Bark Bark Woof Woof

I had to read this headline twice before I was sure it wasn't some cross-posting from Gay.com:

Hung Butchers 'Take Me Out to Ball Game'

At first glance I thought it was about some well-built meat-cutters having their sexual orientation forcibly revealed at the Skydome. But further study showed that there is some demi-celebrity named William Hung (reason enough to change your name right there to Ignatz Pickle) who couldn't get through the classic seventh-inning stretch song at a game between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Texas Rangers without beating it to death with a stick.

One of us - the headline writer or me - needs to get out more.

From the Washington Post:

From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity
Scholars Say Campaign Is Making History With Often-Misleading Attacks
By Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 31, 2004; Page A01

It was a typical week in the life of the Bush reelection machine.

Last Monday in Little Rock, Vice President Cheney said Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry "has questioned whether the war on terror is really a war at all" and said the senator from Massachusetts "promised to repeal most of the Bush tax cuts within his first 100 days in office."

On Tuesday, President Bush's campaign began airing an ad saying Kerry would scrap wiretaps that are needed to hunt terrorists.

The same day, the Bush campaign charged in a memo sent to reporters and through surrogates that Kerry wants to raise the gasoline tax by 50 cents.

On Wednesday and Thursday, as Kerry campaigned in Seattle, he was greeted by another Bush ad alleging that Kerry now opposes education changes that he supported in 2001.

The charges were all tough, serious -- and wrong, or at least highly misleading. Kerry did not question the war on terrorism, has proposed repealing tax cuts only for those earning more than $200,000, supports wiretaps, has not endorsed a 50-cent gasoline tax increase in 10 years, and continues to support the education changes, albeit with modifications.

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

You would think that after the carpet-bombing Bush/Cheney did on Al Gore in 2000 the Washington press corps would have learned their lessons. The job the Bush/Cheney '04 team is doing on Kerry is no different. Which of these is more likely: that the Republicans think they can pull it off, or that the press corps is more than likely to eat it up?

The answer, of course, is both.

I'm not going to let reality interfere with my rosy scenario.

The official hurricane season starts tomorrow. It lasts until November 30. The weather gurus are predicting a higher-than-normal season with eight or more named storms. It's one of the risks we take living here in South Florida - or anywhere along the Atlantic coastline.

Right now I'd settle for a little light rain.

Someone has issues.

Bush Keeps Saddam's Pistol As a Trophy

What's wrong with a t-shirt?

What else would you call it?

Gay-Rights Activists Denied Communion.

What would Jesus do, indeed.

To utilize an old Quaker pun, I'm asking for some friendly help for a fellow Friend. NTodd of Dohiyi Mir is on unpaid leave from his job this summer and he's asking - ever so politely - for small donations to help him with such small things as keeping his blog site running. I'll be putting a few coins in his cup today, and if you feel so inclined to do so, please join me.

That sounds like a name for a comic strip or a 1950's do-wop combo, but in truth they were two giants of American history who played a major role in bringing down the Nixon presidency: Sam Dash and Archibald Cox. Mr. Dash was the chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 and the man who discovered that Nixon had secretly taped his Oval Office conversations. Archibald Cox was the first Watergate special prosecutor and when he insisted on getting access to the tapes, he was fired in the famous October 1973 "Saturday Night Massacre."

Both Mr. Dash and Mr. Cox died yesterday. Mr. Dash was 79, Mr. Cox was 92.

If there ever was a time when we needed strong men of principle who stood up for their beliefs in what was right and wrong and who did not back down in the face of terrible opposition, it was during the years of Watergate. Both of these men did just that, and the country owes them a debt of gratitude. They also set an example of non-partisanship in their endeavours (Mr. Dash served as the ethics advisor to Kenneth Starr in 1998, a thankless job if there ever was one). We can only hope that the examples they set will serve today as the country once again faces a crisis of confidence in the men we have as leaders.

From the Toledo Blade/AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Several U.S. guards allege they witnessed military intelligence operatives encouraging the abuse of Iraqi prison inmates at four prisons other than Abu Ghraib, investigative documents show.

Court transcripts and Army investigator interviews provide the broadest view of evidence that abuses, from forcing inmates to stand in hoods in 120-degree heat to punching them, occurred at a Marine detention camp and three Army prison sites in Iraq besides Abu Ghraib.

That is the prison outside Baghdad that was the site of widely published and televised photographs of abuse of Iraqi detainees by Army troops.

