Geoff Arnold

'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'

Yes, I know it's from Capitol Hill Blue, but it certainly seems compelling:

Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.

Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.

GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

"I don't give a goddamn," Bush retorted. "I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way."

"Mr. President," one aide in the meeting said. "There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution."

"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face," Bush screamed back. "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"

I've talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution "a goddamned piece of paper."

Posted by geoff2 at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)

Blatant propaganda, part 2

First we had the Bush administration paying US media outlets and journalists to carry propaganda as "news", and giving press credentials to political operatives. Now they're playing the same kind of game in Iraq. From the LA Times: U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press. Money quote: "Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. The stories trumpet the work of U.S. and Iraqi troops, denounce insurgents and tout U.S.-led efforts to rebuild the country. Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as 'Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism,' since the effort began this year. The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military."

And this is how we spread "democratic principles" and "political transparency"?

(Via Stephen Elliott in HuffPo.)

Telling it like it is

The opening of Simon Whitaker's piece "Nowhere to run" in today's Guardian commands attention:

There is a remarkable article in the latest issue of the American Jewish weekly, Forward. It calls for President Bush to be impeached and put on trial 'for misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them'. To describe Iraq as the most foolish war of the last 2,014 years is a sweeping statement, but the writer is well qualified to know.

Drucker and my health insurance

A couple of apparently unrelated things happened earlier this month. First, I went through the annual ritual called Open Enrollment, during which I reviewed all of the optional elements of my Sun benefits (health insurance, dental coverage, health spending accounts, life insurance, and so forth) and selected the coverage that I wanted for the next year. Secondly, Peter Drucker, the man that the Wall Street Journal called "the first philosopher of management", died at the age of 95.

So what's the connection? First, Drucker:

From "Is Executive Pay Excessive?" May 23, 1977: Economically, [the] few very large executive salaries are quite unimportant. Socially, they do enormous damage. They are highly visible and highly publicized. And they are therefore taken as typical, rather than as the extreme exceptions they are.

These few very large salaries are being explained by the "need" to pay the "market price" for executives. But this is nonsense. Every executive knows perfectly well that it is the internal logic of a hierarchical structure that explains them.... Money is a status symbol which defines an executive's place in the corporate hierarchy. And the more levels there are the more pay does the man at the top have to get. This rewards people for creating additional levels of management.... Yet levels of management should be kept to the minimum....

If and when the attack on the "excessive compensation of executives" is launched--and I very much fear that it will come soon--business will complain about the public's "economic illiteracy" and will bemoan the public's "hostility to business." But business will have only itself to blame. It is a business responsibility, but also a business self-interest, to develop a sensible executive compensation structure that portrays economic reality and asserts and codifies the achievement of U.S. business in this century: the steady narrowing of the income gap between the "boss man" and the "working man."

Second, health insurance. One of the providers from which I get to choose is United Health. (It's probably a violation of some company policy for me to say this; on the other hand, the concentration of this industry is such that almost every large company offers something from everybody. And I imagine the information is publicly available.) On November 28th, Forbes reported that the salary of William McGuire, CEO of United Health Group last year was $124.8 million. (He cashed in stock options worth $115 million; he currently owns stock options worth $1 billion.) Just to take an area that I know well, a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist makes around $75 dollars per hour; William McGuire makes $115,384 dollars an hour. What on earth can justify this discrepancy? It certainly isn't "market forces"; I'm pretty sure that the board of UBH could find a perfectly competent CEO that would do the job for a mere $1 million.

As Robert Kuttner put it in today's Boston Globe:

Health insurance is the most vivid case of what political scientist Walter Dean Burnham calls a ''politics of excluded alternatives." Polls consistently show that over two-thirds of Americans want universal tax-supported health insurance. Gallup found that 79 percent of Americans want coverage for all, and 67 percent don't mind if taxes are raised to pay for it. Fully 78 percent are dissatisfied with the present system. Medicare, the one part of the system that is true national health insurance (for seniors) is overwhelmingly popular.

There is no hotter political issue, nor one that strikes closer to home. So, if Americans overwhelmingly want national health insurance, why don't we get it? Three huge reasons: political, fiscal, and jurisdictional.

Politically, the immensely powerful private insurance industry would be displaced by national health insurance. Nearly all corporations would rather suffer with the devil that they know (escalating premiums) than the devil they hate (an expanded role for government)....

Fiscally, a shift to national health insurance would require about $700 billion that currently goes through the private sector in charges to workers and consumers and shifted to the public sector in the form of taxes. The result would be a far more efficient and reliable system, but many voters would see the increased taxes but not appreciate the savings in premium costs, payroll deductions, or out-of-pocket charges.

Jurisdictionally, states like Massachusetts can perhaps make some piecemeal progress, but it's hard to do this right in one state without pushing the system toward further fragmentation. Medicare works because it's a national program.

But let's get back to McGuire's $124 million. Obviously the public wouldn't stand for a government official pulling in that kind of money. Instead, that sum would comfortably cover the premiums for all of the uninsured workers here in Massachusetts. As I blogged recently, it's amazing that so many in American business are opposed to single-payer government-administered health insurance, even though it is demonstrably in their best interests (and the interests of their shareholders and employees) that such a program be adopted. And it's a sad commentary on American politics that no political party is willing to stand up for a policy demanded by two-thirds of the people of the USA.

Sassoon's "Statement Against The Continuation Of The War - July 1917"

My colleague Richard just posted a piece reminding us of Siegfried Sassoon's powerful protest against the exploitation of the honour and duty of soldiers by the ignorant and cynical. He also links to a fascinating CD by David Behrman based on correspondence between his father and Sassoon. I've just ordered the CD; I'll review it when it arrives.

What the hell is "philosophical guidance"?

From CNN.com: "A former top State Department official said Sunday that Vice President Dick Cheney provided the 'philosophical guidance' and 'flexibility' that led to the torture of detainees in U.S. facilities.Retired U.S. Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, told CNN that the practice of torture may be continuing in U.S.-run facilities.'There's no question in my mind that we did. There's no question in my mind that we may be still doing it,' Wilkerson said on CNN's 'Late Edition. 'There's no question in my mind where the philosophical guidance and the flexibility in order to do so originated -- in the vice president of the United States' office,' he said. 'His implementer in this case was [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld and the Defense Department.'"

So what exactly is the process for impeaching the Vice President?

Churchill's verdict on Bush and Blair

In a recent article in the Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan contrasts the values of Bush-and-Blair with those of their frequently-cited* hero, Winston Churchill:

In a telegram on November 21, 1943, Winston Churchill defined a fundamental difference between the Anglo-American way of war and that of our enemies. Churchill wrote: 'The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.'

Perhaps Tony Blair and George W. Bush regard Winston Churchill as a bleeding heart lefty. But what Churchill's view represents is an old, very basic principle of Anglo-American warfare and justice: fight war with ferocity, but never lose your democratic soul.

Yes indeed. And Bush-and-Blair's betrayal of this principle is one of the most tragic aspects of this whole sorry affair. It is depressing to think how easily a demagogue (or a puppet) can push a democratic nation towards totalitarianism....

--
*For example, "Sometimes Churchill will talk back, sometimes he won't, depending upon the stress of the moment, but he is a constant reminder of what a great leader is like." -- Dubya's assessment of Winston Churchill, who has been deceased for 35 years. Washington, DC, July 16, 2001

Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for Tony

So Parliament has handed Tony Blair the black eye that he deserves. From the BBC: "Tony Blair has suffered his first defeat after MPs rejected his plan to allow police to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 90 days. MPs rejected the plans by a bigger than expected margin of 322 votes to 291, before later backing a 28 day limit. The defeat came despite Mr Blair saying MPs had a 'duty' to support the police. Tory leader Michael Howard said Mr Blair should resign after failing to 'carry his party' but Downing Street says it was not a confidence issue."

As Enoch Powell famously observed, "All political careers end in failure." Blair should recognize that this now applies to him. The old Blair would never have allowed himself to get into this situation; one has to wonder whether he actually wanted to be defeated.

Juxtaposition

On the one hand, a row of unsold gas-guzzling behemoths, from One Giant Metaphor, reporting on a "Hummer dealer... in a panic.... year-to-year sales down about 50%,"

On the other hand, a photograph that I took in Hyderabad a couple of weeks ago, of a family of five on a motor scooter:

[N.b. I've grabbed a copy of the Hummer pic because linking to the original was unreliable. Hope that's OK.]

On standing up against those who oppose reason

More and more ordinary people - not pundits, columnists or politicians - are speaking up in defence of the values of the Enlightenment. This time it's Adam Bosworth: "It is time to say that facts are what matter, not faith, that human progress is accomplished through unfettered use of reason and inquiry and tolerance and discussion and debate, not through intolerant and irrational acts of terror or edicts."

(Via Loosely Coupled.)

Alexander Hamilton on Harriet Miers

Andrew Sullivan has dug up a wonderful passage by Alexander Hamilton from the Federalist Papers (no.76). Hamilton's subject: the role of the Senate in confirming Presidential appointments:

"To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity."

Read the whole thing. As Sully points out, "Someone who needs a 'crash course' on constitutional law should not be selected to be a Supreme Court Justice".

Why the Miers nomination is an admission of the failure of conservatism

Here's an excellent piece by Cenk Uygur on why the nomination of Miers represents the recognition that, at some deep level, the American people don't agree with the conservative movement:

"Name one liberal or moderate judge who has ever been rejected from the Supreme Court because they were outside the American mainstream. There aren't any. I suppose a judge could be too liberal for the Supreme Court, but no one has even approached this theoretical barrier. On the other hand, Republican presidents play hide and go seek with their nominee's points of view on a consistent basis because they are afraid Americans will be scared off by what they really believe."

(Via HuffPo.)

Le mot juste on the Miers nomination

Rick Brookhiser in the National Review Online: "It's not as bad as Caligula putting his horse in the Senate."

Not quite. And this from a Bush supporter, apparently having a Brownie moment. After all, we're talking about a woman who has reportedly called George W. Bush "the smartest man she's ever known". This immediately disqualifies her, on grounds of judgement or experience - take your pick.

(Via Sully.)

Facilitating genocide as a foreign policy option?

I guess this is what happens when warmongers get tired and impatient. slacktivist quotes Thomas Friedman (whose NYT op-eds really aren't worth paying for) as arguing that if the Sunnis in Iraq won't "come around... [we] should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind" Most people who advocate the withdrawal of U.S. troops do so in the (perhaps naive) hope that this will reduce the tension and reduce the level of violence. Friedman is the first pundit that I've encountered who seems to advocate civil war and perhaps Rwanda-style genocide as an appropriate way of dealing with recalcitrant Sunnis. Simply amazing.

P.S. Of course with or without Friedman's morally bankrupt ideas, a civil war is probably inevitable.

Jaron Lanier on the structural gotcha for American business

Scanning the HuffPo RSS feeds, I spotted this insightful piece by Jaron Lanier: "I am writing this on a United Airlines flight over the Atlantic. The flight is tense. We had a mechanical delay and United has been having trouble re-routing customers who will miss connections, apparently because it is now understaffed. The major airlines of the richest country in history tend to be bankrupt, and somehow or other that is considered normal."

That much is familiar. But the analysis is slightly different from what you'd find in the WSJ:

American corporations are increasingly functioning like fashion models. Youth matters most.... The main problem for old companies is that if you’ve had a workforce for a long time, the health care and pension bills pile up.... From them... I always hear complaints about a walloping big “Tax-like expense” they have to pay for health care and pensions, a tax that foreign competitors are excused from.... [C]ompanies facing the Tax that dare not speak its name have a harder time thinking in the long term. Toyota would probably not have been able to fund the development of the Prius if it faced the Tax at home in Japan.

Is this what an America in decline will look like? When Google has been around long enough to have a middle aged staff instead of a gorgeous crowd of healthy young people, will investors dump it for a new Googalike that can hire kids again to get out from under health care and pension costs?

The thing that I've always found amazing is that universal health care in the U.S.A. is solidly opposed by the right-wing corporate establishment, even though these are the people who could benefit most from it in the long term through the business efficiencies and flexibility that it would create. But I guess ideology is more powerful than rational self-interest.

A profound sense of loss

Herewith the nostalgic observations of my colleague Robin Wilton on listening to Bill Clinton on the BBC: "This morning I heard a snippet of an interview with Bill Clinton; he was lucid, intelligent and persuasive. Some of his sentences had several linked clauses. He used words like 'profound', 'disproportionately' and 'dislocation', and used them correctly. He coherently related the grim after-effects of Hurricane Katrina to the global geo-political issues of the day."

(I also listened to Clinton: it was an excellent interview. I strongly recommend that you check out the streaming audio/video version.)

During the last presidential election campaign, there was at least one documentary that presented film clips of Bush campaigning for his father and giving coherent speeches which demonstrated a modicum of rhetorical skill. It was suggested that the folksy, semi-dyslexic style that he adopted as Governor of Texas and subsequently was therefore likely to be a mere facade, an act to appeal to voters distrustful of "smart-aleck politicians". The implication was that Bush was smarter than he sounded.

But Bush isn't running for anything now, and even members of his own party are turning on him. If he were capable of giving a speech of the calibre of Clinton, now would be a good time to do it. Maybe it's alcohol, maybe psychoactive medication, or even too many diet sodas. Whatever the reason, the conclusion is inescapable that today Bush is, quite simply, what he appears: a venal, cunning, opportunistic, but ultimately rather stupid man, incapable of reasoning from B to C, let alone describing A, B and C in well-turned sentences.

And I really miss Clinton. He had his faults, but they didn't include stupidity and incompetence. Competence would be nice right now.

The two kinds of big government

Comment by Steve Rundio in the Tomah Journal from Tomah, Wisconsin. Rundio is billed as the sports editor, but for a jock he writes really well about politics.:

There are two types of big government. There's big-government liberalism, in which the government administers broad-based entitlements (Social Security, Medicaid) and provides services collectively that individuals can't purchase on their own (police protection, roads, public parks, etc.). Has this vision suffered from excess and waste? Of course. But it has raised the standard of living for most Americans. The elderly can't buy affordable health insurance on the private market, and most individuals can't purchase their own personal police or fire protection. At the very least, big-government liberalism's heart is in the right place.

There's nothing good about big-government conservatism. It's an iron triangle of politicians, lobbyists and industry wallowing in the spoils of government contracting and favoritism linked to campaign contributions. The recipient of big-government liberalism is likely to be a 90-year-old who can't get out of bed, or a pregnant teen in need of pre-natal care. The recipient of big-government conservatism is a Halliburton executive or someone who lobbies on Halliburton's behalf. The owners of Lenco Industries certainly did well when the $180,000 Lenco BearCat assault vehicle landed in La Crosse.

(Via Sully.)

Buddy, can you spare a dime

What's all this in the Los Angeles Times? "The U.S. will halt construction work on some water and power plants in Iraq because it is running out of money for projects, officials said Wednesday. Security costs have cut into the money available to complete some major infrastructure projects that were started under the $18.4-billion U.S. plan to rebuild Iraq. As a result, the United States is funding only those projects deemed essential by the Iraqi government. [...] Less than half of the U.S. reconstruction money has been spent, but in some sectors, such as electricity and water, security costs have eaten up much of the budget."

Not a good way to impress the Iraqis with American efficiency and win hearts and minds.

The shame of Gretna

Read this account of a group of people (mostly tourists, but including EMS specialists) trying to get out of New Orleans last week:

"As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans."

When the investigations into this shambolic and horrific event take place, they must take account of the screw-ups and abuses at all levels. Yes, of course Bush must fire Michael Brown and fix FEMA, but it's equally important that people like these Gretna sheriffs pay for their crimes. (We're talking jail time here.)

(Via Sully.)

Not refugees but detainees....

Gitmo in Oklahoma? Boing-boing has this Blog account from Oklahoma "FEMA Detainment Camp": "Jesse Jackson was right when he said 'refugees' was not the appropriate word for the poor souls dislocated due to Katrina. But he was wrong about why it is not appropriate. It's not appropriate because they are detainees, not refugees." Frightening. And don't expect any press coverage. Well, maybe that's too pessimistic....

Is David Broder as clueless as Michael Brown?

In the wake of Katrina, most of the media has abandoned the fawning, deferential and sycophantic stance that they'd adopted towards Bush. At first they were inclined to withhold judgement: after all, Bush is known for being slow off the mark. But as one example of cluelessness and insensitivity followed another - the stupidity of the FEMA hack, Bush's awful speech, Condi's Imelda moment, Bush's jokes about Trent Lott's house, his expressions of support for incompetent subordinates - things reached a tipping point. Most of the media joined in the upwelling expression of anger towards Bush: Stop screwing around smirking at the cameras; fire that unqualified loser Michael Brown that you put in charge of FEMA, cancel Cheney's vacation, and all of you roll your sleeves up and get down to work, doing the job we pay you to do!!

As Andrew Sullivan points out in the Sunday Times

"The president’s approval ratings were already in the very low 40s. The tracking poll of his response to the crisis showed discontent rising fast. By Friday, 70% were saying the government had not done enough; and a majority disapproved of the president’s handling of the crisis. At times like this, people normally rally round their president. This time, many are turning on him. And my sense is that this is just the beginning. On Friday the Republican Senator Susan Collins announced her intent to launch an investigation into what went wrong. "

But not all of the media has sensed this trend. Case in point: David Broder in the Washington Post, still drifting in Bush's cloud-cuckoo-land:

"The challenges posed by this natural disaster are in some ways even more difficult than those of the terrorist attack, with anger and frustration now being expressed about the response of governments at all levels. But for a president who believes that actions speak louder than words, this is an advantageous setting."

An "advantageous setting"? A fortunate distraction from Iraq and Plamegate? Sorry, David: when even Fox News is turning on the President, things are not "advantageous". Perhaps, like the head of FEMA, you should pay attention to what's going on in the real world...

[UPDATE] Howard Kurtz has a piece in today's Washington Post commenting on the new-found passion of [some of] the journalists covering Katrina. Money quote:

For once, reporters were acting like concerned citizens, not passive observers. And they were letting their emotions show, whether it was ABC's Robin Roberts choking up while recalling a visit to her mother on the Gulf Coast or CNN's Jeanne Meserve crying as she described the dead and injured she had seen.

Maybe, just maybe, journalism needs to bring more passion to the table -- and not just when cable shows are obsessing on the latest missing white woman.

"Taking all the right steps"

From yesterday's Gawker:

"According to Drudge, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has recently enjoyed a little Broadway entertainment. And Page Six reports that she's also working on her backhand with Monica Seles. So the Gulf Coast has gone all Mad Max, women are being raped in the Superdome, and Rice is enjoying a brief vacation in New York. We wish we were surprised.

What does surprise us: Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we've confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo's Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice's timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, "How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!" Never one to have her fashion choices questioned, Rice had security PHYSICALLY REMOVE the woman"

(Via Salon.)

Please tick box if you know how to make a bomb

I'm glad to see that the bureaucratic mentality that asked me to to declare whether or not I planned to "overthrow the Government of the United States" when I first came to the US is still alive and well. From Harry Mount in New York:

Before Euan Blair took up his job this summer as an intern working for the House of Representatives in Washington, he had to fill out a DS-157 visa form from the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

The DS-157 is a special extra anti-terrorist form that asks Euan to give honest answers to questions like "Do you have any specialised skills or training, including firearms, explosives, nuclear, biological or chemical experience?"

