Random Rants

[Shuriken]

I thought I would start a thread just to rant about whatever is on my mind.

IRAQ'S A LOST CAUSE? ASK THE REAL EXPERTS

by Max Boot


When it comes to the future of Iraq, there is a deep disconnect between those who have firsthand knowledge of the situation — Iraqis and U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq — and those whose impressions are shaped by doomsday press coverage and the imperatives of domestic politics.

A large majority of the American public is convinced that the liberation of Iraq was a mistake, while a smaller but growing number thinks that we are losing and that we need to pull out soon. Those sentiments are echoed by finger-in-the-wind politicians, including many — such as John Kerry, Harry Reid, John Edwards, John Murtha and Bill Clinton — who supported the invasion.

Yet in a survey last month from the U.S.-based International Republican Institute, 47% of Iraqis polled said their country was headed in the right direction, as opposed to 37% who said they thought that it was going in the wrong direction. And 56% thought things would be better in six months. Only 16% thought they would be worse.

American soldiers are also much more optimistic than American civilians. The Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations just released a survey of American elites that found that 64% of military officers are confident that we will succeed in establishing a stable democracy in Iraq. The comparable figures for journalists and academics are 33% and 27%, respectively. Even more impressive than the Pew poll is the evidence of how our service members are voting with their feet. Although both the Army and the Marine Corps are having trouble attracting fresh recruits — no surprise, given the state of public opinion regarding Iraq — reenlistment rates continue to exceed expectations. Veterans are expressing their confidence in the war effort by signing up to continue fighting.

Now, it could be that the Iraqi public and the U.S. armed forces are delusional. Maybe things really are on an irreversible downward slope. But before reaching such an apocalyptic conclusion, stop to consider why so many with firsthand experience have more hope than those without any.

For starters, one can point to two successful elections this year, on Jan. 30 and Oct. 15, in which the majority of Iraqis braved insurgent threats to vote. The constitutional referendum in October was particularly significant because it marked the first wholesale engagement of Sunnis in the political process. Since then, Sunni political parties have made clear their determination to also participate in the Dec. 15 parliamentary election. This is big news.

The most disaffected group in Iraq is starting to realize that it must achieve its objectives through ballots, not bullets.

There are also positive economic indicators that receive little or no coverage in the Western media. For all the insurgents' attempts to sabotage the Iraqi economy, the Brookings Institution reports that per capita income has doubled since 2003 and is now 30% higher than it was before the war. Thanks primarily to the increase in oil prices, the Iraqi economy is projected to grow at a whopping 16.8% next year. According to Brookings' Iraq index, there are five times more cars on the streets than in Saddam Hussein's day, five times more telephone subscribers and 32 times more Internet users.

The growth of the independent media — a prerequisite of liberal democracy — is even more inspiring. Before 2003 there was not a single independent media outlet in Iraq. Today, Brookings reports, there are 44 commercial TV stations, 72 radio stations and more than 100 newspapers.

But aren't bombs still going off at an alarming rate? Of course. It's almost impossible to stop a few thousand fanatics who are willing to commit suicide to slaughter others.

Yet there is hope on the security front. Since the Jan. 30 election, not a single Iraqi unit has crumbled in battle, according to Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who until September was in charge of their training. Iraqi soldiers are showing impressive determination in fighting the terrorists, notwithstanding the terrible casualties they have taken. Their increasing success is evident on "Route Irish," from Baghdad International Airport. Once the most dangerous road in Iraq, it is now one of the safest. The last coalition fatality there that was a result of enemy action occurred in March.

This is not meant to suggest that everything is wonderful in Iraq. The situation remains grim in many respects. But the most disheartening indicator of all is simply the American public's loss of confidence in the war effort. Abu Musab Zarqawi may be losing on the Arab street (his own family has disowned him), but he's winning on Main Street. And, as the Vietnam War showed, defeatism on the home front can become self-fulfilling.

Yes, Max, I’m sure that several things are going well in Iraq. I hope that some things are going well in Iraq because I don’t want U.S. forces — excuse me, I mean coalition forces — to become a permanent occupier, which might be the case if nothing at all were to improve.

But your article, Max, overlooks an important issue: The war that we are now fighting in Iraq was not the war that the Bush administration sold us. If enthusiasm about how things are going in that country is starting to sag, it’s because the Bush administration all but promised that a military invasion of Iraq would be a quick and bloodless fix for that particular front of “the war on terror.”

As Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed writer Jay Bookman says in a recent column, the Bush administration egregiously underestimated how long and how costly a military engagement with Iraq would be: “As proof:

“•They budgeted a total of $1.7 billion to rebuild Iraq — we now spend more than that in Iraq in about a week.

“•They thought they could occupy Iraq with a third of the troops that experienced generals told them they needed; today, our troops are getting maimed and killed with explosives looted from Iraqi weapons sites because we lacked the manpower to guard those sites.

“•They expected to have the country on its feet and financing itself from oil in 90 days; 30 months later, we are farther from that dream than ever.”

Bush’s now infamous “Mission Accomplished” photo-op aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in 2003 marked what the president surely thought was the end of the war. He was predicting a quick Desert Storm-like victory, all the while ignoring warnings from Gulf War architects like Brent Scrowcroft that a military invasion of Baghdad would be a different kettle of fish entirely.

Now that the administration’s fairy tale of a swift and painless victory has not come true, administration officials and their neocon apologists are chiding us because we should have expected war with Iraq to be, in Rumsfeld’s words, “a long, hard slog.” But in their build-up to war, the Bush administration did not prepare us for a slog of any sort. I wonder if the term “bait and switch” means anything to them.

I’m tired of being lectured by war apologists that, because the Bush administration’s unrealistic and ill-advised fantasies about a quick and easy victory in Iraq have not come true, the American people are at fault for not energetically supporting the administration’s catastrophic blundering. Why don’t you say anything about that in your article, Max?

[LaiSteve66]

We must stay the course.

* gets slapped by Shuriken *

LMAO!

[Leinad]

aaarrrrgggghhhh:mad: :mad: !!!!!:mad: :mad: ...howz that

aaarrrrgggghhhh:mad: :mad: !!!!!:mad: :mad: ...howz that

o and a little grrrrrrrrrr

[Hiroshi2]

Buck Fush

[Emperor_Mike]

And in other news, more American deaths in Iraq (five to be precise) along with another thirty civilians killed by a car bomb.

Officially, the American death count is at 2,104.

Yes, things are WONDERFUL over there. It's certainly NOT a lost cause, absolutely not! Order will be restored shortly because the insurgency is *obviously* on the verge of defeat. No, it won't take YEARS to stabilise the country and it certainly won't require more lives. No, no, things are FINE.

Do these people listen to the words coming out of their mouths or read what they themselves write?

[Faithless]

And in other news, more American deaths in Iraq (five to be precise) along with another thirty civilians killed by a car bomb.

Officially, the American death count is at 2,104.
...
Where does that count actually come from? The folks who die right then and there?

What about the people who die in route to the hospital or die at the hospital? Given this, the number of dead Americans could be a lot higher. :frown:

[Shuriken]

Here are a couple of letters that I wrote to the Los Angeles Times that weren’t printed:

To the Editor:

I've held off on writing you for the past few days because I thought that I would have seen something in your paper addressing this point by now. I'm writing at this relatively late date because I haven't.

In his campaign-style Veteran’s Day speech in Pennsylvania, President Bush defended his administration's conduct in the build-up to the war with Iraq by saying, “Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.”

Of the two official reports into pre-war intelligence, one authorized by the White House and one by the Senate, Bush is clearly referring to the Senate's. But your Nov. 12 story “Bush Goes on the Offensive Against Critics of War in Iraq” confuses this with the White House report headed by Republican Laurence Silberman and Democrat Charles Robb.

What’s important is that neither report completely absolved the White House of intelligence manipulation because neither report was very thorough. The Senate report that Bush claims as proof of his pre-war truthfulness was only preliminary, with Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) promising a more complete follow-up report. It was to quicken the release of this follow-up that Democrats called for a closed-door session of the Senate on Nov. 1.

Now, Bush is going around the world implying that this incomplete report exonerates his administration's handling of pre-war intelligence when it really doesn't. If Bush didn't mislead this country into war, why is he misleading us now?

[Hiroshi2]

And to think he probably won't be challenged quite as hard for his misleadings as Clinton was for his supposed "obstruction of justice" since the Republicans/conservatives dominate all three branches of government.


While reading about Ronald Reagan, or even the first Bush, and the stuff they did, I used to think it was kinda fucked up how they led the country. But compared to Bush, they might as well have been Abe Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

[Shuriken]

LINCOLN'S WORDS, OUR PLEDGE

by David Gelernter


The Pledge of Allegiance has been in legal jeopardy for years, all because it contains the words "under God" — a phrase Abraham Lincoln stamped on the American consciousness when he used it on Nov. 19, 1863, 142 years ago, in the Gettysburg Address.

The Pledge originated in 1892, was modified in 1923 and again in 1924, and most recently in 1954 when the words "under God" were added. In 2004, and again in 2005, a California atheist named Michael Newdow filed lawsuits claiming that it was unconstitutional for children to be asked to say the Pledge in public schools. In September, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled for Newdow. Inviting students to say the pledge violates their right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God," he wrote. Presumably the pledge — or at least the words "under God" — will wind up being vetted by the Supreme Court.

One of the tragedies in all of this is the attempt to remove history's footprint from the Pledge. The Pledge asks children to state their allegiance to " … one nation, under God … " Lincoln spoke the words "this nation, under God" at the spiritual center point of American history. Today they remind us (or ought to) of how hard this nation has struggled and how dearly it has paid to move closer to its own sublime declaration that "all men are created equal."

Lincoln hated slavery. But he led the Northern states into the Civil War for only one stated, official reason: to hold the Union together by preventing the Confederate states from seceding. At the start of the fighting, public opinion would not have supported a war to end slavery. But as casualties mounted, the public's ideas shifted, and Lincoln felt them shifting. (As soldiers die in war, Americans raise their sights — as they have in Iraq. If Americans are to die, they must die for the greatest, noblest cause the public and its leaders can imagine.)

In September 1862, Lincoln dramatically changed the war's character by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. As of Jan. 1, 1863, all slaves in rebellious regions of the country "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Lincoln saw the proclamation as a first step. Eventually all slaves were freed by the 13th Amendment in 1865.

The Emancipation Proclamation "lifted the Civil War to the dignity of a crusade," wrote Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg in their classic history, "Growth of the American Republic." But crusades can succeed or fail. When the proclamation was issued, no one knew whether the North could beat the South and enforce the president's dramatic edict.

The question was answered on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of July 1863, in the bloody battle of Gettysburg. On the Union side alone, roughly 23,000 men were killed, wounded or missing. There was far more fighting ahead, but after Gettysburg there was virtually no doubt that the Union would win — and at last be in a position to free the slaves and start on the long, hard road to justice and reunification.

By delivering the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln built a sacred shrine out of words on the most important battlefield in American history — a small shrine, of wonderful beauty, that reminds us why an earlier generation of Northerners fought, bled and died to win the Civil War: So that "this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom."

