And She Takes All the Red Yellow Orange and Green and She Turns Them Into Miracle Whip™

The Return of Maureen Dowd: A) "The 46-Year-Old Virgin" (Sept. 5); B) "Old School Inanity" (Sept. 9)

COULDN'T we at least get a slide show of her vacation pictures first?

I don't generally patronize online copyright-violators, but when MoDo returned to my tossed-over-the-fence-when-the-neighbor-finishes-it Sunday Times I ran to the internets, typed "Maureen Dowd" in the Times search field, and learned she'd returned on Wednesday and written (A) a piece on Barack Obama that promised to be every bit as fatuous as (B)'s examination of the Presidential campaign of Fred Dalton Thompson, and I clicked around until I found it.

So it was that I learned that (A) Obama is young and inexperienced and smooth jazz smooth while (B) Thompson plays a tough guy, is considered by some to be lazy, and sounds exactly like George W. Bush. Which....excuse me, but MAUREEN, COULD YOU POSSIBLY STOP CALLING THE PRESIDENT "W." ? The public moved beyond this I'm Jes' A Texas Rancher crap years ago, and even a mocking "Dubya", still seen on occasion and apparently not permitted by The Gray Lady's style book, now cruelly mocks the user, as the subject has moved on to infamies so vast and unexpected (generally) that the 2000 election now seems like it belongs on his juvenile record. I'm as sorry about this as anyone, but the days when we could have a hearty chuckle over his being misunderestimated, or his not having interviewed you, are now separated from us by a smoking stinkpile bigger than the Twin Towers.

I mean, you'd imagine that viewed through the lens of the intervening years all the Al Gore-wears-earthtones business Dowd went on and on and on and on about would have proven at least partly self-correcting. But then the quagmire and wasted lives that followed the 2000 mistake wasn't enough to keep her from making up that Kerry NASCAR quote or calling John Edwards a shampoo model. Why should a few thousand more lives lost to no purpose make her or her editors question whether our politics should be covered the way the noctural gambols of our celebrity party girls are?

Make no mistake--I'm all for snark, even in the Op-Ed pages, but at the service of something. Dowd just throws stale popcorn at teevee "reality" programs when a contestant she doesn't like is talking. It could be improved if she were, I dunno, funny, but a much better idea would be for her to take being informed out for a test drive:

He allows Hillary to present herself as having the experience to be president just because she was married to one. He should be making the opposite case, that Hillary — go ahead, use her name, she won’t bite you, or even if she does, you’ll get over it — knew from nothing about the system.

In the White House, she botched health care and bungled dealing with special prosecutors — remember that talent she had for losing critical files? And in the Senate, she played it safe and became a Democratic Senator Pothole while helping W. launch his disaster in Iraq.

Okay, so we forgot to add "seeking professional help for that misogynistic streak" above. Hillary Clinton has been elected US Senator twice, which equals Fred Thompson's qualifications, exceeds John Edwards' and Mitt Romney's one term as a governor. And, by anyone's electoral math, Giuliani's two terms as a mayor, which alone among major candidates, would be an electoral c.v. of unprecedented slimness.

I'm going to gamble here and suggest that even Ms Dowd knows that the Clinton health care program was defeated by massive cash infusions from Big Pharma and Big Insurance, not Ms Clinton's Feminazi pantsuits. I'll wager Dowd couldn't get 5 out of 10 correct on a standard Whitewater quiz, explain Travelgate, or tell us what files it was that went missing. I'll drop a dime that she could tell us what those files said once they were found, or at least whose side they corroborated. I'll let my winnings ride on a claim that she can't identify the five major federal investigations of Whitewater, and I'd love to parlay that with an insistence that she knows damn well what criminally leaky Special Prosecutor hinted that indictments of Hillary were just around the corner as well as how many actually were. Except nobody'd take that one.

Iraq? Sure, no question. Senator Clinton was on the wrong side, in which she joins Edwards, Dodd, Biden, the previous Democratic nominee, and the entire Republican side, who remain more or less enthusiastic about the whole thing.

(Incidentally--sticking with such wrongheaded decisions makes Republican front-runners "tough guys", provided they do not use blow-driers, like Mitt. )

Which I do not offer as an excuse. But if we're gonna have a hanging let's hang everybody who deserves it, in order of culpability, or enthusiasm, or eagerness to continue. And let's try to remember to save a little torchlight so's we can burn down the Times building on our way home.

God knows you're not going to find a Please Donate button on this website for any candidate who voted for the war. But then neither am I particularly impressed by someone who (cagily) criticized the war effort but displays the following grasp of the issues:

Can we please get someone in charge who will stop whining that Osama is hiding in “harsh terrain,” hunt him down and blast him forward to the Stone Age?

Forward to the Stone Age! Hardy-har-har, it's still as funny as the first two thousand times I heard it. How's this: let's make "hunting down Osama" a project for your next month off, eh Mo? Take Brooks and Friedman with you, and pick up Judy Miller on your way to Kennedy. We'll try to survive without y'all.

