Worse than you thought

After five years of graft, death and mayhem, it gets a little tough to muster up the same kind of anti-Bush anger that burned out of my pores in, say, 2003.

Even so, for sheer monkeyfuck gall, the last couple weeks have seen the kind of revelations that Mike Malloy wouldn't stomach in his worst fever dreams.

A few highlights, in case you're not a European journalist or chronic reader of left-wing blogs:

First came news that the U.S. used a chemical substance called white phosphorous on civilians in Fallujah. It's like napalm on crystal meth, burning to 5,000 degrees and incinerating anything it touches. The administration's defenses have largely turned on the semantics of whether this substance should be labeled a "chemical weapon."

Then the British press learned that in an April 2004 meeting, the president made comments indicating that he wanted to bomb the TV studios of Al-Jazeera, a civilian news outlet based in the pro-American country of Qatar. This story is huge in Britain, where the leakers of the meeting's classified minutes face government prosecution. Imagine a foreign government bombing BBC or NBC headquarters, and you can see why people are a tad pissed.

Also in Europe, news broke that the U.S. has essentially set up off-the-books torture facilities in Eastern European countries. If this is true, such an action would be against the EU constitution, and cooperating countries could face penalties that include expulsion from the EU.

Also, as reported in the Christian Science Monitor:

The row threatens to undermine recent efforts on both sides of the Atlantic to repair US-European relations that had been badly strained by the US-led invasion of Iraq. "This is exactly the sort of thing we do not need," comments Guillaume Parmentier, head of the French Center on the US, a think tank in Paris that promotes transatlantic ties.

If you have a dirty mind, this is a neoconservative dream come true: torture the fuck out of people, and bust up the E.U. in the process.

But at least, you know, there's no gay marriage allowed, so we've got that going for us.