Lincoln added the words "under God" at the last minute. They don't appear in drafts of the speech prepared beforehand. But he included them in copies he made afterward, and historians believe he said them in the speech. Lincoln had grown steadily more religious as he grew older. As his political and spiritual genius flowered, he re-conceived America as a nation where high ideals were not just words on parchment, they were marching orders, principles to fight and die for.

"It is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence," he said, "and if I can learn what it is, I will do it." He wished to be a "humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people." He knew well that Americans are far from perfect. But he believed in their duty to make themselves better.

When we invite our children to say the Pledge, including "one nation, under God," we are asking them to repeat Lincoln's phrase, and perhaps even to feel his presence. Children who were reared as atheists, whose parents are wiser than Lincoln on the subject of God, are free to keep quiet.

And even if children should feel coerced by peer pressure (as the lawsuits have argued) to say that terrible G-word, they won't be magically converted into Christians or Jews or God-believers of any stripe. In fact, children who don't believe in God might still like to be reminded how Lincoln saw this nation, might like to test drive the worldview of the man who saved the Union and set it on the path to justice.

If that's unconstitutional, we have made a serious mistake somewhere along the line. If we have any guts, we will go back and put it right.

To the Editor:

David Gelernter’s article “Lincoln’s Words, Our Pledge” (Nov. 18) — which argues that the phrase “under God” belongs in the Pledge of Allegiance because President Lincoln used it in his Gettysburg Address — is absurd, to put it kindly. When schoolchildren recite the Pledge, I doubt that they are thinking of the Civil War.

The phrase “under God” does not belong in the Pledge — nor “in God we trust” on our money — for one simple reason: it is unfair to religious minorities, just as Jim Crow laws were unfair to racial minorities. Granted, there is a world of difference between the government compelling (explicitly or implicitly) an atheistic public-schoolchild to profess a belief in monotheism and the government ordering an African American to sit in the back of a bus. But the government's message is still the same: something is wrong with you.

The American Flag stands for the U.S. Constitution, which protects the right not to believe in monotheism, so any reference to God in the Pledge is contradictory.

As a monotheist myself, I wouldn’t go so far as to rename towns with Christian namesakes or frown upon a politician ending a speech with “God bless America,” but the government should refrain from endorsing theism whever it can.

I believe that the interpolation of “under God” into the Pledge in 1954 was not to acknowledge monotheism’s role in this country’s history, as its supporters claim, but to inculcate a belief in monotheism (where needed) among our schoolchildren by rote. Gelernter admits as much when he says that, via the Pledge, “children who don't believe in God...might like to test drive the worldview of the man who saved the Union [Lincoln] and set it on the path to justice.” Isn’t Gelernter advocating, in effect, the government unconstitutionally endorsing one religious belief system over others?

I think that many religious conservatives know, in their hearts, that invocations of God by the government are a mark of religious preference, going against the spirit of the First Amendment. But they make disingenuous arguments of support because it is their belief system that is being preferred. Suddenly, governmental neutrality towards religion has become “hostility” towards religion, and governmental advocacy of one theism over another has become “the public square.” But Gelernter’s contorted argument wins a Gold Medal for logical gymnastics.

[Afterward: I’m sure that someone will point out to me that the civil-rights movement was religiously inspired. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was, after all, a minister. But I believe that we can indeed acknowledge the role, positive and otherwise, that religion has played in this country’s history without the government — including our public schools — forcing its people to profess a belief in monotheism, or any religious belief system over another. I believe that is what the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment stands for. ]

[Emperor_Mike]

Where does that count actually come from? The folks who die right then and there?

What about the people who die in route to the hospital or die at the hospital? Given this, the number of dead Americans could be a lot higher. :frown:

CNN figures and no, I don't doubt that the count could very well be a lot higher. I think the number includes those who died of injuries too, though I cannot be sure.

Body bags aren't good morale boosters.

[Faithless]

CNN figures and no, I don't doubt that the count could very well be a lot higher. I think the number includes those who died of injuries too, though I cannot be sure.

Body bags aren't good morale boosters.
A site keeping a monthly track of the deaths.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/

But according to this site, U.S. Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to German hospitals have not previously been counted. They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005. The ongoing, underreporting of the dead in Iraq, is not accurate. The DoD is deliberately reducing the figures. A review of many foreign news sites show that actual deaths are far higher than the newly reduced ones.

http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a1682.htm

[Faithless]

Want some more fun stuff out of Iraq?

How about the claims in the first article that there is torture going on in Iraq that is as bad as during Saddam's reign.

And the second that further emphasizes that the US needs to get out of Iraq in order for Iraqi forces to take the right course.

‘Human Rights Abuses Worse than Saddam Era’ (http://www.zaman.com/?bl=international&alt=&trh=20051128&hn=26867)

By AA, Cihan * Published: Monday, November 28, 2005 * zaman.com

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said human rights abuses were even worse now than they were under Saddam Hussein’s rule.

Speaking to The Observer Allawi said, “People are doing the same as (in) Saddam's time and worse.” Noting that the comparison was an appropriate one, Allawi also warned against the elimination of the records attesting to the current situation. Allawi held responsible Shiites in the government in relation to reports of torture and maltreatment, and indicated that those circles possessed secret torture chambers and death squads. Allawi related that many of those interrogated in these chambers by the secret police units died from the torture and mistreatment.

Referring to the recent revelation of 170 maltreated and tortured Iraqis discovered in a bunker at the Shiite run Interior Ministry, Allawi said, “The Ministry of the Interior is at the heart of the matter; I am not blaming the minister himself, but the rank and file are behind the secret dungeons and some of the executions that are taking place.”

Meanwhile, the trial of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam and seven of his aides in relation to the 1982 massacre in Dujail will continue on Monday.

Iraqi president listens to insurgents (http://newsfromrussia.com/hotspots/2005/11/28/68662.html)

16:48 2005-11-28

Iraq said Sunday it has delayed a major anti-insurgent offensive ahead of December's elections, as President Jalal Talabani confirmed he had been contacted by rebels wanting to join the political process.

The announcement came as the leader of the country's most powerful political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, criticized U.S. forces for preventing Iraqi troops tackling the insurgency head-on.

Interior Minister Bayan Jabr announced the suspension of the large-scale offensive against "hotbeds of terrorism" following an appeal by Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa.

"President Talabani got in touch with me after receiving a call from Mr. Moussa, and asked me to call off this operation to ensure the success of the national reconciliation conference" in February, Jabr told.

Disparate Iraqi groups met in Cairo early this month to prepare for a full-fledged reconciliation meeting in Iraq.

The Sunni-based Committee of Muslim Scholars had called on the Arab League to prevent such an operation, saying there had been too many cases of innocent people being rounded up and detained.

Meanwhile, Talabani confirmed he had received calls from people claiming to be linked to the insurgency, saying they were ready to engage in political talks.

Despite Talabani's conciliatory words, SCIRI leader Abdel-Aziz Hakim lamented what he said were U.S. "obstacles" to Iraqi forces dealing with rebels.

U.S. forces are sometimes "an obstacle preventing Iraqi forces from taking the right course," he told. "U.S. mistakes have cost us dearly in the past and still cost us dearly today."

The accusations came as former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi said in another interview that human rights abuses in Iraq were now as bad, or worse, than when Saddam was in power.

Hitting back, Talabani insisted that the government was against any form of torture or harming of detainees.

Allawi's comments followed recent revelations that some 170 detainees were illegally held, tortured and starved at a clandestine center run by the Interior Ministry, AFP reports.

[Shuriken]

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0525949062.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

I’ve just finished reading Al Franken’s new book, The Truth (with jokes), which I enjoyed a lot. Many of the things he says are thoughts that have already occurred to me, and I found myself nodding in agreement and saying to myself, “It’s about time someone put these things in a book.”

As well researched and documented as Franken’s book is, I know that it’s only a matter of time before political opponents attack its truthfulness. I know that some are already attacking Franken’s previous book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, for using a group of college-funded interns (read: “government money”) to check his facts. This supposedly affirms the belief that liberal opinions rely on patronage from the non-private sector to survive — in other words, if left to duke it out solely in the “free market,” liberalism would get clobbered — as well as the supposed untrustworthy liberal bias of academia. Little appreciation is shown for the idea that Franken, unlike many of his conservative counterparts, wanted his facts checked in the first place. According to this view, a private-funded lie is given more credibility than its public-funded rebuttal.

Already, conservative writers have come out with books and articles challenging what Franken has said. But from the few that I’ve seen, they indulge in the same kind of legalistic parsing of words that conservatives found so unacceptable when practiced (usually regarding less important matters) by the Clinton administration. What’s good for the goose is apparently not good for the gander.

Drastically different views are shaping up about recent history. I’m not saying that competing views of earlier historical events don’t exist, but at least we have a consensus about what those historical events are. When a historian says that Allied troops defeated Axis troops at the end of World War II, no credible person says, “Not so fast.” We may be ending that luxury. Already, conservative publishers like the Regnery Press are putting out books on such subjects as attributing the 9/11 attacks to negligence by the Clinton administration and Al Gore trying to steal the 2000 election from Bush. This isn’t to say that Clinton, Gore, or anyone else I approve of shouldn’t be viewed through a critical lens by historians (they should), but the recent crop of conservative books seem more about character assassination than considerate perspectives on recent events.

I wonder if future history books will say that Bush won the 2000 election in a landslide and that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMD when Bush invaded Iraq just in the nick of time.

[bluemonq]

Where does that count actually come from? The folks who die right then and there?

What about the people who die in route to the hospital or die at the hospital? Given this, the number of dead Americans could be a lot higher. :frown:
the word is that only people who die while in a battlezone are counted as fatalities. once they leave the country, they are not included. some good non-partisan reading:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties_notes.htm
a good excerpt about the "evac" issue:

It is somewhat difficult to imagine that nearly 15,000 people were sufficiently sick or injured to require evacuation from the theater, but that only ten of them subsequently succumbed to the condition that required their evacuation. Overall, the ratio between wounded to killed-in-action is running about ten to one -- about 7,000 wounded in action with over 700 killed in action. The ratio of those evacuated due to combat wounds [over 1,500 as of 01 August 2004] to those who died subsequent to evacuation [eight reported], presents a ratio on the order of two-hundred to one, which is puzzling. It is also puzzling that over 4,000 were evacuated due to non-battle injuries, but only two subsequently died and that over 7,000 were evacuated due to disease, but that none of them died.

on the flipside, holes in the lancet's tally of civilian casualties:

...they did not find 98,000 additional deaths, but a range from 8,000 to 194,000 -- a range is so broad as to be nearly meaningless. And of the 61 actual violent deaths attributed to Coalition forces, three were blamed on ground forces, while 58 deaths were attributed to "helicopter gunships, rockets, or other forms of aerial weaponry" (p. 7). This might suggest that the air war had been infinitely more intense than previously believed, which is difficult to believe. For the "about 100,000 killed" to be correct, almost all of these deaths would have been women and children killed by American air power, at a rate of nearly 200 a day. At least some of these deaths may have been due to the insurgency, since at least some Iraqis interpret insurgent car bombs as American cruise missile attacks.

