Cruising

Unfortunate sentence of the day, from the WaPo: “[Mark Foley] was a respected House member cruising toward a seventh term when...”

By the way, it is ridiculous that votes for Foley, who cannot be removed from the November ballot, will be interpreted, according to Florida law, as votes for whatever candidate the R’s (or possibly NAMBLA) pick to replace him. We vote for individuals not parties in this country (counting the votes in Florida, as we know, is another matter entirely).

A contest I know I’m gonna regret

Delhi, which hasn’t had an execution for a while, now has one scheduled for next month, and no executioner. It is considering calling its 84-year old former executioner out of retirement.


Contest: what are the drawbacks or benefits of using an octogenarian executioner?

Nov. 2006 California proposition recommendations

California proposition time. Time to make decisions we are not qualified to make based on commercials paid for by evil corporations, ballot arguments written by crackpots, and shiny-object provisions designed to make us treat each proposition as a popularity contest (Oil companies, booo! Tobacco companies, booooo! Sex criminals, booooooo!) while ignoring the fine print. Lucky you have me, I guess. Now I’m going to tell you why you should vote no on everything, and in favor of, well, oil companies, tobacco companies and sex criminals. I’m not happy about it either. Sometimes participatory democracy just works out like that.

(Updated with results in purple. 1A through 84 all won, 85 through 90 all lost, which gives the no doubt mistaken impression that Californians simply got bored half-way through the ballot book.)

Prop. 1A. Gas tax only for transportation. I’m not generally in favor of hypothecated taxes (where the revenue from one tax goes exclusively to one purpose): what the appropriate gas tax should be, and what the appropriate transportation funding should be, are two very different debates. It’s even worse when they’re locked in. Also, like all California transportation measures, too little goes to public transportation, too much for cars. No. Yes, 76.6%.

I am opposed to bonds, all bonds, 1) on pragmatic grounds because they’re an expensive form of funding, and the interest is money just flushed down the toilet, 2) on fairness grounds because they are regressive, allowing bond purchasers undeserved tax deductions, and 3) on principled grounds because they place tax obligations on the future generations that have to pay them off, which amounts to taxation without representation. So that argument is why I’m recommending a no on these five props.:

Prop. 1B. Bonds for various transportation-related things, mostly highways but including port security against terrorism, which seems a tad manipulative, a sweetener to sell yet another highway bond. No. Yes, 61%.

Prop. 1C. Bonds for shelters for battered women, housing assistance, wheelchair ramps and the like for poor old people, veterans, the disabled and possibly big-eyed puppies. No. Yes, 57.5%.

Prop. 1D. Bonds for schools. No. Yes, 56.6%.

Prop. 1E. Bonds for levees. No. Yes, 64%.

Prop. 84. Bonds for levees, drinking water, and – hey, didn’t we just see one exactly like this? No. Yes, 53.8%.

Prop. 83. Sex offenders. Lifetime GPS, increased prison terms, bans on living near schools or parks, indefinite commitment without trial to mental facilities. It requires prison sentences rather than probation for crimes including marital rape, where it’s mostly appropriate, but not always, which is why we have judges, and lewd or lascivious acts, where it’s probably appropriate less often. Appropriate, and proportionate, are precisely the concepts the authors of this initiative have left behind. The state (or possibly local government, the authors forgot to specify that detail) would be required to divert significant resources to monitor people many of whom are no particular danger to society, until the day they die. And the idea of committing people to mental facilities after they finish serving prison sentences is a Kafkaesque concept and an abuse of both prisons and mental facilities, the former being misused to house the mentally ill, the latter as a form of punishment rather than treatment. I read the whole text (and very icky it was too), and there are other questionably phrased sections, such as punishing people who communicate over the internet for purposes of sex with someone they “know or reasonably should know” is a minor. And what does it mean that their definition of child porn says that “it is not necessary to prove that the matter is obscene”? The poor drafting of this initiative (it’s not even clear whether it applies to existing registered sex offenders) means we have no idea which parts of it will survive judicial scrutiny, or what they will mean. Also, there will be a sequel: in addition to not being allowed to live near schools or parks (which eliminates most of LA and San Francisco), local governments can, and of course will, add other residency restrictions. No. Yes, 70.5%, but the residency restrictions were immediately suspended by a judge.

Prop. 85. Parental notification of abortion and a 48-hour waiting period. Speaking of waiting periods, we just voted this down one year ago. In fact, the ballot arguments seem to be the same, so there’s no reason I shouldn’t repeat what I wrote a year ago: I’d be against this anyway: parents should no more be able to force their daughters to carry a pregnancy to term than to force them to abort against their will. But this version also has problems with the way the judicial-bypass alternative is set up: it can take so long that parental notification might become, well, redundant; and if there is any sort of abuse, including “emotional abuse,” the court must inform Protective Services, a provision which seems less about protecting abused pregnant minors than it is a “nuclear option” designed to raise the stakes for girls opting for abortion. The prop’s agenda of punishing the little trollops is made even clearer in the ballot argument: “When parents are involved and minors cannot anticipate secret access to free abortions they more often avoid the reckless behavior which leads to pregnancies.” Also, the prop. requires doctors to report abortions performed on minors to the state, which is creepy and worrisome. No. No, 54.1%. Last year’s nearly identical proposition lost by 52.8%.

Prop. 86. Cigarette tax to pay for various health services, including ERs, insurance, nursing training, cancer research, and smoking-prevention programs. The tobacco companies are actually running ads warning darkly about money going to the evil hospitals. This is another hypothecated tax, and since the majority of the price of a pack of cigs would go to the state, California would be in the tobacco business in a big way. Nicotine addicts would have to find well over $1,000 more per year to support their habit. And the only representation that goes with this taxation is this vote, which will lock in spending priorities for all time, with the legislature unable to change them if the state’s medical needs change over time. So look at how it will be spent: some of it we don’t know, because it will have to make up the money lost to previous tobacco taxes, and the rest of it, well, do you feel qualified to say that 1.75% for prostate cancer treatment, 0.75% for rural emergency health services, 4.25% for colorectal cancer, 7.75% for obesity and diabetes, etc, are the appropriate way to divide up this pie, and that they still will be 20 years from now? I know I don’t. And I don’t know who sat down in a room and came up with this deal, but we pay for a government and for public health officials precisely to make these decisions. No. No, 52%.

Prop. 87. A tax on oil drilled in California, which we’re to believe is entirely free money because the oil companies would be prohibited, forbidden and banned from passing the cost on to consumers. Yeah, that’ll work. Money goes to researching alternative energies, alternative-fuel vehicles, energy education, with funding decisions made by an unelected board exempt from conflict of interest laws. Uh oh. I would actually support a tax on drilling, like other states have, but I don’t trust that the revenue from this one would be properly spent, and some of the things it would fund should really be funded at the national rather than the state level. No. No, 54.7%.

Prop. 88. Parcel tax for schools. I’m not fond of parcel taxes, where every parcel is taxed a flat amount. They’re an unfair substitute for property taxes based on the value of the property, or better yet, progressive income tax. But this one is worse than the parcel tax measures you normally see, because it’s at the state level, spending money on things the authors think are important, rather than priorities set locally. Presumably this is considered necessary because parcel taxes have been increasingly rejected by voters at the school-district level in recent years. No. No, 77%.

Prop. 89. Campaign contribution limits, public financing of some candidates (who raise money in $5 contributions, or something), limits campaign spending by corporations (while taxing corporations to pay for the public financing $200m/yr), but not un-incorporated companies (or unions, or Indian tribes, or individuals). First, limiting spending on initiatives (as opposed to spending for candidates, where spending limits serve the purpose of stopping corruption) has no chance of surviving the courts. Second, $200m seems like a lot of money to me. Third, if the authors of this thing had the courage of their convictions that elections belong to the people and should not be corrupted by corporate money, they should have financed it through the general fund; using taxes on corporations seems a little sneaky, a little cynical. In principle I do favor spending limits and public financing, but only if it’s done really carefully. This prop. strikes me as sloppy, and since some of it would be struck down by the courts, we’d be left with fragments of it, rather than a fully fledged system. No. No, 74.5%.

Prop. 90. Bars the use of eminent domain to seize property for private projects like shopping centers. Which would probably be fine, if California actually used eminent domain that way, which it doesn’t. That part of the prop. is therefore just cover for the rest of the proposition: “compensating” land owners for supposedly reduced property values as a result of new zoning, environmental and other regulations (including “limitations on the use of private air space”). No. No, 52.5%.

Comments welcome.

Protecting the rights of terrorists

Denny Hastert said about the vote on warrantless wiretapping: “For the second time in just two days, House Democrats have voted to protect the rights of terrorists.” There are two problems with that statement: 1) the assumption of guilt, 2) he could have just said that D’s voted to protect terrorists, but instead went out of his way to denigrate the whole concept of “rights.” These people are less interested in attacking terrorists than in attacking rights. Indeed “rights” is a nastier word in their vocabulary than “terrorist.”

Bush welcomed to the White House “president” Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, which he called “a free nation.” The CIA World Factbook calls it a republic with “authoritarian presidential rule, with little power outside the executive branch.”


Earlier this morning, Bush spoke to the Reserve Officers Association, saying that “Iraq is not the reason the terrorists are at war against us. ... They can’t stand the thought that people can go into the public square in America and express their differences with government.” Yes, terrorists hate the fact that we can disagree with George Bush.

They must love Kazakhstan, where people who criticize the government have been known to, for example, commit suicide by shooting themselves repeatedly in the chest and head.

They all look the same to me

It’s the pretense of pragmatism that irritates me. The pro-war spin on the semi-declassified NIE focuses on the sentence, “Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.” I’ll concede that premise, which seems common sensical enough, but, even putting aside the countervailing number of jihadists created every day the war continues, how does this add up to a case for continuing the war to make us safer from terrorism? Have they never heard of cost-benefit analysis? Let’s say that pulling out of Iraq would mean 1,000 fighters “inspired to carry on the fight.” Hell, let’s say 10,000. If we dealt with them through traditional means – intelligence, security, phone-tapping, satellites, etc – we could spend $100 million to combat each fighter, and still come out ahead.

At a fundraiser today, Bush said that the war is not increasing the risk of terrorism. “History tells us that logic is false.” How come he gets to invoke History on the same day Congress is doing his bidding in undoing centuries of legal protections on the grounds that history is irrelevant because we are fighting a totally new type of war against a totally new type of enemy?

This morning, Bush met with Republican senators. He said of the meeting, “I’m impressed by the caliber of people that serve our country.” One such person is Sen. Trent Lott, who again demonstrated his caliber by shooting himself in the foot. Several times. Asked by reporters afterwards if any of the senators had brought up the subject of Iraq with the chimperor, Lott said, “You’re the only ones who obsess on that. We don’t and the real people out in the real world don’t for the most part.” He said of the Iraqis, “It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people... Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me.”

