Douglas Brinkley Reports for Duty

SUMIDE'I: [W]e believe that Allah protects the believers, and indeed, Allah stood beside Falluja, and I'd like to mention some miracles Allah performed in Falluja. It is possible that the media does not know about them. The first miracle that occurred in Falluja took the form of spiders that appeared in the city--each spider larger than this chair, or about the size of this chair. The American soldiers left, holding the legs of this spider, and I too, in one of the Friday sermons, held up a spider, with all its magnitude, in front of the satellite channels and in front of the world. This spider also had thick black hair. If this hair touches the human body, within a short period of time the body becomes black or blue, and then there is an explosion in the blood cells in the human body--and the person dies. This is one of the miracles performed in support of Falluja, and the Jihad that took place in Falluja. . . .

INTERVIEWER: According to your personal knowledge, are the casualties in Iraq of the American forces and their allies much greater than what the U.S. admits?

SUMIDE'I: By Allah, I would like to say something. I swear in the name of Allah on this issue. If the American mothers, sisters, and wives--and this is a message directed at the American people--if they knew what was happening to their children in Iraq, no woman could sleep in her bed at night, and you would see women and children in the streets of America, down on their knees, throwing dirt on their heads because of what is happening to the American forces in Iraq. . . .

INTERVIEWER: Sheik, what do the Americans do with all these casualties? Some say that there are special mass graves for the mercenary forces the Americans brought to Iraq and no one is allowed to photograph them. . . .

SUMIDE'I: This is the truth. We too followed this issue. A mass grave was created in a desert area near the Saudi border for the American soldiers killed. There is also a lake near Al-Sa'diya. The Americans place the casualties inside white or black bags, seal them and toss them from a plane into the lake.

Seymour Hersh will want to get on this right away.

"Frigging" Reuters

Last Thursday a U.S. district court judge in New York ruled unconstitutional last year's Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, notwithstanding his finding that the surgical procedure at issue is "gruesome, brutal, barbaric, and uncivilized." The Supreme Court, Judge Richard Casey explained, had left him little latitude to decide otherwise.

Whereupon Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee, sent out an email press release highlighting the importance of this fall's presidential election to the future of the Supreme Court and the practice of abortion both.

Whereupon a man named Todd Eastham, who plainly lacks the necessary temperament to serve as North American news editor for the Reuters wire service--but holds that job anyway--emailed Johnson right back, as follows:

"What's your plan for parenting & educating all the unwanted children you people want to bring into the world? Who will pay for policing our streets & maintaining the prisons needed to contain them when you, their parents & the system fail them? Oh, sorry. All that money has been earmarked to pay off the Bush deficit. Give me a frigging break, will you?"

THE SCRAPBOOK recommends that Mr. Eastham quit his current job and become a presidential historian.