Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr.
August 25, 1913--October 18, 1973
Friday, August 25
Speaking of Idiots Speaking of Idiots Speaking
Kathleen Parker, "Intellectually Curious George", Townhall, August 23
AFTERTHOUGHT: John Hinderacker, "Hail to the Chief"
Like clear cola, it's difficult to say who had the idea first here, but it is clear who's got the bigger psychological problem:
By contrast, Parker is a paragon of rationality:
Okay, wait up. By "going mainstream" she means "was mentioned on Joe Scarborough's show." Is it too late to reconsider who's more delusional? No? Okay, it's still Assrocket.
Man, that must have stung. Especially coming from Kathleen Parker, who is invited to every important international summit, and so would know.
We might take a moment or two to ponder exactly who Kathleen Parker is to be ridiculing someone else's intellectual standing, but as W.V. Quine once said, "Who?"
Instead let us note that Ronstadt made news for calling Bush an idiot over two years ago, so perhaps a better question is, "Far-right mouthpieces bring this up in an election year just as Republicans are trying to distance themselves from The Idiot? Just how big an idiot do you imagine everyone else is?"
Now then, Ms Parker, the rest of us have been at this for awhile, and we've pretty much caught up with all three possible explanations for Bush's idiocy. And yours' is...?
And then he got back behind the wheel of his cab.
Y'know, when I first read this I thought it would be the focus of my response. "Texas English is Bush's first language" is in fact more ridiculous than the image of him as a brush-clearin' cowpoke. He's an effete, cosseted, Eastern prep school party boy who moved to Texas to spend other people's money on the chance that might make him rich. His "Texas" has never been authentic. That's not to say it's put on--he's too much of an idiot for that--but it's the adoption of a generic accentualizing which comes in part from being submerged in a culture with a pervasive and seductive ear--Yanks don't have to live in Britain long before they flatten their "a"s--and in part as the argot of the Texas Rich Guy Club, a sort of aural fraternity handshake.
But fuck that. The comment is too absurd to waste time on. Just as an American must pick up the energy and raise the voicing an octave to do an effective generic British accent, so too does the Easterner or Midwesterner simply lapse into a species of laziness to achieve that drawl. It doesn't mean there isn't some attendant laziness behind it.
Let's have a brief review of the Republican responses to seven years of "Bush is an idiot", shall we?
1. "No he's not."
2. "Yeah, he's an idiot, all right. An idiot like a fox."
3. "Okay, he sounds like an idiot, he exhibits none of the intellectual curiosity or competent grasp of the issues we'd like in a President, but he WON!"
4. "Wow, that was the most inspiring speech I've ever heard a politician give."
They're all delusional, it's just that some are more delusional than others (guess who?). Bush is an idiot. He's not an idiot in the old sense of IQ deficiency, and he's not an idiot just in the sense of doing something stupid based on a faulty grasp of reality, the way we can say, "What an idiot" when someone trips over an obstacle the rest of us categorized as "in plain sight," the way all of us are idiots sometimes.
For far too long, and at far too great a cost, his supporters were able to hide the real meaning of "Bush is an idiot" behind those two strawmen. But, damn, unless you get all your news from what the Right still seems to insist are unvarnished sources, you have to be aware that that game has been lost for some time. 9/11 and the attendant incessant public cheerleading gave George W. Bush a pass long after the public had written him off as a thinker. It eventually found the courage to write him off as a match for the office. That is simply how things are.
Now, a lot of people don't want to believe it, even people who've felt, or come to believe, that George W. Bush's values don't match their own, that he's less than honest and less than truthful. Some of them may have accepted the idea that the President is simply not a good public speaker, the Texas-sized line of codswallop you expect us to swallow this week. But it's not the case. Any native speaker of English knows that what's going on when George W. Bush speaks in public is not simple stagefright, ADD, regional speech variation, dyslexia, or a tendency towards Malapropisms. Speech is not merely words conveyed by sound, or we'd all be driving Ford Pintos. Bush communicates a lot of things when he speaks; among those is a lack of intellectual curiosity, an intolerance for difference of opinion, a sizeable inferiority complex and the concomitant rich boy's mean streak in response. "Bush is an idiot" means a lot of things, many of them things which come straight out of his mouth.
It's not surprising to hear that George W. does better when he's surrounded by a group of sycophants. It's to be expected. He's the living embodiment of the Gentleman's C. It's bad enough that it's taken you this long to even acknowledge the problem. Don't make it worse by claiming it's next to groundless.
The Hinderrocker piece was not only too delusional to take seriously enough to make fun of, it was also to similar to his "George W. Bush, Smartest Man in the World" thingie from a while back. I'm not sure what it means when you're willing to do that twice. I am sure what this means, though:
It means that before you went completely around the bend you somehow managed to avoid even a cursory familiarity with your own history and your own times.
AFTERTHOUGHT: John Hinderacker, "Hail to the Chief"
Like clear cola, it's difficult to say who had the idea first here, but it is clear who's got the bigger psychological problem:
But up close, he is a great communicator, in a way that, in my opinion, Ronald Reagan was not. He was by turns instructive, persuasive, and funny. His persona is very much that of the big brother. Above all, he was impassioned. I have never seen a politician speak so evidently from the heart, about big issues--freedom, most of all.
By contrast, Parker is a paragon of rationality:
Bush-bashing for sport has never lacked fans in the blogosphere, but questioning the president's intelligence lately has gone mainstream.
Okay, wait up. By "going mainstream" she means "was mentioned on Joe Scarborough's show." Is it too late to reconsider who's more delusional? No? Okay, it's still Assrocket.
Scarborough wasn't calling Bush an idiot, mind you. He was just quoting that renowned American intellectual, Linda Ronstadt. Recently, Ronstadt had commented on the president's performance while attending an international summit of heads of state.
Man, that must have stung. Especially coming from Kathleen Parker, who is invited to every important international summit, and so would know.
We might take a moment or two to ponder exactly who Kathleen Parker is to be ridiculing someone else's intellectual standing, but as W.V. Quine once said, "Who?"
Instead let us note that Ronstadt made news for calling Bush an idiot over two years ago, so perhaps a better question is, "Far-right mouthpieces bring this up in an election year just as Republicans are trying to distance themselves from The Idiot? Just how big an idiot do you imagine everyone else is?"
Now then, Ms Parker, the rest of us have been at this for awhile, and we've pretty much caught up with all three possible explanations for Bush's idiocy. And yours' is...?
Language barrier.
This theory occurred to me not long ago at an off-the-record luncheon with Bush and a hundred or so of his supporters. I was the guest of a guest, and welcomed the opportunity to observe the president in his natural habitat.
What I witnessed was revealing. Not only was the man fluent in the English language and intellectually agile, he was knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects raised during a 90-minute Q&A. Someone apparently had been slipping intellectual-curiosity tablets into Bush's cola.
Toward the end, one of the guests said, ``Mr. President, I think if Americans could hear you speak the way you have today, you'd have a 95 percent approval rating.''
And then he got back behind the wheel of his cab.
I think that's almost true. Not 95 percent, obviously, but he'd surely have a higher than 30 percent approval rating were he better able to explain what he's thinking. Bush does know; he just can't seem to say.
The question is why?
My theory dovetails with something one of his most acerbic critics, columnist Molly Ivins, once wrote: ``George W. Bush sounds like English is his second language.'' That's because it's true. ``Washington English'' (BEG ITAL)is(END ITAL) a second language for Bush; ``Texas English'' is his first.