It's a pretty pointless form. If Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein were applying for a visa, they'd hardly tick the box marked "Yes - please explain."

But, in any case, they wouldn't have to.

The form is only for men aged 16-45 wanting an American visa. Saddam Hussein (b. 1937, Iraq) and Osama (b. 1957, Saudi Arabia) don't have to go through this extra level of American security. Euan Blair (b. 1984, England) and I (b. 1971, England) do.

[...]

Issuing precise, catch-all prohibitions on the sort of post you're allowed to send, or precise age ranges for extra visas, just means that terrorists work out ways of getting round the restrictions. They develop 15-ounce letter bombs that you are allowed to send by plane. They train adolescents and geriatrics to become suicide bombers.

If [you are going after] terrorists, you catch them by going to war with them abroad, or by using intelligence to track them down in your own country. You do not catch them or kill them by restricting what they send through the post or what diplomatic forms they fill out.

(From today's Expat.telegraph, a newsletter that I subscribe to containing a few stories and many ads that might be of interest to expat Brits around the world.)

Stupidest op-ed piece in memory?

One of the things about travelling is that you often wind up reading newspapers that you don't normally encounter. Thus it was that when I came down to breakfast at my hotel in Louisville, Colorado, the only newspaper available was MacPaper USA Today. I flipped to the op-ed page, and came across a spectacularly stupid piece by Peter Schweizer entitled Strategies or diversions? His thesis was that Bush's strategy of invading Iraq rather than concentrating on al-Qaeda should be compared to Roosevelt's decision to prioritize the defeat of Germany over that of Japan.

"With a logic that Bush would find familiar, FDR was lambasted by his critics for his WWII military strategy of defeating Germany first before focusing on Japan. They considered Germany a diversion. Wasn't it Japan and not Germany that had attacked us at Pearl Harbor, asked Sens. Arthur Vandenberg and A.B. Chandler? One foreign minister called the idea 'suicidal heresy'."

The amazing thing is that he extends this argument over twelve paragraphs without once mentioning the fact that Hitler's Germany was already engaged in bloody conflict all across Europe, and that as soon as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. Let's see....

• FDR: faced with two foes, both of which have declared war, both of which are killing Americans and allies: chooses a balanced, albeit controversial, strategy to defeat both.
• GWB: faced with an amorphous non-state opponent that has attacked the US, makes an incomplete stab at one related group (the Taleban in Afghanistan), and then invades another country (Iraq) that posed no threat to the US and had not been involved in the attack

Yup, that sounds comparable to me [sarcasm alert]. This Schweizer guy makes it sound as if Germany was peacefully minding its own business, leaving all of its neighbors alone, and when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt suddenly took it into his head to put Tojo on the back-burner and lash out at Germany. What utter bollocks! Does the Hoover Institution really pay this idiot to write?

So passes a courageous, red-headed maverick who spoke truth to power

The Guardian, BBC and others are reporting that: "former Cabinet minister Robin Cook, 59, has died after collapsing while hill walking in north-west Scotland." Apparently he was fell-walking with his wife Gaynor near the summit of Ben Stack, and he had a heart attack which led to a severe fall; it took some time for rescue services to reach him.

Robin Cook was the most senior politician in Britain or the US to take a principled stand against the invasion of Iraq. I blogged about his book, Point of Departure, last year. It's still essential reading. What a great loss to British politics.

(I note that Jack Straw, John Prescott, Gordon Brown, David Blunkett and others have issued statements expressing sympathy and appreciation for Cook's contributions. But there's nothing from Tony Blair yet.)

Political shellscripting

Read Craig's blog (including comments). What a kick-ass community creation! (Even better if the entire CVS history was available, Craig....) Now buy the t-shirt. W00t!

Blair's "naive, all-consuming self-belief"

Paul Routledge has an excellent opinion piece in today's Daily Mirror. (Things have come to a pretty pass when the Daily Mirror is a more reliable source than the New York Times.) The question: why is Tony Blair so consistent in shooting himself in the foot?

Just when it had become possible to be optimistic after the terrible events of 7/7, the Prime Minister... picked a needless argument, not just with his own security services, but with the British people - claiming that the London bombings have nothing to do with Iraq. This attitude is so manifestly absurd that it was immediately repudiated by two thirds of voters in an opinion poll. The Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre also gave the lie, reporting: 'Events in Iraq are continuing to act as a motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK.' These are Blair's own spooks, whose findings presumably go across his desk in Number Ten....

Nobody, certainly not me, says that the war in Iraq is the sole, direct and immediate cause of 7/7. It wasn't. Nor is it any form of justification. But it is pointless to pretend that this conflict has not helped to create a climate in which it is easier for hard-line Muslim clerics to corrupt young minds and for terrorist godfathers to recruit suicide bombers.

So why does Blair do this, squandering good-will and stirring up trouble for himself? Routledge argues that the cause is his "naive, all-consuming self-belief", and cites the damning verdict of Lord Roy Hattersley, the former deputy Labour leader

'The ultimate justification for the war in Iraq - when it was no longer possible to pretend that weapons of mass destruction were only 45 minutes away - was that Blair's conscience allowed no other course of action."

(Driving in to work this morning, I heard John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister repeating Blair's absurd "nothing to do with Iraq" claims. Maybe it's a virus - Howard is visiting Blair, and had just visited Bush.)

Iraq and Iran... "irony" doesn't even begin to capture this.

Juan Cole has a piece in Salon entitled The Iraq war is over, and the winner is... Iran, in which he discusses the implications of this week's love-in between Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari (accompanied by eight cabinet ministers) and the Iranian leadership, including Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. I wonder how the neocons felt about al-Jaafari laying a wreath on the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran, not to mention all of the elaborate plans for joint oil projects, food shipments, electricity supply, and so forth. And how would the American voters feel about the fact that Iran will be providing a billion dollars in foreign aid to Iraq, to go along with the gazillions that the US taxpayer is contributing. (Of course the Iranian aid is unlikely to be recycled through American contractors.)

Money quote:

More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat the Sunni guerrillas and put the Iraqi economy right, a task the Americans have proved unable to accomplish. And Iran will still be Iraq's neighbor long after the fickle American political class has switched its focus to some other global hot spot.

Cause, effect, and response

Over the last few days we've had to endure repeated expressions of incredulity by politicians and pundits about Islamism and the motivations of the London suicide bombers. Politicians such as Blair and Straw, op-ed writers like Cathy Young in today's Boston Globe, and countless others reject the notion that there is any connection between Western policy - especially recent military actions such as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq - and the risk of terrorism.

Now on one level, such claims are trivially absurd. Simply consider the alternative: we are supposed to believe that terrorists who are clearly aligned with certain ideological groups such as al-Qaeda are entirely indifferent to the events that are held up by these groups as emblematic of their conflict. If there is no connection, why were New York, Madrid and London bombed, rather than, say, Paris, Beijing and Stockholm? Coincidence? A flip of the coin? A mere whim, unconnected to any historical reality? Of course not.

The reason for such illogic and denial is not hard to see. People confuse causality with responsibility, and responsibility with blame. There is no time to explore the complicated, messy nature of the real world: everything must be brought down to a simply dichotomy. Thus for Cathy Young, quoting a New York resident:

When asked if he believed New York would be attacked again, he replied in the affirmative. Why? "Because the US is hated now more than ever. Even some of our allies sort of hate us." And why is that? "We invaded Iraq, which has never attacked us or declared war on us." In other words: If we're attacked again, it will be our fault.

The non-sequitur is breathtaking: a reasonable contributing cause is instantly transformed by Young into responsibility; "our fault" (and, implicitly, nobody else's). And since this conclusion is (correctly) rejected, the original causal connection must be wrong! And the final twist: rather than recognizing her own muddled thinking, Young treats this as an example of "A moral muddle on the left". This is pretty pathetic stuff from an editor of Reason magazine....

So where can we turn to for reasonable analysis, with logic and historical context? Johann Hari has two excellent pieces in the Independent which deserve your attention. First, cause and effect:: it all goes back to the way the Western powers carved up the Middle East, from Versailles to Yalta.

The reasoning of the perpetrators is explained in the 2001 book Knights Under the Prophet's Banner by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man Bin Laden describes as his 'mentor'. Into the 1990s, the Islamists became frustrated that they could not rally the 'Muslim masses' to overthrow their local tyrants. So they decided to strike the 'big enemy' - Western states - to re-energise Wahhabi jihadism and precipitate revolutions throughout the Middle East.

So Islamism is more a response to the decisions of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt than of Bush and Blair. Last Thursday was not the price for Afghanistan and Iraq; it was the price of decades of trading oil for tyranny without any regard to the consequences. These recent wars may have been useful propaganda tools for the jihadists, but saying they were their primary motivations does not match the evidence.

So much for the origins of the conflict: what about the response? In the piece just quoted, Hari considers, and dismisses, the simple solution: to give Bin Laden what he wants: concede Wahhabi control over all of historical Islam. As he points out, where would that end? Turkey? Spain? Kosovo? Much of India? Simplistic thinking, whether of military victory or defeatism, must be rejected.

In a follow-up piece last Friday, Hari argues for an alternative approach: a slower, messier, more complicated strategy. It has two key elements: engaging Muslim women, and eliminating Western dependence on Middle Eastern oil. On Muslim women:

One of the central tenets of [Wahhabism] is the inherent inferiority and weakness of women. Every jihadist I have ever met - from Gaza to Finsbury Park - has been a fierce ball of misogyny and sexual repression.... The best way to undermine the confidence and beliefs of jihadists is to trigger a rebellion of Muslim women, their mothers and sisters and daughters. Where Muslim women are free to fight back against jihadists, they are already showing incredible tenacity and intellectual force.

And on dependency:

I have (reluctantly) begun to think that, until we are no longer dependent on Middle Eastern oil, no amount of pressure will make our governments support real democracy and women's rights in the region. The risk of another 1973-style oil-price shock will mean they will always support the "stability" of control over the gamble of proper democracy, no matter how enthusiastically the methods of control are rebranded or relaxed. Until we stop being addicted to the petrol and the status quo in the Middle East, we are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

How the British bombers slipped through the net: Bush admin incompetence?

AMERICAblog has a lengthy piece about how the British attempted to prevent an Al Qaeda bomb plot against London, and why they failed:

"ABC News just reported that the British authorities say they have evidence that the London attacks last week were an operation planned by Al Qaeda for the last two years. This was an operation the Brits thought they caught and stopped in time, but they were wrong. The piece of the puzzle ABC missed is that this is an operation the Bush administration helped botch last year."

This is essential - and infuriating - reading. It's well documented, not conspiracy theory stuff. The Bush team inadvertantly* caused the name of a "mole" in Al Qaeda to become public, and...

"The appearance of Khan's name in the New York Times on August 2 caused the British to have to swoop down on the London al-Qaeda cell to which he was speaking. As it was, 5 of them heard about Khan's arrest and immediately fled. The British got 13, but it was early in their investigation and they had to let 5 go or charge them with minor offences".

And the British authorities have now connected this group with last week's bombing.

--
* Let's be charitable.

Uncomfortable truths

slacktivist went to see Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and was intrigued to find that many conservative pundits are interpreting it as an anti-American diatribe. But as he points out, H. G. Wells wrote the original novel as a commentary on the colonialism of his day. He was trying to get his readers to understand what it might have been like for aboriginal peoples to be confronted by the overwhelming and inexorable fire-power of Britain and the other European powers.

"These conservative film critic wannabes want a story to follow the moral outline of the old comics code or of Job's foolish friend Bildad. They want the good guys to be rewarded for their virtue and the bad guys to be punished for their vice. But Wells' story isn't about morality, it's about power. His Martian invaders have bigger, better weapons so they win and we lose. Period.

This, I think, is what the rightwing critics find most threatening in Wells' story and Spielberg's film. It vividly illustrates that might and right are not the same thing, that military superiority is not evidence of superior virtue. If the illustration of such a basic truth can now be interpreted as an 'anti-American' political statement, that is neither Wells' nor Spielberg's fault."

How quickly they forget

Sully admits, grudgingly, "Many reasonable people argue that the Iraq invasion made matters worse, not better in the short term. Let's concede that, for the sake of argument. But deep down, how do we drain the swamp of Islamo-fascism?" How about the way that many of us proposed back in 2002-2003 while Sully was infatuated with Baghdad? Afghanistan and Palestine. Nail al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for which we had worldwide support, and really rebuild Afghanistan (thus demonstrating that we were serious about this not being a crusade). Meanwhile pull a Bush I on Israel and force through a real solution to the West Bank and Gaza. With all of that going on, it's really doubtful that Saddam would have held out for more than a year or two....

And why on earth does Sully raise the spectre of Saddam helping al-Qaeda? Has he learned nothing? Is his argument so weak that he has to grasp at such totally discredited straws?

Of coure all of this is purely hypothetical, and presumes a basic competence in policy execution which is obviously absent in Bush's team of bozos. In hindsight, since they were going to screw things up whatever they did, it would have been better if they'd done as little as possible to exacerbate the situation.

Standing together? It's not what you think

Americans have been falling over themselves to spin the London bombings into arguments for Bush's policies; to couple 9/11 with 7/7 and present America and Britain as joined at the hip. Here's Bush: "Just as America and Great Britain stood together to defeat the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, we now stand together against the murderous ideologies of the 21st century." But apparently "standing together" is for politicians, not the military. Yahoo! reports:

All 12,000 members of the U.S. Air Force stationed in Britain have been banned from visiting London because of last week's bombings.... A U.S. spokeswoman was quoted as saying that military staff were not allowed to go anywhere inside the M25 orbital motorway belt surrounding the capital until further notice, "because the security of our people is our top concern."

"Family members who are U.S. civilians and are not subject to orders are also being encouraged to stay away from London," the spokeswoman, Cindy Dorfner, was quoted as saying.

The response of the British media was appropriately caustic. The Daily Mail said it best: "It was business as usual in brave and resilient London yesterday -- though not if you were a member of the world's most powerful military machine."

I wonder how New Yorkers would have reacted if, after 9/11, the U.S. Air Force had banned all visits to the Big Apple because it was too dangerous. They have a legendary capacity for invective; I imagine that "chickenhawk" would have been the least of the epithets...

UPDATE: According to the Guardian, the ban has now been lifted - but not before it had disrupted U.S. participation in various ceremonies commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War 2.

Some of the most incredulous comments came from Thomas Conlon, the UK director of American Citizens Abroad:

"These same people who are being restricted from London are being flown into Baghdad," he said. "If they're going into Baghdad, I can't imagine why they aren't allowed to go into London."

He said he estimated that around 80% of Britain's 250,000 expat Americans lived in London. "I'm surprised at the military that they would do this," he added. "If you go to the city, the American expats are all back at work now."

Indeed. But they're doing really important stuff, like making money. Any comments from the Pentagon about this stupid decision?

On American coverage of London

I like astute observers like James Wolcott who have the knack of capturing an idea that has been hovering on the edge of my consciousness and hauling it out into the spotlight. Case in point, apropos of the US coverage on London in the aftermath of Thursday's terrorist attack:

"The curious thing is that so many of the rightward bloggers and Fox Newswers who are hailing the Brits for their quiet stoicism and pluck don't seem to realize they're issuing an implicit rebuke to themselves and their fellow Americans. They're saying, in effect, 'You've got to admire the Brits for showing calm and quiet perserverence after these explosions--they don't get all hysterical, overdramatic, and overreactive the way we Americans do.' They don't seem to realize the example shown by Londoners might be a lesson to them, a model they might follow instead of playing laptop Pattons at full volume every time they feel a rousing post coming on."

Déjà bloody vu

My reactions on hearing about today's bombings in London:

• "Oh, no - not again."

• An almost visceral sensation of being transported back to 1976, to Platform 3 at Baker Street Station, waiting for a Metropolitan Line train, seeing a momentarily unattended bag, and being convinced that it was another IRA bomb. (It wasn't. But to this day I scan for unattended packages or bags in trains, buses, and public spaces, as a matter of deep habit.)

• Are my colleagues at SunUK all right? (So far the answer seems to be yes.)

• Thinking how stupid Bush's "We'll fight them in Iraq so we don't have to fight them at home" sounds now.

• A deep satisfaction that the cricket match between England and Australia went on without a hiccup. And England won by nine wickets: Australia 219-7, England 220-1 in 46 overs.

• A strong impulse to jump on a plane to Heathrow. (I guess that removes any doubt about where I think of as home.)

• Hollow laughter at hearing a survivor explain that "nobody in my carriage panicked when we heard the explosion and saw the smoke, because we assumed that it was just another technical malfunction."

• Reading Tim Bray's piece (linked from Chris's), and remembering a group counselling session after 9/11 when I was shouted down for saying that I thought we needed to understand why people do these things better than we do. We still need to.

• Trying to imagine what it would be like to pack your briefcase (removing any unnecessary weight), get an extra bottle of water from the vending machine, and prepare to leave work in the City and walk five, eight, or ten miles home. And just doing it, without any fuss.

The Economist reaches a nadir

Here in Massachusetts the debate about gay marriage is proceeding in a remarkably restrained, civil, and thoughtful manner, in spite of the posturing of Mitt Romney. (He has no credibility, in part because everyone knows he's just pandering to the various groups that he needs to make a run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008.) But as Gene Stone writes at The Huffington Post, that doesn't stop people from trying to stir the pot: "the right-wing British newsweekly, The Economist, is running a piece this week called 'The Slippery Slope to Bestiality.' (Now there's a headline designed to placate all sides...)" Stone is right; it's a pretty disgusting piece. I've subscribed to the Economist for most of the last 30 years, and I can remember when they were a respectable, fairly non-partisan journal of economic record. They used to be the scourge of dissembling politicians of all stripes, and no-one would have described them as "right-wing". But as I noted early last year, those days are gone: the Economist may still have the best writers, but it has lost its soul.

As Stone suggested, I just sent a letter to the editor of the Economist. (If you're a subscriber, I urge you to do the same.) Since I have no confidence that they'll publish it, I reproduce it here:

Subject: Romney, bestiality, and bartenders.
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 12:22:50 -0400
To: letters@economist.com

Your story on Mitt Romney's exploitation of the gay marriage issue was shameful. From the extravagant title to the closing sentence, you seemed determined to use extreme viewpoints to leave the impression that Romney is a moderate on this issue. By quoting those who "claim that it could open the door to legalised unions with horses" and Bob Pitko's paean to rampant promiscuity, you ignore the majority of Massachusetts' residents who are wrestling with this question. Why would you seek to trivialise their thoughtful debate?

Your correspondent missed the point that on this subject Romney is widely seen as irrelevant, because of his blatant pandering in advance of his run for the Republican nomination. Remember that Massachusetts is fundamentally a Democrat state; we elect Republican governors simply to keep the legislature in check, not because we like them.

This was well below the standard I've come to expect of the Economist over the 30 years I've been reading it.

Geoff Arnold
[address deleted]
[expat Brit, resident in the USA since 1981]

Who has the most interesting politics?

