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Senate Democrats seem likely not to oppose Alberto Gonzales’s nomination, because setting the legal groundwork for Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is nowhere near as significant as, for example, hiring an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Remember Zoe Baird? Remember Kimba Wood? If not, go have a look, and remember the standards nominees of a Democratic president were expected to meet. At the time, I thought that Baird had disqualified herself from being attorney general (Wood was another matter), but Nannygate somehow doesn’t compare to the disregard for the rule of law Gonzales has demonstrated.
The LA Times has a good editorial on the Saving Private Ryan incident, which, like the legal work of Mr. Gonzales, shows the dangers when the predictable application of the rule of law is replaced by the whim of the executive:
the FCC’s refusal to provide advance guarantees to affiliates that it wouldn’t take action if they aired “Saving Private Ryan” makes it look as if the commission’s main priority is to tailor its response to whatever level of pressure it feels from self-appointed morality guardians.
A more sinister interpretation (and the LA Times may be right that it’s just weak-minded opportunism) would be that maintaining ambiguity about what standards it would apply, and applying them unevenly, induces self-censorship, as we just saw happen, which isn’t the PR problem that overt censorship would be, but gets the job of bowdlerization done at least as well. (If you don’t know the word bowdlerization, look it up, because I guarantee you will see it again as the puritans settle into their work with the special sort of glee seen only in those who are improving everyone else’s morals, whether they like it or not.
Karl Rove weighs in on the “bulge” under Bush’s jacket: “there was nothing there.” See, I’ve been calling Shrub an empty suit for years.
London Times headline: “Funeral Exposes Arafat’s Failings.” You’d think if there was one thing he couldn’t be blamed for...
Colin Powell: “We know that, in the eyes of the Palestinian people, Arafat embodied their hopes and dreams for the achievement of an independent Palestinian state.” I like how he doesn’t quite say that the Palestinian people are idiots for believing that, but nudges right up to the line.
Indeed, many are asking how a people could stick with a leader who constantly failed. But enough about George W. Bush....
A couple of days ago I castigated Bush for saying, “There will be an opening for peace when leadership of the Palestinian people steps forward and says, ‘Help us build a democratic society.’” I thought he meant they should ask the US for help. It’s actually stupider than that, because today he said a Palestinian state would depend on “the Palestinian people’s desire to build a democracy and Israel’s willingness to help them build a democracy.” So they’re supposed to ask Ariel Sharon for help, even though he has done so much for them already.
There’s an amusing exchange in the same press conference in which Bush is asked what would happen, in Iraq as well as Palestine, if a non-democrat is elected, and Bush rejects the whole premise of the question:
Well, first of all, if there’s an election, the Iraqis will have come up with somebody who is duly-elected. In other words, democracy will have spoken. And that person is going to have to listen to the people, not to the whims of a dictator, not to their own desires -- personal desires. The great thing about democracy is you actually go out and ask the people for a vote, as you might have noticed recently. And the people get to decide, and they get to decide the course of their future. And so it’s a contradiction in terms to say a dictator gets elected. The person who gets elected is chosen by the people. ... And if they don’t -- the people of the Palestinian Territory don’t like the way this person is responding to their needs, they will vote him or her out.
It’s a contradiction in terms to say a dictator gets elected. HITLER, you moron, short fella, funny mustache, you must have heard tell of him at some point.
The coup government of Haiti plans to issue an arrest warrant for ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. For corruption.
Picture from Fallujah, prisoners captured by Marines. Say, when Tom Ridge told us to stockpile duct tape, do you think this was what he had in mind?
US Gen. Richard F. Natonski accuses the insurgents of storing weapons in mosques and schools in Fallujah. He does not say where he would consider it legitimate to store weapons. He says, “This is the enemy that we fight. It doesn’t respect the religious mosques or the children’s schools.” 1) mosques: Under the Same Sun has a picture of US soldiers wearing boots in a mosque and lounging around on prayer rugs. 2) schools: to repeat myself, when American occupied Fallujah for the first time a year and half ago, they took over schools and shot people who protested that take-over.
