WashingtonPost.com
Here's a letter to the Editors of the Washington Post:
Dear Editors,
I wish you could explain to your readers why you feel you need a conservative blogger on staff at the washingtonpost.com. After this week's fiasco, I found this statement by James Brady to be troubling:
"Brady said that was a "fair criticism" and one he will keep in mind in looking for another conservative blogger. "We're certainly likely to look for someone with a more traditional journalism background," he said."
Another one? And where is the search for a Blue America blogger?
Isn't the public face of the newspaper the .com version? Americans rely on the Post to inform them of the most important stories that eminate from our nation's capitol, and it's been noted that the print and on-line versions are seperate operations. But these days isn't the on-line version becoming more important, more visible, and more influential?
I've been a huge fan of your newspaper for many years, and in many ways you are America's newspaper. Any endeavour that's worth it's salt has standards, and that applies to journalism (as you well know). It's even more important when our democracy depends on a free and open press. Why not apply more focus on supporting your best reporters and their beats?
The truth is neither red nor blue; it's colorless. If I may, here's some that you can count on: Rabid Righties want national newspapers to slant the news so that it conforms to their worldview. Crazy Lefties want the facts. It's really that simple.
For example, Crazed Lefties want the House Ethics committee to emerge from dormancy and start doing it's job, and they don't care if Democrats get taken down in the process. If Nancy Pelosi is dirty, let's find out and let the whole country know. Rabid Righties like the committee just the way it is; Tom DeLay needs to be re-elected, not admonished.
So, why, exactly, does the Post need a conservative blogger?
Stupid, huh? That's the way they like it apprently.....
Holy Halibat, It's Been One Whole Year?
Yup. It sure has. This blog is now one year old. It makes me want to do the Sulu Dance. I never thought it would last this long, or better yet,
come to this, but indeed it has. No matter. No one reads this claptrap anyway. I guess it really is
all about me. For you, the reader who never reads this, I give you two gifts as birthday presents to me. Or, uh, something. Behind door #1, I give you KITTENS:
Aw, ain't they somethin'? Now, as a side note, no one brings you
kittens like The Poor Man.
NO ONE (scroll down a bit
here and you'll find one in a sailor suit). And you know what else? They have
PONIES as well. Good ponies too. We may not have kittens here at the MC, but we're locked and loaded for the Blog Birthday, and we have an exclusive guest tonight that KICKS ASS. So, without further adieu, we give you Wilhelm:
As you can plainly see, he's pretty psyched about this special event, and we can't thank him enough for appearing with us tonight. Thank you, Wil. His appearance here tonight makes the B-Day celebration complete, and now, on to more useless flogging.
Jumping Ship: He's No Conservative
This line of thinking, that Bush's fiscal policies are somehow "liberal", needs to be shot down immediately. On cue, this is what we're going to see more and more of: rats scurrying off the deck of a sinking ship.
Here, Josh Marshall takes down Wall Street Jounral columnist Peggy Noonan (a.k.a, the Dolphin Lady):
In yesterday's online WSJ Peggy Noonan asks readers whether they understood George W. Bush "to be a liberal in terms of spending" when he first came on the political scene in 2000.
I've been mulling over the last few days just how to characterize this: but it is certainly a muddled and bad-faith form of ideological projection mixed with evasion.
I think Atrios or Yglesias or perhaps both have made this point recently: but liberals or Democrats aren't committed to high rates of government spending as a core principle in the way that conservatives are with tax cuts. Yes, they believe in more social spending as a general rule. And there are certainly cases when that's led to fiscal excess. The distinction is an important one -- and one conservatives have a difficult time facing. But, in any case, what President Bush has done over the last five years -- with the unfailing support of pretty much every Republican elected official and pundit -- isn't 'big spending.' It's intentionally reckless fiscal policy which is going to create havoc for the country's finances for years to come.
If a Democrat tried to send soldiers to war and forgot to buy them ammunition or passed a health care plan without enough money for necessary drugs, that wouldn't make him closet conservative. It would mean he was incompetent. And voters would hold him to account.
On the part of Noonan and others, this is just an attempt to unload on the other guys the disaster they've allowed to happen on their watch.
Noonan actually tries to argue that President Bush has been a big spender on social programs and that this is somehow tied to his 'compassionate conservatism.' But that claptrap won't survive first contact with the budget numbers. President Bush has trashed the country's finances with three things -- big tax cuts, big defense hikes and whatever pork is necessary to win the next election.