These numbers would suggest that the US is fighting two wars: a well-publicized ground campaign in which US ground forces have killed over 5,000 enemy combatants this year [at an average rate of maybe 20 per day], and an invisible air campaign in which American helicopters are killing nearly 200 women and children every day. This is difficult to believe.

[Shuriken]

I swear, I would give conservative commentators the benefit of the doubt more often if they would stop making such disingenuous arguments to support their claims. But instead of reasoned logic, they fall back onto extreme either/or propositions or bumper-sticker slogans to paint those with differing perspectives as beyond the pale. Actual thoughtful debate seems to be alien to them.

To illustrate my point, I like to cite some examples by our old friend Max “Give Him The” Boot:


WHITE-FLAG DEMOCRATS

by Max Boot


And the Democrats wonder why they are considered weak on national security? It's not because anyone doubts their patriotism. It's because a lot of people doubt their judgment and toughness.

As if to prove the skeptics right, Democrats have been stepping forth to renounce their previous support for the liberation of Iraq even as Iraqis prepare to vote in a general election. Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards, John Murtha — that's quite a list of heavyweight flip-floppers.

Again, the disingenuous description of the Iraq War as the “liberation” of the country. The main reason that we went to war, Bush told us, was to disarm Saddam Hussein of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction which he was going to use against us at any moment. Removing Hussein from power and the liberation of his people were portrayed by the administration only as secondary effects of this “disarmament.” Now that no stockpiles have been found, the administration and its apologists are insisting that the liberation of Iraq was the primary causus belli. They know that it wasn’t. But they keep referring to our near-unilateral invasion of Iraq as a “liberation” because it makes the administration’s intentions sound more noble than they actually were.

Clinton characteristically wants to have it both ways. He says the invasion was a "big mistake" but that we shouldn't pull out now because "there's a lot of evidence it can still work." (You mean, Mr. President, that we should continue sacrificing soldiers for a mistake?) ...

Well, Bush didn’t leave us much choice. Going into Iraq militarily was indeed a mistake. But now that we’re there, we can’t just immediately pull out. To do so would, as Bush himself now says, lay the groundwork for civil war and the emergence of a Taliban-like theocracy (funny how Bush’s outlook for a post-war outcome before the invasion was a lot rosier). So, yes, Max, thanks to people like you, our troops are put in the position of possibly having to die for a mistake. Maybe democracy in Iraq will indeed work out, as Clinton says, but if it does, it will be despite — not because of — the misguided notion that Jeffersonian democracy can be imposed from without at the point of a gun.

Just a few years ago, it seemed as if the Democrats had finally kicked the post-Vietnam, peace-at-any-price syndrome. Before the invasion of Iraq, leading Democrats sounded hawkish in demanding action to deal with what Kerry called the "particularly grievous threat" posed by Saddam Hussein. But it seems that they only wanted to do something if the cost would be minuscule. Now that the war has turned out to be a lot harder than anticipated, the Democrats want to run up the white flag.

Kerry was going on intelligence — misleading intelligence — passed onto him by the Bush administration. The administration knew — or should have known — that much of the “information” about Hussein’s weapons program came from an Iraqi asylum-seeker in Germany called “Curveball,” a source that German intelligence said was very unreliable. The Bush administration did not pass along to the Congress the caveats and dissenting opinions that were included in the intelligence that they received. Consequently, several Democrats in Congress echoed the administration’s misleading warnings about what an imminent threat Hussein was.

Now that the Congress knows that the information given to it by the administration was so much hooey, several Democrats are speaking out against the war on the basis of what is now known. So, administration apologists are throwing the Democrats’ pre-invasion words back at them in an effort to portray them as flip-floppers. The administration and its supporters must know that this is an intellectually dishonest thing to do, and the fact that they resort to such a tactic, instead of a more honest one, tells me that they have a very untenable position.

Furthermore, it was the Bush administration — not the Democrats — that expected the costs of this war to be miniscule, allocating only a fraction of the troops and treasure that experienced military advisors told them that they would need. Now that the war has turned out to be harder than he anticipated, Bush has shown a stubborn unwilingness to acknowledge the facts on the ground, insisting that we “stay the course.” His speech in Annapolis yesterday was his first real acknowledgement that the war (or counter-insurgency or call it what you will — it won’t change the fact that Americans are needlessly dying) has not been going that well. Choosing between Democrats who recognize that news from Iraq is not good and want to change things accordingly (on the one hand) and a president who will not recognize this and only talks about “staying the course” (on the other), I’ll take the Democrats. To Boot, this is “running up the whaite flag” — what a pathetic argument.

They are offering two excuses for their loss of will. First, they claim they were "misled into war" by a duplicitous administration. But it wasn't George W. Bush who said, "I have no doubt today that, left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will use these terrible weapons [of mass destruction] again." It was Bill Clinton on Dec. 16, 1998. As this example indicates, the warnings issued by Bush were virtually identical to those of his Democratic predecessor.

But Bush’s stampede to war was — to put it sarcastically — not identical to that of his Democratic predecessor (who, of course, did not go to war). Clinton found a way to contain and disempower Hussein without costing the lives of thousands of U.S. troops. I know that some war apologists say that Hussein’s remaining in power was an obvious destabilizing influence on the Middle East, but — given the destabilizing influences that Bush’s invasion has unleashed — it’s not at all obvious to me. Furthermore, the fact that Clinton said similar things about Hussein does not argue against the possibility that the Bush administration indeed misled the country to war. Bush said that Hussein was an imminent threat; Clinton did not.

The Democrats' other excuse is that they never imagined that Bush would bollix up post-invasion planning as badly as he did. It's true that the president blundered, but it's not as if things usually go smoothly in the chaos of conflict. In any case, it's doubtful that the war would have been a cakewalk even if we had been better prepared....

But throughout the build-up to war, Bush portrayed the invasion as something that would be quick and relatively bloodless. Then-CIA director George Tenet told Bush that the invasion would be a “cakewalk.” Now that Bush’s propaganda has proved untrue, it’s the Democrats’ fault in the Republican-controlled Congress that things haven’t gone as smootly as Bush said?

Even most Republican senators are demanding a withdrawal strategy. But it is the Democrats who are stampeding toward the exits. Apparently the death of about 2,100 soldiers over the course of almost three years is more than they can bear. Good thing these were not the same Democrats who were running the country in 1944, or else they would have pulled out of France after the loss of 5,000 Allied servicemen on D-Day....

This is a duplicitous argument that really drives me up the wall, and other war apologists have made it. Conservatives keep comparing the war in Iraq to the Civil War or World War II and wonder what Iraq War opponents would have done in those situations. I’ll state the obvious: The Civil War was a war of necessity. World War II was a war of necessity. The war in Iraq is a war of choice. We didn’t need to invade Iraq when we did or the way we did. And I would submit that we did not need to invade Iraq at all. The fact that war apologists keep making such a dishonest comparison of the Iraq War to wars of necessity also tells me that their position is a dishonest one.

"Things may develop faster than we imagine," Al Qaeda's deputy commander, Ayman Zawahiri, apparently [!] wrote to Abu Musab Zarqawi, the top terrorist in Iraq. "The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam — and how they ran and left their agents — is noteworthy." Even more noteworthy is that so many Democrats seem so sanguine about letting history repeat itself.

Unfortunately, if there is any sanguinity, I think it’s from war supporters affected by “Gulf War syndrome.” Now, I supported the Gulf War back in 1991, and I support it today. I think that Saddam Hussein did an absolutely monstrous thing by invading Kuwait, and it was right for President George H.W. Bush and an actual coalition of the international community to drive Hussein out of that country, out of a respect for international borders. So, although I usually prefer peace to war, I’m not in the peace-at-all-costs camp, and I was relieved that the 1991 Gulf War was over so quickly and with a minimal loss of life.

However, because of the Gulf War, I think that a lot of war buffs began to think of military conflict as something that could be waged quickly and easily. They ignored the prudent way that the elder President Bush put together a genuine international force in the build-up to war — assembling a true coalition, getting U.N. approval, etc. — which was largely responsible for the Gulf War’s success. And these war buffs began to think that America, as the world’s only superpower, could do whatever it jolly well pleased around the world. In doing so, they overlooked some of the obvious similarities between Vietnam and Iraq — for instance, between the “Gulf of Tonkin incident” and WMD, the lack of a realistic exit strategy for either, etc. — which made the possibiity of a quagmire more likely.

Lately, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this is what went down: Being run by oil executives, the current Bush administration wanted control of Iraq’s petroleum from the moment it entered office. They made plans for an invasion of Iraq and eventually saw the 9/11 attacks as an opening for implementing them. Neocons in the administration then cherry-picked intelligence, however dubious its origin, and passed it off to an intellectually lazy president as proof that Hussein had meaningful ties to 9/11 and was reconstituting his nuclear-arms program. Bush and his surrogates then went around the country saying that Hussein was an imminent threat to America and questioning the patriotism of anyone who said otherwise.

Now that the administration’s dire warnings have been utterly discredited, the Bush administration and its apologists are changing their story about why we went in and what they told us at the time. To say that this is dishonest would be an understatement. And the fact that conservative commentators are making such deceitful arguments in support of the war tells me that the administration’s reasons for war were deceitful from the very beginning.

Unfortunately, you can’t reduce all of this to a bumper sticker, so I imagine that most Americans will continue to be bamboozled by Bush’s lies.

[Leinad]

GRRRRRR:mad:

[Faithless]

Some of the stories coming out of Iraq are worth more then a blip in a rant.

[Shuriken]

One thing that I’m real sick of hearing is that liberals have “declared war” on Christmas. Hey, if saying “Merry Christmas” is the best, most heartfelt way for you to wish someone a good holiday season, then by all means, say it.

But when the government or some business says “Happy Holidays” instead, I think that’s a good thing because it’s more inclusive.

The holidays seem to have less and less to do with Christianity and more and more to do with conspicuous consumption. I would think that Christians would be relieved to dissociate one of their most holy days with a holiday that — increasingly — has more to do with money than spirituality.

But there are a lot of Christians out there who want the government to favor Christianity over other religions and theisms. If the U.S. government does not show official bias to Christianity, some Christians feel that they are being discriminated against.

But we liberals are not out to “declare war” on Christianity or “drive God from the public square” (I doubt that they’re even possible to do). We just do want the government not to prefer one religion or belief system over another. America is a country of religious diversity, as well as racial diversity. We should honor and respect that.

[Shuriken]

Duh-bya has nominated ultra-conservative Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. It is the president’s prerogrative to nominate whomever he (or — if the fates allow — she) chooses. Just as it’s the Senate’s prerogative to ascertain that the nominee is a wise (in both senses of the word) choice. After Bush was (re-?) elected in November 2004, I knew that it would only be a matter of time before the legacy of the Warren Court — a legacy of fairness — was jeopardized.

One would hope that a president re-elected with a measly 51% margin would acknowledge the substantial 49% of the country who voted against him, and that he would look to a moderate choice for the High Court. But with George W., that’s just too much to hope for. For him, a win — no matter how narrow or how dubious — is a win. He’s deaf to all criticism, however well taken, and seems perfectly content to be president of the Republican Party — the Democrats and liberals of America be damned.