There have been a spate of articles criticizing the US’s Fallujah strategy, it’s belief that it could beat the insurgents in one set-piece “Battle of Fallujah” in which a geographic territory was captured, like this was World War II, or cowboys & Indians. The Pentagon seems to be surprised and annoyed that the guerillas aren’t playing their assigned roles. This is how it’s been for 3 years. The Onion soon after 9/11/01 had an article, something like: US to Give Al Qaida a Country So We Can Invade It. Soon after, Bush decided that Afghanistan would do as a proxy for AQ, and then Iraq. Fallujah is mimetic of a larger failure of understanding, as the US continues to think geographically and fights a take-that-hill war against enemies that do not think geographically (although they would prefer it if Americans kept their dirty boots out of their mosques and schools).
Update: There is, after all, a link to the Atlantic article I mentioned yesterday about Gonzales’s death penalty memos, which I’ve added to that post.
WAR CRIME ALERT: The NYT reports that refugees fleeing Fallujah “were detained by American military patrols, who allowed the women and children to continue but tested the men for explosive residue. All tested negative, and were sent back to Falluja in accordance with procedures established by the American military to maintain the city’s isolation while fighting continues inside”. American procedures are to send males back into an active war zone, where anything that moves is shot, where the population is running out of food and water and electricity have been cut off.
The Iraqi pseudo-government is issuing orders to the media on how news should be slanted, for example that they should “differentiate between the innocent Falluja residents who are not targeted by military operations and terrorist groups that infiltrated the city and held its people hostage under the pretext of resistance and jihad.”
And the Russian Duma votes to ban all depictions of violence from tv between 7 am and 10 pm, including in news programs.
Rumsfeld says that a good model for Iraq to follow would be...El Salvador.
Shrub, on why the Iraqi elections will be a success in spite of everything: “Well, I’m confident when people realize that there’s a chance to vote on a president, they will participate.” In fact, there will no such chance: the president will be chosen by the national assembly. Not a details man, is GeeDubya.
OK, looking beyond that little mistake, what are we to make of the sentence? Is Bush saying that Iraqis would be interested in voting for a president but not for a national assembly, implying that they really want a strong-man rather than a representative democracy?
The US military is increasingly admitting that the leaders of the resistance have long since escaped Fallujah. So why is no one asking whether it’s worth laying waste to an entire city in pursuit of a few low-level gunmen?
The NYT notes that “because the American marines have seized the hospital in Falluja, television and newspapers have not been able to show pictures of bleeding women and children being taken into emergency wards.” Now does that mean that they are preventing the pictures being taken, or that women and children are bleeding, but not being treated?
I’m thinking of starting a pool on which Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, unfamiliar with the whole concept of Hispanics, will be the first to refer to the attorney-general-designate as “Albert O. Gonzales.” Or possibly as Speedy.
ABC affiliates covering 1/3 of the country have decided not to air “Saving Private Ryan,” because of fears that the FCC would fine them for its 3 dozen plus (according to Daily Variety) uses of “fuck”--contractually, and good for Dreamworks, the movie must air unedited. Fines weren’t the issue for the affiliates--ABC promised to pay--rather, the stations were afraid of losing their licenses at renewal time. Now, this isn’t just tv stations running scared and preemptively censoring themselves, post-Janet Jackson: the FCC could easily have stopped this nonsense by giving an advance waiver. Considering that the FCC already ruled in 2002 that Saving Private Ryan is not indecent, in response to a complaint by idiot puritan Donald Wildmon, this should have been a no-brainer, but the FCC instead told the stations to exercise their own judgment and risk the consequences. As far as I’m concerned, that decision to leave the threat of a multi-million-dollar fine hanging over the stations’ heads amounted to an act of state censorship. Tom Coburn, who so objected to Schindler’s List, would be proud.
Viewers in the affected regions will be treated to less f-word-laden fare such as Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in “Far and Away,” “Return to Mayberry” (!), and in Austin, schizophrenically, an episode of Oprah followed by “Lethal Weapon III.” Honestly, I don’t know whether Return to Mayberry or Lethal Weapon III is the better ironic commentary on the whole affair. At least I hope they’re intended as ironic commentary. Happy Veteran’s Day.