When he tries to speak Washington English, which is the way Bush thinks presidents are supposed to speak -- over-enunciating and sprinkling his comments with awkward aphorisms -- he fumbles. He forgets what he's saying because the thoughts and words are not his own.
This is also when his annoying sibilance kicks in. The ``terroristsssssss," he says when ``terrorists" would do. My guess is he over-enunciates to cover his prairie accent, but the effect is, well, sssssstrange.
Y'know, when I first read this I thought it would be the focus of my response. "Texas English is Bush's first language" is in fact more ridiculous than the image of him as a brush-clearin' cowpoke. He's an effete, cosseted, Eastern prep school party boy who moved to Texas to spend other people's money on the chance that might make him rich. His "Texas" has never been authentic. That's not to say it's put on--he's too much of an idiot for that--but it's the adoption of a generic accentualizing which comes in part from being submerged in a culture with a pervasive and seductive ear--Yanks don't have to live in Britain long before they flatten their "a"s--and in part as the argot of the Texas Rich Guy Club, a sort of aural fraternity handshake.
But fuck that. The comment is too absurd to waste time on. Just as an American must pick up the energy and raise the voicing an octave to do an effective generic British accent, so too does the Easterner or Midwesterner simply lapse into a species of laziness to achieve that drawl. It doesn't mean there isn't some attendant laziness behind it.
Let's have a brief review of the Republican responses to seven years of "Bush is an idiot", shall we?
1. "No he's not."
2. "Yeah, he's an idiot, all right. An idiot like a fox."
3. "Okay, he sounds like an idiot, he exhibits none of the intellectual curiosity or competent grasp of the issues we'd like in a President, but he WON!"
4. "Wow, that was the most inspiring speech I've ever heard a politician give."
They're all delusional, it's just that some are more delusional than others (guess who?). Bush is an idiot. He's not an idiot in the old sense of IQ deficiency, and he's not an idiot just in the sense of doing something stupid based on a faulty grasp of reality, the way we can say, "What an idiot" when someone trips over an obstacle the rest of us categorized as "in plain sight," the way all of us are idiots sometimes.
For far too long, and at far too great a cost, his supporters were able to hide the real meaning of "Bush is an idiot" behind those two strawmen. But, damn, unless you get all your news from what the Right still seems to insist are unvarnished sources, you have to be aware that that game has been lost for some time. 9/11 and the attendant incessant public cheerleading gave George W. Bush a pass long after the public had written him off as a thinker. It eventually found the courage to write him off as a match for the office. That is simply how things are.
Now, a lot of people don't want to believe it, even people who've felt, or come to believe, that George W. Bush's values don't match their own, that he's less than honest and less than truthful. Some of them may have accepted the idea that the President is simply not a good public speaker, the Texas-sized line of codswallop you expect us to swallow this week. But it's not the case. Any native speaker of English knows that what's going on when George W. Bush speaks in public is not simple stagefright, ADD, regional speech variation, dyslexia, or a tendency towards Malapropisms. Speech is not merely words conveyed by sound, or we'd all be driving Ford Pintos. Bush communicates a lot of things when he speaks; among those is a lack of intellectual curiosity, an intolerance for difference of opinion, a sizeable inferiority complex and the concomitant rich boy's mean streak in response. "Bush is an idiot" means a lot of things, many of them things which come straight out of his mouth.
It's not surprising to hear that George W. does better when he's surrounded by a group of sycophants. It's to be expected. He's the living embodiment of the Gentleman's C. It's bad enough that it's taken you this long to even acknowledge the problem. Don't make it worse by claiming it's next to groundless.
The Hinderrocker piece was not only too delusional to take seriously enough to make fun of, it was also to similar to his "George W. Bush, Smartest Man in the World" thingie from a while back. I'm not sure what it means when you're willing to do that twice. I am sure what this means, though:
I've sometimes worried about how President Bush can withstand the Washington snake pit and deal with a daily barrage of hate from the ignorant left that, in my opinion, dwarfs in both volume and injustice the abuse directed against any prior President. (No one accused Lincoln of planning the attack on Fort Sumter.) Not to worry. He is, of course, miles above his mean-spirited liberal critics. More than that, he clearly derives real joy from the opportunity to serve as President and to participate in the great pageant of American history. And he sees himself as anything but a lame duck, which is why he is stumping for Republican candidates around the country.
It means that before you went completely around the bend you somehow managed to avoid even a cursory familiarity with your own history and your own times.
Thursday, August 24
In Fairness, They Did Run the "Lifestyles of the Pig Ignorant" Section Up the Flagpole, But Nobody Saluted
Oh Glorious Day [Jonah Goldberg ]
The New York Times has seen the light. All of those barbs about its elitism and catering to wealthy blue state readers finally hit a nerve and they are getting back to hard-hitting journalism for the common man:
The New York Times Names Chandler Burr as Its First-Ever Perfume Critic
Tuesday August 22, 3:21 pm ET
Fragrances Will Be Reviewed In New Column Appearing In T: Style Magazine
''Scent Strip'' Fragrance Column Will Debut on August 27
Issue Has Largest Total Advertising Pages Since 1984
Posted at 7:49 PM
What, exactly, do you say about Jonah Goldberg after you've said "What th' Fuck?" several dozen times? I realize he's incapable of understanding, or valuing, anything which can't be reduced to comic book form or fitted onto a bumpersticker, but What the fuck? Can no one prevail upon him to shut up when he has no idea what he's talking about? Has there ever been an adult more completely defined by the phrase, "Hand over yer lunch money, lardass?"
So perfume is an elitist concept now? How about soap? And for cryin' out loud, did you accidentally excise the part which said the Times was replacing its news section with fragrance reviews? Did you bother to read all four lines anytime between cut and paste? Like "largest total advertising since 1984"? Have somebody explain to you what it's like to work for a profit-making organization. Or why the Times can't limit itself to printing an Arts section consisting entirely of long think pieces on the Kirk v. Picard question. Or why they have an Arts section in the first place. Although, on the other hand, maybe somebody should suggest to Bill Keller he could just beg people to pony up $500 to join Adam Nagourney on the buffet line at the Ramada Inn O'Hare.
PS. How many times a week does Jonah's contribution to the national debate consist of running after some liberal target and throwing rocks at it like he's seen the bigger kids do?
PPS. Remember when we were all New Yorkers? Boy, that was a great couple of weeks.
Wednesday, August 23
Group Says New Titanic Deck-Chair Arrangement "Six Months Away, Tops"
Robert Dreyfuss, "A Higher Power: James Baker puts Bush's Iraq policy into rehab." The Washington Monthly, September.
First, a confession: I didn't actually read the piece. I skimmed. It's no matter, because I wasn't intending to critique it. All I wanted to do, after seeing the link to a piece about "James Baker heading a bipartisan group looking at ways to pull our chestnuts out of Iraq" was check out how long it took for Lee Hamilton to pop up.
Answer: It's 1218 words to "Besides Baker, the bipartisan task force is co-chaired by former congressman Lee H. Hamilton..."
It's a ways to go, that, 2/5 of the way through the piece, but I never lost faith. After all, who could imagine "Jim Baker" and "bipartisan" turning up anywhere without the seventeen-term former Congressman from Indiana's 9th District, the House's Hoosier answer to Dick Lugar? Why, it'd be like "Wishy" without "Washy", "Chip n' Dale" without "Alphonse and Gaston", "Effectual" without "In".
Except it ain't funny.
