Dolphins, Eskimos, who cares? It's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippie crap

The hippie peaceniks are babbling again.

Lots of arguments have been offered on behalf of striking Baghdad that are not reasons at all. For instance, that Saddam Hussein is an evil man who has brutalized his own people.

Certainly true. But the world is full of brutal regimes that have murdered their own people. Indeed, Washington ally Turkey's treatment of its Kurds is scarcely more gentle than Iraq's Kurdish policies.

Moreover, the U.S. warmly supports the royal kleptocracy next door in Saudi Arabia, fully as totalitarian, if not quite as violent, as Saddam's government. Any non-Muslim and most women would probably prefer living in Iraq.

God, these people living in their little dream world, writing their fantasies up and posting them at liberal mouthpieces like National Review Online. Makes me sick.

Oh yeah, that's the first few paragraphs of an NRO comment by "Doug Bandow [. . .,] a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan."

I'd say I didn't realize that Alzheimers was contagious, but Mister Charlie does not find such comments amusing.

Readers are encouraged to find instances of warbloggers joking about the illnesses or potential illnesses of people they don't care for -- something about Arafat and babywipes, perhaps -- and forward them to Bill Quick so he may denounce them with the same vehemence he directs at those cracking wise about Reagan and Heston.

Speaking of women, and Iraq, and Kuwait (I left out the bit of the editorial talking about using Iraq's invasion as justification for Gulf War II), Inter-Parliamentary Union helpfully point out:

Women in Kuwait do not yet have the right to vote or to stand for election.

Women's Action goes even further:

Kuwait is the one remaining country in the world where only men have the right to vote. Women in Kuwait are denied the opportunity for political participation although women hold positions such as Director of the University of Kuwait, Kuwaiti Ambassador to Austria, and Under-Secretary of Higher Education within the Ministry of Education. On 16 May 1999, the Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, issued a decree granting women full political rights to vote and to stand for office. On 23 November 1999, the National Assembly rejected the decree by a two-thirds vote.

Well, there you have it. Democracy in action.

The CIA Factbook adds:

Literacy: definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 78.6%
male: 82.2%
female: 74.9% (1995 est.)

True, they're not exactly unbiased, but if they don't have solid information to go on, they'd end up doing extraordinarily silly thi-- never mind.

Anyway, that gap in literacy rates actually isn't that bad, comparatively. Nepal, for example, has a 40.9% literacy rate for men, 14% for women. Nice to see there are some places where the ladyfesto is taken seriously.

Well, at least the women of Afghanistan are free now.

15% literacy rate, to 47.2% for men, by the way. And that's from 1999; seeing as the Taliban took over in 1996, you really can't blame them. Not that that's going to stop people.

Seeing as birth rates tend to drop when women become educated and learn about odd notions like effective birth control, you'd think conservatives' fear of a brown planet (which, um, we already have, but they don't get out of the suburbs much) would lead them to push women's education with a vengeance.

Ha! I made a funny.