Dave Winer (among others, but he’s the worst) likes to backhandedly brag about how long he’s been doing this weblog thing by running “One Year Ago Today,” “Two Years Ago Today,” (and so on) pieces. Well, suck on this, Dave:

Eight years ago today, on Lies.com: So it begins.

I’ve been thinking back some more to the Superbowl broadcast (no! anything but that!), and it occurs to me that it may point the way to the story we are eventually going to be telling ourselves about the Bush years.

What prompted the reflection was a conversation I had with my 12-year-old daughter while driving her to school. I forget how it started, but it ended up with my giving a capsule summary of each of the presidencies I’d experienced personally. In my case that meant from Nixon on, since I don’t really remember Johnson, who left office when I was six. (It’s kind of a long drive, so we had time.)

So I talked about Nixon, and Ford, and how the first was eventually revealed to be a shockingly foul-mouthed and generally Very Bad Man indeed. And Ford’s apparent quid pro quo of the pardon pretty much doomed him, and how we then elected the most honest, sincere, humble, and virtuous man we could find, Jimmy Carter, only to realize afterward that maybe we really didn’t want the most honest, sincere, humble, and virtuous man we could find as our president.

So then we had Reagan. And I think you righties would actually have been pleased with the treatment I gave him. Yeah, I talked about secret negotiations with the Ayatollah during the campaign, arms-for-hostages, funding the Contras, James Watt, and stuff like that. But I also talked about winning the Cold War and the general perception that overall, Reagan was actually pretty effective as President, at least in the eyes of non-ideologues. “Morning in America,” and all that.

And then I talked about Bush the First, and Clinton, with the latter’s presidency being basically the mirror image of Reagan’s: hated by opponents, revered by supporters, and effective enough to deliver the middle and win a landslide re-election.

Which brings us to the current Bush, and my glimpse of the underlying zeitgeist of his presidency in last weekend’s Superbowl broadcast. And if Reagan’s time in office was “morning in America,” Bush’s is more like 1:00 a.m. at the frat house, with the fifth or sixth kegger having been tapped and things well into the ugly stage.

You couldn’t miss it. The way the profit-is-everything types at CBS ran all those teenage-male-oriented Bud Light commercials (after refusing to air MoveOn’s “Child’s Pay” issue ad because it was “too controversial”). The way the halftime opened with that video montage of various pop-culture icons urging viewers to exercise their freedom of choice, to choose, choose, choose… segueing into Jessica Simpson on stage, completing the sentence for us: “…to party!!!” The way CBS used its mega-media-conglomerate MTV lackeys to produce the ensuing halftime show, which ended up as a monument to lip sync, raunch, and the spectacular failure of an ill-conceived plan.

The more I think about it, the more appropriate a symbol of Bush’s last year that Justin/Janet fiasco was. The decision to have Justin rip off Janet’s leather top at the end of the song was made without consulting older, wiser heads, professionals who would doubtless have expressed grave doubts about it. Yeah, you think it’s going to turn out great, but you aren’t exactly known for your deep thinking, are you? What if something goes wrong? That’s why you have professionals to plan these things. You’re the performer. You’re not the brains of the outfit.

So it was with Bush, choosing to invade Iraq, arrogantly confident, ignoring the cautions of his dad, the intelligence community, the French. He invades, and rips off Saddam’s leather top, live, on camera, for all the world to see the red bustier of his vast stockpiles of WMD. Except, just like Justin, his reach exceeds his grasp, or rather the other way around: his grasp exceeds his reach, the reach of his foresight, and he gets more than he bargained for, or rather less, and now he stands on stage with the leather and red fabric clutched in his hand, a colossal fuckup, all eyes on him.

Yeah. It’s party time in America. But the fun part’s over, and we’re well on our way to the hangover that follows.

You can’t really call it “tapdancing,” because it’s more energetic than that, more exuberant. He doesn’t just put his spin on things; he flips himself upside down, flings his legs in a wide arc, and before you know it he’s whizzing around like a top, leaving even the most critical onlooker breathless with admiration.

Anyway: Rumsfeld: WMDs may still be found.

I’ve updated my Iraq-Vietnam comparison graphs with the numbers of US dead in Iraq during the month of January.

Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.

The first graph shows the first twelve months of the Vietnam war, and the first eleven months of the Iraq war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

Obligatory note: I am not claiming any military significance in this particular comparison. I’m just talking about the wars’ respective political histories. See lengthy discussion in my previous postings here, here, and here.

The latest figures reinforce the view that we’ll continue suffering 1-2 dead soldiers per day (and some larger number of severely wounded soldiers per day) pretty much forever, or until we decide to declare peacewithhonor and leave.

As seen on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is sueing the company “Sephora” on behalf of several employees of their NYC store. The five women say they were hired because they were bilingual, and are required to assist spanish speaking customers; but they were told they couldn’t speak spanish to each other — even during their lunch break.
Sephora denies having any form of “English Only” policy, so there’s not much detail for the article to go into on this particular case, but it does mention some interesting situations from the past relating to such policies, why some companies have them, who thinks they are good, and how other companies thrive without them.

Newsday columnist Paul Vitello has a great opinion piece running: New president, new lie. Does a good job of summing up the double-standard that many in the “Clinton must be impeached!” crowd are displaying toward Bush’s Iraq WMD lies.

Thanks to reader Immy2g for the link.

There’s something really cool about seeing someone expose her breast to about 130 million TV viewers, live, without (apparently) meaning to. It’s cool because all those viewers had their moment of satori, when the world suddenly stopped, and their brains shut down, and nothing made sense, giving them the barest (!) moment in which to appreciate the infinite possibilities of existence. Anyway, it probably isn’t possible that you’ve missed this, but in case you clicked past the followup, here you go: Janet Jackson’s breast exposed during halftime show.

So, CBS and the NFL are pissed at MTV, which they say will most likely never be in charge of putting on a Superbowl halftime show again. MTV says it is really, really sorry; that the incident was “unrehearsed, unplanned, completely unintentional.” Justin Timberlake says it was a “wardrobe malfunction,” that it was “not intentional” and was “regrettable.”

I’m guessing that the idea was that Timberlake would pull off the leather cover, leaving Janet’s red bra exposed. But he grabbed a little too much, leaving nothing but a silver piercing (nice contingency plan, that) between a global television audience and (gasp!) an actual unobstructed view of a human areola.

A few more links: From the Washington Post: NFL: No place for titillation on Super Bowl menu. The story mentions that FCC Chairman Michael Powell has vowed to launch “an immediate investigation”; given his previous remarks about how much he loves his TiVo (“It’s God’s technology!”), something tells me he’s done some investigating already. Apropos that: Justin and Janet steal Super Bowl show, according to TiVo.

Finally, the link you’ve all been waiting for: A certain disgusting rightwing weblogger has detailed images.

Anyway. Onward.