UD‘s old friend Peter, long a friend of the Kurds, talks about the situation.

If Turkey does take the battle to the 70,000 men and women who make up the Kurdish forces in northern Syria, it will be a bloody fight, Galbraith said.

“It will not be easy,” he said. “A lot of people are going to die.”

He can also be seen here.

It’s not ol’ Boris calling burqas stuff like this. I found these references here.

Why is it not appalling that the common name for this, the most torturing of all burqas, relies on its resemblance to a shuttlecock, and appalling that Boris noted a resemblance between burqas and letterboxes? Shuttlecock! How dehumanizing.

And it ain’t Boris concluding that “we are seriously fucked up as a society” because we put schoolgirls in “coffins.” It’s ordinary Pakistanis, millions of whom have reacted with horror and resistance to some POS in some province mandating shuttlecocks for schoolgirls. The mandate has suddenly been withdrawn. Wonder why.

Even compare them to ghosts! Inhuman. And yet how difficult, even for the most enlightened and sympathetic, to police their burqa/niqab language, to rein in their honest belief about the garments. Take Azadeh Moaveni, eager to understand the Isettes as victims of “repressive and patriarchal governments.” (She means England, dummy.) These women, Moaveni writes, “joined the morality police and became the spectres in the niqab.”

Hey you’re a regular Boris Johnson, comparing pious empowered women to ghosts! Bad, bad, Azadeh Moaveni!

Americans by a 45%-38% plurality now support a vote by the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump, a USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds, as allegations continue to swirl around an embattled White House.

By a similar margin, 44%-35%, those surveyed say the Senate, which would then be charged with holding a trial of the president, should convict Trump and remove him from office.

Pas mal. Keep it coming.

… Charles Grassley. Feast your eyes. Three pages of praise for his stewardship of our tax dollars. UD‘s a deep blue Democrat who deeply admires this conservative Republican for taking seriously his charge to disrupt the theft of federal funds wherever it occurs.

Grassley is a true throwback: a midwestern scold with just the sort of moral backbone a Senator needs to do the right thing in the Ukraine mess. UD‘s totally not surprised, therefore, that he has rebuked Trubu and his minions over their, er, unusual reading of the whistle blower laws. Good on you, Chuck, and may there be more where you come from.

[S]upport for impeachment and removal has risen 11 points to 46% among independents and 8 points to 14% among Republicans.

We knew that others would enter the fray of the fraying prez. And so it is that two knowledgeable sources tell the New York Times
Trump

pushed the Australian prime minister during a recent telephone call to help Attorney General William P. Barr gather information for a Justice Department inquiry that Mr. Trump hopes will discredit the Mueller investigation…

Nice comment from a NYT reader:

Maybe Trump can ring up the ambassador to Nevis and see if he has any dirt on Alexander Hamilton. That way, he can undermine and discredit this pesky thing called the U.S. Constitution.

Recognizing Trump as pure Père Ubu, this blog in 2016 featured some posts imagining a new American version of Jarry’s great play whose main character is Trubu. Trump’s Grand Victory silenced UD‘s parodic energy, but the powerful reemergence – under impeachment pressure – of the man’s ubuesque character has me, if not penning an additional scene or two of Trubu Roi, at least turning to one of Ubu’s greatest perceivers, Roger Shattuck.

(A comment of Timothy Snyder’s on the Rachel Maddow Show had me thinking Trubu thoughts again; he described Trump’s “scorn for the idea of law… [For him,] there isn’t really law. It’s just a joke.” Instantly I pictured vile, hilarious, obscene Ubu rolling around the stage slashing and burning because everything except his power over other people is a joke.)

Shattuck:

[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…

Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character?  It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability,  the vestiges of original sin.  Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him.  He remains a threat because he can destroy at will, and the political horrors of the twentieth century make the lesson disturbingly real… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images.  He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu  – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.

In other words:

Keep smiling through
Just like you always do
‘Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away

Bless him. Go fund him.

When you see all the numbers, it’s astounding that it’s taken this long for the idiotic authoritarianism of the haredim to be pushed aside in Israel.

[A] solid majority of Israeli Jews wants government policy to be far less influenced by Jewish law than it is now.

A total of 64 percent of respondents want there to be separation of religion and state in Israel, while 68 percent want Israel to recognize civil marriages.

Sixty-four percent do not want any religious body to have governmental authority in Israel, according to the poll. At present, Israel’s Orthodox Chief Rabbinate controls marriage, divorce, burial and other affairs in Israel.

A total of 62 percent want Israel to recognize a range of Jewish conversion ceremonies — not just Orthodox ones.

Not in Pakistan it don’t, babe. Shush. Stay in Saudi.

Not that Saudi is safe from the evil intentions of women who insist on being free.

If you truly wish to live where all the women wear burqas, there’s always Al Hol.

She loves the mad things they say, the mad things they do – in airplanes, on city streets, in schools, at archeological sites… She has been able to count on them for madcap anti-democratic action lo all these years.

Nor does she think the very bad outcome for them in the latest Israeli election will stop them from wrapping themselves in cellophane on jetliners or spitting at insufficiently orthodox eight year old girls and calling them whores, etc., etc. After all, God calls them to this behavior.

No, now that they’re cornered by a secular country that hates them, UD expects the ultras to go positively batshit with rage and paranoia.

But, as one observer points out, the election results have thrown a wrench in Bibi’s effort to shut down Israel’s Supreme Court (“Netanyahu does not have the votes to get himself a government that will … tinker with the Supreme Court“), which means that the extreme and endemic law-breaking of the ultras will be punished. And that will be fun to watch too.

UD‘s favorite headline so far from Israel’s close election.

Headlines like At Last, Israelis Are Turning Away From Their Medieval Religious Maniacs certainly sound promising, but even if a secular coalition prevails, Israel will still need to do something about its many varieties of other right-wing cultists. Not only that, but any felt threat to the ultraorthodox will have the haredim pouring into the streets and burning down their neighborhoods. (Note, in the headline, the word maniacs.)