The Sound Of One Man Clapping

Charles "Merkwürdigeliebe" Krauthammer, "The Bush Legacy". April 25

YOU wanna know how awful the human condition is? While I was opening this I actually entertained a small notion that Chuckles here might let Dubya have it right between those close-set smirky eyes.

I mean, really, what did he have to lose? Karl Rove wouldn't return his calls for two days? He wouldn't get invited to Crawford? What? Like George Eff Will, Chuckles occasionally says something sane just to make it sound like he thinks things over. The Republican party, if there is such a thing, doesn't need Bush. It sure didn't for its last two conventions. Scoring a 5% increase in Bush "approval" ratings means squat. And in exchange you own two wars, a huge national disaster, one global economic meltdown facilitated by your core beliefs, and enough hapless decision making and malevolent intentions for twelve Trump reality programs.

The desire to palliate is strong. Especially when the disease is incurable. Ladies and Gentlemen, George W. Bush.

Clare Boothe Luce liked to say that “a great man is one sentence.” Presidents, in particular. The most common “one sentence” for George W. Bush is: “He kept us safe.”

Oh, fuck. I mean I thought it was "Oh, fuck."

Not quite right.

Okay, just for the record, this did not get my hopes up. Even in the salons of D.C., let alone Fred Hiatt's Petting Zoo, "Not quite right" is not a polite synonym for "Absolute fucking bullshit."

With Bush’s legacy being reassessed as his presidential library opens in Dallas, it’s important to note that he did not just keep us safe. He created the entire anti-terror infrastructure that continues to keep us safe.

It's a funny thing: the people most likely to tell you that "History" will decide a thing--usually a thing whose current reputation they don't like, or are responsible for in some small way--are also the first ones to tell you some PR spasm or transient tic on the face of public discourse represents a thoughtful reconsideration.

By the way, the "anti-terror infrastructure" has been in place, in various forms, at least since the FBI started hunting spies and Fifth Columnists in the 30s, and the umbrella placed over the damn business during the Reign of Error--namely, the Department of Security, Preparedness Drills, and Surplus Military Hardware Reallocation--was something Bush opposed when it was first thunk up.

That homage was paid, wordlessly, by Barack Obama, who vilified Bush’s anti-terror policies as a candidate, then continued them as president: indefinite detention, rendition, warrantless wiretaps, special forces and drone warfare, and, most notoriously, Guantanamo, which Obama so ostentatiously denounced — until he found it indispensable.

Yeah, to his eternal shame, at least once History gets ahold of him. Fact is, though, that Candidate Obama's anti-Bush terror policies stance always seemed more than just a little facile, more than a little forced, and conspicuously vaporous. He's also the candidate who wanted hot pursuit into Pakistan.

Quite a list. Which is why there was not one successful terror bombing on U.S. soil from 9/11 until last week.

And that's entirely correct, except for the part with words.

And how you play with them. There was the University of Oklahoma football stadium bombing in 2005, which killed the bomb maker. We decided after the fact that that wasn't terrorism, because the FBI couldn't find any Muslims to tie Joel Henry Hinrichs III, to. There were two bombings in 2008 that didn't kill anyone: the Times Square military recruitment station bombing, and the Fed Ex bombing in San Diego. Does that make them "unsuccessful"? "Non-teroristical"? Maybe we need a War on the Slightly Disturbing. That fall there was a bombing at a Dalton, GA, law firm, which injured four and killed the bomber. That one doesn't count because the perp was a white guy pissed at the judicial system? You're the guys who want to toss around "terrorist" when it suits you. Give us the definition that excludes those.

Oh, did you think we were done? We ain't. Leave alone the question of why our "anti-terror infrastructure" gets credit for stopping theoretical terror attacks and a pass for not stopping real ones when they aren't Muslim enough. Why do only bombs count? Several terrorific "successful" gun attacks in that same period. For that matter, thanks to George W. Bush's Anti-Terror Infrastructure ™, foreign terrorists didn't have to come here to kill Americans. We sent plenty to them.

The Boston Marathon attack was an obvious security failure, but there is a difference between 3,000 dead and three.

Except when it comes to generating political hysteria.

Moreover, Bush’s achievement was not just infrastructure. It was war. The Afghan campaign overthrew the Taliban, decimated al-Qaeda and expelled it from its haven. Yet that success is today derogated with the cheap and lazy catchphrase — “He got us into two wars” — intended to spread to Afghanistan the opprobrium associated with Iraq.

Wait, isn't that George Bush's One Sentence?

Difficulty one: as odious as the Taliban was, and is, it didn't have anything to do with International Terror, Inc. It happened to be a handy, barely functional location for al-Qaeda training, seeing as how that's where all the soldiers and weapons we bought in the 80s for fighting the Soviets were. Second, we can argue exactly what it was transpired in Afghanistan after the Invasion of the Willing, but you people will have to stop celebrating your imaginary victory first. Those two things were done quickly, because they were relatively easy. Yet we're still there, because the hidden portion of that particular iceberg was never planned for. It didn't exist.

As if Afghanistan was some unilateral Bush adventure foisted on the American people. As if Obama himself did not call it a “war of necessity” and Joe Biden, the most just war since World War II.

Which, frankly, was not exactly a difficult standard to reach. Once again, and absolutely, Barack Obama was an opportunistic politician on the issue of George Bush's Two Wars™. He couldn't be tied to either, unlike his primary opponents. He got to sneer at the unpopular one and keep his hands clean on the Just one. He got waaaay too much credit for making a single sidewalk denunciation of Iraq War II. Absolutely. Democrats in the US Congress were enthusiastic about invading Afghanistan. So was the country. In this their judgement was hasty, disingenuous, and filled with a roaring in the ears. And ultimately wrong. And there was one man in the country who could have spoken for Reason, and called for Somewhat Coolish heads to prevail, at least for a minute. And that man was George W. Bush. Instead, he gave the Taliban until sundown to turn over its national sovereignty to US. Instead, he played the television version of that President he wasn't elected to be. Tell that to his Interactive Decision Maker 2000™.

So let's be fair. That's all we could have expected from him, and do not tell me that a sizable percentage of the American public didn't realize that part of the reason it was shitting itself continuously was that George W. Bush, Dinner Theatre Lenny Small, was President. Do we know that we could have negotiated our way to getting bin-Laden turned over? Like, maybe, instead of spending a couple trillion over the next six years, we just slipped Two Large into the right hands, without waving our balls in public? No. We never will. What we do know is that Bush's public stance--once he was willing to show himself in public--was something no government in the world--even one as sketchy as the Taliban--would have agreed to. Unless we already owned them.

Is there any question that the American public was howling for blood? Nope. Could it have been reconciled to a President waiting a week to use military force? If he'd stood up and made the case, particularly when he was the leader of the Shoot First party. You think the public didn't want Hirohito on a platter on December 8, 1941? Roosevelt steered most of our military resources to Europe. What George Bush did in the aftermath of 9/11was to play out every right wing wargasm fantasy. And of course it worked. Sort of. It's the goddam poorest nation on earth. It's also one with a sterling history of resistance to international invaders (yet another lesson we'd steadfastly refused to learn in Vietnam). We were almost guaranteed to be able to scatter the "government" of Afghanistan (which, in the event, we didn't really have the stomach to do ourselves, and so when bombing didn't work immediately we had the Northern Alliance handle the dirty work); we were almost certain to face protracted resistance after that. It was guaranteed that much of that resistance would pour over the "border" into Pakistan. Which is exactly what happened.

Could it have been different? I don't know. Could it have gone any more predictably? No. George Bush took the popular, and the most painless route, and he announced ahead of time that the Battle for Civilization Herself wasn't going to cost any of his party's backers any tax dollars. I did not support the war as announced--which made me one of a half-dozen of my fellow citizens--but I can certainly understand how many who did came to feel that Bush had screwed the pooch, however just or necessary the cause.

The dilemma in Afghanistan was what to do after the brilliant, nine-week victory.

Like "terrorist", "victory" is a word you really need to define before you start slinging it around. "Brilliant" you're just fucking with.

There was no good answer. Even with the benefit of seven years’ grinding experience under his predecessor, Obama got it wrong. His Afghan “surge” cost hundreds of American lives without having changed the country’s prospects.

The Afghan "surge" was, if anything, considerably more popular--or at least recognized as necessary--than the "wildly successful" one in Iraq.

It turned out to be a land too primitive to democratize, too fractured to unify.

Guess there was no way of knowing that ahead of time.