Mr. Bush's mammoth deficit spending isn't some weird sort of ideological inversion. It's a character problem -- like spending money you don't have always is. And it's one Noonan and her ideological fellow-travellers are utterly on the line for.
Can anyone provide us with any example of any enterprise that this man, our president, has not run completely into the ground? And for the sake of clarity, can we please exclude the ones that his father's buddies didn't bail him out of? Thanks. Moving on,
this is from Zach Roth at the Washington Monthly:
RE-WRITING HISTORY: I couldn't help noticing something about one of Bush's responses at his press conference this morning. Asked about FEMA trailers that were left sitting unused in Arkansas after Katrina, he said:
"The taxpayers aren't interested in 11,000 trailers just sitting there. Do something with them," Bush said. "And so I share that sense of frustration when a big government is unable to, you know — it sends wrong signals to taxpayers."
So it's not that the White House was incompetent and uninterested. It's that the government's too big. That's the problem.
The White House has decided, it seems, that the only way to salvage anything from this whole Katrina mess is to use it as a way to further discredit the idea that government can provide people with anything of value. As if any "big government" would have screwed up as badly as Bush's did. We've seen this tactic used before, of course, but Bush's famous rhetorical clumsiness makes it particularly unsubtle here.
In a funny way, it's the same thing that Bush's new conservative critics — Bruce Bartlett, Andrew Sullivan, et al. — are doing by focusing on the growth of spending under Bush. It's not conservatism that's the problem, they're saying. It's that Bush isn't really a conservative at all, he's a big-spending liberal.
Many people smarter than me have pointed out how stupid this is. Sure, Bush has frequently departed from pure conservative ideology, but what that suggests is that he's an unprincipled, Nixon-style political operator, interested principally in maximizing his own power. It doesn't make him a liberal.
This is important in the long-term, because if the lesson of the Bush years becomes that Bush failed because he didn't hew closely enough to core conservative principles, I shudder to think about what the next Republican president's going to do.
The argument that Bush is some kind of liberal spender will not stand because it's devoid of feet and legs. If this man's policies can't stand the conservative test, to reiterate Zach's statement, that in no way makes them liberal. They're his policies; he owns them now and forever. And, after five years of unending support, for the so-called principled conservative thinkers of the day to abondan the president now is beyond disingenuous. It's stupid, lazy, bullshit.
P.S. One other thing I noticed about Zach's post, which may have been inadvertant, was this:
...he's an unprincipled, Nixon-style political operator, interested principally in maximizing his own power.
And that's
all he is. It's really all he's
ever been. He's nothing more than a hatchet man on an endless campaign, and whether American or foreign, his enemies are defined by their loyalty; you're with him, or against him.
Clamping Down...Hard. And Then More Clamping
I think about this quite often, and mainly because it's something I fear will transpire in the next couple of years, but we should ask ourselves, what if the U.S. suffers another major terrorist attack before President Bush leaves office? I believe Richard Cheney will call for even more police state measures that will make us much less free, while making us less safe at the same time (thanks for that bit Ben Franklin). Thankfully, I stumbled across two writers that are able to describe what I was thinking in a far superior way than I ever could. Here's Arthur Silber over at
The Power of Narrative:
As a nation, we continue to suffer from an exceedingly dangerous delusion: that if we only take the correct actions, we will somehow manage to insulate ourselves entirely from all those who wish to inflict injury upon us. To put it kindly, this reflects a rather astounding degree of immaturity. At the same time, we also know that no one actually believes this fable: while our leaders wage war on a country that was no serious threat to us in the name of "safety" and with the alleged aim of reducing the terrorist threat -- while in fact, the occupation of Iraq predictably has had exactly the opposite effect -- they regularly remind us that another attack is inevitable. The fact of a future terrorist attack is a certainty, we are informed; the only unknowns are when, where, exactly how, and the extent of the devastation.
This is another form of the seeming paradox I discussed in a recent essay about responsibility: our leaders seek leave to curtail our freedoms, to engage in widespread spying, and to take any number of further actions justified in the name of security, while they also tell us that we will definitely suffer future attacks. As I pointed out in the earlier post, they thus want to do whatever they wish, while they simultaneously tell us that all such efforts will be futile, at least in part. In this manner, they can act in whatever manner they choose and, when they fail, that failure will not be their responsibility. And when they fail again, they will propose the same solution: they will insist they need still more power and that our freedoms will have to be curtailed still further -- but even that, they will remind us, still will not guarantee our safety. There is only one winner in this perpetual game: an increasingly powerful and oppressive government. History has taught this lesson repeatedly, over thousands of years, and still we will not learn it.
