Politics Feed

Cheryl Morgan on the American Zeitgeist

I think there's something intensely revealing about our current state of affairs in this passage:

While I was away Kevin was practicing for becoming a Master Costumer by entering the Halloween contest at work. He won a nice bottle of bubbly, which I shall enjoy drinking at some point. But I was more interested in his report of one of his fellow contestants. In America Halloween is an excuse for any type of fancy dress, not just spooky stuff. So one of Kevin's co-workers came as a hippy. But her "Make Love, Not War" placard was written in Italian so as not to cause offence.

Two things occur to me here. Firstly, while it was perfectly OK to say "Make Love, Not War" in America back in the 60's, now it is regarded as offensive and liable to cost you your job. And second, it is assumed that if you write something in a foreign language (even if it is pretty damned obvious what it is likely to say), Bush supporters won't have a clue what it means.

Being only 42, I can't say what would and wouldn't endanger your job in the 1960s. I entered the first grade in 1968. But I think Cheryl captures the essence of this historical moment.


The Day Before

There are a number of interesting things going on.

Josh Marshall reports that an outfit called the Florida Leadership Council has issued a Beslan-inspired scare flyer presumably intend to illustrate what will happen if Bush doesn't win. Go to their web site and listen to their sound effects. I think I know what they have in mind for people like me. Perhaps the rise of rightwing terrorism really is on the way. That's certainly the vibe I get from their site. (I'm a little surprised Josh didn't mention the gunshot sound effects.)

Kevin Drum and Ronald Brownstein (writing for the LA Times) have written pices along similar lines, pointing out that regardless of how the election turns out tomorrow, as an attempt to expand the Republican base, the Bush administration has been a failure.

Atrios notes that an Ohio judge has barred vote challengers from the polls.


Let's Do It!

I have this warm, happy feeling that we're going to do it; we're really going to do it. We're going to rise up and go to the polls and vote George W. Bush out of office. I'm no longer interested in the nuances of polls, though they send much the same message. I just feel it. I feel like we've all joined hands and are going to walk in on Tuesday and do it.


It's Lonely at the Top

Check out one of the new Bush commercials, which could easily be titled "It's Lonely at the Top" (actually entitled "Whatever It Takes"). Bush plays for our sympathy, telling how hard it is to president when bad things happen. Get a whole box of kleenex before watching. It's got a real tear-jerker sound track! Can someone redo it with the Randy Newman song in the background?

This one strikes me as really grasping at straws. Let's put him out of his misery, relieve him of the terrible suffering of being a wartime president, and vote him out of office.

(The other two ads, The Choice and No Limits, are just low-end attack adds more at home in a campaign for state legistlature than in a presidential campaign.)

UPDATE: I find I can use iTunes to play the Randy Newman song and also view the commerial simultaneously. You can hear Bush fine, but Newman drowns out the sappy music. Newman croons the refrain, It's lonely at the top at just about the same time the face of the stricken blonde widow comes on. Works real well.

Meanwhile, mithras the prophet at dailyKos notes that in the commercial Bush is apparently addressing an army of clones. You would think the campaign could afford someone better at Photoshop.


So, Is Bush Really the Anti-Christ?

Remember Anthony LoBaido, the self-published Christian fantasist and mercenary groupie I wrote about the other day? Well, he's got another series, this time for The Sierra Times ("An Internet Publication for Real Americans "), this one austensibly about the Texas A&M bonfire disaster. But being the kind of writer he is, by the end of Part 1, he has wandered pretty far afield from his original topic:

In my aforementioned Iraq II column I also stated Bush Jr. might well come to be seen as the "Mabus" Nostradamus called the "third Antichrist." (Linking Bush Sr. and Jr. to Mabus was NOT my own revelation, but that of another person who published this theory on the internet.) This notion about Mabus makes a lot of sense when you consider there is no "h" in Latin. Turn the "a" upside down and invert the "m" and you have G.W. Bus(h). Nostradamus often wrote in anagrams to hide his work form the Spanish Inquisition - the culture that spawned the Conquistadors. "Mabus" might well be the amalgamation of Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. Or is it merely an anagram of "Saddam?"