By "interesting" I don't mean "reasonable", "rational", "fair", "representative", "democratic", or (heaven forbid) "intellectually rigorous". No, I mean, where do political rubber-neckers go to gawk, as they might at a train wreck or a runaway moose? Time and again it seems to come back to one place: Texas. Check out Seriously Kinky from the Dallas Observer: "This Texas Jewboy wants to be the next governor of Texas, and if you think he's kidding, the joke may be on you." You couldn't make this stuff up. Screaming Lord Sutch, move over. (OK, he's dead, I know.)

(Via GeneBob.)

Hegel's bluff

On a mailing list to which I subscribe*, an argument debate was developing about possible Supreme Court nominees. Nothing unusual about that; it happens everywhere. As on many other lists, the views of most of the participants were fairly predictable and a couple of the more vocal members were staking out their positions. Suddenly another occasional contributor to these food-fights chimed in with the immortal words, "Actually, I see you 2 as opposites sides of the same coin called 'political extremism'".

Now this pushed one of my buttons: the sloppy assumption that the right answer to any question must lie in the middle. Historically it's a really dubious stance - how would one apply it to slavery, for instance, or voting rights? Intellectually it's just plain lazy: a way of positioning oneself as moderate, and therefore right, without actually having to do any of the heavy lifting of working out a real argument.

Slacktivist wrote about this back in 2002 (and again recently):

The middle-path-between-extremes-must-be-right rationale is enormously appealing. But it’s helpful to state it more plainly as a logical argument:
1. Everyone thinks I’m wrong.
therefore
2. I am right.
It’s possible, of course, that statements 1 and 2 are both true, but the “therefore” does not follow. Let’s try a more charitable form of the argument:
1. People who are wrong think I’m wrong,
therefore
2. I am right.
Again, it could be true, but it doesn’t necessarily follow (and you haven’t, in fact, proven that the others are wrong). That magical “therefore” can be a convenient way of justifying your position without any sort of principled rationale.

Staking out a coherent, principled position is a lot of hard work. So is trying to understand and respond to the principles and arguments of your opponents. So why bother with all that?

Instead, just find someone seated to your right and label them “thesis.” Then turn to someone seated to your left and label them “antithesis.” Bingo! That makes you “synthesis” – the inevitable and uncontestable culmination of all right-thinking on the subject. Anyone who disagrees with you now is swept into the dustbin of history as a misguided extremist. All done simply without all that belabored appeal to argument, principle or fact.

I call this maneuver “Hegel’s bluff.”

The astute observer will spot this manoeuvre at work all over the place.

--
* Names withheld, since nobody's given me permission to drag this private debate into the blogosphere, and it would be unfair to assume that any statements were intended as carefully considered and defensible positions.

Biblical literalism, Constitutional "original intent": it's all the same thing

I was reading Slacktivist this evening and came across a piece that contained a simple idea that I had never thought about. (It seems so obvious now that I wonder if I'm the only one who hasn't got it.) Put simply: religious conservatives and political conservatives are both obsessed with the primacy of authority over reason. Their sacred texts must never be subjected to reasoned interpretation, because then they cease to be magical tokens of authority.

Let me quote the author, Fred Clark:

At the FRC's "Justice Sunday"... clergy and religious leaders... railed against any judge who dared speak of a "living Constitution"...

[they cited] a Supreme Court ruling barring the execution of the developmentally disabled. That decision was based, in part, on evolving community standards, and that idea -- the evolution, or progress, or development of moral understanding -- is what these religious leaders find dangerous and terrifying. From their perspective, community standards have been devolving ever since Mt. Sinai. The idea that the Constitution, or any revered text, might be read differently over time due to evolving community standards is the very idea these folks have been fighting against for the past century.

This is simply a continuation in a new arena of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the early 20th century. The fundamentalist "battle for the Bible" has escalated to include the battle over another sacred text: the U.S. Constitution. The terms of this battle are exactly the same. So too is the underlying motivation. It's all about control. A "living Constitution" threatens that control as surely as the living word of the Bible.

A superficial reaction would be to assume that the fundamentalists of both types adopt this stance - authority instead of reason - because they are incapable of defending their positions rationally and reasonably.* A more nuanced view is that capability has nothing to do with it: conservatives are temperamentally drawn to arguments from authority. (This is perhaps the fundamental distinction between the conservative and liberal worldview, although many conservative intellectuals might disagree.) And finally a cynical view is that conservative leaders - intellectual, organizational - adopt this stance simply because it is a path to power, to command and control the mass of people. Demagogues have always known the power that comes from unshakable conviction coupled with unquestionable authority.

--
* The last thing a Biblical fundamentalist wants is to be dragged into a debate about why Leviticus is authoritative about homosexuality but not shellfish, let alone slavery and mixed fibres.

One can dream....

Daily Kos on Karl Rove on Plame....

Riverbend nails it as usual

The latest posting to Baghdad Burning about Bush's recent speech is essential reading. Money quote - first Bush, then Riverbend:

“We continued our efforts to help them rebuild their country. Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard and rebuilding while a country is at war is even harder."

Three decades of tyranny isn’t what bombed and burned buildings to the ground. It isn’t three decades of tyranny that destroyed the infrastructure with such things as “Shock and Awe” and various other tactics. Though he fails to mention it, prior to the war, we didn’t have sewage overflowing in the streets like we do now, and water cut off for days and days at a time. We certainly had more than the 8 hours of electricity daily. In several areas they aren’t even getting that much.

Remember what Tip O'Neill said: All politics is local. Bush can blather on about 9/11 and freedom and terrorists and 9/11 and democracy and 9/11 and Bin Laden all he wants; to people in Iraq that don't have fresh water or electricity to run the air conditioners when the temperature goes over 100F, it's simple: "Fix this stuff or get the fuck out of our country and let us fix it!".

Were there subtitles?

Pressure of work meant that I missed Bush's televised speech on Iraq, so I was forced to rely on the transcript and the pronouncements of the pundits to determine what he said. And that's a pity, because I'm sure I missed something - a subtitle, or an ad-lib that wasn't captured in the transcript. How else can one explain the following juxtaposition?

First, Bush promised that "If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job." So the troop levels are a matter of military judgment, right? And since quite a few officers have been saying that they don't have enough troops....

But wait. The President then said "Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever – when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave." Huh? So now we can't send more troops because that would undermine the strategy and send the wrong message? So it's a political decision then.

Well, no. Maybe Bush realized that he was speaking in front of a military audience, because he later said, "As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters – the sober judgment of our military leaders."

So which is it? Did they explain in the subtitles that I wasn't there to see? Or did the President manage to flip and then flop in the course of a single speech? Inquiring minds, etcetera...

Michael Shermer channels the Intelligent Designer

Check out Michael Shermer's delightful creation myth parody over at the Huffington Post: all the way from:

"In the beginning - specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon - out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

to a satisfying conclusion:

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.
By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.

The scary thing is that there are people out there that might take it seriously....

Reality TV

According to today's Guardian:

Channel 4 has teamed up with the award-winning film director Michael Winterbottom to make a docu-drama about three British Muslims who were incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay as "enemy combatants". The Road to Guantánamo will tell the story of the so-called "Tipton Three", who were released without charge from the US government's Camp X-Ray prison last spring after two years in captivity.

(I wonder if it will be shown on US TV? PBS seems increasingly unlikely; maybe HBO.)

So long, 14th Amendment! Welcome to Scalia's two-tier USA

Over at Balkinization, Jack Balkin discusses Scalia's uncompromising dissent in McCreary County v. ACLU, the courtroom 10 commandments case:

Scalia forthrightly explains that the Establishment Clause is not about preserving neutrality between religion and non-religion. It is not even about neutrality among religions. Rather, it requires neutrality among monotheistic religions that believe in a personal God who cares about and who intervenes in the affairs of humankind, and in particular, among Christianity (and its various sects), Judaism, and Islam.

Quite apart from its viciously divisive tone, Scalia's argument displays remarkable ignorance. For example, he asserts that "With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our Nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists". Yet the phrase "believers in unconcerned deities" clearly describes deists, a category that included many of the framers of the Constitution.

Balkin's analysis is much more detailed than my brief note. Among other things, he dissects the curious pretzel logic that Scalia employs in including Jews and Moslems. The (scathing) bottom line: "Justice Scalia's tradition of establishment of monotheism is, like so many other traditions, an invented tradition which he has made up to produce an outcome that he politically prefers."

Highly recommended.

Santorum on Catholic clergy sex abuse: it's all because of liberals....

In his attempt to beat out Karl Rove for the title of Most Shameless Fabricator of Guilt by Association, Senator Rick Santorum explains the origins of child molestation by Roman Catholic priests in Catholic Online: "It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning 'private' moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."

(Via Sully. But Josh thinks Santorum first said this back in 2002.)

UPDATE: Sullivan received a great email from a reader in the Republic of Ireland which emphasizes the sheer stupidity of Santorum's attempt to link priestly pedophilia with liberalism:

99% of schools were Catholic, 90% of the population were weekly mass goers and monthly confession was the norm for the majority. Divorce was banned by the constitution. There was no “plague of cultural liberalism”; there was no liberalism at all! It was almost a perfect Catholic State. Yet the physical and sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy was rampant. Indeed it has been the exposure of these crimes that has revolutionized Irish society in the course of 10 years.

The world is watching

Now here's an interesting idea: a website devoted to foreign media coverage of the U.S.A. It includes English language original material as well as translated stories. I think I'm going to add WatchingAmerica's RSS feed to those that I monitor via NetNewsWire.

"US views of international law vary...."

Juan Cole posts a lengthy analysis of the latest story in the London Times about US and British intentions concerning Iraq.

"US views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community. Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful. We would regard the use of force against Iraq, or any other state, as lawful if exercised in the right of individual or collective self-defence, if carried out to avert an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, or authorised by the UN Security Council."

Hence the need for extensive PR work:

"Time will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein. There would also need to be a substantial effort to secure the support of Parliament. An information campaign will be needed which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign designed to influence Saddam Hussein, the Islamic World and the wider international community. This will need to give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD, and the legal justification for action."

The bottom line: the British government had agreed to support regime change, knew that this was contrary to international law, and was prepared to engage in a PR campaign to convince people that there was justification for the war. And all of this time Bush and Blair were publicly claiming that they were doing everything in their power to avoid war. The documents prove that they were lying. Even if you supported the war, you should be angry about that.

UPDATE: There's an excellent summary, and a list of links to blogs discussing this further, at Freiheit und Wissen. Following one link, Stephen Bates concludes: "Think this is not much? I speak as one who lived through Watergate: at a comparable point in that story, it didn't seem like much, either. But this is moving much, much faster. Pass the popcorn..." (Thanks Majikthise.)

Did someone say "theocracy"?

The Indianapolis Star is reporting that: "An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge's unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to 'non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals.' The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth. Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple's divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion."

What's really bizarre is that Bradford normally hears only criminal cases. Apparently he chose to get involved in this domestic matter because he read a "confidential report" (yeah, right) from a counseling bureau. "'There is a discrepancy between Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones' lifestyle and the belief system adhered to by the parochial school. . . . Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon (the boy) as he ages,' the bureau said in its report." So we're not just dealing with a constitutionally-challenged judge....

Cultural dissonance

While the U.S.A. is getting its knickers in a twist over gay marriage, children's TV depicting a kid with "two mommies", and books by gay authors, DER SPIEGEL is reporting that "there is a very real possibility that Germany's next government will be a coalition between a woman -- who will likely become Germany's first woman chancellor -- and a gay man". Right on!

Munich 2.0

A less sanguine, and probably realistic, assessment of the filibuster compromise....

(Via Majikthise.)

A conservative admission over the filibuster issue

Professor Stephen Bainbridge (a law professor at UCLA) points out, correctly, that "The filibuster is a profoundly conservative tool. It slows change by allowing a resolute minority to delay - to stand athwart history shouting stop. It ensures that change is driven not 'merely by temporary advantage or popularity' but by a substantial majority." That, certainly, is conservatism as I understood it - the conservatism of Burke (who would probably have felt that today's neoconservatives have more in common with Jacobins than with true conservatism).

But Bainbridge's key point is this: "BTW, any honest conservative must admit that the only reason we're having this debate over filibusters is because of Orin Hatch's changes to the Judiciary Committee rules and procedures on matters like blue slips, hearings, and so on, which deprived the Democrats of the tactics that the GOP used to bottle up a lot of Clinton nominees in committee."

Of coure this merely provokes the hard right into accusing him of being a traitor and allying himself with "Demo-Rats". Yet another example of what Andrew Sullivan has described as the tension between "Conservatives of doubt" and "Conservatives of faith".

(Via Sully - to whom I offer best wishes - see Me and my virus.)

Selective quotation

As I was finishing up my last blog entry, I decided to link the final word to Pastor Niemöller's famous "First they came..." quotation. And I stumbled across a page on Niemöller at Liverpool Community College which not only gives the quotation but points out the revealing way in which people have misquoted it over the years - not just casually, but in speeches, and even in memorial inscriptions.

Everbody loves to quote Martin Niemöller’s lines about moral failure in the face of the Holocaust: 'First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.'

But interestingly, people use the quotation to imply different meanings – even altering it to suit their purpose. When Time magazine used the quotation, they moved the Jews to the first place and dropped both the communists and the social democrats. American Vice-President Al Gore likes to quote the lines, but drops the trade unionists for good measure. Gore and Time also added Roman Catholics, who weren't on Niemöller's list at all. In the heavily Catholic city of Boston, Catholics were added to the quotation inscribed on its Holocaust memorial. The US Holocaust Museum drops the Communists but not the Social Democrats; other versions have added homosexuals.

What could make Niemöller's point more eloquently than this selectivity? UPDATE Wikipedia gives the original German text and some of the variations.

Establishment clause? Never heard of it

Here's a press release from the mayor of Lebanon, Tennessee. Apparently we should "regardless of religion... come together as Christians". Note also that "tolerance" is singled out as evil....

"Man has achieved highs and suffered lows during our history of struggling with the wiles of Satan in Satan's quest for our souls.... When our only recourse was to have a savior, God sent us Jesus....tolerance by Christians has caused our nation to slide further and further away from God.... Let us call upon the Lord together by gathering on the National Day of Prayer.... We do this when we, regardless of religion, sing and pray together calling upon God to intervene and forgive our sin and heal our land. For one hour, surely we can leave the signs on the buildings and come together as Christians"

Coincidentally, I read that "cheerful piece of religious propaganda", as Andrew Sullivan calls it, just after I'd finished an article which provided the perfect context for it. In the May 2005 edition of Harper's Magazine, there's a piece by Chris Hedges called "Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters". After a thoroughly depressing account of the annual convention of the NRB, he concludes with a personal recollection:

"I can't help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the 'Christian fascists'. He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance."

Exactly. Today, Lebanon, Tennessee and Colorado Springs. Tomorrow?

(All links and emphases are mine.)

Sullivan on religion and politics

Following his thoughtful piece in The New Republic on faith and conservatism, Andrew Sullivan has been responding to some of his critics. Here's the core of his argument, which has nothing to do with right and left, and everything to do with how we live together. Quoted at length, because it deserves it:

"A conservative of doubt" [or indeed any sincere person - c'mon, Andrew] "may believe that he has a very clear grasp on moral truth. He may believe he is in the grip of divine revelation. He may believe he is so brilliant that he has solved the riddle of truth for all time. But he is also aware that he is not the only one on the planet, that others may have equally certain views of the truth, and that turning politics into a place where one eternal truth is pitted against another is a recipe for civil war and social conflict. The result would be a religious war.... Avoiding this kind of conflict was the crux of the liberal state and of the American founding. It requires bracketing your own moral truth in favor of political peace and pluralism. This is a big sacrifice, as Hobbes and Locke and the American founders fully understood. It may even, as Nietzsche suspected, sap religious faith of much of its power. But they were prepared to make it."

Keeping abortion rare

On one of the mailing lists to which I subscribe, the (semi-annual) abortion debate reared its head, and one participant asked, rather aggressively, why people wanted abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare". Why "rare", he wondered. If it's not immoral.... This pushed a button for me, and I replied as follows:

Because not all issues are simple dichotomies: yes/no, black/white, good/bad. One of the main causes of conflict around social issues, issues of conscience, moral issues in general is that there are some people (often the loudest) who refuse to recognize this.

Everybody except for the sociopath or the simpleton has personal opinions that conflict with one another. Aggregate people into a community, into a society, and the same will be true. People make trade-offs, choose the lesser of two evils, try to split the difference, whatever. Sometimes it's obvious, a zero-sum game, or a mutually-exclusive choice. Sometimes it's a question of log-rolling: I need your help on X, so I'll give up some of my Y. In all of these cases, reasonable people (i.e. not sociopaths, not simpletons) will recognize and feel regret for the fact that their choices are less than ideal.

All of these considerations play out in the case of abortion. The first person I ever knew who'd had an abortion was a fellow student at Essex, back in 1970. Abusive father, impoverished background, she'd performed miracles to get to university, to get away from home. Condom broke. (No, it wasn't me. I was just a neighbour and friend in need.) Her choice was simple: get a first trimester abortion, or (almost certainly) drop out of school. (Even carrying the kid to term and getting it adopted would have been too much - she was on the edge.) She chose to have the abortion, toughed it out. A few months later, a group of us dropped acid for the first time. I had a great trip, but she spent the whole 8 hours sobbing, mourning her lost baby. She got through school, got a good degree, married, raised a family, everything worked out. But OF COURSE I wish she hadn't had to go through the abortion. Contraception should be so ubiquitous and reliable that nobody has to face the problem of an unwanted pregnancy.

Anyway, I wanted to share that.

Ratzinger and sexual abuse by Catholic priests

From today's London Observer: Pope 'obstructed' sex abuse inquiry: "Pope Benedict XVI faced claims last night he had 'obstructed justice' after it emerged he issued an order ensuring the church's investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret.... It asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger... [and] was co-signed by Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone who [said] 'In my opinion, the demand that a bishop be obligated to contact the police in order to denounce a priest who has admitted the offence of paedophilia is unfounded.'"

One might have reasonably expected that such a letter would emphasize that the bishops should cooperate fully with the police and prosecutors in accordance with local laws. Apparently some Vatican officials still have the medieval attitude that the church is above the law.

Ignoring science at our peril

Many of Thomas Friedman's recent op-ed pieces for the NYT have been silly or superficial, but today he hit a home run with Bush Disarms, Unilaterally: "At a time when the global economic playing field is being flattened - enabling young Indians and Chinese to collaborate and compete with Americans more than ever before... what we really need most today is a New New Deal to make more Americans employable in 21st-century jobs. We have a Treasury secretary from the railroad industry.... we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism... Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million... the National Innovation Initiative was virtually ignored by the White House."

And the punch line:
"It's as if we have an industrial-age presidency, catering to a pre-industrial ideological base, in a post-industrial era."

Exactly. But what do you expect if you elect a know-nothing, born-again, failed oilman? And by the way: this blog piece was brought to you by way of the Internet, created with DARPA tax dollars. And don't you forget it.

Quick blog: death penalty

In response to Ideology, American style, Alec weighed in with"ok, here's a poser for you and jeff: 'death penalty' - in your enlightened self-interest, or not?"

