libel

The republicans are so scared of having Harold Ford Jr, a black man as not just the next senator of Tennessee but a black man as the replacement to Bill Frist, that this is what passes to them as fair in the game of political advertising:

Harold Ford is a very smart guy and a shrewd politician. When asked on FoxNews Sunday if he thought the ad was racist, this is what he answered:

WALLACE: Congressman, Bob Corker also ran a radio at in which when they talk about you they have drums beating, and, when they talk about him, they have a symphonic choir singing and playing. Are Republicans playing the race card in Tennessee, or is that too politically explosive for you to talk about?

FORD: You'd probably have to ask Bob Corker and the Republican National Committee. I do know this. The first ad you showed was a piece of smut, and they should not have run that here. I don't know what would make Ken Mehlman or any national Republican believe that we in Tennessee would want to see something like that.

It might have been written a hundred times, easily, on that enormous face. Humpty Dumpty was sitting, with his legs crossed like a Turk, on the top of a high wall -- such a narrow one that Alice quite wondered how he could keep his balance -- and, as his eyes were steadily fixed in the opposite direction, and he didn't take the least notice of her, she thought he must be a stuffed figure, after all.

`And how exactly like an egg he is!' she said aloud, standing with her hands ready to catch him, for she was every moment expecting him to fall.

`It's very provoking,' Humpty Dumpty said after a long silence, looking away from Alice as he spoke, `to be called an egg -- very!'

`I said you looked like an egg, Sir,' Alice gently explained. `And some eggs are very pretty, you know,' she added, hoping to turn her remark into a sort of compliment.

Ssssh. Can you hear us? The sounds we make our muffled. There is not much room for us here in these mass graves. We are stuffed together, face to face, arms strewn across one another, feet covering bellies. We are the dead of 1915. The smell of our rotting bodies has long ago dissipated; the flies have moved on. There is grass over the places where we were thrown into the earth.

But, if you listen closely, you can hear our murmurs. It is not so much justice we want. Justice is for the living. What does it benefit the dead to be granted justice after we are gone?

What we want is to be acknowledged. We are here. And we did not get here on our own.

So what would you have it be called?

Armenians claim that as many as 1.5 million of their ancestors were killed between 1915-1923 in an organized campaign to force them out of eastern Turkey and have pushed for recognition of the killings around the world as genocide.

Turkey acknowledges that large numbers of Armenians died, but says the overall figure is inflated and that the deaths occurred in the civil unrest during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Don't call it genocide, the Turks say, and if you do, you shall be jailed. It insults "Turkishness" to say that they were capable of killing us like that. You cannot even talk about it in your fiction: