I guess we can excuse a little enthusiasm on the part of the good people at Fensler Films, who finally have the complete set of de-evolved GI Joe public-service announcements available online for your viewing pleasure: LAST ONES!! PSA19!! PSA23!! PSA25!!
It’s hard to escape the topic of nation-birthing these days. For example, there was that only-slightly-premature delivery of the new Iraqi state. I haven’t felt like saying much about that, though I did very much like GYWO #37, which featured the following:
Nothing says “Good luck” like handing off sovereignty and then running straight to the airport. Do we always treat sovereignty like it’s a goddamn grenade?
I thought that was pretty funny, but it’s one of those “funny because it’s true” things. Transfers of sovereignty are exactly like a grenade, as pretty much anyone who’s read history knows.
I’ve been reading more history lately. I think I needed an emotional break from the raw news of the day. It’s comforting, in a way, to look back on a political debate with the benefit of centuries of hindsight. Things are more certain in the past. People disagree with each other, they yell and fume and make scurrilous charges against their opponents, but as an observer I’m comfortably insulated from their fears and uncertainties. For me, it’s already over. I know how it turns out.
Currently I’m reading a book I’ve been wanting to read for a while, but have never gotten around to before now. It’s David McCullough’s John Adams, and as I lay in bed tonight I read the part where McCullough describes the debates in Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1776 that led to the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
It’s a great story. The tension builds; the delegates scrabble back and forth like football players chewing up the same turf over and over, but the ball is moving inexorably toward one end of the field, toward a formal break with England, and they all know it.
On July 1 John Adams delivers the speech of his lifetime, making the case for independence with relentless logic, pounding his opponents like a single-minded fullback; no fancy reverses or trick plays, just power drives up the middle.
But stopping him on the 1-yard line is the Pennsylvania delegation, unwilling, in their Quaker pacifism, to take the final, irrevocable step of voting in favor of a declaration that they know will mean years of bloody war. Exhausted, the delegates agree to put off the vote to the following day.
The atmosphere that night at City Tavern and in the lodging houses of the delegates was extremely tense. The crux of the matter was the Pennsylvania delegation, for in the preliminary vote three of the seven Pennsylvania delegates had gone against John Dickinson and declared in the affirmative, and it was of utmost interest that one of the three, along with [Benjamin] Franklin and John Morton, was James Wilson, who, though a friend and ally of Dickinson, had switched sides to vote for independence. The question now was how many of the rest who were in league with Dickinson would on the morrow continue, in Adams’s words, to “vote point blank against the known and declared sense of their contituents.”
To compound the tension that night, word reached Philadelphia of the sighting off New York of a hundred British ships, the first arrivals of a fleet that would number over four hundred.
The next morning, Caesar Rodney, a pro-independence delegate who had been absent the day before, arrived just as the doors to the Continental Congress were about to close, having ridden 80 miles through the night so he could cast his vote and break the 1-1 tie of his Delaware delegation.
Yet more important even than the arrival of Rodney were two empty chairs among the Pennsylvania delegation. Refusing to vote for independence but understanding the need for Congress to speak with one voice, John Dickinson and Robert Morris had voluntarily absented themselves from the proceedings, thus swinging Pennsylvania behind independence by a vote of three to two. What private agreements had been made the night before, if any, who or how many had come to the State House that morning knowing what was afoot, no one recorded.
The birth of our nation arguably didn’t come later that day, when each of the colonial delegations (except for New York, which abstained) voted in favor of independence. And it certainly didn’t come two days later, on July 4, when they finally got all the paperwork drawn up.
If there was a moment when our country really was born, it was late that night, the night of July 1, or perhaps in the wee hours of July 2, 228 years ago this very night, in a smoky Philadelphia tavern, or maybe in a quiet lodging room, as the two sides faced up to the realities of their situation and the opponents of the Declaration agreed to stand down.
Here’s a toast to back-room deals, and real anniversaries, and impassioned partisans willing to step back from their bickering and make common cause, pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, even in the face of a future that, for them, was still very much in doubt.
You know how the Web is; you’re minding your own business, researching an upcoming weblog posting on some important and serious topic, when suddenly you’re hijacked by a Google text ad, and before you know it you’re sitting slack-jawed before the talking Jesus Christ action figure.
12″ action figure dressed as shown in image (staff & sandals not included). Talking Jesus Christ action figure recites the 10 commandments.
$34.95
Which is fun and all, but why the 10 commandments? Shouldn’t Jesus say something actually, you know, attributed to Jesus?
When you listen to it (320K mp3 file) it becomes clear, though. This is an angry Jesus, one who has renounced all that “love thy neighbor” stuff and focuses instead on striking fear into the flock with wrathful pronouncements about what they shall and shall not do.
I dunno; $34.95 is pretty steep, but that thing is cool.
I pretty much can’t not link to this, given my personal linking history. Paul Krugman’s comments on Fahrenheit 9/11: Moore’s Public Service.
Peter Smith of the Ledge of Liberty weblog got a bee in his bonnet about the book Bush was reading during his infamous seven minutes of indecision, and the result is this: Mystery of “The Pet Goat” Revealed. Heh.
Update: Per Adam in the comments, see also http://www.mypetgoat.com/.