I find this an easy one. Setting aside the moral issues, which are not significant in the utilitarian calculus implied by enlightened self-interest, I find that there are three stances to be considered:

• As a general member of society, I find that the death penalty is uneconomic (wastes my taxes), and offers no added societal protection (crime statistics). Since all human systems seem to be fallible, mechanisms for correction should be built in; the death penalty fails this test. It demonstrably distorts the policing and legal systems in countries where it is used, especially "equal protection" provisions. It impedes police work, since convicted criminals are likely to withhold information on additional crimes for fear of execution.
• As a victim, or someone close to a victim of a capital crime, the death penalty offers me nothing but crude revenge. It will not restore the dead to life, or offer practical compensation. Revenge seems an inequitable basis on which to design a legal system. For example, some victims' families might object to the death penalty: should the penalty depend on the whim of each family? In any case, enlightened self-interest is not generally assumed to include purely visceral satisfaction.
• The final stance to be considered is if I, or someone close to me, were accused of a capital crime. (Even if I believe myself incapable of such a crime, I must consider the possibility of a wrongful accusation.) In all cases, the rational thing for me to do is to oppose capital punishment. Even if I were in fact guilty, and believed that I deserved the death penalty, I could always kill myself. I have no reasonable basis for imposing this preference on others who might be guilty, and none for imposing it on those wrongly accused.

Ideology, American style

Earlier today, my colleague Jeff Kesselman posted a piece in which he despaired of the myopia of many Americans; of the way in which, at best, they can't see where their interests lie, and at worst actively work against them. He wrote:

Not long ago I had someone look at me in all seriousness and say, "You don't have kids. Why on earth do you want to pay for public schools?" Now there are all kinds of good reasons for having top quality schools. Reasons in my self-interest having to do with the health of the American economy, our ability to globally compete, and the ability of the masses to do any kind of justice to this thing we call democracy. For this person though I realized a more down to earth explanation was going to be necessary and I simply said, "If your kid has a good job, he won't steal my stereo."

On reading this, I was reminded of the fascinating piece in this month's Atlantic magazine: the first in a series of articles by Bernard-Henri Lévy entitled In the Footsteps of Tocqueville. I'm going to quote at greater length than usual, because the online copy is for subscribers only; I encourage you to pick up a print edition. Here he writes about visiting the Republican Convention in New York last summer; the emphasis is mine:

These people who say 'values matter more'; these activists for whom the struggle against Darwin is a sacred cause that should be argued in the schools; this blue-collar man from Buffalo to whom I explain that the promise of the current president to reduce federal taxes will have the automatic effect of impoverishing his native city even more, who replies that he couldn't care less, because what matters to him is the problem posed by inflation in a quasi-Soviet state. These are men and women who are ready to let the questions that affect them most directly take second place to matters of principle that — in the case, for instance, of the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts — do not have, and never will have, any effect on their concrete existence. Aren't they reacting as ideologues would, according to criteria that have to be called ideological?... What's the matter with Kansas? Since when has politics stopped obeying the honest calculation of self-interest and personal ambition? How can knowledgeable, reasonable, pragmatic men work for their own servitude, thinking they're struggling for their freedom? That, Thomas Frank, is what is called ideology. That is precisely the mechanism that La Boétie and Karl Marx described in Europe, which we, alas, have experienced only too often. Now it's your turn, friends. And as we say in France, À votre santé!—To your very good health!

What kind of person could think that a couple of gay men getting married in Provincetown, MA, was more important than putting books in the school library and cops on the streets? The same species that can't understand why a childless man would support public education, I guess.

The angels cheer: "They killed Kenny!"

No, I don't normally watch "South Park". I'm not sure why - we used to have an awesome "South Park" pinball machine here in the Labs. Anyway, the buzz was that yesterday's "South Park" was going to be a very special one - and it was. Andrew Leonard tells all over at Salon: "But wait! Kenny isn't dead! Doctors manage to resuscitate him! With a feeding tube! He's in a 'persistent vegetative state.' Heaven is doomed!... The feeding tube is pulled. 'They killed Kenny,' the angels cheer! Heaven is saved, as Kenny, using a gold-plated PSP given to him by Peter, defeats the forces of Satan."

Brilliant. Tasteless? Sure, but it's a breath of fresh air after the recent media circus.

And coincidentally Kenny popped up again today, over at Boing Boing: trench art from Iraq. (See thumbnail.) Full size pic at Flickr.

Serendipity: Irshad Manji

This evening I emerged from my philosophy class and turned on my cell phone to call back in to a meeting in California. Instead, I saw an unfamiliar message: No service: SOS only. What to do? I decided to join Dan Dennett and others in attending a talk and book-signing by Irshad Manji, the author of The Trouble with Islam Today : A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith. And I'm really glad I did. She's an excellent speaker: energetic, passionate, witty, uncompromising. Dennett asked her how she dealt with critics who saw her open discussion of Islam with "infidels" as a betrayal; how she negotiated that "fine line". She rejected the premise: she's not interesting in balance, in compromising with bigotry. She's not trying to convince those who disagree with her: she's seeking to empower and encourage those who share her beliefs but are afraid of speaking out.

No, I don't share her faith, nor do I agree with her qualified support for the invasion of Iraq, but I applaud her commitment to universal human rights, her integrity, and her courage. A wonderful event. Do hear her if you get the chance.

Balkin on the lessons to be learned from the Schiavo case

In a series of pieces in Balkinization, Professor Jack Balkin of Yale Law School goes into detail on the constitutional aspects of the Schiavo case. But his closing words on one particular entry were particularly acute:

"Finally, the Congressional Republicans' moves also suggest that if Roe v. Wade were overturned, the matter would not be left to the states, as so many pro-life politicians have advocated in the past, but would quickly become a fight over federal legislation outlawing abortion nationwide. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Indeed. This is more than just Tom DeLay and his henchmen grandstanding to please their base: it's a real test of the US Constitution.

Republican or Islamist? Beats me....

Don't miss this fascinating piece by Juan Cole: "The cynical use by the US Republican Party of the Terri Schiavo case repeats, whether deliberately or accidentally, the tactics of Muslim fundamentalists and theocrats in places like Egypt and Pakistan. These tactics involve a disturbing tendency to make private, intimate decisions matters of public interest and then to bring the courts and the legislature to bear on them."

The similarities are remarkable.

"Freedom is on the march" - unless you're a woman

From a Reuters piece on threats against progressive women: "Pharmacist Zeena Qushtiny was dressed in the latest Western fashion and wearing a sparkling diamond necklace when she was taken at gunpoint from her pharmacy in Baghdad by insurgents. Her body was found 10 days later with two bullet holes close to her eyes. She was covered in a traditional abaya veil preferred by Islamic conservatives.... During Saddam Hussein's regime, women could dress less conservatively in the big cities and would not be punished, according to female activists. But now women say they are no longer safe and decapitated female corpses have begun turning up in recent weeks with notes bearing the word 'collaborator' pinned to their chests"

Was this what America Bush and Blair went to war for?

(Via Juan Cole.)

That was then....

Salon.com Politics: "As Republicans plotted congressional intervention last week to extend the life of Terri Schiavo, a Texas woman named Wanda Hudson watched her six-month-old baby die in her arms after doctors removed the breathing tube that kept him alive. Hudson didn't want the tube removed, but the baby's doctors decided for her. A judge signed off on the decision under the Texas futile care law -- a provision first signed into law in 1999 by then-Gov. George W. Bush. Under the 1999 law, doctors in Texas can, with the support of a hospital ethics committee, overrule the wishes of family members and terminate life-support measures if they believe further care would be futile"

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #162

From today's Houston Chronicle.com: "Iraq needed fuel. Halliburton Co. was ordered to get it there — quick. So the Houston-based contractor charged the Pentagon $27.5 million to ship $82,100 worth of cooking and heating fuel. In the latest revelation about the company's oft-criticized performance in Iraq, a Pentagon audit report disclosed Monday showed Halliburton subsidiary KBR spent $82,100 to buy liquefied petroleum gas, better-known as LPG, in Kuwait and then 335 times that number to transport the fuel into violence-ridden Iraq."

(Via TomDispatch.)

(And Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #162 is Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.)

On how to react to good news

Back in January, Andrew Sullivan announced that he was taking a break from blogging, and so I stopped visiting his site. (A degree of "political burn-out" may also be responsible.) But today, I popped over to see what was new, and I came across an email that he's received that captured my feelings exactly. I have no idea who sent it - I wish I knew - but I hope it's OK to quote the entire thing here:

Respectfully, Andrew, I beg to differ on the alleged churlishness of Democrats on progress in the Middle East.

The result is that the first reaction any Democrat has to good news in the Middle East (or anywhere else) is to think, "How can Bush be denied political credit for this, since you know he's going to claim it." And the important thing to emphasize is that it is Bush's own political habits that have created this dynamic, and it started right after 9-11.

Exactly.

Remedial English 101

This seems to be an accurate transcript of Bush's recent town-hall meeting in Florida where he went to sell his "fix" for the nonexistent Social Security crisis. Please read it carefully. Don't just glance at it, roll your eyes, and go on to the next blog. If you pay taxes in the US, this guy works for you:

WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: I don't really understand. How is it the new [Social Security] plan is going to fix that problem?

BUSH: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

-- President G. W. Bush, Tampa, Florida, Feb. 4, 2005

A brilliant "what if" from Juan Cole

Imagine if Bush was blessed with a modicum of foresight, and had told the truth about a war against Iraq back in 2002. In The Speech Bush Should have Given, Juan Cole describes what such a speech might have said - about the costs in dollars and lives, about the geopolitical issues, about the reasons. Money (ouch!) quote: "A war against Iraq will be expensive. It will cost you, the taxpayer, about $300 billion over five years. I know Wolfowitz is telling you Iraq's oil revenues will pay for it all, but that's ridiculous. Iraq only pumps about $10 billion a year worth of oil, and it's going to need that just to run the new government we're putting in. No, we're going to have to pay for it, ourselves. I'm going to ask you for $25 billion, then $80 billion, then another $80 billion. And so on. I'm going to be back to you for money more often than that unemployed relative that you don't like. The cost of the war is going to drive up my already massive budget deficits from about $370 billion to more like $450 billion a year. Just so you understand, I'm going to cut taxes on rich people at the same time that I fight this war. Then I'm going to borrow the money to fight it, and to pay for much of what the government does. And you and your children will be paying off that debt for decades."

Colour-blind, gender-blind

James Wolcott describes: "watching Senator Joe Lieberman [...] drone his support for the nomination of Condi Rice as Secretary of Clueless, arguing that we should celebrate the breakthrough confirmation of an African-American woman for such a powerful post, even though her being African-American and a woman were irrelevant to her qualifications. Then why bring it up? I suppose it's progress of a sort when a duplicitous incompetent can be promoted regardless of race or gender [...] but it ought to make for a muted celebration." Indeed.

(Via Jon, who manages to be amused by it - no small achievement.)

But what if the shoe were on the other foot?

Marty Lederman has once again taken aim at Heather MacDonald, self-appointed apologist for administation policy about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In a recent item in Balkinization, he writes "Let’s be very clear about this: The DoD General Counsel (who’s recently been renominated for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit) concluded that threats of killing a detainee’s family members, and waterboarding, and forced nudity, and the use of dogs to induce stress, etc., not only did not violate the UCMJ, but are ‘humane’! There is no indication in the public record that Secretary Rumsfeld or any other high-level DoD official ever contradicted or overruled these legal conclusions — and every indication that Rumsfeld agreed with them."

And while it's a point that has been made before, let me repeat: would Ms. MacDonald regard such policies as "humane" and "legal" if they were applied to captured US troops by another power - North Vietnam, say, or perhaps Iran? (Arguing for a difference between regular troops and "terrorists" won't wash - most of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib had not been legally classified, and the presumption should have been that they were therefore covered by Geneva.) Such an acknowledgement is unlikely to be forthcoming any time soon....

(Via Sully.)

Thought-provoking piece on reframing the gay rights question

How many of you, in supporting gay rights, have used the argument that discrimination is unfair because being gay, like being black, isn't a question of choice? And yet, an it harm none, why shouldn't we be defending the right to a freely-chosen life? Excellent piece over at Shakespeare's Sister: Reframing Gay Rights: "A wise start to reframing this argument is to leave behind the repeated invocations of the standard and tiresome fare, ‘It’s not a choice.’ If Liberals are to be true to their words that my rights end where yours begin, then we must acknowledge that whether homosexuality is a choice or not has no bearing on whether we defend the rights of gays and lesbians. The whole point of a free country is allowing people the freedom to make decisions for themselves as they best see fit, including whether to choose a partner of the same sex. A same-sex relationship does not infringe upon anyone else’s rights, so whether it’s by design or choice shouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to any Liberal intent on protecting the freedom and rights of all Americans."

(Via Terry - get well soon.)

Illogic

From Reuters via Yahoo!: "White House spokesman Scott McClellan said [...] that 'based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action' -- war with Iraq -- in order to 'confront a threat posed by Saddam Hussein."

Since we know today that Saddam Hussein possessed no WMDs, what exactly was the threat that he posed? Does McClellan realize how stupid he sounds?

All the news that's fit to gloss over....

The number of people who believe that Saddam Hussein's Iraq actually possessed weapons of mass destruction must by now be in single digits. However the fact that the US has finally abandoned the search for WMD still seems newsworthy - after all, wasn't a war launched on the strength of that falsehood, resulting in thousands of deaths and years of bloody chaos? But as Salon reports: "If you missed this bit of news, that's because in our town's newspaper, a little publication called the New York Times [...] it was buried inside on A10 in a 240-word news brief." (My emphasis.)

(I can't wait to see how Daniel Okrent, the NYT "public editor", explains this one.)

It's going to be an odd election in Iraq....

As River reports, "technically, we don't know the candidates. We know the principal heads of the lists but we don't know who exactly will be running. It really is confusing. They aren't making the lists public because they are afraid the candidates will be assassinated"

An election in which the voters don't know who the candidates are? That sounds weird enough. But then there are the voter registration cards:

[O]n all the voting cards, the gender of the voter, regardless of sex, is labeled "male". [...] Why is the sex on the card anyway? [...] Some are saying that many of the more religiously inclined families won't want their womenfolk voting so it might be permissible for the head of the family to take the women's ID and her ballot and do the voting for her. Another theory is that this 'mistake' will make things easier for people making fake IDs to vote in place of females.

Apparently there's a brisk trade in voting cards: the going rate is around $400. But at least River's family has received voting cards. In many places, election officials are refusing to carry out voter registration because of death threats.

Sleeping with the enemy (metaphorically, I hasten to add)

Regular readers will know that I often pick up blog-worthy items from Andrew Sullivan. Why do I read him? I mean, he's a pompous right-wing blow-hard... but he did turn against Bush in the recent election, he's done the right thing on Abu Ghraib while others have ignored it, and... oh, I don't know, maybe it's that gay chic thing, you know? "Queer Eye for the Political Guy".... And then Terry nails him with a directness that jerks me out of my composure.

It starts with Sully's "QUOTE FOR THE DAY: 'I'd much rather be doing this than figthing [sic] a war,' - helicopter pilot Lt. Cmdr. William Whitsitt, helping the survivors of the south Asian tsunami. Earth to Whitsitt: you're a soldier.

This earns Sully a swift rebuke from Terry: "having been to a war, and having helped people, I'd rather be doing the latter than the former. If Sullivan wants to question why... I'll be more than willing to hand him a rifle, a flack vest, and a Basic Load, and take him for a couple of long walks in Falluja."

Apparently Sully caught a ton of flak for this piece, and he had the good grace to include a couple of responses on the front page and the feedback section. Sully bleats pitifully that his "point is that the military is primarily about fighting and winning wars" - but does that mean that a soldier has to prefer killing to helping?! Does Sully want a soldiery composed of amoral robots with no compassion or humanity?

(Why did that last point remind me of Rumsfeld? Anyway, from now on Sully has to earn my readership.)

Now the truth comes out

A few days ago I noted here that American popular opinion seems to have shifted sharply against the war in Iraq. This provoked a plaintive - indeed anguished - comment from Mark: "Why oh why did they have to wait until AFTER the election to decide this?" It's a good question, and Josh Marshall has an interesting take on it over at Talking Points Memo.

Josh first agrees with Kevin Drum that the main reason is quite simple: support has been declining ever since the initial invasion, and the latest numbers simply reflect that trend. But why did pro-war sentiment seem to to hold up during the election campaign? Josh suggests that "during the slugfest of the campaign, supporting Bush just meant supporting the war and this is what people told pollsters when they were asked, because one question was almost a proxy for the other." Given that "close to 50% of Americans were dead set on voting for President Bush almost no matter what", it's clear why support for the war stayed above 50%. (Imagine "how many conservatives [...] would have been so staunch in their support for the war if it were being fought under a President Gore or a President Clinton.") And the result is that "the end of the campaign season has departisanized the war, [and people] are now freer to see the situation in Iraq a bit more on its own terms".

(Memo to self: During the run-up to the election, I used to read TPM all the time. I think that after November 2nd I tuned out a lot of the political blogs. Bad idea. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow.)

What Social Security 'crisis'?

In today's Boston Globe, Robert Kuttner nails the myth about "The Social Security Crisis". It's just that: a myth. There is no crisis. Key quote: "In June, the bipartisan Congressional Budget office used more realistic assumptions about economic growth. CBO puts the first shortfall year at 2052, not 2042, and it projects Social Security's 75-year shortfall at only about four-10ths of one percent of gross domestic product. Currently, that's about $40 billion a year, or one-fifth of the revenues that the Bush administration gave up in tax cuts for the wealthy. Simply restoring pre-Bush tax rates on the richest one percent of Americans could bring the Social Security system into balance indefinitely, without reducing promised payouts by one penny."

And why do so many Democrats as well as Republicans use the language of crisis? Kuttner's explanation is that "many well-meaning Democrats who defend the Social Security system want to be absolutely [certain] that its funding is rock solid. So [they] talk of its shortfall and offer different ways to make up the gap. Unfortunately, that tends to play into Republican hands."

If Republicans are ideologically opposed to the idea of Social Security, that's their right. But if the only way to argue for the position is to lie about the situation, that doesn't say much for their case.

Must... resist... temptation... to say "I told you so"

Poll: Most Americans Think Iraq War Not Worth Fighting (washingtonpost.com): "[A]ccording to a Washington Post-ABC News poll [...] 56 percent of the country now believes that the cost of the conflict in Iraq outweighs the benefits, while 42 percent disagreed. It marked the first time since the war began that a clear majority of Americans have judged the war to have been a mistake."

(And they want Bush to fire Rumsfeld. Doh!)

Turkey and the EU

I've been watching the current debate on EU admission for Turkey with a fair amount of confusion. Understandably, much of the discussion has revolved around such issues as European "identity", religion, the effect on the labour market, human rights, Cyprus, Armenia, the military in politics, and so on. The question of precedent is also critical: if Turkey, why not Russia? Etcetera. Things have also been complicated by the insensitive meddling of the US administration.

Setting aside such issues, I am surprised that there hasn't been much said about the sheer volatility of the Turkish economy. Even the Economist profile doesn't discuss this as one might expect. The latest EU report makes sobering reading. Recent inflation rates between 28% and 101%; public sector deficits between 10% and 28%; exchange rates oscillating wildly, dropping 50% and then gaining 12%. In part this seems a consequence of the fact around 50% of all business falls into the "underground economy" category. It is hard to imagine how to integrate such an economy into a supra-national body that has been defined since day one by economic convergence.

