Wednesday, July 27, 2005

She's Old, But She'll Hunt

If I had one wish that I could make come true, it would be that Americans of every stripe would, well, first of all, vote, and then keep track of their votes and just how effectively their elected representatives look after their interests. I wish this would be applied especially to members of the House of Representatives, because they need to be re-elected every two years. (Sorry for the civics lesson).

It pains me to see most ordianry Americans dismissing politics as just that: politics. The media does a really nice job of mucking all that up, and people live very busy lives, but politicians wield enormous power over issues of the day, and more importantly, given that laws take some time to take effect, shape the way policies are carried out for years to come. If you hired a lawyer to represent you, be it civil or criminal, and they lied, witheld evidence, and misrepresented statements that you made, you'd hold them to account, would you not?

All this is a roundabout way of saying that I wish Americans would wake up just a little bit and take a look at what the people that you send to Congress are doing to this country. It's not pretty. (Here I sit, blubbering like a stupid baby...sorry)

I guess that's just me. I'm a political junkie. There are few of us out there.

I've come to learn that it's only the catostrophic changes that effect normal life in America that get any attention, and that most folks know, somehow, that they can sail along through some bumps in the road knowing that, in the end, all will be settled and care will be taken. The sense that after all this time, the American Way will be saved and honored. That there really is some kind of national safety net, not necessarily an actual one, but one that exists in our minds that will cushion our fall. That's my only guess as to why Americans keep sending a massive gang of absolute frauds to D.C. to tend to our national business.

Our American Democracy is a nine year old dog with bad legs, but she's eager and willing, and she knows the way. We need to make sure she stays healthy and that we mind her pups, because the wrong track, followed long enough, will foist cascading failures onto people who really don't know what's going on (was that really a dog-democracy analogy? Pathetic, really). And, as Murpy's Law would have it, they are the least prepared to accept those changes.

America has lost it's sense of self. As I was contemplating this drivel, I came across this literary reference from Eric Alterman:

To become sophisticated citizens, Americans would need high-quality, independent journalism; but news organizations, to stay in business while producing such journalism, would need an audience of sophisticated citizens.... Because most members of the public know and care relatively little about government, they neither seek nor understand high-quality political reporting and analysis. With limited demand for first-rate journalism, most news organizations cannot afford to supply it, and because they do not supply it, most Americans have no practical source of the information necessary to become politically sophisticated. Yet it would take an informed and interested citizenry to create enough demand to support top-flight journalism. The nature of both demand and supply cements interdependence and diminishes the press's autonomy. On the demand side, news organizations have to respond to public tastes. They cannot stay in business if they produce a diverse assortment of richly textured ideas and information that nobody sees. To become informed and hold government accountable, the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes, not cosmetic images and airy promises. But that is not what the public demands.”

Source: Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics
(New York: Oxford University Press) 1989 by Robert M. Entman

When Supply and Demand determine what the news media chooses to tell us about our representative government, we're in trouble folks. That's not how our Founding Fathers enviosned it. Life really is like a box of chocolates.

Two more items:

Up From Conservatism: Why The Right is Wrong for America

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

(Whew, those two smarty-pants links sure saved this lame post...)

Message To Self: More Blogging

I want to apologize to all my fans for my absence...more spew is on its way.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Project: Free Wil!

Successful! He's out!

8 lbs. 12 ozs., 21". Arrived: July, 15th, 2005, 7:10 pm.

We here at the MC could not be more proud of K&A: Their love, courage, and sweetness.

There's no way to say it enough: Thank You.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Douglas Feith's CNN Interview

I'm posting a comment about this because I haven't seen anything anywhere else in blogland. Did anyone else out there catch Wolf Blitzer's interview with Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith? First off, as far as memory serves, he doesn't give many interviews at all, and when he does they're usually in print. Who decided it was time to wheel him out in front of the cameras now? He looked woefully unprepared, and one would think he would drag something more fresh out with him than this dead horse, first Wolf:
BLITZER: Let's talk a little bit about the war in Iraq. And you were one of the key architects, one of the key planners.