Bush, in his condescending, white-man’s-burden mode: “There will be an opening for peace when leadership of the Palestinian people steps forward and says, ‘Help us build a democratic society.’” For a man who keeps saying that freedom is a gift from God, he sure acts like he thinks it’s a gift the United States can give.
I could almost have believed that troops really found a “hostage slaughterhouse” in Fallujah (and didn’t the term slaughterhouse spread rapidly through the media?), but my credulity was strained by the CDs of beheadings and the uniforms, and then they claimed also to have found records with the names of foreign fighters, and, according to an Iraqi general, “huge amounts of weapons and records detailing which country had offered it as a gift,” and I found my intelligence being insulted in a major way.
Remember Afghanistan, that country we brought freedom to? Its supreme court just banned cable tv, because of criticism of Bollywood films and Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments (ok, that one I can understand). A supreme court spokesman specifically cited a criticism from the ulema (clerics) council as reason for the ban. Something I missed: the supreme court tried to ban one of the presidential candidates for questioning whether polygamy was Islamic.
In France, where 22% of male prisoners were convicted of sex crimes, the government will introduce voluntary chemical castration. Insert your own obvious but somehow satisfying joke here.
NYT story on members of Colombia’s congress who support the death squads.
Bush nominates Elian Gonzales, the little Cuban boy with the magic dolphins who won our hearts, to be attorney general. Oh, all right, Alberto Gonzales with his own connection to Cuba, or at least Guantanamo Bay. Here’s a longer version of the “quaint” quote from his memo to Bush (long pdf here) which you will be hearing a lot: “As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions”. It’s the dismissiveness of the word quaint that makes this quote so obnoxious. After an election that Karl Rove tells us was won by R’s because they support eternal moral values, Gonzales’s view of civil and human rights, as well as international law, is that they are situational and revocable at the will of the executive.
Gonzales has worked with Bush for a long time, so there’s quite a record. One part of it was examined by the Atlantic Monthly in the July-August 2003 issue, the written summaries of 57 death penalty cases prepared by Gonzales for Governor Bush, on which Shrub, made the decision to execute or to...well, okay, he only decided to execute. The memos were cursory, assumed no mistake could ever be made by the legal system, and left out any mitigating evidence, information about ineffective counsel, witnesses with conflicts of interest, mental retardation, evidence of actual innocence, etc. They never included the defense’s clemency petitions, so Bush effectively only heard from one side. Now, Bush always claimed that his philosophy was that the governor shouldn’t second-guess the courts, so the information Gonzales failed to provide him was, arguably, information Bush had no interest in acting on. But does that “philosophy” sound like Bush? Does he seem overly scrupulous about checks and balances?
Bush praises American soldiers for doing “the hard work necessary for a free Iraq to emerge.” Or possibly the free work necessary for a hard Iraq to emerge.
With Ashcroft resigning, I may not be able ever again to subtly work in these two facts, as I have every time I’ve mentioned his name in the last four years: 1) he believes dancing is satanic, 2) he lost an election to a man considerably less frisky than Arafat is today. Ashcroft wrote in his resignation letter--I didn’t believe it either when I first read it, but it’s true--that “The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved”. Ah, but WHICH Americans? “The rule of law has been strengthened and upheld in the courts.” Well, that would be the place for it.
You can see why he’s resigning: after conquering both crime and terror, there’s nothing left to do but sit at home and wait for Jesus. He says that there have been no terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11. Uh, anthrax, does that ring a bell at all?
The letter is a masterpiece of hyperbole: under Bush, evidently crime has disappeared, drug use among young people has declined (which I attribute wholly to a statistical glitch: the Bush twins turned 21), and “corporate integrity has been restored with the work of your Corporate Fraud Task Force.” Had you noticed that corporate integrity had been restored? Me neither.
And finally, the man who brought us the Patriot Act writes, “I have handwritten this letter so its confidentiality can be maintained until the appropriate arrangements mentioned above can be made.”