Lee Hamilton chaired the House Iran/Contra Committee, the one that decided following the trail to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush would be bad for morale. He reprised that role as vice chair in Iran/Contra II: Episode 9/11, which means that Lee Hamilton was the ranking Democratic witness to the President and Vice-President of the United States holding hands as they testified together. Though at least this time they actually testified.
Hamilton and Baker have worked together before, as co-chairs of the Baker-Hamilton Commission to Investigate Certain Security Issues at Los Alamos, [that's the real name--really answered all our questions right there, didn't they?] so it's possible we could save some money on stationery. As a result of their investigation, a vigorously moderate finger was wagged at confused security policies which might have led to the scandalous theft of those missing computer hard drives, had they ever been missing, and had that potential missing-ness been caused by theft. And without Indiana's Lee Hamilton providing the bi for the report's bipartisanship, that possible scandal might never have seen enough coverage to fully obfuscate the Wen Ho Lee story, America's L'Affaire Dreyfus. Which, had it been fully exposed, might have set the government and its teevee network co-conspirators back much more than $1.6 M. And who knows what that might have done for morale?
This--I probably needn't tell you--bodes quite well for the showily bipartisan pseudo-solution to the missing results in Iraq, as the absolute necessity of removing our troops while we still can coincides remarkably well with the report's conclusions. Or so one might guess.
Representative Hamilton has kept busy since leaving the Congress in 1999, as a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council and the advisory boards of the Central Intelligence Agency and the US Army, all of which have achieved unprecedented successes during this period.
It's a nice match for Baker, the Bush family consigliere, who ran George H.W. Bush's "anti-busing" Senate campaign in 1970 and his "voodoo economics" Presidential campaign in 1980, before becoming Reagan's first Chief of Staff, with particular responsibility for the Gipper's wildly effective voodoo domestic policies and the voodoo tax reforms of 1981, the ones that had to be euthanized between '86-88, while Baker was Treasury secretary. Baker was Secretary of State in the Bush I administration, thus earning the distinction of being the only holder of that office to engineer a war in Iraq we were subsequently able to get back out of. He has since retired from public life, appearing occasionally in a legal capacity to secure the theft of the Presidency or to further the Carlyle Group's world domination plans, or to join with Lee Hamilton in bipartisan efforts to make the Democratic party look worse than it could do all by itself.
The committee has reportedly been quite close-mouthed about its actions, its members refusing to speak on the record, presumably because the group, which was carefully selected for partially-plausible deniability in helping to start the war does not want to take any credit for its vital role in assuring nothing whatever gets said about the issue until after November's midterms. The target date for their report favoring the phased withdrawals any group of ten schoolchildren could have told you two years ago were inevitable is 2007, or roughly the point at which it can be used by potential Republican nominees of whichever end of the right wing of the Party to beat potential Democrats over the head with. That, of course, is the very essence of bipartisanship. And you can thank a Hoosier for it.
AFTERTHOUGHT: A plan. Sure. We haven't seen it in a while, but remember the "Liberals are rooting for bad news in Iraq" thing? Why--assuming I wanted to hear bad news from Iraq--would I have ever bothered rooting for it? With this group it's always been a cinch of the lead-pipe variety. It would be like anxiously awaiting the end of a Perry Mason episode to find out if his client gets off.
First, a confession: I didn't actually read the piece. I skimmed. It's no matter, because I wasn't intending to critique it. All I wanted to do, after seeing the link to a piece about "James Baker heading a bipartisan group looking at ways to pull our chestnuts out of Iraq" was check out how long it took for Lee Hamilton to pop up.
Answer: It's 1218 words to "Besides Baker, the bipartisan task force is co-chaired by former congressman Lee H. Hamilton..."
It's a ways to go, that, 2/5 of the way through the piece, but I never lost faith. After all, who could imagine "Jim Baker" and "bipartisan" turning up anywhere without the seventeen-term former Congressman from Indiana's 9th District, the House's Hoosier answer to Dick Lugar? Why, it'd be like "Wishy" without "Washy", "Chip n' Dale" without "Alphonse and Gaston", "Effectual" without "In".
Except it ain't funny.
Lee Hamilton chaired the House Iran/Contra Committee, the one that decided following the trail to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush would be bad for morale. He reprised that role as vice chair in Iran/Contra II: Episode 9/11, which means that Lee Hamilton was the ranking Democratic witness to the President and Vice-President of the United States holding hands as they testified together. Though at least this time they actually testified.
Hamilton and Baker have worked together before, as co-chairs of the Baker-Hamilton Commission to Investigate Certain Security Issues at Los Alamos, [that's the real name--really answered all our questions right there, didn't they?] so it's possible we could save some money on stationery. As a result of their investigation, a vigorously moderate finger was wagged at confused security policies which might have led to the scandalous theft of those missing computer hard drives, had they ever been missing, and had that potential missing-ness been caused by theft. And without Indiana's Lee Hamilton providing the bi for the report's bipartisanship, that possible scandal might never have seen enough coverage to fully obfuscate the Wen Ho Lee story, America's L'Affaire Dreyfus. Which, had it been fully exposed, might have set the government and its teevee network co-conspirators back much more than $1.6 M. And who knows what that might have done for morale?
This--I probably needn't tell you--bodes quite well for the showily bipartisan pseudo-solution to the missing results in Iraq, as the absolute necessity of removing our troops while we still can coincides remarkably well with the report's conclusions. Or so one might guess.
Representative Hamilton has kept busy since leaving the Congress in 1999, as a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council and the advisory boards of the Central Intelligence Agency and the US Army, all of which have achieved unprecedented successes during this period.
It's a nice match for Baker, the Bush family consigliere, who ran George H.W. Bush's "anti-busing" Senate campaign in 1970 and his "voodoo economics" Presidential campaign in 1980, before becoming Reagan's first Chief of Staff, with particular responsibility for the Gipper's wildly effective voodoo domestic policies and the voodoo tax reforms of 1981, the ones that had to be euthanized between '86-88, while Baker was Treasury secretary. Baker was Secretary of State in the Bush I administration, thus earning the distinction of being the only holder of that office to engineer a war in Iraq we were subsequently able to get back out of. He has since retired from public life, appearing occasionally in a legal capacity to secure the theft of the Presidency or to further the Carlyle Group's world domination plans, or to join with Lee Hamilton in bipartisan efforts to make the Democratic party look worse than it could do all by itself.
The committee has reportedly been quite close-mouthed about its actions, its members refusing to speak on the record, presumably because the group, which was carefully selected for partially-plausible deniability in helping to start the war does not want to take any credit for its vital role in assuring nothing whatever gets said about the issue until after November's midterms. The target date for their report favoring the phased withdrawals any group of ten schoolchildren could have told you two years ago were inevitable is 2007, or roughly the point at which it can be used by potential Republican nominees of whichever end of the right wing of the Party to beat potential Democrats over the head with. That, of course, is the very essence of bipartisanship. And you can thank a Hoosier for it.
AFTERTHOUGHT: A plan. Sure. We haven't seen it in a while, but remember the "Liberals are rooting for bad news in Iraq" thing? Why--assuming I wanted to hear bad news from Iraq--would I have ever bothered rooting for it? With this group it's always been a cinch of the lead-pipe variety. It would be like anxiously awaiting the end of a Perry Mason episode to find out if his client gets off.
