Stop Me If You've Heard This Done Better

Michael Medved, Propaganda, and Perspective, on "American Empire" November 14

SPECIFICALLY by Scott; in reply I swore off tackling this thing on my own but my intestines have been arguing the point ever since.

DEAR GOD WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE IT SHORTER MICHAEL MEDVED: If you ignore all major evidence to the contrary, and pummel the few strawmen which might have penetrated the long-term memory of the contemporary Townhall.com habitué, the foreign policy of the United States looks remarkably beneficent.

IN CYBERSPACE, NO ONE CAN SMELL YOUR PUTREFACTION. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN THEY SHOULD EAT THE WHOLE THING:

“Jingos” at home demanded the annexation of all of Mexico, but instead President Polk accepted a treaty that added to the nation the sparsely populated territory of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah (Texas had achieved its own independence from Mexico eleven years before).

JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME, LEAVING BEHIND ONLY A REASONABLY-SIZED MARTIAL PRESENCE, MOSTLY TO STIMULATE THE LOCAL ECONOMY THROUGH THE STRATEGIC HOOKER EMPLOYMENT PROGRAM:

The bloody (and seemingly innumerable) foreign wars of the Twentieth Century saw millions upon millions of American troops deployed to every corner of the globe but for the most part they came home at the earliest opportunity. President Wilson dispatched more than two-million American soldiers to France to win World War I, but in less than two years they had all left the Old World behind. The sixty year presence of American forces in Europe and Japan following the Second World War has not only decreased dramatically in size since the demise of the Soviet threat but continues today at the insistence of the host countries. Aside from the economic benefits to local economies from the numerous American bases, US troops (for better or worse) provide a security shield that has allowed our European allies to scrimp on defense spending, with military resources in no way commensurate with their economic or political power.

IF YOU'RE GONNA BE QUOTING CRAPPY MOVIES THROUGH THE WHOLE THING, HOW 'BOUT CALL ME BWANA?:

As to the territories added by the United States as part of its ongoing enlargement of its boundaries, none of these acquisitions followed the familiar colonial pattern of invasion and subjugation of hostile native populations.

BUT, BUT, BUT WE ONLY KILLED ALLENDE THAT ONE TIME:

For all his brutality, Pinochet succeeded in creating the most dynamic economy in Latin America and under American pressure he allowed a referendum on his own rule in 1988, then gave up power altogether less than two years later.

DEAR GOD, HOW COULD OSAMA BIN LADEN MISS THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM?

Osama bin Laden pointed to America’s humiliation in Somalia (where 18 mutilated soldiers led to a hasty American withdrawal) as one of the incidents that led him to characterize the United States as a “paper tiger” with no staying power. Bin Laden also mentioned the departure from Lebanon in 1983 after the suicide bombing that killed 261 Marines, and particularly noted the way that public impatience and exhaustion brought about the retreat from Vietnam. Ironically, by focusing on the American penchant for quick withdrawals from the world’s hot spots, our primary terrorist adversary undermined his own characterization of the United States as a ruthless imperialist power.

You have no doubt by now figured out that there's no real answering this stuff. Our precipitous, stab-in-the-back withdrawal from Vietnam after thirty years--instituted by the same perfidious Leftists Medved is fighting with the way an alcoholic wrestles skulls and snakes an' shit--is now the crowning glory of our selfless Christianity and a Cheeseburger foreign policy. Take that, Osama bin Obama! Shoot, Canada's ripe for the plucking, man, and what do we do? Nothing! QED!

I mean, it's not that this sort of nonsense gets spouted, though if I may say so Medved makes a particularly unconvincing spout. Good Lord, the piece runs on from dusk to dawn and the dog never barks once. Where's Basil Rathbone when you need him? You cannot construct this argument and simultaneously believe it. You can't pretend the Shah was installed by the West in response to Mossadegh and then announce that proves the Iranians are just too touchy for self-government. You can't use the Barbary Pirates as an example of our fleeting Christianized do-goodism while ignoring what we were doing on our own continent, however sparsely populated. You can't argue that US military and economic domination of the rest of the Hemisphere "doesn't count" because it didn't always employ the permanent occupying forces favored by the Big Three in the 19th century. If you see it, it's there, or else you're hallucinating. The best you could do is hand it over to Fred Doolin Dalton Thompson to read, and hope the audience is more interested in the popcorn. That is, if you don't mind a dozen takes, as Bogie once said.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

I have expensive taste in eyewear. This is partly due to what the cultural sadists among us refer to as "fashion sense", and partly due to the fact that I've been wearing cheaters since age ten (I was a precocious child; the warnings about masturbation came too late) and thus appreciate the difference between well-made and cheap glasses in a visceral way; the faint impression of the nosepiece of a crappy pair I was saddled (obscure optometry pun*) with in 1967 is still visible if the lighting is right. And it's part accident: I live in the trendy little village of Broad Ripple, ** so my local optometrist is, well, trendy.

