At 07:15 PM 5/3/03 -0400, Adam Shostack wrote:
Please register to participate.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/04/20030430-26.html
Please tell me someone played a DNS game.
At 09:28 PM 05/03/2003 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Oh, right, who's today's target? Are we still practicing hating Saddam, or is it Bashar al-Assad this week, or the French? Tim and Peter have been discussing the origins of "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys" and the general hatred of the Frogs, but I've got to disagree with Tim's assertion that it's been going on for a long time. Sure, there's been some low-level dislike, and Jay Leno's always made fun of their liking for Jerry Lewis, and Parisians have a reputation for being as rude as New Yorkers, but it seemed like there was such as rush of anti-French surrender jokes and anti-French political commentary that it's more than just coincidence; it seemed like the meme was being pushed hard and fast by somebody. Perhaps the meme was just sitting around from DeGaulle's time, waiting to be triggered by France's lack of participation in US Unilateralism and unwillingness to join the COW coalition this time. But it didn't seem that way.
On Sat, 3 May 2003, Bill Stewart wrote:
I kind of wonder whatever happened to Quaddafi? Did he learn to love Big Brother? Or did he have an accidental demide while I was not looking?
The French took the opportunity presented to not only decline to join the party, but to do so in a way that demonstrated our own hypocrisy in an in-your-face manner. That meme was distraction in action ;-) -- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org
At 07:56 PM 05/04/2003 -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:
He's been relatively quiet for a few years; I'm not sure if we're saving him for later (unlikely; North Korea's really lots more fun, and strategically important because otherwise there'd be lots of good reasons for getting the US military out of South Korea and the rest of that corner of the Pacific, but now we can't do that because there's a convenient nu-cu-lur madman around.) As it was, I was spell-checking Hafez al-Assad when Google reminded me that he'd died a couple years ago from cancer, and his kid Bashar had taken over. Bashar's smarter brother Bassel had been supposed to succeed him, but had a suspicious "car accident" in the mid 90s. Syria still has a Baath Socialist Party, as Iraq did, but it's not clear whether there's really a strong enough relationship to worry about, and while America Has Always Been At War With Hafez al-Assad, and Krauthammer thinks we should be at war with Bashar, there's a lot of opinion that maybe he'll fail to be a credible enough target for the warmongers to really pull off an invasion of convenience.
participants (3)
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Bill Stewart -
J.A. Terranson -
Major Variola (ret)