This is not to say poor George Bush Jr. is the singular Antichrist. Would the Antichrist put a stop to partial birth abortion, fight against pornography, stand up to Mainland China, cast a hard eye on Zimbabwe and Venezuela and/or fail to send a representative to the re-inauguration of South Africa's Marxist and America-hating President Thabo Mbeki? But there is a spirit at work in this regard and it is a force affecting all of us in some way. The Spirit of (the) Antichrist is an ancient and very real phenomenon. . . .

Let's ask if there will be a future draft? It would take away many home-schooled American children, ending the last hope of a free, moral America. The Congress recently voted down the draft bill idea by a 400-plus to virtually nil vote. That's good news. But we need more troops. We're even taking a third of our troops out of South Korea to use them elsewhere. Recently South Africa's Afrikaners sent 1500 white mercenaries to fight for America and the UK in Iraq. We have Russian immigrants and women on the front lines. Like Rome at the end of its reign, we have become dependent on mercenaries. Nations that rely on mercenaries usually meet with big troubles; France, Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea, Angola, Burma and many others to name a few modern examples.

Of course we know that no real man would either send or tolerate women on the front lines. That is how cowardly our nation has become. That is how cowardly our leaders (Bush Sr. and Co.) are. Our military academies are not teaching men to be leaders like the warriors of old. American Indians would never send their women into combat. They knew and still know women are sacred, whether they (women) acknowledge it or not.

This whole line of "reasoning" leaves me quite speechless. But hey, if he can wonder if Bush is the Anti-Christ, you can too. Let's all do it!

(In case you're wondering, I think LoBaido is for real.)


Very Plain

Presidential clarity:

He said that, after a debate with Kerry, "I made it very plain. We will not have an all-volunteer army." The crowd fell silent. "WE WILL have an all-volunteer army," Bush said, quickly catching himself. "Let me restate that. We will not have a draft."

(Via atrios)

PS: Michael Bérubé is really fun on the subject of Lynn Cheney here and here. This is not to slight the inimitable Fafblog.


Yes, But How Did His Suit Hang?

I did prowl through the morning-after debate stuff, and it was fun. But I have to admit, what I most wanted to know wasn't there: How did Bush's suit hang? Any further fuel for speculation?

After a little while, I poked around for pictures and watched clips in the Washinton Post web site. While Bush's facial expression often looked oddly rumped, the suit stayed still. It didn't move much. It looked to be made of thick wool. And the main body of the suit jacket looked heavily lined. Also, since the candidates stayed at their lecturns, there was little opportunity for prying eyes to get a look at Bush's back. I did see a brief flash of his back in a distance shot, but there was no illumination on the candidates' backs.

Can those who saw the whole thing fill me in? Were there any good looks at Bush's back? What did they show?

Oh, there it is; Salon's on it. He can run, but he can't hide! He had to come out from behind that lecturn sooner or later!

I wonder who the blonde woman is behind Bush. She seems to be giving the bulge a good look. And lookie at all that puckering around the arm holes. In a $5,000 suit. He did not buy it at Sears, people. Clearly that suit is accomodating something for which it wasn't tailored.


Political Rape

There are a number of things I've meant to blog recently, but not gotten around to, partly because my plan to hire live-in help has not yet come to fruition, and partly because of the subject matter.

The one most in need of blogging is the spate of disturbing tales of political rape. I find that I bounce off of news stories about rape, especially systematic rape in far-away places, and I just don't want to think about them. Here is a brand new one from the BBC: Rape 'a weapon in Colombia war':

Women and girls are being increasingly caught up in Colombia's armed conflict, as rival groups rape, mutilate and kill them, Amnesty International says.

Then there is the coverage of the Pitcairn rape trails. Pitcairn is a small island near New Zealand where rape had apparently become a way of life. A large group trial is going on under New Zealand judges. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to think about it. And yet I keep thinking I really need to blog it. ZHow did this situation get so out of hand that an island with a tiny population needs a trial on this scale?

And then there is the large-scale investigation going on in Kenya. The BBC story that caught my eye is Body exhumed in Kenya rape probe:

The body of a teenage Kenyan girl, whose parents say she died after being raped by British soldiers, has been exhumed by forensic experts.

The parents of Mantoi Kaunda, who was 16, say she and her sister were attacked after collecting firewood.