If someone had told you before the war, in the weeks leading up to the war, that 2.5 years or so later, or two years later, 1,800 or so American troops would be dead, thousands of others would be injured, and the American taxpayers would have to shell out what's now approaching $300 billion with no end in sight, what would you have said?
FEITH: Our purpose in Iraq was to overthrow a regime that was a major threat to us, to the region, to the world. I think the world is much better off with the removal of Saddam Hussein. And I think it's an important contribution to our fight against international terrorism.
He had a really tough time getting this out, and at this point in time, it's no surpirse why. After all we now know about this war, and whatever their reasons were for launching it, does he really expect anyone to believe that Iraq was a threat to the U.S.? Hasn't this talking point been stamped into dust by now? Here's some more:
BLITZER: But did you anticipate the cost, what this would endure?

FEITH: Nobody thought that it was going to be a simple matter. The Iraq war was a large war against a regime that had a formidable military. Iraq is a country of 25 million people. It was clearly going to be a major effort.

And there have been terrible sacrifices and our forces have fought bravely. And the sacrifices are important...
A formidable military? Who does he think he's kidding? And that's what was so weird about the whole interview. Does he really expect us to believe this? And is he that deluded to still believe it himself? One more:
FEITH: One of the major things that was on the minds of the war planners was the danger of a long, protracted, major war.

And there was a premium on surprise, because there was -- General Franks had the view that if we could achieve surprise, we could get a shorter major combat period. And he came up with the idea of the smaller force.

We went to war with the smaller force than Saddam Hussein expected us to start with. We have achieved the tactical surprise. We had a much shorter war than a lot of people anticipated. And there were a lot of benefits...
Surprise? The temptation to get snarky here is almost overwhelming, but did Hussein really not realize that massive mililtary build-up taking place right next door? Go read the whole thing
to get a full sense of the tragic weirdness. Did anyone else see this, or am I really crossing over into the Twilight Zone?

Update: Kevin Drum over at Washington Monthly had this on our Dear friend Mr. Feith:

DOUG FEITH'S SWAN SONG....Via Suburban Guerrilla, you really have to admire the chutzpah of senior Bush administration staffers sometimes. Here is Doug Feith, the outgoing #3 guy at the Pentagon:

"Our intelligence community made, apparently, an error, as to the stockpiles" of weapons it assured President Bush existed in 2003, Feith said. Thus that part of the administration's argument for why war was necessary was overdone, he said, adding, "Anything we said at all about stockpiles was overemphasis, given that we didn't find them."

Our intelligence community made, apparently, an error. Yep, it was all the CIA's fault! Damn their hides!

This really takes some balls considering that it comes from the guy who was ultimately in charge of the Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon outfit charged with ferreting out evidence of WMD and al-Qaeda connections in Iraq that the squishy analysts at the CIA were too reality based to acknowledge. The OSP was practically created to find WMD whether it was there or not. If the CIA did screw up, Feith's shop made them look like pikers.

Ballsy indeed. Of course, Feith is also the guy that Gen. Tommy Franks memorably called "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Perhaps that's the perfect combination for this administration: ballsy and stupid.

Thursday, July 07, 2005

On The Bombings In London

What a horrific day for our friends in England. As Americans, we all send our condolences, and our thoughts are with the victims, their family, and their friends. We also know that the British are a tough lot, Londoners especially, and we encourage them to be strong and hold their heads high.

I'll grant Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly his wish and not discuss what the political fallout of these attacks may or may not be on either side of the Atlantic, but I will address some of the issues that surround the root causes of such inhumane acts.

A few months ago I quoted from Sam Harris' book The End of Faith, and this one graf forced its way back in as I read about the attacks today:
"While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism."
I agree that moderation really doesn't provide any kind of real barrier, but that doesn't keep me from thinking that it's at least worth a try. That means that moderate imams and clerics from around the world need to step forward, and in the strongest terms possible, denounce these acts as a barbaric perversion of Islam and it's teachings. Moderates in the Islamic world should be pressing for the complete eradication of Wahhabism and it's fervent advocation of violence, and should immediately identify and close all of the maddrassas that push this virulent strain. The whole world should be asking the most influential Islamic leaders a few questions: Are you prepared to sit idly by while homicidal militants kill innocent people of all races, and say nothing? Do you oppose these acts of senseless violence, and, if so, how strongly are you willing to condemn them? And, given your sphere of influence, what actions will you take to curb this murderous behavior? We'd all like some fucking answers before we get dragged collectively back into the 7th century.