Tuesday, August 22
Monday, August 21
Bobo Lit
David Brooks, "Cracking the Shells," August 20
Peyton Place. No, really. Peyton Place, Grace Metalious' Peyton Place, is the subject of Our Mister Brooks' Sunday sermon:
Questions: 1) Was there actually a time when people took Brooks' pop pseudo-sociology pseudo-seriously? It's really the reason he has a gig with the Times and News Hour? 2) Is there any reason why I should take Brooks (and others) limitless war on the 60s as something other than a personal confession he (and they) never got laid? 3) Does the Times stylebook really specify enumerating decades with an apostrophe (1950's)? And if so, why?
Let's sort out a couple of the ground rules first. It ought to occur to anyone that this sort of game can't be played with art, which, fortunately, Peyton Place isn't. Second, it ought to be played with some regard for internal consistency. Objecting that Mrs. Medalious did not write an 800-page feminist tract is clearly beside the point. It's like objecting that H. G. Wells never wrote an instruction manual for the microwave oven.
Whether there's some biographical tidbit in Brooks' past that explains his psychedelicaphobia, and whether that or anything else might possibly explain why several inches of the New York Times Op-Ed page in August of 2006 is given over to a discussion of Peyton Place remains moot. But Metalious' bio is relevant: daughter of an alcoholic mother (what she would become) and an absentee father, raised by her grandmother in a female-dominated family; showed an early interest in writing but married at eighteen in 1943 when she became pregnant. Her husband enlisted shortly thereafter, survived the war and returned home, like many, to a wife and child he barely knew. They struggled to get by. Eventually he went to college on the GI Bill while she worked for their support. She had two more children. Peyton Place was her second novel, first published; it happened to catch the eye of a reader in a prestigious firm who then happened to get a job with Kitty Messner, one of the few women of that day to found and run a publishing house. The book became a best seller, but it was in the newfangled paperback market that it really took off.
It is that popularity, and not her literary merit, that Brooks' unnamed critics address, and his Bobo blandishments ("After the class consciousness of the late 1930's, and the national solidarity of the 1940's, Americans in the 1950's were inclined to define problems in moral and psychological terms, not as the products of economic or political forces.") don't seem even to have a point. The book didn't sell millions of copies because it defined problems in psychological terms, or because it told a cautionary tale of grey men in grey flannel, but because of its blunt treatment of S-E-X.
It's hard to figure how Brooks could miss that, or how he could tout the "moral terms" of a book which treats rape as an act of violence and an abortion as a life-saving act of humanity while he claims its proto-pop-feminism as the figment of a buncha hippies. But then this is the pop-culture version of the Right's Lessons of WWII series: a prefabricated moral pasted over historical events in cheap paper. Get it anywhere near the light and you can see right through it.
Of course the point of transforming Peyton Place from rank and horny to (Otto) Rank and (Karen) Horney * is the preservation of the Pre-Fab 50s of popular wingnut imaginings. But there's something a bit odd at work:
Hmmmm. Tasting affluence, check. I'm not sure just how many Americans worried about the power of advertising; more of an elitist thing, wasn't that Mr. Brooks? Troubled by racism? Go back and read the Times own coverage of the Civil Rights movement from, say the Montgomery bus boycott through the end of the decade. Longer, if you'd like. I believe you'll discover that most Americans, at least as the story editors and headline writers saw them, were more troubled by Negro misbehavior than pervasive racism.
It's interesting as always to note that while the Right has gotten to have it both ways for a quarter-century now it still can't win an argument. But there's the acrid taste of metal being smelted nearby, of new coins hurriedly struck from old, devalued currency, and not just in the denial of 50s racism. It's as if, with the neo-con agenda a pile of cinders, and most of the rest of the "conservative" program smoldering rubble, the "Crowd", once the arbiter of all things moral and reasonable, decent and American, is now the problem, the dumb dead weight holding down the Libertarian Republican who will enact the real right wing program once and for all. And this time we mean it. Maybe Grace Metalious was trying to tell us we needed John McCain.
*Old joke, sorry.
Peyton Place. No, really. Peyton Place, Grace Metalious' Peyton Place, is the subject of Our Mister Brooks' Sunday sermon:
When critics write about "Peyton Place" today, they tend to see it as a premonition of the glorious achievements of the 1960's. Some describe it as an early revolt against the repressive bourgeois order of the 1950's suburbia. But "Peyton Place" was set in a rural town without radio, TV, or much consumerism--with farms and outhouses instead of split-levels. This was the sort of supposedly quaint rural community people in the 1950's were trying to get out of in order to flee to the suburbs.
Others see "Peyton Place" as a precursor to feminism and [CAUTION, David Brooks witticism dead ahead, please stow all beverages:] the baby boomers' invention of the female orgasm, which apparently took place at Woodstock. But Metalious treats their strength and sexuality as obvious features of human society, and clearly rejects the notion that to be a woman is to be a member of a cause or the sisterhood collective.
Questions: 1) Was there actually a time when people took Brooks' pop pseudo-sociology pseudo-seriously? It's really the reason he has a gig with the Times and News Hour? 2) Is there any reason why I should take Brooks (and others) limitless war on the 60s as something other than a personal confession he (and they) never got laid? 3) Does the Times stylebook really specify enumerating decades with an apostrophe (1950's)? And if so, why?
Let's sort out a couple of the ground rules first. It ought to occur to anyone that this sort of game can't be played with art, which, fortunately, Peyton Place isn't. Second, it ought to be played with some regard for internal consistency. Objecting that Mrs. Medalious did not write an 800-page feminist tract is clearly beside the point. It's like objecting that H. G. Wells never wrote an instruction manual for the microwave oven.
Whether there's some biographical tidbit in Brooks' past that explains his psychedelicaphobia, and whether that or anything else might possibly explain why several inches of the New York Times Op-Ed page in August of 2006 is given over to a discussion of Peyton Place remains moot. But Metalious' bio is relevant: daughter of an alcoholic mother (what she would become) and an absentee father, raised by her grandmother in a female-dominated family; showed an early interest in writing but married at eighteen in 1943 when she became pregnant. Her husband enlisted shortly thereafter, survived the war and returned home, like many, to a wife and child he barely knew. They struggled to get by. Eventually he went to college on the GI Bill while she worked for their support. She had two more children. Peyton Place was her second novel, first published; it happened to catch the eye of a reader in a prestigious firm who then happened to get a job with Kitty Messner, one of the few women of that day to found and run a publishing house. The book became a best seller, but it was in the newfangled paperback market that it really took off.
It is that popularity, and not her literary merit, that Brooks' unnamed critics address, and his Bobo blandishments ("After the class consciousness of the late 1930's, and the national solidarity of the 1940's, Americans in the 1950's were inclined to define problems in moral and psychological terms, not as the products of economic or political forces.") don't seem even to have a point. The book didn't sell millions of copies because it defined problems in psychological terms, or because it told a cautionary tale of grey men in grey flannel, but because of its blunt treatment of S-E-X.
It's hard to figure how Brooks could miss that, or how he could tout the "moral terms" of a book which treats rape as an act of violence and an abortion as a life-saving act of humanity while he claims its proto-pop-feminism as the figment of a buncha hippies. But then this is the pop-culture version of the Right's Lessons of WWII series: a prefabricated moral pasted over historical events in cheap paper. Get it anywhere near the light and you can see right through it.
Of course the point of transforming Peyton Place from rank and horny to (Otto) Rank and (Karen) Horney * is the preservation of the Pre-Fab 50s of popular wingnut imaginings. But there's something a bit odd at work:
Tasting affluence, worried about the power of advertising, troubled by pervasive racism, Americans fixated on the power of social pressure, and the way individual autonomy could be inhibited by the judgments of the crowd.