The girls were at Archer's Post, in a remote central part of the country close to Mount Kenya.

The UK has ordered an investigation into allegations by hundreds of Samburu and Masai women that they were raped.

British Royal Military Police Special Investigations Branch and Kenyan police have been looking into 650 claims dating from the 1980s and 90s.

Again, how did this situation get so out of hand? Why do 650 claims have to accumulate? Why does a rape probe have to involve exhumations? Why wasn't this stopped? I don't have an answer for that because I don't want to look at the world that way.

Then there is Nicholas Kristof's NYT piece, Sentenced to be raped, the account of a Pakistani woman who was sentenced by local authorities to be raped for a supposed crime of her brother's, after which she was supposed to obligingly commit suicide. She chose a different path.

I bring this to your attention because I find it hard to keep it in mind. I think I need to get better at it.


Novak: Bush Not a Ninny

At home alone with two small kids and no TV reception, I opted out of trying to watch the debate last night. So I'm poking through last night's coverage. My favorite quote I've come across so far is Bob Novak's summary:

I thought Bush won the debate. Kerry didn't make any major gaffes but Bush showed he wasn't the ninny that he appeared to be in Florida.

Because of space considerations Novak did not go on to admire the President's ability to fog a mirror or marvel at his possession of all four limbs.

My goodness: Let's print bumper stickers! Let's make buttons! That can be the new Bush campaign slogan: Bush isn't the ninny he appeared to be in Florida. With all due respect to administration mouthpiece Bob Novak, I think the office of President of the United States requires a little more than an absence of obvious brain damage.

My second favorite is the Bush psycho-stalker horror footage that Oliver Willis has up. (Also, did I get another glimpse of that rectangular object between Bush's shoulder blades? There is a moment when Bush has his back to the camera at a slight angle in that clip.) Where did Bush get the idea that physically intimidating Charles Gibson was a good debate tactic?

Bush arguing the case for his own infallibility is very strange. (Washinton Post video clip here.) It seems unlikely that he wasn't coached on how to admit to mistakes.* It is one of the job interview basics. People get asked that question even when interviewing for minimum wage jobs. So, clearly, he resisted any coaching he received on how to address this aspect of the debate format. Who would hire a CEO who can't admit he ever makes mistakes? Most of us wouldn't even hire a baby sitter who couldn't deal with that issue.

Here's the scene as described in the NYT editorial:

One of the uncommitted voters in the audience sensibly asked President Bush to name three mistakes he'd made in office, and what he had done to remedy the damage. Mr. Bush declined to list even one, and instead launched into an impassioned defense of the invasion of Iraq as a good idea. The president's insistence on defending his decision to go into Iraq seemed increasingly bizarre in a week when his own investigators reported that there were no weapons of mass destruction there, and when his own secretary of defense acknowledged that there was no serious evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Even worse, the president's refusal to come up with even a minor error - apart from saying that he might have made some unspecified appointments that he now regretted - underscores his inability to respond to failure in any way except by insisting over and over again that his original decision was right.

Well, it is a good thing he's not a ninny, but it would be better if he could answer a basic job interview question.

______________
* (Unless Rove & Hughes believe he's God's Own PresidentTM. But that would be crazy!)


Outsourcing Torture

Not content to outsource torture to private contractors, Republicans are apparently pushing a bill to make it legal to outsource torture to other countries.  This is called "extraordinary rendition." Obsidian Wings has the story.

It's not as if to some extent having other countries do our torturing for us isn't done already: See, for example, Samuel M. Katz's book Relentless Pursuit: The DSS and the Manhunt for the Al-Qaeda Terrorists, pages 201-202 on the torture of "an Arab male."

(On the lighter side, see also Fafblog. Fafblog & Michael Bérubé are keeping me sane through election day.)


No Ear for Parody

Foxnew.com:

Editor’s Note:

In an version of this article that was published earlier, the Communists for Kerry were portrayed as a group that was supporting John Kerry for president. FOXNews.com’s reporter asked the group’s representative several times whether the group was legitimate and supporting the Democratic candidate, and the spokesman insisted that it was.

(Via Duncan Black.)