When Bush nominated his legal advisor, Harriet Miers, to the Court earlier this year, she seemed agreeably moderate, but her nomination implicitly said volumes more about the president’s insularity and his rewarding of loyalty than it ever did about Miers’s qualification for the job. Indeed, it was Miers’s very non-committal stance on such red-meat red-state issues as abortion and gun control that led Bush’s base to object to her nomination. Her withdrawal on laughably disingenuous grounds and her replacement with the hard-core conservative Alito also speak volumes about Bush being more devoted to his narrow base than he is to the country as a whole.

The “smoking gun” regarding Alito’s hard-core conservative views came in the form of a 1985 application to the Reagan administration’s Department of Justice, in which Alito blatantly proclaimed that the Constitution did not protect a woman’s right to choose or racial “quotas.” Some conservative apologists are now saying that this statement reflected only the youthful views of an eager job applicant, and at any rate, Alito would never allow his personal views to interfere with his judicial views. But syndicated columnist Marianne Means concisely rebuts all of these that-was-then arguments:

“Argument one: He was only 35 at the time of the Reagan job application, and he is a wiser person now. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) quickly demolished that one, pointing out that by the time he had attained the age of 35, he had served in the Senate for five years, and nobody ever gave him a pass for youthful voting mistakes.

“Argument two: Alito was an advocate seeking a job and therefore the document should not be considered definitive. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) wasn't impressed by that dodge. ‘Why shouldn’t we consider the answers that you're giving today an application for another job?’ Kennedy inquired. Kennedy suggested that if Alito would sacrifice principle to pander to a prospective employer back then, why wouldn't he do so now?

“Argument three: Alito respects precedent. Phooey. As a lower-court judge, he had no choice but to do so. But on the Supreme Court, he has the power to fiddle with precedents all he wants. It's been done before.”

If events continue on their present course, it will only be a matter of time before Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized abortion as a woman’s constitutional right, is overturned. This saddens me. I don’t say this as any great fan of abortion. If a woman is contemplating getting an abortion but still has some doubts, I would encourage her not to go through with the procedure. But if she does want to have one, it should be in a safe and legal setting, preferrably before the fetus is viable. The choice should be hers. Most importantly, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said, if a woman is compelled by others to carry a pregnancy to term, this puts her at a disadvantage with her male competitors — who would never face the physical predicament of pregnancy — on the job market. In this instance, abortion is an equalizer.

I am in favor of reasonable limitations on abortion, but every piece of abortion-limiting legislation that I have heard of seems more like a bad-faith means to overturn or disempower Roe than a good-faith solution to a legislative need. Some pro-choice liberals argue, quite sensibly, that abortion should remain legal but is not in the Constitution, and therefore, Roe ought to be overturned. But at the moment, constitutionality is the only thing keeping abortion legally alive. If the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe anytime soon, I’m sure the Republican-dominated Congress would quickly ram through a bill outlawing abortion — with Senate Republicans probably employing the “nuclear option” to thwart any Democratic fillibuster.

The sad thing is that this is a country of great legal talent, both conservative and liberal. If presidents were to nominate judges based on the distinction of their legal performance — whether they were pro-Roe or anti-abortion — we could have a Supreme Court of which we could all be proud. Instead, we now have a “stealth” court, a court where the nominees have little paper trail and opaque legal opinions. Once they get on the Court, we finally realize how conservative their opinions are.

As much as I appreciate many of Justice David Souter’s opinions, he was also a stealth judge, nominated for his ideological opacity and not his judicial distinctiveness. The Republicans who voted for Souter obviously thought that they were getting a conservative, and he surprised them. But one Souter does not legitimate this ill-advised way to choose justices with lifetime tenure, and President Clinton wisely — and realistically — conferred with Senate Republicans before nominating Justices Ginsberg and Bryer.

Some conservatives will say that that we have a “stealth” Supreme Court because of the hostile way Democrats treated the nomination of openly conservative jurist Robert Bork, but Bork was nominated by President Reagan more for his ideology than his legal reasoning.

Alito’s nomination is the logical result of picking judges in a highly politicized atmosphere. It marks a sad predicament where true believers try to overturn a Supreme Court decision that they don’t like, instead of respecting it. But the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the law of the land. And it’s sad to see it subjected to the forces of petty politics. Is it any wonder that we get a Court majority that writes such intellectually dishonest, results-oriented decisions as the election-subverting Bush vs. Gore?

[Leinad]

i'm fuming, right nnnnnnnnow:mad: :mad:

we humans need a TIME MACHINE!!! GRRRRRR:mad: :mad: :mad:

we humans need a TIME MACHINE!!! GRRRRRR:mad: :mad: :mad:

[bluemonq]

there's a !@#$%% splinter in my palm but i can't see it! it !@#$% hurts like hell.

[Shuriken]

In an unusual and agreeable move, President Bush took some questions from his audience for a speech in Philadelphia, an audience that was (reportedly) not pre-screened. As a gesture of reaching beyond his insular White House bubble, Bush’s question-taking was welcome. However, I thought that his answers were incomplete, especially his answer about why his administration continually associates Saddam Hussein with 9/11. Here is how Bloomberg News reported Bush’s answer:


Asked why he and other members of his administration continue linking the conflict in Iraq to the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on the U.S., Bush said the attacks in 2001 “changed my look on foreign policy.”

Most of the world agreed “that Saddam Hussein was a threat,” Bush said. “The 9/11 attacks accentuated that threat, as far as I'm concerned.”

...

Bush said he had no regrets about going to war, even after finding the threat from Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was empty.

“Knowing what I know today, I'd make the decision again,” Bush said in response to one question. “Removing Saddam Hussein makes this world a better place and America a safer country.”

[Applause from audience.]


Dear Mr. President:

You say that America is “a safer country” because you overthrew Saddam Hussein in an unprovoked military action. All right, that is your opinion. But how would you back that opinion up? What can you point to that would quantify how much safer America is than it was when Hussein was in power? And saying that the Iraqis will soon be holding democratic elections isn’t a good enough answer; there’s no guarantee that Iraqi elections will create a country that doesn’t produce terrorists. I don’t ask this question as any great fan of Saddam Hussein, and so far, the fact that this villainous tyrant is now out of power is the very thin silver lining to the dark cloud that is Iraq. As you know, Mr. President, simply saying something is true doesn’t make it so.

It could be argued that America is less safe now than it was when Hussein held Iraq in his iron fist. Even leaving aside the obvious example that our brave troops are in harm’s way now that Hussein has been overthrown, the reverse of what you say may very well be the more demonstrable position.

By deciding to go to war in a hasty manner, with an insufficient number of soldiers, poorly funded, and without a true international coalition to support us with troops and treasure, you have now strained our armed forces, strained our economy, and strained this country’s international standing. By ordering troops into Iraq, you also stretched thin the U.S. forces in Afghanistan — a nation that actually was directly involved in 9/11 — and made their job of rebuilding the post-Taliban country more difficult than it needed to be.

And by invading a Muslim country that our troops couldn’t leave in a timely way, our military presence is now viewed with suspicion by the Arab world as an army of occupation, and this perception doubtlessly encourages Muslims around the world to sneak into Iraq and help fuel the insurgency. How does any of this make us safer?

Also, by rushing to war against a nuclear-weapons program that didn’t exist, you enabled Iran and North Korea, two countries with better documented unconventional-weapons systems, to resume theirs. Now, with our soldiers and diplomats distracted by the chaos in Iraq, it seems more likely (but hopefully not inevitable) for Iran or North Korea to deliver a nuclear device into the hands of anti-U.S. terrorists. Again, how does this make us safer?

As monstrous as his dictatorship was, at least Saddam Hussein kept a lid on the ethnic and religious tensions in Iraq that get in the way of smoothly establishing a successful democracy there, the same tensions that now put our troops in danger. Though cruel, Hussein maintained a secular state in a widening sea of Islamic fundamentalism, and terrorists find greater refuge in this theocratic philosophy, I would submit, than they ever found in Hussein’s regime. Rather than “accentuating” any perceived threat by Hussein, the 9/11 attacks demonstrated the destructive religious forces that Hussein’s dictatorship kept in check. Once again, how are we now safer?

It’s hard to say this stuff without sounding like a supporter of tyrannical regimes, which I most definitely am not. Unfortunately, not every place on the planet is conducive to U.S.-style democracy, as much as I wish it were otherwise. If the country of Iraq had not been artificially carved by colonial Britain out of three different ethnic regions of the defeated Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the history of the land may have played itself out differently, and a dictator like Hussein might never have emerged. But your administration didn’t seem all that interested in Iraqi history. In particular, it didn’t seem to concern itself with how post-invasion U.S. forces would pacify an ethnically heterogenous country vastly different from the more homogenous countries of Germany and Japan, countries successfully pacified by the Allies after World War II. But perhaps democracy could have eventually arisen in Iraq without us invading it.

And for all your uncompromising talk about America not abiding this particular dictator, Mr. President, he was abided by several U.S. administrations, including your father’s, before his fatal mistake of invading Kuwait in 1990. Also, this particular dictator may be gone, but others still exist. Do you propse overthrowing them militarily as well?

So, Mr. President, I strongly question your unsupported assertion that America is now safer than it was when Hussein was still in power. The next time that you make this dubious claim, I would like to see hard evidence for it.

[Shuriken]

One Mr. Kirk Taber of Roseville, California, begins his letter to the L.A. Times thusly:

Hell hath no fury like a whiney fringe partisan scorned. While Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) often represents voices on the leftmost fringe of partisan clap-trappery...

Note the use of the terms “whiney” and “clap-trappery.” Just what is it about Sen. Leahy’s constituency that makes it “whiney”? What is it about “leftmost” speech that makes it “clap-trappery”? Mr. Taber doesn’t explain. If he were to use more value-neutral terms in his letter, I would probably be able to follow his argument more easily.

But Mr. Taber is in good conservative company. By characterizing liberal speech as “whining,” bumper-sticker conservatives are able to dismiss it without dealing with any issues in a substantive manner. This makes them difficult to argue with, and I wish they would stop it.

Or am I just whining?

[Shuriken]

I received this e-mail a couple of days ago:


http://readingtokids.org/Tribute/HelgaHung.jpg

Dear Friends of Reading to Kids:

It is with great sadness that I pass along the news to you that longtime volunteer Helga Hung died in a car accident Saturday afternoon on her way home from the reading clubs. Helga was 31-years-old and an elementary school teacher in Pasadena.

Helga first volunteered with Reading to Kids in August 2000. Since then, Helga volunteered at 38 reading clubs (all but one at Esperanza Elementary School). To understand the magnitude of her impact on Reading to Kids, you have to know that out of the almost 5,000 people who have volunteered with us since May 1999, Helga ranked an astonishing 14th overall in total reading clubs! In 2003, Helga joined our Reading to Kids Taskforce and quickly became a co-chair of the Community Outreach Committee and then of the Volunteer Relations Committee. Helga was directly responsible for interacting with many of the volunteer groups who participate with Reading to Kids today. Helga was also a project leader with L.A. Works, coordinating volunteers who! join us from that fine organization.

