Soon after charlie and I sat down to view the movie, a particularly gregarious woman and her boyfriend sat next to us and struck up a conversation. Being the gruff, antisocial, pale hermit that I am I would normally have pointed out some shiny light to them and ran in the other direction to find a seat next to fellow angry loners. This time, however, I was happy to engage them (it was just that kind of atmosphere):
Really Friendly Lady That Laughed Too Much: Are you guys excited?
Me: Actually, I really am. If someone had told me one year ago that I would not only be going to a Michael Moore flick, but going on opening night and excited about it I would have told them they were nuts.
RFLTLTM: Really, why is that?
Me: Moore has a tendency to play loose with the facts. I think it is important for people on the left to not resort to the tactics that people on the right have used because then we lose credibility. More importantly, we don't need to stretch the facts because the case against...
At this point charlie boxed my ears and told me to go get him more licorice. My point is that I like to think I have always valued truth over pure partisinship. I realize that I am certainly not immune to it and that my opinions can't help but be colored by the media I chose to pay attention to and the company I keep, but I try.
What impressed my about the reviews of the flick before I had seen it was that the hawks were not really disputing the factual content. "Partisan!" "not really a documentary!" "contradicts other things he has said!" Surely, I thought, if this is the best they can do then Moore really has something here.
I will spare you the long review, I'll just say that I was impressed and that I cried (very quietly and manly-like, of course).
What has struck me afterwards is the way that some liberals have bent over backwards trying to find ways to criticize the movie in order to maintain some "liberal, but not like that Michael Moore!" street cred.
What to say? The argument over the film mostly seems to revolve around whether it's factually accurate and presents a logical case, a conversation so pointless as to be laughable. I mean, it's a polemical film from Michael Moore, not a Brookings Institution white paper. It's like complaining that editorial cartoons are unfair because they don't portray the nuance of serious policy discussions.
Now, as it happens, I thought Fahrenheit 9/11 was a bit mediocre even as polemic, but the thing that really struck me about the film was the almost poetic parallellism between its own slanders and cheap shots and the slanders and cheap shots of pro-war supporters themselves over the past couple of years. If Moore had done this deliberately, it would have been worthy of Henry James.
Take the first half hour of the film, in which Moore exposes the close relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saud. Sure, it relies mostly on innuendo and imagery, but then again, he never really makes the case anyway. He never flat out says that the Bush family is on the Saudi payroll. Rather, he simply includes "9/11," "Bush," and "Saudi Arabia" in as many sentences as possible, thus leaving the distinct impression that George Bush is a bought and paid for subsidiary of the Saudi royal family.
Which is all remarkably similar to the tactic Bush himself used to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11. He never flat out blamed Saddam, but rather made sure to include the words "9/11," "Saddam Hussein," and "al-Qaeda" in as many sentences as possible, thus leaving the distinct impression that Saddam had something to do with it.
Or take Afghanistan. In a lengthy and nearly unreadable screed in Slate, Christopher Hitchens takes Moore to task for arguing in 2002 that the war in Afghanistan was unjust but then arguing in the film that Iraq was a distraction from the real war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
But surely I'm not the only one who's reminded by this of the ever shifting rationales for war from the Bush administration itself? In 2002 it was mostly about WMD. But there was no WMD. So then it became al-Qaeda. But there were no serious al-Qaeda ties. How about liberation? Maybe, except the Iraqis don't seem especially happy with their liberators. Democracy? Stay tuned.
Finally, the last half hour of the film includes a piece of street theater in which Moore accosts congressmen on Capitol Hill and asks if they'll try to get their sons and daughters to enlist in the military. It's a brutally unfair question, but one that echoes a standard debating point of Hitchens and others: "Would you prefer that Saddam Hussein was still in power?" It's a question that's unanswerable in 10 words or less, and about as meaningful as Moore's ambush interviews with congressmen.
So is Fahrenheit 9/11 unfair, full of innuendo and cheap shots, and guilty of specious arguments? Sure. But that just makes it the perfect complement to the arguments of many in the pro-war crowd itself. Perhaps the reason they're so mad is that they see more than a little of themselves in it.
Kevin seems to go out of his way to paint Moore as being just as bad and misrepresentative and the Bush administration. These days, that is about as strong of a condemnation as you can get. He doesn't seem to back it up with much, though.
He criticizes Moore for linking Saudi money with influence. Who in their right mind really doubts that money buys influence in Washington? When Company X donates millions of dollars in campaign contributions to congress and then Company X receives unusually favorable legislation that benefits them, how many really cry "foul" at this fact is being brought up (besides Cheney) or demands that they "connect the dots"? Moore points out that the Bush family has received 1.4 billion dollars from the Saudi family over the past thirty years (A figure that I have not as of yet heard disputed) and points out that the Saudi's received some extraordinary favors from the White House immediately after 9/11 (favors that were, by the way, denied by the White House until they were proven). I seriously doubt that the money came with a signed contract titled "Payment for Access, Influence and in Case Some of Our People Really, Really Fuck Up".
Why does Kevin consider Moore's questioning of congressmen that are so quick to send others off to die about their own children's military service? To me, this is a question that should be asked more often. Why is this "brutally unfair"?
Now to be fair, this is not a completely negative review by Kevin Drum. I posted it in its entirety so that I would not give the impression that it was, but in addition to the points above, why is the entire thing peppered with things like like "mediocre, slanders, cheap shots, innuendo, unfair, specious arguments" to describe it unless it is a deliberate effort to distance himself from it? If it is a deliberate effort and he genuinely didn't like it, fair enough, but I would hope to see more substantive criticism of it for him to come out firing that strongly against it.
The review in Salon by Stephanie Zacharek is even more bizarre. Read it for yourself, but most of the criticism amounts to "I would have criticized this about Bush instead" or on his tactics or that it is too simplistic. Most of this misses the point. The movie is so powerful because Moore understands the nature of his medium. Human being are pattern-seeking, story-telling creatures. We understand, are effected by and retain more when something is related to us as a narrative. Yes, you could fill entire books with the information that Moore didn't use to criticize Bush. In fact, you could a years worth of NY Times bestsellers with it. He could have filled the screen with more statistics, used less of his humor and gone into much more detail on just about any one of his subjects. If he had, though, it would not be Moore and it would not be filling theatres the way it is right now.
She does make one good point that I had missed before:
Moore is a very specific and slippery kind of bully: He glides along on his underdog status as if it were a parade float. He professes to feel great compassion for the common man. Yet over and over again, in movie after movie, he invites the audience to chuckle over ordinary people. Why? In "Fahrenheit 9/11" he lists the countries that stepped forward as members of Bush's Coalition of the Willing (Palau, Costa Rica, Iceland, Romania, Morocco, and the Netherlands among them), accompanied by funny stock footage of people in costumes of many lands. If Moore is the left's great spokesman by default, shouldn't he be using his influence (not to mention his money) to raise the level of political discourse in this country instead of lowering it? Instead we have a filmmaker who manages the feat of getting liberal audiences to laugh at how funny those foreigners are.
The most honest and worthy criticism I have read about the show was by
Juan Cole. The review is mostly positive and his criticism seems to me the most honest attempt in the pursuit of truth. See here for an equally persuasive counter-argument by Mick. The differences were mostly of opinion and not on hard facts, so at the very least I would say it is a wash.
My hope is that liberals will avoid criticizing this movie just for effect or just to show that they are not "too liberal". I remember similar cultural pressure during the Clinton blow job "scandal". Don't fall for it. Most importantly, if you have not seen it yet, go check it out for yourself (and bring your Republican friends)!
Corporate HR fads
Alert reader and fellow Don Marquis fan, Dum Luks sent me this op-ed piece from the English edition of the Japanese paperAsahi Shimbun:
`There is no clear evidence that downsizing actually does any good, at least not in the United States.'
In recent years, Japan's kinder and gentler managers borrowed a critical lesson from their more ruthless American counterparts: They learned to downsize. They got serious about trimming their work forces, that in turn boosted profits, and that finally brought the fragile recovery Japan is now experiencing.
It's a nice story, but there is a big problem with it: There is no clear evidence that downsizing actually does any good, at least not in the United States. What? How could that be? Everyone knows that downsizing reduces costs, and cutting costs raises profits. But that is precisely the point.
Everyone is so convinced that downsizing enhances corporate performance that no one bothers to check the evidence, ...
I have been doing some research on the topic recently, and I discovered to my astonishment that the evidence from the United States suggests that downsizing has not improved corporate performance-whether defined in terms of profits, productivity, or stock price-and many studies indicate that it impairs performance.
After all, downsizing may save a company on labor costs, but it also entails substantial costs: The immediate cost of paying off downsized workers, for example, plus the longer-term cost of losing valuable personnel and undermining employee morale.
In one of the most authoritative studies, prominent economists William Baumol, Alan Blinder and Edward Wolff [in the book Downsizing in America] find that downsizing does not improve productivity, lowers stock performance and raises profits-but only by depressing wages. Other studies contend that downsizing does not even increase profits, and one study suggests that layoffs actually decrease profits in subsequent periods.
So if downsizing doesn't help, then why have so many American companies rushed to do it? Several scholars have taken up this puzzle, and they conclude that American managers are so beholden to the myth that downsizing is effective that they do not even bother to check whether it happens to be true. They also contend that managers view downsizing as a social norm, so they do it to preserve or enhance their firm's reputation.
The NY Times is running a story spoon-fed by the neocons lovable little scamp, Ahmad Chalibi. Fortunately for me, Mick is already covering this with the indignant scorn it deserves so I don't have to.
I originally thought that I would keep the blog roll limited to some of my favorites that I read everyday. I now realized what a stupid idea that was and will be updating accordingly.
One of the first that I need to add is Big Picnic.
THE OFFICIAL BIG PICNIC TERROR PLATFORM
or: ten points that should come as a huge relief to our conservative peers
2. Running an organization whose sole purpose is murdering innocent people in an attempt to bring about global Islamic theocracy is worse, by several orders of magnitude, than the worse thing Bush has ever done.
Apparently, some people are of the opinion that Big Picnic does not make this point frequently enough. Rest assured, the above paragraph is an unqualified expression of my thoughts on the subject, and it was never my intention to suggest otherwise. If it's somehow comforting to you to be reminded that Bush is better than a terrorist, then consider yourself so comforted.
3. Criticism of the way someone fights something should not be construed as support for the thing being fought. (ie. If I suggest that someone should not try to put out a grease fire by throwing water on it, such advice should not be interpreted as being pro-fire.)
4. I only possess a single vote, so my influence on American democracy is limited. Likewise, very few voters (or people, for that matter) read this site. Of those, even fewer are actually influenced, in any way, by the things I write.
Be that as it may, I possess no votes in the terrorist elections, and have even fewer readers who boast membership in Al Qaeda. As such, my very, very, limited influence on the American electorate is still greater than my influence on the actions of terrorists. This is one reason that condemnation of figures in American politics is more frequent than condemnation of foreign terrorists; having pro-terror sympathies is not one such reason, as I do not have pro-terror sympathies.
SCOTUS has decided that they aren't going to make Cheney release his secret meetings for the energy task force. The Duck Hunt Pays Off
In other news, Cheney tells Leahy to "Go Fuck Yourself" on the Senate floor.
Update: Just wanted to note that this is the same Senate floor where, just yesterday, Senators voted 99-1 to Increase fines for naughty words:
WASHINGTON - Disgusted by racy language, explicit scenes and skin-baring outfits, the Senate overwhelmingly agreed on Tuesday to fine radio and TV broadcasters and personalities as much as $3 million a day for airing indecent entertainment.
Faced with public uproar stoked by Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake's "wardrobe malfunction" at this year's Super Bowl, the Senate rushed the bill through on a 99-1 vote without floor debate.
GOP Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said the issue has been debated enough. Lawmakers have continually criticized broadcasters for airing what they say is increasingly coarse programming that can be seen or heard by children.
"People are tired of this indecent material on over-the-air public broadcast, particularly during prime time when people's families are watching," said Brownback, the bill's sponsor. "We're going to have to take action because the broadcasters won't police themselves."
Under the measure, the maximum fine for broadcasters and entertainers would increase to up to $275,000 per indecent incident, up from $27,500 for license holders and $11,000 for personalities. The fines would keep increasing for each incident until a maximum fine of $3 million a day is reached.
What will it take for the media to stop calling it "sovereignty"?
Lifted from billmon who lifted it from The Financial Times:
The US-led occupation authority in Baghdad has warned Iraq's interim government not to carry out its threat of declaring martial law, insisting that only the US-led coalition has the right to adopt emergency powers after the June 30 handover of sovereignty.
Senior American officials say Iraq's authorities are bound by human rights clauses in the interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, prohibiting administrative detention.
But they say the recent United Nations Security Council resolution 1546 sanctions the use by foreign forces in Iraq of "all necessary measures" to provide security.
A senior coalition official in Baghdad said: "Under the UN resolution, the multinational force will have the power to take all actions traditionally associated with martial law."
To curb Iraq's access to heavy weapons, observers say the occupation authorities have signed a $259m contract with US company Anham Joint Venture to be sole supplier of arms to Iraq's armed forces for the next two years.
n April 2003, John Ashcroft's Justice Department disrupted what appears to have been a horrifying terrorist plot. In the small town of Noonday, Tex., F.B.I. agents discovered a weapons cache containing fully automatic machine guns, remote-controlled explosive devices disguised as briefcases, 60 pipe bombs and a chemical weapon — a cyanide bomb — big enough to kill everyone in a 30,000-square-foot building.
Strangely, though, the attorney general didn't call a press conference to announce the discovery of the weapons cache, or the arrest of William Krar, its owner. He didn't even issue a press release. This was, to say the least, out of character. Jose Padilla, the accused "dirty bomber," didn't have any bomb-making material or even a plausible way to acquire such material, yet Mr. Ashcroft put him on front pages around the world. Mr. Krar was caught with an actual chemical bomb, yet Mr. Ashcroft acted as if nothing had happened.
Incidentally, if Mr. Ashcroft's intention was to keep the case low-profile, the media have been highly cooperative. To this day, the Noonday conspiracy has received little national coverage.
I've often wondered what happened to the coverage that the right-wing militias and terrorists were getting back in the 90's when Clinton was president and they were all barricading themselves in and waiting for the gubmint to come and try and take away their guns. Did they just give up? Nope. They're out there, they are still determined and fully capable of killing on a large scale, but they aren't Arab so Ashcroft and the media don't really care. Ashcroft has, however, identified eco-terrorists as our most important domestic terrorism threat (Perhaps he can employ the help of Laurie Mylroie and she can link the enviro's with Saddam in the Oklahoma City bombing and clear McViegh and the other lunatics altogether!).
This is the first I had heard about the Krar case and, apparantly, this is for good reason. The State Department did apparantly issue a press release about this in Novemeber 2003, but was careful not to use the phrase "domestic terrorism" therefor assuring that our lazy, spineless, I-only-repeat-what-I-read-in-the-NYTimes press would never pick it up (and they haven't disappointed them yet).
Fortunately for us, Ornicus has been following the case for a long time. Check the link out. He has been following this story from the beggining and has more info can be found in the comments of his post.
When you are done there, check out the following (in case you missed it). John Stewart of the Daily Show interviewed Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard on his shitty little new book "exploring" the ties between Al Q & Saddam. His information is not from the CIA, the 9/11 commission or any other reputable source, but from Douglas Feith and the Office of Special Planning that was invented with the express purpose of shifting through poorly sourced and completely fabricated information that the CIA had already determined as bogus to try and make a case for invading Iraq:
John Stewart interviewing Stephan Hayes
HAYES: No, I think that's a good point. On the other hand, I think that Iraq, in this case, presented a unique threat. Because...
STEWART: Why?
HAYES: Precisely because of its weapons of mass destruction, because of its demonstrated use of weapons of mass destruction...
STEWART: Iran has done the same.
HAYES: They've used weapons of mass destruction?
STEWART: Yes.
HAYES: When have they used weapons of mass destruction?
STEWART: In the Iran/Iraq war. They both were mustard gassing back and forth.
HAYES: Well, that's one theory. I don't think that that's been shown.
STEWART: Well, you're no one to talk about what's been shown!
So John Stewart does a better job of asking the right questions and shows the rest of the media how to ask follow up questions and point out obvious contradictions and hypocricy.
In the mean time, no major newspaper or television news show has covered the arrest of a right-wing terrorist that could have potentially killed thousands of Americans. However, there is an article about it in this months Maxim magazine (I'm serious).
Orcinus has a nice post highlighting some of the documentaries that will be coming out this year. The mysterious "charlie" and I will going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 on Friday and will perhaps be one of the 40,000 bloggers to comment on it (and by that I mean that charlie will be posting thoughtfull, witty commentary on it and I will be quoting other clever people that happen to agree with me about it- it's kind of our schtick). Ornicus summed up my feelings about Micheal Moore fairly well (although he is more forgiving):
Actually, I find Moore's films to be guilty pleasures. I'm well aware that sprinkled throughout most of them are various factual errors, mostly minor ones, but enough to bring out the censurious editor in me. At the same time, Moore is not only an imaginative filmmaker with astonishing narrative skills, he's also a very clever political provocateur who concocts really hilarious stunts that have the virtue of making his point incisively. I expect 9/11, which hits theaters Friday, will be more of the same.
I was encouraged by Christopher Hitchens' review of it today in Slate. Most of his criticisms boiled down to what he saw as inconsistencies in the films narratives with Moore's previous statements about his own idealogy. He also notes that Micheal Moore is fat. No real criticisms of any factual errors. If that is all you've got, Hitch, you and your war mongering buddies are in trouble.
One that Ornicus did not mention that I am looking forward to seeing is Control Room. I tend to read the "reader comments" at IMBD (a nasty habit) and couldn't help but chuckle when I ran across this:
The Al Jazeera reporters may vow to be neutral, indeed many claim to have inherited the mantle of the best aspects of Western journalism, but they have a daily reality that the other news services wholly lack: each reporter and on-screen commentator is a Moslem and many are Arabs As one young reporter responds to the gentle urging of a senior colleague that he must be neutral, he replies with obvious distress that it is very difficult when his ethnic and national ties can't be shed, a problem U.S. and European reporters often don't have.
Get back to me when you start to notice that most of the reporters on CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC/MSNBC/CNBC are white Judeo-Christian westerners. You may even notice that most of the reporters on Fox News happen to be conservatives.
Here's one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with a headline that stretched across all six columns, The New York Times reported that tuition in the city's elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming school year -- for kindergarten as well as high school. On the same page, under a two-column headline, Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a student body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston Hughes in the library -- no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other giants like them in the modern era. In fact, except for a few Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own money, the library is mostly old books -- largely from the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A 1960 child's primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the workers in the book -- the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady -- are white. There's a 1967 book about telephones which says: "when you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons." The newest encyclopedia dates from l991, with two volumes -- "b" and "r" -- missing. There is no card catalog in the library -- no index cards or computer.
...
Here's something else to get mad about. Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives, the body of Congress owned and operated by the corporate, political, and religious right, approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for families earning as much as $309,000 a year -- families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of The Washington Post called this "bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You'd think they'd be embarrassed," said the Post, "but they're not."
...
Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years -- the worst inequality among all western nations. Or that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. For years they were told work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn't expect it -- among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. Our political, financial and business class expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.
...
Until now. I don't have to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From land, water and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control. And with little public debate. Indeed, what passes for 'political debate' in this country has become a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on -- the not-so-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power in order to divide up the spoils.
We could have seen this coming if we had followed the money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth Drew, says "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years -- in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here -- has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the Wall Street Journal, put it more strongly: "[campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives." Politics is suffocating from the stranglehold of money.
...
Small wonder that with the exception of people like John McCain and Russ Feingold, official Washington no longer finds anything wrong with a democracy dominated by the people with money. Hit the pause button here, and recall Roger Tamraz. He's the wealthy oilman who paid $300,000 to get a private meeting in the White House with President Clinton; he wanted help in securing a big pipeline in central Asia. This got him called before congressional hearings on the financial excesses of the 1996 campaign. If you watched the hearings on C-Span you heard him say he didn't think he had done anything out of the ordinary. When they pressed him he told the senators: "Look, when it comes to money and politics, you make the rules. I'm just playing by your rules." One senator then asked if Tamraz had registered and voted. And he was blunt in his reply: "No, senator, I think money's a bit more (important) than the vote."
...
Hear the great justice Learned Hand on this: "If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: 'Thou shalt not ration justice.' " Learned Hand was a prophet of democracy. The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
...
I may have quoted more than I should have. Please read the entire article.
Charlie,
I'm curious. Do you see the last few decades as a significant ratcheting up of the wealthy declaring and winning the class war or do you see it in terms of just par for the course in American history?
The Center for American Progress has a new petition out calling for the removal of AG Ashcroft. Go sign it here.
To be honest, I don't think that these online petitions are effective at all. Bush's actions have been very clear in showing that his strategy is to stroke his base (quit giggling Wonkette). He really doesn't care about war protestors, environmentalists, activists for the poor or sane people in general because he knows that these people aren't going to be voting for him anyway.
But what the hell. Go sign the damn petition anyway. It will take you two fucking minutes and you weren't going to be doing anything to change the world with that time anyway.
Note to self: You've really gotta work on your pep speeches
Blood, Corruption, Republican Back Scratching, More Blood and...Thongs?
Normally I try and resist linking to posts from the major blogs because I assume everybody already read them before coming over here, but I can't help but make exceptions sometimes.
My Country 'Tis of Thee
The Wall Street Journal has a telling juxtapostion of stories on the front page of its print edition today.
The right-hand item in the "What's News" column is a jumbled roundup of bad news and/or criminal allegations related to the ongoing war of the all against the all in the Middle East:
Massive car bombs in Iraq - blamed, of course, on the forces of the evil Goldstein, I mean, Zarqawi,
Rumsfeld defending his own war crimes (hiding prisoners from the Red Cross, in this case),
The Republihacks on the Senate Judiciary Committee knocking down a subpoena of the Justice Department torture memos - thus proving themselves fully worthy of Ashcroft's contempt,
The looming deadline for the execution of American hostage Paul Johnson by Al Qaeda terrorists in Saudi Arabia - who, for some strange reason, have not been lured to their doom by our president's brilliant "flypaper" strategy in Iraq,
More rumblings of the foulest sort of corruption in the oil industry, this time involving Exxon-Mobil and the Iraqi oil-for-food program (Why should Halliburton get all the gravy?),
Senators falling all over themselves to add 20,000 more soldiers to the Army, so that next time the neocons want to invade a Middle Eastern country, they won't run so short of troops,
One (1) CIA contractor is finally indicted for kicking and beating an Afghani prisoner to death - a year after the case was referred to the Justice Department for prosecution.
Meanwhile, immediately to the right of this litany of woe, the Journal has its silly story of the day (my term for the fluffed up features the paper often sticks in a center column on page one.) It's about the hot trend in women's underwear - thongs:
A Tiny Scrap of Fabric Wins A Huge Following
For the last decade and a half, a little-known company called Hanky Panky has thrived making a $15 lace thong known simply by its style number, 4811. In the cutthroat world of lingerie sales, that is no small thing....
"It's like lace butter," says Joni Wheat, a 33-year-old personal shopper in Chicago. Ms. Wheat, who thinks nothing of dropping $100 or more on high-end European bra-and-underwear sets, figures she owns about 30 thongs in model 4811...
Like I said, it's pretty much standard operating procedure for the Journal to put a, well, frilly feature story right beside the news of the day - no matter how bloody and awful that news happens to be. So I probably shouldn't make a mountain out of a, um, brassiere about this.
But for some reason seeing those two items side by side like that on the Journal's front page starkly reminded me of the enormous disconnect between life here in the "homeland" - as mindlessly materialistic as ever - and the rising tide of chaos and death generated by our imperial adventures abroad.
On the one side, terrorism and war crimes. On the other, personal shoppers and $100 bras. In between, a corrupt political establishment, desperate to keep the hog trough of American consumerism filled even as it sinks deeper and deeper into the Middle Eastern mire.
A splendid isolation indeed. But how much longer can it last?
Conservatives and Marriage
Michelle Cottle on Rush Limbaugh:
"Whatever you think of Rush, this is a fair question. While he clearly knows how to talk the talk in support of the traditional, God-fearing, family-values-oriented America of movement conservatives' dreams, Rush has repeatedly displayed trouble walking the walk. It's not just that he obviously doesn't buy that what-God-has-joined-together-let-no-man-put-asunder marital nonsense."
Fair enough, but in reality breaking up your marriage is in the best Red America traditions. Take a look at this divorce rate list and you'll see that the ten least-divorcing states are Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, Maryland, and Minnesota. Nine blues and a red. And keep in mind that most states are red, owing to their smaller populations. The bottom ten have nine reds and one blue. Louisiana is the only southern state to have a lower divorce rate than California. Etc.
Off the top of my head, I would think that rightwing moralism seems to encourage people to get married too young leading to more split-ups down the road. Alternatively, it's well known that conservative economic policies (said to promote growth at the expense of equality) have impoverished America's Reddest states and perhaps this just puts too much strain on family life.
Q Mr. Secretary, I'd like to ask why last November you ordered the U.S. military to keep a suspected Ansar al-Islam prisoner in Iraq secret from the Red Cross. He's now been secret for more than seven months. And there are other such shadowy prisoners in Iraq who are being kept secret from the Red Cross.
SEC. RUMSFELD: With respect to the -- I want to separate the two. Iraq, my understanding is that the investigations on that subject are going forward.
With respect to the detainee you're talking about, I'm not an expert on this, but I was requested by the Director of Central Intelligence to take custody of an Iraqi national who was believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam. And we did so. We were asked to not immediately register the individual. And we did that. It would -- it was -- he was brought to the attention of the Department, the senior level of the Department I think late last month. And we're in the process of registering him with the ICRC at the present time.
Q Well, why did you not register the individual, and has this man simply been lost in the system for -- why didn't you tell the Red Cross that you had him?
SEC. RUMSFELD: The decision was made that it would be appropriate not to for a period. And he wasn't lost in the system. They've known where he was, and that he was there in Iraq, for this period of time.
Q How is that appropriate, sir, when you say that you -- all prisoners in Iraq are being treated humanely under rules set up --
SEC. RUMSFELD: He has been treated humanely. There's no implication of any problem. He was not at Abu Ghraib. He is not there now. He has never been there, to my knowledge. There's no question at all about whether or not he's received humane treatment.
Q But then why wasn't the -- why wasn't the Red Cross told, and there are other such prisoners being detained without the knowledge of the Red Cross?
SEC. RUMSFELD: There are -- there are instances where that occurs. And a request was made to do that, and we did.
Q I -- I mean -- excuse me, is there a reason for that, sir, why -- why they're not told? There are those who would say, I guess, that -- that you're not telling them because you might be mistreating such prisoners. That might be the suspicion.
SEC. RUMSFELD: That -- I understand that. That's not the case at all. And I think that will be clear.
Q Well, the other thing is General Taguba has criticized this practice in his report, calling them ghost detainees.
SEC. RUMSFELD: I recall that. And as I say, that's being investigated. This -- this individual, this Ansar al-Islam individual I think should be looked at separately from that.
Q Why is that? Is he a ghost detainee --
Q Which --
Q -- was he a ghost detainee?
SEC. RUMSFELD: We've had subject matter experts down here to brief you, and they've been briefing the Congress, and the Congress has been briefed on this extensively, I think, Dan, is that correct? And they've been down here and briefed the press as they're able to.
[snip]
Q What did George Tenet ask? Why did he want this done?
SEC. RUMSFELD: We've asked them.
Q Well, can you say what he said to you?
Q I mean, you --
Q It says you received a letter from him, sir.
SEC. RUMSFELD: I did. I think I did in this case. And it's a classified letter.
Q What was his reasoning? Why did he --
SEC. RUMSFELD: Ask him. It's a classified letter.
[snip]
Q Sir, did he ask you to do this or tell you to do this? You say you had no intention of keeping this man secret from the Red Cross, so why didn't then you --
SEC. RUMSFELD: We had no --
Q -- tell Mr. Tenet, "All right, we'll take custody but we're not going to -- we're going to register him"?
SEC. RUMSFELD: As we get more information, we'll make it available to you.
Q And the last thing. (Off mike.) How is this case different from what Taguba was talking about, the ghost detainees?
SEC. RUMSFELD: It is just different, that's all.
Q But can you explain how and why?
SEC. RUMSFELD: I can't. But we'll be happy to have someone come down and brief you and explain it.
Q In this case, this is not a violation of international law, as opposed to some of the cases that General Taguba was talking about?
SEC. RUMSFELD: I said I don't know. Are you making assertions for the benefit of everyone else?
Q No. No. My question --
SEC. RUMSFELD: I don't know.
Q Okay.
Q Mr. Secretary, is this a one-of-a-kind case, or is this one of several or more?
SEC. RUMSFELD: We have on occasion received people from the agency -- I can think of an additional case right off the top of my head -- where they have, for whatever reason, captured somebody or arrested somebody or been given somebody and at some moment brought them to us and said would you please take custody of this person. I think there are some -- (to staff)-- that's correct, isn't it? Yeah.
Q But how many have they asked you not to register?
SEC. RUMSFELD: I don't know. As I say, we'll be happy to tell you more when we get more.
Q Did Director Tenet ask you to wait for a particular period of time --
SEC. RUMSFELD: Not that I recall.
Q -- or was this an open-ended thing?
SEC. RUMSFELD: Not that I recall.
Q Mr. Secretary, to take you back a little further, to late summer, when a lot of -- a number of officials were expressing concern that adequate intelligence was not being gotten from detainees in Iraq, do you recall discussing that with Steve Cambone? And did you ask that anything in particular be done about that at that point?
SEC. RUMSFELD: I don't recall that.
And then there is this part:
Q You seem to be drawing a distinction between that and the order that you sent out that allowed this other prisoner to be not registered immediately. Why is --
SEC. RUMSFELD: I'm not an expert on that. Dan Dell'Orto is. And what I can say is that I think it's broadly understood that people do not have be registered in 15 minutes when they come in. What the appropriate period of time is I don't know. It may very well be a lot less than seven months, but it may be a month or more.
Dan, do you want to -- is there --
MR. DELL'ORTO: And they should be registered promptly, sir. So --
SEC. RUMSFELD: Its phraseology is "promptly?"
MR. DELL'ORTO: Roughly that, yes.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Fair enough.
He was held for 7 MONTHS without being registered.
Should Americans be concerned that on March 23rd a bipartisan group of Congressmen attended a coronation at which a billionaire, pro-theocracy newspaper owner was declared to be the Messiah – with royal robes, a crown, the works? Or that this imperial ceremony took place not in a makeshift basement church or a backwoods campsite, but in a Senate office building?
The Washington Post didn't think so. For a moment on April 4, a quote from the keynote speech was in the Web version of its "Reliable Sources" column. The speaker: Sun Myung Moon, 84, an ex-convict whose political activities were at the center of the 1976-8 Koreagate influence-peddling probe. That's when an investigation by Congress warned that Moon, after having befriended Richard Nixon in his darkest hour, was surrounding himself with other politicians to overcome his reputation: as the leader of the cult-like Unification Church, which recruited unwary college students, filled Madison Square Garden with couples in white robes, wed them in bulk and demanded obedience.
That was before he launched the Washington Times – "in response to Heaven’s direction," as he would later say – and a 20-year quest to make his enemies bow to him. He has also claimed, in newspaper ads taken out by the Unification Church, that Jesus, Confucius, and the Buddha have endorsed him. Muhammad, according to the 2002 ad, led the council in three cries of "mansei," or victory. And every dead U.S. president was there, too – because Moon's gospel is inseparable from visions of true-blue American power.
Now, this March, Moon was telling guests at the Dirksen Senate Office Building that Hitler and Stalin, having cleaned up their acts, had, in a rare public statement from beyond the grave, called him "none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent."
But not long after it appeared on the Post's web site, the paper erased the quote. Columnist Richard Leiby told me via e-mail that it shouldn't have gone out in the first place. The paper replaced it with breaking news about "Celebrity Jeopardy!" with Tim Russert.keep reading
With all of the incompatible factions that make up todays Republican Party (Grover Norquist-type "economic conservatives", evangelical Christians, flag-stroking, gung-ho military types, and the freakin' Moonies), you would think that the Dems could have done a better job of dividing them in the same way that the Republicans have sucessfully divided the numerous factions of the Democratic Party.
Does anyone have any ideas that don't involve me wandering through Bush country carrying a sign stating, "Jesus was a socialist!"?
The kid is brilliant and I've been meaning to add him to my blogroll.
Good points from Daniel Davies, but all that really needs to be said in response to the "explain [your] reasons for wishing that Saddam Hussein should still be in power in Baghdad" argument is to whisper "opportunity costs." Suppose I lined up 800 American soldiers and several thousand Iraqis, had them all shot, then ground up their corpses into a meat loaf which I then fed to starving children in Uganda.
"That's a terrible idea!" you say.
"Would you tell me, please," I reply, "why you wish those children will still starving.
Mick (from two of my favorite blogs Omnium and From the Trenches) just turned me on to an important post that I had not seen before. It is a journalists manifesto that not only points out many of the problems with our media today, but gives some very specific and potentially powerful ways in which we, as bloggers and citizens, can help turn things around. Media Revolt: A Manifesto
I started blogging out of frustration for the way that politics are being run and how the media is covering them (or, more accurately, not covering them). That post is the best single thing I have seen so far in articulating the problems and devising solutions.