Hmmmm. Tasting affluence, check. I'm not sure just how many Americans worried about the power of advertising; more of an elitist thing, wasn't that Mr. Brooks? Troubled by racism? Go back and read the Times own coverage of the Civil Rights movement from, say the Montgomery bus boycott through the end of the decade. Longer, if you'd like. I believe you'll discover that most Americans, at least as the story editors and headline writers saw them, were more troubled by Negro misbehavior than pervasive racism.
It's interesting as always to note that while the Right has gotten to have it both ways for a quarter-century now it still can't win an argument. But there's the acrid taste of metal being smelted nearby, of new coins hurriedly struck from old, devalued currency, and not just in the denial of 50s racism. It's as if, with the neo-con agenda a pile of cinders, and most of the rest of the "conservative" program smoldering rubble, the "Crowd", once the arbiter of all things moral and reasonable, decent and American, is now the problem, the dumb dead weight holding down the Libertarian Republican who will enact the real right wing program once and for all. And this time we mean it. Maybe Grace Metalious was trying to tell us we needed John McCain.
*Old joke, sorry.
Sunday, August 20
Friday, August 18
That's Rich
Rich Lowry, "Bush's Vietnam? Not yet--but does Bush realize how close it is?" National Review, Aug 15
Iraq and Vietnam. For someone my age it's not exactly déjà vu all over again. More like being forced to watch Robin Williams in The Birdcage having seen La Cage aux Folles a generation before.
Okay, so right off the bat we get something with no corollary. It could be that in the 60s Birchers and editors of the National Review were claiming that Liberals had just been itching to oppose a war since the first Roosevelt administration, but the truth is that in those simpler times most people aspired to not make glaring howlers in their opening paragraphs. Quaint, I know.
2006 - 30 = 1976. The Mayaguez Incident was '75, and is officially considered part of the Vietnam War. I bring it up only to prove I was paying attention back then. * Then there's Jimmy Carter who, if memory serves, did not send troops anywhere except on the Ill-Fated Hostage Rescue Mission, which conservatives blamed on Vietnam. As always we were dabbling in Central America, but nobody was supposed to know, so no Vietnam comparisons there. There was the Olympics boycott of '80, which Paul Krassner or Marlon Brando or somebody called "the decathlete's Vietnam", I think, but it didn't stick. Next Reagan invaded Grenada, apparently because he misunderstood something Claudette Colbert said into his bad ear, and the US lanched the largest Armada since D-Day against 80 Cuban bricklayers who were menacing some American medical students. Thanks in no small part to our position as the world's premier military power we managed to land our troops in such a way that it put the Cubans between us and the students, but fortunately no one was walled up. The planning here may have recalled Vietnam, but it was over too quickly for any real sloganeering to gain a foothold. Reagan also tried to kill Libyan strongman Muammar Kaddafi, who foiled the attempt by changing the spelling of his name. We're insisting on a strict "No ground troops, no 'Nam" rule here. "There are no quagmires in the air," as Curtis LeMay once said. And, again, there was some stuff going on in Central America, but it was pretty much kept out of the papers.
Which brings us to Bush I, and, in no particular order, Iraq War I ("The Last Good Undeclared War"), the attempted musical irritation of Manuel Noriega, and Somalia, which conservatives liked when Bush started it but hated once Clinton became President. Of these, only Iraq I might have qualified for the Vietnam tag, but at the time "No Blood for Oil" was felt to be catchier. Clinton had Haiti, and the Balkans, but those wars had a different marketing strategy altogether and proved to be, if not wildly popular, at least cult favorites.
So we're sorta left with Afghanistan and Iraq II, and perhaps it's time to point out that those wars do not go back nearly 30 years, and that the Vietnam analogy applies in some respects to both. I think we're safe in saying that the Left has gone no worse than 1 for 3, depending on who's keeping score, while some individual Lefties might claim 2-0 with some justification. The Right, meanwhile, goes 1-1-1. And Rich Lowry's full of shit.
...and a government which has lied about that insurgency from Day One, and insisted all this time that the end was no more than six months away, tops. The distinction being that the former is a natural result of conflict, while the latter is inexcusable hubris
Quick game of Spot the Vietnam Myth, anyone? How about the notion that insurgencies facing an overwhelming military superiority turn to fighting a battle in the American media? It's a stupid conceit, and it has led--for 30 years now, some might say--to the sort of National Review "We're Winning" cover and all other forms of mind erasure.
Try it for yourself--go out and organize your own insurgency based on the idea that over the course of a decade, with great sacrifice and perhaps the approval of the diety of your choice, you might gradually dishearten the newspaper readers of some other country. Insurgents fight invaders. The North Vietnamese may have learned how to manipulate American news operations--somewhat; not even the President can do that as consistently as the Right claims our enemies do--but the idea that they defeated us by disturbing our natural buoyancy with wave after wave of bad news is just excuse #417 in the conservative post-Vietnam playbook.
Then there's the argument disguised as bland statement of fact--that the "will of the American people" was fully behind both adventures. But most Americans couldn't have pointed to Vietnam on a map before 1966, if then, and the idea that it was the "will" of the people to invade Iraq is just bluff and bluster, exhibit A being the administration's cowardly refusal to ask for tax increases and military conscription. It's not the public will which has collapsed in the past three years; it's the public's acceptance of what it was told in the first place vs. the harsh reality that has slowly dawned. But yes, this is exactly like Vietnam. So's the attempt to obfuscate it.
This is the difference between a hypothetical and a full-blown case of ergot poisoning. First, for the first several years of US involvement the major source of supply for the North was...us. Captured weapons supplimented a large cottage industry in gunsmithing. The Soviets were very hesitant to get involved, as were the Chinese, and some older readers may recall the two didn't actually like each other much. It was only after the North Vietnamese proved they could embarrass the US that Soviet supplies started rolling over Chinese railroads.
There is one bit of truth to be uncovered here. Had we at some point, as a nation, risen up, seized everyone who ever suggested so blithely that we should have carried the war in Vietnam--or Korea, for that matter--into Chinese territory, tied them in a large bag and sunk it in the Marianas somewhere there'd have been a lot smaller fantasy component to our foreign policy these last forty years.
That's simply not true about Vietnam, and I doubt there's much truth to it in Iraq. Military thinkers adapt to changing situations, of course; you wouldn't want it any other way. In Vietnam we had basically three strategies, in succession, and they were related to how the military saw the situation: pacification followed by large-scale attrition followed by super-scale bombing. None of them worked (though Lowry will claim attrition would have,) but they were hardly "ever-shifting".
God knows we've had shifting rationales in Iraq, two or more a day at its height, but military strategies? Don't think so.
Of course the real democrat in Indochina was Ho Chi Minh; he asked the US for help at the end of the First World War, and again after being our ally in the Second, and was rebuffed both times because we only believed in self-determination for Europeans. Beyond that, of course, we simply obfuscated any cultural details that rose above public indifference (and few if any did). We blocked the July '56 elections in Vietnam, backed Diem's brutalities, kept the utter corruption in the South as quiet as we could, then okayed Diem's assassination and backed a series of corrupt strongmen. I'm still trying to figure out just why that didn't work.
One difference is that in Vietnam the various administrations from Eisenhower to Nixon never spoke of the religious differences at the heart of the conflict, while in Iraq the Bush administration didn't give a shit.