Helga was a beautiful woman, but if that's all that you knew about Helga, then you really didn't know her at all. Helga never tried to be popular. She never had to. People were drawn to her because she was, without a doubt, one of the kindest, most generous, most positive and supportive people you could possibly meet. A beautiful person inside and out, she was always giving — always thinking about someone else. She made this world a better place wherever she went, whether it was through her volunteering, her art, or by just being herself.

Helga's friendly, smiling face was one of those fixtures we always knew that we could expect to see at R2K on any given Saturday morning. Helga had a generous spirit and gave her heart and soul to volunteering with Reading to Kids and L.A. Works. As one of her fellow volunteers remarked, "Among all her qualities, the one I will remember the most is this — every day I saw Helga was a good day. She just made people feel good to be around her."

Helga was our delight. Her loss is so hard and we miss her so much because she gave us so much joy, so often. We feel blessed to have known someone who was so filled with life and love and spirit. She will always be with us.

And so, it is now our privilege to carry on the great legacy of volunteerism that Helga has left behind. Over the next few weeks, we will be planning many ways to honor Helga's name and her memory. We have started by creating a tribute page for her: http://readingtokids.org/Tribute/HelgaHung.html. Please visit that page, and if you have a message of memory that you would like to include, please e-mail it to us at info@readingtokids.org. We have also added a lasting tribute to Helga on our home page. On the upper right corner there is now a small shooting star with the initials HH inside.

Although Helga's passing is a tragedy, the life she lived should inspire us to be better people. The obvious lesson to be learned from her passing is that we must treat life as precious because we never know what is coming. The deeper, more profound lesson, comes not from her death, but from her life. One thing that cannot be ignored about Helga is that she spent a great deal of her time helping others and she was an amazingly joyous person. For Helga, giving back to the community was part of who she was, not just something she did. Upon first glance, it might not make sense, but Helga's life should teach us that the more you give, the more you truly do receive.

To honor Helga's memory and all that Helga did and stood for, the best way would be to give back to your community. Please sign up for a reading club, register for an L.A. Works project (http://laworks.com), or go on-line to volunteermatch.org (http://volunteermatch.org) to find a volunteer opportunity that's right for you. And when you do that act of volunteering, please bring a friend. That's what Helga was all about. She showed up, and she brought people. She made volunteering fun, and she showed others that volunteering is fun. If any of you had the pleasure of reading with Helga over the last five years, you know that you experienced something special.

Helga, although you may no longer be with us in body, you will always be with us in spirit, and your memory will enable us to continue to make sure that our Saturday mornings are smiley and sunny, just as you liked them.

Helga Hung, dear friend, may you rest in peace.


Jason Axe
Reading to Kids
1600 Sawtelle Blvd, Suite 210
Los Angeles, CA 90025
(310) 479-7455
(310) 479-7435 (FAX)
info@readingtokids.org

[Shuriken]

A lot has been on my mind lately about the Bush administration and its dubious relation to truth and reality. But I just haven’t been up for writing anything recently. Maybe I’ll get my strength up next week.

Uh oh, here comes Dick Cheney with a hunting rifle. Gotta go...

[Napoleon Chynamite]

Maggie Q is friggin' hot. Oh oops I guess this isn't a rant. But dayum.

[Shuriken]

http://www.siamzone.com/images/rest.gif

Maggie Q is friggin' hot. Oh oops I guess this isn't a rant. But dayum.

Hahahahahahahaha!

Yes, I should write about Maggie Q instead. Does she engage in warrantless wiretapping too?

[Shuriken]

One Mr. Orlando V. Griego of Carlsbad writes a letter to the Los Angeles Times, about the funeral of Coretta Scott King, that goes as follows:

As a minority and follower of King's message, I was appalled to see the funeral of the first lady of the civil rights movement turn into a political circus. At a time when Coretta King should have been eulogized, some took the opportunity to make political statements directed at Bush. It was a disgrace to the memory of the Kings.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said: "Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true." Coretta King's funeral appeared to exemplify this "hate" in various forms, and I, as a minority, was embarrassed by it.

Mr. Griego obviously feels that voicing opposition to Bush — in his presence — at Coretta Scott King’s funeral was inappropriate. If things were different, I might agree with him. If Bush were intellectually honest and open, frequently exposing himself to differing opinions and regularly making a good-faith effort to argue (rather than petulantly assert) his own opinion, I might agree that turning eulogies for Mrs. King into political statements would have been against the spirit of her funeral. But the Bush administration has turned out to be the most secretive, most isolated, most ethically dubious White House in recent history. Great pains are taken by the administration these days to shield Bush from uncomfortable facts that he doesn’t want to hear, while he dismisses off-handedly those few truths that do get through. Mrs. King’s funeral presented a rare opportunity to “speak truth to power.”

But Mr. Griego goes further. He says that what was uttered during the funeral was “hate.” Really? How so? My dictionary defines “hate” as “intense hostility.” The comments that I heard from the funeral did not sound hostile or intemperate; rather, they sounded well-reasoned and grounded in fact. And since Mrs. King was a great anti-war activist, I thought that her funeral was an excellent forum to drive home a simple fact: Bush has not yet owned up to his conflict in Iraq being a needless war of choice based on (at best) flawed, faulty intelligence. How is that “hate”?

More importantly, how does that compare to the mud and filth flung at President Clinton by many Republican office-holders during his administration. When he was president, Clinton couldn’t sneeze without the Republican-controlled Congress investigating him and implying some nefarious purposes behind his actions. Now, the Bush administration can hold detainees without charge indefinitely, order warrantless wiretaps, and mislead this country into war — and Congress looks the other way.

The impression that I’m getting is that is was okay for Republicans to attack Clinton’s presidency because it was “pre-9/11,” while even the most sober, level-headed, and constructive criticism of the Bush presidency is not to be tolerated because it is “post-9/11” and “endangers our troops.” If you’re a Republican, double your standards, double your fun.

[Faithless]

A lot has been on my mind lately about the Bush administration and its dubious relation to truth and reality. But I just haven’t been up for writing anything recently. Maybe I’ll get my strength up next week.

Uh oh, here comes Dick Cheney with a hunting rifle. Gotta go...
The fucker should be tried on war crimes.

But I'll take his impeachment, if we can get a democrat lead congress.

[Shuriken]

Last week, I was going to link a news story about New Zealand director Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, Die Another Day), who is part-Maori, being arrested in southern California for soliciting sex while he was in drag. But I couldn’t do it.

Western society too often conflates Asian men with sexual impotence or — more pertinent to the Tamahori case — sexual ambiguity. I know the reason for this: Western popular culture too often panders to a white-male audience by sexually neutralizing Asian men and hyper-sexualizing Asian women. But it’s one more regrettable incident that — however inadvertantly — affirms the stereotype.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of Bush’s re-election as the political equivalent of the awful television program that becomes number one on the Nielsen ratings. Just because more people watch The Jerry Springer Show than watch Gilmore Girls, for example, does that make Jerry Springer the better program?

Okay, a (narrow) majority chose Bush for president over John Kerry, but does that necessarily mean that the choice was a wise one?

As I have been reading the opinions of Bush apologists recently, the fact that Bush has prevailed in the 2004 election and other endeavors is everything; the fact that Bush’s various victories have been so narrow and so polarizing means nothing to them. The assertion “Bush won the election” settles everything. A win is a win, apparently.

To me, the great thing about American constitutional democracy is that it establsihed a system in which we could all get along by negotiation. That wonderful tradition is now being trampled by a tyranny of the majority. American government these days is increasingly less about negotiation than about destroying your opponents.

Prayer in public schools? If the majority wants it, says the new thinking, let them have it! What about the constitutional rights of religious minorities? If they are only a minority, comes the reply, their opinion doesn’t count. And there seems to be an increased hostility towards enforcing a minority’s constitutional rights via the courts.

Of course, this is a big U-turn from the 2000 presidential election, where Al Gore won the popular vote, but Bush’s apologists said that the rules governing the Electoral College were more important than the majority’s opinion.

The United States may be a country based on majority rule, but it is also based on the constitutional rights of the minority. It may be heretical to say this, but just because a majority decides on something, that doesn’t always make the decision a good one.

[SunWuKong]

bump

[Shuriken]

I should be taking some satisfaction in Bush’s recent plummet in the polls, but I’m not. Bush’s sagging popularity is, I’m sure, a reflection of the American people’s impatience with the Iraq War. To me, the fundamental flaw with the war is that we were rushed into it dishonestly — whether by outright falsehoods or by a purposeful carelessness with the facts that we ought not to expect from our elected officials.

But if the war had indeed gone more smoothly, whether according to Bush’s pre-invasion best-case scenarios or anything short of disaster, I don’t think that anyone but the most hard-core liberals would be bothering their little heads about the deceitfulness with which Bush needlessly rushed this country into armed conflict.

I’m also not optimistic about Democrats taking back either chamber of Congress this year. One reason is that the Republicans have been so good at selling their ideas — however dishonestly — to a gullible electorate that I wouldn’t be surprised to see them do it again. Let’s face it: If you can sell George W. Bush as acceptable presidential material, you can sell anything.

What I think is going to happen this election year is this: Congressional Republicans — regardless of their past voting records — will “triangulate” (a word usually associated with Bill Clinton) themselves as “moderates” between the conservative Bush and the liberal Democrats. This might work to get them re-elected to the majorities, after which they will again side with Bush and keep tugging Congress in a rightward direction.

I hope that I’m wrong, but the sheer viciousness of the Republican Attack Machine and the sheer unthinkingness of the American voters continue to astound me.

[Shuriken]

Of course there have been mistakes [in the Iraq War]. But it was not a mistake to overthrow Saddam Hussein; it was not a mistake to unleash the forces of democracy in the Middle East.

As you may have read in the news recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is gallivanting around the globe saying what a good thing the war in Iraq is. When challenged about the war, she always reduces it to Saddam Hussein being out of power. I agree that seeing Hussein out of power is a good thing, but Rice speaks as though all of the war’s other attendant elements — chaos, insurgency, factionalism, inadequate planning, inadequate funding, inadequate armoring, overblown misstatements about weapons of mass destruction — don’t enter into discussion. She seems to be saying that the ends (Hussein removed from power) justify the means, however excessive or egregious those means may be.

I would reply to Secretary Rice that, to the contrary, however noble one’s intentions may be, it is a mistake to initiate a war of choice if you don’t have adequate plans to win the peace. In choosing to go to war, the Bush administration relied on unrealsitic assumptions and best-case scenarios to plan for attacking Iraq. Any more pessimistic projections by more experienced experts were dismissed — if not the basis for retribution. Most famously, in 2003, when the Army’s then-Chief of Staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, contradicted the administration’s optimistically small number of troop requirements after the invasion — saying that a more significant numer of combatants would be needed on the ground — the administration prematurely announced his successor to the office, effectively rendering Shinseki an irrelevant lame duck.

So, as good as it is to see an out-of-power Hussein, this single deposed dictator (when there are so many tyrants in the world) doesn’t justify the misleading and sloppy way that the Bush administration rushed to war.

But I’m sure that my argument will fall on deaf ears.

[Martino]

So, as good as it is to see an out-of-power Hussein, this single deposed dictator (when there are so many tyrants in the world) doesn’t justify the misleading and sloppy way that the Bush administration rushed to war.

But I’m sure that my argument will fall on deaf ears.

