I’ve been holding off writing about Jiang’s long-awaited resignation and Hu’s ascension to absolute power because it’s obviously way too early to determine what it really means. But I did want to direct readers to an interesting post over at China Digital News. It cites an opinion piece in the unlinkable Wall Street Journal that claims Hu made a bargain with the devil, and that the terms of the deal eliminate the possibility for true reform:

For over 20 years, Mr. Hu has enjoyed a widespread reputation as a moderate reformist. But to get his latest promotion, Mr. Hu struck a devil’s bargain with Mr. Jiang that will dim the prospects for political reform.”

“For 78-year-old Mr. Jiang, the new arrangement is a sweet one. In his new position as retired senior statesman, he is now formally ensconced, incongruous as it may seem, in the Communist Party pantheon as the co-equal of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping…..

In return, Mr. Hu gets to take over Mr. Jiang’s powerful military position. But it is unlikely that this promotion will have much of a policy impact. Mr. Hu’s Faustian bargain with Mr. Jiang means that he has accepted the program set by his predecessor and by Mr. Jiang’s right-hand man, Vice President Zeng Qinghong.”

Doesn’t it seem kind of early to come to such a sweeping conclusion? Sure, I’m skeptical about Hu but I’m willing to give him at least a little time to prove himself. (Keep in mind, the WSJ doesn’t always feature the most open-minded of intellects.)

…it’s your loss. What a great site. Be sure to go through all the sets.

The blog calls this monstrosity “Speed Bumps.”

Beijing has a lot going for it, but architectural splendor isn’t one of them. With some dramatic exceptions, much of the city is visually drab and uninspired. As any recent vistor to the city knows, it’s alive with cranes and construction everywhere, fueled along by a strong economy and the approach of the 2008 Olympics. But how do the new buldings stack up architecturally? Are they making Beijing more beautiful?

There’s a very creative blog that takes a look at this question and shows some wonderful examples of Beijing’s ugliest new buildings, each with an imaginatively nickname. Be sure to check it out (and also the funny article in The NY Times that pointed me there).

From the blog:

Architectural decisions impact our identities: they have a deep and profound impact on our quality of life, ultimately affecting our emotional and psychological well-being. This is why architecture should not be a whim and should not lack roots.

Welcome to Beijing: a world of random chaos, a fitting and fascinating laboratory for contemporary architecture. In this ancient capital today, home to a glorious built heritage, the most interesting things are being built. Here, in this space, we expose it. We mourn the loss of a great tradition of elegance and craftsmanship. We sometimes come across designs that are thoughtful and exciting. We explore, not deplore, but in our explorations thus far, we often come to conclusions that are uncomfortable and humorous. While our exercise is playful, it ultimately aims to observe this particular place, which produces a contemporary architecture that impulsively pulsates with so much bombast, flamboyance and bravado.

From the Times:

A few pieces of this new architecture stand out for their aggressive awfulness. To pay tribute to those buildings, a group of young Americans in Beijing are launching a Web site, www.chinesetriad.org/bab.

“There’s been so much interest in high-design architecture in China lately, but it almost seems like a joke because there’s this endless amount of bad stuff going up,” said Jeremy Wingfield, who conceived the site with his brother Connor and two friends, Dan Elsea and Dan Shupp.

The Web site will allow residents to post pictures and commentary, will feature those new buildings that have what Mr. Wingfield called “a grandiose quality, a fantastical or monumental kind of aspiration that makes them worth recording.”

Among the buildings that fascinate him most, he said, were those that aimed to recreate masterworks of Western architecture. The mimicry, though, never looks quite right; the architects seem twice removed from their sources, like a designer who decides to study Venetian architecture by spending a weekend at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

“They’re like copies of copies,” Mr. Wingfield said. “Kitsch derived from kitsch.”

Just like when they try to copy Western Web sites and product labels — they look like parodies. It’s all part of the peculiarly charming allure of what Simon Winchester refers to as “the delicious strangeness of China.”

The Toxic Toothpick herself, immortalized in sweet music. I found this over at the world’s funniest satire blog.