One nice thing about fashionable eyewear, aside from the fact that paying for it pretty much forces you to forgo the use of gasoline for a year, is that the modern trendy optometrist helpfully provides you with a list of celebrities who share your taste, except they get theirs gratis. I'm now a part of the Lunor family, alongside Stephen Spielberg, Ringo Starr, David Letterman, and Oprah. We have a LISTSERV group.

This made me wonder about what my first pair would have been like back in '64 if we'd have been so all-fired fucking celebrity obsessed. Here, kid, try these on. Abe Zapruder favors 'em.

The other salient feature of this place is that they have a battery of testing devices which, taken together, provide an answer to the mystery of what Josef Mengele was up to in his final years. The "patient" is laced, cuffed, or hydraulically flattened into a series of machines which contort him in various ways while all performing the identical task of shooting laser beams directly into his skull while he presses a clicker to indicate how close he is to passing out. The experience was actually remarkably similar to the time I saw Pink Floyd in 1974.

All of this occurs before they lead you, half-blind, into the exam room so you can sit in the chair while wondering if the doctor is, in fact, aware that he's scheduled to work this particular shift. This time he showed, eventually, and this time he told me that my pressure was higher than normal, although my glaucoma test was fine, and he'd be wanting to see me repeatedly for the next year to sample my baseline. I said I thought we should just meet for coffee first and see what happened. It turns out that humor is frowned upon in ophthalmology circles.

He told me very soothingly, twice, that I shouldn't lose any sleep over this, it was just precautionary. Which just makes me suspicious. Our first scheduled rendez-vous was two weeks ago. I arrived with the impression that I was just there to get my pressure checked, but instead I found myself being force-fed to half the machines again before being led, mad with vertigo, into a sound-proofed room where they keep the real torture devices. And I am now beginning to get the impression that something is horribly wrong with my eyes, there's some Malignant Monkey Growth he discovered last week and refused to tell me about before he could contact the CDC, and they're mostly interested in making sure the thing is confined to my skull for the few hours I have left and doesn't splash on anyone else when it explodes. I eventually got another pressure test (the tech actually forgot that one and I was pulled out of the exam room for it, another clue that they weren't being straight with me). So I got another dose of those eyeball-numbing drops, despite the fact that, as I tried to explain, the ones I'd gotten the previous week still seemed to be working, if by "working" one meant a continuation of the splitting headache I'd had constantly since. The tech looked at me like a nun looks at a condemned man (she was about eighteen inches away, so I could still see her) and then told me a story about her new puppy.

Several hours and no explosion later the doctor returned--I'm guessing he'd gotten the All Clear from Atlanta--and gave me some more drops, and shot another light into my eyes to see if there was anything left undestroyed, and he told me that my pressure was still high, but he now knew the reason--I have thicker corneas than previously observed in the species, which were giving a false reading. This reminded me that I had neglected to add "mutant" to my medical questionnaire.

SO they arrived last week, along with the Oakley shades (Michael Jordan, Djibril Cissé), and I've had the pleasure of trying to adjust to continual focus lenses, or gradient lenses, or whatever the hell they call 'em. I got them mostly because I felt obligated--I resisted bi-focals last time around, and everybody was so concerned about me I thought the least I could do was take their advice. And ten days later I still take 'em off to read and put them on top of my head in order to read boilerplate in public.

Which is what I was doing in the pasta aisle of the grocery yesterday. Mr. Riley has used De Cecco pasta (Jessica Alba, Christian Slater, Dom DeLuise) for the last thirty years, whenever possible, but certain shapes aren't available, so I was trying to read the fine print on some prohibitively expensive designer creste di gallo and there's a guy walking up and down and up and down and UP AND DOWN the friggin' aisle yammering non-fucking-stop into a fucking headset. And, no, he doesn't appear to work there, or be the field representative of some vendor, or to have dashed in from his job at Burger King; he's got a basket, which he is presently engaged in not filling because he's talking NON-FUCKING-STOP into this foolish piece of shit looped onto his head, and like all such people who just can't stop conducting their personal lives, ever, he's doing so at a volume you'd use to call a distant dog, and he's talking about nothing whatsoever, because if you had anything to actually talk about you wouldn't behave that way. And I'm still nursing that eyeball numb-er hangover. And I look up to give him the glare which says okay, at this point, if you were worth going to jail over the person on the other end of that foul contraption would now be listening to your internal digestive processes, and I notice that he's, like, thirty-five years old.

They hate us for our freedom.

-------------------------
* The bridge of pair of eyeglasses is shaped either like a saddle, or a keyhole. I'm a keyhole, unless I misunderstood the guy.

**I don't, and neither do 50% of the other people who claim to and 75% of the businesses that advertise a Broad Ripple location. The Village (more casually Ripple) was a small town on the Central Canal (actually two small towns, Broad Ripple and Wellington, one on either side) which was devoured by the cultural colossus that is Indianapolis in the 1920s. Hit hard economically in the 1950s when the first mega-mall went up a couple miles away, it bounced back as the commercial center of what passes for Bohemianism in the Middle West, and It retained its small-town atmosphere and 1920s infrastructure into the latter stages of the 20th century, when its high-powered merchants association--the closest thing it has to local governance--decided the more liquor licenses they allowed to be crammed into a three block area the better.