The Democrats and the Backbone Question, Part 2

The Democrats caved in yesterday to the spend & don't tax Bush administration:

NYT: Deal in Congress to Keep Tax Cuts, Widening Deficit

Putting aside efforts to control the federal deficit before the elections, Republican and Democratic leaders agreed Wednesday to extend $145 billion worth of tax cuts sought by President Bush without trying to pay for them.

At a House-Senate conference committee, Democratic lawmakers abandoned efforts to pay for the measures by either imposing a surcharge on wealthy families or closing corporate tax shelters.

"I wish we could pay for them, but this is a political problem and we have people up for re-election,'' said Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, the senior Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee. "If you have to explain that you voted for these tax cuts because they benefit the middle class and against them because of the deficit, you've got a problem.''

Fearful of being attacked as supporters of higher taxes, Democrats said they would go along with an unpaid five-year extension of the $1,000 child tax credit; a four-year extension of tax breaks intended to reduce the so-called marriage penalty on two-income families; and a six-year extension of a provision that allowed more people to qualify for the lowest tax rate of 10 percent.

Senator John Kerry , their party's presidential nominee, has said he supports extension of the tax reductions, though he would roll back Mr. Bush's tax cuts for the top 2 percent of income earners, families with annual incomes above $200,000. . . .

The result of the reversal on the part of the Democrats and the Republican moderates is likely to be a tax measure that will last longer and increase federal deficits more than a two-year extension that Republican Senate leaders offered this summer. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that debt will climb by $2.3 trillion over the next 10 years, and that making all Mr. Bush's tax cuts permanent would cost an additional $1.9 trillion by the end of 2014.

Spineless beyond belief. Just spineless.

While opening the mail this morning, I discovered that the Democratic party's September fundraising campaign is called the "Don't Yeild an Inch" Campaign. Someone forgot to tell congress.

UPDATE: This evening's AP story, which frames the tax cut as a cut for the middle class, also includes the alarming sentence:

The tax package also includes provisions to extend 23 expiring tax breaks, generally for one year, at a cost of $12.97 billion.
Note that this is the figure for ONE YEAR, whereas the earlier figures are calculated for a cost over ten years. Bloomberg has more details on the specifics.

The Democrats and the Backbone Question

I have been somewhat mystified as to why invidious comparisons of the presidential candidates Viet Nam era military records have taken on such a central role in this presidential campaign. As I was driving home from dropping Elizabeth off at preschool, it came to me, encoded in the phrase "vestigial spine." You know, I'd almost forgotten -- most Democratic politicians have almost no spine, so accustomed are they to trying hard to look like moderate Republicans. The military service issue is the pipe cleaner that can be wound round the vestigial spine to make it look like a real Backbone.

This morning, I received an email from MoveOn directing me to this speech given by John Kerry last night, telling me what a fine speech it was. But when I read it, I trip over passages like this one:

In fighting the war on terrorism, my principles are straightforward. The terrorists are beyond reason. We must destroy them. As president, I will do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to defeat our enemies. But billions of people around the world yearning for a better life are open to America’s ideals. We must reach them.

To win, America must be strong. And America must be smart. The greatest threat we face is the possibility Al Qaeda or other terrorists will get their hands on a nuclear weapon.

I'm all for putting a stop to terrorism. But first of all, look where defining our opposition to terrorism as a war has gotten us: into several non-figurative wars. Secondly, I am uncomfortable with the phrase "terrorists are beyond reason." While I don't think we should negotiate with terrorists, or spend a lot of time wondering why certain mass murderers hate whom they hate, there is a dehumanizing subtext to the phrasing. Since he has not defined "terrorist," this is a fairly expansive dehumanization. Following with the sentence "We must destroy them" underlines the dehumanizing subtext of the previous sentence. And what about he choice of the verb "to destroy"? Not "destroy their networks," but "destroy them." Why didn't he just say kill them? "Destroy" is a euphemism used to describe the killing of animals. Then he juxtaposes these terrorists with those who are "open to American ideals." The people of the world deserve a life without terrorism whether or not they are receptive to American deals or ideals. Selectively arming militias and providing vast seed capital for private military startups will not deliver them from terrorism.