Despite all the saber-rattling towards Syria coming from the Defense Department and op-ed jack-offs like Charles Krauthammer, former CIA agent Robert Baer points out in his book Sleeping with The Devil that leaders like Hafiz Al-Assad had seen just about enough of this shit from the Muslim Brotherhood and ordered the destruction of an entire city: The Hama Massacre. The number of casualties in that flattening ranged from 10,000 to 20,000. Morally intolerable? Extreme police state activity? Sure. Ridding his counrty of a sick scourge that challenged his power? Absolutely. Ruthless as he was and his security forces may have been, he wasn't about to let a bunch of religious freaks run around his country dictating poilcy. (Let's not forget, all politics all local, even when you're nasty dictator.)

I stop by to read Juan Cole and his blog Informed Comment, being the shiftless Lefty that I am, and I have immense amounts of respect for him. He's the expert on Middle East affairs, and has made numerous appearances on national television. Let's get a quote (here he's describing a MSNBC appearence by Michael Scheuer, former Osama bin Laden hunter and author of Imperial Hubris:

He said that "chickens were coming home to roost" for US and UK politicians who had obscured the nature of the al-Qaeda struggle by maintaining that the organization attacks the West because "they hate our values."

Scheuer believes that al-Qaeda is an insurgent ideology focused on destroying the United States and its allies, because its members believe that the US is trying to destroy them. Al-Qaeda members see the Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, backed by the US; US support for military regimes like those of Pakistan and Egypt; and US military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as evidence of a US onslaught on Islam and Muslims aimed at reducing them to neo-colonial slavery. That is, specific Western policies are the focus of al-Qaeda response, not a generalized "hatred" of "values."
Horseshit Juan. Cute that Scheuer references Malcolm X's "chickens" comment about JFK's assassination. So, the argument, according to the statement above, goes like this: they're trying to destroy us because they believe we're trying to destroy them. Oh what a fucking crime, we're the ones who live in a civilized society that trusts the rule of law, and they're the teetering freaks that will kill anyone to advance their backward ideological agenda. Why should we, as thinking, breathing humans, give a fuck about what Al-Qadea thinks? By the way, given this logic, shouldn't all the terrorist attacks be directed at Russia? They've had their share no doubt, but they're the ones who invaded Afghanistan and fucked it all up in the first place.

Yes, the U.S. backs Israel, probably way too much. And if we dare to look back, we might conclude that the U.N. and the rest of the world's powers made a big mistake handing over Palestine to the Jews. That big historical guilt trip in no way excuses the treatment of displaced Palestinians in Muslim countries. Interested in how to treat people like shit? Read about how Palestinians are shown the way in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. The bottom line is you are all a bunch of fucking assholes. You've completely lost any idea of how to treat your fellow man and woman. So the big, mighty U.S. is supposed to solve your problems? Solve them on your own you fucking jerks. Work it out. Hammer out a solution. Kill each other wholesale. You've allowed the right-wing of both parties to grab all the power. You know, the ones with all the guns, the missiles, and all the dirty money to replenish them.

I'm a moderate, and we're the ones that come at these things with ideas of compromise, and dare I say it, solitions that work, but here's a fucking warning: the Right Wing has total control of American poilicy and government, and those folks are never interested in compromise. And they can launch Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles anytime they want. Wise up you fucking dipshits...

These events bring out two of the worst: Anger and Fear. There's plenty of the former above, where we all stand on the latter, well, you decide....

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

What's The Frequency, Bitch?