Today In Making Up History As You Go Along

September 8, 2002: The Sunday News Show Official First Anniversary of 9/11. Dick Cheney, TIm Russert's regular co-host, uses that morning's Michael Gordon/Judy Miller front-page centrifuge story, stovepiped from his own office, as evidence that the administration's "Sorry We Can't Tell You What the Evidence Is" is backed by evidence. Rumsfeld performs the same function on Face the Nation. On CNN Condi utters the immortal "smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud" and claims the aluminum tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." Colin Powell, on FAUX, says the UN inspectors were awright, he supposes, but we really learned how much they'd missed once we started talking to Iraqi defectors.

Reading the Meet the Press transcript--call me a sentimentalist--I was struck, not by Russet's waterlogged questioning--a given--but by Cheney's answer when Timmy got around to sorta kinda hinting that Iraq couldn't employ WMDs without, you know, kinda being utterly destroyed within twenty seconds in response. Here's the Dick:

Who did the anthrax attack last fall, Tim? We don’t know.

There's a fine bit of lathe work in the Amy Goodman/Bill Moyers PBS piece on selling the Iraq war when Moyers interviews Russert on how Cheney came to be on the show the very morning the centrifuge story turned up. And Russert says he had no idea what was coming, etc. etc. And they end with a 1-shot of this colossal mound of ego, whose thirty-five years in television journalism has atrophied his sense of Right and Wrong and True and False--the man is, at one and the same time, a pathetically bad liar, maybe the worst since Nixon, and a wizened prostitute--who says, by golly, we now know there were people in the Administration who were raising questions about the evidence, and I sure wish they'd have given me a call.

They cut to CBS' Bob Simon, reporting that he'd called various experts on nuclear weapons programs and been told that the story was dubious at best. And Simon replies to Moyer's question that, yes, most of these experts would have been available to talk to anybody.

Of course your guess as to whether Russert ever even dials any of his own phone calls is as good as mine. The man is not now nor has he ever been a reporter; he's a zeitgeist technician, and if he has a reporter's inclination to check sources the results have thus far evaded detection. Perhaps there wasn't enough time to check the Times story before air, just as--darn it!--there wasn't enough time for someone to ring his phone. You or I might be forgiven for imagining the whole story was a bit too convenient, perhaps even obviously so, but Tim is bound by the Sacred Obligation of Faux-Balance not to object unless he's quoting someone else who did it for him. We might quibble that Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight-Ridder had actually done that, having cast serious doubts on the administration story two days earlier, but surely it's not Russert's job to read the out-of-town papers?

No, we're not master carvers like Moyers. We're butchers and hacksaw artistes, and we have to look at Cheney's reply again:

Who did the anthrax attack last fall, Tim? We don’t know.

It is September 8, 2002, and anyone who'd followed the story beyond the original headlines knew this: 1) that anthrax and other biological agents are not "Weapons of Mass Destruction"; 2) that, assuming Saddam Hussein could have accumulated enough to cause a blizzard in Tel Aviv, which he couldn't, and found some way to deliver it, which likewise, it still wouldn't have caused Nagasaki numbers of deaths; 3) that the anthrax in question was directly traceable to a US biological weapons program we'd claimed to have dismantled thirty years earlier. And all of this preserves the bald-faced fiction that we'd have demanded proof in the face of an actual attack when rumor was plenty sufficient in its absence.

Russert had no follow-up to the response. Oops, I should have warned you to sit down first.

Why Are We In Iraq? Part 627 in a Series.

I HAD to rush in to the grocery this afternoon. I generally try to avoid the quote Express end quote Line, but there was no choice this time, and as a result I was, predictably, stuck two persons behind the woman who read her receipt all the way to the exit, spun around, and came back to announce she'd been overcharged. Which, predictably, she hadn't, and which, predictably, takes four times as long to establish than if she had.

This did nothing to ameliorate the high viscosity service in the quote Express end quote Line due to its being manned by Gabby (not her real name, but definitely her real description), who mistakes making random comments about your selections for "personality", which, evidentally, the store manager has urged her to both acquire and share. This took the form in my own case of the following exchange:

Gabby (scanning my twofer pack of ribeyes): These'd be great on the grill!

Me (inaudibly): I'm so glad you mentioned that. I was gonna take 'em home and boil 'em for a couple hours.

Anyway, the delay provided enough time for two twenty-something Jeopardy! contestants to turn up, each towing a case of warm Bud. After a brief period spent determining which character Sacha Baron Cohen had played in Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby, ("I'm pretty sure he was the French guy.") inspired by the $8.99 Borat DVD hanging on the rack, the talk turned to the possible life-threatening results of consuming all that Bud in a sitting.

"You could go out and get shot in the woods."

"Yeah, especially if you went hunting with that Dave Cheney guy."

I (Heart) Digby

And needless to say, all these recent portraits show a man who is unrecognizable as the hero of Bob Woodward's "Bush At War." That hasn't yet been adequately explained by him or anyone else.

The Thompson Candidacy: A Post-Mortem

FIRST, uh, why? Has that been answered yet? If I understand correctly, Fred Duelin' Dalton Thompson is riding to the rescue because a line-up that includes Huckabee, Brownback, the 90-percentile winger John McCain and the How Much More Could One Man Pander Mitt Romney is insufficiently hidebound. Not that "hidebound" seems like such a marketable trait these days.