Rumsfeld on how Iraqis will converted to democracy by the demolition of Fallujah, demonstrating that he has no clue how people think (“tipping” refers to something he calls a tipping point, which shows that although we seem to be making no process, at some point a balance will tip and...) (I think it has something to do with cow-tipping, which seems like Rummy’s sort of a pasttime): “Over time you’ll find that the process of tipping will take place, that more and more of the Iraqis will be angry about the fact that their innocent people are being killed by the extremists. And that they’ll want elections, and the more they see the extremists acting against that possibility of elections, I think they’ll turn on those people. ... And when I use this phrase ‘tipping,’ people don’t go from here over to there, they move this way, just a slight bit, and pretty soon the overwhelming majority are over in this area, recognizing that that’s the future. The future’s not a dark future of cutting people’s heads off.”
How very reassuring.
Hear no evil:
Arafat’s wife accuses Palestinian leaders of wanting to bury him alive. Ariel Sharon thinks about Arafat being buried alive, spontaneously ejaculates.
Asked about the invasion of Fallujah, Rummy Rumsfeld says, “I cannot imagine that it would stop without being completed,” and, true to his word, spontaneously ejaculates.
This AP picture is of an American soldier injured in a car bomb, his Purple Heart taped to his chest so he doesn’t lose it while being evac’ed to Germany.
So the Fallujah hospital was targeted because the last time we invaded Fallujah, it released figures of civilian casualties which the US military claims were inflated even though it also claims not to be doing its own counts; so the hospital is “a center of propaganda.” Let me understand this: American troops attacked a hospital in order to IMPROVE their image.
Allawi, speaking to Iraqi troops: “Your job is to arrest the killers but if you kill them, then so be it.” Wink wink.
And even less subtly: “You need to avenge the victims of the terrorists like the 37 children who were killed in Baghdad and the 49 of your colleagues who were slaughtered.” “May they go to hell,” shouted the soldiers. “To hell they will go,” Allawi replied.
Contrariwise, the Iraqi defense minister told reporters, “We’ve called it Operation Dawn. God willing, it’s going to be a new, happy dawn for the people of Fallujah.”
The American code name for the operation is Phantom Fury. Sounds like a comic book character.
While figures vary considerably as to how many civilians remain in the free-fire zone that is Fallujah, the Pentagon, not surprisingly, low-balls it at 50 to 60,000, and claims, “terrorists in the city are preventing families from leaving Fallujah. According to residents, terrorist plan to use citizens as human shields, then claim they were attacked by friendly forces.” Okay, one, bullshit, two, “friendly forces”?
A couple of recent WaPo article explain how the Iraqi elections will be structured to ensure the “correct” outcome. This one says that there are strict rules governing who can run for the National Assembly. Education, no criminal record, a good reputation, and a number of other vague rules that can be made to disqualify whoever they like. Also, de-Baathification rules, which are very likely to be applied unevenly. And this editorial suggests that a “monster coalition” party list will be hammered out before the elections based on closed-room negotiations in order to forestall any real electoral competition. Read both articles, it’s the details that will ensure elections that might be formally correct but have no democratic aspect to them whatsoever. Also, the Iraqis insisted on letting expats vote, a process which will be highly susceptible to fraud. Also, they just declared 60 days of martial law, renewable. Which is funny, because “Comical” Allawi keeps talking about bringing the rule of law to Fallujah, and martial law is by definition the suspension of ordinary law. And doesn’t martial law imply a military, which Iraq doesn’t really have one of? Unless you count this one:
Can you guess what military objective the boys in green are storming? Yup, the hospital. And here the brave candy-stripers assist what I can only hope are not patients.
And this dethpicable soldier is having way too much fun.
Karl Rove today: “If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal, and the ideal is that marriage ought to be, and should be, a union of a man and a woman.” In other words, gay marriage is hopeless and indecent.
Doug Ireland has translated a Le Monde story about an Iraqi judge who challenged the Allawi clique’s unlawful detention of 110 people, supposedly as Iranian spies, and was fired for his troubles.