I was going to write this post, really I was, but Will Bunch, who's an amazing journalist, beat me to it. What tingled the memory banks was a story I read quite some time ago about Judith Miller, who aside from being Ahmed Chalabi's sounding board, was all too embedded with a military unit searching for stockpiles of non-existant WMD. Via Atrios, I'm robbing from Will in entirety:

Why this journalist thinks that Judy Miller should go to jail


Earlier today, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for America's most prestigious newspaper was escorted out of a federal courtroom and taken to a jail cell in suburban Virginia because she wouldn't reveal the name of a White House contact.

We know we are supposed to be outraged by today's events. We've written about many issues since we started Attytood back in February, but none so passionately as virtually absolute freedom of the press -- in America, Iraq, or anywhere else in the world.

And so, in an era where government secrecy is on the rise and press freedoms are under assault, we should recoil in horror at the notion that an American journalist -- even one whose work we've criticized in the past -- could be jailed for doing her job.

Indeed, as recently as a few days, we didn't want to see Judy Miller of the New York Times (or Time's Matt Cooper, whose case turned out quite differently) sent to jail. But frankly, our reasoning was pretty much along the same lines that the NRA uses to make hideous arguments to allow assault rifles or cop-killer bullets -- the "slippery slope" argument.

So what if the "source" that Miller (and Cooper) have been protecting may have committed a serious crime, naming an undercover CIA agent and possibly even exposing her to fatal consequences, as happened when American spies were "outed" in the 1970s. In the "slippery slope" argument, those facts are irrelevant. If Judy Miller goes to jail today, under this thinking, it makes it more likely for a good and honest journalist who's on the brink of exposing true corruption to be jailed tomorrow.

Today, we realized that the "slippery slope" argument is wrong, and so were we. We're not happy that Judy Miller is going to jail, but we think -- in this case -- that if she won't cooperate with the grand jury, then it's the right thing.

That's because Judy Miller's actions in recent years -- a pattern that includes this case -- have been the very antithesis of what we think journalism is and should be all about. Ultimately, the heart and soul of real journalism is not so much protecting "sources" at any cost. It is, rather, living up to the 19th Century maxim set forth by Peter Finley Dunne, that journalists should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

That is why the ability of reporters to keep the identity of their true sources confidential is protected by shield laws in 31 states and the District of Columbia (although not in federal courts). Without such protections, the government official would not be able to report the wrongdoing of a president (remember "Deep Throat," the ultimate confidential source?), nor would the corporate executive feel free to rat out a crooked CEO. The comfortable and corrupt could not be afflicted.

But the Times' Judy Miller has not been afflicting the comfortable. She has been protecting them, advancing their objectives, and helping them to mislead a now very afflicted American public. In fact, thinking again about Watergate and Deep Throat is a good way to understand why Judy Miller should not be protected today. Because in Watergate, a reporter acting like Miller would not be meeting the FBI's Mark Felt in an underground parking garage. She would be obsessively on the phone with H.R. Haldeman or John Dean, listening to malicious gossip about Carl Bernstein or their plans to make Judge Sirica look bad.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Miller -- working with her "sources" inside the Bush administration and their friends in the Iraqi exile community like the discredited Ahmed Chalabi -- wrote a number of stories that now seem meant to dupe the American people into to thinking Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were a threat.

Turns out, as you know, there weren't any. When the Times looked back on the fiasco, it found that Miller wrote or co-wrote nine of the "problematic stories" on the topic.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of the war, Miller acted not so much as a journalist as someone working with the American side to prove there really were WMD in Iraq. Re-read this remarkable story, which Suburban Guerrilla reminded us of today:

New York Times reporter Judith Miller played a highly unusual role in an Army unit assigned to search for dangerous Iraqi weapons, according to U.S. military officials, prompting criticism that the unit was turned into what one official called a "rogue operation."

More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, on one occasion accompanying Army officers to Chalabi's headquarters, where they took custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law. She also sat in on the initial debriefing of the son-in-law, these sources say.

And rather than act humbled when the basis for many of her stories proved false, by this year she had adopted yet another pet cause of the Bush administration, the oil-for-food scandal at the United Nations.

