I hereby take the pledge to never again (not that I’ve been in the habit of it) modify the phrase “Republican Guard” with the adjective “elite.” I wish that the rest of the media would stop doing so. It’s either redundant, or pointless, because the only sense in which they are “elite” is in relation to half-starving conscripts with guns in their back. Our non-coms are more elite than their officers, in terms of weaponry, motivation and fighting ability.

Bad news–some are speculating that the lights went out to provide cover for atrocities against the Shias, which will then be blamed on the coalition.

Some of the surrendering Iraqis are expecting (and hoping) to be taken to America.

Apparently, some Iraqi civilians are rushing to surrender to American troops under the false impression that they will be taken to the United States.

“We had a group like that a few days ago,” says Medley. “One guy wanted to go to America, bad. He wasn’t a soldier. He wanted a baseball cap. When we put him on a helicopter, he thought he was going to America ? he was smiling the whole time.”

The whole piece is worth a read.

[via The Corner]

Kathy Kinsley reports over at the Command Post, per Fox News, that the Fedayeen are starting to take hostages in Baghdad, taking over civilians’ homes.

Stephen Rittenberg deconstructs Professor De Genova, and shows him to be not just an odious hater of America, but a poseur, intellectually unworthy to be in the same academic department that was once the realm of Franz Boaz and Ruth Benedict.

Note once again the cant, ideological, ungrammatical and meaningless phrases: “racialized and spatialized”, “reconceptualization” and my personal favorite “transnational urban conjunctural spaces”. Can anyone reading De Genova’s statements and letters seriously argue that his is a scholarly mind at work, striving for knowledge? Can anyone seriously argue that his is a mind striving towards coherence and clarity of expression? So my question for Columbia is this: do you, out of a sense of responsibility for your students, maintain a minimal standard for intelligence in your faculty? How widespread is such mindlessness among your faculty? And what happened to the moral obligation to be intelligent?

Andy Freeman has a good comment to this post:

Just as Eisenhower was the best German general in WWII, PFC Lynch, of Palestine, West Virginia, is in the running for best Palestinian soldier of recent vintage.

Beat by a girl, a little girl, a little blond girl. Good thing they’re not a macho honor/shame culture…

Yup. I’ll be curious to see the coverage of this on Al Jazeera and Arab News. If there is any…

Stevie Nicks has a supportive handwritten letter to the troops.

Stevie Nicks has a supportive handwritten letter to the troops.

Stevie Nicks has a supportive handwritten letter to the troops.

From today’s WaPo:

President Bush, comforting grief-stricken family and friends of fallen Marines, praised U.S. troops Thursday for their two-week advance on Baghdad and said “a vice is closing” on Saddam Hussein’s regime.

So, are they saying that the coalition is like some kind of massive vice squad?

They’ve even got it that way in the headline. I thought we were supposed to rely on “serious newspapers,” rather than blogs, because they have editors.

Go look now, before they fix it.

It’s amusing to see them criticizing the President’s diction, when they don’t even know how to spell “vise.”

[Update at 8:45 PST]

They still haven’t fixed it. I guess no one has even bothered to tell them about it. I’m certainly not.

Hilarious.