The final withdrawal will come after Obama’s own six years of futility.

And while I'm in favor of him withdrawing American troops oh, four years ago, had he done so that's what you'd be complaining about today. He did stay there long enough to get bin-Laden, though, which I'm sure you celebrate as sincerely as if your boy had done it in his seven years of über-futility.

Iraq was, of course, far more problematic. Critics conveniently forget that the invasion had broad support from the public and Congress, including from those who became the highest-ranking foreign-policy figures in the Obama administration — Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and Biden.

No, we don't. But warfloggers and Bushfellators seem to conveniently have never noticed how much pure bullshit that administration put out in the year before. Yeah, Congress, foolishly (or intentionally) backed into a corner, took the easy route of believing the administration. Having done that, one is allowed to blame the administration when it turned out to have lied about shit. Thass how the game is played.

And they forget the context — crumbling sanctions that would, in short order, have restored Saddam Hussein to full economic and regional power, well positioning him, post-sanctions, to again threaten his neighbors and restart his WMD program.

Nope. Context: paranoid fiction as told by people who believe Israel is our most important state. Got it checked off right here.

The Iraq War had three parts. The initial toppling of the regime was a remarkable success — like Afghanistan, rapid and with relatively few U.S. casualties.

Well, slightly different, in that Iraq had once had a tenth-rate military, now reduced to Afghanistan levels.

The occupation was a disaster, rooted in the fundamental contradiction between means and ends, between the “light footprint” chosen by Gen. George Casey and the grand reformation attempted by Paul Bremer, who tried to change everything down to the coinage.

Hey, it's nice to see the underlings get some credit.

(As we've said here many a time, the "light footprint" bit is bullshit; we didn't have the troops to do the job without waiting too long for the Bush plan to segue into the 2004 elections. Ask Eric Shinseki. And Bremer was Bush's man. In fact, he was his fucking doppelgänger.)

Finally, the surge, a courageous Bush decision taken against near-universal opposition, that produced the greatest U.S. military turnaround since the Inchon landing. And inflicted the single most significant defeat for al-Qaeda (save Afghanistan) — a humiliating rout at the hands of Iraqi Sunnis fighting side-by-side with the American infidel.

That would make a great graphic novel. Or pile of ordnance for a buffalo chip-hurling contest.

We'll just see what the Surge really accomplished when Iraq is on its own. Getting the Press to stop covering the daily violence for the Duration is my bet.

As with Lincoln,

Just shut up.

Obama had one task: Conclude a status-of-forces agreement and thus secure Iraq as a major regional ally. He failed utterly. Iraq today is more fragile, sectarian and Iranian-influenced than it was when Bush left office — and than it had to be.

Bullshit. Iraq, strategic American ally? US troops there for a hundred years, like Korea? We didn't have enough troops to conduct the war in the first place, you twit.

Like Bush, Harry Truman left office widely scorned, largely because of the inconclusive war he left behind.

And, like Bush, being dumb as a bag of hair.

In time, however, Korea came to be seen as but one battle in a much larger Cold War

When did this happen?

that Truman was instrumental in winning.

When did this happen?

He established the institutional and policy infrastructure (CIA, NATO, the Truman Doctrine, etc.)

Thought Bush did that?

that made possible ultimate victory almost a half-century later.

Wait, the CIA "won" the Cold War? NATO "won" the Cold War? The Truman Doctrine did something else besides cost us trillions of post-war dollars on paranoid, nuclear-fueled fantasies? Oh, and opening new markets for Coca-Cola?

The Soviet Empire collapsed under the weight of economic and military hubris, dogmatic policy covering for petty thievery and mass murder, a profound, culture-based addiction to paranoia, and--maybe most importantly, in the modern age--an aversion to open scientific inquiry.

The Truman Doctrine, on the other hand, died a long time before that, if it wasn't stillborn in the first place. It didn't survive the "Who Lost China" debate, or the derisive laughter over Quemoy and Matsu. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't get the joke for fifty years. In fact, some still don't get it.  Meanwhile, Chuck, if you'll have a look, we're still in fucking Korea.

I suspect history will similarly see Bush as the man who, by trial and error but also with prescience and principle, established the structures that will take us through another long twilight struggle and enable us to prevail.

Oh, maybe we might wait and see what History--not some David McCullough hagiography much beloved of people who want to pretend that Truman is "supposed to be" the standard bearer for the party they don't belong to--really thinks about ol' Give 'Em Hell.

The world doesn't follow your dreams, Chuckles, nor is it judged by how closely it resembles them. This is the best evidence for a belief in God I have yet found.

Worst Video Game Ever. Figures.

Peter Baker, "Rewinding History, Bush Museum Lets You Decide". April 20

UNIVERSITY PARK, Tex. — More than four years after leaving office, former President George W. Bush has a question for America: So what would you have done? 

In a new brick-and-limestone museum, visitors to an interactive theater will be presented with the stark choices that confronted the nation’s 43rd president: invade Iraq or leave Saddam Hussein in power? Deploy federal troops after Hurricane Katrina or rely on local forces? Bail out Wall Street or let the banks fail?

• Cruise through Yale as a drunken frat boy, or sober up long enough to take notice of the world's intellectual traditions?

• Attend all your required Texas Air National Guard duties, or call in sick?

• McDonald's coffee spoon or rolled-up hundred?

• Hit up daddy's pals for business investments, or hit up daddy's pals for business investments?

• Use your insider knowledge to get out from under Harken Oil just before the stock collapses and buy the Texas Rangers, or the Baltimore Colts?

• Build a new stadium with taxpayer money, or move the team to some other city that's built a new stadium with taxpayer money?

• Realize a 1242% profit when the team is sold, or hold out for a good deal?

• Run for governor of Texas, or move to an island and found your own colony of Jebus-mazed explosion fanciers?

• Fakey Texas drawl, or Cagney impression?

• Run for President, or do something for your country for once?

Wow, that was fun! Which way to the Laura Bush Interactive Driving Experience?

Compelling Satellite Imagery Of The Early 21st Century

[Shown in increasing number of casualties that resulted.]

There Were Nine Official Investigations Of Pearl Harbor Between 1941-1946

Scott Shane, "Expert Panel Is Critical of F.B.I. Work In Investigating Anthrax Letters". February 15

Jerry Markon, "Anthrax report casts doubt on scientific evidence in FBI case against Bruce Ivins." February 15

AND, yes, the first one was actually conducted in December, 1941.

It's now nine and-a-half years later. It's beyond time that subpoena power was applied towards getting the facts on an attack on the US government before the American people.

Yesterday was the capper: the FBI, which had resisted all efforts for independent oversight, and, instead, funded its own evaluation restricted to the scientific evidence--presumably the strongest part of its case--has its own panel cast doubt on that.

And there's plenty of reason to wonder about the rest. There's $5.8 million reasons we paid Steven Hatfill after the Bureau tried him in the papers. What reason do the rest of us have to believe the case against Bruce Ivins was any stronger? Not the lab work, apparently.

Look: this was a direct attack on the U.S. Government. 9/11 was not, despite the apparent belief in some circles that the Pentagon is one of the Two or Three Other Branches, Depending on Who's Counting. We've decided that 9/11 was an Act of War, conveniently, since that was what we were prepared to respond to (though, in the event, not as well as we imagined). The anthrax bombings were an act of pure terrorism, though the FBI has somehow managed to conclude they were more like Ivins' ill-conceived ad campaign for More Lab Work. (And these are the guys who invented, or "invented", Criminal Profiling, but the fact that the bomber targeted Tom Daschle, Patrick Leahy, and the news operations of the three major networks, under the cover of a sort of cartoon Islam, is evidently chalked up to coincidence.)

It's time to live up to our War on Terra rhetoric in a way that will, for once, make a difference. It's time to get to the bottom of this. The investigation hasn't answered any questions, and there are serious questions about the investigation.

Shut Up, He (Tried To) Explain

Ross Douthat, "The Agony of the Liberals". June 21

THIS started for me at the Race Day Soirée we attend, when my neighbor, the dyed-in-the-wool-headed "conservative" "libertarian" with the framed Reagan/Bush reelection campaign poster in his garage, the one who left his Bush/Cheney 2000 yard sign up until after the Inauguration, asked my Poor Wife and I what we read of the Sunday Times he so kindly tosses over the fence for us when he's finished. He added how much he was enjoying the fact that "now even the Times" was "giving Obama a hard time" which he found "pretty funny".