Well, Rich, it's a great time to be thinking of all that, now isn't it? Though I might object that now, as then, our prestige has already plummeted as a result of a brutal and idiotic foreign policy; defeat won't do much to worsen it. As for humanitarian catastrophe, I'm pretty sure it, like a few million pounds of high explosives, has already befallen Iraq. All over the place.
The consequences of the latest defeat, lad, are the responsibility of those of you who were so all-fired sure we'd get to redeem the earlier one.
* That and the fact that the Khmer were using captured Swift boats. It's always good to mention Swift boats, and it's double good to mention them to a critter-pated "conservative" who's just objected that we didn't halt military supplies to the Communists.
Iraq and Vietnam. For someone my age it's not exactly déjà vu all over again. More like being forced to watch Robin Williams in The Birdcage having seen La Cage aux Folles a generation before.
For the past 30 years, left-right debate over America’s wars has traveled a well-worn rut. The Left says whatever war is in question is “another Vietnam,” while the Right denies it. After three decades of being serially wrong, in the Iraq war liberals might be making their first-ever correct diagnosis.
Okay, so right off the bat we get something with no corollary. It could be that in the 60s Birchers and editors of the National Review were claiming that Liberals had just been itching to oppose a war since the first Roosevelt administration, but the truth is that in those simpler times most people aspired to not make glaring howlers in their opening paragraphs. Quaint, I know.
2006 - 30 = 1976. The Mayaguez Incident was '75, and is officially considered part of the Vietnam War. I bring it up only to prove I was paying attention back then. * Then there's Jimmy Carter who, if memory serves, did not send troops anywhere except on the Ill-Fated Hostage Rescue Mission, which conservatives blamed on Vietnam. As always we were dabbling in Central America, but nobody was supposed to know, so no Vietnam comparisons there. There was the Olympics boycott of '80, which Paul Krassner or Marlon Brando or somebody called "the decathlete's Vietnam", I think, but it didn't stick. Next Reagan invaded Grenada, apparently because he misunderstood something Claudette Colbert said into his bad ear, and the US lanched the largest Armada since D-Day against 80 Cuban bricklayers who were menacing some American medical students. Thanks in no small part to our position as the world's premier military power we managed to land our troops in such a way that it put the Cubans between us and the students, but fortunately no one was walled up. The planning here may have recalled Vietnam, but it was over too quickly for any real sloganeering to gain a foothold. Reagan also tried to kill Libyan strongman Muammar Kaddafi, who foiled the attempt by changing the spelling of his name. We're insisting on a strict "No ground troops, no 'Nam" rule here. "There are no quagmires in the air," as Curtis LeMay once said. And, again, there was some stuff going on in Central America, but it was pretty much kept out of the papers.
Which brings us to Bush I, and, in no particular order, Iraq War I ("The Last Good Undeclared War"), the attempted musical irritation of Manuel Noriega, and Somalia, which conservatives liked when Bush started it but hated once Clinton became President. Of these, only Iraq I might have qualified for the Vietnam tag, but at the time "No Blood for Oil" was felt to be catchier. Clinton had Haiti, and the Balkans, but those wars had a different marketing strategy altogether and proved to be, if not wildly popular, at least cult favorites.
So we're sorta left with Afghanistan and Iraq II, and perhaps it's time to point out that those wars do not go back nearly 30 years, and that the Vietnam analogy applies in some respects to both. I think we're safe in saying that the Left has gone no worse than 1 for 3, depending on who's keeping score, while some individual Lefties might claim 2-0 with some justification. The Right, meanwhile, goes 1-1-1. And Rich Lowry's full of shit.
In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we face a vicious insurgency that has worn down the will of the American public.
...and a government which has lied about that insurgency from Day One, and insisted all this time that the end was no more than six months away, tops. The distinction being that the former is a natural result of conflict, while the latter is inexcusable hubris
Quick game of Spot the Vietnam Myth, anyone? How about the notion that insurgencies facing an overwhelming military superiority turn to fighting a battle in the American media? It's a stupid conceit, and it has led--for 30 years now, some might say--to the sort of National Review "We're Winning" cover and all other forms of mind erasure.
Try it for yourself--go out and organize your own insurgency based on the idea that over the course of a decade, with great sacrifice and perhaps the approval of the diety of your choice, you might gradually dishearten the newspaper readers of some other country. Insurgents fight invaders. The North Vietnamese may have learned how to manipulate American news operations--somewhat; not even the President can do that as consistently as the Right claims our enemies do--but the idea that they defeated us by disturbing our natural buoyancy with wave after wave of bad news is just excuse #417 in the conservative post-Vietnam playbook.
Then there's the argument disguised as bland statement of fact--that the "will of the American people" was fully behind both adventures. But most Americans couldn't have pointed to Vietnam on a map before 1966, if then, and the idea that it was the "will" of the people to invade Iraq is just bluff and bluster, exhibit A being the administration's cowardly refusal to ask for tax increases and military conscription. It's not the public will which has collapsed in the past three years; it's the public's acceptance of what it was told in the first place vs. the harsh reality that has slowly dawned. But yes, this is exactly like Vietnam. So's the attempt to obfuscate it.
In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we have failed to cut off the enemy from re-supply.
This is the difference between a hypothetical and a full-blown case of ergot poisoning. First, for the first several years of US involvement the major source of supply for the North was...us. Captured weapons supplimented a large cottage industry in gunsmithing. The Soviets were very hesitant to get involved, as were the Chinese, and some older readers may recall the two didn't actually like each other much. It was only after the North Vietnamese proved they could embarrass the US that Soviet supplies started rolling over Chinese railroads.
There is one bit of truth to be uncovered here. Had we at some point, as a nation, risen up, seized everyone who ever suggested so blithely that we should have carried the war in Vietnam--or Korea, for that matter--into Chinese territory, tied them in a large bag and sunk it in the Marianas somewhere there'd have been a lot smaller fantasy component to our foreign policy these last forty years.
In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we have had ever-shifting military strategies.
That's simply not true about Vietnam, and I doubt there's much truth to it in Iraq. Military thinkers adapt to changing situations, of course; you wouldn't want it any other way. In Vietnam we had basically three strategies, in succession, and they were related to how the military saw the situation: pacification followed by large-scale attrition followed by super-scale bombing. None of them worked (though Lowry will claim attrition would have,) but they were hardly "ever-shifting".
God knows we've had shifting rationales in Iraq, two or more a day at its height, but military strategies? Don't think so.
In Iraq, as in Vietnam, we have had trouble building effective, clean governmental institutions in the soil of an alien culture.
Of course the real democrat in Indochina was Ho Chi Minh; he asked the US for help at the end of the First World War, and again after being our ally in the Second, and was rebuffed both times because we only believed in self-determination for Europeans. Beyond that, of course, we simply obfuscated any cultural details that rose above public indifference (and few if any did). We blocked the July '56 elections in Vietnam, backed Diem's brutalities, kept the utter corruption in the South as quiet as we could, then okayed Diem's assassination and backed a series of corrupt strongmen. I'm still trying to figure out just why that didn't work.
One difference is that in Vietnam the various administrations from Eisenhower to Nixon never spoke of the religious differences at the heart of the conflict, while in Iraq the Bush administration didn't give a shit.
The consequences of that defeat would be remarkably similar to those in the wake of Vietnam. The prestige of the U.S. government would sink around the world, emboldening our enemies and creating a period of American doubt and retreat. A humanitarian catastrophe would likely befall Iraq, just as it did Vietnam. The only significant difference is that in Iraq, radical Islamists harbor ambitions to come to our shores and kill Americans, whereas the Viet Cong never wanted to follow us home.