Testimony about tactics used at a Marine prisoner of war camp near Nasiriyah also raises the question whether coercive techniques were standard procedure for military intelligence units in different service branches and throughout Iraq.

At the Marines' Camp Whitehorse, the guards were told to keep enemy prisoners of war - EPWs, in military jargon - standing for 50 minutes each hour for up to 10 hours. They would then be interrogated by "human exploitation teams," or HETs, comprising intelligence specialists.

"The 50/10 technique was used to break down the EPWs and make it easier for the HET member to get information from them," Marine Cpl. Otis Antoine, a guard at Camp Whitehorse, testified at a military court hearing in February.

It sounds like there were more than just "a few bad apples" over there in Iraq, and they weren't limited to just some lower-rank soldiers.

John Kerry seems to be hitting his stride, according to Tim Grieve at Salon.com (subscription/Day Pass).

Kerry will run a campaign that positions him strongly as a military man, hoping to attract Republicans fed up with Bush's misadventures. That means that one of the swift-boat veterans who served with Kerry in Vietnam travels with him now from state to state. It means veterans frequently get a special seating area near the front of the stage. It means that events often begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. And it means that American flags dot Kerry's necktie, hover over him when he speaks and will soon grace his plane when he flies.

For liberal Democrats, it all takes a little getting used to. Conditioned over the last four years to associate the flag with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers on SUVs and the Pledge with the folks who shout out the "under God" clause, Democrats at Kerry events -- even those who support his approach to Iraq -- may find themselves in an uncomfortable embrace with the trappings of patriotism.

As a veteran who fought in Vietnam and then against it, Kerry gives them cover. In Seattle Thursday, Kerry reminded the veterans and graduate students invited to hear his national security speech that "patriotism doesn't belong to one party or one president." Thursday night in Green Bay, Wis., he told a crowd of Democratic partisans that the flag is a "symbol of our strength, and our strength comes from our ability to speak out and make America stronger."

While Kerry could probably be stronger if he weren't constrained by his own record -- and the lack of easy answers -- on Iraq, as he traveled through the Northwest and back again this week, it was hard not to feel the momentum building behind him anyway. Although some polls still show Kerry and Bush running neck-and-neck, the latest CBS poll shows Kerry leading by 8 points. Perhaps more encouraging for Kerry is a new poll showing rising favorable impressions among voters where it matters, in 20 key battleground states. And on Friday, his increasingly confident campaign announced that Kerry would even challenge the president in Republican-leaning Virginia, a state where Bush beat Gore in 2000 by a solid 8 points.

I will be right up there admitting that I fretted about the slow start and low profile Kerry maintained from the time he took his week-long vacation in March. But given the briar patch the Bush campaign has run into over the last six weeks, perhaps the best thing we could have hoped for was that Kerry wouldn't try to match every move. It's an old martial arts technique - let your opponent make all the big moves. You just keep out of the way, and when he finally is exhausted, you close in and make one swift and deft blow that ends it all. Or so they tell me.

Whiskey Bar took some time off, but he's back. Check out the his ruminations and predictions.

It seems that Sen. John Warner (R-VA) is getting grief from the Right Wing for daring to investigate the prisoner abuses in Iraq.

The silver-haired Virginian with courtly manners is a throwback to a forgotten era of congressional comity. But as he leads the Senate's inquiry into abuse of Iraqi prisoners, Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) also shows another side: a penchant for bucking his party, taking heat and surviving.

Warner says his committee has a "solemn responsibility" to discover what went wrong and to "make sure it never, never happens again." But some conservatives are angry about the high-profile televised hearings, saying the prisoner-abuse issue is overblown and threatens to undermine the United States' primary mission in Iraq.

As a result, the 77-year-old Virginian finds himself in an uncomfortable but familiar position: more at odds with the right flank of his own party on some critical issues than he is with Democrats.

"I think he should stop the hearings at this point; we've heard enough," said Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), a committee member. "We have a war to win, and we need to keep our talents concentrated on winning the war as opposed to prisoner treatment."

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) complained that Warner and other Senate members have become "mesmerized by cameras." Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was irked when Warner, in a departure from normal committee practice, decided to put all abuse-inquiry witnesses -- including the secretary -- under oath, according to Senate sources.

But Warner shows no signs of backing off, arguing that the country wants and deserves a vigorous examination of the sexual humiliation, physical abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. He has held three televised hearings this month to question top Pentagon officials and military commanders -- two more televised sessions than the House has allowed -- and he is planning more.