So if they didn’t talk about Iraq or have a seminar on Sunni-Shiite differences, what did they discuss? According to Bush, “Our most solemn job is the security of this country. People shouldn’t forget there’s still an enemy out there that wants to do harm to the United States. And therefore a lot of my discussion with the members of the Senate was to remind them of this solemn responsibility.” So another productive and informative meeting, then.

I think we spent about half a minute on this issue

Condi Rice was interviewed a few days ago by the editorial board of the NYT.

She set out a goal for Lebanon: “transport moderation with a coalition of states that might be - might have great interest in doing that.” I don’t know what that means either, or whether bubble wrap is involved.

On why the invasion of Iraq did not create terrorists: “They attacked us on September 11th before anybody had even thought of overthrowing Saddam Hussein.” Before anybody had even thought...? Ever heard of the first Gulf War, Condi? Ever heard of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, Condi? Ever heard of the Project for the New American Century, Condi?

She laid out a standard for success in Iraq: “And I think they’re going to be able to move to a place where they continue to have violence, but it doesn’t threaten the stability of the government.” Always the dreamer, is our Condi.

This sentence I like because it has a verb I haven’t heard before: “Hezbollah lives among the population and can easily human shield anything that you go after.”

Are torture and secret prisons hurting America’s reputation? “I can tell you I just spent a whole lot of time with Europeans. I think we spent about half a minute on this issue.”


Caption contest:

Let’s bring justice before the eyes of the children and widows of Sept. 11

I’ve commented on Bush’s recent use of the term “extremists” to describe The Enemy, but I think I missed the point, which is actually the other half of the dyad, “moderate.” In a week when General Musharraf (did anyone else notice how Jon Stewart called him “president” when they were together, and “general” after he left?) and Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev are being welcomed to the White House, he needed a term for the Good Guys that didn’t involve, you know, democracy. Thus, moderates, or even “the moderate world.”

Sillier than the NYT article on Rumsfeld’s squash game? Lawrence Di Rita’s letter in rebuttal.

I think it was when Alberto Gonzales’ nomination vote was being described as a referendum on torture that I said I’d be really curious what the outcome of an actual Congressional vote on torture would be. 253-168: sorry I asked. It wasn’t even close. And the Democrats’ wussiness on the issue suggests that they either believe in torture, indefinite detention on presidential orders, etc or they think that the voters believe in those things. Greg Saunders asks, “Is it really worth all this effort to replace people who support torture with people who tolerate torture?” The British journalist Henry Nevinson said in 1921, à propos the actions of the Black and Tans in Ireland, “It is a terrible thing to feel ashamed of the country one loves. It is like coming home and finding one’s mother drunk upon the floor.”

Molly Ivins points out that the language requiring a defendant to be able to “examine and respond to” the evidence against him has been changed: he won’t be able to how what it is, but he can still respond to it. So that’s okay then.

On denying detainees the right of habeas corpus, James Sensenbrenner: “Let’s bring justice before the eyes of the children and widows of Sept. 11.” A few days I was complaining when Rumsfeld spoke as if the 9/11 victims were all Americans. It seems revealing, though I’m not sure of what, that Sensenbrenner talks as if only husbands and not wives were killed.

London Times: “Hungary’s beleaguered Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, apologised yesterday for his speech in which he admitted lying to the nation.”

“Tokyo Rose” has died, at 90.

The US military wants to hire a company to poll Iraqis “to assess the effectiveness of operations as they relate to gaining and maintaining popular support”. The interviewers would have to disguise who they were working for, in order not to be killed. You know, once you admit that that is the case, maybe you know all you really need to know about gaining and maintaining popular support, and can just skip the waste of taxpayer dollars, to say nothing of risking the lives of some poor schmucks with clip-boards?

That article also says that the Lincoln Group, last spotted paying to plant stories in the Iraqi press, has just been given another contract, for $12.4 million, to do... exactly the same thing.

US military types have been bad-mouthing Iraq’s prime minister and blowhard-in-chief Maliki for not having the will to take on Shiite militias (the WaPo and NYT don’t say it, but they’re frustrated because the Iraqis have recently cancelled several planned operations). The WaPo says, “The questions about Maliki are being posed only privately”. That is, if you consider page A19 of the Washington Post to be private.

Russia may reintroduce a tax on couples who don’t have children. Says the deputy head of the Duma’s health committee, “If people don’t want to think about their debt to the motherland, they must pay.” According to the Guardian, Putin “has announced a 10-year plan to tackle the crisis.” Possibly involving actual tackling.

Tony Blair: without mercy or limit

Follow-up: the guy Bush attacked as an “obscure” spokesman for an “obscure organization” turns out to be Gijs de Vries, the counter-terrorism coordinator for that obscure organization, the European Union. Still not sure what it was he said Tuesday.

Condi claimed today, “We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight Al Qaida. For instance, big pieces were missing, like an approach to Pakistan that might work”. They had to come up with the idea of threatening to bomb Pakistan into the Stone Age all by themselves. (Also, Condi is lying, as Raw Story proves, just in case you didn’t already assume Condi is lying, or know that she’d made this claim before and been shot down before; it’s bad enough that she’s portraying the Clinton admin as being as incompetent and ill-prepared as she is, but that she assumes we are too).

Divine retribution of the day: “A man who bred fighting cocks died after contracting the H5N1 bird flu virus, bringing the human death toll in Thailand to 17.” (AP)

The WaPo is late posting Wednesday’s A Section, so I’m still seeing yesterday’s top story, “Detainee Measure to Have Less Restrictions.” Fewer, goddammit, the correct word is fewer! I blame it on Bush, the man who doesn’t know a comma from a quagmire. He just lowers lingual standards for the entire nation. In 2008, we need to make all presidential candidates pass a strict test on grammar. Of grammar? Oh dear God it’s getting to me now! Or is it “its getting too me now”? Aaaaaayyyyy!!!!!

In truth, there isn’t much more meaning in a Blair speech (yesterday he gave his very last address as party leader to a Labour party conference) than in a Bush one, it’s just that his nothing is better expressed than Bush’s nothing. “But believe me there are no half-hearted allies of America today”. I believe you, I just don’t know what you’re talking about.


He also said, “We can only protect liberty by making it relevant to the modern world. ... Let Liberty stand up for the law-abiding.” His idea of liberty: identity cards with biometric technology and a national DNA database, which I believe John Stuart Mill called for in chapter 23 of On Liberty.


“The new anxiety is the global struggle against terrorism without mercy or limit.” Notice how it isn’t quite clear which side he’s saying is without mercy or limit.


He said that looking for any explanation for terrorism other than that they hate us for our freedom is “wretched capitulation to the propaganda of the enemy... This terrorism isn’t our fault, we didn’t cause it. It’s not the consequence of foreign policy, it’s an attack on our way of life.” Yes, they’re definitely more concerned with what we eat and watch on tv than with our support of Israel and military invasion of their countries.

Speaking of our way of life, he said that Labour must tailor its policies for the “Google generation.” (There wasn’t any reason for that hyperlink; I just thought it was amusingly meta.)

Blair: “I know I look a lot older. That’s what being leader of the Labour Party does to you. Actually, looking round some of you look a lot older. That’s what having me as leader of the Labour Party does to you.”

Actually, it’s worse than that. In this picture, doesn’t he look a lot like Bush, sort of the way dogs and their masters start to look alike?

Bush and Karzai: I don’t have enough time to finger-point

Bush had a photo op & press conference with Karzai today.

He told Karzai, “I know there’s some in your country who wonder or not -- whether or not America has got the will to do the hard work necessary to help you succeed. We have got that will, and we’re proud of you as a partner.” Karzai replied, “Wonderful. Great,” because he had to say something, but it was an odd sort of statement to have to formulate a response to.


“We discussed different agencies in your government and how best to make them accountable to the people. We’re going to help you build roads.” Er, accountable roads?

“The President gave me a very direct assessment of successes in eradicating poppies and failures in eradicating poppies.” Guess which part was longer?


Bush said he will have dinner Wednesday with Karzai and Musharraf, which he says is “going to be an interesting discussion amongst three allies”. Considering all the sniping between Karzai and Musharraf recently about bin Laden and intelligence-sharing, it should indeed be “interesting”: “Pass the rolls, please.” “I would be delighted to pass the rolls, but you have yet to tell me where I might find the rolls.” “I told you exactly where the rolls are.” “Ah, but that is where the rolls were ten minutes ago. How am I to know where the rolls are now? Why, they might not even be on my side of the table...” Etcetera.


Karzai said of an American soldier he’d just met, a woman with six children, “There’s nothing more that any nation can do for another country, to send a woman with children to Afghanistan to help.” Um, right.

Bush says, contrary to the NIE, that the Iraq war isn’t fueling terrorist growth: “My judgment is, if we weren’t in Iraq, they’d find some other excuse, because they have ambitions. They kill in order to achieve their objectives.” “They’ve used all kinds of excuses,” he says, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Funny, I thought just a few days ago we were supposed to be taking the words of the terrorists seriously. “We’re not going to let their excuses stop us from staying on the offense. ... We’re not going to let lies and propaganda by the enemy dictate how we win this war.”


He adds that the NIE is old news, and has the nerve to suggest that it was leaked just now to affect the elections, “to create confusion in the minds of the American people, in my judgment, is why they leaked it.”



A Reuters reporter asked if Clinton was right that the Bush administration had no meetings on bin Laden for the 9 months before 9/11. With a near certainty that he would be asked that very question, this is how well prepared he was:

You know, look, Caren, I’ve watched all this finger-pointing and naming of names, and all that stuff. Our objective is to secure the country. And we’ve had investigations, we had the 9/11 Commission, we had the look back this, we’ve had the look back that. The American people need to know that we spend all our time doing everything that we can to protect them. So I’m not going to comment on other comments. But I will comment on this -- that we’re on the offense against an enemy that wants to do us harm. And we must have the tools necessary to protect our country. On the one hand, if al Qaeda or al Qaeda affiliates are calling somebody in the country, we need to know why....

And so on.

“I don’t have enough time to finger-point,” he added. Because of all the, you know, terrorists he has to deal with: “They’re out there, they’re mean, and they need to be brought to justice.”


Stupid reporter meets stupid preznident:

Q If I may, Mr. President, do you agree with the analysis from the counter chief European -- counterterrorism chief European spokesman who said today that the international support for terrorism has receded. ...

PRESIDENT BUSH: It’s a four-part question. First of all, I didn’t -- what was this person a spokesman for?

Q Counterterrorism chief in Europe.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Some obscure spokesman?

Q No, actually, he has a name.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Okay, he’s a got a name. (Laughter.) Well, no, I don’t agree with the spokesman for the obscure organization that said that the international commitment to fighting terror is declining.