Yet another update: Per Jenny in the comments, see also the Amazon page for the book, including the following reader review:
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
“The Pet Goat” is Great!, July 1, 2004
Reviewer: George W. Bush
I love this book, especially the story “The Pet Goat.”
When my friend Andy told me that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center and the United States was under attack and certainly thousands were dead, well, I just couldn’t stop reading. I was engrossed! You know you’ve got a corker on your hands if a national security crisis can wait.
“The Pet Goat” is great. You won’t be able to put it down!
I’ve updated my Iraq-Vietnam comparison graphs with the number of US dead for June, 2004. The number was down again from the previous month, with 42 US fatalities in June.
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 sixteen months of each 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:
Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.
These graphs are not intended to say anything about the relative lethality of the two conflicts. I am completely aware that the number of dead produced by each of these wars correlates closely with the number of soldiers on the ground at any given time. Nor am I trying to make a case that the Iraq war is somehow equivalent to, or worse than, the Vietnam war. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.
You can view more discussion of these charts on the following pages, if you’re interested. The graphs are all the same; I just update them in place when the new numbers become available.
Some people read an article like this and think: “Stupid birds.” Other people think: “There goes mankind, messing up the environment and indirectly killing off a species”.
I read it and thought: “This is fucking hilarious!” …
Pelicans Mistaking Asphalt for Lakes
(Which kind of person are you?)
Tommy Chong has been released from prison after serving nine months for selling bongs over the Internet, huzzah. He apparently was on the Tonight Show last night, which I might accidentally have instructed my Tivo to record; I’ll check on that as soon as I can reclaim the box from my son, currently rotting his brain with a Spongebob rerun. If I did record it, I’ll watch it and update y’all. In the meantime: Actor Tommy Chong makes 1st post-prison TV appearance on the Tonight Show, Friday July 9.
From the AP, via the New York Times: Pentagon: Bush Military Records Destroyed.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. It certainly sounds fishy. The Bush people have clearly been doing their best to sweep this whole Guard-duty thing under the rug, with accounts of people having “scrubbed” his records, the as-yet-inadequately-answered question (for me, at least) of why he skipped his flight-line physical, and the overall question of whether Bush was or wasn’t the beneficiary of string-pulling designed to trade daddy’s political influence for a cushy spot Stateside to protect young W from the draft.
So, yeah, Bush and Co. (which probably includes senior leadership at the Pentagon) are completely non-credible on anything having to do with this. I think, given their history, a presumption of guilt is warranted when something as ridiculous-sounding as this crops up. It’s reminiscent, in that sense, of the Justice Departement’s “we can’t comply with your FOIA request, because doing so might crash our computers” excuse from last month (see Creative excuse to deny FOIA request).
But just because the people offering the excuse have demonstrated a willingness to lie shamelessly, and just because this particular assertion sounds particularly stupid, at least in the form of a 10-second sound-bite, doesn’t mean it isn’t actually, improbably, true.
It’s like Clinton’s “didn’t inhale” line. As I’ve said before, I think he was probably telling the pure, unspun truth when he said that. But it made such a delicious symbol of dishonesty that his opponents couldn’t resist making it a centerpiece of their arguments against him.
I’m a sucker for the argument that cuts the other way: If Bush is such a shameless liar, why wouldn’t he come up with something that sounds better than this?
Anyway, it’s trivia. The White House strategy has succeeded in that respect, at least: even an avowed anti-Bushista like me can no longer summon the energy required to care much either way. So yeah, okay; the records of Bush’s glorious patriotic service in the Vietnam War were destroyed in a tragic baking accident. Whatever.
The latest in an ongoing series of stories about people running afoul of the hyperalertness of air travellers and those who herd them: I write badly, therefore I am a would-be terrorist.
But the agent ignored the crossword, turning the paper sideways to read a line I’d scribbled in the margin: “I know this is kind of a bomb.”
Update: Slashdotties (and others) coming via isbushwired.com should know that this item really isn’t about the whole “is Bush wearing a hidden receiver” thing. For stuff on that, see the following more-recent items: Kerry’s pen, Bush’s earpiece and Wiregate!
I think a compelling case can be made that George W. Bush is, in fact, the smallest president in the history of the United States.
Not in terms of physical stature. James Madison is the acknowledged champion in that respect. At 5′ 4″ and about 100 pounds he’d be more likely to be mistaken for a pre-teen female gymnast than the manly leader of the free world, at least in today’s televised political setting.
No, I mean in the sense of moral stature, in the sense people mean when they say that “it takes a big man to admit he’s made a mistake.”
George W. Bush will never make that admission. He will never have that kind of bigness.
The latest incident to highlight this came Thursday, when Bush, asked to comment on the indictment of former Enron chairman Ken Lay, got pissy and stalked away from the podium without answering. (Update: Um, not really, as it turns out. It was Wednesday, and it was more that he left the podium and had the Ken Lay question, to which he didn’t respond, shouted at him as he departed. See update below.)
From Capitol Hill Blue: Angry Bush walks out on media, refuses to answer questions about relationship with Ken Lay. (Update: Again, see below for my own mea culpa re: my poor judgement in being willing to link to and excerpt from the lying fucktards at Capitol Hill Blue.)