Reader, I'm a tolerant man, philosophically, and only philosophically. I resist the urge to treat every "conservative", "libertarian" or no, as though he were a largely unexamined bundle of Christian morality tales for Children, stultifying nationalism that takes itself for patriotism, self-aggrandizement, barely-contained racism, FOX News rejoinders, and some self-fulfilling half-assed notions of the law, the Constitution, and US history which cannot withstand the slightest scrutiny, simply because that adequately describes every last one I've ever met. Aside from the outright clinical cases.

I mean, there must be some, right? You'd think the Times could find one, or even two.

Let's just go back to that statement for a moment. This comes from a guy who reads the Week in Review every Sunday, or at least folds the pages back. So he's had the theoretical ability, at least, to read That Dowd Woman since Senator Obama announced his candidacy; he might've noted the forced and belated apology for Judith Miller launching the Iraq War; if it was his habit back before they moved next door he could've read the Gore-sliming of MoDo and Frank Rich, and the factual Gore-sliming of Kit Seelye, and, before that, the comic fiction of Jeff Gerth. Yet, somehow, the Times is both epitome and pinnacle of Liberalism, and the fact that even they now criticize the President is proof positive that he's the worst failure in history, and everyone admits it.

He's fifty, my neighbor, meaning, if you'd care to do the math, prime Reagantot, David-Brooks-Without-the-Road-to-Damascus-Moment, no chance in hell he'd've been conscripted to put his warlust into practice; his natural inclination toward Regional Sales was reinforced during his sexual peak--and the most-likely-simultaneous peak of his indifferent political awareness--by the whole Morning in America crap pile. Meaning that between the Age of Majority and the time last year his teenaged daughter decided she was a Democrat, the only substantive political debates he's either entered into, or deigned to witness, were the imaginary sort that leaves one's opponents bawling like the little girls they are. And it's at least even money an erection was involved, at least metaphorically.

Dude, you been talking to yourself for thirty years! Which means I'm not quite certain what to make of Douthat, who apparently has been talking to himself since before he could talk:

They doubted him during the health care debate. They second-guessed his Afghanistan policy. They’ve fretted over his coziness with Wall Street and his comfort with executive power.

But now is the summer of their discontent. From MSNBC to “The Daily Show,” from The Huffington Post to the halls of Congress, movement liberals have had just about enough of Barack Obama.

Y'know, Ross, this reminds me: every time I read you I'm tempted to ask if 1) you play poker, and 2) what a seat costs. 'Cos son, that's a Tell a man could back a Brinks truck inta.

Let's just forget that notion of "movement" liberalism--aside from the cartoonish MSNBC, in Cartoon Land, there is no such thing--as well as the idea that Barack Obama is a paragon of Liberalism. He's a fucking Centrist. How much plainer could he have made that from Day One? How many times does it have to be diagrammed for you? Who d'ya think all those people will be voting for in 2012? Let's concentrate for a moment on George W. Bush.

Yeah, I know: another Liberal changing the subject. I'm not, and I'm not, but just fucking listen to an argument that isn't either your own, or safely corruptible, for once.

Let's focus on two major disasters of the Bush administration: Domestic, and Foreign. Worst economic record since the War, worst spending since the War, worst wars since the (Vietnam) war, and worst two wars ever. Toss in Katrina, since you're intent on comparing a slow-motion natural disaster greatly compounded by an ideological objection to doing anything about it--or, perhaps more precisely, to doing anything for those people--with a massive man-made ecological disaster which is directly attributable to 1) this country's self-centered consumption mania, which has been egged on by the Republican party especially, and 2) the cult of corporatism, ditto, though most Democrats show up for regular worship there, too, or have since George McGovern nearly toppled Western civilization.

So, tell me, Ross, where were the fucking objections from "conservatives" while those were going on? Please; not the six or seven editorialists who sorta kinda cautioned about soaring deficits, then wholeheartedly backed two blank-check wars. You're the guys who're so opposed to debt, but you're always finding reasons to excuse it when you're in power. We had a week of public denial about the non-response to Katrina before anyone on the Right allowed as how the problem went deeper than the genetic aquaphobia of your average African. Y'all still love those little military adventures, despite the fact that it's been five years since either one could be remotely defended as sane or successful or serving some national purpose.

So, y'know, just fucking spare us the "even the liberal MSNBC" routine as a mark of "liberal" discombobulation. The most substantive criticism of the Obama administration has come from Glenn Greenwald, and that's since the election, back when your side was consumed with Messiah complexes and hatching Birther conspiracies. A lot of us would be happy to make common cause with y'all when possible, provided you ever decide to stop being batshit crazy.

Consider, instead, what it means that such criticism is never heard in your party until it's too late. Consider what that's meant, and what it's gotten you.

And We Had To Waterboard People To Extract Information?

"Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld knew most Gitmo detainees were innocent. " Now there's a shocker.

I was in the grocery store yesterday, behaving as lawfully as I generally do, when I was suddenly and without warning placed in a hammerlock by the store's "music" system, specifically by a crap-filled sappinessfest called "I'm Your Lady", which--my sympathies if you already knew this--was perpetrated by the Bottomless Cup o' Awful that is Celine Dion. Seriously, four bars in--she hadn't even unleashed the rolling artillery barrage of bunker-busting melismas yet--I was using the cart to steady myself, and looking around for someone who'd agree to turn the thing off if I promised to buy a carload of Hawaiian Punch, American cheese singles, and every greeting card in the place that made a funny noise when you opened it. By the beginning of the chorus an enterprising store manager could have had my bank account and credit card numbers, plus the hours my teenaged nieces would be home alone.

They're walking around free, folks. All of 'em, walking around free.

So?

Kirk Johnson, "States' Rights Is Rallying Cry of Resistance for Lawmakers". March 16

FIRST, what Pierce said, as a general maxim:

Ask me what I'd do, and I'd probably vote for the ongoing POS that is the Senate bill. However, I would like both Kevin and Matt -- or John -- to explain the "stepping-stone" argument to me. Why , precisely, should I believe that, that once we pass the POS, any opportunity to improve it, largely by the process of political evolution, will remain? Am I to believe that, gifted with a federal mandate requiring people to buy their products, the insurance companies will drop over time their resistance to the kind of health-care system that exists everywhere else in the industrialized world? That they will desist from the practice of buying enough legislators to eviscerate any subsequent attempts to reform the new system to the advantage of their consumers? Why would they do this? Please show your work.

Nothing, nothing whatsoever supports naiveté about Centrists and Centrism anymore. The only Exit door in that direction leads you to rejoining the Right, like y'all did for Iraq. There was no excuse, in 2008, for anyone of voting age to've been innocent of the eight-year attempted palace coup of 1992-2000; there was no excuse for anyone with a passing familiarity with domestic politics, let alone someone with an Ivy League BA in political science, to imagine there'd been anyone in the Republican party interested in vanquishing the Evils of Partisanship, except insofar as it was liberal Democratic partisanship, for the past forty years. There was no reason to imagine that Reagan's "successes" were due to anything other than the accident of "conservative" legislative hegemony by states with more livestock than people, and the cowardly retreat of real Democrats faced with losing an election they lost anyway. There's no getting around what (Nothing) Congress accomplished after being given a clear mandate for change in 2006. And Nothing is more than it accomplished with historical majorities in 2008.

In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Y'know, I remain unconvinced the idiots in Utah can run Utah, without adding in the 70% the Feds take care of so the locals can busy themselves marrying their 14-year-old cousins and waiting for the Archangel Monsanto to bring 'em some more Heavenly Dinner Plates. So fuckin' let 'em try, already. It's obvious the only thing that's ever gonna meet these illiterate fits of teenaged pique is calling 'em on it. They think canned sheep hunts in Former National Parks are going to make up the revenue difference when the people who now tour Utah no longer want to go to the Former National Parks because of the canned sheep hunts? Okay. Only let's set twenty years operating expenses, in advance, as the price for taking them back next time.

Utah, not surprisingly, has been a net recipient of Federal tax money 17 of the last 25 years (okay, so maybe those eight other years are surprising); seems like a fine time for the New Hampshire and Minnesota and Illinois legislatures to turn off the spigot. South Dakota's averaged a 40% lagniappe over that period. Let 'em make up the difference taxing ammo.

Forget missing George Bush; can't anybody here remember him? These fucks can't run a million-dollar parade. They can't beat a country with no army. Run the modern world? Fuck, they can't even figure out how to run from it. In Utah. Jesus H. Christ With An Assault Rifle, whatever happened to the good ol' country wisdom that when you catch your smartass ten-year-old smoking a cigarette you make him smoke the whole pack?