Then we come to the next paragraph, which is I think the more problematic of the two. He starts out "America must be strong." I'm all for a strong America, by which I mean an America furnished with a military of appropriate strength and skill to protect our country. This is being dismantled by the forces of privatization by people who believe we can buy strength on the open market whenever necessary. But I don't think that's what Kerry means by a strong America. I thinks he means that if he were to have chosen to invade some place like Iraq, he would have had sufficient military force not to screw it up. As nearly as I can tell, Kerry has carefully avoided the privatization issue. (And as for the next sentence, who could argue with "America must be smart."?)

I have to wonder if he really believes "The greatest threat we face is the possibility Al Qaeda or other terrorists will get their hands on a nuclear weapon." That seems to me a failure of imagination. Imagine instead a world in which military force is mostly privatized and is available for hire to whatever entity has the money; and that this privatization extends to nuclear weapons production; a world in which there are dozens of organizations analogous to Al Qaeda, competing organizations with private goals uncoupled from the common good that nation states have some obligation to provide for. Competing multinational private organizations with armed with nuclear weapons seems to me a worse scenario.

But returning to the subject of backbone, how many of the notions in these two paragraphs originate in part from the desks of Karl Rove and Karen Hughes? How much of Kerry's rhetoric on Iraq and on teorrorism boils down to I would have done what he said he'd do, not what he did. It seems to me that the military service issue has loomed so large so as to distract us from the fact that Kerry still lacks the backbone to stand up to the Republican machine.

There was a fair amount of talk in the blogosphere recently about putting on one's game face in order to win this one. I will, but my game face will not be a smiley face. At this point I'm not so much afraid Kerry is going to lose, but rather that if he wins we will still be stuck with so much of the hard right's ideological framework.


Ted Kennedy & the No-Fly List: a Comedy of Errors

I just wish Michael Moore had video footage of Ted Kennedy being stopped and questioned (not once, but five times) because "T. Kennedy" appeared on the "No-Fly" list (Washington Post).

And I note, at the end of the WP article, that my college friend David Fathi, who I haven't seen in about 20 years,  is quoted:

David C. Fathi, who said he is apparently on the no-fly list, obtained such a letter but said it hasn't done him much good. "By the time I show the letter, it is already too late," he said.

Fathi, a U.S. citizen of Iranian ancestry and an ACLU attorney, said he has been stopped seven or eight times at airports, but not on every flight. Once he was led from the counter by armed police and questioned extensively at the airport. 

"There really is a no rhyme or reason" to getting delayed, Fathi said. "It illustrates the ridiculousness of the system. If it stops them because they're on the list they should stop them every time. Not every third time." 

(He look a bit older in his ACLU picture, but then it's been nearly 20 years.)

Kathryn Cramer at August 20, 2004 03:18 PM | Link Cosmos | Purple Numbers  | Edit

Comments

Civil rights hero/Georgia congressman John Lewis, who was beaten up by racist goons in Alabama back in the sixties, said today that he had been stopped, and sometimes searched on the plane, almost forty times. I don't have the link but it's on the CNN site.

This looks deliberate. If they're going after high-profile Democrats already one can only imagine what will happen after the election.

Posted by: Jon Meltzer at August 20, 2004 09:19 PM

Watching this story in the TV media is frustrating - its treated as a light-hearted anomaly in the 'war on terror' - the story should be that there are ''No-Fly Lists' at all!

The freedom to travel is a right for all.

Posted by: redjade at August 22, 2004 07:21 AM

See Dick swear. Swear, Dick, swear.

Maureen Dowd is really funny this morning on Dick Cheney's expanded vocabulary. (Admittedly, as the Bush administration disintegrates under pressure, Dowd has been given a lot of material to work with.)

Here are a few of my favorite bits:

Even as Tom Daschle proposed bipartisan family retreats to heal the harsh mood, even as the Senate passed the "Defense of Decency Act," Mr. Cheney profanely laced into Mr. Leahy for criticizing Halliburton's getting no-bid contracts.

"I felt better afterwards," he told Neil Cavuto during a no-bid interview with Fox News. Hey, if it feels good, Dick, do it.

Is the Vice President of the United States really going around promoting the therapeutic value of using profanity? I felt much better afterwards. He says.

See Dick swear. I think. Swear, Dick, swear. Do not underestimate the importance of bringing your liberatory message to all the viewers of Fox, no matter how small. (Is this in the GOP platform yet?)