Okay, so, I have plenty of proof my prognostication skills will never make a bookie sweat, and I'm no connoisseur of Republicanism. It's like asking me to judge a Kumquat Casserole Bake-Off. Still, I can't for the life of me figure out what Thompson brings to the race besides the Hey It's That Guy on th' Teevee! cachet, which manages to combine the worst sort of Reagan nostalgia, unlettered horse-race touting (of the sort which at various times apparently determined by newspaper headline reading and biorhythms insists that Condi Rice or Haley Barbour or Colin Powell is a juggernaut straining for release), and the power of desperation at a) the condition their party and their ideology had brought the country to and b) the sorry-assed lineup of liars, crooks, feebs, and the certifiably insane they were fielding. Fred Thompson isn't a candidate; he's an invalid's idea of virility.


When was there a candidacy like this in recent history? Three sitting Presidents have been challenged: Truman, LBJ, and Carter. Two of them didn't make it out of New Hampshire, and the third won the nomination but lost the election. Thompson inverts the set-up but not the result; he's a surrogate Bush jumping in because the challengers don't stand a chance. But he's doing so in a year when nobody wants Bush back and the rest of the field has already been handicapped by its inability to come out and say so--excepting, of course, that Paul character, but we're restricting this to serious candidacies.

Now, I've been watching this stuff since I saw John Kennedy motorcadin' his way down 16th Street in Speedway, Indiana in 1960 (so far as I know, the last Democratic Presidential candidate to actually come to Indiana), and, as a somewhat college-educated person, I'm aware that no one ever says, "We need the absolute best, most informed decision we can make on this matter of earth-shaking importance--let's let the public vote!" Inexplicable results have been known to sneak through. People talk about electability all primary season, just like they talk about character and honesty, but they never vote that way. I can't figure out where Thompson, or his staff this week, or the people who were so interested in having him enter the race think he's going to go, politically, that the other candidates can't. He's not an actor turned politician, unleashing the Muses in the service of The Cause. He's a politician turned actor playing an actor turned politician, and both careers seem predicated on the idea that when reading drivel he seems no more inert than when he's speaking extemporaneously. Say what you want about Reagan (please!), he was a much better actor as a politician than he ever was as an actor. Not to mention that the two careers were separate, and separated by a few years, or that it took him sixteen years of trying to get the nomination. I can't see how Thompson separates himself from The Inexplicable DA, and I can't see how that resonates--positively, that is--with an electorate that's been expressing its frustration at hearing scripted lies read to it while Rome burns.

What about after the primaries? At least Rudy has that insanity thing going for him. Mitt is $12 worth of substandard electronics in a shiny stainless-steel case, the sort of thing Americans are used to getting for their money. McCain, whatever the fuck is wrong with him, is a winger on the issues who's staked his entire campaign--and lost--on continuing the interminable war against something the "base" is so enamored of. None of them appeals to me as President, to put it mildly, but then neither do most of the Democrats. I can't see Romney putting up much of a fight, but one can never discount entirely the power of soulless mediocrity. Rudy offers the country its first explicit opportunity to vote for a national Don; McCain could rise from the ashes--it is his only hope, after all--though he'd take a look around, black out, and wind up in flames again within five minutes.

What's Fred? He's a twelvemonth of Law & Order reruns, except you have to swallow them instead of playing them in the background while you do more important stuff. And for all the talk of Rudy's personal life (or Hillary's), we are, like every nation on earth, a land of cheaters and blackguards and self-serving ne'er-do-wells, but membership in the Society for the Appreciation of the Trophy Wife is surprisingly limited. (Then again, as Jane Galt sagely noted, Frances Folsom was similarly a quarter-century younger than Grover Cleveland, and everybody who made a stink about that at the time is dead. However, it's also true that Folsom's plaintive, humble, I-was-but-a-poor-widow-when-Grover-took-pity-on-me personality played quite well over the telegraph.) I think Thompson's numbers have peaked, or will do so with whatever bump he gets in the next week. For a time he re-energizes Giuliani, who had begun to twist on the spit and take on the flavor of all that dripping bile hitting the coals, but who for now gets to be The Guy Fred Plays on Teevee. And Romney's toast if he doesn't knock Thompson out early, and he's had months to prepare for that.

And assuming that Thompson somehow manages to make it a two- or three-man race he'll wind up as the Ponderous White Hope of the so-called base, and they're going to be awfully disappointed with the alternatives after he gets his ass kicked. Just remember: no wagering, and if you must gamble, for godssakes don't base it on anything I have to say.

The Difference Is That Category Five Stupidity Is Making Landfall Constantly

Jonah Goldberg, "Storm of Malpractice: Katrina was a media disaster." Wherever Fine Newspapers Aren't Sold, September 5

Synopsis of the English Translation: There were, like, a million Katrina anniversary stories last week, according to LexisNexis. (You have now been appraised of all the research I intend to do.) Only none of the big media poopyheads ever admits that the media poopheads made any mistakes. They just blame the Bush administration, which is why they were so disappointed when 10,000 people didn't die like they all assured us they had.