Let Kansas teach its schoolchildren that Jesus rode dinosaurs. What, exactly, will the rest of us lose? The bright kids in Kansas will figure it out anyway, and move someplace civilized, and the rest of the state can listen to the corn grow and hope to die before it gets sick. Okay, so this doesn't bode well for the sheep, but the hip-wader industry will flourish. It's an Ill Wind.

Incidentally, an interesting object lesson in the sort of mindlessness which got us here when, snug in its American Exceptionalist cocoon, it decided to humor these 19th century frontier inbreds in the name of Faux Balance, has been on view in, of all places, local Indianapolis teevee news, where, for one, Reconcilliation is the first parliamentary procedure they've ever paid any attention to, and, two, some guy with a phony diploma who's been practicing as a psychologist has gotten more attention than all the phony practitioners of the Daniels administration combined, even after they were caught tossing a billion at Mitch Roob's former employer. Never mind that the sort of harm the guy could have caused by pretending to be a psychologist is about the same as what a real psychologist can. It's the biggest story ever, helped along by every teaser and graphic that says he was pretending to be a doctor. If the guy's office had been a housekeeping disaster, or full of cats, and he'd left a baby in his car while he ran in for cigarettes, I swear at least one of the anchors would be having uncontrolled orgasms on screen.

I Knew If We Looked Long Enough We'd Find Something To Like About Bush

Barton Gellman, "Cheney Uncloaks His Frustrations With Bush: 'Statute of Limitations Has Expired' on Many Secrets, Former Vice President Says". August 13

MY Poor Wife came home from Monday teacher meetings with some godawful soccer/tennis shirt thing, executed in one of those microfibers with a hand so gratingly unnatural that any sentient being placed on the thing would scurry off as if for its life, such a hand that if you touch it unawares your autonomic nervous system will withdraw your mitt for you without bothering your cerebral cortex. It feels like the fourth sample of the six thousand DuPont rejected on the way to introducing Dacron.

And that, in case you haven't already guessed, isn't All; not only was the selection made by a sadist, the thing was designed by someone who, so far as I can tell, was chained in a closet from age 5-9 and forced to wear a 1975 Houston Astros uniform shirt, and swore to take undying revenge on humanity once released.

Our point is not to launch a few fungos about poor fashion sense, but to note something of the martinet impulse, or maybe the Stockholm syndrome, in American public life. The shirts are intended as Friday wear, augmenting a (recent) practice of teachers wearing school colors supposed, I guess, to cap each week with an increase in something called School Spirit, and perhaps other Intangibles. And I'm all for School Spirit, since it gives the budding curmudgeon a real head start on recognizing just what sort of brown-nosing droids he is likely to find himself working with in just a few years. (In a sign of the true disturbance of our age, one of the young teachers stood up in the meeting and suggested everyone wear their shirts Wednesday, i.e. yesterday, first day of classes, "to welcome in our students to the new year!" My Poor Wife relayed the story to me, and I asked if anyone had thought to say "Get a hit, Crash!" to her back.) And if this is just the sort of thing that bad supervisors do in expectation of being hailed for their largesse with company money (even if it's not the whiff of the Waffen SS that really attracts), and which the pathologically needy rise to second, the experience of her colleague, just transferred to another school, who was required to buy four pre-designed team golf shirts to be worn daily, is something else. Teacher uniforms! This was the first impulse of the failed retail executive Mitch Daniels hired to collapse the state Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Dress everyone like servers in a sandwich shop and their Hearts and Minds will follow. This guy (her colleague) has twenty-five years teaching experience, a Masters in Education, and a solid C.V., and some administrator's big idea is to dress him like a Best Buy's stock clerk.

Nothing survives being thought of! says the Book of St. Oscar, and, like all paradoxical truths, that one is most likely to be laughed off by the people who need it most. Or stared at like a dog stares at a ceiling fan. This is why, Young Educator, every falsehood convenient to the Rich, the Powerful, the Petty and Tyrannical, is cloaked in Religion, or Nationalism, or Entrepreneurial Efficiency. Or the full-blooded roar of the partisan sports enthusiast. Shut up and teach somebody something! You will have plenty of opportunities to mold young minds into credulous drones who salivate at the approach of the appropriate swatch of colored fabric in your own classroom. And best of luck.

Which brings us to the Dick Cheney Salvage Operations, which yesterday appear to've moved from mapping out the wreckage into the opening stages of selling the bilgewater, which turns out to be more valuable than the actual artifacts. The whole thing is too laughable for words, provided, I guess, that you didn't still harbor some dim hope for the future of the United States.

It's difficult to even try settling on highlights, but they'd have to include the man who made Richard Nixon look like a walking Sunshine Law saying that now--eight whole months out of office, and one whole day into the promotion of his book deal--the "Statute of Limitations" has expired on his keeping his lip zipped. Which, of course, he didn't actually do as Vice-President of the United States, President of the Senate, and Lord High Poo-Bah of the Invisible Fourth Branch of Government, but then malleability is just about morality's best feature. This brings to mind the old adage I just made up, which is that while there may not be any atheists in foxholes, if you have the choice of whom to jump into one with that's probably the way to play it. Not that you were ever in danger of finding yourself sharing a foxhole with Dick Cheney. A cell, maybe. At the outside.

But there is a sting in Cheney's critique, because he views concessions to public sentiment as moral weakness. After years of praising Bush as a man of resolve, Cheney now intimates that the former president turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.

Now, I've seen four or five versions of this story, and none of them actually quotes Cheney as saying anything about "moral weakness". Which I presume is due to his fear that uttering the M word would cause his pacemaker to burst into flames.

And okay; shooting fish in a barrel is at least as sporting as shooting penned lawyers, so: if Bush gave up on you in his second term it means he was the last man in America to do so, excepting maybe a few Western holdouts who were hoping more oil and mineral rights might still materialize at 2¢ an acre. Just maybe this had a little something to do with every last blessed thing you touched turning to Shit, unless you were an insider investor who was tipped to Sell early.

So let's say the same thing to you we said to Colin Powell when he had a book to peddle: Why didn't you quit? Apart from losing the cloak of Executive Privilege? Conversely, you're so smart: Why didn't you run for President? Because your own popularity could pass under George W. Bush's while on horseback?

"What impressed me was his continuing zeal," said an associate who discussed the book with Cheney. "He hadn't stepped back a bit from the positions he took in office to a more relaxed, Olympian view. He was still very much in the fray. He's not going to soften anything or accommodate shifts of conscience. There was no sense in which he looked back and said, 'I wish I'd done something differently.' Rather, there was a sense that they hadn't gone far enough. If he'd been equipped with a group of people as ideologically rigorous as he was, they'd have been able to push further."

It's remarkable, innit, how often "Steadfastly stands his ground" and "Inerrant choice of the worst shithole to stand on" go together?

And, well, Big Fucking Deal anyhow; Cheney, like Rumsfeld, belongs to that generation of Republicans who were so incontrovertibly wrong about everything from an early age that A Foolish Constancy was their only alternative to Admitting They Were Full of Shit. Guess which one they chose? It's not a noble aspect, or an accomplishment, any more than protective coloration is an accomplishment of the Snow Weasel. It's the only way they could survive until a more attractive candidate than themselves--which doesn't narrow things down much--could return them to power so they could prove just how much they could fuck things up while remaining constant.

What the former vice president assuredly will not do, according to friends and family, is break a lifetime's reticence about his feelings. Alluding to Bush's forthcoming memoir, Cheney told one small group recently that he had no interest "in sharing personal details," as the former president planned to do.

"He sort of spat the word 'personal,' " said one person in the room.

Excuse me, but that distinguishes it from every other word he's ever uttered how, now?

Gee, What's Your Hurry?

Devlin Barrett, "US on verge of closing anthrax probe after 8 years". July 27

I GOTTA admit that after six-and-a-half years of screaming about how quickly the Terrorist Anthrax Attack on America Herself faded from view once it became clear* that it was a Domestic terror attack, I pretty much stopped reading about it myself a year ago, when it became obvious the FBI had pinned the thing on a dead guy. So it was actually new information for me, when I watched Hunting the Anthrax Killer on the National Geographic Network Sunday night, that they'd tumbled onto the late Dr. Ivins because he'd (allegedly) provided a fake sample of the spores he'd been working with, and because the real sample, like the spores used in the attacks, contained silicon, which all the others did not.