I’ve googled, and I still don’t know what the reporter was talking about, but then neither did the reporter and neither did Bush, and Bush completely misinterpreted what the reporter said the guy said, but it didn’t stop him getting pretty darned belligerent.

Then Bush started talking again about that dinner (which I read after I wrote my little dinner roll sketch above): “It will be interesting for me to watch the body language of these two leaders to determine how tense things are.”

Venezuelan street theater review

John Bolton calls the Venezuelan foreign minister’s protests at attempts by airport security people to frisk him “Venezuelan street theater,” saying, “He did not request the courtesies we would have extended to get him through the airport. He purchased his ticket at a time and in a manner and with funding such that he was asked to go to secondary screening and he objected to that. And the first thing he did was call the press and speak to them in Spanish, so this is propaganda.” Yes, if it’s in Spanish, it must be propaganda. I had to read that quote a second time before I realized that Bolton was accusing Maduro of deliberately behaving suspiciously (paying cash for a one-way ticket) in order to provoke an international incident. A cunning plan indeed.

Well, that’s a lie

The British Labour party is having its annual conference. Gordon Brown gave a speech today, and just as he was saying what a privilege it’s been to work with Tony Blair, Cherie Blair was overheard commenting, “Well, that’s a lie.” So that’s all the British newspapers are talking about today. Cherie, by the way, denies having said anything of the kind, and the Labour party machinery suggested that she’d actually said macaca “I need to get by.” No one believes the denials, but no one believes Brown’s praise of Tony Blair either.

I’m not sure how many Americans know that Cherie Blair’s father Tony Booth, a lefty actor along Rob Reiner lines, played the long-haired lefty son-in-law of a cockney bigot in the tv show that was adapted in America as All in the Family. And that the Booths are an old acting family, one of whose members once intervened rather significantly in American politics.

At a press conference with visiting Afghan puppet Karzai (who failed to bring any of his nation’s journalists with him), Rumsfeld was asked whether he would resign, as three retired generals (all of whom served in Iraq) have been calling for:

Q Are you considering resigning at all --

SEC. RUMSFELD: No.

Q -- and if so, why not?

SEC. RUMSFELD: I’m not.

And about the Army chief, Gen. Schoomaker’s, refusal to submit a budget because he is not being given enough money to do the job, the Pentagon transcript quotes Rumsfeld thusly: “(Inaudible) -- the Army for some weeks. (Inaudible) -- the Army -- (inaudible) -- it will continue -- (inaudible) -- if not, the budget will then go to the president, and then the president will send it to Congress and -- (inaudible).” How an inaudible bill becomes an inaudible law, Rummy-style.

Reset

The Lebanese are saved! Rescue is at hand! Well, for Lebanese puppy dogs, anyway. Lebanese humans are still screwed.

Thailand’s Gen. Thawip, spokesmodel for the coup leaders (who are calling themselves the Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy in the hope that they’ll be mistaken for Swedes), explains the necessity for the military overthrow of the elected government: “Just like when your computer is hung and you cannot do anything about it, what you’re going to do is push the reset button or unplug it and that’s the only way to solve it.”

Nodding their heads and voting with their feet

Rumsfeld on why it’s entirely coincidental that the current civil war in Iraq followed the American invasion and occupation: “Now, we talk about the violence that’s going on in that country, and there is violence in that country; let there be no doubt....” Was someone doubting that? “...But there was violence before. I mean, there are -- hundred thousands of people are in mass graves all over that country. Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds, his own people, as well as his neighbors. So violence is not something that’s new to Iraq. Indeed, it’s a pattern in that country.” A pattern. He makes it sound like wallpaper. I’m not sure what sort of a “pattern” it is that encompasses both the repressive violence of a dictator and a sectarian civil war. They seem to me to be quite distinctive phenomena, having in common only a “pattern” of a high body count. Or possibly he’s saying Iraqis are just inherently violent.


Rummy adds that the war won’t be won militarily (on that much we can agree), but on the “political front and the governance front... when people say, ‘Okay, it’s going to make it,’ and they start nodding their heads, and they vote with their feet, and the economic circumstance improves.” I’m a little unclear on whether they’ll be nodding their heads at the same time as they vote with their feet, or they’ll nod and then voting with their feet, but I’ll definitely keep an eye out for the nodding and the foot-voting.

Pulp fiction

In his weekly radio address, Bush praises Pakistan’s “President” Musharraf for “working to build modern democratic institutions that could provide an alternative to radicalism.” Yeah, Musharraf is all about the building of modern democratic institutions.

It may not mean anything, but in his most recent speeches, Bush has been backing away from describing the enemy as Islamofascist or indeed as Islamic anything, in favor of the more generic, basically content-free term “extremist.” In today’s five-minute address, he referred to “extremism” twice and “extremists” five times. Extremists are the bad guys in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq. “All civilized nations, especially those in the Muslim world, are bound together in this struggle between moderation and extremism.”

Note that in that version of reality, Bush is a moderate.

Metaphor of the day, from Capt. Phil Waddingham of the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants at Guantanamo, about the possibility of releasing detainees: “I think what we have here is an orange. What we’re doing is squeezing out the juice and what we’re left with at the end of the day is pulp that will just stay here.”

A deserved rest

Honestly, I feel like I’m more worked up about the state of democracy in Thailand than Thailand’s deposed prime minister, whose reaction to the coup is to take a “deserved rest.” I wasn’t expecting him to go into the jungle and lead a rag-tag but plucky resistance, but c’mon. Meanwhile, the king has finally given his public blessing to the coup, and the coup leader Generalissimo Sonthi Boonyaratglin had some sort of ceremony kneeling in front of a framed photo of the king.



In Amsterdam, an artist has put a car on stilts and replaced its back seat with a mattress, and couples can spend the night in it if they write him an essay explaining why they want to.

Bush & Mush: He understands it just about as good as anybody in the world

Bush met Pakistan’s Generalissimo Musharraf today and praised him for his commitment to education, which is as good an excuse as any for me to make fun of Chimpy’s command of the English language: “The governor of the areas are with us here”; “He understands that we are in a struggle against extremists who will use terror as a weapon. He understands it just about as good as anybody in the world”.


Bush claims that he never heard that Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age until he read it in the newspaper today. Yeah, that’s believable: like Bush would ever read a newspaper. “You know, I was -- I guess I was taken aback by the harshness of the words.” Mush (as I believe Bush calls him in private) said he couldn’t say any more about the incident because he has a book coming out... (Armitage, by the way, denies having made any military threats. Tony Snow says “US policy was not to issue bombing threats” and suggests the whole thing was “a classic failure to communicate”. Bomb. Stone Age. Sounds like pretty clear communication to me.)

Musharraf insisted that his deal with the Waziristan tribes is actually a deal to fight the Taliban, not a deal with the Taliban. Just a big misunderstanding, he says. It is a “holistic approach that we are taking to fighting terrorism”. And Bush said, “When the President looks me in the eye and says, the tribal deal is intended to reject the Talibanization of the people, and that there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be al Qaeda, I believe him, you know?” Looked into his soul, did you, George?


Neither would say whether American forces would enter Pakistan to capture Osama bin Laden.

Bush said the “Kashmir issue will be solved when two leaders decide to solve it.” As ever, the views of any actual Kashmiris are irrelevant. Also, Pakistan is a military dictatorship, but aren’t decisions in India supposed to be made by more than one person?

Bush said “the free world and the moderate world must stand up to these extremists”. Of course I’ve heard the expression “the free world” before, but I didn’t know there was also a moderate world.

Violence

AP headline: “Indonesian Executions Lead to Violence.” Dude, executions are violence. By definition. In this particular case, a firing squad was involved.

A very rude remark

On the Detainee Detention Bill “compromise”: what Digby said.

It includes retroactive immunity for past violations of the Geneva Conventions. Of course nothing was stopping Bush from using his pardon power. And when Congress votes on this, it will have no idea exactly what past acts it will be granting immunity to. This isn’t just legal immunity, it’s an act of willful ignorance about what was done in our names.

Only Bush can interpret the Geneva Conventions.

Evidence obtained through torture will be allowed.

OK, I’m going to stop listing the defects in this deal, or we’ll be here all night. There may be something good in it, but don’t see it. Can anyone else?

BBC headline: “Palestinians Split on Unity Plan.”

Pakistani Prez Musharraf says Richard Armitage’s 2001 threat to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age was “a very rude remark.” Quite.

Lord Holy Joe of Stamford

Here’s a Joe Lieberman ad which suggests that you should never elect someone to the Senate who is not already a senator. “We definitely don’t need someone who needs to be tutored in how to be a senator.” Clearly, election should be for life, not a mere six years. I don’t know what the Founding Fathers were thinking in failing to have a House of Lords.



The Financial Times is reporting that the reason detainees were moved from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo was that CIA interrogators downed tools and “refused to continue their work until the legal situation was clarified.” Yes, a torturers’ strike. And that’s one union you do not want to mess with.

Caption contest:

Angelina Shrugged

About the Thai coup: there’s been a lot of talk in the news coverage in the West about the shortcomings of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra – power-hungry, somewhat corrupt, not obsequious enough towards the king, and so on. I don’t know enough to judge the charges, but they’re really more or less irrelevant, like asking if a rape victim was dressed too sluttily. Also, the thing these stories leave out is that the military also dissolved the government, the parliament, and the Constitutional Court.

Still, sometimes the people just don’t know what they want until it’s given to them by benevolent despots. For example, Hollywood has decreed that what the world needs is a film of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged starring Angelina Jolie.

Jon Carroll offers a platform we can all vote for: a right-click universe.

Hmm, what would happen if I right clicked on Angelina Jolie?

Of the devil, the Terminator, and the choir boy

Hugo Chávez, in a speech to the UN, called Bush “the devil.” And your point is?

Wolf Blitzer interviewed the devil today. The horned one reversed his position, I guess, about whether we would send troops into Pakistan if we knew where Osama bin Laden was, without the “invitation” he said just a couple of days ago that Pakistan as a “sovereign country” would have to issue before we’d do that. Musharraf has voiced some objections. (Update: ah, Georgia10 at Daily Kos asks the question I was wondering: how is it after five years there isn’t some sort of agreement about what happens if bin Laden is found?)

Wolfie asked Chimpy if Iran would nuke Israel if it had nukes. Bush responded that he believes everything that everyone tells him without reservation, which is why he has the world’s largest collection of magic beans:

Wolf, my judgment is you’ve got to take everybody’s word seriously in this world. Again, you can’t just hope for the best. You’ve got to assume that the leader, when he says that he would like to destroy Israel means what he says. If you take -- if you say, well, gosh, maybe he doesn’t mean it, and you turn out to be wrong, you have not done your duty as a world leader.