Obligatory 'I Still Imagine Weaselly Equivocations Turn Horseshit Into Thought" Moment: "And while some might quibble with this or that characterization or selection of facts, ultimately the media were doing what they’re supposed to do: hold government accountable."
SWEET Lordy Gordy, I realize there's probably not a subject on earth that Goldberg hasn't embarrassed himself about, and, further, I know that refusal to admit the obvious swims in his political bloodstream, as well as being a prerequisite of employment and a consequence of Lazy Brain Syndrome, but Jesus. "Grow Some Gills" Goldberg is going to bring up Katrina, let alone criticize someone else's work? Or show his face again? for that matter.

Few of us can forget the reports from two years ago. CNN warned that there were “bands of rapists, going block to block.” Snipers were reportedly shooting at medical personnel. Bodies at the Superdome, we were told, were stacked like cordwood. The Washington Post proclaimed in a banner headline that New Orleans was “A City of Despair and Lawlessness” and insisted in an editorial that “looters and carjackers, some of them armed, have run rampant.” Fox News anchor John Gibson said there were “all kinds of reports of looting, fires and violence. Thugs shooting at rescue crews.” These reports actually hindered rescue efforts, as emergency crews wasted valuable time avoiding phantom snipers.

TV reporters raced to the bottom to see who could moralistically preen the most. Interviewers transformed into outright scolds of administration officials. Meanwhile, the distortions, exaggerations and flat-out fictions being offered by New Orleans officials were accelerated and amplified by the media echo chamber. Glib predictions of 10,000 dead, and the chief of police’s insistence that there were “little babies getting raped,” swirled around the media like so much free-flowing sewage.

It was as though journalistic skepticism of government officials was reserved for the White House, and everyone else got a free pass.

Y'know, first of all, they archive the witty repartee that is The Corner. In case anyone's forgotten.

And the casual nibbler at that Burkean tapas bar could easily be convinced that before they were (largely) debunked--most thoroughly by reporters at the Times-Picayune--the Cornerites were generally less than skeptical themselves, provided the reports in question appeared to justify their preconceived notions. Which, since much of their information came from the likes of John Gibson and Neil Cavuto, qualified as "frequently".

We understand that Golberg is not (suddenly!) aiming for accuracy; his full-time job is the sort of moralistic preening he accuses nameless reporters of engaging in. It's possible--it's always possible with Jonah--that he's not even familiar with standard wall-to-wall teevee news coverage, in which wild rumor and rank speculation stop being filtered to the extent they usually are, and that under those conditions one should adopt the same attitude about drinking straight and deep from the news font that one takes about floodwater. We know by now, those of us who've read the record rather than just checking the Google hits counter, that a lot of those stories were sourced, at least originally, and that they were couched in the usual "reportedlys" and "according tos" which are routinely accepted by Goldberg and the rest of us. We suggest that self-styled Middle East experts who can't name a book on the subject should be the first to renounce the practice. In the meantime, so it goes.

We also know this: that a denizen of Left Blogtopia--who we are embarrassed to admit we friggin' don't remember--caught the frame of the early New Orleans coverage by noticing that Black People Loot while Resourceful White People Find. That little discovery was the drop that topped the levy of racist coverage that dominated the first 48 hours on the television. Teevee reporters are not actively recruited from the ranks of the urban poor, they are not notably eager to join them or particularly sensitive to their circumstances, or knowledgeable beyond a sort of demographic /political Dewey Decimal assignment. There's absolutely no question that the timbre of the early coverage bordered on racist and fell fall short of what we might describe as simple human compassion. The revelations of racism from the Blogosphere came as, well, a genuine revelation to some. (This pathetic little blog received two emails from cable or network news producers protesting that they were just reporting what they could see from their extremely limited perches; our response, "Bullshit," effectively ended the debate.) Meanwhile, much of the Right's free time was spent arguing over whether looters should be shot on sight or merely wounded on sight. In this, K-Lo, somewhat surprisingly, took the opposite theological approach to Peggy Noonan, and Jonah posted an email he'd received (we know he didn't make it up since it contains, like, an historical citation):

"Don't Arrest Them, Beat Them" [ Jonah Goldberg ]

Email from a reader about the great Chief Greenberg:

It's interesting that no one has yet remarked on the behavior of recently-retired Charleston police Chief Reuben Greenberg during Hurricane Hugo in 1989. When the eye of that Category 4 storm passed over the city and offered a half-hour of calm, Greenberg sent out a paddy wagon to round up looters. It got as far as the entrance to the police lot, which was flooded (the police HQ in Charleston is on reclaimed landfill - not below sea level, but not above it by much). He was able to get on the horn to his lieutenants around town with the order: "Don't arrest [looters]; beat them. We don't have any place for them in our jails." I credit the attitude espoused in those lines - a refusal, even in the eye of the storm - to tolerate lawlessness, with the subsequent quality of the response. The National Guard was called in immediately, especially on the barrier islands that had lost their bridges to the mainland (I remember taking our boat to inspect our beach house two days later and being politely told to inspect and leave by the Guard troops on Sullivans Island. Though the entire response in the Charleston area was phenomenal, Chief Greenberg and Mayor Joe Riley were phenomenally strong that horrible night, and they facilitated the rebuilding effort that has led to the Charleston that has developed today. Their response was pure Giuliani - before there was a Giuliani.