The National Academy of Sciences will be reviewing the Bureau's scientific methods, to which we can add only that we wish there was a National Academy of Politically-Motivated Incompetent Police Work, Plus Judith Miller.

Item: it's the largest, most expensive manhunt in history. Item: within days--hours, maybe--of the attacks on Congress they knew it was the Ames strain, and they knew that meant the US was the source. Item: read those notes above--they were written by Arab Terrorists the same way Jonah Goldberg is ghostwritten by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Yes, yes, yes; an investigation that narrows its focus early will frequently live to regret it, but this one had unlimited fucking funding, and it's not like the "foreign power" angle was going to be tossed out on its ear anyway; but at some point, possessing the information that the strain of anthrax used in the attacks was ours, and, so far as we knew, ours alone,** and having read those letters, someone in authority made the decision to continue pumping resources toward proving it was The Ruskies or that Saddam guy, on the grounds that the light was better there. This is not exactly reassuring.

The program reminded us, too, that the focus on Steven Hatfill, like the earlier focus on Ayaad Assaad--though ultimately much more expensive--was entirely the result of Tipster Bingo. Which means that once the lab boys were finished we could have cut costs by reducing the investigation to a couple of secretaries.

Sure, sure, hindsight's 20/20, and I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about, but look: word that they'd found the Ames strain--and the erroneous story that the Congressional anthrax was "weaponized"--was going around by November, 2001. So were the whispers that when we "stopped" our bioweapons program at Nixon's order in 1969 it didn't mean we, like, stopped or anything. And it's almost precisely at this point that public hysteria--remember, bioweapons was the "active" scare, unamenable to security measures, unlike air travel--disappears, the door slams shut, there's a guard posted, and everyone else sorta wanders away. In December the Baltimore Sun officially breaks the story that the US has an active dry-anthrax (i.e. weapons) program, Tom "Limousine Liberal" Daschle says it looks like someone connected to the US military is responsible, and George W. Bush says "We'll keep you informed as developments arise," which are essentially his last words on the subject, at least until John "Bring Me The Credit Card Overdrafts of 100 Arabic-Sounding Legal Aliens" Ashcroft nails Dr. Hatfill in public. From this point it's difficult to find much reporting on the case except that of the Judith Miller Times, the fun-loving genocidists at WaPo, and the tub-thumpers at The Weekly Standard, whose insistence that it was the work of Saddam & Al-Qaeda, LLC., should have been enough to convince all sane people that it couldn't possibly be. Judy and the Posters were still hawking that angle a year later, even after the spotlight had been turned on Hatfill, and Hoosier Attack Representative Mike Pence had written to Ashcroft, asking if he'd please, please get the investigative focus back on Saddam Hussein?

In other words, just months after the anthrax attacks continued, and amplified, the Justification of the Global War of Civilizations and Shitting Your Pants, the administration's henchmen were lying outright about the case despite its earth-shaking consequences. Our Way of Life hangs in the balance, according the them, and they're busy playing politics (yeah, shocking, I know; but how much worse is the refusal to investigate?). Our own biological weapons program, the one that didn't exist, is effectively ignored when it comes time to consider just how evil Saddam Hussein, bioweapons aspirant, truly is. And it takes six years after completion of the DNA and chemical profiles of the strain to locate it among a finite number of samples in domestic labs, or, coincidentally, just unto the beginning of the next Presidential campaign.

I dunno if it was Ivins. Opinions vary. If the science is to be believed there's more than a strong suggestion from the provenance of his working materials, but it's not my fault the Bureau's lab work is perpetually clouded in suspicion. It is a case where the Lone Nut theory seems plausible. I've got a little problem with the proffered motive--that Ivins' anthrax vaccine was being blamed for Gulf War Syndrome, and was no longer being administered to the troops, and he wanted it reinstated--but then you don't have to prove motive. Whether they could prove the rest of it is moot. But all that's a lot less interesting to me than how the story, and the panic, was manipulated, and how easily it was dropped when the truth hit close to home.

Then again, the other thing that interests me is why Cheri "Home Alone" Daniels, later First Lady of Hoosierland, alone among Cabinet-level Spouses and Miscellaneous Dependents, was mailed a supposedly bulging envelope of what turned out to be talc while her hubby was in D.C. single-handedly wrecking the US economy. But maybe that's just me. And maybe we'll get the answers during the 2012 Presidential campaign, eh Mitch?

_____________

*to everyone except Judith Miller and Bill Kristol.

**or everyone except Judith Miller and Bill Kristol.

Okay, Let's Faux-Try This Faux-Again

Scott Shane, "At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?" April 22

NO:

WASHINGTON — Even the most exacting truth commission may have a hard time determining for certain whether brutal interrogations conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency helped keep the country safe....

Senior Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and cheered by many Congressional Republicans, are fighting a rear-guard action in defense of their record. Only by using the harshest methods, they insist, did the intelligence agency get the information it needed to round up Qaeda killers and save thousands of American lives.

Look: Dick Cheney can broadcast from his private news bunker all day, every day, from here until that Doomsday he missed his chance to initiate, and it won't mean a jot, nor should it have inspired one. How does Dick Cheney have any credibility, even on FAUX? He's the ShamWow! guy of American political infomercials, except besides punching a hooker his Miracle Washday Product turns out to have be made from recycled nuclear reactor fuel and extract of poison ivy.

Let us say this again: if you wouldn't accept the argument from the garage mechanic who was trying to charge you $950 for a repair he estimated at forty bucks, then a "controversy" has not been created just because the same sort of crap comes out of the mouth of an opposition politician, especially an unindicted war criminal with a 0-4000 won-lost record over the past eight years.

Just as with Marc Thiessen, the Former Co-Disastrous Fucking Occupier of the Oval Office is welcome to provide us with some evidence, instead of screeching to a halt before demanding President Obama do it for him; otherwise what they say should be treated as nothing more than a yelp of pain coming from someone who shot himself while drunk. Sheesh, Cheney had plenty of opportunity to release them himself back when he controlled the records and what was selectively leaked from them. Okay, so Judy Miller lost her phone privileges; Tim Russert was still kickin', and Andrea Mitchell will be with us always, apparently. Guess he didn't care to call attention to the program back then. If pointing West and yelling, "The Library Tower! The Library Tower!" did the trick the matter would have been settled in back 2005.

Even President Obama’s new director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, wrote in a memorandum to his staff last week that “high value information came from interrogations in which these methods were used,” an assertion left out when the memorandum was edited for public release.

1) So what? and 2) So what? In the first place, this is Blair carrying Obama administration water in the effort to assure Spooko-Americans none of them would be losing his job, let alone going to jail, for torture. The memo's a bit scant on details, and Blair wasn't even on teevee, let alone under oath. Suggesting it was "left out" cuts both ways, y'know. Again, if it were prima facie evidence of the efficacy of torture the matter would be closed.

But it's not, and it brings up a question: Could we keep our fucking eyes on the ball? Just for practice? Whether "high-value information" comes from someone after a little round of Uncle Dick's Favorite Drinking Game has nothing to do with it. The issues are a) whether you got that info because of the "enhanced techniques"; b) whether you got it only because of those techniques or whether c) you achieved some benefit of timeliness over other methods; d) how you could have known about this so-called "ticking timebomb" when you ordered the torture; and e) how you could possibly believe it, or sort it out from whatever else bubbled up just to get you to stop.

And just for starters we have ample evidence that all of this is bogus, that whatever you get out of a torture victim is useless. And that doesn't begin to address the opposite side of the argument, from the violation of the law, to the moral repugnance of torture, to the noxious effect on American principles and our international standing, to the practical question of how much time you waste chasing worthless information just to get something slightly less dubious. Add to that the fact that the Bush administration decided to go proudly semi-public with the whole thing, mostly to court the critical BDSM and Bloodthirsty Racist Statesider votes, before trying to pedal backwards again. What sort of damage did Abu Ghraib cause? What sort of "high-value information" did we get there in exchange?

