disturbing have been China’s sales of ballistic missiles to Iran, including an export model (the M-11) of their famous Dongfeng 東風 (“East Wind”) series. Now, admittedly, these aren’t the ICBMs that had many of us early-cohort Baby Boomers hiding under our wooden school desks back in the late 1950s. They have a maximum range of less than 400 miles. The point is that Iran is a long-time client of China’s missile sales force, and with China’s demand for petroleum, especially motor gasoline, soaring, the banker in me sees an obvious deal lurking in there somewhere.

And, don’t forget that Pakistan has a long history of writing big checks for China’s latest models of export missiles as well, so the plot in that whole neck of the woods could definitely thicken.

As the new Congress settles down to business, it will also be interesting to see if this somehow percolates into the Congressional debate, but -- as the Mandarin said -- it is “too soon to tell.”

Unless of course, the Chinese missiles pop a couple of our GPS satellites and then millions of Americans in SUVs, wandering around lost and low on gas with their fancy $2,000 navigation units on the fritz, pull over at the next payphone and call their Congressmen to complain.

Footnote: The Mandarin just took a quick peek at the mainland Chinese-language blogosphere, and an unscientific impression was that the hits on “satellite” (卫星) and “missile” (飞弹) were dwarfed by the ongoing tizzy over a Starbucks cafe in the Forbidden City.

Cross-posted at Watching Those We Choose

Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" and the Buddhist concept of Hell

2007-01-16T14:29:00.000-08:00

The Mandarin is a bit of an awards show junkie, so he was curled up in front of the TV last night watching the Golden Globe awards. (His excuse was that it was business related, since the Mandarin’s day job is somewhat related to the entertainment industry.)

During the show, one of the presenters mentioned that William Monahan, who wrote the script for Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed,” based his script on Siu Fai Mak’s original screenplay for the 2002 classic Hong Kong film, “Internal Affairs.”

At that point, the Mandarin switched back to “Mandarin mode.” Because she got it wrong, a mistake the Mandarin has noticed too often in reviews and discussions of Scorsese’s excellent film. The English title of the original film was “Infernal Affairs,” with an “f.” And the Mandarin being the Mandarin, prepare yourself for the explanation.

The basic plot setup of both films is the same: two young police academy graduates are chosen for dangerous undercover assignments. One is assigned by the head of Internal (with a “t”) Affairs to be convicted of a crime, go to prison, and infiltrate a major crime family. The other is secretly already connected to that crime family and is assigned by its head to infiltrate the police hierarchy. Each becomes a mole in the other’s organization and neither knows of the other’s role. Years pass (ten years in the original) and each group begins to suspect they are penetrated by a “mole” from the other. The irony sharpens when each mole is assigned to discover the identity of their opposite number.

The Chinese title of the original film is 無間道, Mou gaan dou in Cantonese. (It is Wu jian dao in Mandarin, but because the original film is in Cantonese, the Mandarin will use Cantonese here.) Dou 道 (rhymes with "no") is the usual word for “road.” Mou gaan, literally “without gaps,” or “uninterrupted,” is an abbreviation of mou gaan dei yuk 無間地獄, a translation of the Sanskrit Buddhist term avīcinakara, the “endless hell.”

Unlike popular Christianity, with its one hell where souls suffer for eternity, popular Buddhism has over a hundred different hells. Some are cleverly designed on the principle that the punishment should fit the crime, for example one where gluttons suffer in a hell that is a perpetual banquet where they cannot eat anything because their mouths are too small for even a crumb of food to enter. There are sixteen principal hells, eight “cold,” and eight “hot.” Mou gaan dei yuk is the eighth and lowest, or “hottest” of the hot hells.

Most Buddhist hells are different from the Christian hell in one key way: after a period of suffering sufficient to compensate for their bad karma (“deeds”), souls reenter the cycle of rebirth and have another chance to live a better life on the path to nirvāna (imagine a dot under the second “n”), or enlightenment. In this way, Buddhist hells are more like the Catholic Purgatory. Once their punishment ends, the Catholic soul in Purgatory goes to Heaven and the Buddhist soul in hell is reborn on Earth.

All except souls in the mou gaan hell. Among those hundreds of Buddhist hells, this one is the real Hell. The meaning of mou gaan dei yuk, or avīcinakara, is “the hell without any interval (of rebirth).” The soul in the mou gaan hell effectively never gets out: the instant they are reborn, they end up right back where they were: in hell. Sort of like Michael Corleone’s famous line from “The Godfather, Part III:” “Just when I thought that I was out, they pull me back in.”

This concept of endless, unremitting hell is why, despite the prominent role of police internal affairs in the story, the Chinese title is translated “Infernal Affairs,” as in Dante’s “Inferno.” The Chinese title means simply, “The Road to Hell.” The English title is a clever play on words.

For the Mandarin to explain in detail how the concept of the mou gaan hell works itself out in the plot would spoil the film, but those of you loyal Mandarin readers who have seen it will understand.

As a final footnote (the Mandarin never met a footnote he didn’t like), there is also another – unintentional? -- play on words in the title. The intended reading of the title is “The Road (dou) to Hell (mou gaan).” The words mou gaan dou can also be read as “the uninterrupted (mou gaan) path (dou),” which translates another Buddhist Sanskrit term: ānantayamārga, the uninterrupted path to nirvāna, in which all impediments are removed in one lifetime and no further rebirths are needed before the soul achieves enlightenment.

It seems to the Mandarin that this contradiction of opposites, a phrase (mou gaan dou) that can mean both the road to endless torment in the mou gaan hell, and the short path to enlightenment, is actually a symmetry of opposites. It mirrors the theme of the movie, a kind of cinematic analog of the ubiquitous Yin-Yang symbol. The black of the crime family and the white of the internal affairs officers, locked in a rotating cycle of eternal interdependence. And in each half, a tiny kernel of the other, the “mole” of the opposite color, at its center.

And who knew all those long afternoons in Professor Chi's graduate seminar in "Chinese Buddhist Literature" back at Indiana University in the 1970s would bear such unlikely fruit thirty years later: an on-line movie review. Must be the Mandarin's karma.

Condi stands by her man

2007-01-11T14:01:00.000-08:00

Shrub, ignoring the Mandarin’s recent lecture on Confucian “Rectification of Terms,” went on TV last night to tell the nation:

1) “Stay the course” is out and we have a whole new strategy, which basically looks like staying the same course with some modest changes in tactical focus, and... oh, by the way,... 22,500 more troops going in, mostly to try to occupy and hold Baghdad’s Shiite stronghold Sadr City by force. Oh, lovely.

2) Sending 22,500 more troops into Iraq isn’t an “escalation,” it is just a harmless little “surge.” Kind of like when the tachometer needle on your car fluctuates up and down a bit when you are at a stop light instead of pointing at the same number all the time.

3) Despite having promised to give every consideration to the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, he incorporated (almost?) none of them into his “new” so-called “plan,” and is doing the exact opposite of one key ISG recommendation, to get US ground forces out of the business of trying to prevent Baghdad’s ongoing (Fawlty Towers flashback: “Don’t mention the (Civil) War”) factional struggle.

4) We know Shrub has a short memory, but to have forgotten a humiliating drubbing by the voters in the recent elections, and instead of using his speech to try to persuade the American people that they should support his strategy, he merely listed the things he was going to do, whether they (we) like it or not. He’s the decider and he’s decided.

That kind of hubris takes balls. Big ones.

And Condi, who should know, is showing us exactly how big they are in the photo above.

Original photo caption: U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, January 11, 2007. REUTERS/Larry Downing (UNITED STATES)

The Iraq war as a metaphor for adjusting lawn sprinklers

2007-01-06T14:28:00.000-08:00

Today, the Mandarin took advantage of a warm sunny day in Southern California to adjust his lawn sprinklers. His neighbors recently built a "small" retaining wall that - besides encroaching about 18" into the Mandarin's yard - left a strip of bare dirt along the foot of the wall where a swath of Mrs. Mandarin's carefully tended ground-cover (Lampranthus productus a/k/a "Purple Ice-plant") had been trampled to death by the neighbor's crew. So, after she replanted the affected area this morning, it was the Mandarin's job to adjust the sprinklers in that part of the yard so the tender new plants would get enough water to prevent transplant shock.

In the process of experimenting with different spray heads and aiming patterns, the Mandarin realized his struggle was a metaphor for Shrub's war in Iraq. Or more accurately, the struggle of Shrub's handlers to manage the war in Iraq by manipulating the contents of Shrub's head. Since the neocons are out and President Bush (#41) has mobilized his alumni network to attempt resuscitating Shrub's presidency, their first task - actually going on this week - is to empty out the bad old Iraq ideas in Shrub's head and replace them with new ones they hope will finally do the trick.

The little hollow tube gizmo in the picture is called a Shrub Head (made by "Lawn Genie").

The way a shrub head works (the kind in the picture anyway), is that you attach it to the sprinkler pipe, and then any one of a number of different inserts can be screwed into the empty space in the middle: 1/4 circles, 1/2 circles, full circles, adjustable inserts,... you name it, they make it.

So, if you screw a 1/4-circle insert into Shrub's head (sorry, the Mandarin can't help mixing metaphors here), then the fully-assembled shrub head will do one thing and one thing only, come hell or high water, till the sun cools and the stars go dark, and that is spray water in a 1/4-circle pattern wherever you have aimed it. Nowhere else.

Well, after two trips to the local hardware store and several mini-soakings, the Mandarin finally found the combination of shrub head inserts to do the trick. As an old Army Stability Operations geek, it gradually dawned on the him that getting good coverage with lawn sprinklers is a lot like stability operations. The trick is making sure the plan makes sense, the correct resources are available, and the implementation is effective.

And to do that, sometimes you have to empty out the old contents of your shrub head, flush it out with clean water, then screw in something new, turn it on, cross your fingers, and stand back. Way back.

Photo courtesy of Home Depot.

"Shrub mourns death of 3,000th U.S. soldier in Iraq"

2007-01-01T23:03:00.001-08:00

When the Mandarin read the article under that headline, all he could think of was young ex-Lieutenant John Kerry's riveting question to a Congressional committee back in 1971: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam -– How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Shrub, of course had Daddy fix it so he didn't have to worry about that particular honor.

Footnote: Just over 95% of those killed (2,863) have died since Shrub announced the "end of major combat operations" under the now-infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner.

He should be ashamed.

News headline: "Pope makes Christmas appeal for children"

2006-12-26T15:13:00.000-08:00

While the rest of us were hoping for an iPod or a plasma TV, the Pope's Christmas wish -- despite all the bad press the Roman Catholic priesthood has been getting in recent years -- appeared in the headlines as:

Pope makes Christmas appeal for children

The Mandarin wonders who was duty editor the night some bored wag came up with that headline....

Original photo caption: Pope Benedict XVI greets a child as he celebrates the midnight mass in St Peter's basilica at the Vatican. The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem has urged Middle East leaders to become "peacemakers" as the pope used his Christmas message to appeal for respect of the "dignity of children."(AFP/Patrick Hertzog)

Get ready, boys and girls

2006-12-22T07:55:00.001-08:00

An old professor of the Mandarin's, in the context of analyzing some peculiar laws instituted during the Tang Dynasty in China (618-907), made this pithy observation: "Governments don't pass laws against things that nobody is doing."

In that vein, the Mandarin was intrigued by this little bit of bureaucratic doublespeak:

The Selective Service—the federal agency that would be integral to any draft effort by the Bush administration—will perform tests on its system equipment, The Associated Press is reporting.

Selective Service "is planning a comprehensive test of the military draft machinery, which hasn't been run since 1998," writes Kasie Hunt. "The agency is not gearing up for a draft," an agency official told Hunt, and "the test itself would not likely occur until 2009."

Bush's Secretary for Veterans Affairs, Jim Nicholson, meanwhile remarked that "society would benefit" should the draft return; he later issued a press release stating "he does not support reinstituting a draft."

And the Mandarin means that "boys and girls" in the title literally. Equal rights carry equal responsibilities, don't they? Will we see the Roberts-Alito-Scalia-Thomas "axis of evil" go after Rostker v. Goldberg next?

Anyway, the Mandarin (Selective Service Classification 4-A: "Registrant who has completed military service") wishes today's crop of cannon fodder between the ages of 18 and 26 the best of luck in dealing with their local Draft Boards when the time comes. Or doesn't come, depending on which side of his mouth Jim Nicholson is speaking out of at any given moment....

One of these days, the Mandarin may share a cautionary tale with his loyal reader(s) about his own experience with the Selective Service System, including such highlights as 1) his having received a draft notice while attending graduate school under the G.I. Bill as an ex-Army officer, and 2) a testy meeting with the head of the Tennessee Draft Board, whose name was Col. Sanders. (Would the Mandarin kid you about something like that?)

The Upside-down Flag

2006-12-17T10:44:00.001-08:00

A fellow blogger posted a comment on one of the Mandarin's recent posts, with a link to his own blog, called the Upside Down Flag. Seeing the title reminded the Mandarin of his early run-in with military justice.

Regular reader(s) may recall that the Mandarin was an Army Officer during what, at the time, we called the Big Practical Exercise ("P.E."), a/k/a the Vietnam "conflict." Just as until recently there was no Civil War in Iraq, in those days there was officially no war of any kind in Vietnam. War not having been declared, it was called a "conflict."