After disastrously dividing the world into the strong (Bush hawks) and the weak (everyone else), Vice turned his coarseness into another macho, tough-guy moment against a Democrat considered a pill by many Republicans. "I think a lot of my colleagues felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue," he preened.

The conservatives defending Mr. Cheney are largely the same crowd that went off the deep end because of a glimpse of breast on the Super Bowl, demanding everything from fines to new regulations to protect red states from blue language.

I really like the saidbookism, "he preened" used in this context. Imagine if Janet Jackson had had a little more gall. Imagine her going on Fox to position her mistake as a much-needed feminist gesture, a confrontation with the viewers of the Super Bowl: women have nipples; get used to it. "I think a lot of my colleagues felt that what I did badly needed to be done, that it was long overdue," she preened. (As a nursing mom, and therefore someone who regularly confronts the world with this fact, I really wish JJ had been divinely inspired to say something like that.)

But the ending is my favorite, the part that made me click on New Entry in MT. [UPDATE: I see Patrick was struck by the same impulse.] Cheney walked right into a Damon Knight joke, and Dowd, bless her heart, catches him at it:

Mr. Cheney assured Fox's anxious viewers that he would stay on the ticket and in the White House until January '09. (No four letter words, dear Democrats.) Vice said of W., "he knows I'm there to serve him."

Mr. Bush must have missed that classic "Twilight Zone" episode where the aliens arrive with a book entitled, "To Serve Man." It turns out to be a cookbook.

The Twilight Zone episode is based on Damon Knight's 1950 story of the same title. I imagine Knight rising from the grave to administer a smackdown to the Vice President: Will you serve him fried, grilled? Or on the halfshell?


bin Laden's Numbers Lookin' Good

I have better things to do this morning than blog CNN, but I couldn't pass this up. Saudi poll: Wide support for bin Laden

In terms of approval rating, Osama bin Laden polls better in Saudi Arabia than George W. Bush does in the US.

So, if invading counties is a good strategy for the War on Terror (a notion Bush has been busily debunking, I think), why did we invade Afghanistan and Iraq, but not Saudi Arabia, the coutry of origin of the majorityof the hijackers?

[lots of eye rolling in the background]


Republican "Census"

David's a registered Republican, so we sometimes get Republican campaign mail. I opened a piece of his junk mail that purported to be "the official CENSUS OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY." The questions are written so that the answer they want is always yes and most are rather hard to answer no to (i. e., "should studnets, teachers, principals and administrators be held to higher standards?") But there was one that caught my eye: Do you think U.S. troops should have to serve under United Nations' commanders? Is Bush running on leaving the UN or something? Are we declining to participate in UN peacekeeping forces?

Apparently, this UN question has appeared on previous such mailings.


Sudan: The Passion of the Present

I had been vaguely working on a grumpy post on the shallowness of some recent news coverage on Sudan and how the article that set me off much too neatly positioned Sudan in Cold War II, i. e. the war on "terror." But, via American Dynamics, I discover a blog devoted specifically to the subject of Sudan with links to more information on Sudan than I could possibly assemble: Sudan: The Passion of the Present. Go take a look.

Also, Madeline Drohan has a fine chater on the role of oil in Sudan's political violence in her book Making a Killing: How and Why Corporations Use Armed Force to Do Business. (Buy the book from Amazon Canada; it's not out in the US yet.) Talisman, the Canadian oil company she discusses was forces by public pressure to pull out of Sudan and a scandanavian company followed. Their interests were bought up by Chinese and Malaysian state companies, which I suspect continue or expand upon the same lethal practices.


Tenet Out as CIA Director

This just in from CNN: Bush: Tenet resigns as CIA director. I wonder what this is about. Did Tenet take the fall for Rumsfeld over Abu G? Or is this about the Chalabi-Iran code-breaking thing?  Or is this just another clearing of the decks for W part II? (CNN mentions something about pre-war Iraq intelligence. But if that is the real issue, a whole lot more resignations ought ot be forthcoming in short order, which I doubt.) Personally, I'm glad to see Tenet go. But this administration needs a bottom-to-top housecleaning. Can we have Rumsfeld next? (Pretty please? With Cheney on top?)

