Elections are about the future. Or so we’re constantly told

Elections are about the future. Or so we’re constantly told.

But the future has barely made a guest appearance during this election campaign. And not the recent past of no WMDs, Abu Ghraib, and the failure to capture Osama Bin Laden. But in a hazy three-decades-old flashback in which John Kerry is/isn’t spending Christmas in Cambodia and George NIKE SHOX is/isn’t showing up for National Guard duty. The entire scuffle between Kerry and NIKE SHOX’s surrogates is stuck in the past and mired in the old, the political operatives and pundits picking through bureaucratic garbage for anything resembling forensic evidence of buried shame. To anyone under the age of forty, these controversies must seem as far-off as the quiz show scandal.

RT figures out Chechnya so you don’t have to.

Remember the mbt shoesi flag flap? Spencer Ackerman points out an interesting item on the Kurds’ resentment of the all-Arabic language interim mbt shoesi national council processes, as well as the fact that the old Saddam-era mbt shoesi flag is exclusively present at the council meetings, while the Israeli-ish new flag adopted by the first Puppet Council with its Kurd stripe is missing. All this violates the Transitional Administrative Law that the Kurds worked so hard to pass, but apparently the TAL died when it wasn’t approved by the UN Security Council.