Now you know what the duty of a world leader is.

Here in California, inept gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides is running this inept ad every 12 minutes on every channel against inept governator Ahnuuuld. Governor Terminator’s policies are almost uniformly opposed by the California voters, but the only thing Angelides is calling him out for is chanting “George W. Bush” while wearing an ugly green tie.



British Home Secretary John Reid imparted some helpful advice to Muslim parents: check your children for the “tell-tale signs” of brainwashing.

The official US response to the Thai coup is to say that coups are bad, and to ask that “democratic elections be held as soon as possible, which is a commitment military officials have made.” To call for elections but not for the return of the elected prime minister is to give de facto support to the coup. The State Dept spokesmodel kept repeating that the coup leaders should live up to their commitments to restore democracy, but this formulation suggests that they have some sort of right to make any commitment about the form of government of Thailand, that they are legitimate actors, which they are not.

The British soldier convicted of a war crime in Iraq (Corporal Payne, can’t make this shit up) punched civilians in different body parts to elicit screams and groans. He called this his “choir,” and played it for anyone who visited the detention center, including total strangers. His confidence in his impunity might have been correct, had he not beaten a prisoner to death as well.

Connecting the dots

You’ll remember Ron Suskind’s explication of Cheney’s “one percent doctrine,” by which we have to act on vanishingly unlikely doomsday scenarios as if they were real. The equivalent to that in the debates on violent interrogations, warrantless eavesdropping etc is the metaphor that “we have to connect all the dots.” So while Rep. Peter King of NY, the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, said last week that “If we capture bin Laden tomorrow and we have to hold his head under water to find out when the next attack is going to happen, we ought to be able to do it” (did I mention this thug is the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee?), he’s missing the point: we have to listen in on every phone call, read every email message, and hold every head under water which might provide us, not with the location of a ticking bomb, but with any minuscule “dot,” some trivial piece of information that might possibly, when combined with dozens or hundreds of other dots extracted by similar means, add up to the location of a ticking bomb.

Thinking about them

Bush met with Iraqi President Talibani yesterday.


He said, “I spoke today at the United Nations, and in my speech I spoke directly to the people of Iraq. I wanted them to know that we’re thinking about them during this difficult period of time.”

Since that sounded exactly like a sympathy card, I went to the Hallmark website to see if there was anything I could appropriate for this post, but just got too creeped out. Yick.

Still, I’m sure the people of Iraq are just so very grateful to hear that we’re thinking about them during this difficult period of time.


And today Bush met with Palestinian President Abbas, and welcomed him to Washington, D.C. They were, of course, in New York.

Given limited time and limited support, however, we’re screwed

Least reassuring statement of the week, Gen. Abizaid on whether we’re winning in Iraq: “Given unlimited time and unlimited support, we’re winning the war.”

At least that is an assessment of what it would take to win the war. The Iraq Study Group, led by such elderly luminaries as James Baker and Lee Hamilton, held a press conference to announce that “We’ve made no judgment of any kind at this point about any aspect of policy with regard to Iraq.” Read the hilarious Dana Milbank report.

The hopes of the civilized world ride with us

Cheney gave a speech Tuesday to a conference of the National Automobile Dealers Association (would you buy a used car from this vice president?), about half of which was about The War Against Terror (TWAT). He didn’t mention oil once. He did mention car bombs. Are car dealers for or against those? He also said that “the hopes of the civilized world ride with us,” which sounds like car-pooling, which they’re definitely against.


He brought up 9/11, naturally, saying the terrorists “did not know the people they killed. They didn’t know their names or what they did for a living. They just knew these unsuspecting people were Americans, and that was enough to kill them all.” Funny how people in the White House keep forgetting that not every 9/11 victim was actually an American.

It feels a little trite to point out just how often Cheney’s descriptions of the terrorists could be applied to himself, but sometimes trite is true. You probably noticed the thing about not knowing the names of the people they killed, when the military won’t give an estimate, to the nearest 10,000 say, of the numbers of Iraqis we’ve killed. Cheney also says the enemy “recognize neither the conventions of war, nor any rules of morality,” they “organize in secret” (undisclosed location, anyone?), and “seek to impose a dictatorship of fear”. He contrasts them with “civilized societies [which] uphold justice, mercy, and the value of life”. I recognize nothing of Dick Cheney in that description.

Or of car dealers, if it comes to that.

He says that “despite assassins and car-bombers Iraqis came out to vote at a rate of turnout higher than we have here in the United States.” If the Republicans have an unusual get-out-the-vote campaign in November, don’t say you weren’t warned.

Bush at the UN: Imagine what it’s like to be a young person living in a country that is not moving toward reform

George Bush spent today at the United Nations, representing the US to the entire world. Oh good.

At an exchange of toast with Kofi Annan, Bush said, “I’ve talked to him a lot of times during my time as President, and a lot of times my discussions with him came from when he was in far away places, because he cares deeply about the world.” And frequent-flier miles.




And he addressed the General Assembly. He said that “the world is engaged in a great ideological struggle, between extremists who use terror as a weapon to create fear, and moderate people who work for peace.” And which were you again?

Actually, he talked about moderates or the “forces of moderation” nine times during the speech (“we have seen the forces of freedom and moderation transform entire continents”). A visitor from Mars would think that moderation was an ideology or a political philosophy, rather than merely a position on a spectrum. So remember: moderation good, extremism bad.


He praised elections in, um, Algeria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. But what about Middle Eastern countries that aren’t quite so, um, democratic? He paints this chilling picture, which is like the worst after-school special ever:

Imagine what it’s like to be a young person living in a country that is not moving toward reform. You’re 21 years old, and while your peers in other parts of the world are casting their ballots for the first time, you are powerless to change the course of your government. While your peers in other parts of the world have received educations that prepare them for the opportunities of a global economy, you have been fed propaganda and conspiracy theories that blame others for your country’s shortcomings. And everywhere you turn, you hear extremists who tell you that you can escape your misery and regain your dignity through violence and terror and martyrdom. For many across the broader Middle East, this is the dismal choice presented every day.

Also: kids, don’t do drugs.

“Today, I’d like to speak directly to the people across the broader Middle East: My country desires peace. Extremists in your midst spread propaganda claiming that the West is engaged in a war against Islam. This propaganda is false, and its purpose is to confuse you and justify acts of terror.” He added, “See, doesn’t that clear everything up? It was all just a big misunderstanding.”

He then spoke to the people of Iraq: “We will not yield the future of your country to terrorists and extremists.” The people of Iraq might be forgiven for wondering why the future of their country is George Bush’s to yield or not yield. He went on, “Working together, we will help your democracy succeed, so it can become a beacon of hope for millions in the Muslim world,” adding, “That’s beacon, not bacon, I know you people don’t like crispy delicious bacon. Mm, bacon.”

Then he spoke to the people of Afghanistan (he was speaking in reverse-clusterfuck order), said he’d stand by them blah blah blah.

Then he spoke to the people of Lebanon, many of whom, he said, “have seen your homes and communities caught in crossfire” between Hezbollah and Israel. Crossfire? Was Hezbollah dropping bombs on Lebanese homes?

Then he spoke to the people of Iran, telling them they “deserve an opportunity to determine your own future” and “Iran must abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions.” Mixed message, really.

Then he spoke to the people of Syria, whose rulers, he said, “have allowed your country to become a crossroad for terrorism.” Crossroad? I’ll bet no one’s running a red light at that intersection. Interestingly, in this section, unlike the one on Iran, he doesn’t call for regime change, saying “Your government must choose a better way forward by ending its support for terror (etc.)”

Then he spoke to the people of Darfur, who are suffering “unspeakable violence” (some would say that’s the problem, the lack of speaking). He says he’s appointing a Presidential Special Envoy, one Andrew Natsios, who knows something about the plight of persecuted minorities, being a Republican from Massachusetts. Natsios’s resumé suggests he know something about humanitarian aid, nothing at all about stopping genocide.

Talking about Israel & Palestine, but without speaking to their people, he said that “President Abbas is committed to peace” and “Prime Minister Olmert is committed to peace,” and once again it’s just those fucking extremists that’re making all the trouble.

“Freedom, by its nature, cannot be imposed -- it must be chosen.” Funny, ‘cause I thought we invaded all those countries to... oh, never mind.

You don’t read Miranda rights to barbarians

George Allen (R-Macaca) thinks that asking if one of his grandparents was Jewish is an “aspersion.”

Paul Krugman, in an article behind a pay barrier, and therefore absolutely impossible to find online, says that the reason the Bush admin is determined to torture people is to show that it can, to eliminate all limits on presidential power. Torture is especially suited to demonstrate this “precisely because it’s a violation of both law and tradition.” I’d like to expand on that a little. It’s not just about expanding presidential power, it’s about altering the basis of that power and delegitimizing certain ways of talking about power. They don’t just wish to violate law and tradition, but to sideline them altogether, to treat them as quaint relics of the past, irrelevant in today’s world. Instead, the sole measure is to be what “works.” And somehow, the more violent and savage something is, the more these self-styled realists assume it must work.

Here’s how the Manchester Union-Leader put it Saturday, in an attack on John McCain for being soft on terrorism: “This is a new kind of war waged by a ruthless, extremist enemy that cares nothing for Geneva Convention niceties. ... You don’t read Miranda rights to barbarians or worry about ‘what the world thinks’ when you are fighting an enemy that is out to destroy you.” Considering they claim to be talking about a new kind of war, they’re spouting some very old, very familiar crap. I don’t think there’s been a war in history where it wasn’t said of the other side, “The only thing they understand is force” and “they don’t value life the way we do.”

We long for the days when people don’t feel comfortable or empowered to take innocent life to achieve an objective

This could be fun to watch: Hungarian PM Ferenc Gyurcsany having to explain having been caught on tape telling MPs that his party had won the election “We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening” because “You cannot quote any significant government measure we can be proud of,” “we screwed up. Not a little, a lot. No European country has done something as boneheaded as we have.”

Speaking of boneheaded, George Bush held a White House Conference on Global Literacy today.


You can stop laughing now.

Really, stop.

DEAD BABIES IN DARFUR!

Sorry I had to do that. If I may continue...

Bush said that literacy isn’t just about knowing what happens to the very hungry caterpillar. “It is very hard to have free societies if the citizens cannot read. Think about that.” Dude, you have totally blown my mind. “You can’t realize the blessings of liberty if you can’t read a ballot” [insert Florida joke here] “or if you can’t read what others are saying about the future of your country” [Akbar, it says here that George Bush is going to bomb us!]