That's been my standpoint since 2003: http://forums.yellowworld.org/showthread.php?p=207735&highlight=dictators#post207735

http://forums.yellowworld.org/showthread.php?p=433570&highlight=dictators#post433570

What everyone but everyone forgets is that this war was never supposed to be about Saddam. In the months, weeks and days running up to the invasion, President Bush repeatedly said that if Saddam complied with American demands, he'd be left in power.

Getting Saddam out of office only became an 'objective' after it started to become clear there were no WMD.

Very Orwellian.

[Shuriken]

Here is an example of what is so desperately wrong with this country. Supposedly, we, the U.S., are fighting a “war on terror.” However, we can’t have an honest discussion about what this war entails. Virtually all inquiries into Bush’s response to 9/11 or the logistics of the war in Iraq are squelched as “unpatriotic” or “harming the troops.” Our government deserves and demands better. But I’m not sure that “better” is what the voters want.

Take Bush’s recent nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden to be the new director of the CIA. Hayden oversaw the White House’s use of warrantless wiretaps against U.S. citizens, in direct defiance of 1978’s Federal Intelligence Surveilance Act (FISA), which specifies that such wiretapping be done with court oversight. Bush’s nomination of Hayden was a thumb in the eye to his critics. Now, some Democrats want to use the nomination of Hayden as a means to explore Bush’s spy program. And some Republicans welcome this exploration as a way to paint the Democrats as “soft on terrorism” in the run-up to the November elections.

May 9’s Los Angeles Times quotes Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) as saying:

If the president’s opponents hope to argue that we [Republicans are] doing too much to prevent terrorism, that the intelligence agencies are fighting too hard against terrorists around the world, then we look forward to taking that debate to the American people.

This is a nauseating response to a legitimate issue. The Bush administration’s possible excesses in its conduct are misrepresented as “fighting too hard” against terrorism for short-term political advantage. I would have had much more respect for Sen. Cornyn if he had honsetly said: “The administration needs to bypass FISA because...” And I would hope that his reasoning would include (1) why the very un-cumbersome FISA courts were too cumbersome to be dealt with, (2) why the Bush administration never asked Congress to change the FISA law before the wiretapping program was uncovered, and (3) how Bush’s circumventing FISA squares with an open government and the rule of law.

But this is not the kind of discussion that we’re getting. Simply asserting that warrantless wiretapping is a “necessary tool for the fight against terror” and impugning the patriotism of anyone who says otherwise doesn’t make it so.

In other news, White House staff secretary Brett M. Kavanaugh has been nominated by Bush for a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He had previously been a part of Kenneth Starr’s investigation against President Clinton, including writing a draft of Starr’s report saying that Clinton must release mountains of documents for inspection. But Kavanaugh made a 180º turn when entering the Bush White House, arguing that President Bush’s records must be kept secret. This is clearly a double standard, one that conservatives will surely defend by saying that “9/11 changed everything.” If the American people are willing to accept this kind of ruined reasoning, then we deserve to have our constitutional rights eroded.

[TB4000]

Basically saying that there are other alternatives to war or psuedo martial law equates to being a traitor and having hatred for your country.

[Shuriken]

Here is another of my fabled unpublished letters to the Los Angeles Times:


Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2006

IT'S IRAQ, STUPID

Why isn't Bush getting credit for economic growth on his watch?

by Jonah Goldberg


EVEN IF YOU think President Bush deserves the pasting he's getting in the polls on Iraq, domestic spying and other front-page gloom, it's hard to deny he's getting a raw deal on the economy.

Just look at the numbers. The economy grew 4.8% in the first quarter of 2006 (and for the 18th quarter in a row). Manufacturing is surging; construction spending is breaking records. The Dow is surging. Unemployment is 4.7% — lower than average for the last four decades. More than 5 million jobs have been created since 2003. Personal incomes are up more than 6% in the first quarter, and so is consumer confidence. Housing prices have risen dramatically and — knock on wood — it appears the boom isn't ending with a crash, which means that all that increased wealth won't vanish the way the 1990s stock market boom did. Layoffs are way down; productivity keeps moving up. Blacks and Latinos are starting businesses at far above the national average.

And yet, we're soon going to have to start measuring George W. Bush's approval ratings on the Kelvin scale. Sure, there are reasons why some people are grumpy about the economy — the high gas prices, for one. Athough this is surely painful for some, its biggest effect is psychological. The Associated Press recently reported: "Surveys indicate drivers won't be easing off on their mileage, using even more gas than a year ago." If high gas prices hurt so much, why are Americans driving more?

And if the economy is so hot, why isn't Bush getting credit? In the 1990s, the James Carville catechism — "It's the economy, stupid" — was hailed as the distilled essence of all electoral wisdom among liberals. Nonpartisan political scientists assure us that economic performance is the indispensable factor in presidential popularity. So the main reason Bush doesn't get a lot of credit for the booming economy is surely Iraq. The war makes many people feel the country is "on the wrong track" — a view normally prompted by a weak economy.

Of course, there are reasons to fret about the economy: growing entitlements, demographic time bombs, health insurance woes, the national debt and the deficit. But these are perennial concerns. The debt and deficit didn't sour President Reagan's boom, nor did fears of a healthcare crisis sour President Clinton's.

The prevailing pessimism and Bush's unpopularity contradict the usual rule that when the economy booms, so do the president's fortunes.

It's just so unfair. If Clinton "created" those 22 million jobs in the 1990s, and if Bush "lost" a few million jobs in his first term, surely by the same standard Bush has "created" 5 million jobs since 2003. Of course, Republican presidents rarely receive such fairness. The media held Reagan responsible for the 1981-1982 recession but merely darn lucky for the boom that followed. Poppa Bush was blamed for the mild recession in 1991-1992, and, even though it ended on his watch, the media credited Clinton with "fixing" the economy in the 1990s.

So here's the lesson: The idea that any White House "creates" jobs is absurd and always has been. Alas, there is no machine in the West Wing basement churning out job openings for welders and ophthalmologists. The $12-trillion American economy is too big, too diverse and too complicated for the government to "run." Sure, economic policy matters, but the crude standard often used by politicians, political reporters and Hollywood betrays their belief in the cult of governmental power. On the — finally — canceled TV show "The West Wing," the economy was like some giant machine humming along, as long as the right man was at the controls. It doesn't work like that. If Bush's plight helps Americans recognize this, the pasting might be worth it.

To the Editor:

Jonah Goldberg's recounting of recent U.S. economic history ("It's Iraq, stupid," May 18) doesn't jibe with my memory. Goldberg says, "Republican presidents rarely receive such fairness [on the economy]. The media held Reagan responsible for the 1981-1982 recession but merely darn lucky for the boom that followed." Well, I was around in the 1980s, and I don't remember it that way. During that decade's economic rebound, the mainstream media, which I closely followed at the time, referred to it several times as the "Reagan Recovery." I even vividly remember Reagan taking personal credit for the economic uptick during his 1984 re-election campaign, but I don't remember anyone disputing him.

Goldberg goes on to say that "the media credited Clinton with 'fixing' the economy in the 1990s." Maybe it was because President Clinton so clearly shaped his economic policies as compromises with a Republican-controlled Congress, but I don't remember him being credited with the economic boom of the 1990s the way that Reagan was credited with the boom of the 1980s. Only recently and in retrospect have liberal economists begun referring to the 1990s as the "Clinton Prosperity."

If Goldberg is wondering why there is discontent with the current economy, he should re-examine his statement: "Personal incomes are up more than 6% in the first quarter." Other economists say that this is a misleading figure, since the percentage is an average that hides how much more disproportionately incomes are up among wealthier Americans than they are for average families. In Paul Krugman's words, "Average incomes rose, but only because of rising incomes at the top." Furthermore, some social services that used to be better funded by tax dollars, such as health care and student loans, are now being increasingly passed on to the consumer.

But my main complaint with Goldberg's column is that it marks a disturbing tendency among conservative pundits these days. Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress for ten of the last twelve years. A Republican has occupied the White House for the last six years, and opposition to his policies has effectively been paralyzed as "unpatriotic." Furthermore, conservatives now have a commanding presence on the Supreme Court. In short, much of our nation's direction is largely the result of Republican control of our government. Now, conservative commentators like Goldberg are rewriting history to portray Republicans as victims.

Well, I'm not buying it.

[Shuriken]

Sometimes, I think that liberals and conservatives are living on two different planets. Increasingly, it seems that the two groups can’t agree on a common history — much less a common standard for dealing with important tasks ahead.

It appears to me that virtually everything that George W. Bush has done to wage the “war on terror” has been deliberately to help the Republican Party and to hurt the Democratic Party. I think that a truly great U.S. president after 9/11 would have put partisanship aside and established a genuine dialogue among experts of all political pursuasions to determine how to fight Islamic jihadism effectively, while still adhering to the Bill of Rights as closely as possible. Instead, because “national security” has been an issue working in the Republicans’ favor, they constantly use it as a hammer to beat the Democrats. In effect, Bush would rather be President of the Republican Party than President of the United States of America. It didn’t have to be this way.

Now that Bush’s standing has plummeted in the polls, conservative commentators are scolding the American people that they are being too hard on Bush. And I can’t imagine these pundits using the language they do if they were discussing a Democratic president. Here is an example of such a tactic, from conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg, and my replies:

GIVE BUSH A BREAK

The president's most stubborn critics won't stop beating the Iraq and Katrina drums despite much success elsewhere

by Jonah Goldberg

August 31, 2006


Lord knows I have my problems with President Bush. He taps the federal coffers like a monkey smacking the bar for another cocaine pellet in an addiction study. Some of his sentences give me the same sensation as falling backward in one of those "trust" exercises, in which you just have to hope things work out. Yes, the Iraq invasion has gone badly, and to deny this is to suggest that Bush meant for things to turn out this way, which is even crueler than saying he failed to get it right.
But you know what? It's time to cut the guy some slack.

I think that voters have “cut some slack” ever since the 2000 election. I can’t imagine them turning a blind eye to a [b]Democrat with Bush’s poor powers of communication.

Of course, I will get hippo-choking amounts of e-mail from Bush-haters telling me that all I ever do is cut Bush slack. But these folks grade on the curve. By their standards, anything short of demanding that a live, half-starved badger be sewn into his belly flunks.

Maybe lines like “half-starved badger” are primarily meant to be funny, but they are a symptom of a common tendency among conservative commentators: to use extreme language to caricature — and thereby dismiss — people of opposing political tendencies. In other words, Goldberg is setting up a straw man to knock down.

No, we liberals are not demanding that feral animals be sewn to Bush’s belly. All we are asking for is Bush to be held accountable for what he’s done. And it’s hard to have an accountable president when the Republican-controled Congress sees itself primarily as an extension of the Bush White House, rather than a seperate branch of government. In fact, if it weren’t for moderate Republicans like Sens. John McCain and Arlen Specter, I daresay that there wouldn’t be any oversight of Bush at all.