09/02 11:35 AM

It's also true that as time went on and the scope of the disaster and the disastrous Bush administration non-response became clearer, the tone changed. To be sure, the exaggeration continued. People who have witnessed the wildfire speed with which contrast-enhanced newspaper photographs become global media conspiracies on some websites--whose denizens' lives are threatened by nothing more than the theoretical possibility that the sommelier will break a cork at lunch--can perhaps understand how panic set in among people at the Convention Center who were desperate for rescue in the swampy heat, people whose only source of food or water was being described as lawlessness and a hanging offense, at that. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the horror stories originated with National Guardsmen and FEMA officials who were in no real danger themselves.

AS for "ganging up on Bush", we find that even more risible than most things that come out of Jonah's mouth in the company of Cheetos spray. The administration had no problem getting face time on teevee, aside from the delay caused by its reluctance to rouse from vacation. The Washington Post stovepiped the Blame Bianco stuff, despite it being, uh, factually challenged (remember "she didn't ask for a state of emergency"?). Ray Nagin was frequently portrayed, rightly or wrongly, as an overmatched lunatic. Everyone dutifully ran the loop of the unused school buses and dutifully inflated their number tenfold. Tim Russert aided the sliming of Aaron Broussard, the Jefferson Parish President who'd errantly reported a couple days of non-existent phone calls to a 92-year-old woman already drowned. Not only was Broussard's emotional response to an unmitigated disaster fact-checked, it was still an issue for the national press three weeks later, as though it somehow made FEMA appear not so bad. Name me one time Timmy has similarly chased down someone with real power. Bush went unchallenged when he claimed the levee breach had been unthinkable, and when they finally got Pickles out of Crawford and dried out she was a walking-three-feet-behind-the-President photo op of cheery Here's Your Blanket, Now Go Find Yourself Some Bootstraps can-doitiveness.

The simple fact is that the pathetic administration response to Katrina finally unleashed the dissatisfaction bordering on disgust that had been building around Bush for some time, and while there might have been some debate room had the delay been twenty-four hours, it fucking wasn't, now, was it Mr. Goldberg? There's no question it wasn't Da Media's finest hour, a description Katrina shares with the 2000 elections, among others. There's also no question that the implicit racism and semi-malignant neglect were allowed to fester until many Americans didn't like what they were seeing about themselves. And that, to the extent that this runs counter to Mr. Goldberg's point of view, it's basically his Tough Shit.

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Telethon [ Jonah Goldberg ]

BET will be holding one for the victims, according to the AP.

08/31 04:20 PM

I'm assuming Jonah posted this tidbit because he wanted to make sure his fellow Cornerites--not all of whom are regular BET viewers, apparently--made sure to set their TIVOs.

Happy Birthday

D. Sidhe

Happy Birthday

George Robert Newhart
born September 5, 1929

And It Turns Out That 100-Year-Old Abandoned Mines Do Very Little Advertising

MAYBE I should give up news on television.

Not, of course, because I've suddenly discovered their product isn't actually news, or anything as obvious as that. I'm thinking more in terms of what a man of my age and general level of physical collapse should be subjecting himself to.

I've only recently noticed that teevee news doesn't carry those Teevee Ratings warnings just as it comes on the air. I may have become aware of this due to the astounding variety of entertainment on my still-new AT&T U-Verse system, whose wonderfulness I'm not going to mention again until some bakshish turns up in my mailbox. Or it may be a residual effect of my Poor Wife joining the Colonoscopy Club over the holiday weekend. I not only got to listen to her pre-op questionnaire, but those of the patient next door and across the hallway, including the one about whether the Questionee consumed more than one alcoholic beverage per day. So far as I could tell (I wasn't snooping, it was just the accoustics) everyone answered in the negative, so I don't know if they'd have followed up to ascertain the exact number. But I got to thinking that this should be part of the teevee news requirement, a liability-reducing electronic warning sticker, seeing as how half my local news is now given over to "Things For White Middle-Class People Like Ourselves To Do This Weekend" coverage. Because they evidently don't have a "TV-Lo IQ" rating. A brief questionnaire, I think, is an altogether more satisfactory solution: "Do you drink fewer than two cocktails an hour, night after night, in public, in a desperate attempt to find another empty alcoholic you can marry for several months? Are the celebrity antics of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Whatever "Singer" We Decide To Feature Next less important to you than tax policy, global climate change, or threats to your civil rights? Is your curiosity about tomorrow's weather satisfied by a simple "Clear and Cool," without reference to whatever irrelevant location around the globe is suffering an unseasonable snowstorm or sudden Sinkhole Activity Event, provided it's caught on tape? Then you must turn off your television right now. Why do you even own a set? Go read a book or something, Poindexter."

I was thinking that if I could demonstrate a loss of 20 IQ points, which should not be all that difficult, I might have a deep-pocket target for a class-action lawsuit in my sights, but then it occurred to me that some smart-ass defense attorney would start reading the list of Schedule I drugs and ask me to speak up if he named one I wasn't personally familiar with, and remember You're Still Under Oath. And when he got done he'd turn to the jury, pause, and say, "Do you have some problem with your hearing, Mr. Riley?" while spinning back around dramatically. And that would be the end of that. Even so, I think the warning is the right thing to do.