Mandarin footnote: In Analects 13:3, Confucius made an observation that rings as true in Shrub's second term as it did when first written down (in these very words) twenty-five centuries ago. The key term zhèng míng 正名 is usually translated "rectification of names" or "rectification of terms." In practice it means what we call things should accurately describe their reality:

子路曰衛君待子而為政子將奚先子曰必也正名乎子路曰有是哉子之迂也奚其正子曰野哉由也君子於其所不知蓋闕如也名不正則言不順言不順則事不成

Zilu said: "If the ruler of Wei put the administration of his state in your hands, what would you do first?" Confucius said: "If something had to be first, I would say rectification of terms." Zilu said: "That's it? What a strange approach to things! Why start with rectification of terms?" Confucius said: "Yu, how unsophisticated you are. A gentleman should be careful when talking about things of which he is ignorant. When terms for things are not correct, then what is said will not make sense; when what is said does not make sense, then our undertakings must end in failure."

What is said will not make sense....

among thousands of examples, a few come quickly to mind: "No Child Left Behind," "Clear Skies," "Mission Accomplished," "last throes," "Freedom is untidy," etc.

...then our undertakings must end in failure.

Anyway, returning to the Mandarin's flirtation with the stockade, flash back to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, late 1970 or early 1971.

Way too clever for his own good -- what else is new? -- young Second Lieutenant Mandarin, Field Artillery, US Army Reserve, decides to put a small flag decal on the back panel his unobtrusive, brand new, bright screaming yellow Triumph TR-6 roadster.
Upside down.

The next morning, Big Ugly Sergeant pokes his head into 2LT Mandarin's cubicle in the faculty area of the Field Artillery School Tactics Department, where the Mandarin was an instructor in "Stability Operations," a euphemism (rectification of terms, anyone?) for what our forces are trying to conduct in Iraq these days.

B.U.S.: "Lt. Mandarin, is that your little yellow foreign sports job in the Officer's parking lot?"

2LTM:" Yes, Sergeant."

BUS: "Then kindly report to the Colonel's office toot sweet."

A few minutes later, 2LTM is standing at attention in front of the Colonel commanding the Tactics Department. It should be noted that the Colonel was already not enamored of the Mandarin because of the Mandarin's habit of routinely skipping the Colonel's weekly mandatory officer-only Bible study and prayer breakfasts. (The Mandarin assumed heathen non-coms and enlisted ranks were on their own, prayer breakfast-wise.)

Col: "Lieutenant Mandarin, are you aware there is an upside-down flag decal on the back of your car?"

2LTM: "Yes, a picture of an upside-down flag, sir."

Col: "Why is it upside-down?"

2LTM: "As a distress signal, sir."

Col: "Are you in distress, Lieutenant Mandarin?"

2LTM: "No, sir."

Col: "Is this some kind of political protest, Lieutenant Mandarin?"

2LTM: "No, sir. It is an exercise of free speech, sir."

Col: (sneering) "Well, you young smart-ass, whatever you think it is, I think it is violation of the regulation governing display of the flag, and you will remove it or I will bring you up on charges."

2LTM: "Excuse me, sir, but the regulation on 'Flags and Pennants' does not apply here, sir. It states that flags must be made 'of silk or an acceptable substitute cloth material.' Therefore, my decal isn't a flag, sir, it is only a picture of a flag."

The conversation continued with bursts of surprisingly un-Christian expletives (the Colonel) punctuated by increasingly uncomfortable silences (2LTM), culminating in the Mandarin being offered two choices: 1) remove the decal in the next fifteen minutes, or 2) be demoted to private and shipped off to Vietnam as an infantry rifleman on the next plane out.

A few minutes later, as the Mandarin sat on the asphalt peeling the flag decal off the back of his car, while the Big Ugly Sergeant supervised, he planned phase two of his Waldenesque (Quixotic?) campaign of civil disobedience.

Later that afternoon, the Mandarin changed his glasses frames from G.I. plastic to a pair of thin wire-rims that resembled as closely as possible those in the standard news photos of Trotsky.

The odds of the Mandarin being shipped off to the land of the Big P.E. for striking this new, much subtler blow for freedom, were minimized by the likelihood that neither the Big Ugly Sergeant nor the Bible-thumping Colonel were likely to know Leon Trotsky's wire-rimmed glasses from Nikolai Lenin's.

Or John Lennon's for that matter.

Oh, come on, nobody said anything about acutal "studying!"

2006-12-11T06:47:00.000-08:00

Shrub thought a "study group" was a bunch of guys from the same class getting together to watch football and drink beer, like when he was in the Harvard MBA program.

Original photo caption: U.S. President George W. Bush speaks to the press after receiving the official report of the Iraq Study Group from Co-Chairman and former U.S. Congressman Lee Hamilton, and Co-Chairman and former Secretary of State James Baker in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington December 6, 2006. REUTERS/Larry Downing

The not-so-forbidden city

2006-12-06T17:11:00.000-08:00

Back in the 1980s, when the Mandarin was traveling regularly to China on business, one of his favorite pastimes when stuck in Beijing for days on end waiting for some meeting or another, was to wander the run-down glory of the Forbidden City. In those days, most of the compound, except the central tourist route through the main palaces, was off limits to tourists because many of the shabby, dilapidated Ming-era buildings (dating from between 1406 and 1420) were being used for warehouses, workshops and tenement dormitories, as they had been since Mao seized power in 1949.

Sometimes, using a hundred-year-old plan of the palaces, the Mandarin would wander blithely through unmarked side passages into the unrestored areas of the 180-acre Forbidden City, past signs in Chinese reading, "Stop! No entry to unauthorized personnel!" to see what he could find. What little he was able to see behind those walls was dishearteningly squalid, and sooner or later an angry policeman or guard or plainclothes thug of some kind would block the way, yelling at the Mandarin, in proper Beijing dialect, not the bland official putonghua (a/k/a Mandarin) that even though he was just an ignorant foreign devil, there was no excuse for snooping around in unauthorized areas where he didn't belong and causing trouble for everybody by straying from the approved tourist route. On these delightful occasions, by pretending he spoke no Chinese, the Mandarin was able to add a few new swear words to his vocabulary....

Anyway, all this nostalgia came flooding back when the Mandarin recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Starbucks having actually opened a store inside the Forbidden City itself. The faint humming the Mandarin heard in his ears at that moment was the waxed corpse of Chairman Mao, spinning in his glass display case a mile or so south of the new coffee shop, in his mausoleum in the middle of Tiananmen Square.

Yes, boys and girls, Starbucks Coffee is selling lattes in a side wing of one of the 600-year-old palaces of the Forbidden City. In Chinese, the sign says 星巴克咖啡 xing ba-ke ka-fei. Xing means "star," ba-ke (ke rhymes with "duh!") is a phonetic attempt at "buck," and by now everyone on the planet knows what ka fei is...

Of course, the article points out that most Chinese customers order tea and think coffee tastes nasty. But it is only a matter of time. Just look at McDonald's rapid success in China.

In fact, if old Charmian Mao, under a thirty-year coat of Pledge, ever gets tired of spinning in his crystal coffin, he can bop over to the Micky D's that opened several years ago on the edge of Tiananmen square and recharge his batteries with a Quarter Pounder. Unless, as Vincent Vega would say, they use the metric system over there....

Back in 1927, Mao wrote in one of the most pithy passages in his little red book:

革命不是請客吃飯，不是做文章，不是繪畫綉花，不能那樣雅緻，那樣從容不迫，文質彬彬，那樣溫良恭儉讓。革命是暴動，是一個階級推翻另一個階級的暴烈行動。

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Well, maybe not a dinner party, but these days who can resist a Big Mac® and a Green Tea Frappuccino®?

Sorry, Chairman Mao, the revolution is over.

Shrub sounding manly

2006-11-28T09:55:00.001-08:00

No, faithful reader(s), this time Shrub is not holding his breath (as here and here) to make his critics stop demanding an Iraq pull-out. He is kvelling at the thought of his future legacy as the man who let loose the dogs or war,... oops, the Mandarin meant to say, the man who put freedom on the march in the Middle East.

Today's headline article:

Bush says U.S. won't withdraw from Iraq

RIGA, Latvia -

President Bush, under pressure to change direction in Iraq, said Tuesday he will not be persuaded by any calls to withdraw American troops before the country is stabilized. "There's one thing I'm not going to do, I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete," he said in a speech setting the stage for high-stakes meetings with the Iraqi prime minister later this week. "We can accept nothing less than victory for our children and our grandchildren."

Well, two things popped into the Mandarin's little head right away.

First, did Shrub just say that it will be our children and grandchildren who will finally secure victory in Iraq?

And secondly, it is now crystal clear that Shrub is not an aficionado of George Carlin, one of whose most famous lines (referring to Vietnam) was:

We’re always afraid of pulling out. “Pull out? Doesn’t sound manly to me, Bill. Let’s leave it in there, get the job done!" Because that’s what we’re doing to that country, after all…

And Shrub is never one to avoid an opportunity to look like a manly man, even without a "Mission Accomplished" banner and a strategically padded flight suit.

Original photo caption: U.S. President George W. Bush wells up as he finishes a speech at the University of Latvia in Riga, Latvia November 28, 2006. Bush, in Latvia for the NATO summit, appealed to NATO allies to provide more troops with fewer national restrictions for the alliance's most dangerous mission in Afghanistan. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

The end of the "Pottery Barn rule?"

2006-11-24T08:57:00.000-08:00

Back in the summer of 2002, when -- as we now know -- Shrub and his neocon militia were already deep into planning their invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell advised Shrub that he should be mindful of the so-called "Pottery Barn rule." As quoted from Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack:

"You are going to be the proud owner of 25 million people," he told the president. "You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You'll own it all." Privately, Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage called this the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it."

Powell might well have been recalling the words of Shrub's father, President Bush, who wrote in 1998 about his decision to limit the Gulf War military mission to liberating Kuwait:

While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. ... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome. [Time Magazine, 2 Mar 98]

More than eight years later, this has the ring of prophesy, as we read endless headlines about tribal and sectarian strife costing the lives of over a hundred Iraqi civilians a day, month after month, including a couple of hundred yesterday, our Thanksgiving Day here in America.

So Shrub's ignorance has triumphed over his father's thoughtful "reality-based" foreign policy, and we have inherited a country full of broken pottery. What a Thanksgiving turkey he has turned out to be!

And the sad part for everyone, especially our troops in the field and the Iraqi populace trying to live another day without being kidnapped and shot, is that Shrub hasn't the slightest idea how to fix what he has broken.

Original photo caption: Vehicles burn following a car bomb in the centre of Baghdad. Photograph: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Getty.

"Hey, Putin, does this dress make my ass look big?"

2006-11-20T09:49:00.000-08:00

At this week's APEC meetings in Hanoi, lame duck Shrub and his boy toy Putin were inseparable, and made quite the cute couple in their matching dresses.

The traditional Vietnamese dress called the Áo Dài (pronounced "ow yai" in south and central Vietnam and "ow zai" in the north) is commonly worn by women. These days it is rarely worn by men, and then only on cultural or ceremonial occasions.

Original photo caption: Wearing traditional 'ao dai,' U.S. President George W. Bush walks with Russian President Vladimir Putin after a group photo with leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, Sunday, Nov. 19, 2006. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

1LT Shrub (Texas Air National Guard - AWOL) finally makes it to Vietnam (updated)

2006-11-17T07:27:00.000-08:00

This is an emotional topic for the Mandarin, and the crushing irony of Shrub's semi-triumphant trip to Hanoi is almost unbearable.

The short version of the story, for my younger readers, is that Shrub avoided fighting in Vietnam because his daddy’s friends jumped him ahead of an eighteen-month waiting list and got him into the Texas Air National Guard (TxANG) despite his being unqualified for appointment.

His six-year military obligation began on 27 May 1968. A few months later, he was commissioned an officer without having taken any of the three required routes to an officer’s rank: ROTC (the Mandarin’s route), Officer Candidate School (OCS), or a direct commission after at least eighteen months active duty service as an enlisted man. The program under which his commission was fast-tracked was usually reserved for medical doctors or other critical specialists.

In return for an immediate assignment to pilot training, he agreed to serve as an active pilot in the TxANG for five years following graduation. He graduated on 29 Nov 1969, making his obligation to be on continuous flying duty until the end of November 1974.

Shrub was assigned as an F-102 pilot to the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (FIS) in Houston, once again being jumped to the head of the line - this time a number of more experienced pilots, some of whom had been waiting more than a year for a slot in this highly desirable unit. As a pilot on active flying status, Shrub was obligated to complete at least 36 flying days a year, including one weekend a month (hence we active duty officers called them “weekend warriors”) and one two-week summer training camp. He served honorably until April 1972. That was the month the Air Force began requiring drug testing as part of the annual pilot’s physical exam.

Shrub disobeyed a written order to complete such a physical in May 1972. His last flight as a TxANG pilot was on 17 Apr 1972, more than 31 months short of his five-year flying obligation. By then, he was not even flying the F-102. A few months before that date, he had been ordered to take remedial training flights in a two-seat trainer (the T-33). At the time, this was an unequivocal sign of performance problems in the cockpit. His military pilot status was formally revoked on 1 Aug 1972 for having failed to appear for his annual flight physical and mandatory drug test.

Around that time, without permission, he moved from Houston to Alabama for a few months to work on a political campaign. He was AWOL for the months of May through September 1972, failing to appear for his required one weekend a month of training. He trained intermittently in Alabama beginning in October. He was also paid for a few days of training in Houston, but no one at the 111th FIS remembered ever seeing him there on the dates in question. He did not accumulate the required days for the fiscal year ending 30 Jun 1973. He also disobeyed written orders to attend the mandatory two-week summer training camp in 1973.

The 1973 personnel evaluation by his home unit, the 111th FIS, was submitted blank, the author citing Shrub’s failure to appear at the unit at any time during the year ending 30 Jun 1973.