Here Arthur
nails it. He also includes this from William Pfaff:
Such an attack is possible as long as civil airplanes fly, trains run, power systems and public utilities function, people go to work, and business and markets continue. Each can be subverted, or intervened in, or exploited in ways that damage their users and the larger society.
As they say, go read
the whole post. Hopeless? No. Here's what the U.S. can do, and, let's make it short and sweet, shall we?
- Withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq based on a staged timetable within nine months.
- Impose enormous political and economic pressure on Isreal to agree to a final two-state solution based on full withdrawl from Palestinian territories.
- Negotiate directly with Iran regarding their nuclear ambitions. Include the U.N., NATO, and The Arab League. Call for a summit.
- Close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and all CIA-led prisons on foreign soil immediately. Demand all hardcore prisoners who are likely to be repeat terrorist offenders be prosecuted under the laws of their country of origin. Not feasable? Refer them to the International Criminal Court, and back that court fully.
- Enter into direct negotiations with North Korea, backed by the full force of the stalled six party talks already under way (U.S., China, Russia, Japan, South and North Korea).
- Propose and provide verification for an international program to collect and control loose nuclear material and nuclear intentions on a global scale.
- Use human rights abuses as a cudgel to force governments that voilate them to change their ways (this is where the U.S. has completely lost the moral high ground because of Guantanamo Bay. It's a tool we used to bring down the Soviet Union. We need it back).
In other words, let the rest of the world know that we're serious about global security and stability, and that we're ready and willing to listen to other peoples' interests and take them into account. We can broker these kinds of things. We just have to commit to them. Yes, there's lots of hard work involved, but what's the alternative, keep digging? No.
The only way to convince other people that it's not worth attacking America is to convince everyone that it's not worth it, and not because we'll do something about it, but because the world community at large will.
Tactics
There's a great discussion about the book
The Accidental Empire going on over at the
TPM Cafe. The author, Gershom Gorenberg, even provides us with an excerpt from the book. The subtitle to the book is: Isreal and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. I've switched around the names and places of things from this part of the piece, so let's see how this sounds:
...the Marines carried out “stranglehold ops” in the casbah, the crowded old town, of Fallujah. Troops encircled the area, all men were ordered to gather at a central point, soldiers searched houses and rooftops for suspects and arms caches. Though terror did not ignite popular revolution or spur Iraqis to slaughter, it did help ensure that the occupation was not invisible.
I highly recommend Gorenberg's
reasons for writing the book, as well as the
excerpt that I sliced and diced above. Here's the original quote from the book:
...the army and Shin Bet carried out “stranglehold ops” in the casbah, the crowded old town, of Nablus. Troops encircled the area, all men were ordered to gather at a central point, soldiers searched houses and rooftops for suspects and arms caches. Though terror did not ignite popular revolution or spur Israelis to slaughter, it did help ensure that the occupation was not invisible.
I must be an insane, ranting, Bush Derangement Syndrome victim to even comtemplate the above, right? How did I get
so crazy?
The US military has adopted tough-minded Israeli occupation strategies. Longstanding ties between the Pentagon and Israeli Defense Forces have grown much closer since the run-up to the Iraq campaign. Israel has shared advice on counterinsurgency and even allowed US training for urban combat at mock villages in Israel's Negev desert.
...
"Jenin does come to mind [in Iraq]," says Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert and former US government intelligence analyst, referring to Israel's controversial two-week siege of that West Bank city in April 2002 that left 52 Palestinians - 22 of them civilians, according to Human Rights Watch - and 23 Israeli soldiers dead. Continuing unrest prompted Israeli forces to storm back three more times that spring.
Ms. Marr questions the US strategy in Fallujah.
"I don't think you can have a good strategy to drain the swamp if you don't know what's in the swamp," says Ms. Marr, who spoke by telephone from Doha, Qatar. "I don't think the entire [Iraqi] population wants to see us fail there. [But] we saw what happened in Jenin - you must hit them hard, and not kill all of Fallujah."