Friends say Warner -- a sailor in World War II, a Marine during the Korean War and secretary of the Navy before he came to the Senate in 1979 -- is motivated by a strong belief that the reputations of both the military and the Senate are at stake unless they get to the bottom of the scandal. "To do otherwise would be contradictory to everything he has experienced in his professional life," said committee member John McCain (R-Ariz.). Besides, McCain added, "it would be incredibly stupid politically."[Washington Post]

Senator Warner is far too classy to say this to Inhofe or Hunter, so I will: Piss off, you pompous, arrogant, narrow-minded, back-stabbing, rabble-rousing, never-met-a-bigot-you-didn't-like, sucking-up-to-Rove little twerps. John Warner may be a Republican, but he's done more for the search for truth and justice in Iraq than all the spluttering on the floor of the Senate and House or rants on FOX News by Rumsfeld's little Smees (vis Peter Pan) put together.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

BUFFALO, N.Y. - A man who sent 850 million junk e-mails through accounts he opened with stolen identities was sentenced to up to seven years in prison on Thursday.

Atlanta-based Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. said it hoped the sentence and an earlier $16.4 million civil judgment against Howard Carmack will deter other spammers.

With any luck, he'll end up married to the guy with the most cigarettes in Cellblock D. And I wish the same fate on the losers who keep sending me "Mort.gage App.lication A.proved," the stream-of-conscious prose ("potatoes ride bicycles because a vest has no sleeves") and "Get Ci@lis Here."

Let's start off with welcoming a couple of new listings in the blogroll: Poker and Liberty, penned by a pal of Kop at Kop's Blog, and I Voted For George, who caught my attention last week and confirmed it by tracking a post of mine. And I laughed out loud at his profile picture.

To paraphrase Garrison Keillor, it's been a busy week in the blogosphere, so let's get right to it:

Xan, the newest member of Corrente, pays tribute to David Dellinger, one of the Chicago 7.

Bryant at Make Me A Commentator observes the new national pastime.

Rivka at Respectful of Otters notes the reversal of the Texas comptroller's ruling on the tax exempt status of a Unitarian Church, and adds some thoughts on church finances in general.

Chris catches us up with 24, a show I've never seen (not because I'm not interested in good storytelling; I just never caught it.)

Steve Gilliard writes about Judith Miller and the culture of poor American journalism she represents.

Rook is thinking about classic British TV characters.

Did Bill Cosby go too far? See what bloggg has to say about that.

Scout at And Then... connects a lisping Spanish king to our current Oval Office occupant.

The Invisible Library goes after the New York Times's article on addictive blogging.

The Fulcrum links to a blog on physics by Sean Carroll that even I can understand.

edwardpig on Vietnam vets against Kerry, plus a bit of historical context on fighting a war and running for re-election.

Trish feels a bit of a draft.

Kick the Leftist on certain anti-malaria drugs and their calamitous side effects.

Collective Sigh encounters a well-known figure in her back yard.

Upyernoz learns how to say "baseball" in Arabic.

Jude at Iddybud wants to know which Monty Python character you are. I'm afraid to guess.

SoonerThought wants Rush off American Forces Radio.

Jeff at Speedkill wonders what the meaning of sovereignty is. (Hint: ask the Native Americans in the Southwest.)

Wanda says Be Alert! (Well, we all know the world needs more lerts.)

Have a nice weekend, Michael.

archy on the complexities of tearing down Abu Ghraib.

NTodd is shaking the cup for Kerry. Do it.

Tony at It's Craptastic is off for a couple of days, but he left this piece on compassionate conservatives in Mississippi.

Jesse at The Gotham City 13 has the transcript on JFK 2.0's foreign policy speech. Check it out.

Rick tries his hand at stand-up comedy.

Echidne of the Snakes makes coleslaw.

BlogAmy's David offers some stuff we should know.

Steve writes about the latest tactic being used to extract information: taking hostages. Even Klingons don't do that.

Finally, go wish Happy Furry Puppy Story Time a Happy Birthday!

That's all for the moment, but check out the rest of the blogs on the roll at your leisure. Happy Friday!

I've been telling you Bush is full of it for years - and now the rest of the press is finally waking up to it.

