Duh Roundup (Issue No. 5515)

From a New York Times article on the Iraqi insurgency.

Yet it may prove to be one of history's humbling lessons that history itself fails to illuminate the conflict under way in Iraq. No one really knows what the insurgents are up to.

"It clearly makes sense to the people who are doing it," said Dr. Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. "And that more than anything else tells us how little we understand the region." (emph added)

(Link via Needlenose)
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The usually oblivious David Brooks comes out of his fog long enough to point out the obvious:

But when you look at how Republicans behave in office, you notice that they are often clueless when it comes to understanding the lower-class folks who put them there. They are good at responding to business-class types and social conservatives, but bad at responding to poor Republicans.

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From Ohio Anti-Adult Bill Goes to Extremes, by Mark Kernes:

Ohio women who use tampons can now rest easy that they're not engaging in "sexual conduct," [as] defined under Sec. 2907.01. . . ."

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From a New York Times story on the spectacular uncloseting mayor of Spokane.

Not unlike the Roy Cohn of "Angels in America" - who describes himself as "a heterosexual man" who has sex "with guys" - Mr. West [the mayor of Spokane] has said he had "relations with adult men" but doesn't "characterize" himself as gay. This is more than hypocrisy - it's pathology.

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Time magazine reassures us that Bush has "in fact finished the Tom Wolfe book and is on to some light reading about North Korea." (emph added)

The "light reading" is The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan. This is from the Amazon.com description of the book:

Kang Chol-Hwan's family was removed without trial to a remote concentration camp, apparently because the grandfather was suspected of counter-revolutionary tendencies. Kang Chol-hwan was nine years old when imprisoned at the Yodok camp in 1977. Over the next ten years, he endured inhumane conditions and deprivations, including an inadequate diet (supplemented by frogs and rats), regular beatings, humiliations and hard labor. He was later inexplicably released. (emph added)

This one broke my irony meter.
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