December 7, 09.17am
A couple of stories on the television news yesterday afternoon grabbed my attention and in their honour I have decided to set up my own award system, the No Shit, Sherlocks (NSS) to reward investigative excellence in the pursuit of the bleeding obvious.
The inaugural award is to go to officers of the Metropolitcan Police, who announced yesterday that the death of Russian exile spy Alexander Litvinenko was murder. You don't say.
A close runner-up, and denied the award because it was not exactly an investigation, merely a sort of inquiry, was the US bipartisan Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker, which was charged with looking into possible alternative strategies for Iraq.
The finest minds in American politics went off for several months, and reported back the conclusion that, "there is a risk of a slide towards chaos in Iraq". I haven't had a chance to read the full report, and I'm not entirely sure I want to, because I'm terrified of what their definition of actual chaos really is, if the bloodbath and mayhem in Iraq right now doesn't cover it off.
Perhaps they foresee an apocalyptic vision of fire-breathing dragons sweeping over the desert destroying all before them, or the Mongol hordes raining down death as they invade from the north.
I'm sorry. I know that there is nothing funny about this situation in Iraq. It is a desperate time for the Iraqi people who have already suffered much. But, while this report may be a step in the right direction in terms of jolting the dipshit in the White House back to some version of political reality, in other ways it falls desperately short of the "adequate" mark, and looks to me like an exercise in political semantics.