A clearly-rattled President George W. Bush walked out of a media briefing Thursday, refusing to answer questions about his close relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth Lay, a campaign benefactor Bush nicknamed “Kenny Boy” when the two were up-and-comers in Texas.
The President, visibly upset, stomped off the stage when reporters pressed him about his relationship with Lay and left White House press secretary Scott McClellan to deal with the questions.
Capitol Hill Blue is pretty much just a glorified anti-Bush weblog, so if you’d prefer a more mainstream source for the story, you can go to Telegraph.co.uk (Bush turns his back on Enron questions), or to CNN (White House plays down Bush relationship with Lay).
In honor of my current campaign to immerse myself in US history, you can also dig deeper, into some primary sources. From the post-tantrum press briefing by Scott McClellan:
Q Does the President have anything to say about the unsealing of the indictment against Ken Lay?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Bill, I don’t think it’s appropriate for the White House to discuss any specific criminal case. However, I’m more than happy to talk to you about this administration’s commitment to cracking down on wrongdoing. One of the President’s top priorities is to crack down on corporate wrongdoing and strengthen corporate accountability. And we have a record of accomplishment in that area.
This President has worked to go after those wrongdoers and directed his administration to pursue those who are dishonest in the boardroom. The President has made it very clear that we will not tolerate dishonesty in the boardroom.
This administration worked to uncover abuses and scandals in the corporate arena, and certainly the President’s concern is with those workers and other people who have been harmed by corporate wrongdoing. And that’s where his focus will continue to be.
Q But this particular alleged corporate wrongdoer was a personal friend of the President’s, who the President addressed as “Kenny, boy,” who raised a lot of money for the President in the 2000 election cycle, who offered corporate jets to the President for travel in Texas. He did know him well. Does he –
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, you seem to want to be fairly selective there, because let me point out that he was someone who supported Democrats and Republicans, alike, including the President, as you pointed out.
Q Well, is that all the President had to say?
MR. McCLELLAN: That’s how I would describe the relationship, and I think it’s an accurate way to describe the relationship.
Q Does President Bush consider Ken Lay a personal friend? And did the White House have any communication with the Justice Department leading up to the indictment?
MR. McCLELLAN: No. This is a Justice Department matter, and we expect the Justice Department to do their job when it comes to cracking down on corporate wrongdoing. In terms of the question you asked about Mr. Lay, the President has already addressed that, and he described it the way I did, as well.
You can compare this characterization of the Bush-Lay relationship with The Smoking Gun’s collection of correspondence between the two men.
Now, I realize that on some level this is just a big game of “gotcha”, and any politician in Bush’s position would try to avoid being associated with Lay. It’s not the fact of Bush’s avoidance of the Lay tarbaby that I find noteworthy. It’s the manner of his avoidance.
I mean, it should have been easy for him to answer the question with a statement that distanced himself from Lay while not acknowledging any personal wrongdoing, as McClellen basically did on his behalf later on. Politically, that would have made a lot more sense; then this whole story about how Bush refused to answer the question and stalked off would never have happened.
But see, Bush can’t, or won’t, do that. I’m sure there are Bush defenders out there spinning this as a sign of his deep sense of personal loyalty, his willingness to endure political harm rather than say something bad about an old friend. Well, you believe that if you want to. I think it’s just that such a statement would have come too close to an admission of error, something that this president, by virtue of his record-setting lack of moral stature, is simply incapable of doing.
It was easier for him to just walk away, despite the mental gasps of onlookers, answering the underlying question of “can he really be that petty, that vain, that small?” with an emphatic, “yeah, actually, he can.”
The iconic photo of that moment, as shot by the AFP’s Paul J. Richards:
Update: The Capitol Hill Blue story bends things in the interest of crafting a better story. The photo of Bush was made Wednesday, not Thursday, as the CHB piece incorrectly states. The photograph was taken at the conclusion of Bush’s remarks in favor of Senate action on stalled judicial nominees; see White House transcript, video, and audio here: President Bush meets with pending Michigan judicial nominees.
The transcript and video (and audio, presumably, though I didn’t bother to listen) cuts out as Bush concludes his remarks and leaves without taking questions. Presumably reporters did shout one or more Ken Lay questions at that point, which Bush declined to answer.
The Scott McClellan comments were made the next day (Thursday) at the usual White House press briefing, with Bush not present. I thought that was pretty clear when I read the accounts, but my presentation above may have reinforced the misleading language of the CHB piece to imply that McClellan’s cleanup took place at the same venue as Bush’s earlier refusal to answer the Lay questions.
The telegraph.co.uk article linked to above has a significantly more-accurate description of Bush’s action:
Mr Bush walked away from a media briefing, refusing to answer questions about Mr Lay, a close adviser dubbed “Kenny Boy” by the president.
Note also that the CNN piece I linked to talks only about the McClellan comments, and doesn’t mention Bush’s failure to respond to questions about Lay the previous day.
