ymatt here: This might be blatant abuse of my posting power here, but I’d like to take this opportunity to make a personal statement.

Right now it’s only nomination season, but I tend to believe that the general election is enough of a football game that the selection of the candidates may be the more important step for us to guide our future as a nation. In the last presidential election, I felt strongly enough that I cast my first vote (no, I couldn’t generate a preference between Bush and Gore at the time, nor between Clinton and his rivals). But now I have just made my first contribution to a political campaign because for the first time I care deeply about one particular candidate.

I do not support Obama because of his stance on issues, because of his electability, or because he “represents change in Washington”. I gave Obama my money because after reading and listening to the words of all of these candidates, I believe he has good judgment — something I haven’t seen in a candidate in my lifetime. I believe his primary concern is making decisions that are both the Right Thing to Do and have acheivable results, while having the political skill to see those decisions through and — to be frank — to get himself elected while not compromising well thought-out principles. He is willing to use words that are accurate rather than expedient, and he is willing to hold beliefs that can be shifted when the supporting facts change. He is an idealist about how our nation should behave, but not an idealogue about what our nation should be.

So consider this my stake in the ground. If Obama is elected, I won’t be able to deny my support if he screws up royally, but I’m putting my money where my mouth is to say I don’t think he will. Do any of the other lies.com contributors feel strongly about any of the candidates, or are we just going to wave the pom-poms for our teams next November?

First, I’m back, I know how much you’ve all missed me.

Second of all I caught a JBC post stating that he regarded Halo 2 as inferior. I will not disagree. I will say however that Bungie has really gone all out in the promotion of the soon to be released Halo 3.

Museum

The Making of the John 117 Monument

It feels strange but two of the promotional trailers they’ve released are actually, for me anyway, really emotionally moving:

The first casualty in wartime, famously, is truth. (Phillip Knightly’s book, The First Casualty, is an excellent resource in this area.) The military’s job, its very essence, revolves around the violation of the most fundamental moral principle we have (thou shalt not kill); it would be ludicrous to expect people steeped in that to bat an eye at the relatively minor transgression of bearing false witness. Or, to put it more charitably, for people who are engaged in an activity where the stakes are deemed to be high enough to justify the wholesale taking of human life, to balk at telling falsehoods would be ridiculous, even immoral (if morality could reasonably be applied to any aspect of such an undertaking, a point I’m not willing to stipulate).

There have been a couple of stories illustrating this lately. First was the case of “Scott Thomas”, a soldier in Iraq who wrote a piece (Shock Troops) for The New Republic, in which he talked about how his basic humanity had been eroded by the experience of fighting the war, recounting several icky-sounding actions allegedly carried out by himself and his fellow soldiers: mocking a woman with a disfigured face, taking a skull from a mass-grave and using it as a decoration, and intentionally running over dogs with a Bradley fighting vehicle. There was much howling from right-leaning bloggers that Scott Thomas must be a fake, since no real soldier would do, much less say, such things. Then it turned out that Scott Thomas was in fact Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a real soldier stationed in Iraq, at which point the focus shifted to whether or not Beauchamp’s statements were true. A great deal of blogging later, the question remains fairly murky; at a minimum, Beauchamp apparently got at least one significant detail wrong. But the actual truth of the matter, whatever it is, has been buried by an avalanche of self-serving theorizing and conclusion-jumping. The best source at this point is probably the fairly well scrummed (by which I mean, argued back and forth by partisans on each side, pruning away most of the bloggy snark and leaving only the principal pieces of published evidence behind) treatment at Wikipedia’s Scott Thomas Beauchamp article.

Making the truth murkier in this case is the fact that the military hierarchy is controlling the investigation, making Beauchamp stop talking to people and selectively releasing information to places like The Weekly Standard. Say what you will about the shortcomings of the media these days; even a fully functional media would have a tough time figuring out the truth in this context. One thing I’m sure of, at least, is that the military has not approached this from the perspective of an unbiased seeker of the truth.