According to CNN's update a couple of minutes ago, Dep. Director John McLaughlin will be the interim director.

ALSO from CNN: Flashes and booms over Puget Sound, but CNN does not report them as UFOs. There is no truth to the rumor that the flashes were caused by the Bush administrations plans for a democratic Iraq burning up in the atmosphere as they returned to Earth.

UPDATE: Here's an interesting passage from the Financial Times, May 16th (by subscription):

The New Yorker magazine on Saturday quoted several intelligence officials blaming the Pentagon's political leadership for setting up a clandestine interrogation programme, first used in Afghanistan and later in Iraq. . . .

The story points to long-standing resentment within the CIA at the rival intelligence operations cultivated by Mr Rumsfeld, which has begun to undermine the US military's efforts to blame the Abu Ghraib scandal on a few errant soldiers.

Hmm. Maybe Tenet's camp was perceived as being a bit too chummy with Sy Hersh.

MEANWHILE, The Yorkshire Ranter has run several good posts on arms dealer Victor Bout and his associates.


Let's Talk about Israel

I read somewhere a while back in a pop neurology book that our political opinions are mostly formed in adolescence. My attitudes toward Israel were certainly formed then. As a matter of habit, I do not think about Israel very much as it presents me with an irreconcilable social conflict: I am a strong believer in the separation of church and state and to my strongly atheist mind in adolescence, Israel is a theocracy. The reality is of course more complicated than that, but any state founded on a religious identity is not something I can feel comfortable supporting. On the other hand, a larger percentage of my friends as a teenager were Jewish and were very sentimental about Israel. Such warm fuzzy feelings are contageous, and so I have a second-hand sentimentality about Israel with no particular cognitive basis. I suppose I felt a special obligation to share this sentimentality because of my German ancestry: I'm one quarter German, the product of 19th century immigration. While as an adult, I see that this ancestry is mostly irrelevant to what I ought to feel about Israel, as a teenager, that was not so clear.

The question of the Palestinians, their treatment, and their rights did not enter into this until I was an exchange student in Germany my senior year of high school, and discovered that the European media took a rather different view of Israel than my hometown newspaper. (That the German press should take a dimmer view of Israel that the American press will not seem like much of an argument to some; my point is that this was my first exposure to the Palestinian point of view.) That a theocracy would opress those who were not of its religion was completely consistent with my general suspicions about theocracies, so learning of the plight of the Palestinians did not alter my perceptions of Israel much.

The resolution of this conflict for me, on an emotional level, is to believe that Israel should be expected to behave in accordance with international law; that its status as a theocracy gives it no special rights or privledges regardless of the rationele for and special circumstances involved in establishing the state of Israel. Israel frequently violates these expectations, but because I retain the feeling, from adolescence, that it would be uncouth of me to say so, I don't say much about it and don't think much about it. But it was on this basis that allegations that, say, Jason Raimondo was rabidly anti-Israel cut no ice with me. I find myself entirely unable to be interested in such condemnations. I did, however, restrain myself from responding "so what?".

But it has been 25 years since I developed my basic take on Israel, and as a 42 year-old concerned with contemporary politics, I really ought not hide behind conflict avoidance mechanisms developed when I was seventeen. There are claims that Israel as a democracy. But I am unable to see it as a democracy both because I retain the suspicion that it is a theocracy and because a large portion of its population seems to be banned from participation in its democratic processes. Throughout my life, I feel I have been asked to see people moving to Israel as returning to their homeland. I persist in seeing them as settlers, whether their ancestors lived there a thousand-odd years ago or not. I cannot buy the argument that they are returning home. Finally, and most importantly, Israel is a showcase for the argument that extraordinary enemies require extraordinary tactics; tactics in frequent violation of the Geneva convention. This last point leads me to believe that if I took a sustained look at Israel or thought much about the Palestinians, I would rapidly lose the warm, fuzzy feelings toward Israel instilled in me as a teenager. This would cause me social problems, as some people would think badly of me for being anything but supportive of the State of Israel. I'm not sure how much longer I can avoid this confrontation.


Bush's Exit Strategy Speech

I listened to only fragments of Bush speech last night. I was cooking dinner -- grilling hotdogs and sauteing rice -- walking in and out of earshot.