So, to sum up the ways in which the Capitol Hill Blue piece distorted things:
Bush is still a putz for refusing to answer questions at a press briefing, but that’s not really anything new. Overall, while I stand by my larger point about what the incident says about Bush’s small-minded refusal to acknowledge error, in hindsight, I shouldn’t have linked to or excerpted from the Capitol Hill Blue piece, which is larded with false-to-fact spin in its opening graphs. Sorry about that.
I guess I knew that about Capitol Hill Blue already, given my post-excerpt disclaimer in the original posting. But it’s still a “fool me twice, shame on me” moment. Resolved: no more paying attention to Capitol Hill Blue. Just because I agree with their political position doesn’t mean I have time to waste parsing fact from fiction in the accounts of people willing to consciously mislead.
Dylan Otto Krider of Who’s Lying? has this thoughtful piece: When fairness is a lie.
Dave Neiwert of Orcinus rambles interestingly on the subject of the way the US military staged the toppling of Saddam’s statue at the climax of the Iraq war (er, of the Major Combat Operations Phase of the Iraqi Freedom Campaign of the Global War on Terror), and how the pseudo-event was intended to mold the opinions of both Iraqis and US citizens: The psychological combat field.
We have in fact known from even before the outset that the war against Iraq would prominently feature psychological warfare. Most people have assumed that this warfare would be directed against the enemy and the subject citizens. They have not stopped to consider that, by definition, it would also be directed toward the American public as well.
I don’t really want to link to Fafblog. I want to link to Obsidian Wings for former-blogger Katherine’s goodbye-cruel-blogosphere item on domestic rights abuses (Failures of imagination). But the Fafblog commentary linking to Katherine was fun, so here you go: wake up.
“But Fafnir I do not want to read about torture” you say because you are a lazy whining person. “I want to read about gumdrops an rainbows and Presidents who are made of gumdrops an rainbows an use them to blow up the terrorists.”
No you should really read it it is a very important issue now go or I will have Giblets hit you with the waffle again.
From Joe of American Leftist: The Children of Abu Ghraib.
This one really kind of bugs me. The artist’s statement: Humiliated, angry, ashamed, brown.
From LiveJournal user jiveturkey: The single greatest event of my life.
At the front of this second bus was The W himself, waving cheerily at his supporters on the other side of the highway. Adam, Brendan, and I rose our banner (the More Trees, Less Bush one) and he turned to wave to our side of the road. His smile faded, and he raised his left arm in our direction. And then, George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States of America, extended his middle finger.
Read that last sentence again.
I got flipped off by George W. Bush.A ponytailed man standing next to us confirmed the event, saying, “I do believe the President of the U.S. just gave you boys the finger.” We laughed probably for the next half hour, and promptly told everyone we knew.
Heh. I still think Bush is toast in November, but this could help him get back into it. I mean, in an alternate universe, I could even imagine me voting for someone willing to do that.
Actually, this isn’t as bad as you think. The illustrations are pretty cool. Tasteful, if somewhat crude (but not crude the way you’re thinking). Anyway: I gave my cat an enema.
My dad emails (yeah, weird, I know) to suggest that everyone go see the Doonesbury cartoon from yesterday: Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose.
I saw it in the paper, and thought yeah, cool, but wasn’t blown away by it. I guess that’s because I’ve accepted it as self-evident that George W. Bush is the best thing that could ever have happened to Osama bin Laden for quite some time now. But I guess in more-mainstream circles that’s still a noteworthy observation.
The lead editorial in today’s LA Times was actually interesting and insightful. I suspect the Michael Kinsley effect is being felt there: Kerry-Edwards Stonewall.
They’re pretty web-hostile at the Times, yanking their fishwrap quickly and trying to charge for access, so here are some excerpts. But it’s actually worth reading the whole thing, if you can get there in time. It’s just damn refreshing to hear someone making intelligent observations that aren’t hardcore partisan spin.
If not murder, John F. Kerry and John Edwards have accused President Bush of something close to criminally negligent homicide in Iraq. “They were wrong and soldiers died because they were wrong,” Kerry said of the Bush administration over the weekend.
This is strong language, but not unjustified….
The trouble is, both Sens. Kerry and Edwards voted yes on the resolution authorizing the war in Iraq. And now they refuse to say whether they would have supported the resolution if they had known what they know today…
Reluctance to answer the question is understandable. If they say they stand by their pro-war votes, this makes nonsense of their criticisms of Bush. If they say they were misled or duped by the administration, they look dopey and weak. Many of their Democratic Senate colleagues were skeptical of the administration’s evidence even at the time. If Kerry and Edwards tell the probable truth — that they were deeply dubious about the war but afraid to vote no in the post-9/11 atmosphere and be tarred as lily-livered liberals — they would win raves from editorial writers for their frankness and courage. And they could stop dreaming of oval offices.
Kerry and Edwards are in a bind. But it is a bind of their own making. The great pity will be if this bind leads the Democratic candidates to back off from their harsh, and largely justified, criticism of Bush. The Democrats could lose a valuable issue, and possibly even the election, because the Democratic candidates were too clever for their own good.
From the Patriot News of Harrisburg, PA: Beer drinker fights to get driver’s license back.
LEBANON - Keith Emerich regrets telling his doctors the truth.
The Lebanon man told doctors who were treating him for an irregular heartbeat that he drinks six to 10 beers a day. If not for his admission in February, Emerich, 44, said he would still have his driver’s license.
