There’s a good write-up at Liberal Oasis.

Or you could just read the text of Condi’s happy chat with the dictator here, from the State Department’s own website.

The Amnesty International report on Condi’s “good friend” includes grossly unfair trials, roundups and beatings of immigrants, suspicious electoral results, financial fraud, confessions extracted under torture, and summary executions.  Care for some champagne?

Meanwhile, happy pal runs a country where most people live on less than a dollar a day, but Condi’s new best friend squirreled away tens (and possibly hundreds) of millions of dollars in a DC bank known for its lax standards, ties to the CIA, and (coincidentally, of course) handling of terrorist funding.

Sweet. 

UPDATE — oh, and I forgot: Obiang’s globetrotting son — the one in charge of housing for his poor nation, which he apparently oversees from his mansions in London, Paris, and Los Angeles — has been dating hip-hop singer Eve. 

Small, nasty little world. 

Booed lustily when throwing out the first pitch at the Nationals game.

Today’s Washington Post reports that Bush’s post-invasion claim of the discovery of mobile “biological laboratories,” which war supporters clung to as vindication of the invasion until it turned out to be complete rubbish, was thoroughly debunked by the Pentagon’s own team of experts two days before Bush made the false claim.

“There was no connection to anything biological,” said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: “the biggest sand toilets in the world.”

Defenders of the president will no doubt claim that he had no idea what the Pentagon’s own experts knew, and never found out what they knew during the year or so he continued to repeat the false claim.  Like his dad, he was “out of the loop” on key foreign policy decisions he was making himself.

Does anybody really want to make that argument?  That just means that Bush was running around pretending to know what the hell he was talking about, and that none of his judgments could possibly be considered informed.  He’s still a liar, even in the defense case, and an uniformed loose cannon at that.  And the quagmire in Iraq has been the direct result. 

The chimp lies.  Period.

Let’s hope more people figure this out before we start bombing Iran and who knows where else.

Two measures of how small the world is getting:

First: I didn’t realize it until after it aired or I might have blogged in advance, but tonight the Discovery Channel aired an episode of their Perfect Disasters series that I worked on, in which Sydney is almost destroyed by a hypothetical firestorm.  My contribution was fairly small; I was contacted by the British producers just before the episode was about to go into production in Sydney, so my bits are quite teeny, and the credit goes elsewhere for almost everything.  Point is: my contributions went off to the UK and then Down Under without even leaving this coffee table.

I know you all use email, too, and have far-flung friends, of course.  Neat, huh?  But dang, seeing a tape of the ep tonight (in which almost all of the characters are whimsically named for fellow Jeopardy! players, incidentally; it was sort of a long writing night, and it seemed funny to me for some reason, which explains why an Aussie firefighter named “Ken” was busy rescuing “Professor Dan”), it just really struck me how small this planet is.  I’ve never even met anyone else involved in the program, but there go “Kate” and “Eric” et al, scurrying around a bushfire in Oz.  Wow.

Second, I flipped on the tube to keep me company while writing just now, and the DirecTV dish — nothing unusual these days — has a live Indian broadcast of the Oz cricket team playing Bangladesh, live from Dhaka.  I’m sitting here watching Bangladeshis cheering madly in between Indian commercials for cell phones, air conditioners, hair gel, and Indian Oil gas stations — the exact same broadcast millions of people all over the subcontinent are probably watching right now. 

The Hindi, by the way, translates as “my gas company was willing to do business with the Union Carbide assets of Dow Chemical, but Bhopal, Schmopal — if this XtraPower Fleet Card program can save me a few rupees at the pump, what the hell.”  (The deal was called off, incidentally, after Bhopalis sent protest letters to the prime minister written in their own blood.  You get the feeling that sort of thing wouldn’t work here, though.  It might only make Cheney hungry for steak.) 

Anyway, yes, global communications, nothing new, obviously.  Heck, the Beatles played “All You Need Is Love” to some insanely huge live worldwide audience almost forty years ago.  But what’s amazing, really, is just how ordinary bridging these crazy distances has become.  It’s fabulous, and we should appreciate it, I think.

Maybe we (and everyone else) would bomb people less.  Couldn’t hurt.

Excuse me, but fluck.

The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning.

Yeah, but Iran’s about to get the Bomb, right?  No — not for another ten years, according to the National Intelligence Estimate.

Chimpus Maximus wants to start another war after a series of false claims about dangers which are nowhere near imminent.  This one may be nuclear.  NUCLEAR.

How the bloody hell can any sane American support this administration?