Nope. Instead we've just transferred the argument to one of Dick Cheney's choosing, for no reason other than he's opened his maw again, safely away from anyone who might possibly shut it for him, as always. Restating the argument as the cheap plot of a teevee serial didn't actually work back when Darth Vader there had some strings to pull. Now it's just froth. And along with his party's resounding renunciation at the polls, the difference is that we now know, know, that the administration ordered torture just for torture's sake. There's no fucking way to make the argument that the 171st simudrowning of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed promised to do something the first 170 hadn't. We're running out of time! We tortured these guys because the pathological certifiables who got control of the White House wanted to. We turned criminally untrained Army Reservists, their canine pals, and 3.1 megapixel technology loose on Iraqi civilians because Donald Rumsfeld has a depraved indifference to human life. We didn't do anything to prisoners in US custody that the Republican party hasn't been doing in that Fantasyland it inhabits since the end of the Vietnam war. Except that this time it wasn't just metaphorical. This time the moral fucking cowards could order someone else to do it, and they imagined they had enough cover from 9/11 Changing Everything that they'd never face the consequences of their belligerent psychopathy, just as none of that bunch ever has. Cheney can mouth off forever without changing "the core" of the debate, or anything else, for that matter, and we hope FAUX will continue to give him the opportunity. Nightly. Unless the courts do.

No, Really? Gambling? In This Establishment?

Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti,"In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use." April 21

Mark Benjamin, "Torture planning began in 2001, Senate report reveals". April 22

LAST week's computer bedevilment appears to have ended yesterday when, against all the arguments sanity had at its disposal I upgraded my iAluminum iMac's hard drive to a 1 TB Seagate number which is whisper-quiet, although in truth anything would have been an upgrade, since the old one appears to be dead. This was accomplished with, and occasionally in spite of, the helpful help of some internet experts, at least one of whom confuses Up and Down nearly as much as I do. In the end I had to figure out some stuff myself, and finished with just one part left over, plus the memory door temporarily (hah!) held up with masking tape until I get around to opening the case again to fix it. In my defense, it never fit quite square to begin with, the (integral) screw is too small, and the Apple Genius who eventually got around to fixing the defective motherboard last year pretty well stripped it in the process.

Anyway, it's an interesting trip down a Memory Hole Lane that was never mine; I graduated from college the year the first softwareless Heathkit build-your-own computer hit the market. Everything I know about these devil boxes I more-or-less taught myself, and everything I know about the inside tech should have electrocuted me years ago. And for someone of my age and mechanical aptitude, that is, none, yesterday was like popping the hood on the family Buick: Th' fuck happened to all the room that used to be here? Used to be you'd unscrew the case, then find the three hidden screws you'd missed, take the top off, locate the HD, and switch it. Partial iMac disassembly now begins with sticking one of those Human Fly suction cup dealies onto the glass and popping it off. Which was Weirdly Cool. It actually only takes one or two dimestore suction cup hooks to accomplish, but the guy in one of the videos I watched had some four-head industrial-strength glazier/cat burglar tool, and for a brief moment I was tempted to go find one.

My first HD was a 105 MB monster. I paid extra for the jumbo capacity.

I'm pretty sure that back when I started typing I had a segué, but it seems to have disappeared. Maybe it was how, back in my youth, it was fairly common for people (I wasn't one of 'em, as it happens, being more of a late-to-the-party McLuhanite) to imagine The Computer, and its evil henchaccessory the UPC code, as portents and prime resources of the Evil Dehumanizing Brave New Totalitarianism we were headed for . Of course today, in retrospect, we realize they were absolutely right.

What few if any could foresee at that point is that International Dehumanization would either merge with Disney, or just swipe its corporate vibe; the exact sequence is still a bit unclear, but anyone old enough to remember Good Old Walt himself knows that Happy Fun Places and The Faint But Unmistakable Thud of Jackboots have never really been mutually exclusive. Fascism with Flair! The spacious, affordable, and All-Electric Skinner Box of Tomorrow! Not only did Today's Fascists catch on to the Bright Shiny Object routine, they realized at some point that mass genocide reduced the size of potential markets as well as causing a commodities glut in such areas as the Gold, Pre-owned Eyewear, and exotic leathers markets.

Or maybe it was just that yesterday's technological marvel is today's museum piece, and that just as the generation born with a USB cable in its tiny fist looks upon the SyQuest removable drive with 44MB cartridges the size of small dinner plates as some sort of prehistoric leg-pull, so too has some segment of our populace come to see the mass incineration of Japanese civilians not as an enormity, or a vast, if justifiable, evil committed in a global struggle against evil, but rather as the template for the modern definition of Patriotism. It's been clear all along to anyone who grew up during the Cold War that in certain circles the supposed morality tales about Korean brainwashing, Soviet gulags, and Vietnamese tiger cages were, not a species of wishful thinking, not too often, but certainly a blanket justification for our own less systematic, often surrogated, abuses. It's not a surprise these people condoned torture, or ordered torture, any more than it's a surprise they'd be all legalistic and prissy about it.

We went into Iraq in 2003 because the timetable had been set by the Bush campaign in 1999. I realize these people were almost preternaturally incompetent, but the fact can no longer hide. It's why we went in with insufficient force, which eventually cost hundreds, thousands, of American lives, and uncounted Iraqi. The puppeteers of the Bush candidacy saw Iraq War 2: This Time It's Personal merely as the key to re-election, and perhaps to some dream of a permanent Republican majority (such dreams do not pay off directly, nor are they certain to hire Halliburton, so we imagine this was a far lesser concern). It's why we Couldn't Wait. Of course these people ordered torture; they were going to scruple at that after going to war for partisan gain? This sort of thing has been part of the Credo of the Republican Chickenhawk for a generation, so much so that it passed from bluff and bluster to revealed Truth. We weren't tough enough! said the men who never got any closer to Vietnam than the visitors' bleachers at Penn.

Fuck yes, they ordered torture. Fuck no, they didn't bother studying its efficacy; they didn't care. It's who they are. It's how they view their billions of inferior beings. It's the phony John Wayne shit their party has trumpeted for decades, so long as it, like the Duke, got to remain Stateside and wealthy. The eminent Burkean scholar David Brooks has objected to the term "neo-con" being used as synonymous with "Semite". We agree. "Sexually Perverted Racist Nazi Long-Distance Torturing Coward Mutherfuckers" is a much better fit. And it was here all along; funny how so many people didn't notice.

Wither(ed) Wingnuttia

Marc A. Thiessen, "Enhanced Interrogations Worked". April 21

THE average man, caught naked at high noon on the courthouse square, save for his fedora, will use it to cover his genitals and beat a rapid retreat. It will probably not occur to him, later that same afternoon, to pen a 900-word panegyric to his hat size.

Nor to the Washington Post to print it.

In releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to question captured terrorists "did not make us safer." This is patently false. The proof is in the memos Obama made public -- in sections that have gone virtually unreported in the media.

Y'know, I was wondering about this myself. How is it that previously unreported details highlighting the wanton brutality and callous disregard for standards of decency and the laws of the United States in but two cases of the Bush administration's Extraordinarily Doubly-Constitutional Rendition Program get all the headlines, while the accompanying proof that the administration did not simply make up the name of the Library Tower before the former President mangled it is completely ignored? Damn Librul Media.

Consider the Justice Department memo of May 30, 2005. It notes that "the CIA believes 'the intelligence acquired from these interrogations has been a key reason why al Qaeda has failed to launch a spectacular attack in the West since 11 September 2001.' . . . In particular, the CIA believes that it would have been unable to obtain critical information from numerous detainees, including [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and Abu Zubaydah, without these enhanced techniques." The memo continues: "Before the CIA used enhanced techniques . . . KSM resisted giving any answers to questions about future attacks, simply noting, 'Soon you will find out.' " Once the techniques were applied, "interrogations have led to specific, actionable intelligence, as well as a general increase in the amount of intelligence regarding al Qaeda and its affiliates."

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques "led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into' a building in Los Angeles." KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that "information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the 'Second Wave.' " In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

So, now you guys like CIA intel again?

It's interesting to stop occasionally, take a few deep cleansing breaths, and consider how fucking remarkable this sort of thing would be if it weren't so wearyingly commonplace. The last word the public had about what was done in its name is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sang like a slightly moist canary after 35 seconds. Now it's 183 times, plus 35 seconds. In a month. And the Bush administration-in-exile says, "Bu...bu...but...The Library Tower! Still standing!"

We don't mean to be rude about it, but just for starters, the people who said "Okay, you've covered your ass" in response to a memo entitled, uh, "Bin-Laden Determined To Get Your Ass" might not be the first option when it comes to analyzing intel. Particularly now, when their asses have just been uncovered yet again.