The thing that got me about the Beauchamp story was that after reading all the reactions to it in the weblogs I frequent, I was surprised, when I finally got around to reading the original piece, that the actions it describes were actually as minor as they were. I mean, this is in a context of members of the military being successfully prosecuted for war crimes involving willfully killing unarmed civilians. But your outrage is reserved for a guy using his Bradley to run over dogs? I thought Philosoraptor’s take on that was pretty apt (even if the title puts me somewhat in mind of Jane Austen): The Scott Thomas (Beauchamp) Saga Draws to a Close? And Its Possible Effects on the War Debate With Comments on Memogate.

This is reminiscent of Memogate. It’s indisputable that Bush’s National Guard record stinks to high heaven. It’s very, very likely that something untoward went on there. But the Rather memo was a hoax. This single clear case in which the right was right goes proxy, in the minds of many, for all the other, more substantive debates about Bush’s Guard record. Having been right in one high-profile case, those eager to support him can tell themselves that they were right about the whole thing. Such a willingness to believe is the administration’s greatest ally on the right.

Anyway, moving on. The second story I’ve been thinking about lately that bears on the military’s trustworthiness concerns an op-ed piece that appeared on July 30 in the NY Times: A War We Just Might Win. It was written by Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, and describes their experiences on a military-hosted fact-finding mission in Iraq. In the wake of the piece’s appearance there has been much trumpeting by war supporters of the fact that even two liberal war critics now admit that the surge in Iraq is working. Here’s the key paragraph from the piece:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

There’s more, but the thing that gets me is how transparent the piece is at being a carefully planned opening salvo in the propaganda war that will surround Gen. Petraeus’ upcoming mid-September report on the state of the surge. Some background reading that helps put the piece in context:

• From Think Progress: Media Falsely Labels O’Hanlon And Pollack ‘Vocal Critics’ Of Bush Administration.
• Also from Think Progress: O’Hanlon: Iraq Trip Relied On ‘The Itinerary The Defense Department Developed’ (and the Glenn Greenwald interview quoted therein: The truth behind the Pollack-O’Hanlon trip to Iraq).
• Again from Greenwald: How much credence should Gen. Petraeus’ reports be given?

Okay, ideological rugby players: The ball’s all yours. Have fun in the comments.

I’m throwing these in here because all of them struck me as post-to-Lies.com-able, but I haven’t been able to tear myself away from boring crap like vacations and work and my family and local politics long enough to geek out and post them.

My apologies.

But anyway, here’s some links that I would be talking about if I were in obsessive mode:

• Pelosi’s Choice – Thomas Nephew at the newsrack blog goes into some detail about why Nancy Pelosi is wrong to keep impeachment off the table.
• At The Stupa, The Mystic looks at What to believe?, an analysis of the fairly narrow question of whether it can or can’t be credibly said that Bush lied about the Iraq-Saddam connection in the run-up to the Iraq War. Yes, apparently this is still a serious question going on 5 years later.
• From the Center for American Progress, a fairly compelling little timeline thingy in which Serious Pundits (and others) offer their wisdom as to how we’re just now entering the crucial six-month phase that will decide the outcome of the Iraq war. And have been for, oh, the last 5 years or so.
• The scariest two minutes and nineteen seconds from Bush’s press conference of today: President Bush on accountability.
• Did you know that Lies.com is the 116th-most-visited liberal weblog on the planet? I know it to be true, because a conservative weblog says so (based on Alexa data, apparently). I started off being happy that I was on the list. But I was sort of hoping to be higher than #116, so when I saw that that’s where we actually are, it made me sad. Damn you, expectations. If I could just make myself stop expecting sunshine and rainbows all the time, I wouldn’t go around being depressed about things that just are what they are. Same goes for my feelings stemming from a certain Democratic Speaker of the House’s attitude toward impeachment, now that I think about it.

Anyway, there you go: A concentrated dose of jbclinks. Kthnxbye!

