Ominous dude.

Or a big fucking parody?

I know I’m a Jewish lesbian and he’d probably have me killed. But still, the guy speaks some blunt truths about the Bush Administration that make me swoon…

You decide!

We certainly live in interesting times.

I’ve kept quiet about MoveOn.org’s silly New York Times ad about “General Betray Us” because, frankly, I think it’s small stuff compared to the more urgent matter at hand: that most Americans don’t know what the fuck the “surge” is, how it’s being conducted, or what the true consequences of it have been thus far. (As ever, the president has only himself to blame for failing to articulate his own war policy, and for using an impressive soldier and military strategist in the worst possible capacity, as a public relations man.)

Anyway, here’s the latest tenderloin the witless right has tossed to the ravening left*. You can expect the usual cycle of nonsense to commence, from the talking heads and the post-structuralists alike, to how this image represents North American society in chaos, the death of sanity and reason, blah, blah, blah. Salman Rushdie nailed it on Bill Maher this week: Talk about Iraq has been supplanted by talk about talk about Iraq.

I have to say, as someone who’s trudged through a few pages of Tariq Ali’s Clash of Fundamentalisms, I think this is lightweight Photoshop work. Bush as Osama, Osama as Bush — now that must have taken dozens of man-hours at New Left Review to pull off.

Evidently, the cover and title are the most provocative things in this issue of Maclean’s. And are you surprised?

We can be grateful for one small accomplishment here: At least most people now know just how really, really, really bad of a guy Saddam Hussein was if he’s become evil’s gold standard of moral equivalence. Hitler’s ghost must be going green with envy.

Indeed, on that same episode of Bill Maher, Janeane Garofalo, who always looks like she’s being broken up with, said that Saddam was a war criminal, Bush is a war criminal — hey, war criminals happen, man. Janeane should be more careful. Glib tongues wag and before you know it, a whole cottage industry of Sieg Hail-ing Dubya t-shirts teeters on the brink of insolvency.

* In my original post, I had it the other way about: witless left… ravening right. Terry Glavin, my Canadian comrade, was kind enough to point out that, like our own American Conservative, Maclean’s is one of those reactionary mags whose politics these days is indistinguishable from that of the far left.  At all events, there’s enough witlessness and ravening to spare on both sides of the spectrum. You should see Thanksgiving at the Weiss household.

Latest from Slate:

On Oct. 12, we shall hear again from Oslo, and I will be very surprised indeed if the peace prize is not awarded to Albert Gore Jr. (Don’t ask what a campaign against global warming has done for “peace”; that would be like asking what Mother Teresa or Henry Kissinger had ever done to reduce global conflict. The impression is the main thing.)

So, and if I am right, the former vice president will then complete a year in which An Inconvenient Truth has been awarded an Oscar and he has authored a best seller. Roll it round your tongue again: an Oscar, a best seller, and a Nobel Prize in the space of 12 months or so. Not bad. And meanwhile, the field of Democratic candidates looks—how shall one put it?—a trifle etiolated. Sen. Clinton may have succeeded in getting people to call her “Hillary” and to have made them feel resigned to her front-runnership, but what kind of achievement is that? Sen. Obama cannot possibly believe, and doesn’t even act as if he believes, that he can be elected president of the United States next year. John Edwards is a good man who is in politics for good reasons, but there is something about his populism that doesn’t quite—what’s the word?—translate. …

…..

I remind you that Gore was once a stern advocate of the removal of Saddam Hussein, and that in office he might well not be the coward or apologist that the MoveOn.org crowd is still hoping to nominate. One has the very slight sense that he contains some unexpended political energy and has acquired some dearly bought political experience. At any rate, nothing could be worse than the present dreary political routine, and if it takes a Scandinavian kick-start to alter the odds, then for once one can hope that the heirs of Alfred Nobel will have a more explosive and catalytic effect than they had intended.

All of it here.

No green halos this time, so you’ll have to imagine them:

Ahmadinejad briefly addressed two of his claims that had aroused the most controversy, claiming academics in Europe had been imprisoned for “approaching the Holocaust from a different perspective.”

He also said as a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran had the right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology, and said its programs had always been open to inspection.

Speaking in Farsi with a simultaneous translator, Ahmadinejad several times addressed the audience as “my dear friends.” Ahmadinejad characterized himself as a fellow academic, saying even as president he continues teaching courses on a weekly basis.

There were no disruptions as the audience sat in silence through most of the speech. There was derisive laughter when Ahmadinejad claimed “in Iran, we do not have homosexuals” in response to a question, while the end of the speech was greeted with appplause.

While claims about Iran’s nuclear intentions may be subject to debate, their treatment of homosexuals is not.

See also Norm’s take one, and take two.