IT SEEMS I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE to make a Kerry-Dole comparison.

JEFF JARVIS HAS A ROUNDUP OF IRAQI BLOG POSTS: The UN and USA Today are getting criticized, though for different reasons.

MORE ON UNSCAM:

Why did France and Russia oppose efforts to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime? And why did they press constantly, throughout the ’90s, for an expansion of Iraqi oil sales? Was it their empathy for the starving children of that impoverished nation? Their desire to stop the United States from arrogantly imposing its vision upon the Middle East?

It now looks like they it was simply because they were on the take. Saddam was their cash cow. If President Bush has suffered some discredit over his apparently false – but not disingenuous – claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the lapse is minor compared to the outright personal selfishness and criminality that appears to have motivated many of those who opposed his efforts to rid the world of one of its worst dictators. . . .

The defect of international coalitions is that they include the just and the unjust, the bribed and the honest, the democratic and the autocratic. And their members cannot be trusted equally. The group that stood up and backed the invasion of Iraq was nicknamed “the Coalition of the Willing.” Now it appears it was also “the Coalition of the Honest.”

The press’s relative lack of interest in this colossal scandal — which dwarfs anything involving Enron or Martha Stewart — is hard to explain. As reader Brian Naughton writes:

With the UNscam story unravelling almost daily, no one seems to be talking about the CEO of UN Inc. I’m referring, of course to Kofi Annan. If this guy isn’t complicit in these crimes he would have to be the most astoundingly incompetent CEO in recent history, perhaps ever!

Yes. It’s interesting that he’s not getting the kind of treatment that corporate CEO’s get, notwithstanding that this is likely the biggest financial-fraud scandal in history.

UPDATE: Mystery writer Roger Simon is looking for this scandal’s Mr. Big.

MORE KERRY WORRIES:

In recent appearances, Mr. Kerry’s digressions and obfuscations about whether he threw a war medal or a ribbon on the White House lawn in 1971—or whether the young Mr. Kerry should have used the word “war crimes” to describe actions in Vietnam—have obscured the candidate. At every turn, he has managed to turn the TV screen into smoked glass: He’s right in front of you, but you can’t … quite … make … him … out. With his morose patrician mien and robotic delivery—parodied with precision by Jon Stewart on the Monday, April 24, Daily Show, surely not a good thing for the candidate—Mr. Kerry’s TV performances are sounding a gut-level alarm about his ability to inspire confidence in the electorate. . . .

“I’m not sure what the message is—that may be the essence of the problem,” said Joe McGinniss, the author of The Selling of the President, the best-seller that detailed Richard M. Nixon’s media strategy. As a Massachusetts resident, Mr. McGinniss said he had never seen Mr. Kerry do well on TV—or even in public, for that matter.

I’m pretty sure that if John Edwards were the presumptive nominee, we wouldn’t be hearing so much voters’ remorse from Democrats. This sounds like Bob Dole all over again: He can’t connect with the public, he’s unappealing on TV, but we’ll nominate him anyway! Did we mention he’s a war hero? They always win!

DONALD RUMSFELD ON BIAS FROM THE PRESS:

There are two ways, I suppose, one could inform readers of the Geneva Convention stipulation against using places of worship to conduct military attacks. One might be to headline saying that Terrorists Attack Coalition Forces From Mosques. That would be one way to present the information.

Another might be to say: Mosques Targeted in Fallujah. That was the Los Angeles Times headline this morning.

Ouch. (Via CPT Patti).

RISKS TO NANOTECHNOLOGY INVESTORS: My TechCentralStation column is up.

DAVID ADESNIK makes clear why Wesley Clark isn’t the nominee. Ouch.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Claudia Rosett writes:

It’s looking more and more as if one of the best reasons to get rid of Saddam Hussein was that it was probably the only way to get rid of Oil-for-Food. The problem wasn’t simply that this huge United Nations relief program for Iraq became a gala of graft, theft, fraud, palace-building and global influence-peddling–though all that was quite bad enough. The picture now emerging is that under U.N. management the Oil-for-Food program, which ran from 1996-2003, served as a cover not only for Saddam’s regime to cheat the Iraqi people, but to set up a vast and intricate global network of illicit finance. . . .

