WAS THERE AN INCIDENT IN THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ OR WAS IT JUST SOMETHING COOKED UP FOR THE PYGMIES TO RATTLE THEIR SABERS OVER?

I don't know what happened in the Persian Gulf between U.S. warships and some Iranian motorboats. The Bush Regime claims the Iranians were threatening our ships and painted a frightening picture that could easily have led to war. It reminded me of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, cooked up by another presidential administration determined to drag the U.S. into a war of aggression. Predictably, all the pygmies (except the Nazi) started screaming about war with Iran.

Former governor Mike Huckabee replied that the Iranians should “be prepared that the next things you see will be the gates of Hell.” “One more step and they would have been introduced to those virgins that they’re looking forward to seeing,” said former senator Fred Thompson.

Today the Navy is backing away from the Bush Regime's anti-Iran propaganda and Gareth Porter has shown some great big holes in the Bush Regime interpretation of what really happened in the Straits of Hormuz.

Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to U.S. ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a "battle at sea," new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no U.S. commander was on the verge of firing at the Iranian boats.

The new information that appears to contradict the original version of the incident includes the revelation that U.S. officials spliced the audio recording of an alleged Iranian threat onto to a videotape of the incident. That suggests that the threatening message may not have come in immediately after the initial warning to Iranian boats from a U.S. warship, as appears to do on the video.

Also unraveling the story is testimony from a former U.S. naval officer that non-official chatter is common on the channel used to communicate with the Iranian boats and testimony from the commander of the U.S. 5th fleet that the commanding officers of the U.S. warships involved in the incident never felt the need to warn the Iranians of a possible use of force against them.

Further undermining the U.S. version of the incident is a video released by Iran Thursday showing an Iranian naval officer on a small boat hailing one of three ships.

The Iranian commander is heard to say, "Coalition warship 73, this is Iranian navy patrol boat." He then requests the "side numbers" of the U.S. warships. A voice with a U.S. accent replies, "This is coalition warship 73. I am operating in international waters."

The reaction of desperate warmongers and fearmongers like McCain, the Huckster, Giuliani and Thompson demonstrates once again why none of the pygmies is fit for any kind of responsible public office. You may not like Hillary or Obama-- but these two are infinitely better equipped to lead America than any of the Republicans.


AT LEAST EMILY LITELLA WOULD HAVE SAID, 'NEVER MIND'

Once again I have to invoke that great homespun philosopher Emily Litella (in the person of the late, great Gilda Radner). At least, after discovering that the attacks she was condemning were on "violence" or "euthanasia" rather than "violins" or "youth in Asia" as she had mistakenly believed, or learning that nobody was advocating "canker research" or an "Eagle Rights Amendment" or "making Puerto Rico a steak" ("next thing you know they'll want a baked potato with sour cream"), she had the gumption and--after a fashion--grace to acknowledge that that's different, and she would utter her famous "Never mind." (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

No, with the Bush regime, it appears that all lies about border threats, military triumphs or challenges, bogus terrorist "threats," etc. remain operative until they're replaced with replacement lies, and there's never even acknowledgment that the old set of lies has been superseded by the new one. Just imagine: Emily Litella as a standard of intellectual honesty beyond even the imagining of these people.--Ken

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Isn't it nice to know that in the end Harry Dent, architect of the GOP "Southern strategy," sort of took it back? Never mind, Harry!

I think we're all familiar with the "Southern strategy," the concept by which Republicans took full advantage of Southern white resentment at the civil rights revolution and the minimal empowerment of blacks. It's what got Richard Nixon the GOP nomination for president in 1968 and then put him in the White House, and it was then used to turn the South into the Republican bastion it remains to this day.

I think too that anyone with memories of the Nixon White House knows the name of Harry Dent (seen above in 1969 with President Nixon in the background, back to the camera, talking to Rep. George H. W. Bush), a key Nixon adviser. But I for one didn't appreciate how the South Carolinian Dent and the Southern strategy intersected. Harry Dent was, more or less, the architect and living embodiment of the Southern strategy.

In the New York Times Magazine's annual "The Lives They Lived" issue, out tomorrow, our friend Rick Perlstein has a terrific piece on Dent and his role as the chief conceptualist and enforcer of the Southern strategy--first as right-hand man to South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond (he was, it seems, the man who persuaded Strom to bolt the Democratic Party for the GOP in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater's candidacy) and later as Nixon's "Southern strategist."

The funniest touch is Rick's tribute to Dent's "gift for soothing the egos of powerful men": "On the Nixon Oval Office tapes you can hear him agreeing with whatever the president says almost before he's through saying it." The rest isn't funny at all.

Of Dent's White House service, Rick writes:

Most of Dent's days were spent working the back channels, assuring Southerners that the administration would stonewall federal court desegregation decisions. After Nixon's first Supreme Court nominee, South Carolina's Clement Haynsworth, withdrew under a cloud of corruption allegations, the president ordered Dent to "find a good federal judge further South and further to the right." Dent obliged him with G. Harrold Carswell, who once campaigned for the Georgia State Legislature with the credo, "I believe that segregation of the races is proper and the ONLY practical and correct way of life in our states." Nixon, following Dent's example, argued that the opposition to Carswell's nomination was mere regional bigotry against the South. Liberals, not without reason, regarded Dent, Time reported, as "a Southern-fried Rasputin in the Nixon administration."

Dent was apparently touchy about charges that his career was built on race-baiting, cultivating and politically exploiting racial animus. He seems to have been capable of great indignation at such imputations. But in the end, in a twist that falls somewhere between touching and stomach-turning, "he came clean," as Rick puts it:

The lay preacher in Dent suffered from a guilty conscience. In his 1978 memoir, "The Prodigal South Returns to Power," Dent wrote that his politics were never racist. "The aim of the Southern strategy," he claimed, was merely "to have the South treated just like any other section of the U.S.A." Three years later, when he retired from law to preach the Gospel full time, he came clean. Yes, he admitted, of course he had exploited race to aggrandize Southern power. "When I look back," he said, "my biggest regret now is anything I did that stood in the way of the rights of black people."

Well, thanks for setting the record straight, Harry. I guess, sort of like the late Gilda Radner's SNL Emily Litella character and her addlepated "Never mind," that's supposed to make it all okay.

[P.S.: Would you believe that there's a Wikipedia entry for "Never mind"?]

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