I apologize for neglecting lies.com lately. My attention in the last month has turned from the general to the very, very specific; I started a new blog, and have been focusing way too much of my attention on it. The chances that a reader of this site will be interested in it seem fairly small, but here’s a link anyway, for the idly curious: The Sutro Forest Birdcam Blog.

Even so, an occasional item on the antics of the Failure-in-Chief can break through the fog of birdy obsession that surrounds me, and here’s one now: From author Mark Danner, a commencement speech delivered recently to some graduates at UC Berkeley: The Age of Rhetoric.

Danner offers a powerful argument as to the nature of the reality we, and the Bush administration, are inhabiting these days. It’s very, very good. Which is to say, very, very depressing. But important to read and understand, I think.

Sigh. I wonder what the birdies are up to?

Admittedly, I only found this story in the Boston Globe following Jon Stewart’s reference the other night, but it’s worth pointing out.

When the current administration is so aggressively secretive, it’s pieces of information like this — the fact that there are 150 graduates of 4th-tier (yes, that’s the bottom one) Pat Robertson-founded Regent University Law School working in the Justice Department — that I find really enlightening. A wall is built around large policies and high-profile actions, but it’s in low-profile details like staffing decisions that true intentions really shine through. While another below-the-radar policy change outlined the shape of true policy goals, the choice here of how to staff the Justice Department does the same for the true chosen methods.

Forget the change from civil servants recommending highly-qualified law students to a Bush-appointed Regent graduate directly pulling in fellow alumni. Forget even about the fact that through 1999, graduates had trouble passing the bar, let alone get Justice Department jobs. The thing that gets me is this:

“…Jeffrey Brauch of Regent made no apologies in a recent interview for training students to understand what the law is today, and also to understand how legal rules should be changed to better reflect “eternal principles of justice,” from divorce laws to abortion rights.”

Regardless of Bush or Cheney’s own opinions on issues, it certainly must be convenient to have young lawyers in the Justice Department that place personal ideology over the rule of law. The law is hard and unchanging, objective. Ideology is subject to change, and twists to include personal allegiances or higher causes. That’s incredibly dangerous for our executive branch, and inevitably leads to, well, exactly the kind of failure and embarrassment we as a nation are currently enduring.

Okay. The person behind I Always Believe There’s a Band, Kid is right that Best of Both Worlds was a pretty darn good two-parter, with a nice cliff-hanger. And I’m always happy to see that people are linking to Lies.com’s content, as he (she?) did in linking to the image I stole from some random news photographer in the item on the Virgin Mary water stain. But I wish that he (she) would have linked to the actual posted item, rather than just linking to the image, so people who aren’t clever enough to munge their Location: box would be able to experience the full juicy goodness that is Lies.com.

Oh well. At least he didn’t inline the image from my server. If he’d have done that, I’d have had to think about assimilating that image and Borg-ing it into something like Goatse.cx (which is for sale, it turns out).

But no; I’m more highly evolved than that. Instead, I will simply return the not-quite-favor by linking unto his (her?) actual Lies.com-image-linking item, which was actually kind of amusing: Ha-Ha! We’re Nerds–315751.3175735667.

Here are the updated graphs for February and March. As always, I’m comparing the US military casualties in Iraq to those from the Vietnam war at a similar point in each war’s political lifetime (which some have charged is misleading; see disclaimer below). The data come 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 50 months of the comparison. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

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

Disclaimer: I’ve been accused of comparing apples to oranges in these graphs. For the record, here’s what I am not arguing:

• I’m not saying that Iraq is somehow deadlier per soldier-on-the-ground than Vietnam. For both wars, the number of fatalities in any given month tracks pretty closely with the number of troops deployed (along with the intensity of the combat operations being conducted). There were more troops in Iraq in the early going than were in Vietnam during the “corresponding” parts of the graphs. Similarly, for later years in Vietnam, when the monthly death toll exceeds the current Iraq numbers, there were many more troops in place.
• I am not saying that Iraq is somehow “worse” than Vietnam. I include the first graph mainly because I wanted a zoomed-in view of the Iraq data. And I include the second graph, which shows the entire span of the Vietnam war, because I want to be clear about what the data show about overall death tolls — where any rational assessment would have to conclude that, at least so far, Iraq has been far less significant (at least in terms of US combat fatalities) than Vietnam.