It was Labor Day weekend in Indianapolis, which for the past five decades has meant the NHRA Nationals were out in Clairmont. Grease, smoke, and noise not being much of an attraction for your average local news department, however, the Nationals took a decided back seat to Ribfest featuring Hootie and the Blowfish. Grease, smoke, and familiar, toe-tappin' tunes, in other words. They were also lower-billed than the obligatory fireworks simulcast with "music" on The Tee, or The Kay, or Leon, or some abomination of Frequency Modulation. I mean, fine. Personally, I'm not any more likely to watch drag racing than I am to line up for Hootie and the Ketchup-Drenched Carcinogens, but tradition ought to count for something and not be trumped by the value of any potential perks in the minds of the people reading this shit off teleprompters.

Y'know, it's at least reasonable, in the most generous understanding of the term, that Bush's photo-op Night Mission to Anbar gets coverage. It's even mildly amusing, knowing, as we do, that it's now the Republicans in the newsroom who'd like to pull the plug. It's another to turn on CNN this morning and watch the hairdo interview an Arizona mine inspector in re: what the government should be doing to prevent such tragedies. Suddenly the results of laissez-faire capitalism from a century ago require urgent government action, while allowing a 13-year-old to operate a motor vehicle unsupervised is a matter of personal choice. I don't know how it is in your bailiwick, but the News around here goes apeshit whenever someone's caught leaving a child unattended while running in to the Speedway for a pack of smokes. In fact, this comes at the end of a ten-day period in which a Carmel school bus driver accidentally left a kindergartner on her bus for seven hours, and is facing felony neglect charges, and a Lafayette woman was detained by neighbors after her five-year-old son pulled the family car up to the house. ("He's a good driver," was her explanation. Mommy had had a few.)

I was tempted to call in to CNN this morning to suggest that Arizona needed to repeal the law of gravity, but I just turned the box off instead.

I don't mean to sound callous, but I'm not the one who found "Abandoned Mine Safety" such a vital concern after mostly ignoring the issue of "Actual Working Mine Safety" for the past few weeks. It'd just be nice to see a little consistency. Government inaction--sometimes known as the failure to Tax and Spend--didn't kill that unfortunate child. If the law had been obeyed she'd still be alive. If we're not going to bring this up in light of the tragedy then let's hold our piece about "legislative failure" as well.

Let's Us Compromise And Do It My Way

Peggy Noonan, Erstwhile Presidential Nut-Sack Admirer, "A Time for Grace:
America needs unity in dealing with Iraq. That means the president must lead." August 31

THE difference between Peggy Noonan and, say, Jonah Goldberg is the difference between a semi-sordid "accidental" drowning where police find three empty fifths of White Horse Scotch in the trash, just atop last Wednesday's newspaper and a shoebox full of ripped-up love letters from the mid-60s, and the guy who accidentally kills himself trying to use a plunge router to open a can of pudding. For the former, we recognize a shared humanity that was lost somewhere along the way, too long ago for redemption, while the latter serves no discernible purpose, except perhaps as a reminder to throw out that aluminum cookware and not huff paint thinner.

The only reason anyone would ever discuss what either of these two have to say is that they are given valuable space in the public press to do so. If we chanced upon Peggers or Doughboy reading aloud their latest contribution while seated on a bus-stop bench we'd either walk away briskly or maybe hand them a couple of bucks, depending on our point of view. They and their ilk have been so drastically wrongheaded for so long as to defy the frickin' laws of chance. So we don't actually read either one of them so much as try to get the stain out of the carpet before it sets, after checking that our gloves are free from minute holes, and we don't rebut them so much as try, somehow, to get the smell out of the house before decent company shows up for tea. Here's Peggy, hacking up a four-year-old hairball:

What will be needed this autumn is a new bipartisan forbearance, a kind of patriotic grace. This is a great deal to hope for. The president should ask for it, and show it.

Thank Gore for the internets; even long familiarity with Noonan would not keep one safe were one trying to read this stuff while hurtling through traffic hanging on to a strap.

I mean, it's curious. It's fair to say, without meaning to ascribe any falsity of motive or unseemly hubris to it, that Noonan would describe herself, at minimum, as an aspiring penitent searching for The Light, whereas my own theological needs could be satisfied by accientially stumbling upon the Olsen twins in the middle of a three-day tootsky fest. Yet while I was known to associate with semi-dedicated Quaalude aficionados, I never knew a one who would set fire to your couch with a forgotten cigarette one day, then call you up the next to say he hoped we'd both agree we needed to be more careful with matches.

Well, Quaalude talk always makes me nostalgic, so I took a little trip through the Peggy Noonan archives, back to a place where the Iraq adventure was just beginning. Please do not get ahead of me.

