Chrononautic Log: politics

August 7, 2006

Some of you may remember the appalling behavior of the Gretna, LA police department in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year. Now a grand jury is going to investigate.

Now, they may yet stack that grand jury with the spiritual descendants of David Duke and Huey Long, but still, we can hope.

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Apologies to Huey Long. I don’t know who I was thinking of. (George Wallace?) Well spotted, Will.

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July 3, 2006

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Pursue some happiness for me, y’all. Preferably involving fireworks. And impromptu reenactments of the Battle of Saratoga.

Like Meghan says: eat hot dogs and light shit on fire.

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June 25, 2006

“Iraq Amnesty Offer Upsets U.S. Lawmakers”: Apparently our Congress now believes that a counterinsurgency war ends not when the insurgents stop fighting but when every insurgent who fought is dead or in prison. Yeah, lots of luck with that, guys.

Maybe it’s time to take another look at emigrating to Australia.

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April 26, 2006

My kind of president:

Due to the fact that Lincoln was the one who had been challenged to the duel, tradition gave him the privilege of choosing the time and location of the duel, as well as the weapons that were to be used. Being a man of humor and wit, and having no desire to kill Shields, or allow himself to be killed; Lincoln put together the most ridiculous set of circumstances that he could think of regarding the logistics of the upcoming duel.

Lincoln stated that the duel would be held on an island in the river near the city of Alton, IL. Some historians believe that it was “Sunflower Island”, while others believe it was “Bloody Island”. Bloody Island had long been a popular dueling spot because it was in the middle of the river and was claimed by Missouri where dueling was still legal. Either island would have allowed them to escape any legal implications.

Lincoln stated that the weapons he wished to use would be “Cavalry Broadswords of the largest size”. He figured that he could easily disarm Shields using the swords, whereas pistols would most likely lead to one of their deaths, if not both. He also added that he wanted the duel to be carried out in a pit 10 feet wide by 12 feet deep with a large wooden plank dividing the square in which no man was allowed to step foot over.

These “conditions” were designed not only to be ridiculous; but also to give Lincoln, who at 6’4” had longer legs and arms and towered over the much smaller Shields, a decided advantage. Lincoln hoped that these unorthodox conditions that gave him an almost unbeatable advantage would persuade Shields to withdraw the challenge and settle things in a more gentlemanly fashion.

Shields, however, was extremely stubborn and refused to yield despite the conditions that Lincoln had requested. He agreed to Lincoln’s conditions and no other negotiations were made. Much to Lincoln’s dismay, the two headed to the appointed island early in the morning on September 22 and prepared to do battle in their “Saber Duel”. . . .

At the last minute, Lincoln demonstrated his obvious physical advantage by hacking away at some of the branches of a nearby willow tree. The branches were high off the ground and Shields could not hope to reach them; while Lincoln, with his long arms holding a long broadsword, could reach them with ease. This final display was enough to drive home the precarious situation that he was now in, and Shields agreed to settle their differences in a more peaceful way. . . .

After the “duel”, both groups had the appropriate “after parties” and reflected on the fact they both could have met their ends because of a few sarcastic comments and hurt feelings. The two were civil with each other after this unfortunate incident and remained friends and political allies for the rest of their careers.

Lincoln was extremely embarrassed about the whole incident and refused to talk about it very often. Lincoln began to be more careful about what he wrote in letters and other papers, even those he wrote to his closest and most intimate friends. Never again did he so harshly use another person to try to further his political career.

(Via Making Light.)

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March 16, 2006

Via BoingBoing, this bit from vnunet.com:

The UK has warned America that it will cancel its £12bn order for the Joint Strike Fighter if the US does not hand over full access to the computer software code that controls the jets.

Lord Drayson, minister for defence procurement, told the The Daily Telegraph that the planes were useless without control of the software as they could effectively be “switched off” by the Americans without warning.

“We do expect this technology transfer to take place. But if it does not take place we will not be able to purchase these aircraft,” said Lord Drayson.

Access to the source code isn’t going to help you when the US war machines evolve sentience while they’re still halfway across the Atlantic, boyo.

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January 6, 2006

Now that everyone’s exhausted the subject, I come across this post Scott Eric Kaufman put up a couple of weeks ago, which among other things, as it happens, captures my initial reading of the ideologically suspect Skull Island natives:

. . . what you have is a highly-specialized society which has 1) impressively come to inhabit this island from whereabouts unknown, 2) built tremendous walls to protect the rest of the world from the island’s occupants and 3) descended into a state of mere substinence because their duty as stewards has prevented their culture from evolving. Maybe I’m not the one to comment on the representation of an evolutionary arms race, since I’m inclined to strip it of its cultural implications and say “that’s what happens in an evolutionary arms race,” but the fact that I’m already churning this information through such lofty cognitive devices indicates that the film does what any respectable film should:

It presents you with grist your mill can’t easily refine.

He has some other interesting things to say, too, about the ideologies of the film and the ideologies its viewers bring to it; his commenters have some equally interesting responses (e.g. Jodi Dean: “There is a weird way where the film implicates us in justifying or excusing Jackson’s use of the Kong story.”), and Kaufman has some interesting replies (the part about “meta-cringing,” I could particularly relate to.)

Those of you who were bored by the film will probably find the discussion equally boring, but those of you that weren’t, have a look.

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December 20, 2005

The judge in the Dover, PA creationism “intelligent design” case has handed the creationists’ ass to them.

We have now found that both an objective student and an objective adult member of the Dover community would perceive Defendants’ conduct to be a strong endorsement of religion pursuant to the endorsement test. Having so concluded, we find it incumbent upon the Court to further address an additional issue raised by Plaintiffs, which is whether ID is science. To be sure, our answer to this question can likely be predicted based upon the foregoing analysis. While answering this question compels us to revisit evidence that is entirely complex, if not obtuse, after a six week trial that spanned twenty-one days and included countless hours of detailed expert witness presentations, the Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area. Finally, we will offer our conclusion on whether ID is science not just because it is essential to our holding that an Establishment Clause violation has occurred in this case, but also in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial involving the precise question which is before us.

. . . Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

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November 21, 2005

Having been asked to do so by Michael Bérubé and John McGowan —

I assured John that I would do so at my first opportunity, which would be now. He replied that it might be a good idea to ask all bloggers to issue similar disavowals, so that we can use the power of the blogosphere to identify, by elimination, the person who first spoke to Woodward. So if you have a blog, won’t you please take a moment to tell the world that you didn’t have anything to do with leaking Plame’s name to Bob Woodward? I know that many of you have other things to do, but I’m kind of hoping that by the end of the week, we can narrow it down to this guy, who’s probably blogging as usual from his secret undisclosed location.

— and in the interests of helping to narrow the field of suspects, I’d just like to state, for the record, that I am also not Bob Woodward’s informant in the matter of Valerie Plame. Like Michael, I would like

to assure my loyal readers that I had no hand in disclosing Plame’s identity, or, indeed, in seeking retribution against Joseph Wilson or anyone else who, in 2002-03, doubted the Bush Administration’s claims about Saddam’s attempts to buy aluminum tubes, eat Nigerian yellowcake, develop weapons of mass destruction related program activities, or request assistance in moving fifty million dollars out of the country by means of unsolicited emails.

Whew! It feels good to get that cleared up.

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November 9, 2005

So, you finally caved. It took eight years and five separate elections, but the disgruntled Powers that Be finally whipped you back to your kennel. No more monorail. No more grassroots. No more independence. No more ideas that haven’t been preemptively blessed by the mayor and the city council and Paul Allen.

Enjoy your leaky, voter-fleecing football stadium and your meandering light rail and your Vulcan-approved South Lake Union streetcar to nowhere and your hideous waterfront viaduct, you spineless doormats.

You deserve ’em.

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October 28, 2005

If cellular automata aren’t your thing, how about Jim Macdonald’s cutting (and professionally informed) review of the latest piece of first-person exploitware from Kuma Games (the people who brought you John Kerry’s Silver Star).

In the Training Scenario, the first thing you do is sneak up and shoot a guy in the back while he’s guarding a vehicle. He has a beard and is wearing one of those Afghani felt hats. “Congratulations!” I thought when I saw that. “You’ve just blown away one member of the small but tenacious local Christian community. He was guarding that truck for his brother, the plumber. Now the brother’s ticked off — and he was previously pro-American. He has access to lots of threaded pipe. A friend of his cousin knows where to get explosives. His father-in-law is an electrician, and can rig a simple firing circuit. When your patrol gets greased by a pipe bomb two weeks from now, you’ll know the reason why.”

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October 6, 2005

. . . is Rob’s clever suggestion for labeling — nay, describing — the nine bloodthirsty savages United States Senators who voted against John McCain’s Amendment 1977. So the next time you have occasion to refer to Wayne Allard (CO), Kit Bond (MO), Tom Coburn (OK), Thad Cochran (MS), John Cornyn (TX), James Inhofe (OK), Pat Roberts (KS), Jeff Sessions (AL), or Ted Stevens (AK), remember those three little words.

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September 14, 2005

I don’t know what provisions my state of birth has for honoring members of the California National Guard, but this makes me proud to be a Californian. Hell, I’ll even stop talking smack about Orange County.

The National Guard team of searchers was about to call in a “DB,” or dead body, at 1927 Lopez St. in the Broadmoor district when Lt. Frederick Fell decided to investigate.

In the past few days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has ordered searchers not to break into homes. They are supposed to look in through a window and knock on the door. If no one cries out for help, they are supposed to move on. If they see a body, they are supposed to log the address and move on.

The morticians will remove the deceased later.

But Fell broke the rules and ordered his men to bash open the door, launching a series of events that would save a man's life and revitalize California Task Force 5 from Orange County. In the past two days, the 80-member task force had identified seven dead bodies in the same neighborhood, and they had rescued no one.

But Tuesday, 16 days after Hurricane Katrina smacked this aging community in the face, an unconscious and emaciated man identified as Edgar Hollingsworth, 74, was rescued. The man is expected to survive.

 . . . When they crashed through the door, Hollingsworth didn't move. But he was breathing.

National Guard medics draped an IV bag over his ceiling fan, but his veins were too weak to support the needle. They pulled him out of the house and laid him on the sidewalk. He looked as if he weighed less than 80 pounds.

Task Force 5 sent a team that included Dr. Peter Czuleger, an emergency-room doctor at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, to the scene. Czuleger didn’t have the proper equipment, so he improvised, using a short needle to pierce the vein under Hollingsworth's clavicle.

“It’s like trying to climb into a third-story window with a stepladder,“ Czuleger said.

Once the IV was in place, medics were able to pump 2 liters of saline solution into the man.

The hospital attendants hadn’t expected to see a survivor 16 days after the storm.

“They were surprised at the hospital that anyone in his condition would still be alive,” Czuleger said. “In 24 hours, he would have been dead.“

— “Survivor rescued 16 days after the hurricane”, Orange County Register (Registration required, but Bugmenot has them on file.)

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September 1, 2005

From Knight-Ridder: “Federal government wasn’t ready for Katrina, disaster experts say.”

Last year, FEMA spent $250,000 to conduct an eight-day hurricane drill for a mock killer storm hitting New Orleans. Some 250 emergency officials attended. Many of the scenarios now playing out, including a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome, were discussed in that drill for a fictional storm named Pam.

This year, the group was to design a plan to fix such unresolved problems as evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens.

Funding for that planning was cut, said Tolbert, the former FEMA disaster response director.

FEMA wasn’t alone in cutting hurricane spending in New Orleans and the surrounding area.

Federal flood control spending for southeastern Louisiana has been chopped from $69 million in 2001 to $36.5 million in 2005, according to budget documents. Federal hurricane protection for the Lake Pontchartrain vicinity in the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget dropped from $14.25 million in 2002 to $5.7 million this year. Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu requested $27 million this year.

Both the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper and a local business magazine reported that the effects of the budget cuts at the Army Corps of Engineers were severe.

In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.

“It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay,” Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper. “Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.”

The Army Corps’ New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June.

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August 31, 2005

But you should all go read Cherie Priest instead.

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From BoingBoing: in Ned Sublette’s introduction to “Email attributed to NOLA rescue worker”:

The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number — 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn't leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in New Orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn't be able to get out. The resources — meaning, the political will — weren’t there to get them out.

White per capita income in Orleans parish, 2000 census: $31,971. Black per capita: $11,332. Median household income in B.W. Cooper (Calliope) Housing Projects, 2000: $13,263.

At least it looks like, contra the initial impressions of the contrasting photos and captions in “Black people loot, white people find?” (also BoingBoing), the difference between “looting” and “finding” may be the difference between AP and AFP/Getty, not between black and white.

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May 12, 2005

From the It would be funny if it weren’t so depressing dept.:

You know, Wolfowitz, who if nothing, if not smart, would understand this, but Bush is truly a Trotskyite, a believer in permanent revolution. We have never had one as a president before. He wouldn’t understand that, but Wolfowitz would. He truly is. And he’s doing it — what he thinks he has to do, the revolutions he has to create, without any information, without any — without an ability to absorb information that’s counter to what he wants to hear. And so, I don’t know where you are when you have a man with as much power as he controls and as much ability to do something. I don’t know how we can get at him.

— Seymour Hersh, speaking at UIUC

Follow the link to find out just how fucked-up said information counter to what he wants to hear is.

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And the capitalization’s not too hot, either.

*Sigh*.

Figure 1. New billboard from the Grassroot Democrats.

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May 6, 2005

. . . and for the rest of you, too, Canadian Stephen Notley (now resident in Seattle — or so his web site says) brings you: TN-1 Terror!

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April 15, 2005

Xeni Jardin, “Snapshots of volunteer ‘Minutemen’ on US/Mexico border”:

Y para nuestros estimados lectores hispanohablantes: aquí les presento unas imagenes de los pendejos racistas en Arizona que se creen soldados. El fenómeno me preocupa mucho. No puedo ver ninguna diferencia entre esto y los “lynch mobs” de antaño en el sur en mi país. Ojal´ que el resultado no sea tan sangriento, pero si ellos tienen el apoyo del gobierno y del ambiente político del momento — pues, yo no creo que puede ser una cosa buena para los derechos civiles de la gente en cualquier lado de la frontera.

(Free translation: And for our esteemed Spanish-speaking readers: here we present some images of those racist assholes in Arizona who think they’re soldiers. This phenomenon worries me greatly. I can’t see any difference between this and the ‘lynch mobs’ of the Old South. Hopefully, the results will not be as bloody, but if they have the support of the government and the ambient politics of the moment — then, I do not think this can be a good thing for the civil rights of people on either side of the border.)

Check out the pictures. Scary stuff. I thought it was fucked up enough when these clowns were just hanging around the San Diego airport harassing people. Now they’re hanging around the border, with guns. How long before someone gets killed?

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January 12, 2005

It took a few months longer than I originally predicted, but the Iraq Survey Group is cashing it in. No, Virginia, there are no weapons of mass destruction.

The only part I have trouble believing in all this is that back in April 2003 I actually thought the administration would care, or that someone would call them on it.

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December 14, 2004

Apparently, the connection between federalism and rolling back the New Deal is an even straighter line than I thought it was:

States’ rights conservatives have always been nostalgic for the pre-1937 doctrines, which they have lately taken to calling the Constitution-in-Exile. They argue — at conferences like “Rolling Back the New Deal” and in papers like “Was the New Deal Constitutional?” — that Congress lacks the power to do things like forcing employers to participate in Social Security. Given how entrenched New Deal programs have become in more than half a century, these plans for reversing history have always seemed more than a bit quixotic.

But that may be about to change. . . .[T]wo Californians who use marijuana for medical reasons argued that Congress, which passed the Controlled Substances Act, did not have the constitutional power to stop them. To pass a law, Congress needs a constitutional hook, and the Controlled Substances Act relied on one of the most important ones, the Commerce Clause, which authorizes Congress to “regulate Commerce . . . among the several States.” The Californians argued that their marijuana did not involve interstate commerce because it never left their state.

That is where Wickard v. Filburn comes in. Roscoe Filburn was a farmer who argued that his wheat crop should not fall under federal production quotas because much of it was consumed on his own farm. The Supreme Court held that even if that wheat did not enter interstate commerce, wheat grown for use on a farm altered supply and demand in the national market. The decision gave Congress broad power to regulate things that are located in one state, like factories and employer-employee relationships.

Some leading conservatives want the court to overturn Wickard and replace it with a pair of decisions from the 1800's that one brief filed in the case said would return “Commerce Clause jurisprudence to its settled limits prior to the New Deal.” . . .

If the Supreme Court drifts rightward in the next four years, as seems likely, it could not only roll back Congress’s Commerce Clause powers, but also revive other dangerous doctrines. Before 1937, the court invoked “liberty of contract” to strike down a Nebraska law regulating the weight of bread loaves, which kept buyers from being cheated, and a New York law setting a maximum 10-hour workday. Randy Barnett, the law professor who represented the medical marijuana users, argues in a new book that minimum wage laws infringe on “the fundamental natural right of freedom of contract.”

In pre-1937 America, workers were exploited, factories were free to pollute, and old people were generally poor when they retired. This is not an agenda the public would be likely to sign onto today if it were debated in an election. But conservatives, who like to complain about activist liberal judges, could achieve their anti-New Deal agenda through judicial activism on the right. Judges could use the so-called Constitution-in-Exile to declare laws on workplace safety, environmental protection and civil rights unconstitutional.

Getting rid of Wickard would be an important first step.

— Adam Cohen, “What's New in the Legal World? A Growing Campaign to Undo the New Deal”, New York Times, 14 December 2004

Note that it’s not just the same legal issues that connect states’ rights on medical marijuana to the New Deal — it’s the same lawyers.

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December 10, 2004

An excellent suggestion from John Holbo:

Now the striking thing about 'politically correct' is that it really means the same as 'moral values', as per Republican rhetoric and post-election polls, etc. Both terms denote sets of moral beliefs which are held strongly enough that believers are prepared to impose them on others, politically. Obviously the sets in question are different, but the thing that makes the term toxic to the bearer is actually the connotation. The elitist moral superiority of it. So what we need is an appropriate analog to pin on conservatives. There ought to be one, by rights, since the Republicans surely are elitists, and they surely do think they are highly morally superior.

Once you put the problem that way, the solution is obvious. Let's get in the habit of calling Republican moral elitists: 'the moral elite', 'morally elite', 'moral elitists'. Just use the terms as flat descriptors for anyone proposing to legislate morality in any of the usual ways. Just to change things up, sometimes you use: 'morally superior' to designate the attitude. And 'moral superiors' to designate the tribe. Maybe you start to distinguish, as a matter of course, between legislation that ensures 'moral superiority' and the regular stuff. Talk about Repubicans taking 'necessary moral superiority measures'.

The beauty of it is that 'morally superior' is already a term of faint opprobrium. It connotes petty social snobbery, schoolmarmery, so forth. It stinks. And it fits. Perfect for our purposes. And 'moral superiors' sounds worse.

It should be hard for Republicans to unstick this stuff from themselves, if accurately applied, because what are they going to do: deny that they are morally superior? In the context of, say, proposing to legislate against gay marriage, can they deny that they think they are morally superior to those who think this stuff would be alright? If they deny they are morally superior, then what do they think they are doing? Letting your neighbor be is such a fundamental American value that it is very embarrassing to be on the wrong side of it, as Republican often are these days.

Elite is another good one. Republicans love to dish it out. They ought to get a taste of their own medicine. Again, the hook should be hard to weasel off. Suppose the target denies being 'a moral elite'. Then what proper business does this lot have bothering their neighbors with imposed 'moral values'? Only an elite should think it knows enough about right and wrong to take that rather extreme step. If they are not an elite, they are morally irresponsible.

There should be endless chances to needle people. 'Over at the Corner there is a lot of moral superiority blogging going on today ...' 'Senator, do you support this measure because you are morally superior?' Right now it sounds a little odd, these terms. That's why we have to start using them today. Break them in.

It’s worth a shot.

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December 8, 2004

From Salon:

For every American soldier killed in Iraq, nine others have been wounded and survived — the highest rate of any war in U.S. history. It isn’t that their injuries were less serious, a new report says. In fact, some young soldiers and Marines have had faces, arms and legs blown off and are now returning home badly maimed. But they have survived thanks, in part, to armor-like vests and fast treatment from doctors on the move with surgical kits in backpacks.

“This is unprecedented. People who lose not just one but two or three extremities are people who just have not survived in the past,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who researched military medicine and wrote about it in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The back of the envelope (all numbers are approximate):

• Ratio of wounded to killed in Afghanistan/Iraq: 10:1.
• Ratio of wounded to killed in Vietnam: 3:1.
• Total killed in Vietnam: 50,000.
• Total casualties in Vietnam (10 years): 200,000. (Calculated.)
• Avg. casualties per year in Vietnam: 20,000. (Calculated.)
• Total casualties in Afghanistan/Iraq (18 mos.): 11,300.
• Avg. casualties per year in Afghanistan/Iraq: 7,500. (Calculated.)
• Peak number of US troops in Vietnam: 500,000.
• Peak number of US troops in Afghanistan/Iraq: 150,000.
• Avg. casualties per 1000 soldiers per year, Vietnam: 40. (Calculated.)
• Avg. casualties per 1000 soldiers per year, Afghanistan/Iraq: 50. (Calculated.)

So the good news is that body armor, battlefield medicine, medical evacuation services, and general trauma care are much better.

The bad news is that the fighting is just about as bad, if not worse.

Support the troops.

Comments (2)

December 1, 2004

He assumes that the moral and intellectual problems of the transformation of Society have been already solved — that a plan exists, and that nothing remains except to put it into operation. He assumes further that Society is divided into two parts: the proletariat who are converted to the plan, and the rest who for purely selfish reasons oppose it. He does not understand that no plan could win until it had first convinced many people, and that, if there really were a plan, it would draw support from many different quarters.

Keynes on Trotsky, 1933, via Brad deLong. Plus ça la change.

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November 29, 2004

They’re saying it, too.

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November 24, 2004

Now that my temper has cooled down . . . Ben Rosenbaum makes a comment that deserves attention — and, Will, maybe my reply to it will answer you, too.

We seem to be on a similar political wavelength about many things, Mr. Moles (cf. "WHAT DO WE WANT?" "GRADUAL CHANGE!!!" "WHEN DO WE WANT IT?" "IN DUE COURSE!!!" :->*), but I don't understand entirely the impassionedness of your conviction here. True, segregation and slavery were Bad Things, and the use of force by the federal government was justified in ending them. But then, the Dred Scott decision runs the other way, doesn't it? Allowing the northern states to ban slavery, early on, was arguably an exercise of states' rights. Are you sad the Soviet Union broke up?

Maybe that last is a specious example (bordering on Godwin's law, perhaps), but what I mean to say is, it doesn't follow from the fact that centralizing power has occassionally helped do good things, that it will always do good things.

Now, I think the current left-wing "we'll just retreat to the cities then" meme is stupid and short-sighted -- at least as a strategy for the Democratic party. It overreacts to the Republican electoral victory of 2004, ignores the fact that Bill Clinton won 12 "red states", and creates this fiction of a homogenous urban Left and a homogenous rural Right which plays into the hands of Bush & co. It forgets that Bush was re-elected by an extremely fragile coalition -- a lot of people who voted for him did so gritting their teeth.

There may be something to the meme as a way of thinking about what Democrats stand for, however. Republicans have been able to articulate a sweeping vision that captures the imagination of rural voters. The Democrats ran this last campaign mostly on negatives -- we're not going to destroy civil liberties, we're not going to invade countries willy-nilly, we're not going to write homophobia into the Constitution, we're not going to pay off the rich, we're not going to balloon the deficit... but then again, don't worry, we're not going to go back to Johnson Great-Society liberalism or radically change the social contract either. We're just going to govern cautiously and well, do somewhat better at the things everyone's already talking about like health care and education, and not do the dumb stuff Bush is doing.

Democrats have thus become what Republicans were during the period from Hoover until Reagan -- the party of caution, of not performing radical experiments on the American social weal, of protecting the status quo. Reagan created the Republican Big Idea (or maybe Goldwater created it, but it wasn't ready to win), and since then Republicans have generally been the small-r radicals in mainstream US politics, and Democrats the small-c conservatives.

So if the Democrats are going to come up with a new Big Idea which is not the New Deal-through-Great Society idea -- an idea which is absolutely entrenched now in practice, and unpopular in theory -- then maybe the focus on urban life, and what comes with it -- civilization, tolerance, urbanity -- might be salutary. Not as a way of alienating rural voters, but as a way of constructing a coherent ideological core.

However, none of this has much to do with states' rights. Myself, I think states should generally have a lot of power, and intervention by the federal government should be controversial, and done with care. The defense of constitutional liberties is one such case (both the liberties I like, such as the first amendment, and those I think are stupid, such as the second, because you have to play fair). But the federal government is, to my mind, way too big and unwieldy. It should be a guarantor of individual liberties -- no state should be able to segregate by race, or restrict free speech, say -- but I would define those liberties pretty narrowly. If states want to teach Creationism, or legalize marijuana, I'm not sure that's any of my business as a citizen of a different state. Standardization increases efficiency, but diversity of systems increases robustness.

Ben,

I guess I’m in favor of federalism and local autonomy in theory, because I’m not sure it’s any of my business, either — but in practice, when I look over the last couple of centuries of American history, it’s hard for me not to feel that, on the big issues, the Feds have more often than not been right and the states more often than not wrong. As a historian, I have to admit that America isn’t my area and the 19th and 20th centuries aren’t my period, so I may be missing something important — Dred Scott is a good point. But when I’m called on to salute the flag or stand up for the national anthem and I’m trying to think of reasons to be proud of my country, it’s moments like the 101st Airborne protecting the Little Rock Nine that come to mind; and I identify a lot more strongly with “Marching through Georgia” than with . . . whatever the California state anthem is. (I just looked it up. And all I can say is: Eh.)

Again as a historian, I also can’t help seeing the current situation in historical terms. I think the reason the Democratic party is currently out of power is that the last of the Dixiecrats have finally moved to the GOP side of the aisle. The Dixiecrats, in turn, you can trace back through segregation to Reconstruction to the Civil War.

And everyone says the South could have won if they’d dedicated themselves to decades of guerilla warfare instead of trying to meet the Union in open battle. So I wasn’t kidding when I brought up McClellan and the 1864 election. I think abandoning federal supremacy over the states is, in a very real sense, capitulating to the Provisional C.S.A. and declaring defeat in a 140-year war of attrition. That’s where the impassioned conviction comes from.

On a more practical level — Rob, if I’m wrong, I expect you to tell me why, since you’re the armchair legal history scholar in the crew — it sounds good to say that the federal government should be a guarantor of individual rights and nothing else, but where’s the line? I’m with you on fairness requiring that we defend the Second Amendment (and maybe even the dopey, non-inflation-indexed twenty-dollar threshold in the Seventh); but shouldn’t we also defend the implicit right to privacy that underpins Roe v. Wade — or the First Amendment right to freedom from established religion that underpins case law on school prayer and teaching Creationism? And if we say that, legally, the federal government doesn’t have the power to overrule the states on those issues — let alone issues nearer to our own hearts, but with less established Constitutional clarity, like gay marriage or medical marijuana, where the Feds clearly are in the wrong — then aren’t we also saying that the federal government doesn’t have the power to do the things it did in the service of the New Deal and the civil rights movement?

Finally, an anecdote: My mother teaches ESL at a community college in the Bay Area. She gets a fair number of students from places where “federalism” has a very different history, like the former U.S.S.R., or Yugoslavia, or India, or even (I suppose) Switzerland. They look at the U.S., with all these states, and quite naturally what they want to know is: Why don’t they get along? What ethnic or religious or linguistic or cultural enmity divides California from Arizona, or Indiana from Illinois?

And she always has to answer, gently, that it doesn’t work that way here.

I’d like her to continue to be able to do that.

---

* In fairness, I should credit Patrick for teaching me the Fabian Society Football Cheer.

Comments (3)

November 16, 2004

What’s with this states’ rights bullshit? Did McClellan win the election? Did the Confederacy finally win the war?

This is what “states’ rights” lead to. Abandon maybe 60 million people to that? No way. No goddamn way.

Comments (8)

November 8, 2004

Y’all can go read Cheryl Morgan’s journal instead. (That’s four different posts, by the way.)

And when you get through that, check out Benjamin Rosenbaum (you’ll have to scroll down to comment #33 in this discussion) and Jenn Reese.

Comments (0)

November 3, 2004

Since everyone else has got one.

Fig. 1. Electoral vote map.

(Courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Comments (1)

Update: Someone over at Kos pre-emptively stole my tagline. But in a good cause. Here’s what he’s got to say:

OK. I read thousands of comments and dozens of Diaries last night and this morning. And you know something? I’m going to forget I read most of them. Just erase them from memory along with the names of those who posted them. Chalk them up to adrenaline crashes, too much rage and reefer and booze.

Because what I found in my reading was a plethora of bashing Christians, bashing Kerry, bashing gays, bashing Edwards, bashing Kos, bashing America and bashing each other. As well as a lot of people saying they’re abandoning the Democrats, abandoning politics, abandoning the country. This descent into despair and irrationality and surrender puts icing on the Republican victory cake.

Why were we in this fight in the first place? Because terrible leaders are doing terrible things to our country and calling this wonderful. Because radical reactionaries are trying to impose their imperialist schemes on whoever they wish and calling this just. Because amoral oligarchs are determined to enhance their slice of the economic pie and calling this the natural order. Because flag-wrapped ideologues want to chop up civil liberties and call this security. Because myopians are in charge of America’s future.

. . . Not a few people have spoken in the past few hours about an Americanist authoritarianism emerging out of the country’s current leadership. I think that’s not far-fetched. Fighting this requires that we stick together, not bashing each other, not fleeing or hiding or yielding to the temptation of behaving as if “what’s the use?”

This is what I’m saying.

Comments (5)

November 2, 2004

I hereby turn over the space allocated for my obligatory election-related posting to our new Canadian overlords.

Fig. 1. Those wacky Americans.

’Nuff said? Get out and vote.

Comments (1)

November 1, 2004

What happened to Michael Bérubé’s web site?

Comments (0)

October 22, 2004

The truth is that I don't give a good goddamn about Bush the man. Just to get it out of my system, though, here's what I think of him.

I don't think, as many on the Left seem to, that he's an idiot. I don't think he's Dick Chaney's puppet, or Karl Rove's.

I do think he's in over his head.

I do think he lacks compassion, empathy, foresight, and the capacity for self-reflection.

I sometimes think that he really has been Born Again.

I sometimes think he's a ruthless cynic who's happy to use the religious right to get elected, because he's safe in the knowledge that none of their policies will really affect on him or his friends.

I think (having worked for the sort of people she's talking about) that Teresa Nielsen Hayden's analysis of his psychology is the most plausible I've heard so far.

And I don't think he gives a damn what I think.

If you find this to be at odds with my previously expressed opinions, it's possible that I communicated badly — for which I apologize — and possible that I've changed my mind — for which I don't.

But none of that is what I care about. What I care about is who he surrounds himself with. What I care about is his policies. What I care about is that he and his team have made a dog's breakfast of everything from education reform to Medicare reform to trade policy to fiscal policy to homeland security to counterterrorism (without even getting into his Iraq policy, something that not even a dog would eat).

I'm not even talking about their goals. I'm talking about their approach to achieving them. You don't fix public education by forcing school districts to divert even more resources from teaching to administrative compliance with federal regulations. You don't fix Medicare by setting up a complicated drug plan that no one understands and that actually costs the government more money than what it was replacing. You don't encourage free trade by violating trade agreements to scrounge for votes in steel country and pick fights with the Canadian lumber industry. You don't stimulate an economy with an oversupply problem by cutting taxes on investment income. You don't protect the country by cutting funding for first responders and wasting money to keep nail clippers off airplanes. You don't deny terrorists a safe haven by turning the country that supported them over to anarchy and warlordism. (And you don't take over a large and well-armed country by firing your chief of staff for requesting too many troops, ignoring the State Department's area experts, staffing your viceregal regime with campaign contributors and unqualified kids vetted by the Heritage Foundation, and letting the Defense Department and the CIA fight it out over whether the strongman you prop up is going to be a crook or a spook. But I'm trying not to talk about that.)

What I care about is that Bush broken his most important campaign promise. His most important campaign promise was that it didn't matter whether he was an expert, because he would surround himself with the country's best experts and take their advice. He promised that if there was a foreign policy crisis, he'd listen to Colin Powell, and if there was an economic crisis, he'd listen to Alan Greenspan. Instead he listened to Donald Rumsfeld and Larry Lindsey, and managed to screw up both crises six ways from Sunday.

I'll admit it: There's really not much chance I would have voted for even a competent Republican president. The best the GOP could hope for is that they'd run someone like, oh, take your pick: Colin Powell, William Weld, Rudy Giuliani — and the Democrats would run someone like Dick Gephardt or Dianne Feinstein. That might get me to abstain.

But if I were a conservative (a real conservative, I mean, not some premillenial dispensationalist with a Scofield Reference Bible in one hand and a Gary North tract in the other) I still wouldn't be able to vote for this guy. I know what a competent Republican administration would look like, and this isn't it. Even if I agreed with Bush's stated policies, he's the last one I'd want as their standardbearer. If I were a conservative, my biggest worry wouldn't be a Kerry presidency, it would be that the incompetence of the Bush crew was going to do the kind of damage to the national Republican party that Pete Wilson did to the Republican party in California, casting them out into the wilderness for a political generation and casting their policies out even longer.

And if I were not just a conservative, but a secular conservative, I'd wonder how long Bush can keep giving the religious right half of what they want — before what's left is too small to cut in half.

---

Update:

• “One Hundred Facts and One Opinion.” I wish I'd had this in front of me while I was writing the catalogue above.
• In case you haven't already seen it: “Bush Supporters Still Believe Iraq Had WMD or Major Program, Supported al Qaeda” This is why Bill Clinton wasn't kidding.

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Update: Oops. I do know Larry Lindsey from Larry Summers.

Comments (0)

October 21, 2004

Believing Bush is conservative in any traditional sense is like believing that a Formula One racer with the Perrier logo on its side is full of mineral water.

—William Gibson

Comments (0)

October 19, 2004

I’m a member of the reality-based community.

Everybody ought to read the Ron Suskind NYT article that started the meme. Even if you have to register to do it.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, 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.”

People who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” You bet your sweet ass we do. You’re not creating a new reality; you’re creating a big fucking mess. And when you’re gone, the rest of us are going to have to clean it up.

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Update: Teresa Nielsen Hayden makes some excellent points:

I’m not going to discuss my doubts about Bush’s spiritual life, though I have them. There’s a deeper problem. A whole bunch of times now, Bush has been absolutely certain of his decisions, overflowing with faith—and dead wrong. So whatever it is he’s put his faith in, it’s something that’s telling him things that aren’t true.

As I’m sure you’re aware, God doesn’t do that.

. . . Believing that God prompts your every decision is no guarantee that God will do so. If you abandon your responsibility for thought, judgement, research, and counsel, you’ll be left with maybe a few small, still promptings from God, and a whole lot of noisy promptings from your own will and desire.

. . . This has nothing to do with religion. This is a combination of self-indulgence and Stupid Executive Tricks. If you believe that your will and imagination are the only determinants of success, the most you’ll get is what you’ve wanted and imagined. In Bush’s case, that’s simply not enough.

Comments (15)

October 6, 2004

What’s wrong with this picture?

Figure 1. Close-up of Michigan absentee ballot, scanned.

Poking around on the web, it looks like the company that printed the ballots is reprinting them. I’m sure plenty of them are going to come in anyway, though — probably some have already been mailed — and I sure don’t envy whoever’s supposed to count them. Or whatever judge has to rule on whether they were counted correctly.

(Via Toby Buckell.)

Comments (16)

If not, pick up your cell phone right now and find out why.

And I know some of yours aren’t on here.

Rep Markey, Edward J. [MA-7], or:

• Rep Blumenauer, Earl [OR-3] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Conyers, John, Jr. [MI-14] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Davis, Susan A. [CA-53] - 9/30/2004
• Rep Filner, Bob [CA-51] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Frank, Barney [MA-4] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Grijalva, Raul M. [AZ-7] - 9/21/2004
• Rep Hinchey, Maurice D. [NY-22] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Honda, Michael M. [CA-15] - 7/19/2004
• Rep Jackson-Lee, Sheila [TX-18] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Kucinich, Dennis J. [OH-10] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Lee, Barbara [CA-9] - 7/19/2004
• Rep Lantos, Tom [CA-12] - 10/4/2004
• Rep Lewis, John [GA-5] - 7/7/2004
• Rep McCollum, Betty [MN-4] - 7/19/2004
• Rep McDermott, Jim [WA-7] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Millender-McDonald, Juanita [CA-37] - 7/19/2004
• Rep Miller, George [CA-7] - 7/19/2004
• Rep Owens, Major R. [NY-11] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Pastor, Ed [AZ-4] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Sanders, Bernard [VT] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Schakowsky, Janice D. [IL-9] - 7/19/2004
• Rep Van Hollen, Chris [MD-8] - 9/9/2004
• Rep Waxman, Henry A. [CA-30] - 7/7/2004
• Rep Woolsey, Lynn C. [CA-6] - 9/9/2004

That is the list of the cosponsors of H.R.4674: “To prohibit the return of persons by the United States, for purposes of detention, interrogation, or trial, to countries engaging in torture or other inhuman treatment of persons.”

While Massachussetts’ Representative Markey is struggling to get five percent of the House to co-sponsor this bill, the House Republican leadership is doing its best to legalize the outsourcing of torture.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence, the framers of the Constitution, and the dead of the American Revolution aren’t just spinning in their graves. Any minute now I expect them to rise and walk.

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Update: Fixed link to bill summary.

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Update (10/6): Susan Davis (CA-53) and Tom Lantos (CA-12) have joined the list! Only 400-odd to go. Any Republicans with a conscience out there?

Comments (12)

October 5, 2004

That’s the mean-spirited ha ha ha, mind you, not the jolly one. Taking note of the overwhelming advantage Democrats seem to have in urban voter registration, Matthew Yglesias observes:

Now, clearly, there were more than 90 unregistered Republicans in Multnomah County which had 660,486 people in the 2000 census and experienced 12 percent population growth between 1990 and 2000. What happened here is that the Republicans didn't try to register new voters there. And you can hardly blame them. Walk around a major urban area and there's no obvious way to identify who the Republicans are. The African-Americans and Latinos you find are going to be overwhelmingly Democrats, but most of the white people are Democrats, too. As a result, Democrats can safely push to register minorities, and then if they run out, start looking for white folks, especially students, and single women. Republicans would need to put an awful lot of thought into how to identify their supporters before launching an urban registration drive. So they don't do it, instead they head for rural areas and the exurbs.

That would all be fine except for the fact that an awful lot of Republicans live in big cities simply because big cities contain so many people.

And I don’t care how mean-spirited it is; I have no sympathy for the GOP’s plight, none at all. They chose to become the party of spiteful white men, and this is what they get.

Comments (2)

September 22, 2004

Today marks, among other things, the eighteen-month anniversary of this little conversation.

Comments (2)

September 18, 2004

Q: You’re an expert on Henry Kissinger. Is there someone who . . .

A: I’m an expert on the side of Henry Kissinger that lied like most people breathed.

Q: Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?

A: Oh, believe me, I pray for one (clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward). Wouldn’t it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn’t believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, [that] you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that’s moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There’s no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They’re like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe.

 . . . But these guys, do you realize how much better off we would be if they really were cynical, and they really were lying about it, because, yes, behind the invasion would be something real, like support for Israel or oil. But it’s not! It’s not about oil. It’s about utopia. I guess you could call it idealism. But it’s idealism that’s dead wrong. It’s like one of the far-right Christian credos. It’s a faith-based policy. Only it wasn’t a religious faith. It was the faith that democracy would flourish.

Q:So you don’t think that this is some Machiavellian, cynical, manipulative . . .

A: I used to pray it was! We’d be in better shape.

—Seymour Hersh interview, Salon, 18 Sep. 2004

I’ve been watching “The Fog of War” again — picked up a used copy of the DVD at Scarecrow. And I’ve been thinking. I don’t suppose there’s any way we can get Robert McNamara back?

---

Update: Nice quote from Juan Cole:

I have a sinking feeling that the American public may like Bush’s cynical misuse of Wilsonian idealism precisely because it covers the embarrassment of their having gone to war, killed perhaps 25,000 people, and made a perfect mess of the Persian Gulf region, all out of a kind of paranoia fed by dirty tricks and bad intelligence. And, maybe they have to vote for Bush to cover the embarrassment of having elected him in the first place.

How deep a hole are they going to dig themselves in order to get out of the bright sunlight of so much embarrassment?

It would explain a lot.

Comments (1)

September 16, 2004

Why do we have to go to the UK for this? Why isn’t it headline news across the US?

Don’t answer that.

Civilian control of the military. Gotta love it.

Comments (8)

August 17, 2004

This essay by Philip Agre, “What is conservatism and what is wrong with it?” gets to the heart of the place where I stopped stone dead in trying to meet Gene Wolfe halfway. (It’s also a useful gloss on John Holbo’s takedown of David Frum, previously discussed here.)

(Agre essay courtesy of Electrolite Sidelights.)

Comments (17)

August 16, 2004

ULTROCRACY PROMOTION! Giblets will not settle for promoting anything as pansy-ass as Democracy! He will not rest until every single country in the world — including countries where are no countries such as Antarctica, Atlantis, and the Moon — into Ultrocracies, democracies so ultra-democratic that the will of the people manifests itself as an immense avatar-being of pure energy that roams around the countryside turning garbage into food and corpses into high-paying private sector jobs!

Also: the punchline to this cartoon says it all.

Comments (2)

August 10, 2004

Does anybody still believe that the US is in Iraq to liberate it?

You do? What exactly do you think the word “liberate” means?

Comments (3)

August 4, 2004

I’m just sayin’.

Comments (0)

August 2, 2004

I grew up in a time when people talked about a clash between democracy and communism, but that’s like talking about a war between snakes and frisbees.

— Will Shetterly

Keep that in mind when you hear those jokers talking about “democratic-minded strongmen”. They’re not talking about democracy; they’re talking about supporting the snakes against the frisbees.

Comments (0)

You know, back in 2000 a Republican friend of mine warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we’d lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I’ll be damned if all those things didn't come true.

—— James Carville

(Via Brad deLong.)

Comments (2)

June 25, 2004

I know the administration thinks it’s above the law, but this?

Even if the Senate were in session, the vice president, though constitutionally the president of the Senate, is an executive branch official and therefore free to use whatever language he likes.

That’s taking it too far, Mr. Vice President. I want to see some Justice Department memos on this.

(From the Washington Post, via Gwenda Bond.)

Comments (4)

June 23, 2004

Okay, so this morning I saw the following two headlines, or very similar ones, on the Seattle Times and the New York Times, respectively: Bush rejected torture ban and the apparently contradictory Bush prisoner policy set humane tone.

Unfortunately, I didn’t write them down; and I can’t look up the exact phrasing on the web, because they’ve both been changed: to Treat prisoners fairly, Bush said in 2002 and White House says prisoner policy set humane tone, respectively.

What’s up with that?

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Update: Rob provides the actual NYT headline: Orders by Bush about prisoners set humane tone. The Seattle Times headline: Bush disavows ban on torture.

Comments (2)

June 4, 2004

Images out of Moorcock or Miéville: Molly Ivins, on the secret war between the chickenhawks and the uniformed military:

What we’re looking at is one of those underwater struggles among various bureaucratic behemoths involved in some hideous internecine conflict of which we can see nothing except roiled water.

Comments (3)

May 19, 2004

I don’t know who the Medium Lobster is or where it came from, but it is one insightful arthropod:

Western Civilization. Born 3500 B.C. in early Mesopotamian city-states, Western Civilization developed numerous complex systems of political governance, conquered most of the inhabited world, and invented the hot air balloon, the nuclear bomb, and the ice cream cone. Died May 17, 2004, of a gay agenda in a Massachusetts court house. It is survived by isolated anarchist survivalist camps and nomadic bands of flesh-eating zombies.

Comments (2)

May 18, 2004

I watch about as much “Meet the Press” as I watch anything else on broadcast TV (which is to say, not at all), but it would have been fun to see this one:

EMILY MILLER, STATE DEPARTMENT PRESS AIDE: You're off.

SECRETARY POWELL: I am not off.

EMILY MILLER, PRESS AIDE: No. They can't use it, they're editing it.

SECRETARY POWELL: He's still asking the questions.

EMILY MILLER, PRESS AIDE: He was not ...

SECRETARY POWELL: Tim, I am sorry I lost you.

MR. RUSSERT: I am right here Mr. Secretary. I would hope they would put you back on camera. I don't know who did that.

EMILY MILLER, PRESS AIDE: He was going to go for another five minutes.

SECRETARY POWELL: We've really scre...

MR. RUSSERT: I think that was one of your staff Mr. Secretary. I don't think that's appropriate.

SECRETARY POWELL: Emily, get out of the way. Bring the camera back please. (Camera returns to the interview subject) I think we're back on Tim, go ahead with your last question.

(Transcript via BoingBoing. Video here courtesy of Lisa Rein.

Comments (9)

May 14, 2004

Or as he puts it:

I admit, I’m a little slow. Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post-9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion — as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did — I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to change course because confronting their mistakes didn’t just involve confronting reality, but their own politics.

In a side note, I was woken up in the middle of last night by some asshole in either the alley or the parking garage having a drunken argument about what a great guy George W. Bush is.

Naturally this did not endear me to his argument or to his candidate. I know it takes two sides to make an argument, but since this asshole was yelling loud enough to disturb my sleep and the anti-Bush guy wasn’t — kind of like talk radio, at least till Michael Powell went after Howard Stern — it’s the pro-Bush asshole I’m blaming.

Comments (5)

May 3, 2004

Prior to the revelations, [Brigadier General Janice] Karpinski assured the US media that Abu Ghraib was run according to “international standards”.

——“The Pictures That Lost The War”, Sunday Herald, via Kathryn Cramer

Nice choice of words, General. Would those be the formal international standards laid out by, say, the Geneva Convention and the UN Declaration on Human Rights? Or would they be the de facto standards established by some of the market leaders on Jim Henley’s list, below?

Tacitus writes “Let’s be honest and declare that what happened at Abu Ghraib, while awful, was a mere fraction of the horrors that go on in Saudi, Egyptian, Syrian, and yes, old Iraqi prisons.” Absolutely, let’s. And prisons in non-muslim nations too: Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Israel, China, even the Philippines — all countries that have been credibly accused or admitted using torture in interrogation or punishment.

If we want to live up, or rather down, to those international standards, we have some distance yet to sink. But as Mr. Henley goes on to point out, the question

is not “Are we as bad as Saddam's Iraq?” but “Are we getting more like it or less like it?” We might never get as bad as Saddam’s Iraq or even squalid old Egypt, second-largest recipient of US aid in the world before Iraqi reconstruction began. But we can be much better than those countries and yet a disgrace to ourselves.

Comments (2)

April 21, 2004

Billmon of Whiskey Bar sums it up:

The fact that realism has been pushed to the fringes of the political debate says a lot about America’s collective mental condition. Sanity isn’t very popular these days — not for those desperate to rescue Israel from its demographic predicament, or for those dreaming of a world that looks “just like us,” and certainly not for a president who believes he’s God's vice-gerent on earth, or for the 15%-20% of the population that’s counting down the days until the Rapture.

We seem to have reached the point where a half-baked strategy for endless war in the Middle East is actually easier to sell politically than a sensible energy policy, an end to American subservience to worst instincts of the Israeli national security state, and a focused campaign to destroy Al Qaeda while drying up the pools of hatred in which jihad festers and grows.

Clausewitz, that ultimate realist, once said that “he who neglects the possible in quest of the impossible is a fool.” That just might end up being the epitaph for America’s imperial adventure in the Middle East.

(Via Electrolite.)

Mr. Mon also notes: “If America has become an empire, it isn’t a condition that’s likely to last very long.”

So that’s good news for the rest of the world, anyway, I guess. It’d be nice to think that America was on its way to being — say — the next Britain, or Germany, or (we should be so lucky) Netherlands. Me, though, I’m betting on us becoming the next France.

Comments (5)

April 17, 2004

When George W. Bush is president and is advocating a war and you, too, are advocating for war, then the fact of the matter is that you are advocating that the war be conducted by George W. Bush. That Bush would botch things was a perfectly predictable consequence of said support, based on — among other things — the fact that he’d botched everything else he’d ever done.

—— Matthew Yglesias (via Electrolite)

Comments (0)

April 8, 2004

From ginmar, a writer, Buffy fan, and — I think I’ve got this right — Army reservist in military intelligence, currently stationed at location withheld for security reasons, somewhere in Iraq. This was posted yesterday.

What makes it worse was that we kept trying to get reinforcements and air cover and evac, and eventually we had to do it ourselves. We called up around 1500 because it became apparent that we weren’t going to get out, requesting air cover. We thought it would be over by 1700. By then, though, we realized something else was going on — darkness falls at seven. We heard that the whole province was under control, and that Sadr’s representatives had offered a cease fire while they negotiated. No other government building in the province was not under his control. Our little force, outmanned and outgunned, held him off for better than twenty hours, and then slipped out under his nose. He wanted to keep us there, be his bargaining chips while he tightened his fist around the province. And that fucking governor went along with it. We eventually found out the governor was contacting the command and telling them, no, no Evac behind our backs. He wanted US Marines dropped off and the civilians put in the helicopters while they secured his villa and offices. His own people were running around trying to arrange Evac, and kept counter-manding him. Then he’d go on the air and countermand them. I kept overhearing conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear.

I can’t describe what it’s like. You’re wearing twenty pounds of gear in helmet and vest, and the sound the bombs make screeching in seems not so much audible as it sensory. You feel it first. You know what sound a bullet makes going through the air? SWWWWWiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhh. It seems to burrow through the air with an odd slowness, as if it were greasy and that makes it slip through the air. If I were 11 Bravo, I’d have earned my combat infantrymen’s badge, except of course the fact that I’m a woman means I don’t get stuff like that. The way the Army has it set up, it doesn’t matter if you do the job, if you’re a woman — you’re not supposed to do it, so you don’t get acknowledgement if you do.

We didn’t sleep last night. The cease fire lasted seven hours. The attack resumed at one AM with RPGs and machine guns opening up on us from across the other bank of the river. We kept calling to Higher for Air Support, for Evac, for reinforcements. They’d say, “Sure, they’re on their way…” Twenty minutes later, we’d find out — not be told — that in fact they weren’t. This happened about eight times. During the time they weren’t reinforcing us, the enemy mined the bridge that’s the sole way out of there with IEDs. Then Higher ordered us to Evac our way across that bridge. It was explained to them over and over that the bridge was mined. They’d listen, then issue the order again.

The worst attempted rescue was the first attempt because that one actually got off the ground. We could see that bridge that led to base, and the other unit from base offered to convoy in and get us, and the cease fire negotiators agreed to it.

They were attacked before they even got to the bridge. And we had to watch it happen. That was the last time we got our hopes up.

(Thanks to Elizabeth Bear for pointing out ginmar’s journal.)

Comments (1)

March 31, 2004

I mean, Jesus. How long do we have to put up with this crap?

Comments (3)

March 18, 2004

“If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined,” Scalia went on to say.

No shit, Tony. And whose fault do you think that is?

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March 17, 2004

It’s an election-year idea, so who knows if it’ll get anywhere, but it’s worth a shot. From a Kerry speech at George Washington University:

Civil Affairs personnel, almost all of them reservists, are stretched to the breaking point, building schools and hospitals. . . .

In small towns and cities across this country, there are judges, public administrators, educators, economists, civil engineers, and public safety professionals. They represent a vast untapped reserve of citizens capable — and I believe willing — to make their contribution to national security. . . . I propose that we enlist thousands of them in a Civilian Stability Corps, a reserve organization of volunteers ready to help win the peace in troubled places.

Like military reservists, they will have peacetime jobs; but in times of national need, they will be called into service to restore roads, renovate schools, open hospitals, repair power systems, draft a constitution, or build a police force. A Civilian Stability Corps can bring the best of America to the worst of the world — and reduce pressure on the military.

Of course, the subtext to the proposal is that in the 21st century the US is going to have a lot of nation-building to do, which is a little scary. But that doesn’t necessarily mean knocking them down first. And maybe the right wouldn’t yammer about sending the CSC to help out, say, the UN, the way they explode any time anyone talks about US military units operating under foreign command.

Okay, they probably would.

By the way, if you haven’t already, you should check out Kathryn Cramer’s coverage of the ongoing, and increasingly suspicious, South African mercenary / West African coup / US oil interests story.

Comments (0)

February 19, 2004

I fear you have mistaken voting for pornography. This is a mistake. A vote is not a private satisfaction, chosen solely for the exactness of its match with your own personal tastes. A vote is a social act or it is nothing. It has larger consequences in the larger context, and those consequences go on propagating until another set cancels them out.