He went on, “I am deeply concerned about the spread of radicalism, and I know you are, as well. We long for the days when people don’t feel comfortable or empowered to take innocent life to achieve an objective.” Some sentences could only come out of the mouth of one person on the planet, and that was one of them. “One reason radicals are able to recruit young men, for example, to become suicide bombers, is because of hopelessness. One way to defeat hopelessness is through literacy, is to giving [sic] people the fantastic hope that comes by being able to read and realize dreams.” “Reading,” he added, “will yield the peace we want.”


Contest: what could Bush read have read to him that would yield the peace we want?

I think you’re wrong. I think you’re right.

The interrogation “techniques” the CIA wants legalized evidently are: induced hypothermia; forcing suspects to stand for prolonged periods; sleep deprivation; the “attention grab” (grabbing the detainee’s shirt); the “attention slap”; the “belly slap”; sound and light manipulation. I’m actually surprised for some reason that direct physical assaults are listed.

Fred Barnes provides a few more details of Bush’s get-together with conservative pundits last week. He said, “I’ve never been more convinced that the decisions I made are the right decisions.” Isn’t it cute how he still thinks that his refusal to admit mistakes will convince other people that he hasn’t made any?

He said, “It’s impossible for someone to have grown up in the 50s and 60s to envision a conflict with people that just kill mercilessly, using techniques that are kind of foreign to modern warfare. But it’s real. I’m telling you, it’s real.” Yes, we all got lulled into a false belief in the gentleness of humankind by the Nazis and so forth during the mid-20th century’s golden age of peace and love.

He said that when people wanted him to ask for the American people to make sacrifices in The War Against Terror (TWAT), what those cynical bastards really meant was tax increases. “That’s what that means as far as I’m concerned.”

Bush insisted that he does not live in a bubble. “I listen to a lot of people. I’ve got smart people around me.” Name one. “And they can march right in here – this Oval Office can be slightly intimidating, but I’ve got people here who can fight through the aura and say, ‘I think you’re wrong. I think you’re right.’” That’s just how they say it too: they say the first sentence, then see Cheney pointing the shotgun at their face...

They probably are required to march when they enter the Oval Office, too.

And Maureen Dowd, who I assume was not invited, reports that Bush blamed American impatience on there being too many tv channels.

Until there’s an all-Simpsons channel, there are not too many channels.

A simple “no” would have sufficed

From Reuters: “Rebels unleashed a wave of deadly bomb attacks in Iraq’s ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk on Sunday, including a huge suicide truck bomb, a day after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki urged Iraqis to embrace reconciliation.”

Going beyond dissent

Holy Joe Lieberman quote: “It is wrong for some on the left who go beyond dissent and demonize the president and impugn the motives of all those who support him. Like it or not, we are in this war against terror, and we are in it together.”


I’m not quite sure what it means to go “beyond dissent” or why the motives of Bushites can’t be impugned (a word defined by my computer’s dictionary as “dispute the truth, validity, or honesty of”). But it’s that phrase “like it or not” that I enjoyed.

Which brings us to today’s poll (I need to test out a different poll service):

Like being in this war against terror? Or not? Like it. Not so much.    Free polls from Pollhost.com

Of tools and professionals

In his radio address, Bush says of the Detainee Detention Act (as I shall henceforth call it), “I have one test for this legislation: The intelligence community must be able to tell me that the bill Congress sends to my desk will allow this vital program to continue.” This is a variant on his assertions that the decisions about the timing of troop withdrawals from Iraq and the number of troops deployed in the first place, are made entirely by the generals, the professional soldiers, and therefore Congress should just butt out. Since that line has been pretty successful in intimidating Congress, not wanting to be accused of playing, gasp, politics, into passivity, Bush is using it as a template, except that in this case the “professionals” he keeps talking about (professional what, he never says) are not generals but shadowy spooks whose names and track records we are not permitted to know (like bloggers, only with more people tied up in their basements), but who we are expected to trust to determine what tools they need.


Speaking of tools, today’s must-read is the Rajiv Chandrasekaran piece in the WaPo previewing his book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (isn’t that a good title?), about how the Bush administration sent a bunch of inexperienced ideologues, party donors, and media to handle the reconstruction of Iraq and how, surprisingly, it did not work. We’ve seen much of this before in dribs and drabs, but put together in a single narrative, it’s rather more powerful.

Detaining detainees in detention

The International Astronomical Union may have made the right if unpopular decision in de-planetizing Pluto, but this time they’ve gone too far (about 13 light hours), renaming planet Xena “Eris.”

In my last post I quoted but forgot to make fun of Bush referring to something called the “Detainee Detention Act.” A slip of the tongue, but revealing, I thought, of Bushian logic at its Bushianest. Just as elsewhere in the press conference he said that “one of the reasons [Saddam Hussein] was declared a state sponsor of terror was because that’s what he was,” so “Detainee Detention Act” implies that the reason these people must be detained is that they are, in fact, detainees. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Earlier this week Sikhs held a procession in Amritsar to celebrate “dignity and sanctity of the Turban.”

Bush press conference: They don’t want to be tried as war criminals

I actually saw this one, though not from the beginning. So I’m using my own notes rather than a transcript. I can use my own punctuation, as when he said of the terrorists, “They are comin’ again.” Although I occasionally got caught up with things like trying to figure out if he’d said that Iraqi had a “uni government.”


Our various enemies all have a common ideology, he said. He also doesn’t like Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions. Or the House of Commons. Or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

He doesn’t like Common Article III because it outlaws “outrages upon the human dignity” of prisoners. “That’s very vague,” he complained. “What does it mean?” He didn’t say which word he didn’t understand: outrage, human, or dignity. All three I’m guessing.

He says without “clarity,” CIA torturers, who he called “our professionals” and “decent citizens,” won’t want to go to work in the morning, won’t “step up unless there’s clarity in the law.” Because CIA torturers are all about the clarity in the law. He added, “They don’t want to be tried as war criminals.” You know how not to be tried as war criminals? As Baretta used to say, don’t do the war crime if you can’t do the war time. He even said (Bush, not Baretta) that without the “clarification” he wants (which he says is based on the McCain Act, you know the one he added a signing statement to saying he’d follow it only if he felt like it), the program of interrogations at secret prisons is “just not gonna go forward.” Don’t make me turn this waterboard around! He said if international courts are allowed to determine “how we protect ourselves,” it would “ruin” the program of secret CIA inquisitions.


He was asked (by NBC’s David Gregory) whether it would bother him if countries like Iran or North Korea did to captured American soldiers what he does, roughing prisoners up according to their own interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, and putting them on trial with secret evidence. He said that was okay with him (if they “adopted the standards within the Detainee Detention Act, the world would be better”). When Gregory tried to follow up, Bush told him he’d taken too long to ask his question.


The CNN scroll is just never at the right place when you need it, is it? When Bush was denying that Iraq is in a civil war, it would have been appropriate if it repeated the story about 30 more dead bodies being found in Iraq with signs of torture. I forget what it actually was, probably something about spinach being bad for you.

Asked the difference between Republican and Democratic economic policies, he said it was all about... wait for it... tax cuts. Tax cuts, he added, determine elections, and we have a history of that in our family. Did he mean to make fun of his father’s “Read my lips” line?

Asked about whether it would be a good idea to send in special forces to capture bin Laden, he said that Pakistan was a sovereign nation and we “have to be invited.” This will come as a surprise to Afghanistan. He said that “the Paks” are in the lead. He said that the idea that he had eased off the hunt for bin Laden was an “urban myth.”

Asked about his claim that there may be a third Awakening in America, he said that was based on the number of people who come up to him on rope lines and say they’re praying for him.

Then he was struck by lightning, proving the power of prayer.

Comfortable

Bush says the purpose of the proposed legislation (which looks today to be in trouble) to legalize (retroactively) “tough interrogations” of suspected terrorists is to “provide legal clarity so that our professionals will feel comfortable about going forward with the program”. Because it’s all about whether the CIA’s... professionals... feel comfortable.

That was at a photo op with the South Korean president, who brought along a translator, who unfortunately made the mistake of translating from Korean into English, a language Bush does not speak.



Earlier in the day he met privately with the House Republican Conference. The meeting went smoothly until someone tried to eat a potato chip that Dennis Hastert had his eye on. In the resulting fight, the holographic equipment that has projected the image of Dick Cheney since his death in 2002 was damaged, resulting in the blurring you see here.


Really came a long way for a rather weak joke, didn’t I? I am so off my game today.

Quote of the week: Israeli Prime Minister Olmert: “Half Lebanon is destroyed. Is that a loss?”

Terrific tribunals for terrible terrorists

The R’s have started calling the military commissions Bush wants “terrorist tribunals.” Subtle, huh? And alliterative. But appropriate: the phrase presumes guilt just like the commissions will.

I’m taking bets on how long it takes for Joe Lieberman to start using this Republican rhetorical device.

It occurs to me that I don’t know where people actually convicted by these kangaroo courts (that’s also alliterative) would be sent to serve their sentences. Back to Gitmo? Military prisons in the US?

Compliance and colonoscopies in Guantanamo

Long article in next Sunday’s NYT Magazine on Guantanamo, a narrative history of relations between the detainees and the prison authorities – well, the guards rather than the interrogators, the interrogations aren’t really covered. It gives the longest account I’ve seen of the abortive attempt last summer to establish a prisoners’ council. The author, Tim Golden, is as reasonable and even-handed as he can be under the circumstances, which is also the impression the article gives of the military authorities, who were obviously (and unavoidably) his main sources. But in a place like Guantanamo, doing the job that Guantanamo does, reasonable and even-handed are traits that are irrelevant, even obscene. The authorities were willing, indeed eager, to negotiate about details like bottled versus tap water or not blasting the Star-Spangled Banner during the call to prayer (or, as Gen. Craddock once said, the color of the feeding tubes inserted into the noses of hunger-strikers), in an effort to achieve “compliance,” so long as larger issues like the prisoners being held indefinitely were not broached.

Indeed today Bill “Kitty Killer” Frist commented that the Guantanamo detainees are getting “24/7 medical care - better than many Americans”. Why, 16 colonoscopies have been performed there, he marveled.

Frist’s other priority in The War Against Terror this week is tacking onto the bill authorizing military operations a provision against paying off internet gambling debts with credit cards.

You’re still waiting for me to say something about the colonoscopies, aren’t you? I have way too much class for that.

Stifling

Gen. Richard Zilmer, the US commander in western Iraq, insists that we haven’t “lost” Anbar province and that we are “stifling” the rebels. Call it the Archie Bunker approach to counter-dingbatteryinsurgency.


Here’s Condi meeting with South Korean President Roh today. Not sure which one of them needs the really large spittoon.


And here’s Condi meeting with one of those creepy (and evidently tiny) Polish twins. In a scintillating exchange of dialogue, he said, “It is true I’m visiting the U.S.” You can see why he’s the prime minister.