In Oil-for-Food, “Every contract tells a story,” says John Fawcett, a financial investigator with the New York law firm of Kreindler & Kreindler LLP, which has sued the financial sponsors of Sept. 11 on behalf of the victims and their families. In an interview, Mr. Fawcett and his colleague, Christine Negroni, run down the lists of Oil-for-Food authorized oil buyers and relief suppliers, pointing out likely terrorist connections. One authorized oil buyer, they note, was a remnant of the defunct global criminal bank, BCCI. Another was close to the Taliban while Osama bin Laden was on the rise in Afghanistan; a third was linked to a bank in the Bahamas involved in al Qaeda’s financial network; a fourth had a close connection to one of Saddam’s would-be nuclear-bomb makers. . . .

In a world beset right now by terrorist threats–which depend on terrorist financing–it’s time to acknowledge that the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program was worse than simply a case of grand larceny. Given Saddam’s proclivities for deceit and violence, Oil-for-Food was also a menace to security.

Indeed.

HUGH HEWITT:

Just watched John Kerry on Hardball. Incredibly, although Chris Matthews asked not a single hard question, Kerry managed to hurt himself badly on at least three occasions, and I didn’t hear the entire interview.

Yes, that’s the campaign in a nutshell, at the moment.

Message to Republicans: Don’t get cocky. Kerry can’t possibly do this badly for the entire campaign.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Chris Matthews should be worried. Will Collier says he’s going home to Mama.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ouch — tough crowd in Will Collier’s comment section:

You know Matthews is slipping when he’s the guy Democrats go to in order to recover from the tough questioning on Good Morning America.

Did I say ouch? I’ll say it again. Ouch!

OXBLOG HAS A ROUNDUP of various people’s thoughts on what we should be doing in Iraq.

KENNETH TIMMERMAN SAYS that Saddam’s WMD have been found. Given the way this week has been going for John Kerry, he’s probably right. . . .

OVER AT FRAGMENTS FROM FLOYD, the Nikon D70 is getting a good review. I certainly like mine.

UNSCAM UPDATE: James Morrow has a column in The Australian on the oil-for-food scandal:

Those named include not just Sevan but a vast array of Russian politicians, close friends of French President Jacques Chirac (including France’s former minister of the interior), British Labour MP George Galloway, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and, closer to home, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri.

In short, it’s a who’s who list of high-profile anti-war and anti-sanctions voices, all revealed to be shills for Saddam.

But by far the biggest recipient of Saddam’s largesse was the UN. During the program’s existence, more than $US1 billion was kept by the organisation as a fee for administering the program. As one senior UN diplomat recently told London’s Daily Telegraph: “The UN was not doing this work just for the good of Iraq. Cash from Saddam’s government was keeping the UN going for a few years.”

Amazingly, though, it has taken an incredible amount of time for this story to get what little traction it has so far gained in the media. (Certainly the anti-war Left, which is happy to believe that George W. Bush toppled Saddam to kick a few contracts to Dick Cheney’s old pals at Halliburton, has been deafeningly silent on the topic.)

Perhaps because of all the DIY international lawyering engaged in by the world press corps in the run-up to Iraq’s invasion, many journalists are reluctant to admit that the UN they put so much faith in was many times more corrupt than they could imagine the Bush White House being.

Or maybe they just don’t want to admit that so many of the anti-war voices they used to support their stories were bought and paid for with money belonging to the long-suffering, if little-mentioned, Iraqi people.

But the naive belief among journalists with little or no international law background that no military action is legitimate without the UN’s seal of approval is one thing. The continued fetishistic belief of politicians and opinion-makers in the supposed good intentions of the UN is another — and it is something that needs to end immediately.

It’s ended here.

FROM THE VILLAGE VOICE:

WASHINGTON, D.C.— With the air gushing out of John Kerry’s balloon, it may be only a matter of time until political insiders in Washington face the dread reality that the junior senator from Massachusetts doesn’t have what it takes to win and has got to go. As arrogant and out of it as the Democratic political establishment is, even these pols know the party’s got to have someone to run against George Bush. They can’t exactly expect the president to self-destruct into thin air.

