Bashar and Asma al-Assad and family at home.
Oh the gangster looks so fright'ning
With his luger in his hand
When he gets home to his children
He's a family man
But when it comes to the nitty-gritty
He can shove in his knife
Yes he really looks quite religious
He's been an outlaw all his life
Me, I'm waiting so patiently
Lying on the floor
I'm just trying to do this jig-saw puzzle
Before it rains anymore
-- Stones
The presidential family lives surrounded by neighbors in a modern apartment in Malki. On Friday, the Muslim day of rest, Asma al-Assad opens the door herself in jeans and old suede stiletto boots, hair in a ponytail, the word happiness spelled out across the back of her T-shirt. At the bottom of the stairs stands the off-duty president in jeans—tall, long-necked, blue-eyed. A precise man who takes photographs and talks lovingly about his first computer, he says he was attracted to studying eye surgery “because it’s very precise, it’s almost never an emergency, and there is very little blood.” --Asma Assad / Vogue February, 2011Posted by gerardvanderleun at June 14, 2012 5:28 PM
I can't imagine what it's like be a mass-murdering psychopath. Even less can I understand the woman who loves him. And less than that can I understand the magazine that idealizes them.
Posted by: Gagdad Bob at June 14, 2012 6:28 PMConnect the dots ... Assad (a/k/a the chinless ophthalmologist a/k/a the Butcher of Damascus) ... Vogue Magazine (ran the article) ... Anna Wintour (its editor a/k/a the Devil Wears Prada a/k/a Obama's biggest fundraiser) ... Barack Hussein Obama ... (a/k/a the Choomster in Chief a/k/a the Hammer of the Infidels) ... 100,000,000 million American suckers.
Get it?
Posted by: Fat Man at June 14, 2012 9:39 PMBob, these moral degenerates don't let anything trouble the empty space of their skulls. As long as everything is pretty, pretty is good.
Posted by: Jewel at June 14, 2012 10:09 PMOK, I'll buy that Assad is a bad guy. Who are the good guys. All I know about the old hag, and komrade doofus is that they've never been right about anything.
Posted by: Casca at June 15, 2012 3:52 AMForget it, Casca. There are no good guys in this ghastly little face-off. On one side, you have the regime and its thugs, backed by Iran. On the other, you have the reincarnated Muslim Brotherhood and its thugs.
Dr. Giraffe's daddy killed a whole bunch of them in Hamah in 1982, but just like with mosquitoes and bacteria, the survivors came back stronger. So here we are, 30 years later. As I see it, our interest in the conflict is this: how can the US and its allies use the ongoing civil war to cripple the regime and hurt Iran, have Assad and his buddies kill as many of the Sunni extremists as possible, and keep the suffering of true innocents to a minimum?
Posted by: waltj at June 15, 2012 6:21 AMRemember when the mujahedin were the 'good guys' before they became the Taliban and started executing women in soccer stadiums built by the UN?
Yeah. Good times. There are no good sides in these little Islamic hellholes.
Sounds like the "Pirates of Penzance" about the policeman's life. The felon looks pretty happy and normal - when he isn't doing all of the felon-stuff.
(Of course - putting out all of those 'happy family at home' pictures is for foreign consumption, and tells how hard pressed they are. The pictures for home are more like those from Putin and Mussolini - steely jawwed, strong chest, taking on every threat. And so on.) Dictators - Strongmen - are so predictable.
Posted by: Mikey NTH at June 15, 2012 5:51 PM"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated to combat spam and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.
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