I've seen you visiting. You can say "hi" you know. Give us some feedback. We won't bite. Sometimes we feel like we are just talking to ourselves (and Mick, of course). My ego is like a pillar of stone and doesn't need any encouragement, but that charlie, he could use some appreciation. Yeah, just for charlie. I'm totally secure, though. Yup.
(sigh)
Confronted with a recent spike in the number of hungry Americans, U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA) food and nutrition undersecretary Eric Bost this week acknowledged, "There's a bump, but how much of that is due to people taking the easy way out? I don't know." Shown a study by his own agency demonstrating a rise in the hungry, he said the numbers were probably inflated, and indicated the questions were too vague: "If you ask any teenager if they're happy about the food they have in their house, what will they say?" he asked. According to government statistics, more than 34 million Americans, including 13.6 million children under the age of 12, were affected by hunger in 2002. President Bush quoted these statistics – questioned by Bost – when introducing his own faith-based initiative. Bost's denials will not help solve a problem that has gotten steadily worse by nearly every measure each year since President Bush was elected.
...
BOST SUGGESTS FOOD PANTRIES CROWDED WITH RICH: Bost's comments came in response to an alarming hunger problem in Ohio, where the Columbus Dispatch reports, "A struggling economy has created a new kind of poverty…in which the number of people seeking help at food pantries has increased each of the last three years." In the first three months of 2004, the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks "reported a 44 percent increase in people seeking assistance… compared with the last three months of 2003." Bost was unimpressed. He denied an increase in food stamp recipients and longer lines at pantries were indicative of more needy people, telling the Columbus Dispatch that "food pantries don't require documentation of income…so there's no proof everyone asking for sustenance at a soup kitchen is truly in need."
What is almost as alarming as his response is the complete lack of coverage on this. I did several Google news searches yesterday and today with an assortment of variations on keywords including "Administration","homeless", "Agriculture", "Secretary", "hunger", "remarks" but only found it once I went directly to The Center for American Progress.
Once I knew the name "Bost" I tried "Eric Bost hunger". I got two links. TWO! One of which was the Center for American Progress and the other was this half-assed effort from a Cincinatti TV station:
WCPO.com
A struggling economy has led to an increase in people seeking help at food pantries in Ohio for each of the last three years.
The Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks reports a 44-percent increase in people seeking assistance during the first three months of this year.
George Zeller of the Council for Economic Opportunities in Greater Cleveland blames the state's shrinking manufacturing base.
Nationwide, the number of people seeking emergency food from Catholic Charities USA and its partners has jumped about 20-percent annually in recent years.
But not everyone agrees there's a growing hunger problem.
U.S. Agriculture Department undersecretary Eric Bost says food-stamp enrollment is up largely due to government outreach to eligible people.
Hey, don't fall all over yourselves covering the problem of hunger in America and the Bush administrations insulting response to it. Instead, lets spend some more time telling us how Reagan restored optimism to America, won the cold war and was the greatest fucking thing since Jesus.
Federal funds given last September to a group organizing the recall of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez : $53,400 [National Endowment for Democracy (Washington) ]
Minimum number of misleading statements on Iraq made by the Bush Administration's top officials since March 2002 : 237 [Committee on Government Reform (Washington, D.C.) ]
Percentage of these that contradicted, made selective use of, or mischaracterized existing government intelligence : 100 [Committee on Government Reform (Washington, D.C.) ]
Days before last year's invasion of Iraq that Osama bin Laden called Saddam Hussein a "socialist infidel" : 36 [Al Jazeera (Doha, Qatar)/BBC Monitoring Service (Caversham Park, U.K.) ]
Days into the 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo that candidate George W. Bush observed, "Victory means exit strategy" : 17 [Houston Chronicle/NATO (Brussels) ]
Edwin Morris, historian and biographer on Charlie Rose 6/7/04 (you may remember him as the writer that decided to add a fictional character into his biography of Ronald Reagan called Dutch. How fitting for a president whose legacy is mostly fiction):
(paraphrased)
"...Gorbachev was going on about the suffering of the Russian people in WWII. Reagan surreptitiously reached to his voice box and turned off the sound."
[laughter all around the table]
Why was D-Day so late? June 6, 1944, is a mere 11 months before V-E Day (May 8, 1945). And yet Western Europe had been occupied as of May 1940, four years earlier.
The basic answer is extremely simple, although it is almost entirely unknown in the United States except by war buffs. The United States was happy to let Europe remain under Nazi occupation while the Nazis bled the Soviet Union. Almost the entire brunt of fighting the Nazis was borne by the Soviet Union. The Americans and British, before D-Day, deliberately engaged primarily in comparatively small battles in North Africa and southern Italy, fighting the Italians as often as the Germans (of course, it was more complicated than this, because World War 2 was much more truly a world war than the first, but for the purposes of analysis this isn't far wrong).
Even with the eventual opening of a Western front and heavy fighting first at Normandy and later at the Battle of the Bulge, a common estimate is that 80% of German military casualties were sustained on the Eastern front with the Soviet Union (and virtually all of the casualties of the "satellites" like Romania). And current estimates of the number of Soviet dead put it in the neighborhood of 27 million.
Has anyone noticed the change in Bush's cadence and speaking style? I have noticed that it must have been decided by Rove that the folksy thing wasn't working anymore and that he would have to sound more statesman-like. I'm going to start listening to some old speeches compared to the recent ones to try and determine when exactly this change took place in our doesn't-lead-by-polls president.
I haven't heard anyone mention it, but there is definitely a very different cadence being used that is more rhythmic and there is stress on the last word of each sentence. There is also a very noticeable stress on certain words like he is trying very, very hard to pronounce them correctly. This isn’t extremely important, I just find it odd that nobody else has seemed to notice or mention it.
