Crosblog

Here in Georgia, primary season has only just started. I saw a commercial where former Governor Roy Barnes is trying to win his job back by ensuring us that the State has tons of money to spend or something, which is really cool since I'm a government worker who's losing four days pay due to budget crunch-related furloughs. (Of course, I'm not a state employee. If I was, I'd be looking at more like twelve unpaid days off.) But if you belong to a special interest group that Roy really, really needs, we got the dough.

My point? If the only other candidate running has as his key platform plank - "Will go door to door and jab every voter in the eye with a fork," I'm not voting for Roy Barnes.

So, until stuff heats up around here, we have South Carolina. On the Republican side, the leading candidate for governor happens to be a female of Indian descent. Fringe actors trying to derail her campaign used allegations of marital infidelity and religious and racist slurs against her. Following this racist and sexist assault, said candidate saw her lead widen, and is now the prohibitive favorite to capture both the GOP nomination and the Governor's mansion. This is all supposed to establish what racists we all are down here.

Got it. (See - if you voted against Haley, you obviously did so because you're a racist or a misogynist or something. But if you voted for Haley, well, she was endorsed by Sarah Palin. Need I say more?)

Meanwhile, on the other side, the Democrats have nominated for Senate this guy who...well...we're not sure about the whole porn thing...he...let's see...

...he's a Republican plant! Which is of course ridiculous. Jim Demint was winning this election hands down whether the nominee was Alvin Greene or that guy who tried to win but lost to someone literally nobody has ever heard of and should totally be laughed out of the entire state of South Carolina if it turns out he spent all this time coming up with a political platform that couldn't prevail over "the other guy's name came first" or "has the same name as a moderately famous guy." Seriously, if anything comes out of this whole South Carolina thing, it should be that Vic Rawl becomes the Mulkey brothers of politics.

Besides, does anybody think the GOP would cheat that ridiculously in an election they were certain to win?

I mean, again?

I would say that this whole "flotilla" thing was something rigged up by Turkey's leaders to provoke a break from Israel. Turkish PM Erdogan seems to be striving to assert a leadership role in the Muslim world, a role that Turkey would appear to be a natural for, with maybe on thing standing in the way, that being Turkey's very strong, very solid ties to Israel.

So, what does Erdogan do? He can't just up and make a statement about how Turkey no longer thinks Israel is a real country. He's the prime minister of Turkey, not dean of the White House Press Corps. What he needs is a Maine, as in "Remember the..." Remember the Mavi Mamara doesn't roll off the tongue the same way, but maybe it sounds better in Turkish, and Erdogan now has the reason to cut ties that hadn't been all that popular in Turkey anyway.

Of course, the fact that it's a set-up doesn't help much if Israel allows itself to get set up. That being said, they basically had two options - stop the ships, or let the blockade fall, because simply letting the ships through this time would justify everyone else, and as the point has been made, it's not like these folks were particularly good impressions of "peaceful activists."

That being said, there's a "quit while you're ahead" mentality, that Israel's enemies might not be getting. Right now, you can, if you want, pretend that the blockade runners were peaceful activists simply moved by the plight of Gazans to try and bring humaitarian aid victimized by the big bad Israelis. But when the Iranian navy starts offering to help, then everybody might just figure out what's really going on here.

OK, almost everybody.