In September 1973, Shrub requested a transfer to a reserve Unit in Boston so he could begin the Harvard MBA program. That request was not approved, but he moved to Boston anyway and did not attempt to join any reserve unit there.

The following month, he received a disciplinary discharge from the TxANG and was transferred to the books of the Air Force reserve, where he was liable for immediate call-up. By then, the war was over, the last US combat forces having been withdrawn five months earlier. He remained in that status for over a year and was discharged from the military service on 21 Nov 1974. He had not attended any required training in the previous seventeen months, or flown an airplane since April 1972.

This is a photo of Shrub's F102, cockpit empty and waiting for his return. Mission accomplished?

Shrub's original military files, as released by the White House, can be seen here.

A detailed time-line follows, extracted from publicly-available excerpts from Shrub's actual military personnel record, with hot links to relevant documents.

Note: the six disputed “Killian” memos that Dan Rather presented on CBS News (and for which he lost his job) are included here in their correct chronological position, but are clearly marked “unauthenticated.” The material released by the White House itself is abundantly sufficient to establish dereliction of duty.

17 Jan 68

Takes the Air Force Pilot Qualification test. Scores 25%, the lowest acceptable score. (Some give date as 19 Jan)

30 Jan 1968

Tet Offensive begins in Vietnam.

27 May 68

Accepted into the Texas Air National Guard (TxANG), the same day he interviewed with General Staudt, the Commanding Officer of the TxANG, despite an 18-month waiting list at the height of the war in Vietnam. Ben Barnes -- then Speaker of the Texas House and a friend of the Bush family -- has said on the record he arranged this as a favor to Bush Senior. Private Bush acknowledged a six-year obligation.

28 May 68

Signs agreement that if he is sent to flight school, he will serve the TxANG as a pilot for five years after graduation. Graduated 29 Nov 69, so his obligation to serve on Flying Status would run until Nov 1974.

08 Jun 68

Graduates from Yale

14 Jul 68

Initial Active Duty (Basic Training), until 25 Aug 68 at Lackland AFB, TX

03 Sep 68

Discharged from Enlisted Status

04 Sep 68

Commissioned 2LT without ROTC, OCS or required period of prior active duty (usually 18 months) through a direct commissioning program usually reserved for doctors and other specialists in high demand by the service.

04 Sep 68

Assigned to the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, Ellington AFB, Texas -- despite a waiting list of already-qualified pilots. Other members of the unit, pilots and non-pilots, included the sons of Senator Tower, Senator Bentsen, and Governor Connally, plus seven Dallas Cowboys players.

05 Sep 68

Begins an authorized two-month leave of absence to work on the Florida Senate race of Ed Gurney.

21 Nov 68

Begins one year of pilot training at Moody AFB, GA

29 Nov 69

Finished Basic Pilot Training

29 Dec 69

Begins Combat Air training (F-102)

20 Jun 70

Completes F-102 training with 300 flying hours, returns to 111th FIS as Ready Reserve pilot. To be eligible for assignment to an F-102 unit in Vietnam, 500 flying hours was the minimum. Nevertheless, Bush volunteered for a three-month temporary rotation to Vietnam, but was turned down for that reason.

30 Jun 70

USAF decides all overseas F-102 units will be deactivated and their missions shifted to units flying newer aircraft.

Sep 70

Authorized leave of absence through November to work on Bush Senior's campaign.

03 Nov 70

Promoted to First Lieutenant.

01 Jun 71

Credited with 46 days of flight duty in previous year (minimum requirement was 36 days).

2 Feb 72

Unauthenticated Killian memo to Harris enquiring about Bush’s pilot certification. (1st memo)

Mar 72

De-rated from flying the F-102 and required to undergo remedial training in a two-seat training aircraft (the T-33), usually a sign of pilot performance problems.

1972

Early this year, some sources claim Bush was arrested for possession and use of cocaine, did community service working at an inner-city youth outreach program and had his criminal record expunged. Other sources claim none of that ever happened. The drug issue is mentioned here because Bush’s detractors link it to his decision to disobey orders and not take any required annual flight physicals beginning in April 1972.

Apr 72

US Air Force announces mandatory drug tests as part of all annual flight physicals

17 Apr 72

His last flight in an F-102. He still had a Military Service Obligation to serve as a pilot on Flying Status for another 955 days (until 28 Nov 1974), but he never again flew any TxANG or other military aircraft until his famous "Mission Accomplished" stunt over thirty years later.

4 May 72

Unauthenticated Killian memo formally ordering Bush in writing to report for flight physical no later than 14 May 72.

May 72

Bush expresses the intention to relocate to Alabama during May to work for Blount campaign until November.

15 May 72

Bush’s last day on the base at Ellington. Beginning now, there is no evidence of attendance at any required drills or training activities for five months, technically going Absent Without Leave ("AWOL"). The usual punishment for such action, and it was enforced many times, was to be placed on a list to be called to active duty immediately, for up to two years. Bush’s time spent in pilot training in 1968-70 might have been credited against the two years, leaving him liable at the very least for say six more months of active duty, and in the worst case for the full two years.

Note: AWOL simply means any unauthorized absence. Desertion is defined as: "leaving or remaining absent from [one's] unit, organization, or place of duty, where there has been a determined intent to not return; if that intent is determined to be to avoid hazardous duty or shirk important responsibility." You decide whether Shrub was AWOL or a deserter.

19 May 72

Unauthenticated Killian memo regarding his conversation with Bush, who wanted to get out of training in Texas and do it in Alabama. Killian also counseled him on having missing his physical, Bush said he may be to busy in Alabama to take care of the flight physical while he is there.

20 May 72

Per his pay records, Bush does not attend, and did not later make up, two days of mandatory training the weekend of 20-21 May.

24 May 72

Bush applies for permanent transfer out of the TxANG to the US Air Force 9921st Air Reserve Sq, Montgomery, AL. Note he entered an incorrect AFSC (occupational specialty code) of 1125B rather than 1125D. This would have incorrectly listed him on the records of the USAF Reserve as a pilot trained to fly only two types of already obsolete aircraft, the F-89 and F-94, both no longer in service. He also listed his Training Category as “G” (no drills required) instead of the correct category “A”. Bush was not legally eligible for this transfer because of his unfinished obligation as a pilot. He was still in Training Category “A”, requiring 48 half-day drill periods plus 15 active duty training days a year. Also, merely having filed an application to leave the TxANG did not relieve him of his obligation to continue drills in Houston, two days of which he had already missed the weekend before he filed the request.

26 May 72

Commanding officer of 9921st accepts Bush, but cautions him the 9921st is not a "ready reserve" unit and training there may not satisfy his MSO (military service obligation). This unit was a training category “G” unit – also called a “postal unit” because its members had completed their Military Service Obligation and were no longer required to attend any drills.

01 Jun 72

Credited with 22 days of flight duty in previous year, which was 12 days short of his minimum requirement of 36.

Jun 72

Per his pay records, Bush was not credited with or paid for any training in or attributable to Jun 72, rendering him technically AWOL or a deserter, depending on his intent (see above).

Jul 72

Per his pay records, Bush was not credited with or paid for any training in or attributable to Jul 72, rendering him technically AWOL or a deserter, depending on his intent (see above).

31 Jul 72

HQ Air Reserve Center, Denver, disallows his request for transfer to 9921st, citing Bush's Ready Reserve obligation and the inappropriate status (training category "G" or “postal”) of the destination unit.

Aug 72

Per his pay records, Bush was not credited with or paid for any training in or attributable to Aug 72, rendering him technically AWOL or a deserter, depending on his intent (see above).

01 Aug 72

Unauthenticated Killian memo reports revoking flight status for failing to meet TxANG/USAF standards including failure to take physical. Comments Bush has made no effort to meet his certification requirements. Also reports he has directed a Flight Review Board be convened, a very serious matter for a military pilot. Bush's flying status was formally revoked in these written orders on the same date.

3 Aug 72

Memo from Major Shoemake, TxANG Personnel officer, to Bush’s unit - rebuking them for having submitted an unacceptable transfer application for Bush.

Sep 72

Per his pay records, Bush was not credited with or paid for any training in or attributable to Sep 72, rendering him technically AWOL or a deserter, depending on his intent (see above).

05 Sep 72

Bush requests permission to perform “equivalent duty” (meaning substitute drills in Alabama for required drills in Texas with the 111th) for Sep-Nov 72 with the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group at Dannelly ANG Base, AL. This was not a transfer – he remained on the books of the 111th in Houston.

15 Sep 72

Request to perform equivalent duty with 187th for Sep-Nov approved, but the September drill date had already passed when the request was granted.

07 Oct 72

Bush invited to report to 187th for equivalent duty Sat/Sun 7/8 Oct 72. Both the Commanding Officer and the Personnel Officer of this unit said in later interviews that he did not appear at any time in 1972 to train with them.

28/29 Oct 72

Per his pay records, paid for two days training in Alabama to make up Oct training missed in Texas.

04 Nov 72

Bush was invited to report to 187th for equivalent duty Sat/Sun 4/5 Nov 72. The Commanding Officer and the Personnel Officer of this unit said in later interviews that he did not appear to train with them.

11/12 Nov 72

Per his pay records, paid for two days training in Alabama to make up Nov 72 training due in Texas.

13/14 Nov 72

Per his pay records, paid for two days training in Alabamato make up Dec 72 training due in Texas.

Nov/Dec 72

Returned to Houston after Blount lost the election. Did not report back to the 111th. Did not resume training with his home unit.

4/5 Jan 73

Per his pay records, paid for two days training in Alabama to make up Jan 73 training due in Texas.

6/8 Jan 73

Per his pay records, paid for two days training in Alabama to make up Feb 73 training due in Texas, 35 days early and therefore contrary to regulations limiting substitute training to no more than 30 days ahead of time, rendering him technically AWOL or a deserter, depending on his intent (see above), for February 1973.

9/10 Jan 73

Per his pay records, paid for two days training in Alabama to make up Mar 73 training due in Texas, 60 days early and therefore contrary to regulations limiting substitute training to no more than 30 days ahead of time, rendering him technically AWOL or a deserter, depending on his intent (see above), for March 1973.

27 Jan 73

Paris peace talks result in a cease-fire agreement in Vietnam.

Mar 73

Last U.S. combat forces depart Vietnam, leaving behind only a small group of advisors and enough Marines to guard the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

7/8 Apr 73

Per his pay records, paid for two days training with 111th in Texas, but that unit's Commanding Officer later wrote that Bush was not present. Had he actually been there, it would have been Bush’s first actual day training with his unit in Houston since 17 April 1972, almost a full year during which he did not appear for duty at his home unit.

1 May 73

Ordered to attend summer “active duty for training” at Ellington during the period 22 May - 7 Jun 73. He disobeyed this order and did not attend.

02 May 73

Bush's TxANG Commanding Officer writes in his fitness report of Bush, that Bush had not been observed at the unit at any time during the twelve months ending 30 Apr 73. Page one. Page two.

19/20 May 73

Per his pay records, paid for two days training with 111th in Texas.

22 May 73

During this period, until 30 Jul 73, Bush was credited with 35 reserve points on a form that does not explain what they were for. Early version, unaltered or incomplete. Later version, altered or more fully filled in.

23/24 Jun 73

Per his pay records, paid for two days training with 111th in Texas.

23 Jun 73

Air Reserve Personnel Center returns the 2 May 73 fitness report to his unit, querying the lack of any ratings, and says Bush should have been reassigned to another AFSC (occupational specialty code) in May 1972 since he was no longer flying or serving with the 111th FIS, so carrying him on the book as a pilot was unauthorized.

24 Jun 73

Unauthenticated Killian memo to a superior officer saying that Harris and he cannot rate Bush for full year ending 30 Apr 73 because he had not trained with the 111th after April 1972. Killian further comments that, “His recent activity is outside the rating period,” supporting evidence that Bush had finally returned to the unit after 30 Apr 73 to begin makeup drills. (5th memo)

16/17 Jul 73

Per his pay records, paid for two days training with 111th in place of training due in Aug 73, 33 days early and therefore contrary to regulations limiting substitute training to be done no more than 30 days ahead of time.

18/19 Jul 73

Per his pay records, paid for two days training with 111th in place of training due in Sep 73, 66 days early and therefore contrary to regulations limiting substitute training to be done no more than 30 days ahead of time.

21/22 Jul 73

Per his pay records, paid for two days training with 111th.

18 Aug 73

Unauthenticated “CYA” memo by Killian saying the brass want him to write a fake annual evaluation for Bush, but that he would refuse because Bush had not been with the unit that year and he had no info from the Alabama Air National Guard to support a review. Says he would backdate the review but not assign Bush a fitness rating.

5 Sep 73

Requests discharge from TxANG and transfer to Air Reserve Personnel Center (NARS) as of 1 Oct 73 to attend Harvard. NARS stands for Non-Affiliated Reserve Section -- meaning the inactive reserve with no further obligation to attend drills or training. As a condition of his early discharge from the TxANG, Bush agreed to affiliate with another Guard or Reserve unit in Boston, but later failed to do so.

Sep 73

Begins Harvard Business School

16 Oct 73

Reassigned to Air Reserve Personnel Center (ORS). The ORS is the Obligated Reserve Section – not his requested assignment of Air Reserve Personnel Center (NARS). Some personnel experts interpret this as a disciplinary action for failing to take 1972 flight physicals and missing 1973 summer camp and numerous drills. Assignment to ORS meant he was severed from the Guard and Active Reserve, placed on inactive status, and available for call to active duty. Bush’s signed acknowledgment of disciplinary reason for transfers from TxANG to Air Reserve Personnel Center (ORS). His orders. Texas ANG discharge. This was his final assignment. He remained in this status for another year without being called to active duty.

