Month: March 2003

Finally Some Honesty Out of Mugabe

Henry Hanks links to a story in which it turns out Zimbabwe strongman Robert Mugabe is capable of telling the truth. Here’s how Mugabe chose to describe himself at the recent state funeral of one of his cabinet ministers,

I am still the Hitler of the time. This Hitler has only one objective, justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people, and their right to their resources.

If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold. Ten times, that is what we stand for.

For once, Mugabe is absolutely right. He’s even using Nazi-style tactics, deploying elite units of his army openly to assassinate and sexually assault key members of the opposition party according to the London Daily Telegraph.

One other thing Mugabe shares with Hitler — thanks to spineless multilateralism by the usual suspects, he and others in his government are free to move as they want across Europe. Ah, the fresh smell of appeasement.

Source:

‘Hitler’ Mugabe launches revenge terror attacks. Peta Thornycroft, Daily Telegraph, March 26, 2003.

Dave Winer on NBC

Somehow I have a feeling that Dave Winer is not going to be too happy with the story NBC ran that included a “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” quote from him. If you missed it, the feature Winer’s been talking about on Scripting News for the past few days was pretty much exclusively about warblogs (and likely gave the impression to the uninitiated that Winer is a warblogger or a fan of warbloggers.)

Why didn’t they just interview Glenn Reynolds since he’s doing a weblog gig with MSNBC anyway? Weird.

Coalition Combat Death/POW Figures

Command-Post.Org offers something I had been looking for — total coalition deaths to date in the war on Iraq:

US:
Combat – 15
Accidents – 8

UK:
Combat – 6
Accidents – 14

POWS:
US – 7
UK – 0

Just for comparison, there were a total of 363 deaths and 357 wounded in the first Persian Gulf War according to this site.

By my reckoning, the first Persian Gulf War lasted 46 days, yielding an average of almost 8 KIA every day.

So far with Operation Iraqi Freedom, American KIA are averaging less than 3 per day.

Frontline Stays True to Form

An episode of Frontline recently explored the risks that reporters face covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of course to Frontline that means — surprise — covering the risks that Palestinian journalists face from the Israeli Defense Force. Palestinian official censorship, intimidation, etc. warrants just an article on the Frontline web site as an afterthought.

Wonder Woman Gets a Hair Cut

Yahoo! Entertainment actually has an entire story devoted to Wonder Woman’s new haircut. Superman had to die to get mass media interest, but Wonder Woman just has to cut her hair?

Is there any gimmick DC won’t try to improve their sales? And with a lineup that includes books like Aquaman Secret Files can you blame them?