Media

CSM excepted, I don't really like any news media, mainstream or otherwise. I especially don't like MSNBC, which is poised to be the new Fox News for the next four years*. But now I think I have a new exception to my odium: Asia Times Online.

I don't know who they are, and I can't even figure out their political slant. But their editorials are a blast. Examples:

The failed Muslim states to come

Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad controls Iran through a kleptocracy of Central African proportions, dissipating the country's oil windfall into payoffs to an "entire class of hangers-on of the Islamic revolution", ... when oil still sold at US$135 a barrel. What will Ahmadinejad do now that the oil price has collapsed? According to my Iranian sources, the answer is: Exactly the same thing, but without the money.

The emperor gets the boot

Al-Zaidi called Bush, in Arabic, at the top of his lungs, ya kalb ("you dog") - now a legendary Youtube epithet that around the world has been largely interpreted as unfair to dogs, who for all their barking do not gang up and launch pre-emptive wars that cause more than 1 million deaths and displace more than 4 million people.

*Or eight, or twelve, or whatever.