12 Nov 73

Fitness report addendum for year ending 30 Apr 73 (responding to 5 Sep 73 request for more info) says “Not Rated” for administrative reasons.

24 May 74

Original end date of Bush's six-year obligation, later extended because of his flight training agreement.

21 Nov 74

Discharged from inactive reserve, five years after completing flight school.

30 Apr 75

Saigon falls to the North Vietnamese army one day after the dramatic evacuation of the U.S. Embassy by helicopter from the rooftop.

17 Nov 06

Mandarin's head explodes to see Shrub in Hanoi, smiling under a bust of Ho Chi Minh, telling his hosts that the minor ideological differences of the 1960s and 70s should be bygones and we're all just one big happy family now.

Original picture caption (top photo): A bust of revolutionary communist leader Ho Chi Minh is seen at rear as U.S. President George W. Bush smiles before the start of his meeting with Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet, not pictured, at the presidential palace in Hanoi, Vietnam, Friday, Nov. 17, 2006. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Dietrich lives!

2006-11-13T13:37:00.000-08:00

The Mandarin lives in Southern California, and earlier this year our local papers (and perhaps yours, too) were full of the story about a Swedish millionaire who totalled his $1,000,000 Ferrari Enzo going 162 mph while racing one night on the Pacific Coast Highway ("PCH") in Malibu. Police found the Swedish millionaire sitting in the passenger seat of what was left of his car. Even though he had a bloody nose and was in the passenger seat, only the driver's airbag had blood on it. Even so, the Swedish millionaire said he had not been driving, it was his friend "Dietrich" who had crashed the car, and then ran off into the hills above PCH.

Well, Dietrich was never found, and it turned out that the Swedish millionaire was really an ex-millionaire who had been some kind of con man, and even the Enzo was due for repossession because he had fallen behind on the payments on it and another exotic car. Now, he is going to jail for embezzlement.

But, imagine the Mandarin's surprise to read today of recent events in Australia that have "Dietrich" written all over them:

Police in Sydney said 240 people were under investigation over [a] speeding scam, where hundreds of motorists blamed either the same dead man, or a person living in another state, for driving their cars at the time of the speeding offences.

Come to think of it, when the Mandarin got that ticket a few years ago, wasn't that the day some Australian bloke named Dietrich borrowed the Mandarin's trusty Saab?

Shrub plays defense

2006-11-09T11:07:00.000-08:00

In this shot, besides the, shall we say, cautious look on his face, Shrub seems to be protecting the family jewels -- note the left hand position.

But can you blame him? After the symbolic kick in the balls he got in Tuesday's elections, I suppose he can't be too careful when the new Majority Leader is sitting right there in person....

Original photo caption: President Bush, right, shakes hands with Democratic House Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of Calif., during their meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Intelligent design

2006-11-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

The Mandarin is now a believer in intelligent design: the voters have sent Katherine Harris into a well-deserved retirement.

The Mandarin's prediction for the House was thankfully too conservative, although one small disappointment in the overall delightful picture was Tammy Duckworth finishing two percentage points short of upsetting Peter Roskam in the Illinois 6th.

In the Senate, if the razor-thin Democratic leads in Virgina and Montana hold up through the recounts and lawsuits, the Mandarin's guess will have been spot on (allowing for mistaking Socialist Independent Bernie Casey in Vermont as a Democrat - sorry, Bernie).

Anyway, the voters have comprehensively repudiated Shrub, Big Dick, Karl "Shrub's Brain" Rove, Rummy [update: Rummy takes one for the team], Condi and the whole incompetent crowd of neocons and their camp followers. Golly, how will the Wall Street Journal editorial page spin this one?

It was worth the long wait, boys and girls. A boatload of bums have been thrown out. Now let's hope the Democrats can deliver on their promise to be different.

On to 2008!

Original photo caption: Sarasota, Florida, January 16, 2004. Harris lost her long-shot quest for the Senate on Tuesday after a gaffe-prone campaign that saw the former Florida election official shunned by her own party chieftains. (Peter Muhly/Reuters)

Did Karl Rove decide the timing of Saddam's verdict?

2006-11-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

Josh Marshall is shocked. So is the Mandarin.

Well, if it turns out Karl and Shrub don't have Osama in the White House kitchen's walk-in freezer, then it would make sense.

A sweep?

2006-11-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

The Mandarin, fresh from his insightful prediction for the 2004 Presidential election, fearlessly predicts the following:

Senate
50 Democrats
49 Republicans
1 Independent caucusing with the Democrats (Lieberman)

House
223 Democrats
212 Republicans

Of course, the Mandarin reserves the right to come back and change his mind at any time.

Keith Olbermann said it better

2006-11-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

The Mandarin bows before him - he has succinctly summarized the issues better than anything the Mandarin has heard in a long time. Watch it.

How not to tell a joke (updated)

2006-11-01T09:23:00.000-08:00

Today, the Mandarin is recalling President Ford’s famous gaffe:

On October 6, 1976, during a televised presidential debate in the 1976 presidential election with rival Jimmy Carter, President Ford became confused stated that Poland and Eastern Europe were not under the domination of the Soviet Union. When challenged over his comments, he repeated "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration." [Wikipedia]

That led to a lot of Republican back-filling and damage control, always beginning, “What President Ford meant to say was…..”

Enter John Kerry, definitely no David Letterman when it comes to delivering jokes.

Kerry’s script:

Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.

What Kerry said:

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.

What Senator Kerry meant to say was [déjà vu attack] that Shrub, the poster boy for people who are intellectually lazy, allowed his ignorance and intellectual laziness to get us stuck in Iraq.

Now, unfortunately, between Kerry's lame delivery and the short attention span of the american TV audience, the combat veteran with three purple hearts is once again facing character attacks from a bunch of draft-dodging chicken hawks like Lieutenant “AWOL” Shrub and Dick “multiple student deferments” Cheney.

Anyway, the lesson for Senator Kerry is, apologize whether you meant it or not, and read the Mandarin’s lips: no more ad libs. Leave the jokes to Al Gore.

UPDATE

Kerry's full statement of apology:

As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop.

I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.

It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy. I don’t want my verbal slip to be a diversion from the real issues. I will continue to fight for a change of course to provide real security for our country, and a winning strategy for our troops.

Ennui

2006-10-29T18:15:00.000-08:00

The Mandarin is back from his travels, but nothing in the news seems funny enough to make fun of these days. Maybe as we get closer to election day, things will pick up. Maybe it was the tedium of marking his mail-in ballot, looking up the records of all those judicial candidates and deciding how to vote on the various ballot propositions. Tough assignment on decaf....

Sex, Denial, and Rain, in no particular order

2006-10-18T22:08:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin is in Bellevue, Washington for a few days, attending the annual meetings of the American Literary Translators Association (or ALTA). Think rain. For an airplane book for the flight from beautiful downtown Burbank, the Mandarin splurged on a copy of Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III. The Mandarin was hard-pressed not to think of Hot Shots, Part Deux, but managed to keep from giggling as he paid the $30.00.

Well, reaching page 180 out of 560, the Mandarin has got to say, some of us knew all along these guys were incompetent idiots, but reading it chapter and verse is kind of a vindication. If it is Mark Foley's flirtatations that are the last straw for the Republicans next month, well, whatever it takes. But compared to a pitiful middle-aged pedophile IM-ing teenaged boys about their "wood," the stuff in this book is effing dynamite.

By the way, the opening night of the ALTA conference was led off by a group in Swedish costumes singing Swedish songs in Swedish. No subtitles. The roof was leaking above my table, and the little drops hitting the tablecloth every minute or so became a kind of a bilingual version of the Chinese water torture. (Or agressive but fully legal Chinese water interrogation method, as Shrub now calls it.) But despite the Mandarin not understanding much Swedish (the Mandarin has owned eight Saabs, though), it was great fun and a good way to get into the spirit of the conference.

Tomorrow, things should liven up a bit. The Mandarin is giving a bilingual reading in Tibetan and English of some poems by the Sixth Dalai Lama of Tibet (died 1706), an extract from a much larger set of poems coming out in book form next year, if the Mandarin can get time to review the page proofs. And later that day, unless James Dobson or Jerry Falwell shut us down, the Mandarin's explicit presentation on sexual themes in Classical Chinese poetry should bring a blush to the tender cheeks of the masses.

Film at eleven.

And, way to go, Jeffrey Sebelia, winner of Project Runway and actually a really nice guy when you meet him in person.

Playing catch-up

2006-10-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

After two weeks in Italy, the Mandarin returns to find a number of notable events took place in his absence.

Little Kim Calls Shrub's Bluff

Talking about playing catch-up, check out the photo of Shrub signing something called the North Korea Nonproliferation Act. The Mandarin assumed this photo was taken shortly after Shrub's "Axis of Evil" speech in January 2002. But, on reading the caption more carefully, the Mandarin realized the photo was taken yesterday!

[sound of Mandarin's head exploding]

So let's get this straight. Shrub nominates North Korea for Axis of Evil in 2002. North Korea threatens 4 1/2 years later, like last week, to detonate a nuclear test. Shrub declares that a noo-kyoo-lur North Korea is "unacceptable." North Korea detonates a small nuclear device (or did they?). So what does Shrub do? He gets Senator Frist to rush through a bill making the test retroactively (radioactively?) illegal. Phew. Boy does the Mandarin feel safer now. Nagging question: does Shrub know what the word "unacceptable" means? He's certainly been throwing it around a lot lately....

Did They or Didn't They?

North Korea's explosion was estimated by seismic experts to have been about 0.5 kilotons. That means you could get the same bang by exploding 500 tons of TNT. Sounds big, but keep in mind that back in 1970-71 when the Mandarin was a young artillery officer, the US Army had in its arsenal artillery shells designated "W-33" that were 8" in diameter (about the diameter of a salad plate), 37" long and weighed about 240 pounds. They came in various yields between 5 and 40 kilotons. [While classified "secret" when the Mandarin learned it, this info is readily available on the Internet now.] Compare the Hiroshima bomb, which yielded about 15 kilotons and weighed 9,000 pounds. Even the lightest yielding W-33 made a bang ten times larger than Little Kim's recent test. So, folks, as nukes go, this one was t-i-n-y.

If it was a nuke. The Mandarin's personal theory is that the North Koreans decided to call Shrub's bluff by putting a few boxcars of TNT in a tunnel along with a few ounces of radioactive material to fool our sniffer planes flying downwind of the test, lit the fuse, and ran like hell.

The Mandarin Successfully Guards First-Class Lavatories Against Terrorists

Thanks to cashing in a boatload (boatload = 100,000 miles per seat) of frequent-flyer miles, the Mandarin was able to travel to and from Europe in First Class on a Lufthansa A340-300. From his aisle seat in Row 1, the Mandarin was able to keep an eagle eye on the two lavatories for roughly twelve hours each way, ensuring than none of the seven other passengers in first class were able to sneak into the lavatory and make a bomb. The flight attendants were thoughtful enough to leave little tubes of shaving gel and moisturizing lotion in the lavatories for us to use during the flight, and the Mandarin was tempted to mix them together in the sink to see what happened, but then he remembered he was flying on a German airline.... So, instead, he followed the orders printed on the lavatory wall, wiping off the wet sink with his used paper towel as a gesture to his fellow passengers.

The Party of Family Values Finds Another Foot to Shoot Itself In

The Mandarin was pleased to learn the Republican House Leadership has a no-tolerance attitude toward perverted House Members who persistently try over a number of years to have sexual relationships with underage congressional pages. No tolerance for anyone finding out about it, that is. While the Log Cabin Republicans may feel like an endangered species as the Christian wingnut right gears up to purge gays from the party (and any gay Republican has a lot to answer for in the Mandarin's book), this isn't about gay or straight. It is about adults in positions of power trying to seduce children that have been placed in their care in loco parentis. Besides being sick, it is a crime. And knowingly concealing that crime is itself a crime. So I expect to see a few more sanctimonious family values Republican talking heads roll in the next few weeks. Starting with that lovable bear of a guy, Denny Hastert.

Countdown to Heartbreak

The 2006 mid-term elections are shaping up to be a repeat of the 1994 Republican take-over of Congress. Shrub, his handlers, and their Corps of Congressional Clowns have now alienated almost every key element of the Republican coalition: small government conservatives, fiscally responsible moderates, isolationist America-Firsters, immigrant-hating border fence advocates, radical Christian fundamentalists,... You name it, and each of them has something to shake their fists at while they stay away from the polls. Unless Karl Rove has Osama bin Laden's body stashed in a freezer in the White House kitchen for the much-expected "October Surprise," we could be witnessing a wholesale repudiation of Shrub and his administration that will make history. Call it a "November surprise."

Original photo caption: President Bush signs into law S-3728, the North Korea Nonproliferation Act of 2006, as Senate Majority Leader Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) looks on, in the Oval Office, October 13, 2006. (Eric Draper/The White House/Handout/Reuters)

Gone, but not forgotten

2006-09-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin is taking a little holiday and will return in mid-October.

Shrub seeks clarity on torture

2006-09-17T20:21:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin is relieved to see actual Republicans developing backbones on this issue. For chickenhawks like Rumsfeld, draft-dodger Cheney, the raft of Neo-Cons who never wore a uniform, and of course AWOL Shrub to say that we need to "clarify" the Geneva Conventions to make sure that abuses like "waterboarding," for example, are not considered torture, well, Shrub, here are two simple tests.