Voting the perfection of your own conscience is a great luxury. We didn't have it. We’re getting billed for it now. The cost is terrible.

—— Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Comments (3)

From Eschaton:

I get a reasonable amount of political junk mail. Frankly, most of it goes into the trash unread these days. But, to the extent that I do read it I have the impression that it reads something like this:

REPUBLICANS ARE GOING TO EAT YOUR BABIES UNLESS YOU GIVE US $25

There’s a kind of “we’re pathetic and can't do anything unless you send us a couple of bucks” vibe. Now, that may in fact be true — that they’re at a financial disadvantage. But, look — nobody likes a loser.

I'd prefer direct mail which went something like:

Last week we took Tom DeLay out back and kicked the crap out of him. This week, we plan to do it again. Help support this ass-kicking! For only $25, your name can be on a bootprint on DeLay's mottled ass!

Democrats are tired of being on the defensive. We’ve been on the defensive since the Failed Clinton Presidency began being reported 2 hours after election day ‘92. It’s time for those days to be over.

Comments (1)

February 11, 2004

If you pay your ratcatchers by the number of rats they catch, you shouldn’t be surprised to find them breeding rats in the basement. Breeding terrorists is harder, but on the other hand, since terrorists don’t look that different from normal people . . . Well, have a look at what local law enforcement — not to mention the FBI — are getting up to:

In an interview with the [Oakland] Tribune, Mike Van Winkle, spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, issued a remarkably broad definition of terrorism. “You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest,” he said. “You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.”

What do you say to something like that? Don’t they teach civics in school any more?

“This is a good way for police officers to get terrorism points,” says Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the ACLU. “They have to justify the dollars they’re receiving from the federal government for homeland security. We’ve seen a massive inflation of terrorism statistics on the federal level. Every Arab who has a phony drivers license is now called a terrorist by the Justice Department, so they can say, ‘We've arrested thousands of terrorists.’

And if the fact that all those Arabs and hippy longhairs are getting beat up and arrested doesn’t bother you, this should: while the cops are wasting their time making lists of Democrats, shooting beanbags at kids, and arresting people for talking to National Guardsmen, the real terrorists are laughing their asses off.

“This is the perfect example of not learning the lessons of 9/11,” he continues. “The FBI was not sufficiently focused on the possibility that a group like al-Qaida would commit a serious terrorist attack. One real failure since 9/11 is that, when they call everything a ‘terrorist,’ they're still not sufficiently focused on actual terrorists. There’s an overbroad definition of domestic terrorism in the PATRIOT Act, and it’s had a spillover effect into state and local governments who want to justify their antiterrorism funding and mission.”

Details on Salon.

Comments (5)

February 7, 2004

So a couple of weeks ago I filled out an absentee ballot — school board bond issue, reauthorization of property tax, something like that — and was mildly curious about the fact that it didn't include anything about the presidential elections. But I'd heard that the courts had thrown out Washington's open primary system a while back, so I didn't give it much thought. I figured there'd been some party registration drive that I'd missed, or that the state Democratic machine was planning to settle things in some smoke-filled room in Olympia, or something like that. Oh well. Till I moved here I was always registered to vote in California, so I'm used to the idea that presidential candidates are chosen by a few spoiled people in Iowa and New Hampshire, rather than, like, by any process I might have any input into. So no change there.

Turns out I was only half right — earlier this week I found out that Washington was having Iowa-style caucuses, not primaries. Then I found out the caucuses were on a Saturday. Then, poking around on the web, I found out that my local caucus was going to be held literally a block from my apartment. Then I found out Saturday kendo practice was canceled.

Okay; running out of excuses not to do my civic duty here.

About five minutes after ten, and there's a definite increase in the neighborhood's pedestrian population. Two, five, seven, a dozen — lots of people in sweaters and waterproof REI jackets, some of them with dogs and/or children, all converging on the B. F. Day School. Some of them calling out to each other as they cross the soccer field. Obviously many of my neighbors take this whole 'neighbor' business a lot more seriously than I do. About 95 percent white — even whiter than the general makeup of the neighborhood. (I would have expected to see more Asians. There are a few, but not many. Maybe the older ones I see around are Republicans and the younger ones are foreign students.) Gray-haired, ponytailed couple in front of me — probably Kucinich voters. Nope, Dean. Darrel Schweitzer lookalike with a feather in his trilby — probably a Kucinich voter. (Nope, Dean.) Arty-looking Eurasian girl in a powder-blue parka — probably a Dean voter. (Nope, Kerry.) Rock-climbing engineer type and girlfriend — probably — okay, no more of that.

Line looks long, but it moves pretty quickly. Posters — Dean, Kerry, Kucinich, Clark, white on blue, all pretty much identical from a distance — all over the place; obviously none of the rules about campaigning within x-hundred yards of a polling place apply to this business. Guy with the feather gets the local Dean activist's last button. (The Dean activist looks like a certain sort of SF congoer: jeans, white T-shirt over pot belly, fanny pack worn in front.) (I may have imagined the fanny pack.) Herded down into the school's basement and told to divide ourselves by precinct, if we know what our precinct number is; good thing I brought my voter registration card. Cafeteria full — like, King’s Arms at the end of exam week full — with people closest to the tables holding up small pieces of paper with precinct numbers on them. No way I can get to the precinct sign-in sheet; just have to hope it all works out in the end somehow.

Oh, God, did I just hear someone mention Robert's Rules of Order? Let's hope nobody else heard him.

Call for volunteers to move (by precinct) out of the overcrowded cafeteria. 43-1352 enthusiastically rises to the occasion, our first collective act. Great, now I can drop my bag on the tray return shelf and take off my jacket. The bag's heavy and it's hot in here.

The sign-in sheet becomes accessible. By the time I get to it (actually, by the time the tenth or twentieth person in front of me gets to it) the neatly printed blue and white forms have gone away and we're down to yellow notepaper. From things like this — and the put-upon tone of the meta-precinct chairman, or whatever he is, who's going around from precinct group to precinct group shouting instructions and seems to think that we all failed to do our required reading before coming to class — I get the feeling that the local party machine didn't expect anything like the turnout they've got. Probably thought it would just be them and their political junkie friends and relations.

Wow, all these people live around here? Probably some of them are even from my building. I'd be sure that the fact that I don't know any of them was a sign of the collapse of civil society, only lots of them seem to know each other, so obviously it's just me. (Hey, she's cute — ah, she's talking about some guy; sounds like a boyfriend.)

Chorus

We're supposed to have a precinct chairman. Do we have a precinct chairman?

Anyone?

Okay, we don't have a precinct chairman, but we've got an officious type who's willing to open the Official Envelope and read the Official Instructions. Good for him; glad I don't have to do it. Looks like 43-1352 gets to nominate four delegates and four alternates, who go on to the next round of caucuses in May.

Put-Upon Guy is shouting (from the cafeteria) that we should all be voting now. Whatever, Put-Upon Guy; there are still half a dozen people signing in. As that starts to get done I suggest to the people nearest me that maybe it would be easier if instead of trying to count hands we all sorted ourselves into groups by candidate. The meme spreads; candidate posters are torn from the walls and held up.

Simultaneously:

Me

Dean people over here!

Woman next to me

Kerry people over here!

Woman on other side of crowd

Dean people over here!

Kucinich guy (already in the right place)

(Says nothing; just looks smug.)

Dean people from here go over there. Officious Guy is trying to count written candidate preferences on the sign-in sheet. Put-Upon Guy is shouting (still from the cafeteria) that we should sort ourselves into groups by candidate — way ahead of you, buddy — and then we get ten minutes to figure out which candidates are below the 15% minimum threshold and/or re-sort ourselves, either to reapportion voters for those candidates or to push those candidates over the minimum. Since we've only got four delegates, I'm not sure how much the 15% is going to matter.

Doesn't look like it's going to matter much; as we sort ourselves out it seems pretty clear-cut. Looking good for Dean.

Me

I can hold that sign, if your arm's getting tired.

Not looking good for Edwards or Clark or Sharpton — not only are they below the 15% threshold, they don't seem to have any voters here at all. Must have just been one enthusiastic Clark supporter with a stack of posters. Fair-sized groups for Kerry and Kucinich. (Not only does she have a boyfriend, she's a Kerry voter. Oh, well.) A couple of undecideds, apparently. Can't really tell any of them apart — no wonder my guesses were all wrong.

Put-Upon Guy (coming over to 43-1352)

Now that you've selected your delegates —

Me

Don't look at me — just 'cause I'm holding this sign, doesn't mean I'm in charge.

Chorus (to Put-Upon Guy)

You're ahead of us!

Put-Upon Guy

I'm not ahead of you, you've had ten minutes, no one will be allowed to vote after 11:00, I'm not going to repeat this, you should have read the instructions, don't ask questions.

Screw you, too, Put-Upon Guy. I thought this was supposed to be a democracy. But, regardless of Put-Upon Guy, we've got four delegate slots and three candidates, so we'd better count heads. Thirty-one for Dean. I don't know how many Kucinich and Kerry have got, but apparently it's not that many, because according to those closer to the border (and according to Officious Guy), Dean wins. So Dean gets two delegates and Kerry and Kucinich get one each. Probably there's some complicated mathematical explanation in the rules, but this seems obvious to everybody, so never mind. Anyway, right, now we thirty-one need to elect two Dean delegates.

Okay, forget elect. Have we got two volunteers?

One hand up. Right, I had that one pegged as the student activist type from the start. Have we got any others . . . ? All right, what the hell.

Me (Raises hand)

Me, sure, okay.

I guess we've got two delegates.

Selection of alternates follows; then paperwork. One of the Kucinich guys (I think), who's standing near Organized Guy, the sign-up sheet, and the Official Envelope, volunteers to be elected precinct chair, so we have a precinct chair to sign (the rules say "notarize"; how quaint) our delegate selection cards. We fill out said cards and some sort of official sign-up list that includes addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. Hopefully the party machine will (A) remember to call us to tell us what to do about the county and/or legislative district caucuses, and (B) not use that list for fund-raising.

While we're filling out the paperwork, someone remembers that we're also supposed to vote on resolutions, to be forwarded for consideration as part of the state party platform, or something like that. The other Dean delegate, the one I had pegged as an activist, has brought one of her own — apparently she is with some advocacy group — and also has a couple that she's found lying around on tables. The one she's brought is about universal health care, and passes 28-3. The others are about working hours (mandatory minimum paid vacation, caps on overtime, that sort of thing) about the war on Iraq, and about the environment. I miss the details of the last couple since I'm busy with the paperwork. They all pass with a minimum of discussion, though a couple people object to the one on working hours on the grounds that it doesn't have a small-business exception.

Oh, yeah, we should probably give the Kerry and Kucinich people a chance to vote on these, too, since it's supposed to be by precinct. (Completely forgot about those guys. Amazing how quick these little sub-tribes form, isn't it?) Someone takes the resolutions over to the other groups, and our numbers on them over to Organized Guy and the precinct chairman.

I exchange names and phone numbers and email addresses with the other Dean delegate and the two alternates. We'll make sure we all get to the district convention, even if the party machine forgets about us.

I'm not sure this has been more democratic than primaries, but it's sure been more entertaining.

Hey, I'm a delegate. Isn't Mom going to be proud?

Several hours later

State-wide, the papers are reporting Kerry 49%, Dean 30%, Kucinich 8%. Apparently 43-1352 isn't very representative. If Dean concedes before the May caucuses, it's going to get interesting.

Comments (8)

February 6, 2004

About a decade ago, I invented a game with a colleague of mine who, like me, had once worked for Irving Kristol. We called it neoconservative bingo. The idea was that the clichés of neoconservative discourse would be arranged in various combinations on bingo cards: “The World's Only Superpower"; “The New Class”; “The China Threat”; “Decadent Europe”; “Against the UN”; “The Adversary Culture”; “The Global Democratic Revolution”; “Down With the Appeasers!”; “Be Firm Like Churchill.” The free space in the center of the bingo card would be “The Palestinian People Do Not Exist” (nowadays it would be “No Palestinian State” or “All Palestinians Are Terrorists”). As you read an essay or a book by a neoconservative, you would check off each slogan on the card in the order in which it appeared.

—— Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors”, The Nation, Feb. 2004

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February 2, 2004

This is not to say that the Leninists and the imperialists are without moral feelings. Individually they are for the most part perfectly normal. Their compassion for their enemies’ victims is absolutely genuine. So is their outrage at their enemies’ moral failings and blind spots. . . .

Morality has very little to do with choosing sides. It can tell us that a given act is dreadful, but it can’t tell us whether to say, ‘This is dreadful, therefore . . .’ or ‘This is dreadful, but . . .’ We still often believe that we oppose our enemies because of their crimes, and support our allies despite their crimes.

—— Ken MacLeod

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December 23, 2003

Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., commanding general, 82nd Airborne Division, quoted in the Fayetteville Observer (“82nd Troops To Fill Iraq Gap”, 20 Dec. 2003):

The Department of Defense is concerned about the transition of troopers this spring and sustaining the continuity of effort for stability in Iraq. They need special troops to fill this “gap” in order to smoothly transition troops into and out of Iraq. Our paratroopers would have it no other way in these times that require the best of the best to give a little more.

Reaction from a friend of mine with family in the 82nd:

ROFL.