The US military has taken over Fallujah’s main hospital (which I believe is its only hospital), not that it matters, since the hospital is on the wrong side of a bridge which the Americans closed. All roads and bridges have been closed, and there are one or two obvious questions the press do not seem to be asking:
- Are any provisions being made to get food to the residents of Fallujah, now that it has been sealed off?
- What happened to the patients at the hospital?
- Fallujan men under 45 were given the option of being arrested if they left the city or being starved, shot at and bombed if they stayed. How many have been arrested, and what’s happening to them?
We’re seeing a curious number of pictures of American soldiers praying before the massacre begins. This sort of thing:
And, um, this:
And there are lovely, godly sentiments expressed by commanders at these gatherings. Colonel Gary Brandl (Marine Corps): “The enemy has a face. It’s Satan’s. He’s in Fallujah and we’re going to destroy him.” And Lt-Gen John F Sattler (ditto): “This is America’s fight. What we’ve added to it is our Iraqi partners. They want to go in and liberate Fallujah. They feel this town’s being held hostage by mugs, thugs, murderers and terrorists.” Mugs? Who does this guy think he is, Edward G. Robinson?
Speaking of imperialist wars, when the Ivory Coast asked France to police a peace deal, I don’t think it had in mind France destroying its entire air force--ok, 2 planes and 5 helicopters, but still the entire Ivorian air force.
As I look for sources of humor and outrage in the next few dark years, I suspect much bloggy goodness will be had from Oklahoma’s new senator, Dr. Tom Coburn, he of the lesbian fetish, sterilizations of under-aged girls, racist ads, belief that black men are genetically inferior, calls for death penalty for abortion doctors, etc. He’s also the guy who complained about all the nudity and bad language in Schindler’s List. These are links to earlier posts which mention him, some of which link to outside articles: link link link link link link.
So when I heard that he’d written a book, I bounded over to my public library and checked it out: Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders into Insiders (2003).
Since I just added the Powell’s link, I should make very clear that I am not recommending that anyone read, much less buy this book. For a start, he doesn’t talk about lesbians in bathrooms or any of that good stuff. Mostly it’s about the budget process.
At the time of the book’s writing, Coburn was out of Congress, having kept his pledge to leave the House after 3 terms. He was a Gingrichite (aka Newtzie), one of the bomb-throwers of the class of 1994. He is inordinately fond of using the word “revolution” for the enterprise that group of ideologues was engaged in, and the book is an attack on R’s for having been too soft and compromising in their pursuit of Newtie’s agenda. Ultimately, he even broke with Gingrich, proving himself more royalist than the king (I was going to write that phrase in the original French, but I believe Ashcroft plans to outlaw any use of French as sedition). He was especially let down when the government shutdown of 1995 was abandoned. The adults in the Republican party came home just as the party was getting good; “Enough is enough,” Bob Dole said.
Coburn wanted the government cut down to size. About the size of a basketball team. He’s one of those for whom every time the federal government spends a dollar, an angel dies. And he believes the reason this doesn’t happen is that we don’t have enough citizen-legislators such as, for example, himself. Instead, Jimmy Stewart goes to Washington and is instantly corrupted, “going native” as he describes it, a phrase more telling than he intends since it derives from white imperialists, smugly confident in their own cultural and moral superiority. Seniority in Congress, i.e., going native, “tends to erode sound judgment and character”. He pathologizes power (and Washington DC), portraying it as either a cancer that consumes morality, or as a drug to which people become addicted. He also likens it, over and over, to the ring in Lord of the Rings. You’d never know that, while he kept his commitment to term-limit himself out of the House, he would soon be running for Senate. And while he did deliver a few babies (he makes a big deal about delivering babies, which he did right through his time in the House; I’m gonna take a wild guess that he’s using it as some sort of metaphor for purity)(he doesn’t mention sterilizing under-age girls and then billing Medicare), he got Bush to appoint him to the AIDS Commission, where he fought against condoms and for abstinence-only sex ed.