One: when a former POW (Senator McCain) who has been totured himself says the Geneva Conventions should not be watered down, that should be a hint.

Two: if by some unimaginable twist of fate your daughters someday followed in their grandfather's footsteps and fought in a war, and were captured, anything you would be outraged to learn they had suffered at the hands of their captors, well,... get the picture.

When the Mandarin was a young officer back during the previous pointless overseas quagmire (think rice paddies), he and his fellow soldiers were trained in the Geneva Conventions. The Mandarin even was issued a little wallet card with the key provisions printed on it.

And we were taught that if we were captured, we should hold out if at all possible for twenty-four hours, and after that tell the enemy whatever they wanted to hear. The assumption was that after twenty-four hours, anything useful a captured soldier knew, the enemy knew, so plans and codes, etc., could be changed to take advantage of what the enemy thought they had learned of value, to turn it against them.

If Shrub and his chickenhawks start interpreting the Conventions to permit abusive interrogations in the name of protecting Americans, American soldiers will pay the price in blood, sooner or later. Perhaps on a waterboard....

We need to live up to our ideals as a country. As a wise old man (whose initials were B.F.) once said, "The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either." The same will be true of a country who trades the long-standing protections of the Geneva Conventions for a temporary political advantage.

Original photo caption: President Bush pauses during a Rose Garden news conference, Friday, Sept. 15, 2006 at the White House. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

Movie Description of the Week

2006-09-12T23:07:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin was flipping through the on-screen cable guide this evening and came across this little winner. Unfortunately, he was drinking from a glass of water at the time and the professional-quality spit take that followed (never laugh out loud and drink water at the same time) was fortunately not caught on film.

"When Night is Falling." A bisexual mythology professor has an affair with a circus performer she met at a laundromat.

Well the Mandarin thought it was funny. Maybe you just had to be there.

If Shrub wants a Constitutional amendment banning flag-burning, this little trick ought to get him a serious spanking at the very least....

2006-09-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

Talk about being made of teflon! The Mandarin wonders what the right-wing blogosphere would make of a picture of Hillary Clinton pulling this little trick.

Plus he did it on September 11th of all days, defiling a date that is sacred in the hearts of all Americans: the Mandarin's birthday.

And to my loyal readership, despite Shrub's callous insensitivity, thanks again for making it a memorable day in Mandarin-land.

Original photo caption: U.S. President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush stand on a carpet commemorating the date of the attacks of September 11, 2001 near a mural depicting those attacks outside the Ladder Company 10 firehouse opposite the site of the World Trade Center in New York, September 10, 2006. Bush lay a wreath at Ground Zero before visiting a chapel for a memorial service. REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES)

Condi channels Travis Bickle

2006-09-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

"You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here."

The Mandarin is fairly sure Condi doesn't have a gun up her sleeve, like Travis Bickle did in Taxi Driver, but she sure does have that "I'm practicing my mean face in the mirror" look, doesn't she.

Note: Sharp-eyed readers will recall the Mandarin has used the Travis Bickle bit once before, but this one was just too good to resist.

Original photo caption: In this photo provided by CBS, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appears on CBS's 'Face the Nation' in Washington, Sunday, Sept. 10, 2006. (AP Photo/CBS Face the Nation, Karin Cooper)

The Mandarin Supports the President in the Fight Against Terrorists - President Clinton, that is....

2006-09-04T09:11:00.000-07:00

Shrub is right - politicians who don't want the President to have the tools he needs to fight terrorism should be thrown out of office.

The Mandarin suggests we start with those Congressional Republicans who were "soft on terrorism" ten years ago.... click me.

Pluto Demoted!

2006-08-24T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin was saddened to learn that Pluto has been demoted:

Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is — and isn't — a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one.

However, all is not lost for Mickey's pal:

[Pluto] will be reclassified in a new category of "dwarf planets," similar to what long have been termed "minor planets."

We may have lost a planet, reducing the total in our solar system from nine to to the classical eight, but -- looking at the bright side -- Snow White has gained a dwarf.

How timely! As the Mandarin read recently, "three quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White's seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court Justices."

So, the Mandarin proposes -- to avoid cultural confusion -- we keep the number of Snow White's dwarfs constant at seven, and improve the name recognition of Supreme Court Justices by 50% with one simple step: Pluto will join the Seven Dwarfs, replacing Dopey, at which point Clarence Thomas will officially change his name to Dopey (which the other eight Justices already call him anyway).

"Have I turned blue yet?"

2006-08-22T07:18:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin found Shrub's session with the press yesterday fascinating.

This is from the Associated Press report:

[Shrub] said Monday the Iraq war is "straining the psyche of our country;" but leaving now would be a disaster.

[He] served notice at a news conference that he would not change course or flinch from debate about the unpopular war as he campaigns for Republicans in the fall congressional elections.

Then, as evidence of how much the war has strained his own psyche, he told reporters that he was going to hold his breath and turn blue unless they stopped asking him negative questions about Iraq, about his low poll numbers and especially until veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas stopped looking at him with her "evil eye" all the time.

Original photo caption: US President George W. Bush listens to a reporter's question as he conducts a press conference inside the White House Conference Center across the street from the White House in Washington, DC. Bush called for urgent deployment of a peacekeeping force in Lebanon to salvage a UN-brokered truce that halted 34 days of warfare between Israel and Hezbollah.(AFP/Paul J. Richards)

Better air travel through chemistry

2006-08-18T11:13:00.001-07:00

The Mandarin was in Mexico on holiday when the latest gang of crackpot British al Qaeda wannabees were rounded up for talking about thinking about plotting to blow up airliners with binary explosives made in the air by combining carried-on liquids disguised as a Starbucks Venti Latte and a bottle of lip gloss.

Beginning the return trip with more than the usual trepidation, the Mandarin found the luggage searching process at the Guadalajara airport to be quite manageable, as it turned out. So, happily, the Mandarin managed to return to the land of the Red Threat Level in one large piece. Thank you, Mexico's Michael Chertoff, whoever you are -- you're doing a heckuva job.

Anyway, now the Mandarin reads an article that explains just how binary explosives, in this case the versatile TATP (triacetone triperoxide), would be assembled in, say, an aircraft lavatory.

It makes fascinating reading, and the Mandarin for one, will be ever vigilant from now on in case he sees someone sneaking an ice bucket, a thermometer, a large beaker, a glass stirring rod, a medicine dropper and bottles of acetone, hydrogen peroxide and (you guessed it) sulfuric acid into the first class lav and then staying in there for several hours with nasty-smelling toxic fumes coming out from under the door now and then.

Money quote:

Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide / acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.

After a few hours - assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities - you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.

The genius of this scheme is that TATP is relatively easy to detonate. But you must make enough of it to crash the plane, and you must make it with care to assure potency. One needs quality stuff to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," as Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson put it. While it's true that a slapdash concoction will explode, it's unlikely to do more than blow out a few windows. At best, an infidel or two might be killed by the blast, and one or two others by flying debris as the cabin suddenly depressurizes, but that's about all you're likely to manage under the most favorable conditions possible.

Boys and girls, it's just that easy.... Don't you feel safer now?

While the Mandarin is on holiday for a week or so.....

2006-08-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

Perhaps one of his loyal readers can explain what the hell is going on in this picture. The Mandarin knows that Katherine Harris, both a proponent and an example of intelligent design, is fighting for her political life in the Florida Senate race, but what does paying $400 for a possum have to do with it?

The press description wasn't completely enlightening on the point:

You're not likely to catch Katherine Harris doing this in her hometown of Longboat Key. But she was a long way culturally and geographically from her well-heeled seaside community. She was in the middle of the Possum Palace holding a scruffy-looking marsupial by the tail, adroitly shaking it to prevent the creature from crawling up her arm. She paid $400 in an auction for the privilege.

And the U.S. Senate candidate was impressing the locals with her possum-handling skills. "That gal knows how to shake a possum," the auctioneer drawled.

Original photo caption: U. S. Congresswoman Katherine Harris, R-Florida, holds up a possum she purchased at the Wausau Possum Festival, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2006, in Wausau, Fla. Harris is a candidate for the U. S. Senate.(AP Photo/Phil Coale)

Boob descending a staircase

2006-08-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin imagines that whenever Shrub is going up or down the Air Force One stairs, photographers must just put their cameras on rapid fire. They know sooner or later they will get a money shot like this one. The upper middle frame is a particularly fine example of the "Curious George" genre.

The Mandarin's apologies to all the teen-aged blog crawlers who thought the "boob" in the title meant the more usual kind. For them, there is an ample endowment of Pam Anderson shots bouncing around on the web this week.

"Curious George takes a tumble" was the Mandarin's runner-up caption, but sometimes life must imitate art. So, apologies also to Marcel Duchamp for stealing the title of his iconic 1912 paining "Nude Descending a Staircase #2."

Original Shrub photo caption: In this combination photo, President Bush reacts as he stumbles while walking off Air Force One after returning to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., Monday, July 31, 2006. (AP Photos/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

Oh, lovely....

2006-07-25T10:57:00.000-07:00

Oh, lovely. Israeli military are firing Dual-purpose ICM artillery shells at civilian villages in southern Lebanon.

ICM ("Improved Conventional Munitions") are commonly called cluster bombs. Back in the stone age of 1970-71 when the Mandarin was an artillery officer, we called ICM "popcorn" because of the popping sound of the little bomblets going off in a cloud over the target area. Each 155mm DPICM artillery shell releases 80 or so little bomblets that are supposed to bounce up a couple of feet after hitting the ground and explode at a pre-determined hight most effective against both people and military equipment (hence "Dual-Purpose").

Unfortunately, 10-20% of the bomblets usually fail to explode, and are sometimes picked up later and detonate themselves in the hands of curious children thinking they are some kind of little toy. For that reason, use of them against civilian areas is prohibited by normal military doctrine, and is considered by some to be a war crime. We even stopped selling them to Israel twenty years ago or after they fired them into,... you guessed it, Lebanon. Israel now makes DPICM itself.

Thank goodness there is no such thing as global warming, because if we had global warming on top of the record-breaking heat wave hitting Los Angeles for the last few weeks, our goose would really be cooked.

The Mandarin was over in Burbank yesterday and the temp display on the Mandarin's Saab read 117 degrees. And that was the actual air temperature. In the car, after sitting for a few hours, it was pushing a Baghdad-like 140!

Perhaps the Mandarin should blame his lack of postings recently on the unprecedented hot weather we've been having. But the news has been exceptionally depressing lately - not much to make jokes about as Israel destroys Lebanon while Shrub and Condi sit on their hands.

The British and French foreign ministers, quoted by Kevin Drum at "Political Animal", said it well:

Speaking to a BBC reporter before travelling on for talks in Israel, where he will also visit the missile-hit areas of Haifa and meet his Israeli opposite number [British Foreign Office Minister Kim] Howells said: 'The destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so many children and so many people: these have not been surgical strikes. If they are chasing Hizbollah, then go for Hizbollah. You don't go for the entire Lebanese nation.' The minister added: 'I very much hope that the Americans understand what's happening to Lebanon.' -- The Guardian

"It is obvious that there were a certain number of hits where one did not exactly see the point," [French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie] told reporters on board the French frigate Jean Bart, which has been shuttling between Beirut and Larnaca, Cyprus carrying evacuees to safety. "One cannot ask the Lebanese national army to disarm the militias and at the same time bomb the main Lebanese barracks." Alliot-Marie also raised doubts about the strategic sense of bombing factories that produce powdered milk for infants. "And unfortunately, more and more, we are seeing a number of bombardments that are hitting civilians, even convoys of people who were simply seeking to reach Beirut to find shelter have been hit by bombs." -- The Lebanon Star

Whether enervated by the heat, or depressed by our powerlessness to force Shrub and his neo-Con Mafia to condemn Israeli agression in Lebanon, the Mandarin is at a loss.

Original photo caption: An injured Lebanese woman and her daughter from the southern village of al-Tiri sit in the hospital following Israeli air strikes on a convoy of people fleeing their villages in the southern city of Tyre. The UN relief chief condemned Israel for "violating humanitarian law" over its blistering raids on Lebanon as the Jewish state and Hezbollah killed more civilians in another wave of attacks.(AFP/Hassan Ammar)

Where has the Mandarin heard that before?

2006-07-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

As the Israeli military invades Palestine and Lebanon trying to recover three captured soldiers, Shrub -- visiting Germany -- weighs in:

[Shrub] voiced concern about the fate of Lebanon's anti-Syrian government, but offered no direct criticism of the punishment Israel is meting out.

"Israel has the right to defend herself," he said in Germany. "Secondly, whatever Israel does should not weaken the ... government in Lebanon."

Sustained air strikes in south Lebanon killed over 50 civilians and wounded 110 people, security sources said. Ten family members were killed in Dweir village and seven family members died in Baflay. A Lebanese soldier was also killed.

Hmmm. Take one of ours and we kill fifty of yours. That tactic sounds familiar.... Where has the Mandarin heard that before? Maybe here? Or here?

No. The Israelis would never, ever do something like that. Definitely the wrong guys. That can't be it.

The Mandarin must have been thinking about something else.

In fact, never mind. Forget the Mandarin even mentioned it.

Pick your sponsor

2006-07-07T10:52:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin has been off-line lately doing some rush work on a book manuscript for a publisher who wants to see a full draft by the end of the summer.

Also, politics hasn't been that funny lately.

But, a couple of things in today's TV listings caught the Mandarin's eye. There are probably a dozen jokes here about flexible shafts and going the distance (not to mention golf games lasting longer than four hours being dangerous to your health), but you loyal readers can handle that on your own.