Then, seemingly out of left field, comes her involvement in the case of Valerie Plame, the "outed" CIA operative. The facts of the case are still murky, and so we want to tread carefully as we write about it. What is clear is that Judy Miller wasn't on the side of the person seeking to expose government wrongdoing -- that would have been Plame's husband, ex-ambassador Joe Wilson, who revealed the White House's lies about uranium and Iraq.

Instead, the special prosecutor wants to know about conversations that Miller had with a person, or persons, who wanted to squash the whistleblowers. He wants to know if Miller, perhaps unwittingly, abetted what would have been a criminal act against the whistleblower and his family. In fact, there's a theory that Miller might even have been a person who told Bush administration officials that Plame was a CIA agent.

We don't know what it's all about, except we do know that this isn't really journalism. It's about whether she continued her longtime pattern of aiding those in power and spreading their propaganda. What ever it is, we don't think it's protected by the shield laws that are on the books.

Nor do we think her jailing is the end of the world for a truly free press. And we're not alone. This is what Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center, a free-speech advocacy organization based in Washington and Nashville, said today -- he doesn't seem too worked up.

"One of the aspects of a free press is we don't have a lockstep approach. I have no doubt many reporters will not like Time's decision. But that's every journalist's decision to make under the First Amendment."

Indeed, cases like these have come and gone since 1735 and Peter Zenger -- the outcome changes, but the fight for freedom remains. And so some time in the near future, another American reporter will be threatened with jail -- this time because he won't reveal a source who exposed corruption, not a source who caused it.

And we will be fighting alongside that reporter every step of the way, right up to the jailhouse door.

Maybe Judy Miller will be a free woman by then. Maybe she won't. Either way, it's her own fault -- and the result of the choices that she has made over the years.

My My, That's A Big Goiter You Have There

Ed Kilgore over at Josh Marshall's TPM Cafe seemed to say what a lot of people have been thinking about President Bush's appointment to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court:
This appointment represents the giant balloon payment at the end of the mortgage the GOP signed with the Cultural Right at least 25 years ago. Social conservatives have agreed over and over again to missed payments, refinancings, and in their view, generous terms, but the balance is finally due, and if Bush doesn't pay up, they'll foreclose their entire alliance with the Republican Party.
Here's what traditional Grand Old Party types have either missed or have failed to come to terms with: The modern Republican party has been hijacked by religious and cultural fanatics. Not necessarily on policy choices, oh no, no worries there, modern pachyderms are still complete whores to K Street Lobbyists. But as far as voting blocs go, if you want to run for president under the GOP banner, you better talk the talk, even if you don't quite walk the walk. Just look at the way presidential-hopeful and Senate Majority leader Bill Frist falls all over himself to court the religious and the right (diagnosing Terri Schiavo as responsive, screwing up the names of NASCAR drivers at a race), and you've seen all you need to about future Republican candidates for president. They might as well drop to their knees and cry for forgiveness Jimmy Swaggert style (at least he actually got to fornicate with a real live whore, even while he played a money-grubbing one on TV. Neat that.).

If you need more proof, have a gander at what's happened to Kansas. One day the GOP strategists might come to realize that they really need to cut the Clown Show loose, and I'll be watching that closely. It could take years, but I'm a patient sort, and these socialogical shifts take time. Heck, you never know, SpongeDob Stickypants may decide he can't get anything through with the Republicans in power and run off and form his own shiny, new political party. That would be enough to tear away enough votes from the Ruling Party to make sure Democrats get elected en masse, even for president, and that my friends would leave yours truly in a perpetual state of, well, it'd be like I viewed the photographs of 500 puppies in a row. I'm betting on the former scenario, so the goiter's got to go.

Ed couldn't be more right: the bill has come due, and Mr. Swagger had better ante up or he'll have one hell of a revolt on his hands (pun intended, bite me).

Friday, July 01, 2005

Sandra Day O'Connor Announces Retirement

She'll stay on until a replacement is confirmed.

Best quote I've seen so far:

"Spongebob, head for the border now, buddy."
-- Josh Marshall