The kind of tactics described above are deplorable, and I would argue they stem from viewing the occupied not just as enemies, but nearly as some sub-human species. It's vile and nauseating. Look at it this way (while we're flipping things around here): is there an American that exists that would ever dream of this sentence?
I don't think the entire American population wants to see us fail there. They saw what happened in Jenin - you must hit them hard, and not kill all of Cleveland.
Yes, there is a freakish dissonance when you flip American primacy on its head, and of course the nuanced hand of history plays a role, but the thought of foreign troops on U.S. soil is absolutely unfathomable to the American mind. It doesn't even compute. And that's the point. Our Founding Fathers, having just thrown off the yoke of oppression, would be astounded to find the way America looks and treats the rest of the world today. I guess we've come full circle.
Nuclear Proliferation
Via the indespensible blog over at the American Prospect,
TAPPED, we have a couple of posts on the subject at hand. First we hear from
Matt Yglesias:
NORTH KOREA'S NUKES. Daniel McKivergan wrote the other day that the Clinton administration "rewarded North Korea . . . by letting that government keeps its nuclear weapons." In response I noted that since North Korea didn't have any nuclear weapons at that time, it could hardly have kept them. McKivergan strikes back with an update to his post: On October 20, 2002, the New York Times reported: "Several years ago the Central Intelligence Agency estimated that North Korea already had reprocessed enough plutonium at Yongbyon to make one or 2 nuclear weapons, and that the fuel in storage could be fabricated into 5 or 10 more." There are many other similar examples.
Let's back this up. I have enough money to buy a Mac Mini. I don't have a Mac Mini. I have the ingredients in my fridge to make a Greek omelet. I don't have a Greek omelet. The gas station a couple blocks from my house contains enough gasoline to make a lot of napalm bombs, but it doesn't contain any napalm. The government of Japan has the technical know-how to build a nuclear bomb, but it doesn't have any nuclear bombs. My computer has the capacity to run Microsoft Word, but the program isn't installed. With that said, North Korea, while Bill Clinton was president, had enough plutonium to build nuclear weapons. It did not, however, have nuclear weapons. Why not? None were built. Why not? Clinton's deal. What went wrong? Bush:
But the North Koreans had another route to nuclear weapons--a stash of radioactive fuel rods, taken a decade earlier from its nuclear power plant in Yongbyon. These rods could be processed into plutonium--and, from that, into A-bombs--not in years but in months. Thanks to an agreement brokered by the Clinton administration, the rods were locked in a storage facility under the monitoring of international weapons-inspectors. Common sense dictated that--whatever it did about the centrifuges--the Bush administration should do everything possible to keep the fuel rods locked up.
But instead of "everything possible" the Bush administration . . . invaded Iraq while ignoring the situation.
And then from
Mark Leon Goldberg:
DEFINING “LEGITIMATE” DOWN. Here's a novel experiment in logic and reasoning: At a meeting of the World Jewish Congress yesterday, John Bolton told the audience that India and Pakistan’s acquisition of their nuclear of nuclear weapons was “legitimate,” precisely because they are not parties to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. As Irwin Arieff of Reuters reports: "I give them (India and Pakistan) credit at least that what they did was consistent with the obligations they undertook," Bolton said. "They never pretended that they had given up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. They never tried to tie what they were doing under a cloak of international legitimacy. They did it openly and they did it legitimately."
If you are shocked by this statement you are not alone. No one in the administration has summoned this argument before. And it was nowhere to be found among the reasons President Bush cited in his de facto recognition of India's nuclear program yesterday.
So this morning, perhaps in anticipation of a tongue-lashing from his boss in Foggy Bottom, Bolton channeled his inner lawyer this morning and tried to clear things up. (Via email from a reporter on the scene.)
“What I said last night was in the context of the NPT, that India and Pakistan had never signed the nonprolfieration treaty and therefore they weren't in violation of it by having nuclear programs, in contrast with Iran that is a state-party to the non proliferation treaty and that is violating its obligations."
Problem is, by Bolton's logic, A.Q. Khan’s proliferation of nuclear technology to Iran and elsewhere can be considered legitimate as well. After all, if Pakistan is not party to the NPT, they are free to sell nuclear technology to whomever they desire; the sole international obligation lies at the feat of NPT countries not to buy the technology. This is a generous reading of international law, but one we can expect to find from a man who considers such law to be fiction.