But considering which products sponsor which sports, the Mandarin can definitely see some method to their madness:

PGA Golf - The Cialis Western Open

NASCAR stock car racing - Nextel Cup USG Sheetrock 400

If those are the sponsorship choices, the Mandarin would have to give the nod to golf....

A young Iraqi woman writes a blog....

2006-06-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

I ran across this blog today, and highly recommend reading it. Her recent posts give a vivid and heartbreaking picture of exactly how "Freedom is on the March" in Shrub's Pottery Barn Iraq.

Her take on the death of Zarkawi: (June 10, 2006)

How do I feel? To hell with Zarqawi (or Zayrkawi as Bush calls him). He was an American creation- he came along with them- they don't need him anymore, apparently. His influence was greatly exaggerated but he was the justification for every single family they killed through military strikes and troops. It was WMD at first, then it was Saddam, then it was Zarqawi. Who will it be now? Who will be the new excuse for killing and detaining Iraqis? Or is it that an excuse is no longer needed- they have freedom to do what they want. The slaughter in Haditha months ago proved that. "They don't need him anymore," our elderly neighbor waved the news away like he was shooing flies, "They have fifty Zarqawis in government."

So now that Zarqawi is dead, and because according to Bush and our Iraqi puppets he was behind so much of Iraq's misery- things should get better, right? The car bombs should lessen, the ethnic cleansing will come to a halt, military strikes and sieges will die down… That's what we were promised, wasn't it? That sounds good to me. Now- who do they have to kill to stop the Ministry of Interior death squads, and trigger-happy foreign troops?

Ver-Klimt

2006-06-19T11:47:00.000-07:00

Yikes!:

A 1907 portrait by Gustav Klimt has been purchased by cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder for $135 million, the highest amount ever paid for a painting, The New York Times reported.

The price tops the $104.1 million paid for Picasso's 1905 "Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice)" in an auction at Sotheby's in 2004, the paper said in its Monday edition.

The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist, is considered one of Klimt's masterpieces.

The Mandarin has a set of drink coasters with Klimt's most famous paintings (bought at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna a few years ago), and he is going to be extra careful with this one from now on.

Original photo caption: The 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustav Klimt. The portrait has been purchased for $135 million, the highest amount ever paid for a painting, The New York Times reported. (Handout/Reuters)

Too bad they didn't point the camera at Shrub

2006-06-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

It could have been another of those watershed "Dukakis in the tank" moments.

For the Mandarin's younger loyal reader(s), Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 Presidential election to Shrub's dad (a/k/a "President Bush").

Here's a snippet from Wikipedia about "Dukakis in the tank."

In September 1988 Dukakis visited the General Dynamics plant in Michigan to take part in a photo op in an M1 Abrams tank... Filmed wearing a safety helmet that seemed too large for his head, Dukakis looked awkward, out of place, and decidedly uncomfortable in a military setting. Footage of Dukakis was used by the Bush campaign as evidence he would not make a good commander-in-chief, and "Dukakis in the tank" remains shorthand for backfired public relations outings.

To see killer "tank" photo, the one that came to the Mandarin's mind when he saw the shot above, click here.

Original photo caption: White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, left, and White House Counselor Dan Barlett, ride in a military helicopter wearing helmets and flak jackets for a trip from Baghdad International Airport to U.S. Embassy in the Greenzone Tuesday, June 13, 2006 in Baghdad, Iraq. Snow and Bartlett traveled with President Bush who made a surprise visit to Baghdad. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Inconvenient, but true

2006-06-11T18:19:00.000-07:00

No joke: see this movie. As soon as you can. Take your friends and family. Go to the web site.

As the Mandarin was watching this film today, the phrase, "tanned, rested, and ready" came to mind. Except Al Gore isn't rested. He's tireless. Think how different things would be with a Democratic Congress and Al in the White House where he belongs (eight years late, but who's counting).

Shrub, al-Zarqawi, and the Legend of the Hydra

2006-06-08T09:17:00.001-07:00

Shrub’s crowing over the killing of al-Zarqawi (another “Mission Accomplished”?) shows how deeply he still misunderstands the rifts in Iraq, not only among the Shia, Sunni and Kurds, but also among various factions of the Iraqi insurgency and the wider Islamic fundamentalist movement.

Bin Ladin and al-Zarqawi were never allies, and often rivals. Bin Ladin strongly condemned al-Zarqawi for killing Muslims. While al-Zarqawi claimed the use of the “Al Qaeda” brand in Iraq, he never submitted to Bin Ladin’s leadership or attained Bin Ladin’s stature in the Muslim world.

An early informed view of the impact of his death (Juan Cole, Ivo Daalder, Juliet Kayyem, among others) is that the US has cut off one of the hydra’s heads in Iraq. Another one will certainly grow in its place.

The Mandarin was particularly struck by this expression of that fundamental idea by Mary Anne Weaver in The Atlantic:

Before leaving Amman, I had asked the high-level Jordanian intelligence official with whom I met whether al-Zarqawi, in his view, was a potential challenger to Osama bin Laden.

“Not at all,” he replied. “Zarqawi had the ambition to become what he has, but whatever happens, even if he becomes the most popular figure in Iraq, he can never go against the symbolism that bin Laden represents. If Zarqawi is captured or killed tomorrow, the Iraqi insurgency will go on. There is no such thing as ‘Zarqawism.’ What Zarqawi is will die with him. Bin Laden, on the other hand, is an ideological thinker. He created the concept of al-Qaeda and all of its offshoots. He feels he’s achieved his goal.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Osama bin Laden is like Karl Marx. Both created an ideology. Marxism still flourished well after Marx’s death. And whether bin Laden is killed, or simply dies of natural causes, al-Qaedaism will survive him.”

Until they understand who our enemy is and why they fight us, the Mandarin is hard pressed to have much confidence in Shrub and his Generals.

Déjà vu

2006-06-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin was having déjà vu recently, reading about the military’s investigation into the incident at Haditha where a few Marines may have murdered a number of innocent civilians. The investigation is being led by an Army General named Bargewell.

The Bargewell investigation is likely to be explosive on Capitol Hill, because it focuses on questions that have haunted the Bush administration and the U.S. military since the scandal over abuse at Abu Ghraib prison emerged two years ago: How do U.S. military leaders in Iraq react to allegations of wrongdoing by their troops? And is the military prepared to carry out the long and arduous process of putting down an insurgency as part of the first U.S. occupation of an Arab nation?

One of Bargewell's conclusions is that the training of troops for Iraq has been flawed, the official said, with too much emphasis on traditional war-fighting skills and insufficient focus on how to wage a counterinsurgency campaign. Currently the director of operations for a top headquarters in Iraq, Bargewell is a career Special Operations officer and therefore more familiar than most regular Army officers with the precepts of counterinsurgency, such as using the minimum amount of force necessary to succeed. Also, as an Army staff sergeant in Vietnam in 1971, Bargewell received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army's second-highest honor, for actions in combat while a member of long-range reconnaissance team operating deep behind enemy lines.

In the Mandarin's eyes, Bargewell's "cred" is immmesurably enhanced by his having worn the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol, or "Lurp" badge.

While then-Sgt. Bargewell was earning his DSC, the Mandarin was an Army Lieutenant at Ft. Sill, OK, teaching “Stability Operations” in the Tactics Department of the Field Artillery School.

“Stability Operations” was Army slang for the process of dealing with the local people in an area where US forces were occupying or conducting military operations. More broadly, as the Mandarin taught it, it concerned investigating the reasons some locals supported indigenous resistance movements, such as the Viet Cong at that time. The Mandarin also taught his Captains cases dating back to the Maoist guerrilla war in China in the 1930s and 1940s as well as lessons learned from the French occupation of Vietnam -- ending in their magnificent (or disastrous, depending on your point of view) defeat at Điện Biên Phủ at the hands of the brilliant General Võ Nguyên Giáp.

Even back in 1971, Stab Ops was only a two-week elective for Captains in residence at a nine-month course to prepare them to command units at the Battalion level and higher. But the Mandarin felt that those Captains who stayed awake in his two-week introduction to guerrilla warfare -- from the guerrilla (a/k/a “insurgent”) point of view -- went away at the very least with the impression that Stab Ops was something complex and difficult, needing forethought and planning.

Too Bad 1LT Shrub, Texas Air National Guard wasn’t cracking his gum in the back row of the Mandarin’s class when we were analyzing General Giáp’s approach to insurgency, or perhaps something might have stuck. Besides Shrub’s gum to the bottom of one of the Mandarin’s chairs, of course….

P.S. The head shot is General Giáp, who is apparently still alive and kicking at age 96. The Mandarin wonders what he would make of our latest adventure?

The Incredible Shrinking President

2006-06-02T06:44:00.000-07:00

Someone forgot to bring the three phone books he usually stands on when he uses the "grown-up" podium....

Original photo caption: U.S. President George W. Bush speaks about immigration reform at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington June 1, 2006. REUTERS/Larry Downing (UNITED STATES)

War has many faces

2006-05-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin is one of the few people who still watch the CBS evening news (when he gets home from work early enough to catch it). CBS rotates a couple of faces through its Baghdad bureau, and one of them is the excellent reporter Kimberly Dozier. Not long ago, after Bob Woodruff of ABC was wounded, the Mandarin had a premonition that something similar would happen to Ms. Dozier. Today it did.

Two members of a CBS News team, veteran cameraman Paul Douglas, 48, and soundman James Brolan, 42, were killed and correspondent Kimberly Dozier, 39, was seriously injured Monday when the Baghdad military unit in which they were embedded was attacked.

They were reporting on patrol with the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, when their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb.

CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier, 39, sustained serious injuries in the attack and underwent surgery at a U.S. military hospital in Baghdad. She is in critical condition, but doctors are cautiously optimistic about her prognosis."

Shrub has already lost the support of a majority of the nation for his crusade in the Middle East. Very few people are buying his ever-shifting line on the war any more, whether to find non-existent WMD, or to avenge Saddam's attempt to assassinate Shrub's father (the Mandarin's personal favorite), or to "spread freedom" in countries where free elections will probably result in victory for Islamic fundamentalists who hate us for our support of Israel's actions in Palestine,...

The number of military dead and wounded in Iraq is approaching 20,000. To borrow an image from President Bush (Shrub's daddy), these casualties produce "a thousand points" of outrage and grief. Those points are gradually coalescing into a national will so strong that not even Shrub can ignore it. Public reaction to casualties among well-known people like Bob Woodruff, or Pat Tilman, or now Kimberly Dozier, may also help hasten the end of Shrub's not-so-excellent adventure in Iraq.

The Mandarin is grateful for free speech (without it John Ashcroft or Alberto Gonzalez would have jailed the Mandarin a long time ago) and especially a free press. But defending our freedoms has a price, both abroad and at home - where we should always remember the wise words of Ben Franklin:

They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.

The Mandarin wonders if old Ben had a premonition, too.

What's wrong with this picture?

2006-05-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

One of the Mandarin's favorite loyal readers (that small, elite group) passed along this picture. The Mandarin struggled with a few sarcastic captions, but eventually decided just to let the word speak for itself.

Intelligence

1: the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations; also: the skilled use of reason

2: the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests)

3: the act of understanding

4: information concerning an enemy or possible enemy or an area; also : an agency engaged in obtaining such information

Antonyms: denseness, density, doltishness, dopiness, dullness, dumbness, fatuity, feeblemindedness, foolishness, idiocy, imbecility, senselessness, simpleness, slowness, stupidity.

A true believer breaks with Shrub

2006-05-21T15:45:00.000-07:00

Richard Viguerie has been dubbed the "funding father" of modern conservative strategy, having pioneered important tactics in computerized direct mail strategy in the 1970s and 1980s. He is considered the direct mail titan of the right. (ex Wikipedia)

Well, at long last, Viguerie has finally had enough of Shrub's shenanigans.

The patriarch of US conservatives has urged his followers to halt their financial support of the Republican Party and start an independent movement, signaling a major political shift that could result in heavy losses for the US ruling party in upcoming elections.

Richard Viguerie, who was instrumental in cementing the winning coalitions behind Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000, declared that conservatives were "downright fed up" with both the president and Republican-controlled Congress.

James Dobson, Patriarch of the Wingnut Christian Right has joined Viguerie and is singing the same tune:

"There is a growing feeling among conservatives that the only way to cure the problem is for Republicans to lose the Congressional elections this fall," said Richard Viguerie, a conservative direct-mail pioneer

Mr. Viguerie also cited dissatisfaction with government spending, the war in Iraq and the immigration-policy debate…. "I can't tell you how much anger there is at the Republican leadership," Mr. Viguerie said. "I have never seen anything like it."

In the last several weeks, Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and one of the most influential Christian conservatives, has publicly accused Republican leaders of betraying the social conservatives who helped elect them in 2004. He has also warned in private meetings with about a dozen of the top Republicans in Washington that he may turn critic this fall unless the party delivers on conservative goals.

The Mandarin feels their pain. The real conservatives deserve their own political movement, and if that means seceding from the Bush-Cheney-Schwarzenegger-Giuliani Republicans, forming a third party and giving Congress back to the Democrats in 2006, well, sometimes you have to break eggs to make an omelet (or should the Mandarin have said "egg foo yung" 芙蓉蛋?)

And how about that Al Gore? We're talking tanned, rested and ready. He was elected President once, so the second time should be a piece of cake. Especially with people like Viguerie and Dobson sitting on their hands, or supporting fellow wingnut Tom Tancredo in a right-wing splinter party in 2008.

