Let's start with this business of the ship that was intercepted carrying scud missiles from North Korea to Yemen on Wednesday.
The U.S. found out about the shipment, probably from South Korean or Japanese intelligence sources. Our guys got the Spanish Navy to intercept the ship. The ship tried to run and it took - literally - a shot across its bow before it hove to.
The crew tried to convince the Spaniards that they were Cambodian, not North Korean.
The Spaniards called in the US Navy which went aboard and found the missiles buried in the hold of the vessel under a - well - a boatload of bags of cement.
The US State Department sent Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage out to say in Beijing, "This is not exactly a development that is new ... As a major proliferator, the North Koreans apparently have been caught."
The Yemini government claimed there was nothing wrong with one country selling military equipment from another (ask General Dynamics or Boeing or Raytheon) and besides, the missiles were for defensive purposes only.
The US, yesterday, released the ship and sent the missiles on to Yemen which is now safe from attack by such aggressive neighbors as Madagascar and Malawi.
Ok, so what's the deal? There are two possible answers: (1) That the US did all this just to prove that no military materiel moves around the world without our knowledge and permission, or; (2) That the North Koreans didn't care about the missiles - they were really smuggling the cement.
In any event, the first successful naval action by Spain since 1588 went for naught (See? "Naught." Add that to "lest" and "mustn't" on the list of very good words when writing from Europe.
Trent Lott has apologized and apologized and apologized for his remarks at the 100th birthday celebration for Strom Thurmond last week. Lott, who is from Mississippi, was praising Thurmond and strayed into a political pit of despair when he pointed out that Mississippi voted for Thurmond (as the States Rights candidate) in the Presidential election of 1948, "and if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years."
President Bush rhetorically smacked Lott on the back of the head in a speech in Philadelphia yesterday, saying Lott "has apologized and rightly so. Every day our nation was segregated was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals."
Democratic presidential candidates elbowed each other out of the way to grab some TV time saying Lott should resign. These are the same people who argued that Robert Byrd's (D-WV) use of the "N" word last year in an interview on Fox was to be forgiven because of his advanced age (85).
Here's what I don't understand: Why is Byrd's age an explanation for the same kind of lapse for which Lott has been pilloried, but nobody seems to think he was too old to have been Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee?
Just when you thought all the idiotic lawsuits had already been filed, this: The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has filed suit in - wanna guess? Kee-reckt! - San Francisco, against the California Milk Board for its advertising campaign showing cows strolling around a meadow, allegedly being happy.
An attorney for PETA said "the campaign's catch phrase, 'Great cheese comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California,' improperly portrays idyllic conditions for dairy cows and misleads consumers."
Who will PETA call as a witness, Elsie? Will she testify that she was exploited by Borden all those years and was forced to feign contentment under a threat of being turned into...into - what's the word I'm searching for? Oh yes,
Baloney.
On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Links to
the Geneva Travelogue, what 1588 means, a link to the PETA article, the Mullfoto of the day, and an interesting Catchy Caption of the
Day.
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