I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and how those deaths played out in terms of their political impact inside the US. For that reason, I chose as the starting point for each graph the first fatality that a US president acknowledged (belatedly, in the case of the Vietnam graph, since US involvement in the war “began” under Kennedy, but the acknowledgement was made only later by Johnson) as having resulted from the war in question.

As ever, you are free to draw your own conclusions. And for that matter, you’re free to draw your own graphs, if you have a way of presenting the information that you believe would be better. In that case, feel free to post a comment with a URL to your own version. Thanks.

A lengthy and mostly unrelated debate in the “Dick Cheney’s Honor” comments has led to a good question posed by shcb. So rather than continue to abuse that thread, I thought I’d make a post of it. That question is:

“Now I have a question for you; I’ve already said many times I think we were justified to invade Iraq, and I know you disagree. I also think we are at war with a large portion of the Muslim population, and you don’t. What I would like to know is what event, events, evidence etc would it take to convince you we should have invaded Iraq and/or at war with the Muslims at large.”

A valid question indeed. Discuss.

Here are the updated graphs for January. As you can see, we’ve entered the part of the Vietnam War where Johnson was dramatically increasing troop levels; from here on out, barring something really horrible, I’d expect the Vietnam numbers to exceed the Iraq numbers.

As always, I’m comparing the US military casualties in Iraq to those from the Vietnam war at a similar point in each war’s political lifetime (which some have charged is misleading; see disclaimer below). The data come 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 48 months of the comparison. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

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

Disclaimer: I’ve been accused of comparing apples to oranges in these graphs. For the record, here’s what I am not arguing:

• I’m not saying that Iraq is somehow deadlier per soldier-on-the-ground than Vietnam. For both wars, the number of fatalities in any given month tracks pretty closely with the number of troops deployed (along with the intensity of the combat operations being conducted). There were more troops in Iraq in the early going than were in Vietnam during the “corresponding” parts of the graphs. Similarly, for later years in Vietnam, when the monthly death toll exceeds the current Iraq numbers, there were many more troops in place.
• I am not saying that Iraq is somehow “worse” than Vietnam. I include the first graph mainly because I wanted a zoomed-in view of the Iraq data. And I include the second graph, which shows the entire span of the Vietnam war, because I want to be clear about what the data show about overall death tolls — where any rational assessment would have to conclude that, at least so far, Iraq has been far less significant (at least in terms of US combat fatalities) than Vietnam.

I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and how those deaths played out in terms of their political impact inside the US. For that reason, I chose as the starting point for each graph the first fatality that a US president acknowledged (belatedly, in the case of the Vietnam graph, since US involvement in the war “began” under Kennedy, but the acknowledgement was made only later by Johnson) as having resulted from the war in question.

As ever, you are free to draw your own conclusions. And for that matter, you’re free to draw your own graphs, if you have a way of presenting the information that you believe would be better. In that case, feel free to post a comment with a URL to your own version. Thanks.

The news item this morning on the Bush administration’s new space policy (ABC News, The Guardian) caught my attention and, for me, exemplified precisely what’s wrong with the goals and motivations of this administration.

The new policy rules out any treaties that limit America’s access to space, then goes on to call for the development of greater space-bourne weapons capabilities. Together these messages make clear that Bush intends America to control space, with force if necessary. But what’s the big deal about this when our foothold in space is still so tenuous?