Look At All Those Lovely Right People

David Brooks, "History and Calumny." November 9

Shorter David Brooks: Telling the truth about Ronald Reagan is the same as telling vicious lies about other people, because Truth is complicated. And besides, Kevin Drum, radical Leftist, agrees.


The Background: Fresh from gaining the Republican Presidential nomination he'd been chasing for sixteen years, The Great Communicator heads to a fair outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, epicenter of the Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman murders, where he mentions "States' Rights" in his speech (Brooks, by the way, avoids the capitalization). The ensuing twenty-five years of viciously accurate reporting of the incident leaves David Brooks unable to fully enjoy any of the thousands of public airports, roadways, bridges, naval vessels, laser-based weapons system development programs, scenic overlooks, or minority housing projects his party has named for The Gipper in the interim.


Obligatory, Doomed-to-Failure Compromise Offer: If I promise never to mention this again, will you promise never again to claim the Soviet Union collapsed because Ol' Dutch ordered the Berlin Wall removed?


Systematic Destruction of the Argument in Light of the Collapse of Compromise Talks:

The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

As proof? Proof? C'mon, that's the word you come up with? And even if it were, it's not like the incident occurred in a vacuum or anything.

In reality, Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes. Reagan delivered a major address at the Urban League, visited Vernon Jordan in the hospital where he was recovering from gunshot wounds, toured the South Bronx and traveled to Chicago to meet with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines.

Which can be taken as proof that Reagan's strategists understood he had a problem dating at least to his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and that, unlike the days when he was a Goldwater spokesmodel, overt opposition to racial equality would no longer fly (at least so long as the Dixiecrat-Republican migration remained incomplete). If Reagan hit the chitlin' circuit, it's not exactly proof he had a hankerin' for some soul stew.

Lou Cannon of The Washington Post reported at the time that this schedule reflected a shift in Republican strategy. Some inside the campaign wanted to move away from the Southern strategy used by Nixon, believing there were more votes available in the northern suburbs and among working-class urban voters.

Well, that's an interesting way to avoid claiming Reagan campaigned for African-American votes, North or South. Lou Cannon made with the punditry at the time? Did he happen to mention later which side won?

But there was another event going on that week, the Neshoba County Fair, seven miles southwest of Philadelphia. The Neshoba County Fair was a major political rallying spot in Mississippi (Michael Dukakis would campaign there in 1988).

When they name an airport after him let me know.

Mississippi was a state that Republican strategists hoped to pick up. They’d recently done well in the upper South, but they still lagged in the Deep South, where racial tensions had been strongest. Jimmy Carter had carried Mississippi in 1976 by 14,000 votes.

Which leads us to conclude the Yellow Dog South didn't suddenly break out into Republicanism for the love of Voodoo Supply Side economics, which in turn causes us to consider if there's some salient feature we're all overlooking. We'll accept nominations from the floor.

So the decision was made to go to Neshoba. Exactly who made the decision is unclear. The campaign was famously disorganized, and Cannon reported: “The Reagan campaign’s hand had been forced to some degree by local announcement that he would go to the fair.” Reagan’s pollster Richard Wirthlin urged him not to go, but Reagan angrily countered that once the commitment had been made, he couldn’t back out.

The Reaganites then had an internal debate over whether to do the Urban League speech and then go to the fair, or to do the fair first. They decided to do the fair first, believing it would send the wrong message to go straight from the Urban League to Philadelphia, Miss.

So off goes stalwart Ronnie, brave and true, refusing to renege on someone else's promise, even though nobody knows whose, and despite a conflict over which he should do first, which seems to cast just the teeniest doubt on the idea that the whole thing was just an innocent misstep. And it's kinda funny that his theoretical support for theoretical States' Rights included theoretical elimination of the federal Department of Education, but not the elimination of the federal subsidy buffet for Bob Jones University.

Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful, and can be heard at: www.onlinemadison.com/ftp/reagan/reaganneshoba.mp3. He told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.

And 100 percent white.

The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.

Because the meaning, to the crowd, to the reporters, and to Ronald Wilson Reagan, was unequivocal.

I'm not sure if the explanation is that Brooks, whose major area of study during the Civil Rights era was Go Potty, has simply never bothered to learn anything about it, settled for the happy-ending re-write, in which MLK went from Commie troublemaker to sainted sermonizer, rendering the issue closed business, or if he's lying. It's a fairly common thing for Reagan idolaters of a certain age to claim that their party's refusal to adopt a Frankly, Negroes Are Just Not All That Bright platform during their adult lives means there were no racist appeals dating back to the earliest reaches of American political history (circa 1980).