There are blogs and websites devoted to debunking the screeching of Ann Coulter. Frankly, I can't bear to watch her. First, she's so full of shit that I'm surprised she hasn't got brown eyes. Second, if I wanted to listen to to spittle-flecked rants, I'd go down to the corner of Biscayne Boulevard and NE 15th Street and watch the guy who yells at the passing traffic. But my friend Brian apparently has a higher tolerance (after all, he spent twenty years as an EMT so I guess he has a strong control on his barf reflex) and he sent me this note:

Uh Oh

No, not me, but those words are undoubtedly being uttered around one presidential campaign tonight. I was just channel surfing and stumbled across "The O'Reilly Factor" where Bill was hammering...a bit gently, but still hammering...his guest's ascertains. He referred to them at various times as "strident," "an extremist," and my personal favorite, "wrong, wrong, and wrong again." The guest? Ann Coulter.

To her claims that the war is going "magnificently," Reilly gave his famous "Oh, pa leeez!" look and said "Our FOX correspondents in Baghdad are afraid to leave their hotel." When she claimed that WMD's had in fact been found...well, if not actual weapons, at least research facilities and documentation...Reilly fired back with "Well, labs and papers aren't what Powell went to the U.N. with," to which she could only sputter "of course he's the guy liberals like best," as though it was Colin Powell's idea to go to war, and the lack of proof of his claims shows that somehow the whole Iraqi thing was some sort of liberal conspiracy.

But I guess my favorite part came when she defended Rush Limbaugh's "Oh, it was only hazing" comments about the Abu Ghraib disaster. First she tried to claim he didn't say it, then said it was "one minute out of a three hour show," to which O'Reilly responded with some anger that he competes against Rush with his own radio show, is intimately aware of everything he says, and it was a lot more then a passing comment...it was the theme of that day's show. Ann got really bent at that point, doing the famous hair-flipping thing, and O'Reilly really got angry, saying he was in that business, she wasn't, and she was in no position to dismiss his knowledge of the competition with a wave of her hand. I thought she was either going to cry or slap him when he said as an author she appealed "to a niche market" and could widen her appeal if she wasn't so "strident and closed minded."

So...can we expect to see O'Reilly endorsing Kerry? Hardly, but it's more evidence of his supporters distancing themselves from the Boy Wonder. Throw in the lukewarm defense of Rumsfeld by a mere handful of the Republican majority, the substitution of "support the troops" for any talk of "support the president" when referring to the war, the lack of pundits touting his "accomplishments," and I think the handwriting, no matter how dimly, is starting to appear on the wall. Johnson knew it was over when he lost Cronkite over Tet and said as much. I doubt Dubya is perceptive enough to note what's happened, but that doesn't matter. It's happening whether he and his arrogant crew know it or not.

Matthew Yglesias has a nice piece on Howard Dean and a retrospective on his claim that the capture of Saddam Hussein didn't make America safer. (Wow, we're already having wistful recollections of events from six months ago? Time flies.)

Remember Howard Dean? Early last December he was riding high. Having been dismissed early in the campaign by even his fans as a hopeless cause, he'd managed to parlay a wave of anti-Bush sentiment and novel Internet organizing into front-runner status for the Democratic nomination. Still, two interconnected questions remained. First, could he beat George W. Bush? And second, did he have what it takes to run a campaign likely to focus on foreign-policy questions?

On December 15, 2003, Dean had a chance to dispel those doubts. His strong showing had allowed the campaign to attract interest from many of the Democratic Party's foreign-policy heavies, who’d busied themselves working with Dean’s staff to compose an address underlining the candidate’s basically centrist, mainstream convictions. His support for the Gulf War and those in Kosovo and Afghanistan, along with his advocacy of a tough stance on North Korea, were to be on display. The public would see a new Dean (or, rather, a new side of the same Dean who'd been there all along) -- the sensible, moderate Dean the voters of Vermont had known for years. The speech, delivered to the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles, was his shot at the big time. And he blew it.

Not with anything in the carefully prepared text but with an ad-libbed piece of red meat thrown to his angry base. "The capture of Saddam [Hussein]," Dean said, "has not made America safer."

Good and decent people everywhere were outraged. Joe Lieberman said Dean had crawled into a "spider hole of denial." John Kerry called the remark "more proof that all the advisers in the world can't give Howard Dean the military and foreign-policy experience, leadership skills, or diplomatic temperament necessary to lead this country through dangerous times." Dick Gephardt was more restrained, merely accusing Dean of "playing politics with foreign policy."