Bill O'Reilly the self-described coward

David Brock of MediaMatters.org just posted a scathing attack on Bill O'Reilly (King of the Unfair and Unbalanced). After listing the numerous occasions on which O'Reilly had attacked both Brock and MediaMatters, Brock calls him out:

As you can see, Mr. O'Reilly, you have repeatedly and personally attacked me, Media Matters for America, and my fine staff, calling us "vile," "despicable," and "weasels," and comparing us to the Ku Klux Klan, Castro, Mao, and the Nazis. And you have refused my repeated requests to appear on your broadcast.
You once offered your viewers your definition of the word "coward." On the January 5, 2004, O'Reilly Factor, you declared: "If you attack someone publicly, as these men did to me, you have an obligation to face the person you are smearing. If you don't, you are a coward."
Well, Mr. O'Reilly, you have attacked me publicly on numerous occasions, and you refuse to face me. You, sir, are a coward -- by your own definition of the term.

Frankly, I don't know why anyone would want to share the same studio with that bombastic bigot, but if O'Reilly continues to refuse Brock's request we'll know him for what he is. No surprise, of course.

(Via Sully)

There's something about Alabama...

First, racist language in the constitution. Then trying to ban books with homosexual characters in them. And now we have the Alabama judge in court "wearing a judicial robe with the Ten Commandments embroidered on the front in gold". (As one wag put it, "don't worry as long as the robe isn't white and doesn't have a matching hood".) What next, I wonder?

When do politicians take electoral issues seriously?

When their own ballots are affected, naturally! From The Seattle Times: "The King County error came to light Sunday when Larry Phillips, chairman of the Metropolitan King County Council, was looking over a list of voters from his neighborhood whose ballots had been disqualified. Phillips spotted his own name on the list, prompting an investigation by King County elections workers that turned up 561 improperly disqualified ballots." So Gregoire may still win....

(Via E-Voting News. Their story included a grammatical howler: somebody used the word fluctuant, presumably under the impression that it was an adjectival form of fluctuate. In fact it's a term from biology, meaning "movable and compressible — used of abnormal body structures (as some abscesses or tumors)".
UPDATE: The author of the piece assures me that the usage is blessed by the OED, even if it is a little archaic. My apologies: I have no objection to the creative revival of archaic language.)

The Economist on the dollar's decline

The Economist on what happens if the dollar's fall means that it loses its status as the reserve currency for the world: "The dollar's loss of reserve-currency status would lead America's creditors to start cashing those cheques — and what an awful lot of cheques there are to cash. As that process gathered pace, the dollar could tumble further and further. American bond yields (long-term interest rates) would soar, quite likely causing a deep recession. Americans who favour a weak dollar should be careful what they wish for. Cutting the budget deficit looks cheap at the price."

(Via Talking Points.)

Rowan Atkinson on the right to offend

In today's Daily Telegraph, there's coverage of a press conference including Rowan "Mister Bean" Atkinson. He and others criticized proposed changes to UK "hate speech" laws that have been interpreted as covering criticism of religious ideas. "The freedom to criticise ideas - any ideas even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. And the law which attempts to say you can criticise or ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed." Exactly.

(Via Sully.)

Better late than never, I guess

According to San Diego's 10News: "Kenneth Starr says he never should have led the investigation that resulted in the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton."

(Via Salon.com.)

First racism, now censorship

Not content with preserving the racist language in their state constitution, those wacky Alabamians are at it again. State Representative Gerald Allen is proposing to burn (OK, ban from libraries) all books that include homosexual characters. Neil Gaiman has blogged about it, as has Sully. So much for Tennessee Williams' southern classic "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof", Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited". (And Dave Thompson's book on "Last Tango in Paris" would also be excluded: the proposed ban would also cover books containing heterosexual "actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of Alabama".)

50 years after Rosa Parks....

The Guardian reports that a ballot initiative in Alabama has failed (despite a recount), which means that the state constitution will still contain language such as: "Separate schools shall be provided for white and coloured children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race." Since this racist claptrap has already been declared unconstitutional, why would Alabamians want to retain it? The mind boggles. But when I saw that former Alabama Chief Justice Roy "Ten Commandments" Moore was involved....

(Via Salon.)

"Play something sad"

The Guardian reports that an incident in which soldiers forced a violinist to play at a roadblock is causing an uproar within Israel. Recent IDF abuses such as the shooting of a young girl and the mutilation of corpses generated less angst than this: "If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."

(Via Juan Cole.)

"Even a three-year old needs to be killed"

The Guardian has a report on an incident in which an Israeli officer emptied his automatic rifle into a wounded thirteen-year-old girl. His explanation (over the radio): "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over."

"Even a three-year old needs to be killed"

The Guardian has a report on an incident in which an Israeli officer emptied his automatic rifle into a wounded thirteen-year-old girl. His explanation (over the radio): "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over."

Economic `Armageddon' predicted; film at 11

Back on November 5th I blogged about the likely consequences of the "perfect storm" of the trade deficit, budget deficit, and oil prices, particularly the collapse of the dollar. Others have the same idea. In today's Boston Herald, Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, waxed apocalyptic: "To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day. That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings." Roach predicts a major slump, with a massive wave of bankruptcies.

Interestingly, the article concludes: "But [...] there may be an alternative scenario to Roach's. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today's consumer debts in real terms. Inflation of 7 percent a year halves ``real'' values in a decade. It may be the only way out of the trap. Higher interest rates, or higher inflation: Either way, the biggest losers will be long-term lenders at fixed interest rates.". And this is exactly the "stagflationary" scenario that I predicted.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Economic `Armageddon' predicted; film at 11

Back on November 5th I blogged about the likely consequences of the "perfect storm" of the trade deficit, budget deficit, and oil prices, particularly the collapse of the dollar. Others have the same idea. In today's Boston Herald, Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, waxed apocalyptic: "To finance its current account deficit with the rest of the world, he said, America has to import $2.6 billion in cash. Every working day. That is an amazing 80 percent of the entire world's net savings." Roach predicts a major slump, with a massive wave of bankruptcies.

Interestingly, the article concludes: "But [...] there may be an alternative scenario to Roach's. Greenspan might instead deliberately allow the dollar to slump and inflation to rise, whittling away at the value of today's consumer debts in real terms. Inflation of 7 percent a year halves ``real'' values in a decade. It may be the only way out of the trap. Higher interest rates, or higher inflation: Either way, the biggest losers will be long-term lenders at fixed interest rates.". And this is exactly the "stagflationary" scenario that I predicted.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Americans, evolution, religion, and post-modernism

During the recent US election campaign, the issue of American's attitudes towards evolution popped up again. It's usually presented as "X million Americans don't believe in evolution...", with the corollary at election time "...and they all vote Republican". As I was dozing on the flight from Boston to Seattle on Friday, I found myself musing about this "fact" in various ways.

• Do non-evolutionists get flu shots? After all, they don't believe in the science that underlies the development of flu vaccines, and some of them (in Kansas) clearly don't want their children growing up with the kind of education that would equip them to work on new vaccines.
• How do Biblical inerrantists pick and choose those bits of the Bible they'll use and those bits they'll ignore? There are so many bits of blatantly allegorical and magical thinking, not to mention contradictions galore. Does consistency actually matter? If not, why not? Etcetera.
• Why should I worry about all of this? Things like belief in quaint creation myths, or circumcision, or not eating meat on Fridays, are all just tribal membership memes, ways of identifying that you are a member of a group in a way that is relatively resistant to mixing or diaspora. True... but it becomes important when people seek to impose it on others, whether it be banning the teaching of evolution in Kansas or orthodox Jews stoning tour buses in Jerusalem on Shabbat.

After all this fact-free speculation, it was nice to be proved wrong... or at least to get a chance to appreciate the true complexity of the situation. Over at People for the American Way there's a fascinating report on Evolution and Creationism in Public Education [PDF format]. It's based on a 1999 survey of 1,500 people. Among the more intriguing findings is the fact that for many people the inclusion of creationism in schools is based not on their religious beliefs, but on what the report calls a "Post Modernist" perspective.

A second important contextual point is what we term the “post-modernist” influence. For about a third of Americans, their fundamentalist religious beliefs drive their support for including Creationism in the public school curriculum. However, for most Americans who would like to see some mention of God or a Divine role in the development of humans, along with the teaching of Evolution, it is not primarily religion behind their opinions. It is much more of what can be called a Post Modernist perspective (a “Hey, you never know” mentality). This perspective is characterized by a wide tolerance for many different beliefs, since no single belief is seen as the final and complete answer to any issue. Also, many parents want their children to be exposed to a wide range of views. Their reasoning is, “our kids should be given enough information so, when they grow up, they can make up their own minds.”

Of course this meant that the vast majority of people were opposed to the Kansas evolution decision because it reduced the "wide range of views" that kids would be exposed to. And as one would expect, support for creationism and opposition to evolution were generally linked with poor education and based on ignorance of the ideas involved. Ironically, people were far more confident in the "proven" status of the Theory of Relativity than of Evolution. The basis for such a belief seems hard to understand....

The Urban Archipelago

Here's a powerful thesis about red America and blue America. It isn't about the north vs. the south. It isn't about slave states vs. free states. It isn't (primarily) about religion, or guns, or gay marriage. It's about cities: an archipelago of blue cities in a sea of red suburbs and rural areas. It's about the Urban Archipelago. Worth reading.

(Via Sully, who also has a link to this really cool graphic.)

Armistice

Terry wrote: ""On the 11th hour, of the 11th day of the year 1918 all fighting shall cease on the Western Front"

And so came the Armistice. The peace of the world was to follow. It had been a war, to end all wars.

But it wasn't."

(From Better Than Salt Money.)

Good grief

File under "nobody would believe you if you made it up": Oslo Girl: "I saw on TV2 news last night that there was a march in the center of Oslo yesterday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Jews, apparently, were forbidden to participate. Technically, they could join the demonstration as long as they refrained from showing any Jewish symbols, like the Star of David. The rule was enforced in order to "avoid any conflicts.""

(Via Heretic's Almanac. And Sully has also got it now.)

UPDATE/CORRECTION (from Sully's Letters page): "There were Jews present in the demonstration. The arrangers, SOS Rasisme, makes it very clear that not only will they never exclude Jews from their activities, but they have always invited Jewish organisations to participate.

A statement from Norsk Forening Mot Antisemitism (Norwegian Society Against Anti-Semitism, NFMA) also condemned the action as historyless and unworthy."

Google censored?

Search Google images for abu ghraib, and you get 136 hits, with no explicit scenes of torture or humiliation.

Search Yahoo! Images for abu ghraib, and you get 4,035 hits, including the most notorious shots of abuse, torture, and dead prisoners.

What's going on here? Perhaps we should abandon Google if we can't trust it any more....

(Via Slashdot, where it was reported that google.co.uk doesn't have these problems. Well, I just checked, and it does now.)

UPDATE: It now appears that the explanation is quite simple: Google is incompetent at indexing images. Even more reason to dump them.

Sullivan on Chomsky

Apropos of Chomsky, Andrew Sullivan pointed his readers to this piece by Antichomskyite. My response to Sullivan follows.

Thanks for the links. I agree that there are strong arguments against many of Chomsky's theses (though "antichomskyite" makes a hash of many of them - see below), but the problem that you face is that by replying ad hominem you appear to concede (or at least to seek to avoid) the issue on the table. When Chomsky (as many others) refers to Nuremberg, what he is citing is the powerful and unequivocal argument against pre-emptive war made by the American prosecutors. I can't believe that you don't know this. Go ahead, shoot the messenger, rant against Chomsky if you like (though calling his quiet responses to Maher a "diatribe" is a real stretch), but the moral and legal question remains.

Geoff

PS Oh yes, antichomskyite.

How am I to make sense of a strawman like:

Apparently, we are to believe that the Soviet Union was the single most humane empire ever to exist in world history and, as soon as its subjects began to express minor disagreement with their political situation, it happily encouraged their independence and then allowed to go free like children at last taking their first, awkward steps away from their parents.
This has to qualify as one of the most obscenely immoral distortions of history I have ever read.

when only a few paragraphs earlier he quotes Chomsky as saying:

The Cold War provided that too. No matter how outlandish the idea that the Soviet Union and its tentacles were strangling the West, the "Evil Empire" was in fact evil, was an empire and was brutal. Each superpower controlled its primary enemy -- its own population -- by terrifying it with the (quite real) crimes of the other.
In crucial respects, then, the Cold War was a kind of tacit arrangement between the Soviet Union and the United States under which the US conducted its wars against the Third World and controlled its allies in Europe, while the Soviet rulers kept an iron grip on their own internal empire and their satellites in Eastern Europe -- each side using the other to justify repression and violence in its own domains.

In fact Chomsky nowhere claims the Soviet Union was "humane".

Later antichomskyite writes:

At least Chomsky does not attempt to parrot the propaganda line that the CIA overthrew Allende

Propaganda line? Well, as the CIA's own documents indicate, the CIA worked assiduously but unsuccessfully to do just that. In fact Chomsky's position on Chile corresponds closely to declassified analyses.

Look: Chomsky is a mecurial character. He has said some outrageous things; he's also supplied some useful contrarian alternatives to self-justifying groupthink. In addition, Maher was right to have him on the show. Hell, he even had Ann Coulter on the other week. Arguing for the silencing of differing points of view is irrational and un-American.

Sullivan on Maher

I just watched the season finale of Bill Maher's Real Time on HBO. Normally I forget to watch it, and have to catch up via video-on-demand, but since Andrew Sullivan had blogged that he was flying out to take part I wanted to see if he'd say the same stuff on TV that he's been blogging.

It was a weird show in some respects - Bill Maher was obviously still pretty angry underneath his bravado - but I was particularly struck by three things that Andrew Sullivan said.

(1) He attacked Bill Maher for losing the election for the Democrats by making jokes about people of religious faith that demeaned them. "If you demean them, how do you expect them to vote for you?" Say what? Look, I'm perfectly willing to concede that there are religious folk in the red states (and elsewhere) who are turned off by what they see as ungodly attitudes and actions from people in the blue states. But it's been that way for years, just as there are secular people in the blue states (and elsewhere) who are turned off by Bible-based thinking and homophobia. For some people on both sides, these attitudes are deeply ingrained, and cleaning up Bill Maher's jokes or Pat Robertson's sermons isn't going to have any effect. Each group offends the other simply by existing, by being themselves, and to argue that they should change seems to contradict Sullivan's pleas for a return to tolerance through federalism.

(2) Why does Sullivan (and many others) froth at the mouth when anyone mentions "America" and "war crimes" in the same sentence? And why do they always argue how much better America's actions are than those of Saddam? Is that the standard by which America should judge itself? From someone like Sullivan who argued so eloquently just a few days ago about the collective amnesia concerning Abu Ghraib, such jingoism seems inapposite.

(3) It is possible that Sullivan's excitability was occasioned by the appearance on the program of Noam Chomsky, whom Sullivan accused of "making millions running around the world denigrating the United States". (I may have got the exact words wrong: he certainly said "millions", which caused a few eyebrows to be raised.) But why the outrage? Numerous legal bodies, including the International Commission of Jurists, have declared that the invasion of Iraq and many of the consequent actions of the USA and its allies violate international law. Logically Sullivan would seem to have only three options: refute the charges, accept them and agree that the USA should take responsibility for its actions, or declare that the USA is somehow above the law. Lashing out at an academic for exercising his freedom of speech, and saying that his views don't deserve to be heard, does Sullivan no credit. (Whatever happened to Evelyn Beatrice Hall's immortal dictum "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?)

Of the other speakers on the show, ex-Senator Alan Simpson seemed determined to take offence, especially at the antics of Maher's unruly audience. (They should fix that - it's actually an embarrassment.) Susan Sarandon was frustrated and exhausted after all her campaigning in Ohio and Pennysylvania, and was a bit too paranoid about voter fraud (though I can sympathize with her). Comedian D. L. Hughley was OK but forgettable, and Pat Schroeder was as forthright as ever.

Despite Sullivan's plaintive "God help me" about tonight's show, he appeared to enjoy himself. His reactions to Bill Maher's New Rules segment seemed to attract the camera like a magnet. I wonder how he'll blog about his perspective?

Follow the bouncing ball

Dollar at record low against euro: "It seems now that the longer-term investors like pension funds and perhaps monetary authorities are either hedging their dollar risk or moving assets out of the United States. It looks like the dollar has further to fall..."

You can check out the historical data using Oanda's FXGraph applet: choose "from USD", "to EUR", "since 6 Nov 1996". Note the trend over the last four years, and extrapolate....

What will this mean for the US economy? Unless the budget and current account deficits are slashed, the probable consequences are rising interest rates, rising inflation, a depressed housing market, and recession. We've seen this before: it's called stagflation. Welcome to the 1970s. Even the oil prices look familiar....

(Via the BBC.)

"Talk more, shoot less"? What a quaint idea....

Iraqis Say U.S. Should Talk More, Shoot Less: Iraq's Deputy Foreign Minister Hamid al-Bayati said the insurgency was partly due to mistakes Bush made earlier. "Using force that kills civilians on a large scale is a mistake. The logic of occupation must end. Bush's main mistake was not to let an Iraqi provisional government take power after Saddam was toppled," he said. "The resistance operations were seen coming as soon as the United States kept acting as an occupier."

(Via Yahoo!.)

Culture war?

From Andrew Sullivan: "A MANDATE FOR CULTURE WAR: That's Bill Bennett's conclusion. He won't be the only one. What we're seeing, I think, is a huge fundamentalist Christian revival in this country, a religious movement that is now explicitly political as well. [...] But the intensity of the passion, and the inherently totalist nature of religiously motivated politics means deep social conflict if we are not careful. Our safety valve must be federalism. We have to live and let live. As blue states become more secular, and red states become less so, the only alternative to a national religious war is to allow different states to pursue different options."

UPDATE: Amy Sullivan has a different take on this: "the "huge fundamentalist Christian revival" took place about thirty years ago, not last month, and it has always been explictly political". Worth reading, but flawed. Yes, the revival took place years ago, and Reagan and Bush Snr. courted the religious right and then ignored them. Dubya did pretty much the same in 2000. This is the first time that religious wedge issues have been so nakedly and cynically exploited as part of a GOTV effort, and it coincides with (1) the election of a new crop of Republican congressmen who are as rabid as Newt's crowd were but are explicitly religious in their allegiance, and (2) the likely opening of 2-4 Supreme slots. I think that it is going to be different this time.

Creative cartography

One from Not A Dollar Short:

And one from All I Know:

Update: And don't overlook the Purple Haze....

"Education + Militarism = K (constant)"

Terry wrote: "The demagogues will continue... There are not enough Jon Stewarts. The lack of thought will appreciate (Franco had a teaching, "Education/intelligence + Military Fervor/Patriotism = K [a constant]) and the lack of real value to the elections will grow."

