Wednesday Mashup (6/16/10)

Repug U.S. House Rep Ed Royce of California opines as follows at The Hill (here)…

Back in April I wrote about "the ever-lasting lure of a temperate Syria," noting the Obama Administration’s persistent attempts to get Damascus out of Iran’s orbit despite zero evidence of progress.

Well, the Wall Street Journal reports today that after innumerable, fruitless trips to Damascus by our diplomatic and military officials, the Administration is trying something new: sending some of our top technology companies to Syria, "marking the latest bid by the Obama Administration to woo President Bashar al-Assad away from his strategic alliance with Iran."

("Innumerable, fruitless trips" including the one by this guy, by the way...)

Royce’s snide tone has been echoed by other House Repugs, notably Dana Rohrabacher and Dan Burton here; Burton is the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee for the Middle East and South Asia, and compared sending an ambassador to Damascus to appeasing Adolf Hitler before World War II.

Oh, cute (the Bloomberg story also tells us that President George W. Bush withdrew the last U.S. ambassador in 2005, following Syria’s alleged involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri).

Is Syria a bad actor? Of course they are. But Bushco rewarded Libya which, unlike Syria, executed an honest-to-goodness terrorist attack against our people and gave one of the perpetrators a hero’s welcome when he returned home (and besides, as noted here, Syria acted in our defense in 2006 when our embassy was attacked). Syria’s actions have affected neighboring states in the region where they live; though they support Hezbollah, I know of no actions they have perpetrated directly against this country (and Fred Kaplan of Slate made a compelling argument for opening a dialog with Assad here in 2006, which was dutifully ignored by Former President Nutball of course…despite it all, I’ll still take “Professor” Obama over his perpetual truant predecessor).

Also, I thought this was an interesting story telling us that the U.S. is prepared $300 million to Vietnam to help treat the effects of the chemical defoliant known as “Agent Orange” used during the war…

A joint panel of U.S. and Vietnamese policymakers, citizens and scientists released an action plan Wednesday, urging the U.S. government and other donors to provide an estimated $30 million annually over 10 years to clean up sites still contaminated by dioxin, a toxic chemical used in the defoliant.

The funding would also be used to treat Vietnamese suffering from disabilities, including those believed linked to exposure to Agent Orange, which was dumped by the U.S. military in vast quantities over former South Vietnam to destroy crops and jungle cover shielding communist guerrilla fighters.

Washington has been slow to address the issue, quibbling for years with its former foe over the need for more scientific research to show that the herbicide sprayed by U.S. aircraft during the war caused health problems and birth defects among Vietnamese.

This Wikipedia article also tells us the following…

Starting in 2005 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency‎ (EPA) began to work with the Vietnamese government to measure the level of dioxin at the Da Nang Airbase. Also in 2005 the Joint Advisory Committee on Agent Orange made up of representatives of Vietnamese and US government agencies was established. The committee has been meeting yearly to explore areas of scientific cooperation, technical assistance and environmental remediation of dioxin.

A breakthrough in the diplomatic stalemate on this issue occurred as a result of United States President George W. Bush's state visit to Vietnam in November 2006. In the joint statement, President Bush and President Triet agreed that "further joint efforts to address the environmental contamination near former dioxin storage sites would make a valuable contribution to the continued development of their bilateral relationship. [27]

In late May 2007, President Bush signed into law a supplemental spending bill for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan that included an earmark of $3 million specifically for funding for programs for the remediation of dioxin 'hotspots' on former US military bases and for public health programs for the surrounding communities.[28] The appropriation was renewed in the fiscal year 2009 and again in FY 2010.

Make a note that I’m giving Number 43 some actual credit for doing something constructive here (shocking, I know - the article tells us that New Jersey was the first state to create a commission working with Rutgers University to study the effects of Agent Orange in 1980, but the commission was broken up by former governor Christine Todd Whitman in 1996…figures).

Also, here is a link to a page on Agent Orange from the web site of the Veterans Administration, including a link for any service people exposed to this deadly chemical to apply for disability compensation.

Finally, I came across this column from Bernie Quigley at The Hill that would be hilarious if it weren’t so utterly illogical (ostensibly, Quigley continues to make fun of Paul McCartney for his joke about Dubya supposedly not knowing what a library is…in addition to being wrong 90-something percent of the time, conservatives generally are execrable because they have no capacity whatsoever to laugh at themselves).

There is so much dookey in Quigley’s column that it’s hard to address it all. Among other things, he claims that McCartney was “along for the ride” during the whole Beatlemania thing way back when. He also alleges that the name of Apple, the corporation The Beatles formed after the death of former manager Brian Epstein, had something to do with Rene Magritte’s painting, when in fact it had more to do with an exhibition of performance art John Lennon witnessed by a previously-unknown artist named Yoko Ono (I’ll tell you how I know that in a minute). Quigley also says that Lennon had “become the bodhisattva in exile who never smiled for the cameras again when he returned from India,” presumably after the Fab Four’s infatuation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, which is also laughable (Quigley obviously never watched the interview Tom Snyder conducted with Lennon over his immigration issues in 1975).

I suppose all of this is an excuse to plug author Philip Norman’s great book on Lennon here, which I’m currently reading (Norman explains who people such as Pete Shotton and Bill Harry are in Lennon lore, among many, many others - I’m up to the part where the movie “Magical Mystery Tour” has just bombed…you can tell how desperate the wingnuts are to go after McCartney when they actually cast Lennon in a sympathetic light; had he lived, I’m sure he would have earned volumes more spite from them than McCartney ever could).

And one more thing – as long as I’m on the subject, all I can say in response to this is “way to rock on, Sir Paul!”…I think he’s coming to Philly this fall.