And not only did I learn there was gambling going on in this establishment, I found that at a time when one might expect the utmost national seriousness, when the nation was arguably undertaking a step as serious--and as driven by tub-thumping bloodlust--as our entry into WWI, a time when, at least according to "conservatives" like Peggy, "Conservatives" Like Peggy represented the national consensus, at this moment of extreme peril, as we were preparing to send young men and women to fight in a land which, according to Peggy, "everyone" believed possessed nuclear weapons and the trigger was in the hands of a madman, at this moment I say, well, surprisingly, Pegs wasn't feeling all that bipartisan!

September 22, 2002:

One senses they [the Democrats] are looking at the whole question merely as a matter of popular positioning

February 24, 2003:

Mr. Clinton is by nature a partisan and, deep down, an embittered one. Mr. Carter is a very nice, confused man of considerable vanity. Both of course have full rights of free speech and a right to their views.

But if they cannot offer unity, couldn't they offer discretion? Whatever their views, they should not put them forth in ways that undercut an administration that, right or wrong, is attempting to get a fair hearing from the world in order to take the steps it thinks necessary to make it safer from terror regimes.

Ibid:

Mr. Clinton, on the other hand, has taken to telling the world that "we should let Blix lead us to come together." Mr. Clinton calls Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, "a tough honest guy who is trying to find the truth." Does Mr. Clinton speak of the American president with such approbation? No. He treats President Bush with equal parts derision and faux sympathy.

March 3, 2002 (the bloodshed will begin in just over two weeks, guaranteed now; it is, in case you've forgotten, a war which has been denounced as unjust by Peggy's theological Father, a man she will otherwise limn as the irresistible spiritual force of the 20th Century. This week, Peggy informs her fellow citizens that the Democrats have attempted to thrive on snob appeal. As always, I leave the pronouns to her discretion; if you stare at a fixed spot on the wall the vertigo will be lessened):

In the Democratic Party now, and for some time, I have not perceived that they are trying to get us to a good place. They seem interested only in thwarting the trek of the current president and his party, who are, to the Democrats, "the other." When the president is a Democrat you now support him no matter what. You support him if he doesn't have a map, and isn't interested in markers, and is only interested in his own day-to-day survival.

Ibid:

An example: abortion. The Democrats became the party of what they called abortion rights. Fine. It seemed to them right at the time and a step toward human progress. But now, 30 years later, after all the things we've seen and pondered, after all that science has shown us, the Democratic Party has grown not less radical on abortion, but more. Your party won't even agree to ban third-term abortions--which is the abortion of a baby who looks and seems fully human and capable of life because he is. The Democrats oppose parental consent even in the cases of 14-year-olds who are themselves children. It opposes directing doctors to inform frightened young women before an abortion is performed that there are other options, other possible paths.


This is so radical. So out of touch with the feeling and thought of the vast middle of the country. So at odds with our self-image as a nation. We think we try to protect the vulnerable. We think we're kind.

We think we're about to bomb Iraq into a democracy.

We can, of course, go on (and on and...). How by way of contrast the Republicans would never continue to support a President who'd abandoned his principles, or turned destructive, or behaved in a grossly offensive manner (which, of course, means doing something with his penis other than stuffing it and a pair of tube socks into a flight suit. How astonishing it is to realize that in four short years George W. Bush could fuck up so badly that discovering the Clenis™ obsession was still alive on the brink of--for all Peggy knew--nuclear annihilation seems surprising and almost quaint!). We'd find that ten days before we plunge into war her personal humidity is such that she pens a bodice-ripping fantasy about bin-Laden's capture. That on the 24th, which will become the bloodiest day of the war to that point, Peggers will gush about the Good Thing which is about to occur, as the Civilized World, roused from slumber and Democratic do-nothingism, teaches the bad guys a lesson they'll never forget. It's a day after the day at Nasiriyah PFC Jessica Lynch will never forget, at least what she remembers of it. It's just under four years before the Vice-President will confuse her with Jessica Simpson at a ball game. In that same column, Peggy will tell her readers that George W. Bush is no stereotypical Cowboy, but a steely-eyed Rocketman bound for the stars.

Then she'll sort of trail off, even disappear for a couple months. Mel Gibson's Jesus slasher flick will occupy her Holidays, especially after John Paul II pronounces it Oscar™ worthy. As with a lot of warfloggers, the following March will roll around without her seeming to notice the war supposedly ended nine months earlier. The days of rose-colored target screens will fade in the memory like Bill Clinton's erection, and the argument will somehow shift to irrelevancies like soccer balls and school paint jobs, of spider holes and how many dead-enders still await our swift justice. There would be no recognition, let alone admission, that things weren't going swimmingly, despite the fact that they were not. Undeniably not. In one more month the Abu Ghraib photos will come out, all except the ones that don't, and Peggy will bemoan the the publicity boon for our enemies, while celebrating our near-compulsive need to get the truth out. No, really. She'll also ponder how far we've fallen due to the Feminists' insistence that female soldiers be allowed to make fun of prisoners' ding-dongs just like the guys do. No. Really.

And at some point, like a lot of print warfloggers who could manage it, Peggy will just sorta begin pretending that she's cast a jaundiced eye on the whole operation, and her admiration of the Presidential Package will sorta shrink back up to where it's not quite noticeable, and she'll allow as how the thing didn't quite work out like every Civilized Westerner would have expected, but it's time to forget all that and back the President, and if we do maybe she'll use some of her pull to get him to admit the rest of us were right a little. Even if it was for all the anti-American reasons.