Monday morning quarterbacking

Masood has been pointing people at an interesting piece in Counterpunch by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, criticizing Kerry's campaign strategy and tactics for the loss. While the brute facts of the argument are incontrovertible - the role of religion and homosexuality, and Kerry's difficulty in establishing a clear distinction between him and Bush on Iraq, outsourcing, and so forth - I'm not sure that those factors were decisive. Look at it another way: in spite of all of those handicaps, Kerry came extremely close to unseating an incumbent president who should have been a shoo-in. What could he have done differently? (No, he couldn't have tacked left.)

As Cockburn and St.Clair point out, the choice of VP was probably decisive:

Edwards added absolutely nothing to the ticket. At least Dan Quayle held Indiana back in 1988 and 2002. No one state in the south went into Kerry's column. Gore did better in Florida and West Virginia. Dick Gephardt would certainly have brought the Democratic ticket Missouri and probably Iowa and hence the White House.

Gephardt could have worked, but he has a lot of baggage. I actually think that the best choice might have been Wes Clark, in order to hammer Bush on the issue of military incompetence. Unlike Kerry or Edwards, Clark could have invoked Abu Ghraib as a moral catastrophe for which heads ought to roll, and done so without being accused of betraying the troops.

Convenient fictions

Baghdad Burning: "Everyone here knows Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi isn’t in Falloojeh. He isn’t anywhere, as far as anyone can tell. He’s like the WMD: surrender your weapons or else we’ll attack. Now that the damage is done, it is discovered that there were no weapons. It will be the same with Zarqawi. We laugh here when we hear one of our new politicians discuss him. He’s even better than the WMD- he has legs. As soon as the debacle in Falloojeh is over, Zarqawi will just move conveniently to Iran, Syria or even North Korea."

At this point, I don't know if Allawi is using Bush or if Bush is using Allawi. And the truly depressing thing is that I don't think it matters. The dead, the maimed, and the orphans won't discriminate. Meanwhile, please read River's blog and spare a thought for the people of Falloojeh.

Lessons from November 2

Independent of the actual result, one clear message to the rest of the world is that the US is simply incompetent at running elections. After 2000 one might have expected some improvement, but no: if anything it's worse. A crazy patchwork of laws (whatever happened to "Equal protection"?) selectively applied; untested and unreliable machines; incompetent poll workers; running out of ballots; insufficient polling places. See this IHT report on overseas' observers for one example, or the E-Voting Experts blog for more. And don't tell me that it only affects a few voters, or that it's an inevitable side-effect of the size of the country. Japan, UK, Germany, France... all make this stuff work at comparable scale with virtually none of these problems. When a city provides two voting machines for 1100 registered voters (Columbus), or halves the number of polling places in the face of significantly increased registration, that isn't a "scaling problem": it's either incompetence or (worse) a triumph of partisanship over democratic principles. The ends don't justify the means.

Listen guys, it may have been cute to spend a couple of hundred years pretending that you were just a bunch of agrarian sovereign mini-states, like Swiss cantons, but it's time to grow up. Uniform laws. Uniform standards. Voting systems that work. Guaranteed provision of enough ballots, machines, and polling places for ALL, not just the people you expect/want to turn up. Absentee ballots sent out on time, not three days before the election. And voting spread over Saturday and Sunday - what's the rush? (Although mandating an 11 day waiting period for counting provisional ballots is also ridiculous.) Try taking a few lessons from Venezuela, for instance. Or Serbia.

America may be the world's second largest democracy, but don't hold yourselves up as a role model.

Fulbright got it right

From Tuesday's Guardian: "Stuck in the middle" by David Clark:
Almost four decades ago, during the Vietnam war, the great liberal, Senator J William Fulbright, captured more eloquently than any recent commentary what is at stake in today's US presidential election. There were, he said, two Americas: "One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good humoured, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power."

It's time to choose.

New blog on e-voting

There's an interesting new blog on E-Voting News and Analysis, from the Experts. Sample issue under discussion: "Suppose, hypothetically, that I knew of a vulnerability that would allow someone to corrupt vote counts or interfere with voting on some e-voting system being used in tomorrow’s election. And suppose further that it was too late to get the vulnerability fixed. What should I do?"

(I'll be watching the RSS feed.)

A statistician's gut feeling

From the Princeton Meta-Analysis of State Polls: " Just for the record, my gut estimate of the likelihood of a Kerry win is about 6-1 in favor."

Update: "Predicted electoral outcome (11/1/2004 noon EST): Kerry 323 EV, Bush 215 EV"

Quote of the day

From Gary Kamiya's article in Salon.com, American nightmare: As Eugenia C. Kiesling, a historian at the U.S. Military Academy, has written, "The Iraq war ... was caused largely by the U.S. demand for unrealistically absolute security. Not since the Romans has any polity justified preventive wars on the grounds that no military threat be permitted to exist."

(And the rest of the article is well worth reading too.)

It's a small world: The Votemaster

For some months now one of my "must read" web sites has been Electoral-Vote.COM. (Me and over half a million others every day!) I've watched the maps showing the aggregated results of recent opinion polls, I've read "the Votemaster's" pained accounts of wrestling with different algorithms for aggregating, averaging, aging, and presenting the data. I've even contributed a few bucks to support the effort. Through all this, I had no idea who "the Votemaster" might be, until today. In the Votemaster FAQ , all is revealed: "My name is Andrew Tanenbaum. I am one of the 7 million U.S. citizens living abroad. I am a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [...] I can write fairly complex software. I wrote MINIX, the precursor to Linux, for example."

Ah, that Andy Tanenbaum! "Mister Minix." Now where did I put my battered copy of Operating Systems: Design and Implementation?

Correlation of beliefs

Seymour Hersh on why Kerry isn't winning by a landslide: "I think one thing you have to face up to is the fact there are roughly 70 million people in America who do not believe in evolution - and those are Bush supporters."

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Hitchens vs. Hitchens

OK, this is priceless. The mercurial expat Brit writer Christopher Hitchens (note my restrained description) has seen fit to endorse both Kerry and Bush!! Maybe another bottle of port will cure his double vision. Or perhaps he should stick to writing about Henry Kissinger and George Orwell.

(Thanks to Atrios.)

"How many more have to die?"

From Capitol Hill Blue: How many more have to die?: "An internal memo circulating at CIA headquarters at Langley says more Iraqi civilians have died since the American invasion than died at the hands of Saddam Hussein over the past decade."

The empty accusation of the "L-word"

From the Des Moines Register: "Yes, Kerry is liberal. But what's to fear from a liberal president? That he would run big deficits? That he would increase federal spending? That he would expand the power of the federal government over individuals' lives? Nothing Kerry could do could top what President Bush has already done in those realms."

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Bush on civil rights

This piece in Salon by Sidney Blumenthal (registration possibly required) needs no comment:

Oct. 20, 2004  |  Passing almost without notice earlier this month, the public release of the official staff report prepared by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission on "The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration," whose submission is required by federal law, was blocked by the Republican commissioners. Nonetheless, it was posted on the commission's Web site. "This report," the site states, "finds that President Bush has neither exhibited leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that matched his words."
[more, particularly on the implications for minority voting]

"Going Upriver"

This morning before I left for work I started downloading the film Going Upriver. At 650MB, I figured it would take a couple of hours, even via cable modem. This evening I sat down at my PC to watch it. This may sound like rank heresy, since the Red Sox were playing the Yankees at the culmination of a series which has turned even cricket-loving expat Brits like myself into baseball enthusiasts! (I must admit, however, that I did have a browser window open to keep an eye on the score.....)

The film runs for 90 minutes. The first half hour is about the Vietnam experiences of John Kerry, Max Cleland, Bob Kerrey, and others. It is not for the squeamish: the snapshot of US soldiers grinning over Vietnamese corpses is disturbingly familiar. The remainder of the film is about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War: the Winter Soldier Investigation of winter 1971; the Dewey Canyon III demonstration in Washington a couple of months later, which culminated in Kerry's appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the repudiation of medals; and Kerry's subsequent TV appearances, including the confrontation with O'Neill.

Over the last year or so, I've seen many clips from these amateur movies and TV recordings, but this is the first time I've seen the material assembled so completely, unhampered by the exigencies of MTV-generation editing. Kerry is remarkably impressive for a man of his age, both in his speech and his actions. One thing that really comes across from the body language of those around him - whether long-haired veterans or pin-stripe-suited Senators - is the fact that he clearly commanded enormous respect. As we now know, this respect even extended to the Nixon White House; the legacy of their response is still with us in the form of John O'Neill's vicious "Swift Boat" lies. (He learned his dirty tricks from the master.)

Even though the film is playing in theatres, and can be purchased on DVD, you can download it from here, as I did. You can also get it through BitTorrent, eDonkey and Kazaa. Please watch it, and share it. It's an important part of American history, and painfully relevant today.

And yes - the Red Sox did it! 10 to 3. Who would have believed it? As I finish typing this, people are outside in the street, sounding car horns, letting off fireworks, whooping it up... and this is in a quiet residential area of Brookline. I wonder what it's like downtown?

Memo from Hackworth to C-in-C

Ambitious, but cogent.

Does anyone remember Abu Ghraib?

Andrew Sullivan just blogged a comment that is so perfectly expressed that all I can do is reproduce it verbatim.

THE MISSING ISSUE: It does strike me as astounding that in four debates lasting six hours, the horrors of Abu Ghraib were never mentioned. Remember when we were reeling from the images? They remain the most spectacular public relations debacle for this country at war since Vietnam. And we know the underlying reasons for the abuse and torture: the prison was drastically under-manned and incompetently managed, the Pentagon had given mixed signals on what constituted torture, the CPA had no idea that it might be dealing with an insurgency and was dragging in all sorts of innocents to extract intelligence in a ham-handed manner. Although the administration has clearly done all it can to stymie Congressional investigations, it has become clear that responsibility for the chaos ultimately stops at Rumsfeld's desk. No, it wasn't a systematic policy. It was a function of what wasn't done, rather than what was done - and, in that, it remains a symbol of everything that has gone so wrong in Iraq. Bush, of course, barely mentioned it at the time. He has no ability to stare harsh reality in the face - especially if it means reflection on himself and his administration. As with everything else on his watch, he was not responsible. In fact, no one was responsible except for those literally caught on camera raping, murdering and abusing prisoners in the care of the United States. And so his silence in the debates is not surprising. But Kerry's is - and reveals a worrying lack of courage. Kerry is afraid that criticizing Abu Ghraib will make him look like a war critic, or anti-American, or somehow responsible for weakening morale. Vietnam hovers over him. It shouldn't. What happened was unforgivable negligence and evil, a horrendous blow to American moral standing - as well as simply an outrage on a human and moral level. It didn't affect Iraqis' views: they tragically already believed we were as bad as these images portrayed. But it was a fatal blow to domestic morale. I haven't fully recovered from it in my pro-war heart. I couldn't believe America could do this. I still wince at the memory. But what I still remember was Dick Cheney's response to criticism of Rumsfeld at the time. "Get off his case," he harrumphed. Even after such a blow to the very core of the meaning of America, Cheney was contemptuous of holding anyone in his circle accountable. It says it all, doesn't it?

The "reality-based community"

There's an excellent - and sobering - analysis of Bush's faith and certainty, by Ron Suskind in today's NYT Magazine: Without A Doubt. (Registration required.)

Two quotes. First, what do we mean by "reality-based"?:

In the summer of 2002 [...] I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Second quote, on why Bush's crew isn't worried about the opinions of people who think that reality matters:

We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

Read the whole thing. To this reality-based individual, it was an eye-opener.

Alternative histories of 2001-2004

During this presidential campaign, one consistent Republican mantra has been that "if Kerry had been President, Saddam would still be in power and blah, blah, blah...." And this got me thinking about counterfactuals, about alternative histories - what might have plausibly happened if the initial conditions had been different.

Naturally I turned to the web, but I was disappointed with what I'd found. For example, Ed Driscoll links to several pre-9/11 alternative scenarios, all of which are equally implausible to anyone that has read Richard Clarke's book. Most of the other uses of the term (or its cognate "alternate history") seem to involve alternative accounts or interpretations of what actually happened. (The works of Seymour Hersh and Michael Moore are often described in this way.)

So what kind of alternative am I thinking about? Well, consider a world in which two little things are changed. First, in the summer of 2001, Tony Blair has a heart attack. This is plausible; we know today of his heart problems. His doctors advise him to retire, and he hands over to Gordon Brown. Second, imagine that Project Anaconda had been blown open in the press with Rumsfeld's fingerprints all over it. (Anaconda really happened; it was a horribly botched operation in Afghanistan in which the military chain of command broke down completely, resulting in dozens of US Army fatalities. See Hersh's Chain of Command.)

With these changes, let's run the movie forward. 9/11 happens, and coalition forces hit Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Anaconda blows up, and although Rumsfeld doesn't resign, his relationship with the military leadership is fatally poisoned.

Now Bush and his team begin to plan for Iraq, as described in Woodward's Plan of Attack. But there's a hitch. Unlike Blair, Gordon Brown understands the caveats and codicils to the various intelligence reports, and he asks the hard questions. Hearing only unsatisfactory answers, he declines to offer Bush his unconditional support. Bush and Rumsfeld are willing to push ahead without Britain, but now Powell reaches his limit. A coalition without a single permanent member of the UN Security Council other than the USA has no credibility, he says; the damage to America's standing in the world from unilateral action would be irreparable. It's a resigning matter. Meanwhile Rumsfeld is challenged from another quarter: the Joint Chiefs refuse to sign off on a plan for military operations without adequate supplies, body armor, and training.

Faced with these obstacles, Bush realizes that he can no longer push for an early invasion of Iraq... [to be continued]

This feels like an interesting counterfactual. Would Bush have taken the time to build a coalition? What if Blix had had a year to demonstrate that there were no WMDs? How might Bush have approached the questions of Iran, of the Palestinians? Would Saddam have resigned and fled in the face of an inexorable build-up with full UN support? Fascinating to speculate.....

Flip-flops

Try these all season Flipflops. Click on image to progress forward.

(Thanks, Kate.)

"al-Qaida a dark illusion"?

OK, so this is really contrarian thinking. In the midst of an election campaign in which one of the main issues is how to prosecute "the War on Terror", along comes a documentary which argues that al-Qaida may not really exist. In today's Guardian, Andy Beckett reviews the series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear which begins on BBC2 next Wednesday. In this three-part series, the director Adam Curtis:

... points out that al-Qaida did not even have a name until early 2001, when the American government decided to prosecute Bin Laden in his absence and had to use anti-Mafia laws that required the existence of a named criminal organisation.

Bill Durodie, director of the international centre for security analysis at King's College London, says: "The reality [of the al-Qaida threat to the west] has been essentially a one-off. There has been one incident in the developed world since 9/11 [the Madrid bombings]. There's no real evidence that all these groups are connected."

Good heavens - maybe Bush was right to dismiss Osama bin Laden as he did. But in that case, who are we supposed to be fighting? Iraqi patriots insurgents? Or perhaps - and even more terrifying - it's....

"The United States of Fighting Terrorism"

Thomas Friedman's op-ed Addicted to 9/11 today was right on the money. He addresses Kerry's hope that America can get back to a state where "terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance", and says, "The idea that President Bush and Mr. Cheney would declare such a statement to be proof that Mr. Kerry is unfit to lead actually says more about them than Mr. Kerry. Excuse me, I don't know about you, but I dream of going back to the days when terrorism was just a nuisance in our lives."

I would certainly like that, and having lived in England through the IRA's mainland bombing campaign I can remember what it felt like. I can still recall the moment when I caught myself looking at a package in the sidewalk and, for the first time in years, didn't immediately think panic "Bomb...?". It's a good feeling. Naive? I don't think so; just getting things into proportion and being careful rather than obsessive.

Friedman concludes, "Lastly, politicizing 9/11 put a wedge between us and our history. The Bush team has turned this country into The United States of Fighting Terrorism. [...] I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them - the bad guys - not about us. We're about the Fourth of July. Just so.

Asymmetry or hypocrisy?

After a series of mind-bogglingly inept op-ed pieces in the New York Times, David Brooks came up with what seemed like a reasonably interesting column today. Under the heading Not Just a Personality Clash, a Conflict of Visions, he argues that there is a relationship between political orientation and geography:

We're used to this in the realm of domestic politics. Politicians from the more sparsely populated South and West are more likely, at least in the political and economic realms, to champion the Goldwateresque virtues: freedom, self-sufficiency, individualism. Politicians from the cities are likely to champion the Ted Kennedyesque virtues: social justice, tolerance, interdependence.

Politicians from sparsely populated areas are more likely to say they want government off people's backs so they can run their own lives. Politicians from denser areas are more likely to want government to play at least a refereeing role, to keep people from bumping into one another too abusively.

And he goes on to wonder if this dichotomy is related to the way people think about international affairs. (He cites a recent article by Adam Wolfson in the Weekly Standard, at which point my interest started to wane. C'mon, there has to be a better source than that rag.)

However before Brooks gets to that point, he tosses in the following throw-away line:

Neither group lives up to its ideals with perfect consistency, but this is what both groups say.

And that got me thinking. Brooks clearly intends this as an even-handed characterization, in true journalistic style, but is it accurate. Are liberals and conservatives equally inconsistent when it comes to living up to their ideals?

I think not. My sense if that, by and large, conservatives are much more likely to be "closet liberals" than are liberals to be "closet conservatives". The newspapers report many arch-conservatives who denounce the Federal government one moment and then turn around to lobby for a contract, or a tax break, or a subsidy. Taxprof Blog published an analysis of government spending and subsidies last month that showed:

...that of the 32 states (and the District of Columbia) that are "winners" -- receiving more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes -- 76% are Red States that voted for George Bush in 2000. Indeed, 17 of the 20 (85%) states receiving the most federal spending per dollar of federal taxes paid are Red States.

On the other hand, I can't remember a single case of a prominent liberal politician displaying "closet conservative" tendencies. (Apart from Zell Miller, I guess, though he's out of the closet these days.) Of course you may regard the efforts of Clinton, Rubin, Kerry and others to balance the budget in the 1990s as rather conservative behavior. I thought so at the time, but after four years of Bush and his runaway deficits I'm thoroughly confused.

Naturally I'm not talking about campaign fundraising or pandering to special interests. Those are equal-opportunity failings, neither liberal nor conservative.

The bottom line: Brook's simplistic ideas about geography and politics do illustrate a point - but not necessarily the point that he intended to make.

On the exploitation of fear

Recommended: my colleague Alec's recent piece on America, Terrorism, and the Power of Nightmares.

"Dear Michael Moore..."

The Guardian has an article today in which they show some of the letters that Michael Moore has received from soldiers and contract workers in Iraq. All are bitterly angry with George W. Bush.

And yes, I'm sure Moore's received other letters from people who support Bush. But with the election less than a month away, it's worth paying attention to the soldier who wrote: "People's perceptions of this war have done a complete 180 since we got here. We had someone die in a mortar attack the first week, and ever since then, things have changed completely. Soldiers are calling their families urging them to support John Kerry. If this is happening elsewhere, it looks as if the overseas military vote that Bush is used to won't be there this time around."

Update: The letters are taken from Moore's new book, Will They Ever Trust Us Again?

The other George had a way with words, too...

During the tenure of the current President, many people have compared him with his father. Herewith a few bon mots from George Senior. Make of them what you will.