The state Department of Transportation recalled Emerich’s license as of April 1 because he was reported by a physician as having a medical condition that impairs his driving ability. Emerich’s medical condition, according to PennDOT, is substance abuse.
Gotta love it: Turning the tables on Nigeria’s e-mail conmen.
“I persuaded him to send me the $80, which he did, inside a birthday card, by courier,” Mike says.
If you care about trivia like White House operatives exposing the identity of our own side’s anti-WMD-proliferation spooks (which, I’ll grant you, is nowhere near as important as amending the Constitution to deny the pink-triangle set the right to marry), then you doubtless already know about the latest developments in the Valerie Plame-outing story. But in case you’ve been too busy, here’s a quick roundup.
First, the Senate intelligence committee report on the CIA’s bogus Iraq data (yeah! it was all the damn CIA’s fault!) apparently asserted that Valerie Plame really did recommend husband Joe Wilson for the Niger investigation, and Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post wrote a story about it: Plame’s input is cited on Niger mission.
Then Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo did a fairly thorough attack on Schmidt (elsewhere attacked as being ad hominem, which may be a fair cop, but it’s still a fun piece): I’ll dispense with the literary prologue…
Various righties made lots of hay with the story, including this choice example from Donald Sensing: Prophecy fulfilled. (Update: Note, though, that Sensing wasn’t prophesying that Wilson would be found out to be untruthful, but rather that the legal investigation into the Plame outing “would go nowhere, lead to no indictments and would eventually just sputter away.” See his comment on this item for more.)
But not so fast; Josh Marshall has some analysis that spills much of the wind from Sensing’s sails: There’s been a rush of egregious commentary… And then the good little partisans at the WSJ’s OpinionJournal weblog weighed in with their own snark, and Marshall again went to bat to put their assertions in context: A Republican lobbyist friend just sent me a link…
But after all the sturm und drang, I think the best summary of the whole thing comes from the inimitable Fafnir of Fafblog (which is destined to displace some less-obsessive entry in my blogroll as soon as I can get around to it): How could you lie to me so, Joe Wilson!
Heh. And now I think we’re completely up to date.
I admit it, I get all of my news from the Daily Show, which is where I heard about the “Marshmallow Terrorist“.
It’s a good thing we have Federal Marshals performing random warrant checks on people entering the country, otherwise we never would have caught this vicious, vile, 32-year-old Wyoming woman who never paid a year-old $50 fine from Yellowstone. And it’s a good thing they carry leg shackles so they could keep her from escaping when they dragged her off her cruise ship at 6:30 AM (in her nightgown) … not to mention during the 9 hours they kept her locked up.
Oh wait, she paid the fine? the same day she got the citation?
Oops. Our bad.
Umm. I guess we should probably take those shackles off now.
Anybody who says John Edwards is “way out of the mainstream” obviously hasn’t run into him and his wife at a Wendy’s on their aniversary.
For my next lies.com posting, I have in mind something different. I intend to try to argue myself into voting for Bush.
In making the case, I will only use arguments that I think are actually valid. (Remember, I’m trying to convince me.) I will endeavor to honestly make the best case I can. No pulling punches. No cheating.
I’m not sure why I want to do this. It just seems like an interesting exercise. I’d find it even more interesting if I could talk one or more of the Bush-supporters around here (actually, I’m not sure there are any, but I think there might be a few) to post a similar piece making the best case they can for Kerry. I’m curious how the resulting arguments would compare to those that candidates’ actual partisans make on their behalf.
Anyway, stay tuned for that.
The Washington Post editorial writers make a pretty good case against the CIA’s (as distinct from the Pentagon’s) actions regarding detainees in the War on Terra: The CIA’s Prisoners
(Still working on the “Why you should vote for Bush” piece. I’m thinking this particular item won’t figure prominently in it.)
A must-read, one of those Rashomon-in-real-life stories that mean entirely different things depending on your personal perspective. The actual story in question comes from Annie Jacobsen, a writer for Women’s Wall Street, who got really scared on an airplane flight recently because of the suspicious behavior of a group of Syrian men on the plane. Her story reads like an Alfred Hitchcock movie: Terror in the skies, again?
Courtesy World O’Crap, which has a nice round-up of blog commentary on the story, plus mockery: Terror in the Skies!!!
I really like Jim Wallis. From a column in Sojourners magazine: The theology of torture.
Christian theology is uneasy with empire, and the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison reveal why. More than politics is at stake in this scandal. Moral theology is also involved, and that is worthy of serious public discussion - especially when this war’s commander-in-chief speaks often of his Christian faith.
Jeanne of Body and Soul talks about a speech that journalist Seymour Hersh gave recently to the ACLU, in which he went into more detail about the allegations of child abuse at Abu Ghraib: The thing with feathers. She quotes from a video of Hersh’s speech that is available online (Hersh’s part begins at about 1:07:48; the part quoted below begins at about 1:31:30):
The boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking — that your government has. And they’re in total terror it’s going to come out.
I know reader Thom has been interested in this story. I realize this isn’t additional confirmation; just more detail from one of those who has already been talking about it.