To the tune of You Fill up my Senses, with sincerest apologies to John Denver:

You fill up your columns
With lies and distortions
With trite observations
and lame hackneyed prose.
You’ve nothing of substance
to say on one issue,
You’re shrill and you’re senseless
and wear skanky clothes!

Please do us a favor
and French kiss a fuse box
do a platform-shoed can-can
near an oncoming train.
Now, I’m only kidding
If I wanted to hurt you
I’d make you read SLANDER
’cause it would cause the most pain.

You’re sweet and you’re dainty
like a rabid Chihuahua
You’re moral and upright
Just like Reverend Moon.
You look like a hottie
next to Phyllis Schlafley.
But don’t be too flattered
So does a baboon.

[UPDATE: Kenneth Bigley video was just added to the same site.]

Plus a lot photos and videos of the other terrorist atrocities. This is not for the weak — watch the videos at your own risk.

Someone mentioned this pornographic site in a comment — it is truly disgusting. But videos and pictures of what the terrorists are doing shouldn’t be hidden. We have come to take these atrocities for granted. We all knew the names of the first victims, Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg, but now there are so many they’ve become anonymous, “just another decapitation.” They’ve got faces and names, and this little video really drives that home.

UPDATE: Beheading Video Of American Hostage Eugene Armstrong (decapitated by Zarqawi Militant Group) has also been added

Joseph Bosco does all of us a great service by posting an otherwise unavailable article from the New Republic that puts all the controversy of Dan Rather’s “sins” into perspective. And perspective is the one thing missing from this in-large-part blog-generated tsunami.

The reporter, Telis Demos, doesn’t let Rather off the hook, but shows how far more egregious instances of irresponsible journalism have been shrugged off, if not altogether ignored by the very same bloggers and media critics now shrieking in chorus for Rather’s skin. It’s important reading, and underscores the inherent unfairness of the Rather witch hunt. Be sure to read it.

In another important post, Kevin Drum points out how the outcry for Dan Rather’s resignation and disgrace has reached insane decible levels. Not that we hadn’t noticed.

If I’ve counted correctly, Instapundit has posted 65 separate items about Dan Rather this week — and that’s not counting either the endless updates or the fact that he slowed down today in order to get some dental work done. Over at National Review Online, snarky Dan Rather references have taken over their entire home page today, which includes six full-length articles about Rather in addition to uncounted references on The Corner and the Kerry Spot.

And don’t even mention LGF, Hugh Hewitt or Tom Maguire — it’s totally off the charts. It’s a fine example of the pack-blogging phenomenon that’s polluted the blogosphere. We saw it during the UN oil for food scandal, never fully verified or adequately investigated. Instapundit posted non-stop about it for days on end, and so did the other warbloggers. After all, it fully supported many of their key arguments about those pusillanimous lying scheming French, not to mention their hysterical rage over the United Nations and Kofi Annan, the warbloggers’ Antichrist. The sky was falling; it was the end of the UN and Annan. (Only it wasn’t.)

Glenn Reynolds and the usual suspects led the charge, and it seemed they had infinite sources of shocking stories of French, Russian and German misdeeds, albeit all specualtive. Well, that sort of petered out (especially since our man in Iraq, the hero of the warbloggers Paul Bremer did all he could to stifle the oil-for-food investigation). So that didn’t work — on to the next scandal, real or perceived! Next BS scandal, please!

Welcome to Christmas in Cambodia, where Tom Maguire and InstaPuppy and Charles Johnson made it seem that Kerry’s mistake about when he was in or near Cambodia was far more important than the fact that we are losing in Iraq. And again, the decibel level was overpowering. And weeks later, look around — nothing. No one gave a damn about this lunacy. But for a few days, Glenn and Hugh and Charles and Roger erected the world’s highest mountain from the most insignificant molehill.

The latest example, Rathergate, is the culmination of this phenomenon, and by far the nastiest example. No voice of reason is permitted. The warbloggers smell blood, and the only word in their heads is “ATTACK!” just like a couple of months ago during the Sandy Berger kerfuffle. Remember the outcry, as some bloggers — even one of my HK friends! — saw it as the end for Kerry, as Berger must have been stealing the stuff for JFK. Never mind that this non-story, based on a series of unproven leaks, quickly vanished since there was nothing to it. So onward to Rathergate.