To arms! (two arms good, four arms bad)

Headline of the day, from the WaPo: “Four Armed Men Attack U.S. Embassy in Damascus.” Now what we need to know is whether the terrorists are recruiting people who were born with extra appendages, or if they’re somehow attaching extraneous limbs to their existing recruits. We could be in an... please forgive me... arms race, people! Well, forewarned is... ok, I’ll stop now.

Invigorating

All day bloggers have been pointing out that George Allen’s campaign website has pictures of Allen meeting Saturday with members of the Macacan-American community at an “ethnic rally.” Many of those bloggers took screen shots under the mistaken impression that Allen’s people would be embarrassed by the ridicule into taking them down. But maybe Allen’s people all have Confederate paraphernalia and nooses in their offices too, cuz it’s all still up there. At the Ethnic Rally, Allen declared it to be “invigorating to be here with people from all sorts of different and diverse backgrounds”.

Doesn’t he look invigorated?

Speaking of invigorated, Condi Rice is pursuing America’s foreign-policy goals in a place I’m told is not part of the United States, some place the natives call Canada (I’m not sure what we call it in English). The Toronto Star has a slide show of “Condi’s Canadian adventure,” including this photo of her sampling the exotic local cuisine.


A Virginia woman who smoked pot with her 13-year old son as a reward when he finished his homework is facing charges of being the coolest mom ever.

Where are the mothers organizing against terrorism?

In an editorial in USA Today, Karen Hughes asks why there isn’t more “concerted moral outrage of everyday citizens” against terrorism. “[W]here are the mothers organizing against terrorism as American mothers did against drunken driving? Where are the fathers promising to teach their sons to choose to live rather than choose to die?” She wants there to be a “terrorism is bad” movement, with petition drives and bake sales and the like, modeled after the abolitionist movement.

On the off-chance that this isn’t just a parody that didn’t make it into The Onion, I’d like to help. Contest time! Yay! Provide a slogan, motto, bumper sticker or chant for Mothers Against Terrorism (MAT) (or a better name for the organization). “Hey hey, ho ho, the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes, has got to go!” “Friends don’t let friends drive explosive-laden cars into the American embassy.”

Bush 9/11 speech: leading the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty

Even if you think that war is the appropriate response to 9/11, was it in good taste for Bush to make a broadcast on its anniversary entirely oriented towards war? But of course this was not a commemoration of 9/11, but of the start of The War Against Terror (TWAT).

Evidently it’s not a clash of civilizations, it’s a struggle for civilization. Which is us, I guess. Maybe that’s just a piece of rhetoric, but it sounds to me like a rejection of pluralism and a denial of Muslim civilization. Elsewhere in the speech he said that the response of people who tried to rescue the victims of the 9/11 attacks was “distinctly American.” Presumably anyone not an American would just start going through the victims’ pockets for loose change.


If the speech was ethnocentric, it was also Christian-centric, like that bit about how they brought America to its knees, but “united in prayer.” Uh, dude, you do know that some religions expressly forbid kneeling when praying?

Terrorists, he felt the need to say in various ways over and over, are bad. We “saw the face of evil,” they “kill without mercy,” blah blah blah. And they are still “determined to attack America”. Funny, where have I heard that phrase before? Let’s see: “bin Laden determined to attack...”


The people of the Middle East “have one question of us: Do we have the confidence to do in the Middle East what our fathers and grandfathers accomplished in Europe and Asia?” Um, incinerate their cities?

I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom

Cheney at the Pentagon: “Nine-eleven is a day of national unity. The memories stay with all of us because the attack was directed at all of us.” Obviously if it had been directed against brown-skinned people somewhere, we... or at least Cheney... would have forgotten all about it by now. “We were meant to take it personally, and we still do take it personally.” Yes, it’s all about us. Everything is always all about us.


“We have learned that there is a certain kind of enemy whose ambitions have no limits, and whose cruelty is only fed by the grief of others.” Cheney has met the enemy, and it is him.

“Yet in the conduct of this war the world has seen the best that is in our country.” I would really like to think that the “best that is in our country” has nothing to do with how we fight wars.


AP looks at the children in that Florida classroom, five years later. “[Bush’s] face just started to turn red,” says Tyler Radkey. “I thought, personally, he had to go to the bathroom.”

“Not any more ah don’t.”

President Poopy Pants was interviewed by Matt Lauer (no transcript, and the video seems only to be playable in Internet Explorer). Nothing new, although the 11-minute interview was conducted standing, about a foot apart. Lauer asked Bush, who kept talking about fighting terrorism “within the law,” about secret CIA prisons. Bush, in pissed-off mode: “So what? Why is that not within the law?” He also tells us that he’s been “assured by our Justice Department that we were not torturing.”

There are intelligence reports and conflicting intelligence reports all the time

I skipped “The Path to 9/11” (which isn’t quite the same thing as skipping down the path to 9/11), because life is too short and, you know, The Simpsons was on. I will also skip most of Monday’s coverage, with the mournful music and slow motion footage of the towers falling and whatnot, and you probably should too. Feeling sad about a tragedy is not obligatory because the calendar tells you that today is the day to feel sad about it. And you’re unlikely to hear anything that will make you a wiser or better person, just as 9/11 did not make us a wiser or a better nation.

5 months after 9/11, Bush was so embarrassed about not having captured bin Laden that he never spoke the man’s name. For some reason, 5 years of failure is less embarrassing than 5 months, and Bush has taken to quoting him in every speech. I suppose he’ll do it again today, but one could wish that he’d quote Jefferson or Paine, one of the idealists who helped create that freedom for which they, you know, hate us. Making us secure at any price is not the high moral calling Bush seems to believe it to be.

Condi went on no fewer than three talk shows this morning. She came close to admitting that the intel on WMDs in Iraq was wrong, but “once you’re in Iraq you can learn things that you could not possibly know before you were in Iraq.” Have to invade a country to learn whether it was worth invading. Asked on a different program about a 2002 CIA report that Iraq was not supplying chemical or biological weapons or training to Al Qaida, she said, “There are intelligence reports and conflicting intelligence reports all the time.”

And she insisted, contrary to Friday’s Senate committee report, that there were “multiple contacts going back a decade between Osama bin Laden and Iraq.” And when asked what about all the countries that sponsor terrorists who we haven’t invaded, she offered this: “Well, but Saddam Hussein was special in this case. This is somebody against whom we went to war in 1991.” Um, so?


Really, for someone with a doctorate, you have to wonder about her inability to use facts to support a thesis. Here’s how she responds to a rather apposite question (but with no follow-through) from Chris Wallace:

Q: Secretary Rice, what evidence do you have that the homegrown Sunnis and Shia fighting each other in Iraq, and of course that at this point is the vast majority of the violence, that they have any interest in attacking the U.S.?

RICE: Well, clearly the person who set off much of the sectarian violence, who plotted the notion that Shias should go after Sunnis and you should try and spark civil conflict, actually was the al-Qaida leader at the time, Zarqawi, who we later killed.

Q: But he’s gone.

RICE: Well, but it was his strategy and we know that, to try and set off sectarian violence.

Back to Saddam: “We were still at war with him in 1998 when we used American forces to try and disable his weapons of mass destruction.” We did what now?

Validating the strategy of the terrorists

The WaPo, in a long story about why we still haven’t found bin Laden (short answer: Pakistan isn’t helping, and the US has starved the mission of resources), has an anecdote that if properly sourced should by yet another reason why Rumsfeld has to go: in November 2002, after the CIA assassinated an Al Qaida leader in Yemen, Rumsfeld was livid that it wasn’t the military that had done it, and ordered NSA head Michael Hayden to stop sharing intel with the CIA of the sort that had made it possible. The article says that Hayden claims not to recall the conversation, which is funny because you’d think that would have been an important one to remember. The Post doesn’t seem to have asked Rummy for his recollections. And while the paper is evidently sure enough of its source’s accuracy to put Rummy’s words in quotation marks, its failure to name that source renders the story merely interesting rather than usable (that is, you can’t demand Rummy’s resignation on the basis of this sort of hearsay).

I wonder if the 9/11 tv programs will rerun footage of the many times Bush said that bin Laden “can run but he cannot hide”?

The LAT has an analysis piece that starts by saying that the US military won’t say how it came up with that figure of a 50% reduction in sectarian deaths in Baghdad because, shh, it’s a secret.

During weekly news briefings deep inside barricaded compounds, commanders regularly display slick charts, multicolored bar graphs and PowerPoint presentations, all heralding good news.

“One more indicator that operations are in fact reducing the amount of attacks on civilians is shown here on this graph,” Caldwell assured reporters the other day, pointing to a bar chart dutifully placed on an easel by a stone-faced uniformed subordinate. But all the numbers had been carefully scrubbed. They were classified.

The Iraqi government’s contribution to opacity: the Baghdad morgue has just been banned from releasing death figures, which will now come from the Shiite-dominated Health Ministry, and “Morgue officials who previously provided details have abruptly ‘retired’ or left the country.”

The article also discusses the recent use of the term “death squads” by the Pentagon to describe the groups responsible: “By unmooring death squads from the context of government-backed Shiite militias, U.S. officials have redefined the problem — and avoided a direct confrontation with the U.S.-backed Iraqi leadership.” Now that you mention it, the US used that term in the 1980s to deflect blame from the Central American governments backed by Reagan, applying it to those killing leftists in El Salvador, where the death squads were closely linked to the military, and Honduras, where the death squads were the military.

On the talk show circuit today, Condi and Cheney both denied the Senate report (which Cheney said he hadn’t read) that Saddam Hussein had no connection to Al Qaida.

Cheney also hadn’t read the WaPo article on the hunt for bin Laden. Or the NYT story saying that his ascendancy over the White House is weakening. Evidently he didn’t think he’d be asked about any of this on Meet the Press on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, although he was prepared to discuss current cinema – “‘Snakes on a Plane’ was a real hoot, Tim, a real hoot.”

What else did Cheney, wielding his Index Finger of Doom, have to say? Well, as always he supported a free and open discussion of American foreign policy: “And those doubts are encouraged, obviously, when they see the kind of debate that we’ve had in the United States, suggestions, for example, that we should withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, simply feed into that whole notion, validates the strategy of the terrorists.”


He refused to say whether there are more or fewer terrorists now than there were 5 years ago.


He claimed that everything he ever said was correct, that we were in fact greeted as liberators, and that when he said the war would be over quickly, “that’s true within the context of the battle against the Saddam Hussein regime and his forces. That went very quickly.” And the “last throes” thing, that was also true, I forget how, but it was true, goddamit!


The Shiite-Sunni “strife,” he said, is entirely the fault of Zarqawi and the mosque bombing.

In an interesting slip when defending Maliki’s visit to Iran (“It also visits the Saudis”), he admitted, “the new government in Iraq. It is a Shia government, no question about it.”