This should more-properly be titled “Why I should vote for Bush,” it being my good-faith effort to convince myself that I should do just that.
Why am I doing such a thing? I guess because I want to make sure I’m considering the question as objectively as I can, divorced as much as possible from my preconceptions. Also, I’m interested in how the arguments I would make to myself differ from the arguments that are made to those actually likely to vote for him.
Anyway, in thinking about this, I’ve come up with two broad, and in some ways mutually exclusive, arguments. Here’s the first one:
Argument the First: Personal Integrity
Character matters. As a person, Bush is lame, but so is Kerry. In fact, Kerry’s personal lameness actually exceeds Bush’s. Therefore, I should vote for Bush.
I apologize to those in the audience who share my hatred of Bush for having just said that. But in fact, having tried really, really hard to be objective, I think I actually believe the foregoing statement to be true, at least from a certain point of view.
I’ve talked a lot (I mean, a lot) here about how much I dislike Bush’s character. But I have to give him credit for internal consistency. On some level, he’s his own man, not pretending to be something other than he is. He’s direct, decisive, and, within the limits of his personal world view, honest. In that sense he’s a real person, not just an empty shell designed to appeal to voters. If Bush were my neighbor (and I didn’t already despise him), I think I’d actually enjoy hanging out with the guy.
Kerry, on the other hand, appears to be very much a politician, crafting his position based on how it will be received rather than standing for anything. For example, he (and his running mate) voted for the Iraq war resolution, and have never offered an adequate explanation for why they did so. In Edwards’ case, I get the impression he actually still thinks in his heart of hearts that the war was a good idea. In Kerry’s case, I think it’s clear that he was just taking the politically expedient choice, rather than risking public disapproval for opposing what was clearly a trumped-up case for war. But if he’s willing to compromise his principles in the name of political expediency in that case, it pretty much proves that there’s no evil he’d be willing to oppose if it was going to cost him politically.
I mean, Kerry’s formative political experience was as a leader in the anti-Vietnam-war movement. For someone who did that to be willing to vote in favor of reproducing the exact conditions that led to Vietnam is pretty mind-boggling. It could be argued that all politicians are unprincipled opportunists in the same way I’ve described Kerry, but Kerry does seem a particularly striking example of it.
Bush’s character is different. His internal sense of who he is shows through in the form of personal charisma, which is an important factor in being an effective leader. I may not always agree with the direction he chooses to go, but he possesses a demonstrated ability to communicate in a way that effectively speaks to large masses of people, and, potentially, to lead them.
In the months after 9/11, Bush’s response to that event struck a chord with Americans, helping to take a shocked and grieving people and infuse them with a sense of strength, courage, and shared purpose. It seems possible that in a similar situation, Kerry, with his appreciation of nuance and his balanced approach and his desire for global cooperation (and his hollow political opportunism), would have lacked the ability to adopt and communicate a strong response. He might have been paralyzed in a Jimmy Carter-esque paroxysm of national hand-wringing, leaving the country adrift when what it needed was for him to pick a direction and start moving resolutely forward. Which, in all honesty, is what Bush did.
In a memorable scene from Full Metal Jacket, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (played by Lee Ermey) says, “Private Joker is silly and ignorant, but he’s got guts. And guts is enough.”
Bush is sillly and ignorant, but he’s got guts.
I know; I know. Thirty-five years ago Kerry was earning a Silver Star by being a hero in the Mekong River delta, while Bush was coasting through an entitled life avoiding any serious responsibility. But we’re not choosing between the Bush and Kerry of 35 years ago. We’re choosing between the Bush and Kerry of today. And today, for all his failings, Bush has many personal qualities that are important in a leader, and that Kerry, at least based on the evidence I’ve seen so far, seems to lack.
As long as we’re talking about their 1960s selves, there’s also this issue: Kerry chose to go to Vietnam, while Bush (sensibly) avoided the conflict. What does that say about Kerry’s intelligence and personality? I’m grateful to him for being willing to risk his life in service to his country, but that war was wrong. In that sense, his evolving views on Iraq seem eerily reminiscent of his evolving views on Vietnam. I’m not sure that a track-record of being repeatedly wrong on that particular question, only to realize his error after the fact, is a particularly strong qualification for the presidency.
Having such strong feelings (as I do) on Bush and Kerry’s personal integrity, I felt like I really needed to look at that side of the equation, and do my best to neutralize my anti-Bush bias. But the fact is, having done that, I don’t think it’s really the issue I should be focusing on. Hence my second argument:
Argument the Second: Outcomes
While character may matter somewhat as a predictor of how a president will behave in unforseen circumstances, character per se doesn’t actually matter much at all. All that matters is what results the candidate would bring about if elected. Who he is and how he thinks and whether he’s a hypocrite or not are all irrelevant issues in and of themselves. What matters are the outcomes that a given president’s being elected would lead to. Bush (or Kerry) could be the world’s biggest asshole, and still be the right choice for president if I believed his election would produce better results than electing the other guy.
My crystal ball capabilities are limited, but there is a definite possibility that a second Bush presidency, in the long run, would turn out to be better for me, my family, my country, and/or my world than a Kerry presidency. If I think that that is likely to be the case, I should vote for Bush, regardless of how I feel about him as a person. So, do I think the outcomes of a second Bush term are likely to be better than those for Kerry? Well, let me try to think of some scenarios in which that might be the case.