While his arguments against pork and fraudulent budgeting practices are legitimate (and obvious), there’s a great gap between the need to eliminate highways-to-nowhere, and dismantling most of the federal government. In fact, the connection between the paucity of uncorrupted congresscritters and his goal of microscopic government is so clear in his own head that he doesn’t bother actually to make the case. His ideal is citizen-legislators whose short exposure to the Ring will allow them to make unpopular decisions, except he won’t acknowledge their unpopularity. Several times he describes these little vignettes in which he explains to old people that they don’t really want Social Security increases at the expense of their grandchildren, and they all go away convinced. Unanimously. And the same when he gave up road funds for his district, and agriculture subsidies. This is a man who still believes, or claims to believe, that the 1994 elections were a mandate to destroy 60 years of social programs, just as Shrub thinks 2004 is a mandate.
Coburn does not play well with others, so I’m not too worried about the damage he might inflict. It’s as likely as not to be inflicted on his own side. And I suspect there’ll be a few filibusters in the future--in 1999 he tried to filibuster in the House, which doesn’t actually have filibusters.
I’ve added a Powell’s Books search box to the right column. I get a commission from any sale that goes through it, so it’s a nice way to support this site while engaging in one of life’s great pleasures, buying books. Shipping free on orders over $50. But don’t neglect your local independent bookstores either. Feel free to email me with any comments, suggestions, jeremiads against my crass commercialism, reminiscences about the early days of the Web when it wasn’t about making a fast buck, it was all about the porn, etc.
The Iraqi “government” declares a state of emergency in most of the country. So what has Iraq been in for the past two years if not a state of emergency?
A story from the new improved Afghanistan: An American adviser to the Afghan finance ministry, Vincent White, made the mistake of vetoing several corrupt contracts. So the police beat the shit out of a male Afghan acquaintance of his, forcing him to say that White had paid him to have sex, a crime that carries a penalty of up to 15 years. He spent 4 weeks in prison before being released. The US embassy did nothing besides give him the names of Afghan lawyers--none would represent him. Why is this story not in any American paper, according to news.google?
A new German company sells do-it-yourself gravestones, on the Ikea model. They’re astonishingly chintzy and only $1,600.
Better start screwing a few together for the people of Fallujah, a city whose name is about to join the rank of place names that have been turned into names of events: Dresden, Vietnam, Guernica, Columbine, Hiroshima, and Intercourse, Pennsylvania.
In perhaps the most pathetic of the post-election pieces on how the D’s should cozy up to “Middle America,” Nicholas Kristof praises Bill Clinton for sacrificing a brain-damaged black prisoner (Kristof doesn’t mention the black part) to his political ambitions in 1992, and urges D’s to do the same by giving up gun control as an issue. In my favorite part, he says D’s should cozy up to religion, and in the very next paragraph says “Pick battles of substance, not symbolism,” by which he means the Confederate flag. Presumably expressing loud obeisance to imaginary gods in the clouds is not about symbolism.
We’ve been hearing a lot about not offending the delicate sensibilities of religious Middle America, and we’ll hear a lot more. I say, in olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now get the fuck over it, Middle America. It’s not 1953 or 1637 anymore and never will be again.
So much of this seems to be pre-emptive self-censorship by wishy-washy liberals like Kristof that I’ve put off posting my “Red states = Red China analogy” for a few days, but here it is. China has been getting its way for years with a “Don’t fuck with us, we’re crazy” stance, which I’ve always thought was mostly put on. Whenever there’s even a hint of acknowledgment that Taiwan exists as an independent nation, which is simply a fact, even down to something as minor as the Taiwanese prime minister catching a connecting flight in a US airport or attending his own college reunion here, there’d be this incredible display of princess-and-the-pea hypersensitivity. Just as San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is now being blamed for Kerry’s defeat because he dared to authorize gay marriages, so timid State Dept diplomats would insist that China not be offended. When Bill Clinton met the Dalai Lama, he didn’t allow pictures to be taken. Ohio and Alabama (to pick 2 states at random) want to be able to go on treating gays as second-class citizens and repress any visible sign of their identities without any criticism from the outside world, just like China does with Tibetans, and want others to do the same, as a sign of concurrence with the values of Middle America/the Middle Kingdom.
(James Wolcott suggests the D’s adopt Kristof’s advice with the slogan “Shoot a fag for Jesus.”)