27 Oct 1984 "Let me assure you of one thing: the United States under this administration will never -- never -- let terrorism or fear of terrorism determine its foreign policy."

28 Jan 1987 [On selling weapons to Iran] "On the surface, selling arms to a country that sponsors terrorism, of course, clearly, you'd have to argue it's wrong, but it's the exception sometimes that proves the rule."

Maybe this explains why his son prefers other counsel. But sometimes they seem too much alike. More from Bush pere:

2 Aug 1988 [When the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner] "I will never apologize for the United States, ever. I don't care what the facts are."

4 Dec 1990 "I know what I've told you I'm going to say, I'm going to say. And what else I say, well, I'll take some time to figure that all out."

12 May 1991 "I've got to run now and relax. The doctor told me to relax. The doctor told me to relax. The doctor told me. He was the one. He said, 'Relax.'"

4 Mar 1992 "Somebody asked me, what's it take to win? I said to them, I can't remember, what does it take to win the Superbowl? Or maybe Steinbrenner, my friend George, will tell us what it takes for the Yanks to win... one run. But I went over to the Strawberry Festival this morning, and ate a piece of shortcake over there -- able to enjoy it right away, and once I completed it, it didn't have to be approved by Congress -- I just went ahead and ate it."

More here.

"If Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote"

I keep running across links to quotations from recent emails by the WSJ reporter Farnaz Fassihi in Baghdad. Here are two sobering excerpts:

Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for insecurity. Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day, even if it means having a dictator ruler. I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad.

I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree elect a leadership. His response summed it all: "Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice democracy? Are you joking?"

After reading this, and watching Bush and Kerry debate Iraq, all I can say is, "Don't promise what you can't deliver."

The personal side of Bush's war

Three pieces caught my eye today with a common theme: the personal consequences of Bush's elective war in Iraq.

First, there was a piece in today's NYT about an ex-reservist who's been activated for duty in Iraq.

[M]y cousin Alan - the youngest - joined the Ohio National Guard after graduating from high school in 1997. [...] My primary concern was whether Alan was in good enough shape to get through the arduous training. Once that was over, he had to train with his unit for only one weekend a month and two weeks a year for the next six years. His name would then be placed on an inactive list for another two years, unless - as the recruiter who visited his high school had explained - our country needed his skills during a natural disaster or a college riot. [...] But two-day weekends became four-day weekends, two weeks stretched to three weeks, and full college tuition shrank to half the tuition for vocational school. Alan grew disenchanted with the National Guard, and [...] he was given a general discharge. His name was still placed on an inactive duty list - a roster he was told was only for an unprecedented national disaster that active-duty soldiers couldn't handle alone. [...] He packed away his uniform, and none of us ever thought about it again. Until last month. Alan received orders to report for "involuntary" duty on Sept. 12. In Iraq. For a year and a half: 545 days to be exact, with two possible extensions.

Next, I was reading PlanetSun, the aggregation of blogs for folks at Sun Microsystems, and I came across a piece by David Kordsmeier about his thoughts on coming across his (fairly unusual) name in the list of US casualties in Iraq. It's a moving piece, worth reading slowly and thoughtfully.

And then, as so often, I turned to Terry, and read his short piece on the moral issue at the core of sending someone to war. This is from an interview with Stephen Fry, quoting Bertrand Russell, as cited in Neil Gaiman's blog (and that pretty much captures the magic of the web right there):

“Don’t you understand? The sacrifice we’re asking of our young is not that they die for their country, but that they kill for their country.” That’s the sacrifice. To ask a child to kill someone else, whom you’ve never met. That’s a moral choice, pulling a trigger. Having a bullet hit you is not a moral choice. You don’t decide to be killed. It’s a terrible thing that happens to you. But killing something is something you do and that’s a desperate sacrifice.

Exactly. (See also my earlier piece on War and Morality.)

River's back

River is back with two new blog entries from Baghdad. Her thoughts on viewing a (bootleg copy of) Fahrenheit 9/11 are essential reading. Speaking about Lila Lipscomb, the mother of the US soldier killed in Iraq, River says:

I can’t explain the feelings I had towards her. I pitied her because, apparently, she knew very little about what she was sending her kids into. I was angry with her because she really didn’t want to know what she was sending her children to do. In the end, all of those feelings crumbled away as she read the last letter from her deceased son. I began feeling a sympathy I really didn’t want to feel, and as she was walking in the streets of Washington, looking at the protestors and crying, it struck me that the Americans around her would never understand her anguish. The irony of the situation is that the one place in the world she would ever find empathy was Iraq. We understand. We know what it’s like to lose family and friends to war- to know that their final moments weren’t peaceful ones… that they probably died thirsty and in pain… that they weren’t surrounded by loved ones while taking their final breath.

As for her comments on watching Bush and Allawi on television...

The elections are already a standard joke. There's talk of holding elections only in certain places where it will be 'safe' to hold them. One wonders what exactly comprises 'safe' in Iraq today. Does 'safe' mean the provinces that are seeing fewer attacks on American troops? Or does 'safe' mean the areas where the abduction of foreigners isn't occurring? Or could 'safe' mean the areas that *won't* vote for an Islamic republic and *will* vote for Allawi? Who will be allowed to choose these places? Right now, Baghdad is quite unsafe. We see daily abductions, killings, bombings and Al-Sadr City, slums of Baghdad, see air strikes... will they hold elections in Baghdad? Imagine, Bush being allowed to hold elections in 'safe' areas- like Texas and Florida.

Sad to say, I actually can imagine the latter. Maybe I need to get out more.

CD of the week: "An Audience with Tony Benn"

I know, I know: you see "CD of the week" and you expect music. Not this time. An Audience with Tony Benn is a double CD that I picked up in Oxford recently. It's simply a recording of the former MP and Labour politician Tony Benn on stage, speaking about politics and answering questions from the audience over the course of a couple of hours. Sounds boring? Anything but.

Tony Benn retired from Parliament a few years ago "to spend more time with politics", and listening to him one remembers that politics is about ideas - big ideas, about how we organize and govern our lives, and how power is acquired, transferred, and controlled. It's a refreshing - and somewhat wistful - realisation. To most people, he's identified with the label "left-wing extremist", or "socialist". While that may have been his assigned role in the bizarre game of day-to-day politics, here he simply talks about common-sense, uncomplicated ideas, with the clarity that marks a superb thinker and orator.

A couple of years ago, while visiting England, I turned on the TV late one evening and found myself watching an hour-long conversation between Tony Benn and Michael Portillo, the former candidate for the leader of the Conservative Party. Here were two prominent politicians from opposite ends of the political spectrum, having a quiet, civilized discussion about the state of politics in Britain over recent years. Obviously they disagreed about many things, but they agreed on many more - on the responsibility of those in government, and the dangers of the "politics of personality", among other things. They clearly liked and respected each other, and enjoyed the interplay of ideas. Voices were not raised, slogans and sound-bites were eschewed. It was wonderful. I thought of American politicians, and tried to imagine such an exchange occurring. Mario Cuomo and Newt Gingrich? Ted Kennedy and Bob Dole? Alas, my imagination wasn't up to the task.

"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all"

Sobering reading from The Guardian, also available here:

According to the US military's leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush's war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends."

And the politicians can't blame the military for this.

After the killing of four US contractors in Fallujah, the marines besieged the city for three weeks in April - the watershed event for the insurgency. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare. "I asked a three-star marine general who gave the order to go to Fallujah and he wouldn't tell me. I came to the conclusion that the order came directly from the White House." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base.

As David J. Morris writes in Salon:

The mainstream press has largely overlooked the fact that in the case of Fallujah, the White House unnecessarily injected itself into the military's tactical decision-making process in Iraq, ignored the informed opinions of ground commanders, and in effect micromanaged the battle. According to many observers, the seemingly contradictory U.S. military actions over the course of the siege were largely the result of the wishy-washy directives being issued by the Bush administration and its failure to appreciate the implications of sending in a large Marine force to seize a notoriously hostile town.

To both outside observers and former high-placed officials, including former U.S. Central Command chief Anthony Zinni and historian Robert Kaplan, it appeared as if the Bush administration had ordered the punitive campaign out of anger and then lost nerve when Arab outrage over civilian casualties rose to a fever pitch.

I don't care about Bush's ANG career, or even that he was a pathological liar at college. I care about the fact that he's demonstrated that he's totally incompetent, and that his bad judgment has caused thousands of deaths. He deserves impeachment, not re-election.

How come "pro-life" doesn't include the mother's life?

Respectful of Otters just posted a piece about so-called "partial birth abortion". It cites an article in Ms. about a woman whose baby died in utero at 19 weeks. She was forced to spend a week carrying a dead fetus inside her - bleeding steadily, at risk of hemorrhage - before she could be treated. Quite simply, no-one was willing to treat her, because the safest procedure for removing the fetus was proscribed under the "partial birth abortion" ban.

Excellent analysis of the strategy behind 9/11 by Juan Cole

Please read Juan Cole's piece on September 11 and its aftermath. I doubt anyone who reads my blog actually believes Bush's blatherings about the perpetrators "hating freedom", so I may be preaching to the choir, but this piece explains the real strategic thinking involved.

The use of TV drama to enhance fear and panic?

Last night I watched part two of The Grid on BBC. This is a joint BBC/TNT/Fox drama that "explores both sides of the escalating war on terror". Call me a cynic, but it seemed to me that the main effect that the producers were looking for was to convince the viewing public that (a) the law enforcement and counter-terrorism forces in the US and UK are mostly incompetent, and (b) we should all be VERY, VERY, AFRAID of everyone and everything. Carl Rove (Bush's choreographer of campaign dirt and panic) must have been delighted.

Amazing how people change over 3 years....

Yesterday the faux-Democrat Zell Miller spoke at the Republican Convention, and lambasted John Kerry mercilessly and with visible anger. He ranted that "For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure."

Yet a scant three and a bit years ago, the same Zell Miller lauded Kerry as "one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders - and a good friend". In a speech introducing Kerry at the Democratic Party of Georgia's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in March, 2001, Miller waxed lyrical:

"In his 16 years in the Senate, John Kerry has fought against government waste and worked hard to bring some accountability to Washington. Early in his Senate career in 1986, John signed on to the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Bill, and he fought for balanced budgets before it was considered politically correct for Democrats to do so. John has worked to strengthen our military, reform public education, boost the economy and protect the environment."

Yes, it's amazing how people can change - and I'm not referring to John Kerry! Zell Miller should be bloody well ashamed of himself, if you ask me.

Thanks to Mark M. for the tip.

UPDATE: Apparently Jimmy Carter was also upset with Zell, and wrote to him to say so.

I thought Vietnam was overseas

I'm confused. Dubya told an NBC Today Show interviewer that “had my unit been called up, I would have gone (to Vietnam).” But according to his Air Guard application (the one released by the Pentagon but not the White House), Bush checked the “No Overseas Service” box when he pulled strings to avoid the draft. Can someone explain?
(This is courtesy of William McTavish at Capitol Hill Blue; they have a mixed reputation, but this is irrefutable.)

The subversive writings of the Supreme Court

Just when you think things couldn't get any more absurd... The Memory Hole is reporting a truly Orwellian attempt at censorship by the Justice Department. The ACLU had filed some documents as part of its ongoing case against the Patriot Act, and the Justice Department - as is their right, apparently - chose to black out portions of the material before it was published. The supreme irony is that the text that they blacked out is taken from a Supreme Court decision:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

Fortunately, the court rejected this redaction. I would love to read an interview with the Justice Department staffer who tried to censor the words of the Supreme Court. What mental processes were involved, I wonder. Any lawyers out there?

"Free Lunch Republicans"

Terry just posted a pointer to a piece by akiru:

Waking up to NPR, as you do, I heard an analyst use a golden phrase to describe half of the Congressional inactivity on fixing Social Security. Free Lunch Republicans. Gosh that's beautiful. It's got such wide applicability. Everytime they trot out the old chestnut about "Tax & Spend" Democrats, you can reply that only Free Lunch Republicans would imagine that you can keep spending money without having some first. It's particularly exquisite because there is that brand of "Libertarian" Republican who is only too fond of reciting TANSTAAFL at the drop of a rhetorical hat.

Please feel free to disseminate widely.

And so I am. And so should you.

Fahrenheit 9/11

We finally saw F9/11 this morning. Brilliant agit-prop. I don't care about categories: if critics complain that it isn't a documentary because it doesn't follow journalistic standards of being "fair and balanced" (oops....), then find another category for it. Emotional? Damn right! How do you talk to a woman who's lost a son in Iraq without dealing in emotions? And if you can look at the broken bodies of Iraqi children and American soldiers without emotion, I pity you.

A lot of people have latched on to the wrong issues from this film. And many people are criticizing it without even seeing it. (See, for example, Rep. David Dreier on Real Time With Bill Maher.) Please, make up your own mind. If you haven't seen it, I really think that you should. If you are from the USA, or the UK, or Australia, you need to see what is being done by your government in your name. It isn't pretty. You'll see blood, bodies, coffins, amputated limbs: that's what war is all about. I hope you won't use Barbara Bush's beautiful mind excuse. In the words of Lou Reed, "This is no time for my country Right or Wrong/remember what that brought/.../This is no time to turn your back.

Odd stuff in the mail

As a resident alien in the US, I don't get to vote, or sit on juries, or various other stuff. And although it wouldn't be illegal, I refrain from participating directly in US politics - I don't contribute to or work for political campaigns, PACs, or advocacy groups.

Yesterday I was surprised and amused to receive an unsolicited piece of mail from the Bush campaign. It contained a letter, urging me (not once, but three times) to contribute "$1,000, $500, $250, $100, $50, $35, or even $25 today". It spent more time blasting the spending of "hundreds of millions of dollars [by] liberal special interests" that it did actually talking about Bush's policies and values. (And the policies weren't particularly coherent: more "Cutting taxes", not a word about the deficit, energy, or health care.) And it encouraged vandalism! The envelope contained a "W'04" bumper sticker which I was encouraged to put on my car "or that of a neighbor or family member who's backing me."

Compared with the up-beat Kerry-Edwards mailing that my wife received the same day, this Bush piece felt negative and threatened. Portraying the President as an underdog may be realistic, but (unlike us Brits) America seems to prefer winners. In this mailing, Bush certainly didn't come across as a winner. And ranting about the "attacks" in Liberal "TV ads" is a bit rich, in view of the fact that media analysts rate the Bush campaign as the most consistently negative in modern history.

However there was one positive item: the letter concludes with the assurance that "This is my final political campaign". Amen. And so this morning I compromised my principles (just a bit) by putting a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on my car. Hey, I can always say that one of my neighbors did it!

"The Corporation"

So as I blogged last month, I've seen the Control Room. I've seen The Fog of War. I own the DVDs of OutFoxed and Uncovered. I missed The Hunting of the President, but I read the book. This is clearly the summer of the political documentary.

So yesterday we were planning to go to see Fahrenheit 9/11 (which we still haven't seen - are we the only ones?) But on Saturday we talked to my son Chris, and he urged us to go to see The Corporation first, so we did. It's a study of the rise of the modern corporation over the last 150 years, from groups that were specifically chartered for limited purposes through the emergence of the corporation as a legal "person", to today's supranational entities.

It's a very good documentary - it's 145 minutes long, and the time flies by. It's not a great documentary, in part because the film-makers tried to cram too much in, and lost focus. But on the other hand if you're only ever going to watch one documentary on the subject, it's probably a good tactic to cover as many bases as possible, to plant as many seeds for future reading, research, and - just maybe - action as they could.

My (un)favourite person: the woman psychologist who works on ways to make advertising targeted at pre-school children more "effective": specifically, by making the children more productive naggers of their parents. She managed to keep her composure when asked whether she regarded what she did as "ethical", but as she replied that she "didn't know about ethics" her eyes told a different story.

Five uneasy pieces (Iraq-related)

First, River has resumed her blog Baghdad Burning after a six week hiatus. As always, it's both moving and informative, particularly her observations on the Christian churches in Baghdad. And then there's the chilling note that:
Word on the street has it that email, internet access, and telephone calls are being monitored closely. We actually heard a couple of reports of people being detained due to the contents of their email. It's a daunting thought and speaks volumes about our current 'liberated' status- and please don't bother sending me a copy of the "Patriot Act"... this last year it has felt like everyone is under suspicion for something.

Second, Juan Cole wrote an excellent op-ed piece in the Washington Post about Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr. Essential reading.

Third, Terry Karney proposes a practical way of dealing with the al-Sadr situation. Of course the chances of it being followed are slim to none....

Fourth, while everyone's attention is on Baghdad and Najaf, it appears that the British forces have abandoned Basra. With separatist elements emerging in the south as well as the Kurdish north, the whole thing could be about to break apart.

And finally, as I was checking out various US media websites to see if and how they were reporting all of this, I came across an MSNBC page with a small sidebar entitled "IRAQ: the human cost". Naively, I thought that this might actually address the real human costs: all the casualties (coalition and Iraqi, military and civilian), the effect on health, education, and humanitarian services in Iraq, and so forth. Not a chance: it was simply about coalition casualties. Now I'm all in favour of recognizing the sacrifices of those who have died, but why limit it to Americans? I guess that, for MSNBC, Iraqis simply aren't human.

"Not appropriate for external use"

From Terry comes word of a statement issued by the American Library Association.

Last week, the American Library Association learned that the Department of Justice asked the Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents to instruct depository libraries to destroy five publications the Department has deemed not "appropriate for external use." The Department of Justice has called for these five public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library.

The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA).

I have two immediate reactions. First, what are the constitutional implications of the government attempting to restrict access to the text of Federal statutes? Secondly, this seems to reflect obsolete (20th century) thinking. Presumably all of these texts are on line somewhere. If not, I'm sure that there are plenty of law students and librarians ready to crank up the scanners. So what's the point? (Maybe that's the answer - it's simply intended as a distraction.)

UPDATE: The ALA reports that the Justice Department has rescinded its request. See also this Boston Globe story. From reading the latter, this whole affair looks like a simple case of bureaucratic myopia, but the fact that no-one questioned it at the time says a lot about the prevailing climate.
Thanks to Steve E. for the pointer.

God wars

In today's Salon, Laura Miller reviews a couple of books that take very different positions on the role of religion in contemporary society. The two volumes are Alister McGrath's "The Twilight of Atheism" and Sam Harris' "The End of Faith". After a reasonable and balanced assessment of each, she spoils it all with a final paragraph that provoked me into writing a letter to the editor. Just in case it doesn't get published, this is what I wrote. (If it is published, I'll replace this with a link.)

Laura Miller concludes: " I have to agree with McGrath (and Stephen Jay Gould) that, ultimately, the existence of God can be neither proven nor disproven by means of conventional empiricism." But the problem isn't one of existence - it's definition. To my theist friends, I say "define your god and I'll tell you if I believe in it." Spinoza's god has little in common with that of the "Left Behind" novels. There is no coherence to what "God" is, and without such coherence talk of "existence" is pretty meaningless. And just to make it worse, she tosses in "proven". What does this mean? Legally proven? Mathematically proven? Scientifically? Proven as a matter of logical necessity? Proven beyond a reasonable doubt? This is just a recipe for rampant equivocation.