Second--and we don't want to distract from all the other amazing evidence of the amazing efficaciousness of torturing captives just for shits and giggles--but the Library Tower thing has pretty much been disreputable since the day Bush called it by the wrong name, and saying "The CIA says it believed it" now doesn't change much. After 9/11, even the Bush administration had pretty much figured out that terrorists had commandeered commercial aircraft and flown them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Assuming for a moment that this soggy Library Tower intel was 1) genuine; 2) obtained by torture; and 2a) unobtainable by any other means; and 3) was somehow still timely eighteen months after 9/11, and one month and 183 trips down the CIA's waterslide after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's capture--by the Pakistanis, by the way, despite all of Abu Zubaydah's gurgled admissions to us--we are still left with a question--wait, I'm sure I wrote it down somewhere--oh, yeah: So what? Are we supposed to believe we hadn't prepared for any more attacks until The Sheikh coughed this up? Not on the largest building on the West Coast, defended, just to choose one, by the California Air National Guard's 144th Fighter Wing and its phalanx of Mach 1.2-at-low-altitude F-16 Fighting Falcons? Any single one of which--I hope I'm not revealing classified information here--is generally considered superior in firepower to a standard 747? We had to know the specific target in order to respond to a commercial airline hijacked across the Pacific over a year-and-a-half after 9/11? Sure we did. Oh, what's that Khalid? You're still thirsty? After all you had to drink just 4.06 hours ago?

And look: that's the best fucking case scenario. Even after crossing that chasm in several leaps we're left with the requirement of 1) blind faith assumption that this averted a real attack, and one which was still going to be carried out after its Mastermind had fallen into US hands; and 2) believing anything anyone connected with the Bush administration says. And swallowing those whales still leaves us right back at the beginning of the argument: was torture of any sort, let alone the 183 times a month, Tomás de Torquemada barely-sublimated sexual-thrill sort we substituted for anything approaching justified use of extreme techniques, really efficacious, or not? This is, again, the product of the American Right talking to itself for the last thirty years; it seems to imagine that restating its objections somehow advances the argument, as though the rest of the world was its profoundly deaf grandmother.

On the other side, of course, we have the fresh--if unfairly focused on to the exclusion of how Bush administration tactics Kept Us Safe, Except that One Time--evidence that the whole torture business was an outright sham, that the Ticking Time Bomb wasn't actually hooked up to a clock, and that it didn't fucking work. You "waterboarded" one man 83 times in a month, another one-hundred times more in the same time period. At what point do you think they figured out they weren't actually going to be drowned, that this was just part of the torture program? After six, twenty-six, sixty-seven? At what point would they have stopped caring, or looked to tell you anything you wanted to hear?

Speaking of which, ain't Anything We Wanted To Hear what we got? A neatly-wrapped confirmation of the fear-mongering scenarios the Bush administration fed on for five years or so? Big buildings, jetliners, scary brown fanatics, plans for continual attacks until everything over two stories was rubble? It was fucking bosh then. You may remember (say AndrewSullivanAndrewSullivanAndrewSullivan while clicking your heels together three times) that anyone trying to understand the attacks of 9/11 was objectively pro-terrorist? Never mind that the targets of 9/11 were symbolic; it was a Declaration of War on America Herself, bent on our total destruction. Never mind that such was clearly outside the capabilities of the Islamofascists, or outside terrorism's purlieu; kindly shit your pants like a patriotic American should. Big Buildings! Crashing Down! Everything's Changed! Vote GOP!

And never mind that, if you're an international terrorist Mastermind, you might just wait for the next earthquake to bring down LA, and save on the trained manpower. Or that once you saw the sort of Head Meets Sand, Let's Bomb The Globe response 9/11 got, you'd just sit back and wait to see what sort of zaniness the Bush administration would get up to next.

But oh, by all means, let's read the fine print:

Yet there is more information confirming the program's effectiveness. The Office of Legal Counsel memo states "we discuss only a small fraction of the important intelligence CIA interrogators have obtained from KSM" and notes that "intelligence derived from CIA detainees has resulted in more than 6,000 intelligence reports and, in 2004, accounted for approximately half of the [Counterterrorism Center's] reporting on al Qaeda." The memos refer to other classified documents -- including an "Effectiveness Memo" and an "IG Report," which explain how "the use of enhanced techniques in the interrogations of KSM, Zubaydah and others . . . has yielded critical information." Why didn't Obama officials release this information as well? Because they know that if the public could see the details of the techniques side by side with evidence that the program saved American lives, the vast majority would support continuing it.

Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, "as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, 'brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship." In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that "Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable." The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.

Okay, now, leaving aside the Amazing Proof! that the Office of Legal Counsel, aka the Fucking Long-Distance Small-Animal Abuser John Yoo, wrote a memo detailing how many reports were generated by just a few hundred instances of simu-drowning, it's certainly nice to relive the days of Shit Your Pants, America, Part II: crazy Muslims believe all sorts of crazy shit and want to kill Jesus! Just promise 'em 73 virgins or something, and they'll squeal. After a suitable, slightly damp interval.

Oh, we're done with you, Mr. Thiessen. We were done with you a long time ago, as was that America you still imagine you can lecture. In the meantime here's some more fine print for you to examine, courtesy yesterday's Times story:

The Times article, based on information from former intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Abu Zubaydah had revealed a great deal of information before harsh methods were used and after his captors stripped him of clothes, kept him in a cold cell and kept him awake at night. The article said interrogators at the secret prison in Thailand believed he had given up all the information he had, but officials at headquarters ordered them to use waterboarding.

He revealed no new information after being waterboarded, the article said, a conclusion that appears to be supported by a footnote to a 2005 Justice Department memo saying the use of the harshest methods appeared to have been “unnecessary” in his case.

Let us know when you're ready to restate your previously discredited positions again, Mr. Thiessen. We're sure they'll have a similar impact. On that day's Post op-ed layout.

And A Field Telephone Is A Communications Device, Except When It's Attached To Your Genitals

Scott Shane, "Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects". April 19

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew....

The release of the numbers is likely to become part of the debate about the morality and efficacy of interrogation methods that the Justice Department under the Bush administration declared legal even though the United States had historically treated them as torture.

WHICH, then, seems ample justification to refer to them in print as "torture techniques", sans quotes, or "interrogation methods," quotes included, or for just working around it if you want to be squeamish. Not to trivialize things, but when, for example, an administration takes what had been called, throughout the history of the Republic, "tax increases" and starts referring to them as "revenue enhancements", the onus is on it to explain the subtle shades of meaning; otherwise it ought to be treated as a risible, if not shameful, attempt to use euphemism in an effort to fool people which should be doomed to failure if the target audience has what are called "reading skills". It ought not to be presented as though there's some sort of active semantic debate going on between the previous two centuries and some transparent PR scheme.

The present case is the opposite of laughable, of course; too bad the faux-balanced coverage veers that way once or twice. When we report that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to "simulated" drowning 183 times in March, 2003 (it is a month with 31 days, meaning 5.9 times per day, once every 4.06 hours a day, every day, non-stop), we are reporting that he was tortured, period. There's no fucking wiggle room about "interrogation", however enhanced, and there's precious little to suggest that those supervising this treatment, if not also those carrying it out, have some sort of blanket excuse, or immunity, bestowed upon them by the small-animal-torturing sexual psychopaths then occupying the two highest executive offices in the land. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah were being tortured. For kicks. By, and at the behest of, people who do not believe that American justice is medieval enough to be fully satisfying. This was one month. If we expected to get information out of these two we would have allowed them time to breath oxygen.

Let's lose the 24 shit. This was not some sort of hot pursuit/ticking time bomb bullshit (and I say this as someone who believes that a competently-trained field commander, in a combat zone, might indeed be justified in using harsh measures if he had determined they were absolutely necessary and time was of the essence, whether or not they are proven efficacious. Although it is also true that I believe such cannot be sanctioned by US or military law). It was torture justified by the facile description of the crimes of 9/11 as Acts of War, which metaphor we then treated as an adequate description whenever it suited us, and ignored when it came to the Geneva Conventions. What was either of these two ever able to sputter? Certainly not the truth: every single increase in the Color Code Alert Level changes in that Homeland Security Barometer for Stateside Tom Clancy Fanboys was bogus; every single global terror attack went unpredicted. We were torturing Clyde because Bonnie had escaped to the mountains. Because trial and execution weren't good enough for President Frog Baseball.