I didn’t mean to write more than a few paragraphs, but the article Joseph cites made me furious — and frustrated. Once again, the right proves infinitely superior at the art of rapid mass communication, and instead of readers demanding answers from their awol president, the tables are turned and it’s all about Dan Rather. Charles Johnson’s usual stream of anti-Moslem hatred has slowed to a trickle as he fans the flames of this orgy — his site is almost a parody of warblogger obsession. And the masses are eating it up — at times, he boasts, LGF has nearly 9,000 readers on at a time. Johnson knows exactly how to cater to his crowd of deranged wingnuts who feed on this drivel. (Don’t think they’re deranged? Try engaging them in dialogue in the comments. At your own risk.)

Anyway, for all the hysteria, the polls are stabilizing and Kerry is definitely still in the game. So it looks like the effort to blow Rathergate up into an indictment of the Kerry campaign has failed.

Oh, and don’t forget, there’s a four-letter word that casts a gigantic shadow over the entire affair. It’s spelled I-R-A-Q.

If only uncurious george had listened to pop:

In his memoirs, A World Transformed, written more than five years ago, George Bush, Sr. wrote the following to explain why he didn’t go after Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War:

“Trying to eliminate Saddam .. would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible … We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq …there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

If only his son could read.

If only. The US and the world have paid an awful price thanks to shrub’s learing disability.

God, that’s more than SARS killed in the city-state. As the article says, this is not at all normal, and the government is checking to see if someone’s spreading it intentionally.

LINK IS FIXED. Damn, I wish Firefox would let me use those nice buttons MT provides to make hyperlinks.

A commenter tells me Jiang Zemin has resigned and Hu is about to take over China’s military. I looked for confirmation on the news sites and haven’t seen anything yet. Anybody have any new information? If true, we’ll soon know what direction Hu really plans to take the country. No more saying he’s being forced to go slow on reforms because of Jiang. IF the rumor’s true.

Update: China Post says just the opposite, though I always take their stories with a big grain of salt.

Update II: Here’s the latest.

Freedom is on the march, and victory in the glorious war lies right around the corner. Josh Marshall looks at shrub’s Alice-in-Wonderland view of things, and wonders how it’s possible.

We’re safer with Saddam in prison; America is safer. The critics are pessimists.

These aren’t quotations. But phrases like these are the stock phrases of the president and the rest of his campaign. They filled the recent Republican convention in New York. Actually, on Thursday President Bush was speaking in exactly this vein: “Freedom is on the march.”

But as yesterday’s piece in the Times made clear, that’s exactly the opposite of what the government — or rather the people in the government paid to analyze these things — actually believes. A new and still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq says that the best case scenario for the country over the next eighteen months is drift, along more or less the lines that it’s at right now. The worst case scenario is all-out civil war. The middle ground is spiralling extremism and fragmentation — basically a continuation of the evolution, or rather devolution, we’ve seen over the last year.

There have been a raft of new findings over the last week or so which dramatize or confirm this finding. But the truth is we don’t really need anyone to tell us this.

It’s always possible to posit ‘optimism’ up until the point when the whole place actually erupts spontaneously into hellfire. But to any thinking individual it’s clear and it’s been clear for some time that our whole enterprise in Iraq is going extremely poorly, by pretty much every concievable measure.

And yet the president just says none of this is true. Things are going well. Yes, things are difficult, he says. But we’re on the right track and things keep getting better. Dan Bartlett today said that Democrats are just showing their pessimism: “President Bush gets his briefings from commanders on the ground. He has reason for his optimism because of the enormous amount of progress we have made.”

The president is simply in denial. Or he’s willing to keep burning through the US Army and the Marine Corps to avoid admitting the failure of his policies or even the obvious fact that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating terribly.

Today another suicide bomber just exploded himself in Baghdad killing at least a dozen people. The country is continuing the slide into chaos and violence. President Bush says we’re on the the right track. Freedom is on the march.

Words and excuses meet incompetence, chaos and death. That’s what this election is about.

Trying to get into bush’s head, to see the world as he does is no easy task. Nothing makes any sense. As Alice exclaims to the Mad Hatter, “Their books look like our books, only the words go the wrong way!”