Currently our local space is a shared resource, useful for communication, observation, and experimentation, but an impractical battlefield. For exactly that reason, this is the best possible time, especially as the dominant power, for America to press for the treaties to avoid the militarization of space. At this early stage, when there are no competing national interests to interfere, gathering international support for such treaties should be easy. And enforcement of these treaties then becomes in the international interest. Future escalation is avoided, and space is preserved for broad scientific and commercial gain.

The only thing America stands to lose, by pressing for such treaties while we are the dominant space power, is another platform from which to wield our power over the rest of the world — but that apparently is exactly what Bush does not intend to give up. This isn’t a real and immediate tactical concession. There is no advantage we give to the terrorists by pushing for the nonmilitarization of space, but that clearly isn’t what’s important to this administration. Our freedom and security aren’t ultimately what’s important to this administration. Absolute American power is.

The last 6 years certainly make a lot more sense viewed through that prism, don’t they?

I’ve been so busy that I didn’t even notice at the time, but back in February Lies.com had its tenth anniversary. In honor of that, I did a quick skim through the site’s entire history and jotted down comments about a few of my favorite items. Think of it as something like an audio-commentary track for a DVD. Only, um, without the audio. Or the DVD.

Happy anniversary, Lies.com!

Follow the link below, or scroll down, for more.

(more…)

No time (of course), but I enjoyed reading this article: Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald: Republicans and Islamic terrorism during the Clinton presidency.

I was impressed by Tom Blanton’s op-ed piece on government secrets in the LA Times this morning (just as I was distinctly unimpressed by the one by Gabriel Schoenfeld). I was so impressed I resolved to hop on lies.com and post a link to it with some commentary and an appropriate excerpt… but then I saw that Keven Drum had already done exactly that in his posting on the same story: State secrets…

You’ve got to get up pretty early in the morning to beat Kevin Drum to an LA Times item like that.

More technologically-amplified meat flapping: Lies.com podcast 17. Includes:

• Audio of the Ray McGovern/Donald Rumsfeld debate.
• Commentary on same.
• A little about the Moussaoui verdict.
• A mind-boggling amount of detail about the new birds I saw at the office this week.
• Watching a missile launch from Manhattan Beach.
• Ranting about Bush’s emotional problems.

Enjoy!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to this, since it really is very much up my alley. From Rolling Stone: The Worst President in History?

It won’t actually do you any good, but I wanted to mention that I’ve tried — twice now, dammit — to record a podcast for y’all. Both times I’ve suffered a lockup of my powerbook (I’m guessing due to my sleeping it, then shutting off/unplugging the USB mic; I think that’s exercising some bug or other), which has prevented me from saving the thing before the battery runs out.

It’s actually been fairly depressing. Those weren’t half-bad podcasts, at least by my standards.

Anyway, today I ordered a recording adapter and a new microphone for the iPod, and with any luck I’ll be able to use that to record the podcasts more reliably.

Anyway, keep the faith. More lies.com goodness shortly. Thanks.

Interesting guy and flaming narcissist Dave Winer has claimed another victim: Rogers Cadenhead, the net celebrity who gave Lies.com its first big boost of fame by linking from his cruel.com to my lies.com domain dispute page. Cadenhead has recently been one of the more-prominent defenders of Dave against his critics, but now it seems he has fallen out of favor with the big guy: Letter from Dave Winer’s attorney.

Dave actually sounds fairly restrained about the whole thing so far, but based on prior history I’d assume there’s a pretty good chance of some bigtime flames coming our way.

God, I love Winston Smith of Philosoraptor. I wish I still had time to hang on his every utterance in real time. Still, dipping in for the occasional bracing dose of clarity is fun, too. Anyway: It does not matter whether or not there were WMDs in Iraq.

Even if there had been WMDs in Iraq, this would not have made the administration honest. It would have made them lucky. If I trick you into believing that there’s gold in them thar hills by, say, fabricating or distorting geological data, then I am a liar–even if, by sheer luck, you do find gold there.

I’ve updated to the nifty new version of WordPress. All the changes are (or should be) behind the scenes; if you notice anything different about the site please let me know. Thanks!