Well, Rich, it's a great time to be thinking of all that, now isn't it? Though I might object that now, as then, our prestige has already plummeted as a result of a brutal and idiotic foreign policy; defeat won't do much to worsen it. As for humanitarian catastrophe, I'm pretty sure it, like a few million pounds of high explosives, has already befallen Iraq. All over the place.
The consequences of the latest defeat, lad, are the responsibility of those of you who were so all-fired sure we'd get to redeem the earlier one.
* That and the fact that the Khmer were using captured Swift boats. It's always good to mention Swift boats, and it's double good to mention them to a critter-pated "conservative" who's just objected that we didn't halt military supplies to the Communists.
Thursday, August 17
Installing a Plot Device
Item:
Wait a minute, uh, chaps...you had these guys under surveillance for a year, you've gotten international help, including vital help from the US of A, according to our former President, where we've been tracking this stuff for five years now without regard for, well, much of anything, really, and you still need a month to fast-forward through somebody's videotapes looking for naughty bits?
Say, by any chance did you happen to get all your information from some no-account on the lam from the UK who the Pakistanis tortured ?
Item:
Wow, the whole case may rest, ultimately, on what was tortured out of someone? That sort of thing could give even La Shawn Barber pause, couldn't it?
Item:
Sure. I mean, it's not like it was a couple of white guy patriots who blew up the Murrah Building, right? Neither was it some right-winger with a security clearance who was mailing anthrax around the country. And even if it had been, those types would never attack a plane.
This, then, is the principal difference between an electronic device and a human being: electronic devices only rarely get stuck in the ON position.
It's not about torture per se, it's about the unreliability of the evidence thus obtained. You twit. By which I simply mean, kindly curb your bloodlust for two seconds, huh?
I'm a little short on free time these days, but since last week's foiling of the Facepowder Plot my mind has occasionally wandered of its own accord to my school days. Somewhere between seventh grade health class and the high school Health and Safety class everyone took at summer school after Driver's Ed just to get the damned requirement out of the way, the Man had discovered The Drug Menace. (In the idyllic days junior high the great threat was homosexual molestation, apparently. One day they divided the boys from the girls, and marched us off, with all the gravitas a junior high gym teacher can command, to watch a film. I remember they brought in the gym teacher specifically to herd us, the regular teacher being female. The movie was short on plot and really short on action; some guy lured a couple of boys off the playground and into his suburban-type house. Then it was Behind the Green Door, except you were on the outside. For all I knew then or now it could have been about Commies. I remember the teacher snapped, "Any questions?" after he snapped on the lights, and I resisted the urge to say, "Yeah, what the fuck was that supposed to be about?"
I never found out what the girls watched. Breakfast at Tiffany's, maybe.
Oh. My best friend in those days was in another class, and his group was shepherded by the football coach, who he reported as being more talkative than my own instructor. "If somebody tries to stick his thing in your butt just shit on him," was his advice, culled from many years of showering in locker rooms, no doubt.)
The Drug Menace struck Middle American squarely in the 70s, and there was a paucity of available classroom film studies. We got two, as I recall, one which was pure Reefer Madness, including implied wanton sex after those inhibitions had been loosened (that scared us straight!), and the other which was late-40s JD stuff with black leather and DAs and a pusher in a Panama hat ("First taste's free!"), and our budding hooligan gets hooked on the weed and looks into a mirror and sees a werewolf or something and goes insane. Based on a true story. Later that year there was another film shown at an all-school convocation conducted by the Sheriff's Dept., a hip updating of the anti-Drug message hosted by Sonny and Cher, whom the hippest among us could actually remember.
And they passed out pamphlets which would help us identify any dangerous drugs we might come into contact with, which had a glossary in the back in case we wanted to fit in or do some undercover work or something, and the glossary was obviously a combination of Harlem street slang from the Mezz Mezzrow era and pure crapola the cops had been sold by some poor unfortunates in their clutches ("Yeah, officer, if you want to buy two marihuana cigarettes you ask for a Gemini, and when you smoke one down to where you can't hold it without burning your fingers, that's a Goojie."). I baffled a generation of hippies by asking sotto voce if anyone had any Muggles.
I'm not really sure why I made the connection. But I do remember last week, driving somewhere, listening to NPR, when their Terror Expert said that while, no, there wasn't any direct link to al-Qaeda, the "complexity of the plot" was certainly al-Qaedaish. "Jackson," I heard myself say out loud, "that's the Aces, Gate."
British Argue 22 Suspects Should Be Kept
By MATT MOORE Associated Press Writer
August 16,2006 | LONDON -- British investigators argued at a closed-door hearing Wednesday that suspects arrested in an alleged plot to blow up as many as 10 trans-Atlantic jetliners should be kept in custody without charge....
Experts say the primary reason police could use nearly a month to complete a probe is because of the complexity of investigations into the alleged plot to smuggle liquid explosives hidden in hand luggage aboard flights.
"You've got laptops, you have to bring in translators to translate all the documents in there, and sometimes it's inopportune to release all your suspects -- particularly terrorism suspects -- while all that is being downloaded and translated," said Cliff Knuckey, a retired police detective who has worked on terrorism investigations.....
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, who commands the anti-terrorist police branch, said officers had found terrorist training videos spliced in the middle of normal Hollywood films, meaning hours spent scrutinizing videotapes.
Wait a minute, uh, chaps...you had these guys under surveillance for a year, you've gotten international help, including vital help from the US of A, according to our former President, where we've been tracking this stuff for five years now without regard for, well, much of anything, really, and you still need a month to fast-forward through somebody's videotapes looking for naughty bits?
Say, by any chance did you happen to get all your information from some no-account on the lam from the UK who the Pakistanis tortured ?
Item:
Liberal agonies
Tuesday August 15, 2006
The Guardian
Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week's arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance. Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had "broken" under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who has no doubt about the meaning of broken. "I don't deduce, I know - torture," she said.
Wow, the whole case may rest, ultimately, on what was tortured out of someone? That sort of thing could give even La Shawn Barber pause, couldn't it?
Item:
08.15.06
Let the Ethnic/Religious Profiling Begin!
Since the people murdering and maiming others are overwhelmingly young men of Middle Eastern descent who also happen to be followers of Allah, isn’t it wiser, safer, smarter, and more efficient to keep a heavier eye on these types of individuals?...
Sure. I mean, it's not like it was a couple of white guy patriots who blew up the Murrah Building, right? Neither was it some right-winger with a security clearance who was mailing anthrax around the country. And even if it had been, those types would never attack a plane.
Karol Sheinin guest-blogging at MM links to a Guardian story that reports torture was used to foil the terror plot. Last year I wrote :
I believe exerting pressure on enemy combatants in order to extract information is sometimes necessary. What I mean by that carefully-worded statement is that yes, I “support” torture as a last resort method to save lives.
Still do.
This, then, is the principal difference between an electronic device and a human being: electronic devices only rarely get stuck in the ON position.
It's not about torture per se, it's about the unreliability of the evidence thus obtained. You twit. By which I simply mean, kindly curb your bloodlust for two seconds, huh?
