I notice from Greg Palast's newsletter that Dan Rather, former CBS news anchor, is crying foul over President Bush's draft-dodging.

In case you weren't aware of the scandal which got swept firmly under the carpet during election time in favour of smearing John Kerry's anti-war comments, Bush Snr pulled some strings to get Georgie Jnr the all-important task of defending Texas from VietCong air attack . . . except George was ruled unfit to fly and went AWOL to help on Daddy's political campaigning.

Rather, who once said "You can't be a good reporter and not regularly be involved in some kind of controversy", was told to sit on the story by his CBS paymasters.

Years later, CBS reneged on their promises and fired him, after he'd been relegated from various high-profile broadcast slots. Rather took out a lawsuit, and the details of his journalistic double-standards have now spilled out.

Perhaps it's fitting given the hypocrisy of a draft-dodger launching a smear-campaign against a Veteran's war record and comments that Rather should have sucked the big dick of bribery . . . but then Kerry himself was altogether rather quick in conceding the election despite widespread reports of voter disenfranchisement. Perhaps there's more than one deal that went down?

So . . . now it's getting past the point that the truth makes any difference to Bush's Presidential career, we start to see more and more of it . . . or, more accurately, the stories that were broken by investigative reporters and booted firmly into touch by the government-owned mainstream media are now being picked up again, years too late . . . when are we going to get the confirmation of what we always suspected about Blair?

***

Never mind Holocaust denial, I've just heard President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a hostile debate at Columbia University, has denied that homosexuals exist in Iran!

Ho ho ho. Granted that if you are facing the death penalty, there's not likely to be that many admitting it, but none whatsoever? I understand the whole thing about nukes . . . how else are you going to stop the Western World marching for your oil wells when you are on their "Axis of Evil" list? Even the witty wink-wink-nudge comments about arming proxy fighters in Iraq I can admire . . . but no gays in Iran?

Yeah, right. Earth to Ahmadinejad: human behaviour is pretty well documented on this throughout history and cultures, your religious prejudices notwithstanding.

I guess he wants to be original, and not copy the Western Christian book-of-fairy-tales approach by equating homosexuality with satanism.

Reminds me of the Soviet Union's assertion that serial killers were a "decadent Western phenomenon", which made Victor Burakov's Herculean attempts to catch the man responsible for 50-odd murders in the Rostov area much harder than it might have been. How telling, incidentally, that profiles of Chikatilo abound on the web, but of the interview I saw with Burakov (the man the FBI specialist on serial murder said would be " . . . the person I would least like tracking me down if I were a serial killer"), there is not the slightest trace.

Still, there is hope for humanity yet. The closest Tony Blair got to doing anything feisty about Burma was to label the military junta a "disgrace" in the UN. To see the toothless threat made with such a nod to a favourable soundbite, as opposed to any real action (arms sales ahoy!) quite brought a chunk to my throat.

So all hail the Buddhist monks who despite repeated threats have started peaceful marches, and have now got 10,000 people demonstrating at the last count.

It remains to be seen if Burma's closest ally, our soon-to-be warm 'n' friendly Olympic Hosts China, can prevail upon the government to not turn the streets of unarmed peaceful protestors into an abbatoir of shark-bait.