Also, note Goldberg’s use of the word “haters,” which makes our criticisms of Bush sound irrational and unreasonable. What makes these criticisms “hate”? Bush has done virtually nothing to reach out across the aisle. After losing the popular vote in 2000, and winning the presidency only on a technicality, he proceded to govern as if he won in a landslide. When some Democrats compromised in good faith with Bush on some of his pet projects, he would then turn around and campaign against them. After winning the 2004 vote by the narrowest of margins for a sitting president, he proceeded to crow that he had a “mandate” and “political capital.” He continues to use issues to advantage the Republicans and disadvantage the Democrats. He doesn”t consider himself answerable to the 49% of the American voters who voted against him. I wouldn’t call my feelings for Bush “hatred,” but I am very frustrated by his behavior and his unwillingness to compromise. Should I love a guy like this instead?

Besides, the Bush-bashers have lost credibility. The most delicious example came this week when it was finally revealed that Colin Powell's oak-necked major-domo Richard Armitage — and not some star chamber neocon — "outed" Valerie Plame, the spousal prop of Washington's biggest ham, Joe Wilson. Now it turns out that instead of "Bush blows CIA agent's cover to silence a brave dissenter" — as Wilson practices saying into the mirror every morning — the story is, "One Bush enemy inadvertently taken out by another's friendly fire."

Even though Plame was outed inadvertently by Armitage, it seems to me that the Executive Branch was more concerned with concocting an excuse to overthrow Saddam Hussein than it was with the accuracy of Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. (This was the speech where Bush asserted that Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Africa in order to make nuclear bombs, an assertion subsequently challenged by Plame’s husband, former amassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had investigated this charge earlier for the CIA. Conservatives wondered if Plame, an undercover CIA agent specializing in weapons-of-mass-destruction issues, had nominated her husband for the investigation out of nepotism. If so, conservatives contended, Wilson’s conclusions were at least debatable.)

And then there's Hurricane Katrina. Yes, the federal government could have responded better. And of course there were real tragedies involved in that disaster. But you know what? Bad stuff happens during disasters, which is why we don't call them tickle-parties.

The anti-Bush chorus, including enormous segments of the mainstream media, see Katrina as nothing more than a good stick for beating on piñata Bush's "competence." The hypocrisy is astounding because the media did such an abysmal job covering the reality of New Orleans (contrary to their reports, there were no bands of rapists, no disproportionate deaths of poor blacks, nothing close to 10,000 dead, etc.). It seems indisputable that Katrina highlighted the tragedy of New Orleans rather than create it. Long before Katrina, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership, many of whose residents think that it is the job of the federal government to make everyone whole.

The Mississippi coast was hit harder by Katrina than New Orleans was. And although New Orleans' levee failure was a unique problem — one the local leadership ignored for decades — the devastation in Mississippi was in many respects more severe. And you know what? Mississippi has the same federal government as Louisiana, and reconstruction there is going gangbusters while, after more than $120 billion in federal spending, New Orleans remains a basket case. Here's a wacky idea: Maybe it's not all Bush's fault.

Note that Goldberg says nothing about the video of Bush being briefed on Katrina before the hurricane struck, a video that showed an intellectually disengaged president. Also, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which had worked so well under Clinton, became a dumping ground for cronies under Bush, thereby undermining its effectiveness. No, it’s not all Bush’s fault, but I think that a more engaged president wouldn’t have let his response to the disaster get so out of hand.

Then, of course, there's the war on terror. Democrats love to note that Bush hasn't caught Osama bin Laden yet, as if this is the most vital metric for success. Yes, it'd be nice to catch Bin Laden — no doubt Ramsey Clark, the top legal gun for both LBJ and Saddam Hussein, will be looking for a new client soon. [Note Goldberg’s unnecessary dig at a Democratic operative.] But even nicer than catching Bin Laden is not having thousands of dead Americans in New York, Washington and L.A. Contrary to all expert predictions, there hasn't been a successful attack on the homeland since 9/11. Indeed, the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly contains a (typically) long, exhaustively reported cover story by James Fallows about how the U.S. is in fact winning the war on terror, thanks largely to Bush's policies (though Fallows works hard not to credit Bush).

I can’t imagine conservative commentators holding a Democratic president to this low a standard: no Bin Laden, but no new attacks either. This seems especially bewildering when so many conservative pundits are blaming Clinton for not capturing or killing Bin Laden when he was president, such as Rich Lowery’s book Losing Bin Laden. More important to me is that — after the 9/11 attacks, when Bin Laden had actually done something that made his capture imperative — Bush passed up a chance to get the terrorist mastermind in Afghanistan, in order to redeploy U.S. troops for the overthrow of Hussein in Iraq.

Political dissatisfaction with the president rests entirely on Iraq and overall Bush fatigue. The rest amounts to little more than Iraq-motivated brickbats gussied up to look like free-standing complaints. That's how hate works: It looks for more excuses to hate in the same way that fire looks for more stuff to burn.

Again, what makes our criticisms of Bush’s behavior “hate”? I find it very ironic that some conservatives — even lawmakers in Congress! — considered it acceptable political discourse to accuse Clinton of rape and murder when he was president. But even the most sober, fact-based, constructive criticism of Bush’s policies is considered “hate.” To call this a double standard is an understatement.

That's why Bush's Democratic critics flit about like bilious butterflies, exploiting each superficial or transient problem just long enough to score some points in the polls and then moving on. Bush's Medicare plan was an egregious corporate giveaway, they cried, until seniors overwhelmingly reported that they like it. And the Patriot Act? Can anyone even remember what the Democrats were whining about? I think it had something to do with libraries that were never searched.

Look, things could obviously be a lot better. But they could be a lot worse too. John Kerry could be president.

How would a John Kerry presidency be worse?

In the end, Goldberg still hasn’t convinced me that the war in Iraq, the erosion of our constitutional rights, and FEMA’s disastrous response to Katrina are all “superficial or transient problems.” Just the fact that someone is making so far-fetched an argument — in order to tell us that the naked emperor is wearing a wonderful suit of clothes — dismays me no end.

[Shuriken]

Bush is now running around the country, trying to divert the country’s attention from the disaster in Iraq to the overall “war on terror,” his stronger suit in the polls. Voters are probably gullible enough to fall for it. I thought that I would pass along an article that I read in the Los Angeles Times yesterday:


WISE UP, VOTERS

Citizens have a choice about the direction of their country. If only they'd read up before deciding.

by Alan Wolfe

September 10, 2006


Americans may be divided by party, but they are united in ignorance. Seventy percent of them are unaware that Congress passed a prescription drug benefit for the elderly, the most publicized domestic accomplishment of the Bush years.

Nearly 60% are unfamiliar with the Patriot Act and, as a result, are oblivious to the debate taking place in Washington about whether civil liberties should be curtailed in wartime. If Republicans lose control of one or both houses of Congress in November, the message voters deliver will be tempered by the fact that a majority does not know that Republicans currently control both.

Does ignorance matter? For years, scholars argued that it did not. Some pointed out that voters rely on what political scientist Samuel Popkin calls "low-information rationality" when making their decisions; in other words, they respond to cues — Al Gore's sighs, George W. Bush's sneers — that stand in, not always incorrectly, for a candidate's broader policy positions.

Others, such as professors Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro, argue that although each voter may not possess considered views, the mistakes cancel each other out when all views are added up, producing a coherent overall picture. Still others — notably, Stanford University professor Morris Fiorina — claim that voters hold politicians accountable retrospectively; that even if they don't know the details of a candidate's policy positions, they are quite capable of comparing the quality of their lives now with the quality four years ago and judging their elected officials accordingly.

The views of these political scientists once had some merit. Throughout much of the 1970s and into the '80s, voter ignorance, however disturbing to people who teach about politics, did not interfere with how democracy worked because Americans were centrist in their views. Office-seekers understood that and tended to move to the center in search of support, and voters and politicians wound up on the same page. Americans were not harmed by their lack of knowledge because whatever the president or Congress did was more or less in accord with what most Americans wanted.

In recent years, the conditions that made democracy work in the face of ignorance remain in place — except one. Most Americans continue to remain moderate in their views: They think abortion should be legal but rare; that Social Security should be reformed but not privatized, and that the war against Iraq was justified [?], although they would have preferred to have had the support of the United Nations.

Yet the nation's current leaders no longer share voters' centrist inclinations; the Bush administration prefers judges who would restrict the legality of abortion, seeks to change the basic principles that have undergirded Social Security since the 1930s and went to war without the support of the United Nations. Not only are voters and politicians no longer on the same page, they are not even reading from the same book.

In these more ideological times, voter ignorance, far from being a relatively harmless quirk, becomes a serious problem for democratic performance. Politicians, for one thing, come to rely on ignorance to get what they want; lack of political knowledge, in that sense, is not a byproduct of the public's failure to read newspapers or talk with their neighbors but is the result of systematic efforts to mislead the public by those claiming to represent them.

All politicians try to "spin" the truth to their advantage, as we saw during the Clinton years. But no one has ever gone to the extremes of the Bush administration in suppressing data hostile to its policies, punishing those who leak information needed by the public to make informed decisions, paying off journalists sympathetic to its causes or repeating claims widely known by everyone else to be false.

The Bush administration does not do these things because it is mindlessly mendacious; it does them because it is keenly aware that the more informed the public becomes, the less likely it will be to support what the administration hopes to accomplish. And to the degree that the public fails to pay attention to the administration's objectives, it harms itself. Only later — when voters discover that the war in Iraq cost more than projected or that Medicare pays less than promised — do they realize how much their lack of attention has cost them.

Voters could respond to this attempt to impose on them policies they do not support by overcoming their political ignorance. But this they rarely do. Instead, Americans tend to grow increasingly cynical about politics; the distrust they express toward their leaders is as consistent a finding among political scientists as their lack of political knowledge.

When politicians try to manipulate them, Americans frequently respond not by informing themselves about events but by concluding that they were correct to distrust politicians in the first place. This creates a vicious cycle in which ignorance breeds manipulation that then justifies further ignorance. Why pay attention to politics, Americans ask themselves, if politicians are just going to ignore what we want?

Given the disheartening times through which so many Americans have lived — the 1960s, Vietnam, Watergate, the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 election, Sept. 11, the Iraq war and a looming constitutional crisis over presidential authority during the Bush years — it is perhaps understandable that they learn so little about politics and distrust it so much. Such a conclusion, however, can take us only so far.

Ultimately, the American public's lack of information about politics stems from one fact only: Americans have a choice concerning the future of their democracy, and they are not exercising that choice responsibly.
This is a harsh conclusion to reach, and I do not reach it lightly. One always wants to give ordinary Americans the benefit of the doubt; Americans tend to be reasonable in their views and moderate in their inclinations.

But reasonableness is not enough, not in this contentious age. Leaders determined to achieve ideologically driven agendas have raised the stakes for Americans, brilliantly taking advantage of their ignorance of and hostility toward politics to pursue policies that can only prey on their fears and destroy their hopes.

American democracy will only be as good as Americans are willing to make it. If it is to perform better, they will have to work harder.

***

ALAN WOLFE teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of "Does American Democracy Still Work?" The book will be out later this month from Yale University Press.

[snailpoo]

Sometimes, I think that liberals and conservatives are living on two different planets. Increasingly, it seems that the two groups can’t agree on a common history — much less a common standard for dealing with important tasks ahead.