I know what you are going to say, but bear with me for a second. If the pundits and bloggers can spend hundreds of hours and thousands of lines speculating on the Kerry-McCain ticket that is never going to happen then goddammit I can spend five minutes on this.
Here is the plan. At the right strategic time, Kerry announces that Ralph Nader will be his VP candidate. This shocks everyone and dominates the headlines for weeks, giving Kerry and Nader the kind of press that you can't buy (well, actually you can, but this would be a way to bridge the financial gap between Kerry and Bush) and a golden opportunity to spell out their plan for a better country.
By most accounts, 40% of the US is in the anybody-but-Bush camp and 40% are in the lets-follow-Bush-off-that-cliff camp. All of the tens of millions of dollars spent during the campaign will be spent on the remaining few. Obviously Kerry would lose some moderates because of this, but he would pick up EVERY SINGLE GREEN VOTE in the country (along with their energized grass-roots campaign efforts). If Kerry were to continue to run as a moderate he could still pick up close to half of the remaining undecideds. He gets credit by many for making an extremely bold move and any charges of wishy-washyness are expelled forever. There will be howling and grunting and thrashing and crying from the right, but lets face it, we are going to see that not matter who the hell he picks anyway. This way, much of the howling is going to be directed at Nader and I'm pretty sure he can handle himself.
The risk, of course, lies in the fact that there are many, many more moderate undecideds (read "clueless idiots") out there than there are Greens. I would be interested to see how many people would be initially turned off by a potential Nader nod. If the gap between those people and the Greens (remember, they probably wont be voting for Kerry as it stands right now anyway) is not that wide, I think that Nader could win them over by using his new, powerful bully pulpit. He is an excellent and convincing public speaker.
There are many side benefits to this too:
1. I can stop despising Ralph Nader.
2. The Nader-Cheney debates.
3. No need for secret service protection for Kerry anymore.
3a. The pleasure of imagining our friends at the NRO sweating and being unable to sleep for the next four years out of fear for Kerry's safety.
President Bush appears to be planning to run for re-election as a tax cutter without discussing what federal programs will be sacrificed to make up for the lost revenue. That can't be allowed to happen. Voters have the right to see the whole picture, including the downside. Chances are they won't like the view.
While Mr. Bush has been out crowing about spending increases in some popular programs, his Office of Management and Budget was instructing federal departments to prepare to pare them down. In a May 19 memo that was first reported in The Washington Post, departments were told to trim domestic discretionary spending in 2006, the first complete fiscal year after the November election. And the administration recently submitted legislation to impose caps that would result in further reductions in every year after that through 2009.
According to estimates by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Office of Management and Budget guidelines translate into inflation-adjusted reductions in 2006 alone of about $925 million for Head Start and childhood education. That would come at a time when schools are already struggling to meet the demands of Mr. Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative without adequate resources. College financial aid, mainly Pell Grants, would take a $550 million hit — at a time when lower-income students are dropping out of school because they cannot meet rapidly rising costs.
If this doesn't make you chuckle nothing will.
Josh Marshall clipped this from the NY Times:
Chalabi also accused Tenet of providing ``erroneous information about weapons of mass destruction to President Bush, which caused the government much embarrassment at the United Nations and his own country.''
Wow! I was delighted that I received an email reply from Father Drinan today. It would be unethical to post his entire email without his permission, but I don't think he would mind me sharing this part with you:
"I was simply trying to reflect the message given by Vatican II that we
should avoid coercion or discrimination against non-Catholics or
non-believers in any form or shape."
He also mentioned that he was glad to hear that I married into a good Catholic family. :)
I can't help but think that if we had more like Drynan we just might be ok.
Bush: Tenet resigns So Bush has decided that George Tenet is to be the scapegoat, but for what exactly? This seems like a victory for the Pentagon.
Chalabi - White House, Pentagon
Plame - White House
WMD - White House, Pentagon, CIA
9-11 - White House, FBI
Abu Graib - White House, Pentagon, CIA?
Iraq war - White House, Pentagon
This should be an interesting distraction. Will he go down quietly like a good little soldier or can we expect yet another tell-all book by an ex-official by the fall?
Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner said the timing of Tenet's resignation -- just five months before the presidential election -- cast doubt on the explanation that it was a personal decision.
"I think he's being pushed out or made a scapegoat," said Turner, who led the CIA during the Carter administration. "That is, that the president feels he's got to have somebody to blame, and he's doing it indirectly by asking Tenet to leave. ... I don't think he would pull the plug on President Bush in the middle of an election cycle without having been asked by the president to do that."
My (admittedly limited) understanding has always been that people at this level do not just decide to leave. They serve at the will of the president. If they resign it is almost always because they were told to.
I don't think that we can really expect that book that I am hoping for from him, though. I think that he has publicly defended the president often enough on some of the more damning subjects that if he were to change his tune now we would see every hack in the country pulling these quotes out again and splashing them on the headlines and spitting them out on the talkshows (which is fair enough). It would be like Richard Clark's letter of praise to Bush x 100.
I just heard him for a couple of minutes on NPR (it could have been a local MPR show, I'm not sure). The subject of the discussion was religion in politics. Despite being a Catholic priest, he spoke out in defense of agnostics and atheists as being, "some of the most moral people I know".
The host of the show asked him if people shouldn't prefer their politicians to have some kind of religious faith in order to have a "moral compass". This is not shocking, of course. The absurd view that the deeply religious have been the been the key-holders of morality is a common one despite the fact that even a cursory glance at history would tell us otherwise. The shocking thing is that we almost never hear the counter-argument in our public forums and we certainly never hear it from the clergy or a congressman (he served several terms in Massachussetts).
Here is his bio and email link at Georgetown Law. Drop him an email in support there. You know that his detractors (google him and you will see what I mean) have probably flooded him with angry mail many times, so give him that little pat on the back that he so richly deserves.