We might explain this as a heretofore unknown form of Lexical Drift, wherein words or phrases not only take on new, even opposite meanings but have the effect of changing the language retroactively; thus Reagan's speech becomes a defense of local toll booths on interstate highways, and Mark Twain turns into a Klansman. And Bleak House, where Sir Leicester "leans back and breathlessly ejaculates," becomes the most highly respected novel of silent onanism in English lit.

Or he could be lying:

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.

So, went there, said that, and The Party of Lincoln does indeed have a little problem with regard to race dating to the ascendancy of the Reagan/Goldwater wing. Where's the slur--in disagreeing with Brooks' notions of its importance? Or are we redefining "calumny" now:

HAMLET: If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague
for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice,
as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape disagreeing with David Brooks.

Armistice

THERE are times when I think if I could change only one thing about this country it would be to return 11-11 to its original name and original meaning, even at the expense of losing its holiday status to another date selected to celebrate sacrifice and martial glory; even if it meant the dead of Passchendaele and Ypres and Belleau Wood were condemned to lie even less remembered than they are today. Just give them back the day, the hour the guns fell silent, even if we ignore it. And give the rest of us back some sense of the enormity of modern war, same as those who set aside the day had when they did so.

Worthless sacrifice is the rule of war, not the exception. We don't need any prodding to remember the fight against Fascism as noble, or to view all service as heroic. But it's obvious we too quickly forget that senseless, unspeakable slaughter has always started out sounding like a reasonable idea to too many people.

Bhutto Under House Arrest in Pakistan

By ZARAR KHAN, Associated Press Writer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistani police placed opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest Friday, uncoiling barbed wire in front of her Islamabad villa, and reportedly rounding up thousands of her supporters to block a mass protest against emergency rule.

Would now be a good time to remind people of the shit fit the Right had--post facto--over Jimmy Carter allowing the Shah into this country for medical treatment? Or is that just the contentious Boomer in me talking?

At Least He Looked Really Good When He Said It

The USAToday, yesterday:

For the record and as points of reference: Obama is 46, and had just turned 8-years-old when Woodstock was held. Clinton is 60, and would have been 21 when Max Yasgur's farm was used for that festival.

I refute it thus! The Great Ridgepole of Recognition for The Sixties™ isn't the Kennedy assassination, the other Kennedy assassination, the King assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Freedom Rides, Selma, the great marches against racism or the war, Berkley, Kent State, Jackson State, Chicago '68, Malcom X; not even the Beatles on Sullivan or Dylan at Newport. Woodstock! Far out, man. You kids seem to know as much about your history as, well, Barack Obama.

I remember the year I went to camp
Heard about some lady named Selma and some blacks
Somebody put their fingers in the President's ears
And it wasn't too much later they came out with Johnson's Wax.

Where was Hillary when Andy Warhol was shot? And how old was Obama when she killed Vince Foster?

We've spoken before about this line of reasoning from Senator Obama, and I guess we'll be speaking about it again. But first, for fuck's sake! Is there any fucking evidence of Hillary Rodham, Wellesley '69, Political Science honors student, attendee of the 1968 Republican National Convention, who spent the summer between college graduation and Yale Law entry working in Alaska (and shutting down a cannery by blowing a whistle on its unsanitary conditions), not making macramé bong cozies, spending her free weekends as a hashish-and-patchouli-scented backup singer for Sly Stone?

As for Senator Without The Sixties Your Parents Would Have To Have Gone Farther Away Than Halfway Across The Pacific To Get Married, let us first reply (again) that the answer is easy: go ahead and bring us all together for this important business of yours. Who's stopping ya?

As we've noted many a time here, when people say The Sixties™ these days what they really mean, politically, is The Fifties, that time of imagined unification across the entire spectrum of Caucasian skin tones, that time when the movement which would finally kill Jim Crow arrived, when modern feminism started to take shape, when Ban the Bomb and environmentalism began. Silent Spring was published in 1962, and The Feminine Mystique a year later; in 1962 the Court struck down "non-denominational" prayer in public schools. For the record and as a point of reference, this was before you could buy Beatle Boots. Hillary Clinton was fourteen. These issues all have roots in the ostensibly conservative 50s; of all matters of contention supposedly kept alive by hidebound Boomers only Gay and Lesbian rights, and the battle over the Vietnam War (but not our involvement in it), trace directly to the Groovy Acid Decade.

Let's be fair all around. The junior Senator from the Land of Lincoln has a point, certainly, but it requires explaining, not just complaining. Who compromises what for your vision, Senator? From my own perspective it's the Right which has kept the cultural battles of The Sixties™ alive; Reagan was canonized for rolling them back, two decades later, when Hillary was thirty-four. It's the Right which uses pornography, Darwinism, multiculturalism, and abortion rights, to name but a few, as cudgels on the skull of the body politic. Do they stop now by your fiat? And they insist that the magic dust of The Sixties™ led to a mind-blowing detour from constant American principles, to the Personal, from the Property-Owning. That they are historically full of shit--this country was contentious at its founding, over the same philosophic issue, and the compromise of counting the ancestors of nearly every African-American in this country as 3/5 human is, I'm thinking, not the example Senator Obama would like me to use--is beside the point. You try explaining it to them. For the record and as a point of reference, I've been trying since before you were at madrassa. I know you never were at madrassa, but I've decided to give this compromise business a whirl. How'm I doin' so far?