The paratroopers are pissed. They’re being sent to Iraq because someone else isn’t ready to do their job. When this battalion came back to Afghanistan, they came back a month or later than they were supposed to because the idiots that were replacing them shipped their gear by boat (to a landlocked country) and the boat got rerouted to Iraq where nobody knew what to do with it, and they couldn’t go out without their gear.

The people I talked to all seem to have a sense that the 82d is being abused to cover up other peoples’ fuckups.

I’m sure Gen. Swannack knows this is how his troopers feel. Predicting it wouldn’t exactly take a Ph. D. in organizational psychology. What’s interesting to me is that he feels compelled to say stuff like this (not just to the press, but to the troopers’ families, who must know better), and that the press feels compelled to print it.

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December 14, 2003

Looks like they finally found Saddam Hussein. Here’s hoping a lot of ordinary Iraqis sleep more easily now. And here’s hoping we have enough international goodwill left that we don’t have to resort to a show trial by an American kangaroo court.

(But what I really want to know is, what happened to all those body doubles we kept hearing about?)

Comments (2)

December 8, 2003

George Will, I think it was, was once quoted as saying he would be perfectly happy if the US were to return to the social order of 1905. It’s an idea that should strike horror into anyone who’s not an upper-class white male with no conscience; but thanks to what passes for fiscal policy in the GOP these days, we’re now well on our way. Paul Krugman (pause while conservative members of the audience leave the room, assuming there will be nothing of substance to follow) lays it out in the New York Times magazine:

Here’s how the argument runs: to starve the beast, you must not only deny funds to the government; you must make voters hate the government. There’s a danger that working-class families might see government as their friend: because their incomes are low, they don’t pay much in taxes, while they benefit from public spending. So in starving the beast, you must take care not to cut taxes on these “lucky duckies.” (Yes, that’s what The Wall Street Journal called them in a famous editorial.) In fact, if possible, you must raise taxes on working-class Americans in order, as the Journal said, to get their “blood boiling with tax rage.” . . .

The astonishing political success of the antitax crusade has, more or less deliberately, set the United States up for a fiscal crisis. How we respond to that crisis will determine what kind of country we become.

If Grover Norquist is right — and he has been right about a lot — the coming crisis will allow conservatives to move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue, he says, will make it possible for conservative politicians — in the name of fiscal necessity — to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable.

In Norquist’s vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.

It was bad enough when the future looked like Mexico City. I’m not sure it’s an improvement now that it looks more like Yoknapatawpha County.

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December 3, 2003

Let us remember, first, that the victory of democracy over autocratic governments in Europe [or the US — Ed.] did by no means give the power, even in its formal sense, to the ‘individual’. For many decades, the citizen with the right to vote in European democracies was the white, ‘free’, male owner of land or capital. The voting right of workers, women, etc., is not an organic component of the definition of democracy, and has not been born along with it. It is, rather, the outcome of the struggle for justice of various classes and layers in the existing democratic societies — struggles waged under the intellectual and political banner of other movements, such as the socialist movement, the women’s rights movement, the anti-racial or anti-ethnic discrimination movement, etc., and, more often than not, waged by undemocratic or illegal methods.

—— Mansoor Hekmat, founder of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran

Interesting guy; seems to know whereof he speaks. And unlike too many leftist writers, Hekmat quite deliberately doesn’t require you to have a degree in Marxist criticism (or equivalent coursework) to get where he’s coming from. Worth a read, especially in a time when the Right, having spent the last hundred years deliberately confusing “democracy” with “anti-Communism”, can toss around oxymorons like “democratic-minded strongman.”

(Courtesy of Ken Macleod.)

---

Update: I can’t resist posting this one more bit, which says more about the failure of third parties — left or right — to get anywhere than anything else I can remember reading:

If fundamental changes are not on the agenda — as the very act of elections, parliamentarism, and the existence of a non-revolutionary situation make the people understand — then it is quite natural that the deprived masses, who have no alternative but to be satisfied with reform, should vote for reformist personalities and parties within the ruling class itself — personalities and parties that, as they see it, have the actual possibility to bring those reforms about. The problem of the Left is not that the allocation of the seats is not proportionate to the number of direct votes, or that the neighbourhood Trotskyist party does not have equal possibilities for propaganda to eventually secure one seat out of four hundred. The problem is that, under normal circumstances, the workers do not regard someone who wants to become a member of the parliament for four years from a revolutionary position against capital a good representative for pursuing their interests through this particular channel.

Not that I’m asking for a revolutionary situation, mind you. But it’s nice to see someone explain this in terms that don’t amount to a second-order idiot plot.

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November 18, 2003

All this time you probably thought we invaded Iraq because we wanted to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or because we wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East, or because Saddam Hussein was a world-class bastard, or so we could get control of Iraq’s oil before we hit Hubbert’s Peak.

Apparently you were wrong. Apparently we were tricked into invading Iraq by the Iraqis themselves. Apparently those greedy little buggers have been after that fat reconstruction package from the beginning.

Or so Salon’s Michelle Goldberg reports from Restoration Weekend.

The self-regarding humanitarianism that the right wrapped itself in before the war with Iraq is beginning to fray and chafe. At Restoration Weekend there was anxiety about the postwar situation, and anger. Senators and congressional representatives avowed their faith that Bush’s fabled steadfastness made victory assured in Iraq, a stance they struggled to reconcile with the White House’s recently announced decision to expedite the transfer of power to Iraqis and scale back the occupation by election season. Meanwhile, the right’s intellectuals and activists had largely scrapped talk of democracy. Some suggested that the Iraqis themselves are our enemy, that we owe them nothing. [Conservative ideologue Daniel] Pipes referenced “The Mouse That Roared,” the 1959 film in which a poor country declares war on America, hoping to lose and be rebuilt like Germany and Japan. The implication seemed to be that Iraq is both lucky and greedy.

Apparently, if we rebuild Iraq, the terrorists win.

Comments (1)

November 7, 2003

More interesting stuff from John of John & Belle, in this case a review of David Frum’s Dead Right. I fully sympathize with John’s curiosity as to what

conservatism looks like in all its glorious and unalloyed philosophical ideal purity, scoured clean and purified of blemishes, flaws, errors, compromises, distortions due to human weakness, money, K Street, the usual suspects.

I also, however, fully sympathize with his dismay at the possibility that Frum’s thesis might be the best modern American conservatism has to offer.

John paraphrases:

”It’s the economy, stupid! We need to bury it under ten to twelve feet of snow so that we will be forced to cannibalize the dead and generally be objects of moral edification to future generations.“

I think we are beginning to see why Frum feels that his philosophy may be a loser come election time.

As John says, it’s not that Frum — and the great mass of American conservatives — really think this. It’s that they don’t think at all, at least when it comes to thinking through their premises to their logical conclusions. Have a look.

(Courtesy of Electrolite.)

Comments (5)

October 31, 2003

Another interview, with a live guy this time: James Weinstein, founding editor of In These Times, on Salon.

So as time went on, and especially in the New Deal, the ideas that had originally been totally marginal became the property of the mainstream of American political discourse, and meanwhile socialists had nothing new to say, because the Russian Revolution had thrown the whole movement backward. What came to mean ”socialism” after the Russian Revolution was this incredibly backward, pre-capitalist, pre-industrial society whose main goal was to catch up with the west. I mean, in my book I show how the Russian city of Magnitogorsk became the model of a socialist city, but it replicated Gary, Ind. — everything radiated out from the steel mill! — which was probably the worst failed American city. I mean, they had no idea what socialism was. It was a terrible throwback, the use of slave labor, the absence of any kind of political democracy. And yet the communists, who really were at the time the most vital force in the American left, were defending it.

I’ve driven through Gary, Indiana. He’s got a point. (But of course so does the ghost of Karl Marx, who points out that there was no way under any system that industrializing someplace as backward as Tsarist Russia was going to be all ponies and ice cream.)

From there Weinstein goes on to some discussion of what’s continued to go wrong with the American left — or rather with American leftists, since Weinstein maintains there’s no such thing as the American left at the moment. It kind of deteriorates into a discussion of the Democratic presidential primaries, but it’s interesting stuff nonetheless.

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October 24, 2003

I was really going to leave the California election alone, but — someone at Knight-Ridder apparently had the bright idea of sending reporters out to interview Iraqi bodybuilders about it. How can I pass that up?

“For me as a bodybuilder and coach, Arnold is like a very big book. His way of training, his experience, we follow every step of his career,” said Saif Abdul Razak Hussein, 23, who spends most days at the Rasheed Center for Bodybuilding on al Maamoon Street. “It’s good to see someone like him, someone like us, running a big state.”

Practically every Iraqi knows Arnold is governor-elect of California. One gym changed its name to The Arnold Classic after Schwarzenegger won.

Like many Americans, Iraqis are divided about whether he has the experience to pull a state the size of Iraq out of its economic slump.

But most think he’ll do a better job running California than their own interim Governing Council will do managing the challenges of rebuilding postwar Iraq. . . .

“Before, I had a good opinion of Arnold, but right now my opinion has completely changed. When he came here to speak to soldiers I was disappointed, because I thought he agreed with what the American soldiers did,“ said Amir Foaad Abed, 19.. . . .

Still, Abed said Arnold would do a good job as governor because he was elected. “Because he’s famous, he’s an actor, he’s rich, so people elected him for those reasons. So he will do a good job.”

Can’t argue with logic like that. Maybe we can win over the hearts and minds of the Afghanis by screening Red Scorpion for them and electing Dolph Lundgren to something or other. At least Lundgren was a Fulbright scholar.

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October 23, 2003

Iran, naturally. It’s starting. Expect blame for everything that’s going wrong in Iraq to be gradually shifted to Ansar al-Islam, and blame for Ansar al-Islam to be shifted to Iran.

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October 1, 2003

A handy spotter’s guide for someone writing a political SF novel (yes, the planetary romance is also a political SF novel), but also handy for Jane and Joe Citizen.

These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

—— “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt”, NYRB 22 June 1995, Utne Reader November-December 1995.

(Reproduced on some site called Reality Macedonia — apparently a news and opinion site dedicated to keeping Macedonia from being absorbed into a Greater Albania. Via . . . well, I’ll update this if I can remember where I found the link.)

Some choice tidbits:

• [Under Nazism,] the rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

• Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. . . . The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

• In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

• Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders.

• The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. . . . However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

• For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. . . . . Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such “final solutions” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

• Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world. . . . But . . . the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.

• In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

• In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view — one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights. . . Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter.

• Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.  . . . All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

And, finally, a reminder for us in particular:

Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

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September 24, 2003

Apparently my theory that Bush really is the born-again he claims to be and really does think we’re sliding into the End Times is not supported by the evidence. Jeanne d’Arc quotes Al Franken (not trying to be funny):

Then I talked to [Howard] Fineman and he remembered talking to Bush during the primaries in New Hampshire. Howard asked him what selection of the Bible he’d read that day because the campaign was saying that Governor Bush read the Bible every day.

And we tracked down the transcript and Bush was totally defensive and it seemed to me from the transcript that he really didn’t read the Bible every day. He just said he did — which is, like, a very weird thing to lie about.

(Via Brad de Long.)

Given the current geopolitical situation, I guess this is a good thing, on balance. I guess.

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September 22, 2003

I figured out what it is that the future I see when I read the news or listen to the radio these days reminds me of. It reminds me the final scene of Charlie Stross’ “A Colder War.” XK-MASADA. All that.

That’s been bothering me for a while, so I’m glad I finally figured it out. The odd thing is, I only read the story for the first time yesterday.

This is why I’m not paying all that much attention to the news right now.

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September 18, 2003

Bill Amend’s Fox Trot isn’t political very often, but when it is, it’s on.

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September 17, 2003

Are any of the San Francisco mayoral candidates replicants? The Wave Magazine wants to know. (Courtesy of Rob.)

(Best line: “Fifty-fifty he’s a skin job.”)

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September 12, 2003

So how are we doing, two years on? Well, shockingly, the “make peace through war” plan seems to be stumbling a bit; for some reason, all war seems to make is more war. Oh, I know, I know, it’s only been a few months, we gotta give this war a little time to mature and magically invert its nature to become peace. But still, I can’t help wondering . . . is it possible that war isn’t the answer?

—— Stephen Notley

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August 28, 2003

Courtesy of Nick Mamatas, this gem from the Weekly Worker:

Five young Ukrainian conspirators — seemingly with a background in the ‘official communist’ Komsomol and well able to pick up the vital factional nuances of left politics in the Anglo-Saxon world — managed to pass themselves off as ‘sections’ of anything up to 12 different organisations. A feat which might be explained by the claim that they first met each other in an “amateur acting troupe.”

Those stung include Peter Taaffe’s Committee for a Workers’ International, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Sheila Torrance’s Workers Revolutionary Party and its ‘Fourth International’, the US-based League for a Revolutionary Party, the Committees of Correspondence (publishers of News and Letters), the International Bolshevik Tendency, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and Workers Power, along with its burlesque League for the Fifth International. Plans were also being hatched to establish links with colonel Gaddafi and his regime in Libya — that at least might have proved to be a real money-spinner.

Using a whole string of aliases — Alexander, Ivor, Ivan, Jukuv, Kyril, Marsha, Alyosha, Ihor, Pugachov, Mikhail, Oleksity, Sergey Kozubenkow, Vadym Yevtoshok, Vassily, Viktor, Vitality, Yakov — Boris Pastukh, Oleg Vernik (assistant lecturer at a Kiev law school and mastermind of the fraud), Oleksander Zvorsky (born 1972), Yuri Baronov (born 1984) and Zakhar Popovich (born 1976) recreated in fictional microcosm the factional struggles and rivalries that plague the left in Britain and the US. Negotiations, polemics, splits and all. This doubtlessly pleased their ‘masters’ in London and New York no end.