I guess I'll have to call this blog "The English"

2006-05-19T07:44:00.000-07:00

The Senate has voted to make English,... well, it got a little confusing:

The Senate first voted 63-34 to make English the national language after lawmakers who led the effort said it would promote national unity.

But critics argued the move would prevent limited English speakers from getting language assistance required by an executive order enacted under President Clinton. So the Senate also voted 58-39 to make English the nation's "common and unifying language."

Well, whichever, I guess the national melting pot, or ethnic salad, or whataver you prefer, may be getting a little blander.

Perhaps the first step will need to be translating all those foreign words on restaurant menus into English. Somehow "sauce" for salsa and "stir-fried leftovers" for chop suey just don't have that,... je ne sais quoi.

UPDATE: Stop the presses! El arbusto se opone a declarar inglés la lengua nacional. Or, perhaps the Mandarin should say: 灌木反對宣稱英語為國家語言. But, on second thought, maybe he opposes it because he's not fluent in English?

Great Moments in Presidential Ventriloquism

2006-05-16T07:32:00.000-07:00

Dick Cheney has broken new ground in the highly specialized field of political ventriloquism. Some ventriloquists amaze audiences by throwing their voices while drinking water or smoking a cigarette. In his never-before-seen photo, Cheney has actually introduced two unprecedented innovations: 1) he has taken his left arm and hand completely out of the socket in Shrub's back, and 2) he is actually throwing his voice while sleeping.

Until now, when Cheney dozed off at Cabinet meetings, the others present had to endure extended pauses in Shrub's remarks until someone reached over and poked Cheney to wake him up. Now, it appears those days are over.

Talk about raising the bar! The Mandarin can only imagine what wonders are still to come from this circus act....

Original photo caption: U.S. President George W. Bush speaks during a meeting about the situation in Iraq with current and former U.S. secretaries of state and defense at the White House in Washington May 12, 2006. From left are Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

The old 80/20 rule

2006-05-12T07:32:00.000-07:00

Shrub's approval rating has sunk to 29%, so can the reverse of the 80/20 rule be far off now, a 20% approval rating?

Even at 29%, it means he is even losing part of the faithful bedrock: fiscal small government conservatives (what we used to call "Republicans") and the nutcase Christian right (what we used to call "the nutcase Christian right") who combined with five Supreme Court justices and Katherine Harris to put him in the White House in the first place.

The Mandarin was magically reading Karl Rove's mind last night during one of the commercial breaks on the "Colbert Report," and -- you're reading it here first -- he learned what Karl is cooking up for 2008. The plan now is in three steps. First, Dick Cheney will resign this year for health reasons and devote himself to the cause of homeless victims of hunting accidents. Second, Shrub will nominate his brother Jeb as Vice President. Third, (and shhh.... Shrub doesn't know this part yet) Shrub will be persuaded to resign ("abdicate"?) in Jeb's favor, thus setting up the battle of the titans in 2008: incumbent President Bush III vs. challenger Clinton II.

Actually, the Mandarin isn't sure what Rove was smoking at the time, but the odds of that happening are about, what... 20/80?

Original photo caption: US President George W. Bush, pictured here late on 11 May 2006 steping off Air Force One under stormy skies, according to a recent poll, only 29 percent of Americans now believe he is doing a good job.(AFP/File/Paul Richards)

Sometimes the Mandarin thinks news photographers do this on purpose

2006-05-10T21:38:00.000-07:00

Creative cropping, that is. I'm sure the Shrubbites thought this one was funny.

Can we get some completely new candidates this time?

Original photo caption: U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) discusses the negative impact of the Bush/Enzi health bill and women's access to contraception and abortion prevention efforts while at a news conference in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, May 10, 2006.

Slow News Day

2006-05-04T16:39:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin is under the weather for a few days, but couldn't resist sharing another "Curious George" shot.

Original photo caption: President Bush shakes hands after delivering a speech about taxes and spending to the American Council of Engineering Companies meeting on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Colbert Rapport

2006-05-01T06:33:00.000-07:00

The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will.

Steven Colbert is a national treasure. Here is a complete transcript of Colbert's roasting of Shrub (who was seated a few feet from the podium) at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. If Shrub knew who Queen Victoria was, he might have said, "we are not amused."

Original photo caption: President Bush listens to a speaker during the White House Correspondents' Association's 92nd annual awards dinner, Saturday, April 29, 2006, in Washington. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

UPDATE: Links to the video have come and gone, but here is one on Google Video endorsed by C-Cpan, so it should stay up.

Keep it simple, stupid....

2006-04-26T07:22:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin is sure now that Treasury Secretary (John) Snow is about to be fired.

Reason?

Shrub's new Press Secretary is Fox News talking head Tony Snow. As part of new Chief-of-Staff Josh Bolten's mission to streamline the White House staff, the Mandarin is certain he won't want to confuse Shrub by having two people working there with the same last name.

Original photo caption: Tony Snow smiles as he is introduced by President Bush as his new Press Secretary in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington Wednesday, April 26, 2006. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

UPDATE: Courtesy of Think Progress, here is a digest of some of (Tony) Snow's recent comments about Shrub. Hint: the word "incompetent" does appear once or twice....

Comrade Hu is on first base

2006-04-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

Back in the dim ages of 1982-3, the Mandarin was a baby banker living in Hong Kong. One of his projects on that tour was to organize and help present a bilingual two-day seminar in Peking on energy project finance lending for the China National Offshore Oil Company ("CNOOC" or "see-nook") and the Bank of China Second Credit Department - their project lending unit. The Treasurer of CNOOC was Mr. Xu 徐 and the head of the Second Credit Department was Mr. Hu 胡. Let's call my boss Bruce (that was his name).

Bruce was based in Chicago, and had never been to China. So one of the Mandarin's tasks was to brief Bruce on protocol for Chinese-style meetings, and to give him capsule bios of the senior Chinese-side officials. Like many Americans, Bruce was having trouble with the pronunciation of Chinese names. It took the Mandarin quite a while to get him to pronounce Mr. Xu's name correctly (more or less "syoo" - not "zoo"). Mr. Hu's name is pronounced as it looks ("who"), but correctly pronounced in the Mandarin second tone with a rising inflection, as if one is asking, "Who?" Bruce and I decided that he would nail it if he thought of Mr. Hu as Mr. Who?

Naturally, a variation of the Abbott and Costello bit "Who's on first?" ensued.

The Mandarin thought at the time it would have been even funnier if Bruce's surname had been Shea -- it wasn't -- because the Mandarin word for "Who?" is shei 誰, pronounced exactly as the Anglo-Irish surname Shea, in the same tone - "Shea?" So while we were doing the Hu = who? drill, the Chinese side in Peking would have been going through something like this:

A: 他是誰? [Ta shi shei? "Who is he?"]

B: 對. 他是 "Shea." [Dui. Ta shi Shea. "Correct. He is Shea."]

A: 那是我的問題 - 他是誰? [Na shi wode wenti - ta shi shei? "That 's my question, who is he?"]

B: 我已經告訴你, 他是 "Shea." [Wo yijing gaosu ni, ta shi Shea. "I already told you, he is Shea."]

and on and on and on....

In the end, at the big welcoming banquet in Peking, when the Mandarin brought Bruce up to meet Mr. Hu, saying, "Bruce, I would like to introduce you to...," Bruce interrupted with a huge smile on his face, "Mr. Who? I've really been looking forward to meeting you!"

This nostalgia attack was triggered when the Mandarin recently happened by a web page with an updating of the "Who's on first?" bit - this time featuring Shrub ("George") and his new Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, discussing various world leaders, beginning with another Mr. Who? - China's current President, Hu Jintao 胡錦濤.

Josh: Sir, as you know, this week you're being paid a visit by the leader of China.

George: Great. Lay it on me.

Josh: Hu is the new leader of China.

George: That's what I want to know.

Josh: That's what I'm telling you.

George: That's what I'm asking you. Who is the new leader of China?

Josh: Yes.

George: I mean the fellow's name.

Josh: Hu.

George: The guy in China.

Josh: Hu.

Click here for the whole bit.

And if the co-author of the linked page is the same James Sherman who was a much younger baby banker working for Bruce in Chicago back then, hey there Jamie.

Scottie beams up

2006-04-20T07:06:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin has been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but so far it looks like the old "deckchairs on the Titanic" routine except for the departure of long-suffering Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

Otherwise Shrub's much-anticipated White House staff clean-up, shake-up, fix-up looks more like Dorothy is still in Oz: "Scarecrow Rove, give some of your straw to Tin Man Kaplan. Cowardly Lion Rumsfeld, you're still doing a heck of a job. Toto Gonzalez, you make sure Wicked Witch Fitzgerald and his flying monkeys don't kidnap us and send us all to Munchkinland."

Toto, we're not in Kansas any more. Well, some of us aren't....

Original photo caption: White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan steps aboard Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, April 19, 2006. (Jason Reed/Reuters)

UPDATE: The incomparable Ann Telnaes has a slightly different "slant" on the McClellan departure - click here.

You're doin' a heck of a job, Rummy!

2006-04-14T11:43:00.000-07:00

Secretary Rumsfeld is seen here doing his famous imitation of Ed McMahon (to Shrub's Johnny Carson doing Carnac - off camera), caught in the act of saying, "Right again, O Magnificent one!"

(Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Friday said Donald Rumsfeld has "my full support," after a number of retired generals criticized the defense secretary's handling of the Iraq war.

"Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period. He has my full support and deepest appreciation," Bush said in a statement.

Several retired generals, some who led troops in the Iraq war, have accused Rumsfeld of arrogance and ignoring his field commanders and said he should resign.

"Earlier today I spoke with Don Rumsfeld about ongoing military operations in the Global War on Terror. I reiterated my strong support for his leadership during this historic and challenging time for our nation," Bush said.

Bush's own job approval ratings have slid to around the lows of his presidency due to increasing public discontent with the Iraq war.

Original photo caption: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaks at a news briefing at the Pentagon in Washington April 11, 2006. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)

Would you like fries with that?

2006-04-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin bets if you asked them to hold the mayo, you could get one for under $140. They should also have a soup and sandwich special -- one of these babies plus lobster bisque topped with cognac, crème fraîche, and caviar - for maybe $200 plus tax and tip.

Original photo caption: London's most expensive sandwich, nick-named 'The MacDonald Sandwich', is seen at Selfridges in London April 10, 2006. The sandwich, which is on sale for 85 pounds ($148 dollars), contains ingredients of Wagyu beef, fresh lobe foie gras, black truffle mayonnaise, brie de meaux, rocket, red pepper and mustard confit and English plum tomatoes. REUTERS/Paul Hackett

P.S. The Mandarin is glad to see that Paul Hackett has found another job after being forced to drop out of the Democratic Senatorial race in Ohio....

What is it with trailer parks, anyway....?

2006-04-05T06:46:00.000-07:00

The Mandarin spent most of the 1970s at graduate school in Indiana, where it seemed every tornado to hit the state during the annual tornado season hit a trailer park.

Now this:

MERCED, Calif. - Two levees broke Tuesday in California's chief agricultural region, flooding a trailer park, threatening other homes in Merced and inundating farmland near Sacramento.

Water breached a 30-foot section of levee along a creek in Merced, sending up to 18 inches of water pouring through a mobile home park, said Michael Miller, a spokesman for the Department of Water Resources.

Three trailer parks were evacuated, a total of 200 people, said Elaine Post, spokeswoman for the Merced County Office of Emergency Services.

The message is clear: God has something against manufactured housing, plain and simple. Maybe we can blame this on Tom DeLay, too.

The only question now is, "How many dominoes...?"

2006-04-04T07:33:00.000-07:00

Well, the Hammer is gone. You can see him already starting to tilt over in the photo. Since he has been remaking the House Republican machine in his image for the last five years, the Mandarin is wondering how many more shoes are waiting to drop? And dropped shoes knocking over dominoes may be a classic mixed metapor, but the Mandarin doesn't care this itme. Pop some popcorn and turn on the news!

Original photo caption: Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) attends the House Republican Conference at the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay in Cambridge, Maryland, in this February 10, 2006 file photo. DeLay, one of the most powerful members of Congress, is now ready to call it quits in the face of mounting legal problems and a tough reelection campaign. (Larry Downing/Reuters)

Wave "bye bye," Katherine

2006-04-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

One of the Mandarin's favorite intelligent designs, Republican Representative Katherine Harris of Florida -- who as Florida election commissioner helped hand the state's decisive electoral votes to Shrub back in 2000 -- has been having a bit of trouble with her campaign for Senate this year. Like what, you may ask? Well, most of her staff have quit, she looks even more like an idiot than before, and her campign is in shambles. The Mandarin believes in Karma. So should she.

Original photo caption: Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Sarasota, smiles during a news conference where she announced her candidacy for U.S. Senate in this 2004 file photo. Harris' U.S. Senate campaign lost what was left of its core team on April 1, 2006 when a top adviser, campaign manager and communications director resigned. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, File)

Jeez, you would think he might at least recognize Arabic when he saw it....

2006-03-29T07:03:00.000-08:00

The Mandarin is biased when it comes to studying foreign languages. After all, why so you think they call him the "Mandarin?" Anyway, one of the Mandarin's hot buttons is the sad fact that in America knowledge of, or even a rudimentary familiarity with foreign languages (except for America's unofficial second language - Spanish) seems to be dying out.

Here is an example, courtesy of Howard Kaloogian - a man who plans to run for Congress in the Mandarin's home state of California. Howard recently traveled to Baghdad (or did he?) and now he is trying to convince us that life in Baghdad is just peachy these days. He wants us to condemn the lefty press bias that fills our news with (doctored?) pictures of dead children and car bombs and mass execution of Shiite police recruits -- all purpotedly from some fictional civil war that he claims isn't happening. Just look at the happy Baghdadites, peacefully going about their daily lives. He wrote:

We took this photo of dowtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.