Who compromises? I have. I voted for Jimmy Carter in '76 and Bill Clinton twice. Any vote I cast in 2008 will be a compromise, too. I share the country with racists, rapacious capitalists, Dominionists, resource-wasters, gun-toters, neo-colonialists, hate-spewing corrupters of the public airwaves, liars for profit, and people who can't get enough Brittany Spears news. I've haven't shot a one of them, fired and missed, or even tried to restrict their right to free speech, aside from that public ownership of the airwaves business. I've paid my taxes every year, including those that go to pay public servants who refuse to stop the part that goes to a war nobody wants and that seek to balance those books by cutting services to people like me. Just tell me what I'm supposed to give up now, Senator, in exchange for the joys of seeing your smiling visage in the Oval Office. Give me the specifics.

Oh, and do it someplace other than FAUX News, 'kay? That's where you should be telling them what they're giving up.

We (Heart) R. Porrofatto

OKAY, we always do, but most recently for this , in a discussion of Alan Dershowitz' recent WSJ piece, "Nazi Supermen Are Our Intel Gathering Superiors," at LG&M:

Geez, Alan, it's a pity them expert Nazis weren't around for some of your famous clients, huh? Cuz after they'd worked their magic on O.J., you can bet that fucking glove woulda damn well fit.

Happy Birthday

Dorothy Day
November 8, 1897--November 29, 1980

Axe the Experts

Totally not stolen from Norbizness. Note the "e" on the end of "Axe".

TWO-term Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson goes down in flames to a guy who was given no chance whatever, got no support from the Marion county GOP (until the last minute), and who remains unknown to that segment of the voting public which does not exchange Xmas cards with him.

Now, here's the thing: I've never been what you'd call a Bart Peterson fan, and the Indiana Democratic Party Led By a Guy Named Bayh that I have an emotional attachment to was Birch's, not Evan's. (Being a Democrat, or even Democratesque, in Indiana the past twenty-five years has been the best training anyone could ask for when faced with another inexplicable capitulation in the Senate.) Peterson gets big points for finally beginning the process that might someday result in the city not dumping raw sewage into the White River every time it rains--something three sinecured Republican mayors before him had simply refused to do on the grounds it would cost money--and he's consolidated police and fire protection left in the antiquated township system as patronage by those same predecessors. He's been the sort of competent, non-partisan manager Hoosiers tend to re-elect regardless of party.

But he ran afoul of a shocking murder rate, a long vendetta by the Indianapolis Racist Star, and, especially, this summer's Property Tax revolt, the one that took place in suspiciously wealthy sections of town and featured his name prominently displayed on its signage, despite the fact that the mayor of Indianapolis has little to do with those assessments and had nothing whatsoever to do with the State's handout to business that caused the big increases. (Peterson also made an uncharacteristic mistake by coming out swinging in last-minute political ads.)

Anyway, all of this will wind up as prelude in short order, as the New Improved property tax bills arrive before the '08 general elections and we get to see how many protesters saved their signs when it's Mitch "How's The Weather Down There" Daniels with his bacon on the fire. You'll forgive me if I smell Florida Recount Riot II; it could just be the river.

But on to the Expert: whatever Political Scientist Channel 8 had on last night said, at one point, that if Peterson and the City/County council had anticipated the Property Tax Rebellion they might've delayed raising the County tax until next year! Good Government in Action! This is the problem with our politics, folks, and I don't mean just locally; the damn thing is a fractal. Raising local taxes is, ostensibly, the sort of solution the tax protesters were after. It's certainly the sort of thing the new mayor will be faced with doing once property taxes are capped by the legislature next Spring; his only option is to cut services and hope that the murderers kill themselves off and it's too cold for outdoor protests when the streets don't get plowed. Our "Experts" feel that the best course of action is to do what's necessary only in off-years; it's apparently how one appeases an electorate incensed by flip-flopping.

Pissing Match

Fred Kaplan, "The Freedom Agenda Fizzles: How George Bush and Condoleezza Rice made a mess of Pakistan." Slate November 5

"NOW we've really got problems," is Kaplan's opener; one imagines that if things were to go from worser to most worser Slate might even find it necessary to start telling the truth in the first place instead of contradicting the anti-truth, or whatever it is they imagine they're doing over there. Kaplan continues:

The state of emergency in Pakistan signals yet another low point in President George W. Bush's foreign policy—a stark demonstration of his paltry influence and his bankrupt principles. More than that, the crackdown locks us in a crisis—a potentially dangerous dynamic—from which there appears to be no escape route.