In a spirit of internationalism, but presumably with an eye to outdoing their rivals on the left, various groups channelled money and material resources to aid those whom they believed to be their co-thinkers. For example, it seems that at least three organisations were supplying cash for the upkeep of an ‘office’ in Kiev.

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August 14, 2003

I’d just like to call attention to Rob’s erudite expression of outrage over the Pentagon’s plan to allow Congress’ appropriation of extra combat pay for American soldiers to lapse, now that tens of thousands of American soldiers are actually in combat.

If the Pentagon can’t find the money to pay our soldiers, it should ask the Congress for more. And if the Congress is worried about keeping expenses down, it should clearly state to the American public, and to our soldiers, which specific programs it values more than the men and women fighting and dying for their country.

I’m sure this will do no end of good for the troops’ morale.

(Yes, Rob has a brother in the 82nd Airborne, and last I heard he was still in Afghanistan. Anyone who thinks this means Rob is insufficiently unbiased to express an opinion on the issue is welcome to stand up and get smacked.)

Comments (3)

August 11, 2003

Yeah, it’s Al Gore. So what?

Normally, we Americans lay the facts on the table, talk through the choices before us and make a decision. But that didn’t really happen with this war — not the way it should have. And as a result, too many of our soldiers are paying the highest price, for the strategic miscalculations, serious misjudgments, and historic mistakes that have put them and our nation in harm's way.

I’m convinced that one of the reasons that we didn’t have a better public debate before the Iraq War started is because so many of the impressions that the majority of the country had back then turn out to have been completely wrong. . . .

And it’s not just in foreign policy. The same thing has been happening in economic policy, where we’ve also got another huge and threatening mess on our hands. I'm convinced that one reason we've had so many nasty surprises in our economy is that the country somehow got lots of false impressions about what we could expect from the big tax cuts that were enacted . . .

[W]hether you're a Democrat or a Republican — or an Independent, a Libertarian, a Green or a Mugwump — you've got a big stake in making sure that Representative Democracy works the way it is supposed to. And today, it just isn’t working very well. We all need to figure out how to fix it because we simply cannot keep on making such bad decisions on the basis of false impressions and mistaken assumptions.

. . . I think it has a lot to do with the way we seek the truth and try in good faith to use facts as the basis for debates about our future — allowing for the unavoidable tendency we all have to get swept up in our enthusiasms.

. . . Robust debate in a democracy will almost always involve occasional rhetorical excesses and leaps of faith, and we’re all used to that. I’ve even been guilty of it myself on occasion. But there is a big difference between that and a systematic effort to manipulate facts in service to a totalistic ideology that is felt to be more important than the mandates of basic honesty. . . .

So I would say to those who have found the issue of honor and integrity so useful as a political tool, that the people are also looking for these virtues in the execution of public policy on their behalf, and will judge whether they are present or absent.

We can only hope.

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August 8, 2003

— and not, that is, just a Western journalist’s overreaction to Japan’s general low level of backround right-wing zealotry —

[AP] Just a few years ago, talk about possessing nuclear weapons would have been the pinnacle of taboo in Japan, the only nation to suffer atomic attacks. But the nuclear ambitions of neighboring North Korea now have this nation thinking the unthinkable, even as it marks the anniversaries this week of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings — should Japan have its own atomic arsenal? . . . “If people had voiced such opinions a few years ago, they would have been branded weirdoes,” said Hideo Hosoi, editor in chief of The Shokun. “We’re starting to be able to talk about it in a rational and normal way.”

— then the world is in even worse shape than I thought it was.

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July 25, 2003

So the government has finally admitted it: in addition to the famous “do-not-fly” list, there is also a separate, likely longer, “harass before flying” list. According to Salon:

[I]n documents released this week in a federal court case in San Francisco, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) confirmed for the first time that it keeps not just a list of potential terrorists barred from the air, but also a list of “selectees” who are subject to strict security checks before they’re allowed to board commercial aircraft. The agency has revealed almost nothing else about the selectee list, and is fighting in court to keep secret the names of people who are on it and the standards for putting them there.

It appears, however, that the list may contain thousands of names. Officials at the ACLU of Northern California, which is pressing the Freedom of Information Act case filed by two leftist newspaper editors, says it learned from authorities at Oakland Airport that there is an 88-page typed list of names.

Nobody in the TSA will tell you whether you’re on the list, why you’re on the list, or — God forbid! — how you might get off the list. Not only won’t they tell you about you, they won’t tell you about anyone else, or even discuss the list in general terms. The criteria for getting on the list appear to have little to do with your chances of actually doing something bad aboard an airplane, and quite a bit with any history you might have of political activism.

Being on the list won’t stop you from flying, but — particularly since its effects are being administered by airline personnel and the semipro TSA rather than trained, accountable law enforcement officers — it will result in extra security attention, strip searches, and even being held at the airport by local police until someone from the FBI bothers to come down to tell them they can let you go.

Arrest and trial without due process even for for American citizens. The FBI questioning people about their coffee-shop reading habits. Now, singling out dissidents for extra-judicial harassment.

Makes you wonder what we fought the Cold War for, doesn’t it?

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July 22, 2003

“I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq.”

—— Paul Wolfowitz

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June 17, 2003

Salon is running a brilliant interview with music executive Danny Goldberg that is the most insightful single thing I’ve read on what’s gone wrong with the Democratic party. Some excerpts:

It’s on cultural issues where the left has been most successful with the public, and on economic issues where they've had the biggest struggle, where they've lost. Yet a lot of people in the political world think the exact opposite. They delude themselves into thinking that their economic ideas and policy ideas are really popular and these social issues are dragging them down. But the facts are the opposite.

You have a political consultant culture that produces candidates like Al Gore, who thinks that on a nationally televised debate at the peak of the election season he should talk about the “lockbox” or “Dingell-Norwood,” incomprehensible insider jargon. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I read the New York Times every day. And then there are people like Joe Lieberman, who feel the way to win swing voters is to attack popular culture. As if popular culture had been created by Martians, instead of by the actual people in the country.

I don’t know why they can’t talk about a moral conception of politics. I do think younger people want an idealistic framework for their politics, and the conservatives have been really good at creating an idealistic concept behind everything they do. I don’t agree with any of it, but they have a philosophy you can understand. Even people who don’t benefit from a tax cut feel that there’s a moral concept behind the idea of what taxes should be, and that’s why they support it. It’s not that they’re stupid. They buy into a moral philosophy that the conservatives express. Our guys don't express a moral philosophy.

I’m a little disappointed in people from my generation, the baby boomers, at least when it comes to electoral politics and public interest groups. We were so anxious to get into the game and get power and get our voices heard. The Gores, the Liebermans, these are people of my generation, the people running the public interest groups. So many times I’ll run into political people my age and they’ll say, “Oh, isn't music terrible?” And I say, “I don't think so.” Is music not as good as it was when we were young? Well, we're not the same people we were when we were young. Nothing is going to touch me the way Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” touched me then. But today, to my daughter, Pink is somebody she's going to remember 30 years from now. Kids who like the White Stripes, or like Jay-Z or Eminem, these are artists who are touching them in a similar way. They’re 16 and we’re not.

I’m 30, and I’ve already figured that out. Baby Boomers have no excuse. But why is this more than a personal problem? Why is it a problem for the Democratic party? Here’s why:

To me, it’s amazing that no one has looked back on that election in the political world: There was this drop in young support for the Democrats, it was dramatic. Clinton beat Bush Sr. by 12 points among the 18 to 24’s in 1992. He beat Dole by 19 points among 18-to-24’s in ‘96. In 2000, Gore was only able to tie Bush in that group. A 19-point drop! There were 9 million people in the 18-to-24-year-old group, so that's a couple million votes, at least. That obviously would have swung New Hampshire, it would have swung Missouri. I think it would have swung Florida, although I acknowledge that Lieberman picked up some Jewish votes in Florida. But he cost them much more than he got them. I mean, it wasn’t only Lieberman. But he orchestrated Senate hearings in September, six weeks before the election, to bash culture. Then they wonder why Ralph Nader did so well among young people. I mean, that’s not the only reason why, but it certainly didn’t help.

Normally I wouldn’t post this many excerpts, but it’s just too good. Go read the rest of it.

Comments (8)

June 4, 2003

A strong case might have been made to go after Hussein just because he posed a potential threat to us and the region, because of his support for suicide bombers, and because of his ruthless oppression of his own people. But this is not the case our President chose to make.

...

I trusted Bush, and unless something big develops on the weapons front in Iraq soon, it appears as though I was fooled by him. Perhaps he himself was taken in by his intelligence and military advisers. If so, he ought to be angry as hell, because ultimately he bears the responsibility.

It suggests a strain of zealotry in this White House that regards the question of war as just another political debate. It isn’t. More than 100 fine Americans were killed in this conflict, dozens of British soldiers, and many thousands of Iraqis. Nobody gets killed or maimed in Capitol Hill maneuvers over spending plans, or battles over federal court appointments. War is a special case. It is the most serious step a nation can take, and it deserves the highest measure of seriousness and integrity.

—— Mark Bowden

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May 21, 2003

Just discovered Electronic Iraq, a portal offering news, “eyewitness reports from Iraq, and ... diary accounts from on the ground.” Among other things, they’re hosting pictures for Salam Pax and mirroring his blog entries, but they’re also collecting and linking to other things I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. They’ve been around since February; wish I’d noticed them earlier.

The site definitely has an editorial slant, but who doesn’t, these days?

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May 16, 2003

Not the facts themselves, which are great for Pfc. Lynch* and, really, for one’s opinion of humanity in general. But knowing how the military and the media over here have spun it — yes, depressing.

This, by the way, is why I try to stay away from TV.

* Don’t get me started on the persistent habit in the press of referring to her as “Private Jessica,” or even just “Jessica.”

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May 12, 2003

Fifty-nine Democratic members of the Texas state legislature are now on the lam as they flee the statehouse in order to cut off debate on a controversial redistricting bill.

As the rebellion took shape during the weekend, the Democrats broke up into small groups, with only their team leaders knowing the details of their travels. They were told to pack enough clothes and necessities to last four days.

(For some reason I’m reminded of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, in which the Prime Minister of a postapocalyptic England is reduced to travelling the country in company with the Shadow Minister, putting on a Punch-and-Judy morality play. Maybe itinerant opposition parties are the wave of the future.)

---

Update: For those of you who don’t reflexively dismiss Molly Ivins out of hand, here is a summary of the events leading up to the Dems’ precipitous flight. A subversion of the democratic process it may be, but so is the tyranny of the majority.

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May 11, 2003

Yeah, I know, it’s so six months ago to care about this stuff. I just wanted to make a note of it, for the record, so that in the future, when someone asks me why I don’t trust my government, I can just link back to this entry.

The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants.

The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group’s departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.

Objective, and justification, and legal basis too. At best, this administration has presided over a massive intelligence failure. At worst, they’ve perjured themselves.

But nobody cares, ‘cause We’re #1. Guess I’ll shut up and go have some ice cream.

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May 9, 2003

A lot of the stuff from Micah Wright’s Propaganda Remix Project is, barring a repeal of the 22nd amendment, going to seem dated in a few years. But a lot of it isn’t.

I can’t help it; I’m a sucker for retro graphic design. And freedom of expression.

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April 30, 2003

Molly Ivins proposes what’s definitely the most entertaining answer yet to the question I posed here a few days ago:

If there are no WMDs, I would seriously advise this administration NOT to try to spin its way out of the problem. Bad idea. Will not fly. There’s plenty of evidence that we believed in the WMDs — took along chemical suits, antidotes, etc. So if there are no WMDs, it’s time for a blame-game witchhunt. I really hate those things, but someone needs to go around roaring, “WHOSE FAULT WAS THIS?!” It’s a splendid opportunity to fire half the CIA, which has needed to be done for years anyway. Let it be a lesson to all intelligence analysts not to let political pressure sway them on evidence.

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April 26, 2003

Courtesy of Rob, an article — I should say a disturbing article, but I guess I’m just resigned to this sort of thing — from ABC News:

To build its case for war with Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but some officials now privately acknowledge the White House had another reason for war — a global show of American power and democracy. ...

(We’ve shown the power. I’m still not sure how we’re going to go about showing the democracy. But anyway —)

If weapons of mass destruction were not the primary reason for war, what was? Here’s the answer officials and advisers gave ABCNEWS.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks changed everything, including the Bush administration's thinking about the Middle East — and not just Saddam Hussein. ...

[T]he Bush administration decided it must flex muscle to show it would fight terrorism, not just here at home and not just in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but in the Middle East, where it was thriving.

Officials said that even if Saddam had backed down and avoided war by admitting to having weapons of mass destruction, the world would have received the same message: Don't mess with the United States.

As Rob points out, this undoubtedly needs to be taken with at least one grain of salt. Whether it’s; true or not isn’t something I’m particularly interested in. I mean, I am interested, obviously, but the only way we’ll ever find out is if someone turns up hard physical evidence one way or the other. In the absence of that, I just can’t work up much enthusiasm for the argument.

What I think is significantly more interesting is that plenty of Americans would probably be totally OK with this.