Happy Birthday

Walter Philip Reuther
September 1, 1907--May 9, 1970

"No Wonder We're Going Down The Tubes,"

SEZ Sergeant Dave Karsnia, and it should be made clear at the start that he isn't talking about Larry Craig's penchant for bathroom sex, or Craig's scared silly lies, the ones he'd rehearsed so often for when--not if--they'd caught the bad, bad boy, when he was looking at the punishment he secretly knew he deserved, the explanations for the casual acts that wouldn't have an explanation if they really were casual--"I reached down to pick up a piece of paper"--or even his attempt to cling to a story that made no sense. Karsnia's used to those things. He's a cop. No, that "Embarrassing, embarrassing"--he'll repeat the word one more time in a moment, just before reading the date and time into the tape recorder, and telling it the interview is finished--refers to Craig's embracing the idea that a lie is the equal of the thing it's designed to dispute, and everyone in earshot is supposed to accept it. No, we aren't going down the tubes because Larry Craig is a hypocrite, or even because he's made himself into the poster boy for Republican entitlement (imagine the uproar if a similarly flimsy tale got someone a new trial in a capital murder case!). It's because the truth doesn't even enter into the equation anymore. It's because there's no reckoning with it required, even behind closed doors, even face to face with a man who knows for a fact that you know for a fact you're lying.

I have no way of knowing Sgt. Karsnia's politics, if any, but if he reads the paper every day I wonder if he could have followed that final "Embarrassing" with a "I suppose they'll be digging up Tom DeLay to defend you once this hits cable news."

That's the one thing that's interesting about Larry Craig, or, rather, it's the locus of what theoretical non-scurrilous interest that might lie beneath the tabloid news. Larry Craig, with his trolling dick suddenly caught in a law-enforcement wringer, squeals exactly like Larry Craig, outraged defender of public morality or steadfast defender of giving the surge time to work or outraged defender of outrage over the--it turns out--more traditional places Bill Clinton's wanger got stuck in. There's no fuckin' difference. Larry Craig might just as well have said he was looking for WMDs, or trying to reform Social Security, or blasting off to Mars. The Republican party lies as unashamedly as Craig did, no matter the evidence to the contrary, and it too imagines that merely offering up an excuse, however transparent, always beats trumps. Craig might as well have told the Sergeant, "Hey, it's okay if you're a Republican!"

This is why we're going down the tubes! Tom DeLay goes on Today, which is abomination enough right there, and says that the only important public point here is that Republicans get rid of such miscreants while Democrats re-elect them, and he doesn't have his mike cut by some Christian technician fearful of God's electronic Wrath. It was, indeed, the same Tom DeLay who, as leader of the most criminal House of Representatives in history, had his minions change the ethics rules so he could remain in office despite being indicted. And he's the spokesman. (The Hammer appears to have lost some weight, and we sincerely hope this is due to diet and an exercise regimen, and not some undisclosed wasting disease, by a 51-49 margin.)

This put me in mind of Fred Kaplan's piece in the Sunday Times Magazine, about rising manifest junior officer dissatisfaction with the Army senior command. I'm nothing if not a dilettante of military matters, but the more I read the more I thought, "This is why it takes a Luther." It requires that someone say, "If you try to fix this it will be worse than before. Tear it out and start over." This is well-nigh impossible for the corporate mindset, absent total disaster. It's why the so-called Powell Doctrine, the so-called realistic assessment of post-Vietnam use of US military force always had the air of the hungover recently-ex-fiancé who imagines a heartfelt letter will get him off the hook: My Darling Sharon, I'm sorry, I'll clean it up, and I promise never to hurl in your purse again. Because the Republican/military brass had no real problem with pointless bloodbaths; the only real problem they saw was the effect of public or press opposition. We'd still be in Vietnam if they could have gotten away with it. Even after the engagement ring comes back registered mail they're not going to do anything so reckless as to consider whether to stop drinking.

General officers today are not a product of the soul-searching post-Nam era. They're a product of the Reagan revisionism. We didn't take "necessary" actions in Libya, or Grenada, or the first Gulf war. We took steps towards reviving the brand. Check the histrionic victory celebrations after Grenada, when the Mighty Arsenal of Democracy managed to defeat two dozen Cubans after first contriving to wedge them between us and the people we supposedly were there to save. The hubris born of sheer firepower never left us. We were itching for more Vietnams, because the next Vietnam would prove that we lost only because of poor hippie hygiene patterns.

This is not to say there was a failure of professional responsibility in the military, only that the prevailing political attitude trumped it far too often. Yes, it's a shame more of the brass did not fulfill its obligation to tell the Bush administration to Go Fuck Itself, but to suppose that some sort of careerist cowardice is to blame is to get the thing wrong way 'round. We don't need general officers who'll consider telling Don Rumsfeld his ideas are simply, totally incompetent and risk disaster. We need general officers who couldn't consider not telling him so. Instead it's Larry Craig Nation: so long as we've got an excuse for what we want to do, all objections are just somebody else's opinion.