It appears to me that virtually everything that George W. Bush has done to wage the “war on terror” has been deliberately to help the Republican Party and to hurt the Democratic Party.

Hrm. Take a guess at who said this, when, and why.

The administration began discussion of Iraq by almost belittling the importance of arms inspections. Today the administration has refocused their aim and made clear we are not in an arbitrary conflict with one of the world's many dictators, but a conflict with a dictator whom the international community left in power only because he agreed not to pursue weapons of mass destruction. That is why arms inspections--and I believe ultimately Saddam's unwillingness to submit to fail-safe inspections--is absolutely critical in building international support for our case to the world. That is the way in which you make it clear to the world that we are contemplating war not for war's sake, and not to accomplish goals that don't meet international standards or muster with respect to national security, but because weapons inspections may be the ultimate enforcement mechanism, and that may be the way in which we ultimately protect ourselves.

I am pleased that the Bush administration has recognized the wisdom of shifting its approach on Iraq. That shift has made it possible, in my judgment, for the Senate to move forward with greater unity, having asked and begun to answer the questions that best defend our troops and protect our national security. The Senate can now make a determination about this resolution and, in this historic vote, help put our country and the world on a course to begin to answer one fundamental question--not whether to hold Saddam Hussein accountable, but how.

I have said publicly for years that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein pose a real and grave threat to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region. Saddam Hussein's record bears this out.

I have talked about that record. Iraq never fully accounted for the major gaps and inconsistencies in declarations provided to the inspectors of the pre-Gulf war weapons of mass destruction program, nor did the Iraq regime provide credible proof that it had completely destroyed its weapons and production infrastructure.

As bad as he is, Saddam Hussein, the dictator, is not the cause of war. Saddam Hussein sitting in Baghdad with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction is a different matter. In the wake of September 11, who among us can say, with any certainty, to anybody, that those weapons might not be used against our troops or against allies in the region? Who can say that this master of miscalculation will not develop a weapon of mass destruction even greater--a nuclear weapon--then reinvade Kuwait, push the Kurds out, attack Israel, any number of scenarios to try to further his ambitions to be the pan-Arab leader or simply to confront in the region, and once again miscalculate the response, to believe he is stronger because he has those weapons?

And while the administration has failed to provide any direct link between Iraq and the events of September 11, can we afford to ignore the possibility that Saddam Hussein might accidentally, as well as purposely, allow those weapons to slide off to one group or other in a region where weapons are the currency of trade? How do we leave that to chance?

[Arex]

^ I've seen that posted here before.=)

While I agree that Kerry's speech suggests that people on both sides (both Democrats and Republicans) had mistaken beliefs as to whether Saddam possessed WMDs, I think that first paragraph bears highlighting as well:

The administration began discussion of Iraq by almost belittling the importance of arms inspections. Today the administration has refocused their aim and made clear we are not in an arbitrary conflict with one of the world's many dictators, but a conflict with a dictator whom the international community left in power only because he agreed not to pursue weapons of mass destruction. That is why arms inspections--and I believe ultimately Saddam's unwillingness to submit to fail-safe inspections--is absolutely critical in building international support for our case to the world. That is the way in which you make it clear to the world that we are contemplating war not for war's sake, and not to accomplish goals that don't meet international standards or muster with respect to national security, but because weapons inspections may be the ultimate enforcement mechanism, and that may be the way in which we ultimately protect ourselves.The way I read that statement is that the authorization of (and threat of) war was to be used as a stick to hold over Saddam's head in the event that he did not permit inspections. It was the still Bush administration that jumped the gun and started dropping bombs, even after Saddam finally agreed to inspections and despite protests by U.N. inspectors on the ground.

[snailpoo]

The way I read that statement is that the authorization of (and threat of) war was to be used as a stick to hold over Saddam's head in the event that he did not permit inspections. It was the still Bush administration that jumped the gun and started dropping bombs, even after Saddam finally agreed to inspections and despite protests by U.N. inspectors on the ground.

Then how do you explain the very next paragraph:

I am pleased that the Bush administration has recognized the wisdom of shifting its approach on Iraq. That shift has made it possible, in my judgment, for the Senate to move forward with greater unity, having asked and begun to answer the questions that best defend our troops and protect our national security. The Senate can now make a determination about this resolution and, in this historic vote, help put our country and the world on a course to begin to answer one fundamental question--not whether to hold Saddam Hussein accountable, but how.

Better example, said POST invasion:

George, I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the President made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him.


Meaning, yes, he had reservations, BUT he was ok with the way things went.

http://www.factcheck.org/article269.html

Note how the Kerry quotes become increasingly anti-war, and note the timing of the polling results leading up to New Hampshire primaries.



Which brings us back to:


Sometimes, I think that liberals and conservatives are living on two different planets. Increasingly, it seems that the two groups can’t agree on a common history — much less a common standard for dealing with important tasks ahead.

[Arex]

I am pleased that the Bush administration has recognized the wisdom of shifting its approach on Iraq.This statement, to me, flows directly from his preceding statement that, "weapons inspections may be the ultimate enforcement mechanism, and that may be the way in which we ultimately protect ourselves."

That shift has made it possible, in my judgment, for the Senate to move forward with greater unity, having asked and begun to answer the questions that best defend our troops and protect our national security. The Senate can now make a determination about this resolution and, in this historic vote, help put our country and the world on a course to begin to answer one fundamental question--not whether to hold Saddam Hussein accountable, but how.By this statement, I'm pretty sure he did not mean we should go to war irrespective of the outcome of the weapons inspections, and without international support, at least not when he originally said it. This is evidenced by his preceding statement that, "That is why arms inspections--and I believe ultimately Saddam's unwillingness to submit to fail-safe inspections--is absolutely critical in building international support for our case to the world." In other words, it was a call for the use of force if certain conditions were met (i.e., Saddam fails to comply with inspections).

So yes, people from both sides erroneously believed that Saddam possessed WMDs, and everyone agreed that WMDs in the hands of Saddam was a bad thing, but it was still the President that ultimately decided to ignore the U.N. and plunge the U.S. into the war without significant international support and without a well thought out exit strategy.

At any rate, I'm not really sure what any of this has to do with Shuriken's original statement anymore which, I believe, was directed at the Goldberg column he posted.=)

[snailpoo]

By this statement, I'm pretty sure he did not mean we should go to war irrespective of the outcome of the weapons inspections, and without international support, at least not when he originally said it.

But then read what Kerry said AFTER the invasion but BEFORE the New Hampshire primary:
George, I said at the time I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein, and when the President made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him.
Whose interpretation is closer?


At any rate, I'm not really sure what any of this has to do with Shuriken's original statement anymore which, I believe, was directed at the Goldberg column he posted.=)

The tie-in is simple:

It appears to me that virtually everything that George W. Bush has done to wage the “war on terror” has been deliberately to help the Republican Party and to hurt the Democratic Party. I think that a truly great U.S. president after 9/11 would have put partisanship aside and established a genuine dialogue among experts of all political pursuasions to determine how to fight Islamic jihadism effectively, while still adhering to the Bill of Rights as closely as possible.

While Shuriken lamblasts Goldberg's criticisms for not recognizing the past, neither does he:


How would a John Kerry presidency be worse?
Imagine if Dean, the ONLY anti-war candidate in pre-New Hampshire, hadn't polled better than Kerry.


And no, this is NOT a Kerry bashing thread. Part of recognizing the past is to remember the BIPARTISAN support for the Iraq war that included many (but, of course, not all) of the Democrats who now seem to have selective amnesia for their own actions while they accuse Bush of doing things they supported.

[Arex]

^ I think it's clear from Kerry's statements, both before the invasion, and during his campaigning, that he thought there should have been a greater emphasis on diplomacy leading up to the invasion. I will give you that he is an idiot for holding onto the view that the invasion was the right thing to do, even in hindsight.

But I still don't see where in Shuriken's post he's giving Kerry or any of the dems a free pass for their failure to stand up against Bush and his war machine.

[snailpoo]

^ I think it's clear from Kerry's statements, both before the invasion, and during his campaigning, that he thought there should have been a greater emphasis on diplomacy leading up to the invasion. I will give you that he is an idiot for holding onto the view that the invasion was the right thing to do, even in hindsight.

But I still don't see where in Shuriken's post he's giving Kerry or any of the dems a free pass for their failure to stand up against Bush and his war machine.
here:
How would a John Kerry presidency be worse?

[Shuriken]

here:

I don’t understand what you’re getting at. If you’re trying to make a point about Kerry’s ambivalence during the 2004 campaign, I agree with you: Kerry was trying to seek a squishy center on the issue of war in Iraq, and I think that cost him a lot of support. I think that the Kerry quote about “disarming” Hussein is especially bewildering: Just what was Hussein “disarmed” of, Sen. Kerry?

If you’re questioning my assertion that Bush’s policies on anti-terrorism were made specifically to hurt the Democrats, I stand by that statement. The fact that Bush began beating the war drums against Hussein in September 2002 (the day after the one-year anniversary of 9/11, to be precise) was done deliberately to make the Democrats look “soft” on national security in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections in November.

I also don’t understand your attention to this quote of mine:

How would a John Kerry presidency be worse?

By posing it, I was not “giving Kerry ... a free pass for [his] failure to stand up against Bush and his war machine” (in Alex’s words). I was asking it rhetorically to Jonah Goldberg after he baldly asserted that under a hypothetical Kerry presidency, things in America would be worse. I agree that Kerry made some missteps during the campaign. But are these missteps clear evidence that Kerry would make a worse administrator than the disastrous George W. Bush? If you’re saying that they are, I think you’re making a huge logical leap.

[snailpoo]

Sometimes, I think that liberals and conservatives are living on two different planets. Increasingly, it seems that the two groups can’t agree on a common history — much less a common standard for dealing with important tasks ahead.

My point was the "common history." I'm not deriding Kerry specifically. Kerry was not alone in his beliefs and opinions concerning the war.

I agree that Kerry made some missteps during the campaign. But are these missteps clear evidence that Kerry would make a worse administrator than the disastrous George W. Bush?
And these "missteps" were not made by Kerry solely during the campaign. Proof? Simply look at:

It appears to me that virtually everything that George W. Bush has done to wage the “war on terror” has been deliberately to help the Republican Party and to hurt the Democratic Party. I think that a truly great U.S. president after 9/11 would have put partisanship aside and established a genuine dialogue among experts of all political pursuasions to determine how to fight Islamic jihadism effectively, while still adhering to the Bill of Rights as closely as possible.


Again, for all the accusations you make about the Republicans invading Iraq and trampling rights, there was only ONE vote against the Patriot Act (http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=107&session=1&vote=00313) and only twenty three votes against invading Iraq (http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=107&session=2&vote=00237) in the Senate. Even AFTER all this hoopla about trampled rights and AFTER Bush's re-election, in 2005 there were ONLY TEN (http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2&vote=00029) votes against the Patriot Act's renewal.

[Arex]

^ Even if you want to place equal blame on both the President and (the republican controlled) Congress (and each of its members) for all of the things that have occurred during the Bush administration, this still does not answer the question of how the country would be worse off if Kerry had won the election.

[snailpoo]

^ Even if you want to place equal blame on both the President and (th