Leave us recall that at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan, Dr. Rice was National Security Advisor. Or maybe "National Security Advisor," since for all the blather at the time about Rice and Colin Powell being the two most powerful African-Americans ever, or Rice and Karen Hughes as the Estrogen Emperors, Dick Cheney was in her chair, literally, not just as boss. Rice's tenure at State is a disaster, as it had to be. If she intended to salvage anything of her reputation, aside from her reputation as a sycophant and a tenth-rate intellect she should have resigned at the end of the first term. But then, shoes aren't free! Bush will go down in history as the man who found a foreign policy of marble and left one of partially-digested Texas tube steak, but let us note two things: disaster in Pakistan was a matter of when not if, and we set upon this road with the almost unanimous and completely unreflective support of the American people.

Sure, the name "Osama bin-Laden" only turns up these days when Mitt Romney tries to pronounce "Barrack Obama"--understandable mistake--but the sober reflection which was so badly needed and so completely absent (both supply and demand) might have been our best chance at capturing him. We gave the Taliban 24 hours to hand over both bin-Laden and their sovereignty; we've given Musharraf $10 B that we know of. What if we'd reversed that? Given the Taliban the golden handshake and Musharraf notice that we'd be in hot pursuit of al-Qaeda wherever it went? It may be that I'm the only man cynical enough to think Yellow is the favorite color of government officials everywhere, regardless of degree of religious conviction (or maybe that's just because of the particular examples of government officials and men of religious conviction I'm most familiar with); it may be that no President, even a functionally literate one, could have withstood the demand for vengeance long enough to make Dollar Diplomacy work. But it's certain that the opposite approach has stuck us in an endless occupation of Afghanistan even Slate can't turn inside out.

And where, we might add, just across the border we find one of the world's acknowledged nuclear powers, the one with the perpetually unsettled government and the perpetually simmering conflict with its nuclear-club neighbor just across the disputed border area that's been the site of military action since 1947. Gosh, who could have foreseen any problems with that? Not the gang at Slate. But then the 19,000 American troops currently in Afghanistan have no worries about the takeover of a nuclear arsenal just the other side of Waziristan (motto: Hey, At Least Our Border Isn't Disputed!), since we saw to it that India got extra fissionable materials just in case.

Yes, the Bush administration has been a disaster in Pakistan, and everywhere else for that matter, but who opposed the stick-to-the-hornets'-nest approach in the first place? We dealt with Musharraf at the same time we passed a war resolution ipse dixit, as they keep saying whenever I'm retried. The Congress of the United States, in effect, told Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, et.al., that they could chase whomever they chose wherever they wanted. One lone Representative--California's Barbara Lee--objected, on the grounds that the resolution was too broad. As I understand it, the death threats have now fallen to less than one per hour.

So enough, already. We know the administration screwed the pooch, but who was cheering on the sidelines as she was locked into that Michael Vick Heet-O-Matic™ Canine Corset? The time to think about this was September, 2001. Now is the time for you to piss yourself while remembering just why you're doing it again. The leading Presidential candidates of both parties are still making noises about Iran--if at different levels of insanity--and they've managed to convince about half the population. Maybe it's time we pissed ourselves forward for once.

Shut The Fug Up

Bruce Lipsky/Florida Times-Union
Apparently his handlers cut off the left flipper so he could wear one of those Purple Heart band-aids on it.

Jim Rutenberg, "Flip-Flopery: Said That vs. Meant This, a Hot Matchup for ’08." New York Times, November 4

Maureen Dowd, "Gift of Gall" New York Times, November 4

Frank Rich, "Noun + Verb + 9/11 + Iran = Democrats’ Defeat?" New York Times, November 4


Adam Nagourney and Patrick Healy, "Different Rules When A Rival Is A Woman?" New York Times, November 5

HERE'S the deal: it is past time, now, to acknowledge that our public press, writ large, is a collection of shameless careerists and liars of the Pathological class, or else we stop, once and for all, making fun of those labels that warn consumers not to point burning propane torches toward the face or operate that new bagel toaster while immersed in the morning bath. It's one or the other. These people cannot believe what they say, or we cannot believe they all survived their introductions to pointy-ended scissors.

This is Day 7 of the Hillary Gang-Bang. Why? I'm sure there have been other, comparable stories to have come out of either party's incontinent stream of debate infomercials, and if so I'm sorry to have slept through them. It's even possible that one or two may have involved substantive issues, however marginally. Had any of them received a week's worth of chatter--and counting--I'm guessing it might have penetrated my force field of indifference. Have I missed something? Even the twin concerns of Haircutgate and the Whitewater cleavage scandal--high on every American's list of dangerous river spans along our political turnpike--didn't last the weekend.

Let's begin with Rutenberg's "think piece" on flip-flopping, which happens to show up this weekend (in fairness, it gives every evidence of months of exhaustive research):

Last week, it was Senator Hillary Clinton’s turn. Under questioning from Tim Russert of NBC News in a debate Tuesday, she acknowledged saying recently that a proposal by Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York to give illegal immigrants driver licenses “makes a lot of sense,” but that, in fact, “I did not say it should be done.” On Wednesday, her campaign said she supported the idea.