John Bolton tried to scuttle any plans to round up Russia's loose nukes when he worked at the State Department during Bush's first term, and this is just more of the same. Anytime you hear an administration flak saying they're concerned about nuclear material ending up in the hands of Islamic extremists, don't buy it. Behind the scenes, and certainly out of the spotlight, they're actively working to trash the kinds of policies and initiatives that would tighten control of the world's supply of nuclear goodies.
And, it's not like we all weren't warned. This from the intro of the Hart-Rudman Commission's
report from
September 15, 1999:
Weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, and biological) and weapons of mass disruption (information warfare) will continue to proliferate to a wider range of state and non-state actors. Maintenance of a robust nuclear deterrent therefore remains essential as well as investment in new forms of defense against these threats.
A really simple question comes to mind: why? Why allow
more nuclear material to traverse the globe? I'm no conspiracy theorist, but aren't the only plausible answers that they don't care, or that ratcheting things up works to their political advantage? Maybe they're mentaly locked into a worldview that is so adversarial to international cooperation that they can't see how working with other countries might benefit us here at home? I'm mystified.
And, isn't it funny how Bush and his supporters stomp around like they're the big tough guys, the only ones with the "seriousness" to deal with national security, and they go and attack one of the weakest states in the Middle East while the real threats remain unengaged and largely ignored? Fucking idiots. Up really is down these days.
Scraping The Bottom?
He's taken the United States low. Lower than low. How far down can he slide?
According to a
CBS poll, President Bush's overall approval rating stands at 34%. Yes, this news is a couple of days old, but I believe there is a trend developing here. All the horrible policy choices, all the decisions based on optics, the willful ignorance, the disconnection from reality, these things come with a price.
There were bold predictions from supporters that he would bounce back when he hit 36%, and that the State of the Union address would push him back into positive territory. That never happened, and when you run things in a slipshod manner
for years, the bad news just keeps on coming.
When you're guiding philosophy is "government is bad", then there's no point in real governance. The whole enterprise becomes a vehicle for the grabbing power and funneling money to the people that got you where you are. In this case the oil and gas industries. How do you solve the problems of average Americans when you have zero belief in the system that might provide some aide? Answer: you don't. Compound that with this: you don't care either.
Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly
writes:
Tis the winter of their discontent. But if I were them I wouldn't count on a glorious summer to follow. This has been their show for the past five years, and it's their show now. Jumping ship now just makes them look like cowards.
Kevin's a bit harsher than I would be, and I can be very harsh, but did I hear cowards? Was it cowards you speak of?
...we have not had a serious three-year effort to fight a war in Iraq as opposed to laying the preconditions for getting out.
That's from the
chief cheerleader of the Iraq War from start to present. He's been pushing for it since
'98, and now he's saying it was Rumsfeld's and the military's fault? Spare us Bill. It's been you're reason for being for eight years.
Joshua Micah Marshall
steers us to this book review by
Peter W. Galbraith:
Peter Galbraith: "In his State of the Union address, President Bush told his Iraq critics, 'Hindsight is not wisdom and second-guessing is not a strategy.' His comments are understandable. Much of the Iraq fiasco can be directly attributed to Bush's shortcomings as a leader. Having decided to invade Iraq, he failed to make sure there was adequate planning for the postwar period. He never settled bitter policy disputes among his principal aides over how postwar Iraq would be governed; and he allowed competing elements of his administration to pursue diametrically opposed policies at nearly the same time. He used jobs in the Coalition Provisional Authority to reward political loyalists who lacked professional competence, regional expertise, language skills, and, in some cases, common sense. Most serious of all, he conducted his Iraq policy with an arrogance not matched by political will or military power."
A pretty crisp and concise description of a man who has been an utter failure as a leader, in almost every respect unimaginable. Hubris, ignorance, inability to lead or make hard decisions. The list is as bleak as it is long.
This president will never get back to a 50% approval rating. Ever. This year will be worse than last year for him, and he'll drag GOP congressional members down with him in the mid-terms of '06. When you're a complete fraud, especially one that runs a country, there comes a time when the common folk tire of your bullshit. His presidency is effectively over. The American public may be slow on the uptake, but if there's one thing they do not like, it's this: liars.
This man, our president, is only starting to feel the effects of his failures. The full brunt is on it's way. Someday he'll realize how badly it went, but only after someone he really cares about has the gumpshen to notify of the truth directly.