Greedy personal reasons:
Here’s one reason: Bush’s tax policies are probably better for me personally, and that will certainly be the case should my level of income rise by much. I operate my own business, and have plans to try to grow that business. A pretty strong case can be made that Bush’s business-friendly policies would be more favorable for those activities than Kerry’s. My chances of getting a tax break based on the private-school tuition payments I make for my daughter, and will probably at some point be making for my son, are better under Bush than under Kerry.
Here’s another reason: Bush might withdraw from Iraq sooner than Kerry would. Bush’s short attention-span and emotional inclination to walk away from and deny the existence of failures might bring about a quicker resolution than Kerry’s plodding, minimize-political-risks decision-making. That earlier withdrawal could help avoid a Vietnam-style quagmire, with beneficial effects for my country. Note that in five years I will have a child of draft age. (But note also that Bush’s greater militarism probably increases, rather than decreases, the chances that one of my kids will end up being drafted.)
Idealistic large-scale reasons
In bringing about large-scale social change, things sometimes must get worse before they can get better. Through his evident dangerousness to the world, Bush could give impetus to a global movement aimed at making war obsolete. The dangers represented by Bush are symptoms of a broken geopolitical system that persists in acting as if international conflicts can be resolved by war, when in fact scientific progress as applied to killing large numbers of people means that we must either develop an alternative to war or exterminate each other. Bush’s ill-considered belligerance makes those risks more clear to the people of the world. This might result in a backlash that helps pave the way for a new, more peaceful order. Kerry’s more thoughtful, engaged approach to the world could actually, paradoxically, serve to mask those symptoms, allowing the old, broken system to continue in place, rather than being recognized as a failure and replaced with something better.
Pragmatic large-scale reasons
Wisdom requires balance. It is unwise to grow cynical and believe that things can never change. It is similarly unwise to be so idealistic as to believe that an oncoming train 50 feet away going 50 mph can be stopped or diverted. One has to know when to act based on an idealistic faith that by doing the morally right thing, even when it seems risky in the here and now, one can build a better future, versus when to act based on a pragmatic recognition that one must sometimes compromise in order to address an immediate danger. Bush’s blunt, direct response to the terrorist threat this country faces is not so hot from a long-term, idealistic perspective, but it may in fact be appropriate given a realistic evaluation of the threat.
It’s not very much in keeping with Sun Tzu, but the fact is that Bush is probably going to be more willing than Kerry to use US military power as a tool to oppose global terrorism. In an era when it is a demonstrated fact that radical Islamic terrorists would like to do things like detonate nuclear weapons in US cities, the willingness of Bush to use force could make the difference in preventing a major domestic tragedy. (Note, though, that Bush’s go-it-alone reliance on the military is harmful to the international cooperation that could also make a difference in that area.)
Also, as Jenny pointed out in the comments to my earlier item on this topic, by pursuing military hegemony in the middle east, Bush could position the US to better withstand the shock of the world running out of oil. With US military control of Iraqi oil reserves, the social and economic disruptions that will be the inevitable result of the oil crash will be lessened, at least for me and my family. As morally reprehensible as it may be to contemplate, if the world in 2050 is going to be like a post-iceberg Titanic, I want my children to have a place in the lifeboats. (Note, though, that Bush’s pro-big-oil policies, including his hostility toward conservation, seem likely to undercut the benefits of our controlling mideast oil with our military.)
So that’s it. Those are all the reasons I’ve been able to think of that seem like good reasons to me to vote for George Bush. I’ve done my best to present them fairly and honestly. They’re not strawmen (though Bush opponents are welcome to knock them down, should they wish to). After considering all those reasons as objectively as I can, am I willing to vote for Bush?
I don’t know. Probably not. But I’m going to do my best to keep an open mind going foward. I probably won’t make my final decision until election day.
In the meantime, if anyone else would like to play this game, I encourage you to do so. I would be particularly interested in seeing a similarly constructed case-for-Kerry from one or more of the Bush supporters around here. Thanks.
Paul Krugman takes a while to get to the point, and doesn’t construct it as a rational argument, but rather as an extended pitch for a remake (a different remake) of The Manchurian Candidate, but I think he’s basically right, and that it’s a topic that’s worth discussing more, so here you go: The Arabian candidate.
Annie Jacobsen (the cub reporter from Women’s Wall Street who made a sensation by recounting her suspenseful brush with not-quite-terror in the skies) has some followup comments: Part II: Terror in the Skies, Again? She breathlessly recounts being slashdotted (or whatever the equivalent term is when it happens at the hands of überbloggers; Instalanched, I think I’ve seen before), and goes on to reiterate how her story and its aftermath demonstrate that we are being endangered by rampant political correctness.
After reflecting on the story for the last few days, and reading much of the commentary on it, I disagree. It’s not political correctness. It is our cherished American freedom, embodied in our Constitution, a document that Jacobsen and others like her, who favorably quote Anne Coulter’s calls to subject all swarthy-skinned muslims to body-cavity searches in front of the other passengers before every flight, should spend more time reading.