And those were the Democrats. The Republican National Committee's Ed Gillespie said, "Those who say these things would return us to a weak and indecisive foreign policy that would only embolden those who seek to do us harm," all but accusing Dean of being in league with the terrorists. A small number of voices in the media stood up for Dean, but who were we to contend with the awesome national-security knowledge of Sam Donaldson and Chris Matthews? Some, like The New Republic's Jonathan Chait, conceded that on "a narrow, technical level" it was perfectly true that Hussein's capture did not make us safer. Still, he was upset. The remark, Chait wrote, "demonstrates once again Dean's incurable habit of handing Karl Rove the rope he'd use to hang Dean if nominated." Besides which, he continued, while Americans who live in America -- that's most of us! -- might not have been made safer, there are "many Americans in Iraq who are safer now that Saddam's out of his hole."

Read the rest of it here in The American Prospect. And for those of us who agreed with Dr. Dean and took the flak for it, we can now, in unison, nod sagely and say sadly We told you so. There's nothing smug about being right about increased war and death.

The Education President and the Leader Against the War On Terror wants to cut funding for the Education Department and Homeland Security if he is re-elected.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration has told officials who oversee federal education, domestic security, veterans and other programs to prepare preliminary 2006 budgets that would cut spending after the presidential election, according to White House documents.

The programs facing reductions -- should President Bush be re-elected in November -- would also include the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department.

Many of the targeted programs are widely popular. Cuts could carry a political price for a president who has touted his support for schools, the environment and other domestic initiatives.

[edit]

The documents show spending for:

--domestic security at the Homeland Security Department and other agencies would go from $30.6 billion in 2005 to $29.6 billion in 2006, a 3 percent drop.

--the Education Department would go from $57.3 billion in 2005 to $55.9 billion in 2006, 2.4 percent less.

--the Veterans Affairs Department would fall 3.4 percent from $29.7 billion in 2005 to $28.7 billion.

--the Environmental Protection Agency would drop from $7.8 billion in 2005 to $7.6 billion, or 2.6 percent.

--the National Institutes of Health, which finances biomedical research and had its budget doubled over a recent five-year period, would fall from $28.6 billion to $28 billion, or 2.1 percent.

--the Interior Department would fall 1.9 percent from $10.8 billion in 2005 to $10.6 billion.

--the Defense Department would grow 5.2 percent to $422.7 billion in 2006, and the Justice Department would increase 4.3 percent to $19.5 billion in 2006.

I can expect the Republican to cut such things as EPA and NIH since those are the pervues of "humanitarian tree-hugging do-gooders," but cutting the VA and Education? Aside from Defense spending, those are the two areas that have the most lasting long-term benefits for the most citizens. But leave it to the short-sighted Bushies who can't see past November 2004. What a bunch of cheap bastards.

Yesterday the editors of The New York Times published a rather stunning admission: We Goofed.

Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.

In doing so — reviewing hundreds of articles written during the prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation — we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information. And where those articles included incomplete information or pointed in a wrong direction, they were later overtaken by more and stronger information. That is how news coverage normally unfolds.

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.

The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one.

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

While the editors are not willing to name which reporters were responsible for the flawed reporting, Salon.com is not so hesitant.

The reporter on many of the flawed stories at issue was Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and authority on the Middle East. The Times, insisting that the problem did not lie with any individual journalist, did not mention her name. The paper was presumably trying to take the high road by defending its reporter, but the omission seems peculiar. While her editors must share a large portion of the blame, the pieces ran under Miller's byline. It was Miller who clearly placed far too much credence in unreliable sources, and then credulously used dubious administration officials to confirm what she was told.

And of all Miller's unreliable sources, the most unreliable was Ahmed Chalabi -- whose little neocon-funded kingdom came crashing down last week when Iraqi forces smashed down his door after U.S. officials feared he was sending secrets to Iran.

Check out the rest of the story on Miller in Salon.com (subscription/Day Pass required).

It's hard to know whether or not Miller and other reporters at such venerable papers such as The Washington Post were gullible or whether Chalabi is just that slick to pull off the con. Certainly Miller's creds are impressive, but it seems that she and others fell for parts of the story of Saddam Hussein's massive WMD program based not on an overall picture of the whole thing - which would have led them nowhere - but on bits and pieces that seemed credible at the time, i.e. the aluminum tubes that were supposed to be part of the centrifuge that would extract fissionable material for atomic weapons. It turns out that the tubes, which became part of the propaganda for the war (remember Dr. Rice's fear of a mushroom cloud?), were actually for the "Medusa 81," a missile program from Italy that pre-dated Gulf War I. But Miller bought the centrifuge theory and ran it as a part of her story in September 2002 that detailed the parts and pieces of Saddam's phantom nuclear weapons program.