I trimmed down what I'd originally written in order to increase the likelihood of getting it published, so let me clarify one point. The various notions of "God" that people espouse are manifestly inconsistent, often incoherent (contradictory), and even absurd (Credo quia absurdum, as Tertullian said). But people don't acknowledge that and talk about "the existences of Gods". They assume that everything can be collapsed into a singular "existence of God" question.

For theists, I imagine that each believes that their own definition is The One True meaning, and that everybody else's is either a distorted view of the One True God or simply false. For secularists, such as Laura Miller, I can only assume that she gives everybody the benefit of the doubt and wraps them all up in some vague, woolly uber-God.

And don't get me started on "proven".....

An item that you may have missed

[REVISED] This got almost no coverage. In Lancaster Online (the web edition of the Lancaster, PA Intelligencer Journal; minimal registration required), there's an account of President Bush meeting with a group of Old Order Amish. At the end of the meeting, Bush said, I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.

"God speaks through me"?! Good grief. What un-Christian hubris. Even though I'm an atheist, I prefer what John Kerry said to the DNC: I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side.

Speech, speech! (But where are the DVDs?)

Just watched the final evening of the Democratic Convention (on C-SPAN, of course). I thought Kerry's speech was excellent, capping a week of wonderful speeches from Clinton, Gore, Carter, Edwards, Cleland, and Obama. And Kerry's daughters were fantastic, more than making up for Lieberman's embarrassing performance.

Naturally enough, I want to share some of these moments with folks that I know missed the Convention. So why isn't the DNC selling DVDs of the Convention Highlights on their website? Doesn't this seem like an obvious fundraising opportunity?

And yes, I have emailed the DNC to suggest this.

The uncounted casualties of Iraq

As I write this, the official number of US military dead in Iraq is 906. But many soldiers die without being added to the casualty list. Over at Democracy Now! you'll find a gut-wrenching interview with the parents of a 23 year old Marine Reservist, Jeffrey Lucey. (It's also mirrored here, at John Fabiani's blog.) The Hermit summarised it on Terry's blog like this:
[This is] the story of a family whose son went to Iraq at 18 [actually 21] and came back and hung himself. He had two sets of Iraqi dogtags that he wore to honour the two men (prisoners) that he had been ordered to shoot, close range, unarmed. He told his sister he was a murderer and could no longer live with himself. The VA committed him at his father's insisting and released him after 3 days despite his telling them of four ways he was considering using to die. He got told he was weak, to suck it up, and get on with his life. His father found him hanging in the cellar.

A political junkie's dream site

The Current Electoral Vote Predictor integrates recent polling data to create a map of Electoral College votes. As with most successful sites, it concentrates on doing just one thing, and doing it extremely well. (Only omission is that there's no RSS feed to alert me on updates.) Thanks to Tim for the link.

Things that make no sense (ongoing series, apparently endless)

Per Terry, it seems that while the U.S.Army is so shortstaffed that they are recalling a 67 year old retired Colonel,
the Air Force and the Navy are doing fine. They are offering early outs (as much as 12 months) with no penalties to first term enlistees because they have (sit down, it's a deusy†) 50,000 too many people.

(Of course it might help if those being reactivated could actually count on getting paid for their services.)
———
† Transcribed from the (correct) original: no sic is required.

Dude, where's my blood pressure?

As I blogged earlier, we went to see Control Room yesterday. When we got home, the DVD of Outfoxed that I'd ordered had arrived. We watched it this evening. It was good (though not as good as Control Room, which was quite brilliant), and it left me feeling very angry - which is the point, isn't it? It's worse than Berlusconi in Italy, because at least everyone knows that he's a crook who uses his media empire for illegal purposes.

Anyway, the next time some slimy Fox pundit-masquerading-as-a-journalist begins a comment with "Some people say...", watch out - a bunch of people are liable to throw up.

Preaching to the choir... or not

In today's New York Times there was an op-ed piece by Nicolas Kristof entitled Jesus and Jihad. In this piece, which Kristof admits he had reservations about writing, he shares with us some scenes from the Left Behind series of evangelical thrillers. He writes:

These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is Glorious Appearing, which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.

In "Glorious Appearing," Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."

He concludes:

Many American Christians once read the Bible to mean that African-Americans were cursed as descendants of Noah's son Ham, and were intended by God to be enslaved. In the 19th century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification for slavery as God's word - but surely it would have been wrong to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have been perceived as denigrating some people's religious faith.

That's not what America stands for, and I doubt that it's what God stands for.

Obviously as an atheist I find the last couple of words incoherent, but overall this seemed like a very sensible - and very relevant - commentary. And so, as an inveterate blogger, I wanted to blog about it. And then I wondered who might read it. I think that most of the people I know well would agree with Kristof that the popularity of these books says something important and disturbing about America. But would any Left Behind enthusiasts read this, and if so what might they say? Could any kind of dialogue follow, or is that a futile idea? Would we even speak the same language?

Curious. And troubling. [Cached]

The Control Room

We went to see The Control Room today. Highly recommended. If you didn't realize that the Jessica Lynch story was released in order to bury another news item, you need to see this film. If you didn't realize that the US deliberately targeted three separate groups of journalists in Baghdad, and why, you need to see this film. If you've already forgotten the things that people were saying at the time of the invasion, and need to be reminded of how they sound against the backdrop of over a year of fighting, occupation, torture, and chaos, you need to see this film. In fact, you just need to see it. Period.

(And don't just take my word for it. Last time I looked, the Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film was 97% fresh - 75 critics positive, 2 negative.)

Update: If you have seen the film, you might be interested in this piece in Salon about Lt. Josh Rushing, the press officer at CentCom.

Our worst fears

Back on June 11 I posted an entry entitled This is a blog entry I hope I'll be able to delete. Weeks went by, and I began to hope that Sy Hersh had got it wrong after all; that the things to which he'd alluded were unsubstantiated. But today Salon Magazine has posted a piece entitled Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape.

WARNING: It's pretty upsetting stuff.

UPDATE More info here at Boing Boing, including new info from European sources.

How to talk about unemployment

Telling the real story about unemployment is tough. Anna Marie Smith's piece in Zmag is excellent on the complexity, but really hard to summarize (although the cartoon, right, captures one angle very nicely). Paul Krugman's July 6th op-ed in the NYT focusses on one measure - the percentage of adults who have jobs. In Salon, J. K. Galbraith discusses the "Manchester index", which "multiplies the number of unemployed by the average duration of their unemployment. In this way, it captures one of the most important features of being without a job: that the situation gets worse the longer it lasts." And not all jobs are equal: as the EPI points out, real wages have been falling for the last six months. All of these articles tell a part of the story, but none of them clearly supports the kind of memorable slogan that is essential in political rhetoric.

Maybe Kerry's best approach is to stick with the simple words of Reagan: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" For the majority of people, the answer is crystal clear.

Update July 9, 2004: FactCheck.Org has put out an interesting analysis which suggests that the "quality of jobs" issue may not be as straightforward as most people think. Essentially there seem to be two inconsistent sets of data coming out from the BLS. FactCheck normally does good, careful work, so I'm going to watch this. One omission: they don't mention benefits, which could be a significant factor.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

While searching Google's Usenet archives looking for an old friend, I stumbled across the first Usenet posting that I ever made on the subject of politics. It was in April, 1986, and I ventured into a heated discussion in net.followup about Reagan's bombing of Libya.

The sense of déjà vu is weird. Take this bit, for instance:

It's ironical, isn't it? Over the last year or so the "Great Communicater [sic]" has presided over an absolutely disastrous slide in the world perception of the U.S. [...] A good indication of this is the fact that last week the Soviets felt able to launch a massive series of air strikes against the Afghan rebels, knowing that compared with the Libyan raid it would be a non-event.

Substitute Bush for Reagan, and Chechnya for Afghanistan....

Acronyms we need to know: IRR

Terry Karney just posted a blog entry about the IRR, the Individual Ready Reserve. Worth reading, including the comments. As he says, "we are pulling water from deeper in the well, someday it will run dry.".

Things that leave you speechless

On Tuesday, according to the Washington Post, Bush uttered the following absurdity: "Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion."

If any other politician had said this, there would have been an uproar. With Bush: nothing. Its the kind of inanity to which we've become accustomed. How pathetic.

P.S. Given Bush's recent attempts to tell the EC what to do about Turkey, it's worth noting that the USA would not qualify for EC membership. No state that employs the death penalty is eligible to join. The 13th Protocol of the ECHR is the operative text. [And thanks, Gene, for pointing out my Freudian slip.]

Killed on the next zebra crossing

Remember the old HHGTTG quote about proving black is white and....? Well, on Lisa Rein's Radar she has QuickTime clips of the 6/21/04 Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart shows exactly how Cheney contradicted himself over The Mythical Connection Between Saddam And Al-Qaeda. (Of course this was the same show in which Stewart nailed Stephen Hayes, author of the mind-bogglingly stupid book The Connection.)

I wonder what Cheney's reaction might be? (And apropos of Cheney's new attitude towards Congressional decorum, Juan Cole suggests that if a $275,000 fine is appropriate for Howard Stern, it should be good enough for the Vice President.)

Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance: A feeling of tension experienced when certain cognitions are contradictory or inconsistent with each other

For example, in this morning's news:

"I think the bitter differences over the war are over," said Mr Bush. [iC SouthLondon]

While at the same time, the level of peaceful demonstrations - and threats of violence - is such that:

About 4,000 police and 2,000 soldiers ­ more than a third of Ireland's security forces are being deployed... In addition, 700 US security personnel and four naval ships are being called in.... In Istanbul... Turkish police are expected to deploy more than 23,000 officers for the Nato leaders' summit. [Belfast Telegraph]

I'm definitely experiencing "a feeling of tension" about contradictory cognitions. How about you?

"Our preposterous use of books"

Back on June 4th, I posted a piece about Arianna Huffington's article comparing George W. Bush and England's King Henry V (as depicted by Shakespeare). Of course politicians, advertisers, journalists and others have always mined the English literary canon for stirring sound-bites. (In Blood, Class and Empire, the alternately brilliant and insufferable Christopher Hitchens notes that William Safire went through a purple patch in which a third of his NYT op-ed pieces included Churchillian references.) And today Scott Newstrom, an assistant professor at Amherst College, sent me a pointer to a fascinating essay in which he looks in some detail at the various (and varied) ways in which Americans have exploited the "Prince Hal" character, particularly with respect to George W. Bush. Recommended.
---
The title of this entry is from Emerson. Read Scott Newstrom's piece for the connection.

Will Mukaradeeb prove to be the My Lai of Iraq?

From the Guardian newspaper:

It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.

By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.

It seems that they need to teach the U.S. military about more than just the Geneva Conventions. How about Middle Eastern culture and the nomadic peoples of the region? I wonder if General Mattis will be quite so stupidly gung-ho at his court-martial:

Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. "How many people go to the middle of the desert ... to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilisation? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive."

When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child's body being lowered into a grave, he replied: "I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don't have to apologise for the conduct of my men."

Dammit... first Pat Buchanan, now George Will

In this piece, George Will gets to the heart of today's quagmire in Iraq: accountability:

The first axiom is: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.

Leave aside the question of who or what failed before 9/11. But who lost his or her job because the president's 2003 State of the Union address gave currency to a fraud — the story of Iraq attempting to buy uranium in Niger? Or because the primary and only sufficient reason for waging pre-emptive war — weapons of mass destruction — was largely spurious? Or because postwar planning, from failure to anticipate the initial looting to today's insufficient force levels, has been botched? Failures are multiplying because of choices for which no one seems accountable.

Indeed. And for Rumsfeld, Will summons up the bard....

One question is: Are the nation's efforts in the deepening global war — the world is more menacing than it was a year ago — helped or hindered by Rumsfeld's continuation as the appointed American most conspicuously identified with the conduct of the war? This is not a simple call. But being experienced, he will know how to make the call. Being honorable, he will so do.

He knows his Macbeth and will recognize the framing of the second question: Were he to resign, would discerning people say that nothing in his public life became him like the leaving of it?

Marxist quotations

Today's leader (that's "editorial" for you Americans) in the Guardian begins as follows:

Shortly before being elected US president, George Bush wasn't able to name the president of Pakistan when asked in a televised interview. Yet, according to his national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, in the months leading up to September 11, President Bush was fully briefed and supported a detailed plan to help General Musharraf cut off support to al-Qaida in Afghanistan. As Groucho Marx once asked: "Who do you believe - me, or the evidence of your own eyes?"

Precisely.

Understanding Iraq

Watching the news about what's happening in Iraq, I am struck by two things: they only talk about the number of Americans killed (or perhaps "Coalition forces"), and they do not even try to answer the question "Why now?" There are fatuous references to the weather, as though we were talking about a bunch of crips in the 'hood on a hot summer night. Why? In the grand scheme of things, I am not surprised, and I want to say "I told you so", but even so.... Why?

I turn to Salon, and read Andrew Cockburn's piece. It reminds us of history, of how things unfolded just like this in 1920, and it mentions the unmentionable: the way some American troops are turning on the civilian population, robbing them during searches, the naive young men and women brutalized by their situation, just like in Vietnam.

But why now? Ask the Iraqis. I have an Iraqi colleague at work who insists, angrily, that things are not as bad as they seem, but his perspective seems distorted. So I turn to Baghdad Burning, and read what River has posted from the city itself. If you care about what's happening over there, you should read her journal.

Now it seems we are almost literally reliving the first few days of occupation… I woke up to the sound of explosions and gunfire last night and for one terrible moment I thought someone had warped me back a whole year and we would have to relive this last year of our life over and over again…

Falloojeh has been cut off from the rest of Iraq for the last three days. It's terrible. They've been bombing it constantly and there are dozens dead. Yesterday they said that the only functioning hospital in the city was hit by the Americans and there's no where to take the wounded except a meager clinic that can hold up to 10 patients at a time. There are over a hundred wounded and dying and there's nowhere to bury the dead because the Americans control the area surrounding the only graveyard in Falloojeh; the bodies are beginning to decompose in the April heat. The troops won't let anyone out of Falloojeh and they won't let anyone into it either- the people are going to go hungry in a matter of days because most of the fresh produce is brought from outside of the city. We've been trying to call a friend who lives there for three days and we can't contact him.
[...]
And now Muqtada Al-Sadr's people are also fighting it out in parts of Baghdad and the south. If the situation weren't so frightening, it would almost be amusing to see Al-Hakeem and Bahr Ul Iloom describe Al-Sadr as an 'extremist' and a 'threat'. Muqtada Al-Sadr is no better and no worse than several extremists we have sitting on the Governing Council. He's just as willing to ingratiate himself to Bremer as Al-Hakeem and Bahr Ul Iloom. The only difference is that he wasn't given the opportunity, so now he's a revolutionary. Apparently, someone didn't give Bremer the memo about how when you pander to one extremist, you have to pander to them all. Hearing Abdul Aziz Al-Hakeem and Bahr Ul Iloom claim that Al-Sadr is a threat to security and stability brings about visions of the teapot and the kettle…

Then Bremer makes an appearance on tv and says that armed militias will *not* be a part of the New Iraq… where has that declaration been the last 12 months while Badir's Brigade has been wreaking havoc all over the country? Why not just solve the problem of Al-Sadr's armed militia by having them join the police force and army, like the Bayshmarga and Badir's Brigade?! Al-Sadr's militia is old news. No one was bothering them while they were terrorizing civilians in the south. They wore badges, carried Klashnikovs and roamed the streets freely… now that they've become a threat to the 'Coalition', they suddenly become 'terrorists' and 'agitators'.

Bush: what the hell have you done?

Thoughts on the Tyco mistrial and the jury system

So another multi-million dollar trial collapses because of a mistrial related to the jury system. Can anyone give me any good reason - other than "tradition" [cue Fiddler On The Roof music] - for requiring unanimity in juries? For most (?all) trials in the UK, they moved to a 10-2 majority requirement years ago. Requiring 12-0 means that you are at the mercy of jury tampering or the wacko who wants to play Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men. It's much harder to intimidate or bribe three jurors than one.....

I'll make an exception for capital cases, although since I'm opposed to capital punishment on principle, this exception is more tactical than anything else.

Legislate 10-2 juries in every state and at the Federal level; those who vote against it can pay for the mistrials!

Bill Moyers on patriotism in time of war

Among Lisa Rein's archives of TV clips is this piece by Bill Moyers, from March 25. Simple, direct, moving.

(She also has the hilarious Daily Show piece on Richard Clarke's 9/11 Commission testimony.)

How many times do we have to tell you?

Depressingly, opinion polls seem to suggest that Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 panel isn't changing anyone's mind. Folks who already support Bush are playing back the White House attacks on him; those on the other side don't really need any more reason to think that Bush is a disaster. The cynic in me says that Gary Hart's damning account of how the White House blocked consideration of the report of the Hart-Rudman Commission is going to be equally ineffective in waking people up. Maybe. However, there is one shred of hope: that the accumulation of evidence will tip the media from cowering complacency into investigative enthusiasm. If they smell blood in the water, and a Pulitzer on the mantelpiece, who knows.....

Here's the most critical bit from Salon's interview with Gary Hart, about what happened when the bipartisan commission completed their report in January 2001:

We didn't meet with President Bush. But we briefed at length Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condi Rice. And all of them at that time treated it seriously. I conducted the briefing, along with my co-chairman Warren Rudman, and Gen. Charles Boyd, who was our commission's executive director, and maybe one or two other commissioners. I would say the response was respectful, professional, serious. [...] We also sent copies of the report to every member of Congress. [...] And in the spring of 2001, some members of Congress introduced legislation to create a homeland security agency. Hearings were scheduled. And our commission, which was scheduled to go out of operation on Feb. 15, 2001, was given a six-month extension so we could testify with some authority. Which we did in March and April.

So this wasn't just neglect, it was an active position by the administration. He said, "I don't want Congress to do anything until the vice president advises me." We now know from Dick Clarke that Cheney never held a meeting on terrorism, there was never any kind of discussion on the department of homeland security that we had proposed. There was no vice presidential action on this matter.

US/UK spying at the UN

Over in London, the Observer has just run a story providing details of US and UK spying at the UN and how it was used to derail an attempt to delay military action against Iraq.

Now in the UK, the relevant ministers are certain to be asked whether they approved the spy operation (in which case their explanations/excuses will be eagerly awaited) or not (in which case the question is simply "who's in charge?"). Either way, it's more bad news for Blair.

But will any US media pick it up? Will Bush or Rumsfeld or Powell be asked to explain why America conducts covert operations against the representatives of sovereign nations at the UN? If not, why not?

The story is here.

Marketing politics

On Saturday I received a slim, glossy package in the mail. It was from Macallan, and contained a DVD with a 17 minute film about the making of Macallan single malt Scotch. Quite apart from being interesting and educational, it got me thinking about 21st century marketing. A DVD is now a disposable piece of collateral material. Mmmmm....

So here's a suggestion for George Soros, the "legendary investor and philanthropist" who's pledged his fortune to get rid of George Bush. Fund the creation of a short video based on the devastating book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill by Ron Suskind. It doesn't have to be fancy: a few video clips, plus still shots (using the Ken Burns Effect from Apple's iMovie, perhaps), with a voice-over narrated by a super-trustworthy voice. Morgan Freeman would be good. Slap it onto DVD and mail a copy to every household in the USA.