I'm a little short on free time these days, but since last week's foiling of the Facepowder Plot my mind has occasionally wandered of its own accord to my school days. Somewhere between seventh grade health class and the high school Health and Safety class everyone took at summer school after Driver's Ed just to get the damned requirement out of the way, the Man had discovered The Drug Menace. (In the idyllic days junior high the great threat was homosexual molestation, apparently. One day they divided the boys from the girls, and marched us off, with all the gravitas a junior high gym teacher can command, to watch a film. I remember they brought in the gym teacher specifically to herd us, the regular teacher being female. The movie was short on plot and really short on action; some guy lured a couple of boys off the playground and into his suburban-type house. Then it was Behind the Green Door, except you were on the outside. For all I knew then or now it could have been about Commies. I remember the teacher snapped, "Any questions?" after he snapped on the lights, and I resisted the urge to say, "Yeah, what the fuck was that supposed to be about?"
I never found out what the girls watched. Breakfast at Tiffany's, maybe.
Oh. My best friend in those days was in another class, and his group was shepherded by the football coach, who he reported as being more talkative than my own instructor. "If somebody tries to stick his thing in your butt just shit on him," was his advice, culled from many years of showering in locker rooms, no doubt.)
The Drug Menace struck Middle American squarely in the 70s, and there was a paucity of available classroom film studies. We got two, as I recall, one which was pure Reefer Madness, including implied wanton sex after those inhibitions had been loosened (that scared us straight!), and the other which was late-40s JD stuff with black leather and DAs and a pusher in a Panama hat ("First taste's free!"), and our budding hooligan gets hooked on the weed and looks into a mirror and sees a werewolf or something and goes insane. Based on a true story. Later that year there was another film shown at an all-school convocation conducted by the Sheriff's Dept., a hip updating of the anti-Drug message hosted by Sonny and Cher, whom the hippest among us could actually remember.
And they passed out pamphlets which would help us identify any dangerous drugs we might come into contact with, which had a glossary in the back in case we wanted to fit in or do some undercover work or something, and the glossary was obviously a combination of Harlem street slang from the Mezz Mezzrow era and pure crapola the cops had been sold by some poor unfortunates in their clutches ("Yeah, officer, if you want to buy two marihuana cigarettes you ask for a Gemini, and when you smoke one down to where you can't hold it without burning your fingers, that's a Goojie."). I baffled a generation of hippies by asking sotto voce if anyone had any Muggles.
I'm not really sure why I made the connection. But I do remember last week, driving somewhere, listening to NPR, when their Terror Expert said that while, no, there wasn't any direct link to al-Qaeda, the "complexity of the plot" was certainly al-Qaedaish. "Jackson," I heard myself say out loud, "that's the Aces, Gate."
Wednesday, August 16
We Apologize
for the relative paucity of entries and, especially, more cute cat pictures, but we spent an exhausting evening trying to catch up with all the right-wing blogs distancing themselves from John Spencer's "Hillary is bin-Laden's right hand man" ads and George Allen's creative use of White Supremicist op-talk. Blogger ethics are a powerful force for good in today's world. Better than robot girlfriends, even.
Alpha and Omega
The above search began and ended with Jonah, not that I didn't find a couple of the guys (Tigerhawk, a hand washing, Cap'n Ed, a medium sigh) willing to admit that Allen had said something pretty stupid; one couldn't get around that, no sir. But not racist by any means. Rather, Jonah's continuing substitution of stupor for style just laid me out again, even though I thought I was ready for it:
Which is followed all of two sentences later by:
Now, don't get me wrong; the two lines in between include his decision that it "wasn't such a big deal" and "just boilerplate" to Allen's earlier remarks. It's not incoherence per se I'm on about here, just this: anyone who could write that second sentence has no business complaining that someone else's writing is confusing.
And another, minor point: the Tapped commentary didn't offer reasons for a rethink, say with the Port and Stilton after the ladies had been dismissed. It made explicit what the context had already made obvious: Allen used a racial epithet. Surely Jonah and all the other great admirers of Martin Luther King, Jr., should be the first to denounce it.
I'd been directed to that comment, so I hit "Home" to catch up with all the zany NRO characters, and damn me if there weren't Cheetos stains at the top of the page.
For the love of Mike, how did this man get his job again? If there isn't anybody who can put an end to that incontinent wishy-washiness which is supposed to indicate--what? extended ratiocenation over brandies in the library?--could someone at least try to explain to him that you don't follow that sort of thing by putting quotation marks around the word in question?
Jonah's writing from Alaska, by the way, and not Tunisia (4/02), Karachi (5/02), Karachi (6/02), Bali (10/02), Mombasa (10/02), Riyadh (5/03), Casablanca (5/03), Riyadh (11/03), Istanbul (11/03), Madrid (3/04), Khobar (5/04), Jiddah (12/04), London (7/05), Bali (10/05), or Amman (11/05).
Okay, earlier I asked how someone who writes like Jonah could critique anyone else's output; now I'd like to know how he can type the words "the same logic applies" without his monitor exploding?
For God's sakes, how does someone pass through into high school in this country without outgrowing this sort of nonsense? More importantly, what have we done to rate this pathetic twerp as an adversary?
Frankly I found the original Washington Post story so confusingly written I couldn't figure out what to think.
Which is followed all of two sentences later by:
Garance at Tapped has a pretty detailed discussion of the whole thing which gives me reason to rethink that interpretation.
Now, don't get me wrong; the two lines in between include his decision that it "wasn't such a big deal" and "just boilerplate" to Allen's earlier remarks. It's not incoherence per se I'm on about here, just this: anyone who could write that second sentence has no business complaining that someone else's writing is confusing.
And another, minor point: the Tapped commentary didn't offer reasons for a rethink, say with the Port and Stilton after the ladies had been dismissed. It made explicit what the context had already made obvious: Allen used a racial epithet. Surely Jonah and all the other great admirers of Martin Luther King, Jr., should be the first to denounce it.
I'd been directed to that comment, so I hit "Home" to catch up with all the zany NRO characters, and damn me if there weren't Cheetos stains at the top of the page.
Whatever the merits of the charge that Iraq is a "distraction" from the war on terror, the reality is that arguments about Bush are a larger distraction from the war on terror.
For the love of Mike, how did this man get his job again? If there isn't anybody who can put an end to that incontinent wishy-washiness which is supposed to indicate--what? extended ratiocenation over brandies in the library?--could someone at least try to explain to him that you don't follow that sort of thing by putting quotation marks around the word in question?
For much of the past five years, Democrats not in the Joe Lieberman wing of the party — which is to say the Democratic Party, minus one — have repeatedly pointed to Osama bin Laden's ability to elude capture (as opposed to, say, his inability to once again murder thousands on American soil) as proof that Bush's anti-terror efforts have been a failure.
Jonah's writing from Alaska, by the way, and not Tunisia (4/02), Karachi (5/02), Karachi (6/02), Bali (10/02), Mombasa (10/02), Riyadh (5/03), Casablanca (5/03), Riyadh (11/03), Istanbul (11/03), Madrid (3/04), Khobar (5/04), Jiddah (12/04), London (7/05), Bali (10/05), or Amman (11/05).
It would surely be nice to see bin Laden's head on a pike, but this is childishly partisan.
When U.S. forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, bin Laden's "prince" in Iraq, Democrats presented Zarqawi's demise as good but trivial news....
Why shouldn't this same logic apply to bin Laden and the global Islamic insurgency?
Okay, earlier I asked how someone who writes like Jonah could critique anyone else's output; now I'd like to know how he can type the words "the same logic applies" without his monitor exploding?
For God's sakes, how does someone pass through into high school in this country without outgrowing this sort of nonsense? More importantly, what have we done to rate this pathetic twerp as an adversary?
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