On the Iranian nuclear program, Cheney cited information from the International Atomic Energy Agency, “an international body that I think most people wouldn’t question.” Russert reminded him that he did in fact question the IAEA during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: I asked you on this very program...

VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s correct.

MR. RUSSERT: ...about ElBaradei and you said he’s wrong.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Yes. It wasn’t consistent with our report.

MR. RUSSERT: But he was right about Iraq.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I haven’t, I haven’t looked at it. I’d have to go back and look at it again.

You do that.

They’re violent in Iraq for a reason

The Republicans have put out what purports to be a newspaper from 2007 showing what would happen if, heaven forfend, the Democrats win the 2006 elections. Bush impeached! Star Wars dismantled! Tax cuts for the rich repealed! Michael Moore eating! Universal health care! Don’t miss the horoscopes.

Bush gave an interview to ABC’s Charles Gibson. Here are some quotes, taken out of context, just because I feel like it:

“You know, when you have Republicans hugging Democrats, it really does inspire the nation.”

“No question the Iraq War has been a divisive, you know, war”.

“Some say, ‘Well, it’s impossible for democracy to take hold in the Middle East.’ Well, that’s true if we leave.”

“We have learned since that [Saddam] did not use them, but he had the capacity to use weapons of mass destruction.”

“No question they’re violent in Iraq, but they’re violent in Iraq for a reason”.

“The short term objective is to understand the stakes in this war against extremists. The long term objective is to ... win the ideological struggle.”

I mean, they are all very hot

The LAT got hold of a recording of Gov. Schwarzenegger with his advisers, speculating about the ethnicity of a state legislator (“She maybe is Puerto Rican or the same thing as Cuban. I mean, they are all very hot. They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it.”). His people are claiming it was a joke. No one mentioned that other Austrian who had theories about the blood of different races. But the best part of the story was when the LAT set the scene for us:

The meeting probably took place in the Ronald Reagan Cabinet Room, the governor’s de facto office that adjoins his smaller official quarters. The conference room faces east toward lush Capitol Park and has a long conference table that serves as a giant desk. The sword from Schwarzenegger’s movie “Conan the Barbarian” rests on a nearby table.

I don’t see dead people

So the Pentagon touted an astounding 50% drop in civil war-related deaths in Baghdad, thanks to Operation Forward Together, but then the Iraqi Health Ministry revised its figures up drastically, showing the number of deaths basically the same. Not that the Pentagon is admitting it, as shown by that hapless general on McNeil-Lehrer yesterday, still saying “well that’s not what our numbers show.” Dude, their numbers come from the Baghdad morgue. They get dead bodies, they count dead bodies. You’re not disputing numbers, you’re disputing the existence of 750 corpses you evidently didn’t know about. So the next question is: we’re occupying their country, we have responsibility for security, we’re running a major operation to reduce sectarian violence in the capital... and we don’t know how many fatalities there are in the capital to within plus or minus 50%? We had no one on the ground with enough of a sense of the overall picture to realize that the claim that deaths were down 50% did not accord with that overall picture?

Best line in the WaPo story: the Health Ministry is planning to build some more morgues, get more refrigeration units and hire more personnel to cope with the influx of dead bodies, but said it had “nothing to do with the violence and killing.”

Restoration tragedy

In the NYT today, David Sanger writes, “Mr. Bush is challenging Congress to restore to him the authority to put the United States’ worst enemies on trial on terms he has defined.” Restore? The whole point of the federal court rulings has been that Bush does not have and never had that authority either under law or the constitution.

O.J. Simpson has failed to give the heirs of Ron Goldman the $33.5 million they were awarded, so Goldman’s father is asking LA County Superior Court to transfer to him O.J.’s “right of publicity,” including the rights to his name, image and likeness.

The Iraqi government announced that it hanged 27 “terrorists” Wednesday. Which seems to be all it’s willing to disclose; it wouldn’t say where this took place, and I don’t think it released their names. Secret mass executions are back, baby! Freedom, ain’t it grand?

No, really, ain’t it?

Wherein is revealed why America is a wonderful country

Another day, another Bush speech. Fortunately, right near the start, he tells us, “Many Americans look at these events and ask the same question: Five years after 9/11, are we safer? The answer is, yes, America is safer. (Applause.)” Who really needs to know more than that?

Making the case that one of the major goals of The War Against Terror (TWAT) is to deny “safe haven” to the terrorists (no one thought to excise this bit after Pakistan ceded Waziristan to the loons?), he quotes a “fatwa” issued by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996, “by the grace of Allah, a safe base here is now available.” Notice how Bush subtly included the “by the grace of Allah” bit, which doesn’t add anything substantive to the quote except to remind us that Osama is a Muslim.

Actually, this is another speech with a more clever and effective rhetorical strategy than we’re used to hearing from Chimpy. He narrates the 9/11 plot as it unfolded, interpolating at various points how it could have been stopped if there had been in place the visa screening and unified watch-lists we now have, or the warrantless surveillance he wants Congress to legalize. Most of this is Bush congratulating himself for closing the barn door after the horse has, um, hijacked an airplane with box-cutters, but someone has put better than usual words into his mouth.

How they come out of his mouth is another matter entirely: “And the United States Congress was right to renew the terrorist act -- the Patriot Act. (Applause.) The Terrorist Prevention Act, called the Patriot Act.”


He went on to a fundraiser, where he said:

I fully understand why Americans are troubled by the death and destruction they see on their television screens. I know that. You see, it’s easy to understand because I understand the compassion of the United States of America. Isn’t it a wonderful country when people suffer when they see a child maimed by an extremist’s car bomb. It’s the nature of our country.

Makes you proud to be an Amurriken.

Re-branding Guantanamo

One effect of transferring prisoners from CIA custody to Guantanamo is that Gitmo now has real terrorists people have heard of, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They’re trying to restore Gitmo’s reputation (!) as the place where “the worst of the worst” are stowed (albeit with volleyball courts and Harry Potter), rather than the place where low-level go-fers, wannabes and innocents sold out for the reward money are tied down in restraint chairs and forcibly fed (how many prisoners are still hunger-striking, by the way?).

The US Senate refuses (70-30) to limit the use of cluster bombs near civilians, or to restrict their sales to countries like Israel that refuse to do the same.

Harper’s follows up a Guardian story I must have missed, that a UN report on the history of human rights abuses in Afghanistan has been suppressed because it names those responsible, some of whom are currently prominent in the Afghan government, parliament or military (click here for the report in pdf).

I think you understand why

Somewhat unfortunate headline of the day: “Bush Taps Peters for Transportation.”

Bush gave a broadcast speech in support of secret prisons and torture. He surrounded himself with lots of American flags in case you were wondering if this is still America.


The centerpiece of the speech was a story about how the torture of Abu Zubaydah (who many analysts doubt is as important as the US claims he is, or indeed as important as he claims he is). It’s a rather odd and not hugely believable story, or maybe it’s just the way Bush tells it. Zubaydah, who the US had shot and was holding in a secret prison, “declared his hatred of America. During questioning, he at first disclosed what he thought was nominal information,” including descriptions of Al Qaida members planning a terrorist attack in the US, and where to find them. Then he clammed up, and “it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. ... I cannot describe the specific methods used -- I think you understand why... But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.” So they extracted information from him through these unnameable “procedures,” and then “confronted” other prisoners with it, whereupon they immediately caved: “When confronted with the news that his terror cell had been broken up, Hambali admitted that the operatives were being groomed at KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed]’s request for attacks inside the United States -- probably [sic] using airplanes.” Evidently despite being trained to resist interrogation, they never considered the possibility that interrogators might lie to them.

The [sic], by the way, is in the transcript, rather mysteriously. There’s another mysterious sic, a reference to Al Qaida and Taliban fighters being “held secretly [sic]”.


According to him, any number of plots to blow things up, fly airplanes into things, or spread anthrax, have been thwarted because of data given by prisoners held secretly [sic] after alternative sets of procedures were used upon their persons. And yet he claimed once again, “the United States does not torture.” As proof of this, he cites the McCain Act, neglecting to mention his signing statement. So he won’t tell us – “I think you understand why” – the procedures that induced fanatical terrorists to betray their ideals, their plans, their friends and their cause, but the United States does not torture. Phew.

He does tell us that CIA interrogators “had to complete more than 250 additional hours of specialized training”. Oddly enough, he says that like it’s supposed to be reassuring.

Today marks the first time that the White House has admitted that the CIA holds prisoners in secret prisons outside the country. It has not said under what legal authority it does so, or where those prisons are. Or did so, since Bush says that the CIA’s prisoners are all being transferred to DOD control at Guantanamo. Since they’ve denied up until now that there were secret prisons and secret prisoners, I can’t imagine why we would take that claim seriously.

Also, the Pentagon today released a new interrogation manual, which bans hooding, the use of dogs, sexual humiliation, waterboarding, etc. None of this applies to the secret CIA prisons.

Bush demanded that Congress pass laws establishing military tribunals and ensuring that interrogators using alternative procedures cannot face prosecution under the War Crimes Act.

Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?

Bush gave the first in the latest series of “pretty please won’t you support my war?” speeches today. It’s actually a kind of interesting speech, containing many quotes from documents and speeches of Al Qaida leaders and others showing that they don’t like us very much and that they think Iraq is important to their cause and so on. He says ignoring these statements would be like ignoring Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” He says that “Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?” but intentions are not capabilities. Al Qaida may want to take over Iraq and Afghanistan and establish a caliphate from Basra to Boise, or wherever, but...

OK, right in the middle of that sentence I realized that just as Bush was treating bin Laden’s wet dreams as sensible strategic thinking, I was attempting to engage Bush’s speech with logic, which is about as sensible as punching jello. Moving on...

Condi Rice has translated the “people who oppose the Iraq war are like Nazi-appeasers” argument into African-American, telling Essence magazine, “I’m sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold.” She also added that she’s sure there are some people who think Captain Kirk should have “taken a peace” with the Tribble-hating Klingons...

Like Bush’s logic, Condi’s charge is too fatuous to merit a response, but let’s compare & contrast their tone with that of members of the Democratic Congressional leadership. Reid, Pelosi, Murtha, Biden, Lantos et al have written to George Bush asking him to “consider changes to your Iraq policy” and “consider changing the civilian leadership at the Defense Department”. It’s the tone of supplication that annoys me. Not just that they don’t dare to say R*msf*ld’s name out loud, but that in requesting not that he do these things but only that he “consider” doing them, they are reaffirming his contention that only he has any say over foreign and military policy. They are speaking as if they are humbly offering advice to an emperor, not as if they are people with any share of power themselves. Bush, while paying utmost attention to Al Qaida fantasists with delusions of grandeur, will not have to ask “Will we listen?” about this letter.