I have several answers to this, but seeing that all of them involve some variation on the You're A Fucking Moron theme, I will ask the reader, if any: have you ever said or thought something like this? "It makes a lot of sense to buy that new car," or "snap up that undervalued stock," or "get that $400 haircut," but at one and the same time you felt the timing was not right because your bank account was challenged or your portfolio unbalanced or those damn teenagers were sure to put your preening ass on YouTube? Would you, in fact, trust a business association with someone whose answer to each and every complex situation was to damn the torpedos and give you a poodle cut?

Okay, okay, the next day the campaign said she supported the idea. If this is a flop, where's the flip? You buy the car or not, you get the haircut or you sit on a kitchen chair while your spouse has at it with the dog shears. Have you never supported something you were equivocal about? I have in every Presidential election since 1976. She clarified her position not in response to the flip, or the flop, but to the flap. Is that something less than 100% consistency? Probably. Is that a standard we wish to enforce in each and every situation, however trivial? You're a Fucking Moron.

In case I need to remind anyone, I'm not exactly campaigning for Senator Clinton. And I'm getting pretty tired of having to defend her. But let's note here that some greater damage to the body politic is at work beyond the sliming of all things Clinton/Gore, constantly and in perpetuity, whatever degree of waterboarding the Truth is required. The question is a technical one. It has little or no relevance to "Illegal Immigration" as a Presidential campaign issue. It's a New York State matter. But because it has a "gotcha" quotient it is wielded as if Eliot Spitzer, and he alone, holds the key to our impending doom. The question may be fair, in the sense of "all's fair" or the sense that it's "fair" to ask Mitt about Utah's enforcement of polygamy laws, but it's guaranteed to be understood as weighing more than it does. See Bob Somerby on the questioning from the tragedy team of Russert and Williams, versus the questioning of Bush's challengers in 2000.

Before we head to more heavily manured pastures let's note, for the record, that John Kerry did not flip-flop on Iraq; he voted for the war resolution, and he later opposed the war. Isn't it obvious those are two different things? His vote on the resolution was wrong, and obviously so by 2004; would that more of our nation's elected officials had been willing to admit it. It may very well have been a political calculation. But that isn't what he was criticized for. Republicans did the Flipper dance, and the punditocracy did its best to learn the steps, but Kerry wasn't inconsistent on the war. Meanwhile back at the party where the act of flipflopping was such an enormity three years ago, the two leading candidates are running campaigns either based on little else or based on the notion that present-day massaging solves the problem. The guy in the dolphin suit is nowhere to be found, but no one's questioning his consistency.

I spent some time last week gleaning the October MoDo archives for her first mention of Hillary per column. The piece wasn't working out, and I tossed the research, but I was within one column of the end of the month and I'd found to that point precisely one (1) column that didn't mention Hillary at all, and I think that one was her drunkblogging live from Clarence Thomas' thought processes. By that point the word "Hillary" appeared as the 47th word in an average column, and that includes the other one--it was either about Rudy or about herself--where I thought "Hillary" was home free only to have her turn up on the second page as word 857. And that's not counting times like Sunday when she starts off [at word one (1)] by referring to the junior Senator from New York as Girlfriend. (Her unnamed supporters appear as Hillaryland and Hillville. As with the incessant downpour of W.s every time she writes about Bush, we ask: is there no one at the Times who can edit her? Or buy her some adult protective undergarments?)

Dowd's columns have been a veritable waterfall of urea's hot and sibilant torrents for months now, demanding that Barack Obama ("Senator Smooth Jazz") get tough with "Hillzilla"; now that her companions in fatuousness over at NBC have thoughtfully provided the context (though, sadly, the real engine was John "Breck Girl" Edwards), Mo is on to the planned meta-response: the denizens of "Hillville" are crying it's no fair to gang up on a girl, therefore "Senator Pothole" is not really a feminist. This, despite the fact that "Senator Code Pink Pinko" expressly said she'd been gang-tackled not because she was a woman but because she was the front-runner. This is the problem with healthcare in this country: most people have to shell out enormous sums by the hour to work out their personal problems with mental-health professionals, while a fortunate few actually get paid to do the same thing on the Times' Op-Ed pages.

The ever-reliable Adam Nagourney turns up on Day Two to put the facts behind the opinion. Geraldine Ferraro says the attacks on Senator Clinton would never had be unleashed on Senator Obama, because that would be racist, which is not permitted, while sexism is okay.

Once again we have several responses, the first of which is What Kind of Fucking Moron Thinks We're Such Fucking Morons? And the second is Who Got Sent Into What Sub-Basement To Look For Geraldine Ferraro's Number, And How Long Did It Take?