As demonstrated lately, I’m kinda wishy-washy, in the sense that I try to pay attention to people on both ends of the political spectrum, and believe, on some level, that truth and certainty are mutually exclusive. That attitude makes me less able to spout one-sided rants (what? I could actually be worse??), but it pays occasional dividends. For one thing, it puts me in a position to notice when rational people on both sides seem to be saying the same thing.
As they are in this case. See the latest Jacobsen deconstruction from unapologetic liberal Rivka of Respectful of Otters: Terror In The Skies!!!. And from very-much-Right-leaning former Army public affairs officer and current fire-and-brimstone-spouting (at least on the subject of countering Islamofascist terrorism) Reverend Donald Sensing: Terror in the skies — Jacobsen writes more. (Update: Sensing is a self-described non-Bush-supporting centrist. My apologies for the mischaracterization.)
Though Rivka and Sensing disagree about a great many things, they are pretty much of one mind about Annie Jacobsen: She’s paranoid (Update: Sensing might not go that far — see his comment below), and almost surely over-reacting to an innocent case of “Arab while airborne.” Which isn’t a crime in the land of the free and the home of the brave. At least not yet.
I know reader Thom is following this story, so here’s an interesting data point: From Sadly, No!, an email from someone named John Heacock, who spent a year in Iraq with the Tennessee National Guard: Iraqi prisons, continued.
I hopped a link from Alterman’s blog and saw your publicizing of alleged children imprisoned and abused in Iraq. I spent almost a full year at the main prison in Iraq, Camp Bucca, which is near Um Qasr on the SE Iraq-Kuwaiti border.
There was a special compound for kids, defined as younger than 18, mainly those who were picked up with adults (generally relatives like Dads) for crimes or suspicions of crimes. I think the # peaked at around 60 or so.
There’s lots more. Definitely provides a useful perspective.
From Janus/Onan comes word of this fun story: Four inmates flee jail, return with beer
ROGERSVILLE, Tennessee - With their cell doors accidentally left unlocked, four county jail inmates escaped only to return the same night — with beer.
I feel a Coen brothers movie coming on.
The thing about lying is, it has a way of taking over your life. It’s the old slippery-slope thing. You tell a little white lie because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, and you find out hey, that was actually pretty easy. And then you tell another one to save yourself embarrassment. And another because you just really, really want the shiny happy outcome that telling it will help you achieve. And another one because you were too lazy to tell the complex, messy truth when a simple lie would work just as well.
And then you start telling them automatically, just because.
My wife and I are dealing with this issue with our daughter these days. She isn’t so much lying as just being dishonest with herself about whether or not she really looked for the shirt before complaining that it wasn’t in her drawer, or had time to pick up the dog poop before going to see her friend, or really is (or isn’t) willing to make the commitment to continue with her piano lessons. And then, having lied to herself, she tells us what she now honestly believes (for certain values of the term) to be the truth. I mean, if it was good enough to get past her own bullshit detector, shouldn’t it be good enough for ours?
Well, actually, no.
An interesting case that kind of goes the other way is this one, in which the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy presumes to tell parents how they should talk to their kids about marijuana: Your government wants you to lie to your kids.
As the debunking by AlterNet’s Bruce Mirken amply demonstrates, many of the things the White House drug czar wants you to tell your kids are blatant falsehoods. But I think parents willing to take the current administration’s assertions on pretty much anything at face value, and then pass it on to their kids, are guilty of the same kind of failure as my daughter is when she lies to herself, and then expects her parents to believe her.
Yeah, well, good luck with that.
This seems to wrap things up pretty neatly: The Syrian Wayne Newton. Clinton W. Taylor, writing for the National Review (yeah, I know) identifies the actual musicians who were on the flight.
Okay, people. Move along, nothing to see here…
Here’s another one of those fun cases where different webloggers look at the same evidence and extrapolate to radically different outcomes.
First up, a couple of Bush supporters look at the current political landscape and predict that their guy is not only going to win, but win big. Michael Williams talks about the coming Bush landslide, and links to Steven Den Beste’s A masterstroke? for the explanation of how it will happen. Both of them seem pretty well convinced that Bush is just biding his time, setting Kerry up for a brutal bloodletting sometime around September.
Meanwhile, Joshua Micah Marshall sees evidence that the Bush camp, looking at their guy’s perpetually falling poll numbers, and facing the cruel reality that late undecideds almost never break for the incumbent, are in fact reaching the desperation stage: Apropos of my earlier post about Republican desperation…
Both assertions can’t be true. If the evidence truly supports the assertion that Bush is sitting pretty and will crush Kerry in November, then Marshall is letting his wishes thoroughly cloud his perceptions. If the evidence actually points the other way, then it’s Williams and Den Beste who are lying to themselves.
And I suppose there’s that third option, that a truly objective analysis would predict a close contest, with both sides being guilty of shading reality in keeping with their wishes.
Goodness. Just when I think the whole “Terror in the Skies!!” story is done, it takes another turn. Check out this reporting from LA radio station KFI, as quoted by Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping (Air marshals “not worried” aboard Flight 327):
Undercover federal air marshals on board a June