And that — not the meaning of international law, or the role of the UN in world affairs, or the level of threat posed by WMDs Iraq may or may not have had — is the argument we, as a country, need to be having. We need to stop sweeping our differences under the rug and talking past each other and having our politicians say one thing to one consistituency and one thing to another. We need to publicly, and forthrightly, decide what kind of country we’re going to be.

And while I’m at it, of course I’d like a pony.

Comments (4)

April 25, 2003

Rumsfeld said the United States — which has promised to let Iraqis choose their own leaders — will not permit the establishment of a religious government comparable to the one in neighboring Iran.

“If you're suggesting, how would we feel about an Iranian-type government with a few clerics running everything in the country, the answer is: That isn't going to happen,” Rumsfeld told The Associated Press.

[AP]

First, that’s not how Iran works. Maybe in 1983, but not now. Iran now still has some serious problems — imagine the federal judiciary hand-picked by John Ashcroft — but it’s more democratic than plenty of our so-called allies.

Second, I thought we were supposed to be establishing democracy in Iraq — real democracy, not the kind where as soon as you elect someone we don’t like, we change your regime.

Third, Rumsfeld knows both of those things.

Okay, maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe he’s expressing confidence in the political wisdom of the Iraqi people.

Or maybe he just thinks we’re stupid.

Comments (11)

April 24, 2003

Final Exam, Spin Doctoring 101: Consider the following hypothetical scenario:

In summer 2004, after more than a year of investigation, the US occupying forces conclude that all or nearly all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were destroyed well before the US invasion in March 2003. (It’s too late to suppress the information or disavow the conclusions; a copy of the investigating team’s report has already been leaked to the press.)

In your own words, compose a brief public statement for the President to make in response to the news. Extra credit if the statement is not made as part of an appearance at a military base or conservative think tank.

“He tried to fool the United Nations and did for 12 years by hiding these weapons. And so it’s going to take time to find them,” the president said at the Lima Army Tank Plant. “But we know he had them. And whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we’re going to find out the truth.”

[AP]

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April 3, 2003

John Keegan, possibly the world’s foremost military historian, professes to be mystified by the tactics that Iraq is using, or rather not using, in the current war, or rather non-war.

What is Saddam up to? Does he believe he can inflict such casualties on the Americans outside Baghdad that they will lose heart and go home? Does he believe he can fight and win a battle of Baghdad? Did he so much underestimate his enemies that he made no proper preparations? Did he so much overestimate the importance of Franco-German protest against this war that he was persuaded he did not need to? Or is it simply that Saddam is disabled or dead and that no one of his megalomaniac determination is running the Iraqi war effort?

What I’m eerily reminded of is Cheradinine Zakalwe’s tactics in Use of Weapons. I don’t think Saddam Hussein is the general Zakalwe was, though, and I don’t think he has the Culture behind him. If he does, the Minds are playing a very deep game.

But then, they always do.

Comments (2)

April 1, 2003

What they say...

What I think there is no question about is that when there is a democratic Iraq, and that is our goal, an Iraq that preserves the territorial integrity of that country... that truly cares for the welfare of its own people. It won't be only the people of Iraq that benefit from that; it will be the whole world and very much this region.

—— Paul Wolfowitz, July 2002

And what they mean...

Decisions on the government’s composition appear to be entirely in US hands, particularly those of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. This has annoyed Gen [Jay] Garner, who is officially in charge but who, according to sources close to the planning of the government, has had to accept the inclusion of a number of controversial Iraqis in advisory roles.

The most controversial of Mr Wolfowitz’s proposed appointees is Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, together with his close associates, including his nephew.

During his years in exile, Mr Chalabi has cultivated links with Congress to raise funds, and has become the Pentagon’s darling among the Iraqi opposition. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is one of his strongest supporters. The state department and the CIA, on the other hand, regard him with deep suspicion.

He has not lived in Iraq since 1956, apart from a short period organising resistance in the Kurdish north in the 1990s, and is thought to have little support in the country.

—— The Guardian, April 2003

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March 28, 2003

Let me be absolutely clear. The Founding Fathers guaranteed this freedom because they knew no tyranny can ever arise among a people endowed with the right to keep and bear arms.

That's why you and your descendants need never fear fascism, state-run faith, refugee camps, brainwashing, ethnic cleansing, or especially, submission to the wanton will of criminals.

——Charlton Heston, President, National Rifle Association

We’re dealing with a country in which everybody has a weapon, and when they fire them all in the air at the same time, it’s tough.

——Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, commander, US Army V Corps

Comments (4)

March 27, 2003

Tacitus — the blogger Tacitus, I mean, not the Roman historian — is someone I haven’t run across before; I may start checking his stuff out more regularly. (I assume Tacitus is a he, because otherwise, I figure, Tacitus would be Tacita.)

At the moment he has an interesting post on the why, how, and what-if of establishing democracy in the Middle East; a short attempt to address questions like why democracy has been working in some places and not others, and what happens if democracy in a Middle Eastern state results in the election of an Islamist regime.

All the alternatives have already failed. A democratic Saudi Arabia electing Wahhabist firebrands to office would be a terrible sight and a menace to the rest of us. But we must ask: are we safe now? Do the Wahhabist firebrands not exist now? Time to be bold. Time to let the people of the Middle East learn their own lessons, as the people of Iran seem to be. Time to let them learn by making mistakes — with the novel recourse of an electoral corrective when they do.

His point about Iran is especially apt, and one lost on many people who haven’t paid attention to Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution — even people who should know better. Of course, in the last election progressive voters, depressed by Khatami’s lack of progress, stayed home in droves — but that’s a problem American democracy has, too, isn’t it? At least there were polls for them to not go to.

I don’t agree with everything Tacitus says (I’m quite tired, for instance, of the idea that the Protestant Reformation is the fundamental — pardon the pun — reason why democracy has been a success in the West), but I think his position is not a bad one.

Side note: As pointed out by Get Your War On, though — thanks, Patrick — if we’re going to go around imposing freedom on people, we can’t mess around. (Not that I expect the bomb France crowd to show that much integrity.)

But that means none of this “free as long as you don’t do anything we don’t like” bullshit.

Comments (4)

March 22, 2003

On the question of how postwar Iraq should be governed and by whom, retired US Army general Wesley Clark has a nice editorial in the Washington Post. We shouldn’t get our hopes up that reconstructing Iraq will be as easy as reconstructing Japan.

Japan was not at odds with itself. It possessed the raw material for postwar reconstruction: an educated, industrious population; some surviving infrastructure; and modern industrial experience. Imperial Japan was also largely free of the problems of large, restive minorities... Defeat, when it came, was palpable, complete and unquestioned... Literacy was high, and the culture valued hard work and discipline... Almost none of those conditions will be present in post-Saddam Iraq.

This certainly dovetails with what I know of modern Japanese history. (And while I can’t claim to know the Mideast the way I know Japan, what I do know on that score certainly dovetails as well.)

Nor should we be looking for another MacArthur:

We have many highly capable, well-educated generals... but none of them alone can “do a MacArthur” and shouldn’t try. The search for such a figure is escapism, a desire to turn over responsibilities to someone, give him a title — and few resources — and hope the problems go away.

General Clark is a former c-in-c of US Southern Command and a former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, so he ought to know whereof he speaks. It’s years since I read William Manchester’s American Caesar. I should dig it out again.

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March 21, 2003

After the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty was formulated proclaiming the right of the Soviet Union to invade satellite states in order to support pro-Moscow “socialist” regimes. Now a new Bush-Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty may become the basis of international law. The United States now claims a sovereign right to invade any other country to change a nasty regime, if the president and Congress agree to it. The U.N., France, Russia and other “veto holders” can go and get stuffed if they do not like this new emerging world order.

—— Pavel Felgenhauer, The Moscow Times

The point for real American conservatives to remember is that, in some sense, it doesn’t matter whether this is really what we intend; it is still how others are seeing us.

The point for neocons to remember is that it didn’t work for the USSR, and sooner or later it’s bound to stop working for us, too. Terrorism is as effective a way to force your enemy into breaking the bank as Star Wars ever was, and it’s much cheaper.

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March 18, 2003

For those of you wondering how I could be so monumentally wrongheaded as to oppose the current administration’s foreign policy, this Newsweek article (courtesy of Electrolite, again) about sums it up.

America’s special role in the world — its ability to buck history — is based not simply on its great strength, but on a global faith that this power is legitimate. If America squanders that, the loss will outweigh any gains in domestic security. And this next American century could prove to be lonely, brutish and short.

I like this planet. I’d prefer not to have to spend my life within the 6% of its total land area that flies the Stars and Stripes. Sewing Canadian flags all over my luggage is not an option.

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I’m spending way too much bandwidth on politics.

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Courtesy of Jed Hartman, a short demonstration from the Christian Science Monitor illustrating just how far replacing French toast with freedom toast falls short of solving the problem:

It is time for English-speaking peoples folk to throw off this cultural imperialism lording-it-over-others and declare say our linguistic freedom. It is time to purify clean the English language tongue.

Shades of Poul Anderson’s “Uncleftish Beholding”. I think I could do better, but a valiant effort nonetheless. Down with English; up with Modern Anglo-Saxon!

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One of the besetting sins of American progressives is a tendency to wish for a more European politics, rather than buckling down to deal with the country we’ve got.

—— Patrick Nielsen Hayden

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March 13, 2003

A nice comment posted over at Electrolite by one Lydia Nickerson:

One of the most pernicious lies ever told is that “things have to get worse before they get better.” Nader specifically argued that. Several other people have done so, as well. This is a calculus that I think is far less principled than voting for a candidate you don’t like.

Ms. Nickerson’s comment was in response to the left-wing argument that — excuse me while I exaggerate and mischaracterize — the horrors of a conservative Republican presidency will galvanize the masses to revolt, and that electing such a president is therefore a more direct path to left-wing goals than electing a moderate Democrat.

What occurs to me is that Ms. Nickerson’s comment applies equally well, I think, to the right-wing argument (currently being caricaturized in Doonesbury, but also currently being put into practice in Washington) that massive deficits and spiralling debt are a more direct path to reining in government spending than making the case against popular programs to the American people.

Rob has very nice post about the gap between the historical, intellectual foundations of rational American conservatism and what currently seems to be going on in this country. There are a lot of things about the 1920s that we’re immeasurably better off without, but it’s a shame we’ve lost Herbert Hoover’s brand of conservative.

Personally, I blame the Dixiecrats.

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March 4, 2003

Nice to see someone do the math:

In the more potentially disastrous category of “What happens when we win?” the numbers are not good. Of the 20 regime changes forced by U.S. military action in the last century, only five produced democracies; and of the five unilateral actions, only one produced a democracy — Panama. Afghanistan, the closest proximate case, is not looking good beyond Kabul.

—— Molly Ivins

Y’know, just like Paul Wolfowitz, I’d love to be using the immense military, economic and political power of the world’s only superpower to spread democracy and human rights.

Unfortunately, I’ve studied history, so I know it ain’t gonna happen.

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February 14, 2003

...but favorite Canadian - I - don't - know - personally Stephen Notley just summed up perfectly how I feel about geopolitics right now.

Particularly after waking up to a headline like Bush urges UN to confront Iraq or “fade into history.”

Maybe that's what this is really about.

Molly Ivins sums up the situation from the American perspective: “When all your friends think you're about to do something stupid, it might be wise to listen to them.” Unfortunately, instead our government is apparently listening to people whose idea of diplomacy is to demand that NATO develop a strategy to contain France. As Ms. Ivins says, “Couldn't they at least read How to Win Friends and Influence People?”

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January 29, 2003

I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

— Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Me, too, Teresa.

(To the rest of you, all I can say is, read the story. As if Kissinger wasn't enough.)

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January 27, 2003

Rob has an entry noting a Wall Street Journal piece that — well, I'll let him tell it:

The ‘Best of the Web’ column in the online WSJ today uses Oakland’s post-superbowl-loss riots to demonstrate “just how peaceful the denizens of that part of the Country are” and, by implication, suggest that the area's widespread opposition to the war in Iraq is disingenuous. (It even puts “antiwar” in quotes, to make the point even stronger).

(I'd link to the article, but, y’know, registration-only and all that.)

I haven't really got anything to add.

I'd just like to castigate everyone I know in the Bay Area (including my mother, the Green, pacifist, feminist union organizer) for, all these years, pretending not to be citizens of the Raider Nation. (And thanks for not buying me all those war toys when I was a kid, mom, you hypocrite.)

And Rob — I don't want to hear any more ominous news about your brother being posted to the Middle East with the 82nd Airborne; at least, not until you apologize to the good people of Tampa Bay.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Apples is oranges.

Thank you.

Here's the piece itself. (Toward the bottom — “Dispatch from the Peace Belt.”) It's not from the Journal's main page; rather James Taranto's OpinionJournal sideline “Best of the Web”. (The level of discourse of which, I have to say, seems typical of the Journal's editorial staff.) Note that the SF Chronicle story Mr. Taranto's blogging makes no reference to the war, or to the Bay Area's alleged “pro-Saddam” sympathies. That's all WSJ love.

My castigation stands.

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January 21, 2003

usa today's top headline yesterday:

U.S. units intensify hunt for Saddam

As the Bush administration moves into what officials call the last phase of the showdown with Iraq, the United States is undertaking a vigorous military and intelligence effort to track, and possibly kill, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

I don't know about you, but I found it highly disorienting — the geopolitical equivalent of the dream where you show up for the midterm having somehow completely forgotten to attend the first six weeks of class.

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