The problem is the picture. I don't expect a wingnut like Howard to recognize that the signs are in Turkish, but I would have expected him to notice that there is not a single Arabic letter in the entire scene!

Jeez Louise! The Mandarin is sad to say that we in America get the Congress we deserve. The voters of San Diego deserve better.

UPDATE: Parody is the sincerest form of ridicule - click me.

Photo source: linked page on Josh Marshall's "Talking Points Memo."

Our Constitutional Crisis: Has Shrub even read the dang thing?

2006-03-27T06:59:00.000-08:00

President Bush has given Commander-in-Chief Bush unlimited wartime authority. But the "war on terror" is more a metaphor than a fact. Terrorism is a method, not an ideology; terrorists are criminals, not warriors. No peace treaty can possibly bring an end to the fight against far-flung terrorists. The emergency powers of the president during this "war" can now extend indefinitely, at the pleasure of the president and at great threat to the liberties and rights guaranteed us under the Constitution.

...

The presidency possesses no power not granted to it under the Constitution. The powers the current administration seeks in its "war on terror" are not granted under the Constitution. Indeed, they are explicitly prohibited by acts of Congress.

The Mandarin admires writers who can explain a complex issue in simple language. Read the full article, to see why Shrub and Big Dick and the whole neo-Con Mafia must be removed from their posts at the next legal opportunity.

Could their timing have been any better?

2006-03-22T20:49:00.000-08:00

The Vatican has begun moves to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a conference at the weekend that portrays the Crusades as wars fought with the “noble aim” of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity.

The Crusades are seen by many Muslims as acts of violence that have underpinned Western aggression towards the Arab world ever since. Followers of Osama bin Laden claim to be taking part in a latter-day “jihad against the Jews and Crusaders”.

The late Pope John Paul II sought to achieve Muslim- Christian reconciliation by asking “pardon” for the Crusades during the 2000 Millennium celebrations. But John Paul’s apologies for the past “errors of the Church” — including the Inquisition and anti-Semitism — irritated some Vatican conservatives. According to Vatican insiders, the dissenters included Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. [Click the title above for the full article.]

Well, Ratzinger is Pope now, so the Mandarin guesses he decided that the Crusades need a bit of a PR touch-up. Excellent timing, O snappy dresser.

Clear signs of progress. yep... they're out there somewhere....

2006-03-20T20:15:00.000-08:00

Well, it's kinda hard to see them from here, but y'all are just going to have to trust me on this one.

Original photo caption: President Bush shades is eyes from the lights as he takes questions at the City Club in Cleveland, Monday, March 20, 2006. President Bush on Monday cited success in stabilizing an insurgent stronghold in northern Iraq, saying he has 'confidence in our strategy' and critics should look beyond the images of violence to see clear signs of progress. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan)/

As the twig is bent....

2006-03-20T09:45:00.000-08:00

Somehow the Mandarin knew an article like this was coming sooner or later.

Yikes! Maybe I should start calling him "President Bush" again....

2006-03-17T18:34:00.000-08:00

Click me for a look at which recent California gubernatorial candidate is attending the National Republican Congressional Committee "United to Victory" dinner. Hint: no Austrian accent.

Judge deals what?!

2006-03-14T20:04:00.000-08:00

Headline: Judge deals blow in Moussaoui trial

The Mandarin keeps picturing lawyers at the sidebar passing hundreds to the judge.... Then the Mandarin read the article.

The Mandarin would have read it sooner, but he took a detour and didn't want to ask for directions.

Why Ann Telnaes is the Mandarin's favorite cartoonist

2006-03-14T07:37:00.000-08:00

Click me to see why.

Reminds the Mandarin of "Mission Accomplished"

2006-03-10T07:11:00.000-08:00

Original photo caption: U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney speaks during his keynote address to the U.S. Labor Department's 2006 National Summit on Retirement Savings at the Willard Hotel in Washington March 2, 2006. REUTERS/Larry Downing

Oscar Chinese

2006-03-08T15:23:00.000-08:00

The Mandarin was checking out Chinese press reports of the Oscars (don’t ask him why) and he decided to see how the titles of some recent films had been translated into Chinese. It turned out that some Chinese titles were fairly literal, and others less so. Deciphering the names of directors and actors was a challenge, too.

So, without further ado, a selection of films nominated in various Oscar categories, as presented in the Chinese press:

“Broken-back Mountain” 斷背山, directed by Li An and starring Jieke Jilunxi'er and Xisi Laiji'er.

“Penetrating America from One End to the Other” 穿越美國 starring Feilixiti Huofuman. Mandarin’s note: Don’t go there.

“Flowing and Bustling” 川流熙攘 starring Telunsi Huohuade and Andongni Andesen. The song from this film also won the Oscar, but the Mandarin hasn’t been able to find a Chinese version of "Its Hard Out There for a Pimp" yet.

“Good Night, Good Luck” 晚安好運 , directed by Qiaozhi Keluni, starring Keluni and Dawei Siteleizeen. Keluni was also nominated as an actor for the film “Xinruina.”

“I Will Definitely Not Give Way to You” 決不讓步, also called “Wind and Clouds in the North” 北方風雲, starring Chalizi Sailong, Saien Bin, Wudi Haliseng and Fulanxisi Maikedaoman.

“Iron-fisted Male” 鐵拳男人 starring Luosu Keluo, Ruini Qiweige and Baoluo Jiyamati.

“Munihei” 慕尼黑 [Cantonese “Moneihak” = Munich] directed by Shitiwen Sipierboge.

“Press Forward with an Indomitable Spirit” 一往無前, starring Ruixi Weisesipeng and Jiaokuayin Feinikesi.

“Pride and Prejudice” 傲慢與偏見, starring Kaila Naiteli.

“The Never-withering Gardener” 不朽的園丁, also called “Ominous Pursuit Without Borders” 無國界追兇, starring Leiqie'er Weizi and Lai'erfu Feiyinsi.

“A Tale of Cold Blood” 冷血字傳, also just called “Kabote” 卡波特, directed by Beinate Mila and starring Feilipu Saimo'er Huofuman (no relation to Feilixiti Huofuman) and Kaiselin Jina.

and the Oscar went to:

“Automobile Accident” 撞車, directed by Baoluo Hajisi starring Sandela Buluoke, Ruian Feilipu (no relation to Feilipu Saimo'er Huofuman), Tang Qiande'er*, Mate Dilun, Bulandeng Fuleize, and Telunsi Huohuade (that makes two big films this year for Huohuade). Mandarin’s note: The Chinese title is a nice bit of wordplay, because the word 撞 also conveys a sense of “chance meeting” as well as things crashing into each other.

Next Sunday night, with the Oscars out of the way, the Mandarin will have to decide whether to watch "Frenzied Housewives" 瘋狂主婦 on ABC or "Criminal Clan" 黑道家族 on HBO. Decisions, decisions.

* If you got this one, you're probaby a Mandarin yourself. Tang Qiande'er = Don Cheadle.

George Orwell must have predicted this

2006-03-04T17:46:00.000-08:00

George Orwell, or as the Mandarin says in Mandarin 喬治歐威爾 Qiaozhi Ouerwei, didn't die in 1950, as you will read in palces like Wikipedia -- he is alive and well and living in China.

The Mandarin recalls back in the 1980s, when he was traipsing the length and breadth of China trying to find a single Chinese entity creditworthy enough to make a loan to them, that one year (in the late 80s?) the central government decided to crack down on extravagant entertainment of local officials by limiting all banquets to five courses (or was it three?). This of course was at a time when many business proposals were approved after undergoing further "study" by the Chinese side. Hint: "study" 研究 sounds a lot like "cigarettes and liquor" 煙酒. Nudge, nudge.

So, shortly after that announcement, the Mandarin was at a bank meeting (where a borrower and their bankers meet to discuss a new loan proposal) in Shenzhen and after the third course (or was it the fifth?) of a long maotai-filled dinner, all the local officials got up stony-faced (especially since it was mid-winter and the snake soup was just coming out of the kitchen) and excused themselves.

Ah, nostalgia. Sometime, the Mandarin will have to describe the public toilets at the Lhasa (Tibet) Airport.

Anyway, imagine the Mandarin's surprise to read this today:

BEIJING (Reuters) - An adviser to the Chinese parliament has urged curbs on civil servants' body weight to aid the fight against corruption.

In a country where people often complain that police officers seem too well fed to catch villains, Miu Shouliang said limiting the weight of officials would stop them spending government money on wining and dining, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Such a measure "should also contribute to regulating their working styles and improving morality," Xinhua said, citing Miu, a businessman from the southern boom town of Shenzhen.

"However, some experts doubted the scientific basis of such a method," Xinhua added.

The proposed measure, which Miu did not detail, might do more than limit waste of public funds. Low-level bribery in China often takes the form of elaborate banquets, which, unlike cash, cannot be traced after being eaten.

Well, the Mandarin wonders if perhaps tiny multi-colored indigestibe plastic balls mixed into the sauces might overcome the "cannot be traced" public funds waste problem....

Anyway, the Mandarin can see it now: the monring weigh-in at the Shenzhen Bureau of the State General Administration for Foreign Exchange Control.

"Next, Comrade You Qianren 有錢人 [Mandarin joke: it means "rich guy"], step on the scales please; we know you were entertained last night at a banquet by the decadent right-wing revisionist running dog capitalist lackeys from Citibank.... Uh oh, up two kilos from last week. Get out the castor oil."

Another caption contest

2006-03-04T10:14:00.000-08:00

During his trip to India, Shrub visited an agricultural college in Hyderabad where he received a warm welcome from one of the local celebrities.

Captions might include:

"Condi! Get me a red cape and a sword before this thing gets any closer."

"Dang, why did I put that apple in my pocket this morning."

"Well you don't smell too good yourself, big fella."

Photo source, picture #3.

Hiding in plain sight?

2006-03-01T07:07:00.000-08:00

Four and a half years ago, Shrub was warned by Condi (seen here in the background whispering Shrub's lines into her concealed microphone) and the CIA that bin Ladin was going to attack inside the US, which he did soon afterward.

Now, after spending all that time trying to get bin Ladin dead or alive, Shrub is finally "confident" that we are about to find him.

Actually, the Mandarin knows where he is. You can see him behind Shrub, saluting (perhaps his way of giving the finger?) -- check out the tall guy in a military uniform wearing the cheap big nose, mustache and thick glasses dime-store disguise:

Original photo caption: U.S. President George W. Bush, left, walks with his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai at the Presidential Palace in Kabul after making a surprise visit to Afghanistan Wednesday, March 1, 2006. Bush said Wednesday he remains confident Osama bin Laden 'will be brought to justice' despite a so-far futile five-year hunt. (AP Photo/Shah Marai, Pool)/

Bizarro President

2006-02-23T07:02:00.000-08:00

Shrub's latest gaffe - defying his own party's leadership by defending the sale of some U.S. port operations to a company with Arab owners, gave the Mandarin a nostalgia attack. Especially when the Mandarin read that Shrub wasn't even told of the potentially controversial decision at the time it was made and only learned about it later, from press reports.

Back in the early 1980s, boys and girls, there was a Middle Eastern dictator with billions of dollars of oil money to spend who was an avowed enemy of the U.S., sponsored terrorism and was seeking weapons of mass destruction. The Mandarin isn't talking about Saddam Hussein - he was one of our best allies in the region back then. We were worried about that Michael Jackson of the Middle East - Muammar al Qadhafi.

On August 19, 1981, during military exercises in the Gulf of Sidra, two U.S. Navy F-14s entered an area considered by the U.S. to be international waters, but claimed by Libya as within their coastal territorial limit. Two Libyan Su-22 fighters scrambled to challenge the F-14s and were promptly shot down. Amid fears that the incident might escalate to open warfare between the U.S. and Libya, our forces went on high alert and a crisis team worked through the night in Washington. In the end, Libya backed down from its threats to retaliate for the provocation and relations returned to a lower, more usual level of tension.

The enduring, some way bizarre, image of the event for Americans (well maybe not so enduring after all if the Mandarin has to provide this turgid footnote) was the White House crisis team's decision not to wake President Reagan up to tell him what was happening. He learned about it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the next morning over his breakfast, just like the rest of us.

A few weeks later, "Saturday Night Live" ran one of its all-time funniest sketches, based on the Superman comic book character Bizarro Superman. On Bizarro World, everything is backwards. The sketch was set in the Trapezoidal Office of the Black House, residence of Bizarro President Reagan. An excerpt:

Black House Aide #2: Where am the Bizarro President?

Black House Aide #1: His job in Washington, so of course he in California.

Black House Aide #2: That don't make Bizarro sense.

…

Black House Aide #2: Hello. Ah-ha! Phone did not ring, so me answer it. [answers phone] Goodbye! Oh, no! Oh, no! There's a crisis! There's a crisis! Quick, Bizarro President! Go to sleep!

[Bizarro President drops his head onto his desk and falls asleep]

Black House Aide #1: Phew! That was quick Presidential action. What a leader!

…

Black House Aide #2: Him am incredible! Bizarro Americans all love him!

Black House Aide #1: Of course.

Bizarro President: [waking up] Me right-to-lifer, so me support the death penalty!

Black House Aide #1: It's that kind of statement that has made him the darling of the Bizarro empire.

As Bizarro George Santayana once said, "Those who cannot learn from Bizarro history are condemned to repeat it."