As much as I wish Ms Ferraro had responded, "Fuck you, Nagourney, you fucking asshole," she absolutely has a point, and it might make an interesting discussion if it were taken seriously and not rewritten by Adam Nagourney. Sexism didn't suddenly rear its head last Tuesday night, and to suggest that Ferraro is trying to provide Hillary Clinton with some protective coloration is flat fucking absurd. I'd like to see Nagourney try to endure in a lifetime the sort of shit that's been thrown at Clinton on a daily basis for the last fifteen years. One reason she's got that commanding lead is that over a series of months she's shown she can outpunch Edwards and Obama ("The Comely Twins").

Two more things. Frank Rich may not have devoted an entire column to this nonsense, but he did say of Clinton's defense of her Kyl-Lieberman vote:

Much like her now notorious effort to fudge her stand on Eliot Spitzer’s driver’s license program for illegal immigrants, this is a profile in vacillation. And this time Mrs. Clinton’s straddling stood out as it didn’t in 2002. That’s not because she was the only woman on stage but because she is the only Democratic candidate who has not said a firm no to Bush policy.

Y'know, I like to imagine that I, indolent headline reader, have some appreciation of, if not appreciation for, Senator Clinton's stance on Iraq, Iran, and whatever other little brown people make the list. I'm not willing to say she's the lone Democrat who isn't "saying what they really believe rather than trying to play both sides against the middle" (but Rich is). I may believe the troops never should have gone, or, failing that, should have been brought home years ago; that does not mean I think every candidate refusing to pledge to bring them home by a date specified by Tim Russert is politicking or lying. And if I do want to gauge who's being honest I'm not going to ask any savvy Times columnists who did their best to see to it that the idiot in the Oval Office got there in 2000.

The last thing is this: shame on John Fucking Haircut Edwards. Shame on everybody else for not telling Russert and Williams to get fucking serious or get off the fucking stage. That's the real problem, not whether our candidates have a favorite Bible verse, and it's well past time for someone to say so. Or, preferably, a gang.

Hughes Suddenly Remembers Family; Resigns Again

OKAY, that headline won out over "Karen Hughes, 2001-Spring 2002, 2005-2007: An Appreciation", and "Karen Hughes: My Work Here Is Finished", on the grounds that the more I thought about it the more I figured that her first resignation was the only thing Karen Hughes ever said or did that had a fair chance of being remembered. This is the principle difference between Karen Hughes and a stick of gum: the stick of gum actually delivers some flavor for a couple of minutes.

This is the woman the Cato Institute's David Boaz, in what can only be assumed was a desperate cry for help, once described as "[possibly] the most powerful woman in the history of American politics". This came in the opening paragraphs of an April 30, 2002 "think piece" in the New York Post "newspaper" in which he insisted that Hughes really was leaving to spend more time with her family, and he said this as a means of promoting his idea that women (God love 'em) are just too estrogen-laden to run anything more complex than a nursery. (The Institute has graciously reprinted it here, just in case any outsiders were contemplating taking libertoonianism seriously, even for a moment.)

I have to admit I find the lure of Bush administration nostalgia almost irresistible, now that the man himself is reduced to playing a community theatre Miss Havisham and the only thing left of his gang is Condi Rice and a mountain of criminal prosecutions. Oh, bright cherry blossoms of 2001! Hughes was the most powerful woman ever to set foot in the West Wing. Rice and Colin Powell were the twin avatars of The Mostest Color-blind Administration, Like, Ever. Winking, smirking, and used-car-dealer bonhomie were the softening artillery barrage of a Charm Offensive set to conquer the land with Conservative Compassion. And Dick Cheney was the selfless éminence grise with one ambition-less hand discretely on the rudder as the Boy King learned the read the winds.

We say again: it is impossible to believe that anyone who accepted this crap could have survived the required navigation of any of a multitude of modern-day commonplaces: lighting a pilot light, refueling a vehicle, crossing a street, operating a zipper. And yet, there you have it, a kitschy, sentimental small-town parade where all the floats are constructed of horseshit, with a couple of local disc jockeys babbling on the PA about how fresh the air seemed that morning.

And sorry to destroy the reverie, but this wasn't the hopeful beginning of some potential New Camelot, it was the coronation of the man who had lost the fucking election. And it was not some wispy and wistful naivete; it coincided with the ugly and transparent Hey Look Over There attacks on the outgoing President, spearheaded by libels from the new Press Secretary and gleefully transmitted by the White House Press Corps and the other seekers of truth who had, to the best of their ability, ignored Iran-Contra and the Great S&L Swindle but revived the dead-issue of Whitewater for an eight-year run. It's difficult not to focus on the colossal blunders of the administration, and the unblinking bloodlust of the public in the wake of 9/11, but the departure of Karen Hughes, former Most Powerful Woman in the Solar System For Several Weeks, former WHIG, former Dallas teleprompter reader, should remind us that nothing about this operation ever passed the smell test, and it survived as long as it did because of a complete lack of public scrutiny which stinks just as bad. I hate to go all misty-eyed on ya, but to me the enduring image of the Bush administration comes from shortly before there was such a thing: his limo stopped for several minutes in the coronation parade, while the teevee commentators said nothing.