Looking at the NYT transcript this morning, here are some passages that I find noteworthy:

SIDELIGHT
Andreas Schafer, 26, of New Plymouth, New Zealand, missing in Iraq for 3 months, was in US custody:
US Denies Holding Kiwi In Iraq
MP Keith Locke says it is hard to believe US officials did not know where Mr Schafer was, particularly when their people interrogated him several times.
NZ traveller held in Iraq by US Army
"I was then held for nearly three months and interrogated by the US Army on several occasions. / "Each time they questioned me they said it was the first they had heard I was being detained and that the investigation was starting from the beginning. / "Eventually the British consul got involved one way or another (probably notified by New Zealand Foreign Affairs) and then I was out within a week." . . . /  She said her son and a number of other foreign nationals were picked up by the Iraqi police the day after a serious bomb attack.  / "Initially they told him it would take two days and he would be out. Then the two days turned into a week and another week ... "

This one seems to me to border on delusional. Not only does this resurrect the old saw that the old regime was in cahoots with al Qaida; it de-emphasizes real efforts elsewhere to reduce the risk of terrorism in favor of the war in Iraq.

Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror. And we must understand that as well.

The return of tyranny to Iraq would be an unprecedented terrorist victory and a cause for killers to rejoice. It would also embolden the terrorists, leading to more bombings, more beheadings and more murders of the innocent around the world.

(The neocon speechwriters just don't quit with that Saddam=Osama thing, do they?)

Then there's this  juxtaposition. Bush says that on June 30th the occupation will end. But a few paragraphs later he says:

Given the recent increase in violence we'll maintain our troop level at the current 138,000 as long as necessary. 

How, exactly, does one define occupation in such a way that ending an occupation does not involve troop withdrawals?

He goes on to say:

Successful units need to know they are fighting for the future of their own country, not for any occupying power. So we are ensuring that Iraqi forces serve under an Iraqi chain of command.

But if we haven't withdrawn any troops, who can be expected to believe the occupation has ended?

Eventually, he comes around to the subject of Abu Ghraib:

A new Iraq will also need a humane, well-supervised prison system. Under the dictator prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.

America will fund the construction of a modern maximum security prison. When that prison is completed detainees at Abu Ghraib will be relocated. Then with the approval of the Iraqi government we will demolish the Abu Ghraib prison as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning.

I'm all for demolishing the place, but simply getting its inhabitants new digs does not seem to the point. According to our own military, a large percentage of them don't belong in jail in the first place, let alone in maximum security. Exactly whom does Bush think he's impressing with this line of reasoning? The problems in that facility were not simply a function of malign architecture. He's proposing to solve the Abu G problem the way one would deal with a haunted house, when in fact the problems are systemic to our own military and its outsourcing policies. Demolishing a building can be a metaphor for a solution, but it is not the solution itself.

Then he says, The fourth step in our plan is [drumroll] to enlist additional international support for Iraq's transition. Given the recent erosion of the coalition, this is a rather pathetic pronouncement. What is he really saying? We'll sideline Rumsfeld and get that bench-warmer Powell back in the game?

His final proposal is "free national elections to be held no later than next January."

In that election the Iraqi people will choose a transitional national assembly, the first freely elected, truly representative national governing body in Iraq's history. This assembly will serve as Iraq's legislature and it will choose a transitional government with executive powers. 

I'm all for elections, but if he's really ending the occupation and handing over power June 30th, what is he going to do about it if the new government doesn't want to hold elections? Why should his appointees hold an election if they are already in power? As he says himself, Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way. (Of course the answer to this question is that since Bush is only pretending to end the occupation, they will have elections, or else our non-occupying troops will do something about it.)

Finally, he contrasts two visions of Iraq: the terrorists' and "ours." I'm not sure who he thinks "we" is but this back-and-white dichotomy does not seem to leave much room for legitimate disagreements within Iraq. It sounds very much like Bush's my-way-or-the-highway policies of the past.

This speech is not so much to outline a strategy for a US exit from Iraq as a strategy for a US exit for responsibility for Iraq. The mindset underlying the speech seems to me to be It matters not whether you win or lose, but where you place the blame.