Those of you with long memories will recall those distant days when "If X then the terrorists will have won" was a common rejoinder. It was certainly convenient to portray them as SPECTRE. It was politically rewarding, too, for a time. And, as seemed clear to more than a few of us at the time, it mostly looked liked a lot of fun to far too many of our fellow citizens, a too-sizable chunk of the military establishment with direct control over captured combatants and non-combatants alike, and the nearly-unfettered criminals installed in our highest office at the time. It's not a question of what "top [unnamed] Obama administration officials" think of, or don't think of , as "torture." It's torture, and it was perpetrated not for any of the flaccid excuses offered as an afterthought, but out of the pure infantile-sexuality and psychopathy of its stewards, who believed they were empowered to ignore the law and all standards of civilized behavior, in the name of all Americans. The one proper response is to allow the actual Rule of Law to serve as the rivers Alpheus and Peneus and clean the Augean stables. This of course will be, and already has been, tempered by political cowardice. The least the rest of us can do--including the Times--is to lose the fraudulent quotation marks once and for all.

You Swing Like A Girl. Or So We've Heard.

Condimelda Rice, "My Weekend on Tiger's Trail". April 13 via Wonkette

FIRST, any day that begins with the headline:

Drinking Led To Sword Fight Death, Charges Filed

in your local paper, even if your local paper is the Indianapolis Racist Star, which could probably run something similar every day or two if it wished, is not a day to be boldly stared at across a small space, at least not without a lot more coffee than I've had by 7 AM. Perhaps, even, not without the same level of alcohol consumption which last weekend led Christopher Rondeau, 37, from intoxication to incarceration. Well, that and what were described, either in journalese or the court papers, or both, as, respectively, "a Japanese samurai-type" and a "Japanese sabre-style infantry" sword. Rondeau is being charged with murder in the death of his uncle, Adolf Stegbauer, 69, and with the reckless homicide death of Franziska Stegbauer, 77, Rondeau's grandmother, who tried to break up the fight, apparently without knowing the appropriate spells.

Plus I'm laboring under sleep deprivation brought on by a thirty-hour bout with computer glitchiness that turned into a full-fledged meltdown last night, though my NASAesque system redundancy seems to've saved the day, or stopped the bleeding. I'll let you know for sure after the full Nuke n' Pave on the internal hard drive.

I am, in fact, still transferring recent files--of which there are a lot, since I naturally was in the middle of a big project and had shit scattered everywhere--to their redundant redundancy location while typing with the other hand. But I couldn't bring myself to abandon Condimelda for one more day.

I'VE admitted, on these very internets, that my Poor Wife and I enjoy the PBS Lawrence Welk Show package, though just in case there's someone out there who could possibly misunderstand that, for "enjoy" read "very occasionally stare at in slack-jawed wonder for up to three minutes at a time, depending on how long ago we've eaten." It's a sort of perilous exercise in teevee anthropology for us, except it's the rare anthropologist who can't explain a single fucking thing about the strange alien culture he's immersed himself in.

But that's it; you consider, even briefly, that the elements in your very marrow are the product of the life and death cycles of not one, not two, but three stars, of a vastness of Spacetime beyond Vast, beyond even Rod Serling's or Gene Roddenberry's imaginations; that the remarkable, if not miraculous, chain of events which preceded the first stirrings of mammalian evolution on this planet took 3.5 billion years, give or take a billion; that hominid evolution can be measured back more than 4 million years, and our own genus over 2 million; that the odds of a particular sperm implanting itself in a particular egg are roughly one in 225 billion, that human beings speak 5-10,000 different languages, depending on who's counting, that everyone living on this continent came from somewhere else, and that if a lorry driver in New York c. 1926 had made a left turn rather than a right your grandfather and grandmother would never had met. It is beyond all reason that we find ourselves here at this very moment, or that doing so we speak more or less the same variant of proto-Indo-European filtered through Greek, Latin, Norman French, High German, and Old Frisian, just for starters, enough at least for purposes of misunderstanding. So how is it you can turn on the teevee and find people who might as well be from Mars?

I mean, you would not watch this program. You would not wear clothing in colors normally reserved for the sugariest of children's breakfast cereals. You would not listen to this stuff unless you had been trapped within earshot by falling boulders or a collapsing ceiling, and then only until you had finished gnawing your own arm off, and you certainly wouldn't dance to it under any circumstances, particularly if it meant abandoning your walker and oxygen bottle. In short, nothing about the program makes sense under any conceivable mental framework. Even Gene Roddenberry's. And it was on teevee for thirty years.

Not to mention it was hosted by a guy who was born in North Dakota, but who, seventy years later, still spoke English as though he'd been raised by wolves in the Black Forest and rescued scant months ago.

And the PBS packages, being PBS, have to cover the old commercial breaks, which they accomplish by bringing back such of the "Welk Stars" as are still able to follow a teleprompter and can be spared from Branson that week. This is not a crack, by the way; America's Entertainment Destination for people who do not actually care for entertainment includes a 160-room Welk Resort Hotel, and those 160 rooms include free Wi-Fi. And these "Welk Stars" are uniformly nauseatingly chipper, and not just in the mode of the professional "entertainer", mind you; they relate the stories of their post-show lives which, without exception, mix grandchildren, golf, and either "performing" at a Welk Theatre in Branson or San Diego, or just keeping in touch with other members of the "Welk Family", plus your choice of crushed corn flake or Durkee's™ french-fried onion crust. I suppose it's possible there's some former Family Member somewhere who drinks to excess and spouts off about what a cheapskate and bluenose his old boss really was. Sure, none would ever make it on camera. But when you watch the ones who do, the ones whose pasted-on smiles show no sign of disappearing the second the red light goes off, and you bet anyone who ever possessed a negative thought in his life would have jumped out a window by his second rehearsal surrounded by these mutants.

And here's the thing: let us, arguendo, take Mormons as the Whitest People on the Planet. And if I asked you to name five, excepting any who've been arrested for polygamy or child abduction, you'd likely say, "Mitt Romney, Ken Jennings, and three Osmonds". Unless you're, like, a big fan of The Jets or somethin'. Anyway, that's four stiffs plus possibly the coolest guy on the planet who's never released an album. From the very heart of Waltz-Time, Church-Basement Potluck Supper America. So how, exactly, does one go about finding vast, free-range herds of these people who seem never to have experienced social intercourse with anyone different from themselves, or sexual intercourse with anyone at all? (Okay, sure, they appear to breed. I'm not convinced.)

WHICH brings us to Condolezza Rice, born November 14, 1954, Birmingham, AL, onetime classmate of one of the four African-American girls who'd die in that city's most notorious--but far from only--white supremacist terror bombing, and her article about...golf. And not just golf, but golf at The Masters, Augusta, GA, where, forty-five years after the 16th Street Baptist Church met sixteen sticks of dynamite, Condi Rice still cannot play, now because she's a women, although she could caddie. Prior to 1990, that's 1990 A.D., C.E., 1990 eighteen years ago her skin color would have been enough.

And, y'know, that's between Secretary Rice and her conscience. I'm not an African-American woman, let alone one who grew up in the Jim Crow South. If Condi Rice and her mother chose that second week in April, 1968, to commiserate with Roberto De Vicenzo (whom she calls "Robert") for the possible language barrier that resulted in him signing an erroneous scorecard (how do they make "3"s in Argentina, anyway?) at a Whites Only club just 130 miles and a few anguished hours away from where they'd buried Dr. King, well, it was their business.

No, I never had to deal with Jim Crow. I do do a little writing, or typing, and I believe I can safely say that if this is indicative of how Condi's mind works we are extremely fortunate to have escaped the Bush II years as well as we did.

If you clicked the Wonkette link you've seen some samples, including:

As the time approached, my assistant Anne said, “They want to know who you want to follow.” Borrowing language from Anne’s generation, I said, “Duh?

Okay, but if she didn't understand you it's probably because you left off the be-otch.

Look, again: there are probably people in the audience at either Welk Theatre--and that's astonishing enough, really--who shout out requests for "Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah", or "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?", or, for that matter, "Old Black Joe". But where do they come from? How does one of them become Secretary of State?

Think you can take more?

• I had decided that if Tiger did not win, I would champion the cause of Phil Mickelson (met him at the White House and he’s a really nice guy); Stewart Cink (met him in Atlanta and he’s a really nice guy); or Anthony Kim (haven’t met him but I like his swagger).

• Upon arrival, Augusta took my breath away with its physical beauty.

• A golfer hit his ball over the green and they needed a foot (a human foot) to hold down the rope and produce space for his chip. My foot was there and I happily stood on the rope.

• But you know that Tiger will be there to do it right the next time.

• In the end, it was Angel Cabrera and justice for Robert De Vicenzo.

Okay, back to trying to salvage a hard drive, secure in the knowledge that it could be much worse. I could be trying to salvage our international reputation now that Condi finished with it.