With growing issues over his wealth (which makes fellow plutocrat Bush seem a charity case by comparison), the miasma over his medals and ribbons (or ribbons and medals), his uninspiring record in the Senate (yes war, no war), and wishy-washy efforts to mimic Bill Clinton’s triangulation gimmickry (the protractor factor), Kerry sinks day by day. The pros all know that the candidate who starts each morning by having to explain himself is a goner.

Is resurrecting John Edwards the answer? I doubt it, though I liked him better than Kerry. Lots of people on the right, meanwhile, are predicting a last-minute appearance by Hillary Clinton. This sounds like the stuff of pundit dreams more than reality (though she’d probably be better on the war than Kerry — say what you will about Hillary, but nobody’s ever accused her of being wimpish or indecisive). It’s not too late for Kerry’s campaign to hit its stride. But all this wheel-spinning isn’t helping.

AIRPORT SECURITY:

Someone attempting an exact replay of the 9/11 attacks today would likely be beaten to within an inch of death – and I wouldn’t take that inch for granted – by passengers with nothing to lose. Even if the terrorists managed get to the cockpit, physical locks and airline policy would make it impossible to take control of the plane. They could kill everyone on board and blow up the airplane, but that makes this kind of attack identical in effect to the “bombing” type. The “hijacking” category, at least for commercial passenger flights, has been largely negated. “Never again” is not just a solemn vow here. It is a statement of fact.

Why, then, do I still have to surrender my nail clippers, take off my belt and wait three quarters of an hour to go through a metal detector honed to such a level of sensitivity that the steak taco I had for lunch sets it wailing? What harm could I inflict with a one inch piece of flimsy metal on a hundred instant air marshals, a bank-vault quality door and pilots specifically trained to never give up control of the airplane? Why is our still-recovering economy being subjected to this level of delay and inefficiency? More importantly, why are our dramatically finite security dollars being spent here as opposed to on other, largely unsolved, problems – like the other three types of threats outlined above? Are these measures effective security, or are they primarily meant to comfort us?

I think we know the answer.

PAMELA BONE:

I am sent a newsletter from a women’s rights group in Pakistan, which lists items from Pakistani newspapers. The following is a recent selection (I checked the items on the newspapers’ websites):

Lahore: A girl, Kauser, 17, was strangled by her elder brother because she had married of her own will. She returned home and asked her family to forgive her but her brother strangled her with a piece of cloth. – The Daily Times.

Ghotki district: Two women were killed over Karo-Kari (honour killing). One Nihar Jatoi tied his wife to a bed and electrocuted her. One Bachal axed his wife Salma to death and fled. No arrests were reported. – The News.

Sargodha: A woman is in hospital after having both legs amputated because of severe injuries inflicted by her brother-in-law and mother-in-law, who clubbed her for her alleged illicit affairs. The woman, who was fighting for life, said the real reason was that her brother-in-law was trying to force her to arrange his marriage to her younger sister, but her sister had instead eloped with her paramour. – Dawn.

What chance of this woman becoming an international symbol, as has the boy who so tragically lost his arms during the invasion of Iraq?

Why is international public opinion not outraged at the treatment of women in Islamic fundamentalist societies? Why is it easier for millions of people around the world to see America as the great evil, rather than the countries in which governments ignore such horrific abuses of women?

Because elites around the world see American culture as a more immediate threat to their power than Islamic fundamentalism.

THIS suggests that they need remedial civics lessons for the Times editorial board:

An editorial on Saturday about citizenship testing referred to a question about voting rights that many people get wrong — and gave the wrong answer. The Constitution does not specify a “right to vote.” Four Amendments, the 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th, forbid denying or abridging the right to vote on account of such things as race and sex. The Seventh Amendment, mentioned in the editorial, deals with the right to have a lawsuit tried by a jury.

Indeed.

SOUTH DAKOTA’S POLITICAL SOAP OPERA continues to unfold.