(Update: which is why the reply to a letter written by a bunch of United States senators was delegated to White House chief of staff Josh Bolten.)

Just treat us the way we treat you

I’ve had one report of problems with this site in Internet Explorer 6. Has anyone else experienced that? My current stats show that 39% of you are using IE6 to access my blog, but they don’t say if that’s the last thing you ever did.

Bush gave a little Labor Day speech at the Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education. He doesn’t have much to offer actual working-class people, so he talked about tax cuts: “I like it when people are working for a living, have more after-tax money in their pocket. That’s what I like.”



And he talked about dependence on foreign oil: “I mean, the problem is we get oil from some parts of the world and they simply don’t like us.” You know what they call parts of the world that don’t like us? The world.


He talked about opening up foreign markets to American goods: “See, we got 5 percent of the world’s people here in the United States, which means 95 percent are potential customers.” He added, “And my message to the world is this: Just treat us the way we treat you.” There’s a truly scary thought.


I’ll leave you with a better one, which I stumbled upon on the Internet Movie Database: there will be a Futurama movie (for video).

Whaddaya want, an engraved invitation?

Israeli PM Olmert claims to have made repeated offers to Lebanese PM Siniora (which Siniora says he never received and wouldn’t accept) to “sit down together, shake hands, make peace and end once and for all the hostility, fanaticism and hatred that part of his country feels towards us.” I don’t understand Siniora: who wouldn’t accept such a gracious offer? In a variant of that sentence, Olmert said he wanted to “sit, shake hands, make peace and end once and for all the hostility and jealousy”. I’d be interested to know what he thinks the Lebanese are jealous of.

Book review: Steven Poole, Unspeak

I seem to be reading bloggers in book form lately. July I read and reviewed Glenn Greenwald’s book. Then I read “Crashing the Gate,” a book supposedly about politics but with no idea in its head that is not about winning elections. If that thought doesn’t bother you and depress you a little bit, maybe you’ll like the book.

Speaking of books by bloggers, I think everyone should pester Billmon to write one.

Which brings us to Steven Poole’s Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality.

One of the unexpected pleasures of blogging is discovering a blog you like because they discovered you first. So I’m declaring an interest: I am blogrolled on Poole’s blog, also called Unspeak, and he has posted comments here two or three times. I thought I’d recommended his blog before, I certainly intended to, but a search indicates I haven’t.

One of my areas of bloggy focus, in the jokes as well as the more serious bits, has increasingly been the use of language in politics. So Poole’s book on that subject is very much of interest to me. Language has also been a great concern of the Bushies, who are constantly telling us to be careful what we say, that those who think we aren’t engaged in a “war” against “terror” are mistaken, that Iraq is not in a “civil war,” that prisoners were “abused” and not tortured,” that it’s not domestic surveillance, it’s terrorist surveillance, etc etc. Democrats have begun to show some interest in “framing,” following George Lakoff, who unlike Poole is a professional linguist, with degrees and everything, but whose work I find to be much less persuasive and useful than Poole’s.

Poole’s concept of “unspeak” focuses attention on how political language functions. “Unspeak” is a catchy term (although not catchy enough for the Guardian, which recently mis-identified him as the author of “Unthink”), although it arguably creates a false distinction between propagandistic language and ordinary words, downplaying the extent to which all vocabulary influences and canalizes our modes of thinking. Unspeak is language designed not only to advance one’s position, but to preempt and delegitimze one’s opponents’ viewpoints. “Rhetorically,” Poole says, “Unspeak is a kind of invasive procedure: it wants to bypass critical thinking and implant a foreign body of opinion directly in the soft tissue of the brain.” It works well in our newsbite age because “it packs the maximum amount of persuasion into the smallest space.” The word “reform,” for example, implies the superiority of any proposed change: “The very word ‘reform’ thus argues efficiently in favour of itself, whatever it actually is, in paradigmatic Unspeak fashion.” Another example: “To call someone an ‘extremist’ is to denounce him merely for his position on our imaginary spectrum of ideas, rather than to engage with what he is actually saying.”

The book is a compendium of case studies of such terms as community, global warming/climate change, sound science, intelligent design, ethnic cleansing, the Israeli apartheid wall/security fence/separation barrier, weapons of mass destruction, terrorist, extremist, war on terror, abuse, enemy combatant, and others, tracing their coinage, spread and evolution. He even makes brief forays into Unspeak in other languages; it had never occurred to me to ask what Israeli “settlements” are called in Hebrew and Arabic.

People who like my blog will enjoy this book. Indeed, there is some overlap between our writings. For example, we both object to the phrase “freedom is on the march,” which he traces back to Reagan and observes that “To be ‘on the march’ means to be unfree, insofar as one is subject to military discipline,” while I wrote (two years ago), “Freedom does not march. It may walk, hop, skip, traipse, mosey, even flounce, but it does not march.” His humor is similar to mine too, except he’d spell it humour, and I must say seeing blog-like snarky humor on the printed page rather than a computer screen took a little getting used to. Actually, the book is quite like Poole’s blog, so if my recommendation isn’t (sniff) enough, you can window-shop there.

Powell’s link

Amazon link

For those of you not playing volleyball and reading Harry Potter...

I forgot to mention that in his op-ed piece, Rumsfeld made a big deal about Guantanamo having volleyball and basketball courts and that the inmates are all reading Harry Potter. Does anyone truly believe (as Rummy would say) that Gitmo prisoners are allowed to use the volleyball and basketball courts?

I’m sitting by the computer waiting to pounce on any juicy news this holiday weekend, but so far not a dicky bird. Also, the change to Beta Blogger seems to have cut my readership way down, possibly because there’s a new RSS feed and the old feed may or may not be working for everybody, and of course I have no way of contacting them to tell them that, and did I mention how annoyed I’m getting with Beta Blogger?

Or possibly my stats are low because my readers are all at the beach, playing volleyball and basketball and reading Harry Potter.

Anyway, while we’re waiting for someone to do something for me to mock, here are some London Review of Books (LRB) personal ads (for those of you looking for that special someone to play volleyball and basketball and read Harry Potter with). The complete collection of my favorites is here.

Estella, 42, seeks Pip. Low expectations. Box. No. 17/03

I am not as high maintenance as my highly polished and impeccably arranged collection of porcelain cats suggests, but if you touch them I will kill you. F, 36. Likes porcelain cats. Seeks man not unused to the sound of sobbing coming from a bedroom from which he is strictly prohibited. Tell me how attractive I am at box no. 16/08

6.10 am, January 19, 1977. Snow falls for the first time on West Palm Beach. The snow spreads to Fort Lauderdale by 8.30am, continuing south to Miami and Homestead. At Crandon Park Zoo, heat lamps are brought in to protect the iguanas. True story. Man (35) incapable of making any point whatsoever would like to meet woman to 40 for nights of awkward smiles and petering off mid-sentence. Box no. 16/05

I’m placing this ad against my better judgment. But then the last time I listened to my better judgment it told me the only way to find a well-read articulate man to 45 was to hide in a bin outside his flat until he arrived home from work then lunge wildly at him as he struggled to put the key in his door. If the ad doesn’t work, keep your bins inside until collection day. Woman. 40. Tactile and cuddly in a mildly terrifying sort of way. Box no. 17/06

When the authorities eventually remove this covert recording device from my brain, they’ll be able to download not only the most profound musings on the universe ever conceived by man but also possibly the whereabouts of my car keys. Until then paranoid amateur tailor (M, 37, Warwickshire) remains unable to take these cross-stitch manuals back to the library. The chirps and whistles aren’t getting any quieter, and the fines aren’t getting any smaller, but this dog-fur suit is sewing up a storm at box no. 17/09 That’s not revulsion you’re feeling right now – it’s passion (or possibly it is revulsion).

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this personal advert puts me firmly on the map. Box no. 17/10

Shepherd of Love seeks F to 45 free of scrapie, pinkeye and Caseous Lymphadenitis. Vet (M, 43). Little experience of human contact outside the farming communities of Pembs. Box no. 16/01

‘Good news! My favourite flavour of crisp is in production again!’ If this is a sentiment you have ever expressed or conceived in adulthood, you needn’t write. You know who you are. F, 32. Box no. 16/09

Meeting the stringent international legal standards for civil war

Wouldn’t you know it? On the Friday before a holiday weekend, the Pentagon released a report (pdf) saying that violence is increasing in Iraq, that “Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife” in which civilians are increasingly targeted, and admitting that the campaign to reduce violence in Baghdad has had no effect.

It admits that “Conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq, specifically in and around Baghdad,” but gives this very comforting reason why there won’t be a civil war, or at least not something we’ll ever call a civil war: “there is no generally agreed upon definition of civil war among academics or defense analysts.” So the term has no meaning? Funny, because you seemed to think it had a meaning when you said on page 3, “the current violence is not a civil war.” It goes on, “Moreover, the conflict in Iraq does not meet the stringent international legal standards for civil war.” So that’s all right, then.

Did you know there were stringent international legal standards for civil war? Really, you have to dot every i and cross every t, it’s all “the party of the first part” this and “no implied warranty is created” that. Lawyers, huh? Take the fun out of everything.

Comment link, same caveats as before.

Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America is the real source of the world’s troubles?

BBC headline: “Pope in Visit to Religious Relic.” Coals to Newcastle.

Jonathan Cook provides a good demolition of Israeli lies and exaggerations about the late unpleasantness, including claims that over a billion Israelis were forced to flee their homes because of Hezbollah rockets, while another 1.7 trillion were in bomb shelters. Some of these lies are about pretending to have suffered more than the Lebanese, and some are because the Israeli government intends to stiff the Israeli Arabs who are half the population of northern Israel and suffered a disproportionate number of deaths, damaged buildings etc.

We’ve been hearing a bit lately about military families winding up paying usurious rates on payday loans, which effects security clearances. The California state senate rejected a bill to cap those interest rates at 36%.

Secretary of War Rumsfeld had an op-ed piece in the LA Times today. As always, he had a lot of questions and they were all rhetorical, designed, he said, “to guide us during this struggle against violent extremists.” Here are those questions:

• With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that vicious extremists can somehow be appeased?

• Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?

• Can we truly afford to pretend that the threats today are simply “law enforcement” problems rather than fundamentally different threats requiring fundamentally different approaches?

• Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America — not the enemy — is the real source of the world’s troubles?

Let the great debate begin! I like how each one has that “can we really” or “can we truly” phrase, as if someone had already said yes and he’s responding, No, can we troooly blame America first (a phrase he’s been very fond of recently)? Rummy says the question is “whether we believe that the defense of liberty is worth the cost.” Gee, I’m pretty sure that’s a trick question.

To which you can respond in the comment link below. I haven’t gotten HaloScan working, but I can cobble together comments links individually. It’s just a pain in the ass and it may disappear if I ever do get HaloScan functional.