The Times has vowed to be vigilant in their future vetting and research: "We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight." That's great - but you'd think that after the hue and cry that has been raised over Ms. Miller's reporting since the beginning of the run-up to the war and the well-known shadiness of Mr. Chalabi, they'd have been far more careful about printing whatever she turned up.

General Anthony Zinni garnered a lot of press when he came out swinging against the Bush administration on 60 Minutes, and his book Battle Ready does the same. That's pretty amazing for a crusty military man to lash out at the high command. But what's even more interesting is that Zinni's co-author is none other than novelist Tom Clancy, author of such hugely popular books as The Hunt for Red October and Clear and Present Danger.

Clancy is perhaps the least likely writer imaginable to lend his name to a project bashing the Bush administration. Since the beginning of his literary career in the 1980s, he has been the most Republican of authors. Clancy owes his fame to Ronald Reagan, who propelled the unknown former insurance salesman to celebrity status when he endorsed The Hunt for Red October in 1985; Clancy, in turn, dedicated his novel Executive Orders to the 40th president a decade later. He is a Republican donor and reliable conservative, penning articles and book introductions against gun control and in favor of school prayer.

[edit]

The novelty of the book isn't that Clancy has moved away from criticizing liberal elites; he hasn't. Rather, it's the suggestion that President Bush, who has so effectively positioned himself as the champion of Red State America, might in fact be no better than Clancy's old left-wing villains. Clancy, after all, seems now to be harboring contempt for both "flower children" and the Bush administration, raising the question of whether, in the author's mind, they are equally destructive forces. This is a possibility rarely considered in our polarized political climate. But in Battle Ready, Zinni and Clancy air a contention that has been percolating among right-wing realists for some time now--namely, that an overambitious Republican president can be just as bad for the U.S. military as a wimpy Democrat, albeit in a different way. Tom Clancy has long been one of popular culture's most reliable conduits of conservatives attitudes. If this is where those attitudes are headed, Bush is in trouble indeed. [The New Republic]

No one harbors any illusion that Tom Clancy will join John Kerry on a campaign platform - but it doesn't look like he'll be doing Bush any turns, either.

Think that the heightened terror warning is politically motivated? Well, so do a lot of people, and not just Bush opponents. From the New York Times:

Attorney General John Ashcroft said at a news conference that intelligence reports and public statements by people associated with Al Qaeda suggested that the terrorist group was "almost ready to attack the United States" and harbored a "specific intention to hit the United States hard."

But some intelligence officials, terrorism experts - and to some extent even Mr. Ashcroft's own F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III - offered a more tempered assessment, saying, "For the next few weeks we have reason to believe there is a heightened threat to the U.S. interests around the world." And some opponents of President Bush, including police and firefighter union leaders aligned with Senator John Kerry, the expected Democratic presidential candidate, said the timing of the announcement appeared intended in part to distract attention from Mr. Bush's sagging poll numbers and problems in Iraq.

The administration did not raise the terrorist threat advisory from its current level of elevated, or yellow, and the White House said Mr. Bush would not alter his schedule because of security concerns.

"There's no real new intelligence, and a lot of this has been out there already," said one administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "There really is no significant change that would require us to change the alert level of the country."

[edit]

Some intelligence officials said they were uncertain that the link between the fresh intelligence and the likelihood of another attack was as apparent as Mr. Ashcroft made it out to be. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security said just a day before Mr. Ashcroft's announcement that they had no new intelligence pointing to the threat of an attack.

From CNN:

CNN) -- President Bush's approval rating remains virtually unchanged from the record low of his presidency two weeks ago, according to a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll.

The poll of 1,002 Americans was released Monday, hours before Bush was to deliver a speech to the nation about Iraq -- the beginning of a new campaign aimed at recovering popularity at home. (Full story)

Forty-seven percent of people polled May 21-23 said they approve of how Bush is handling the presidency -- up 1 percentage point from a poll taken May 7-9. (Full story)

Forty-nine percent said they disapprove, down 2 percentage points from the previous survey. With a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, the change was statistically insignificant.

From CNN:

CNN) -- Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller will hold a news conference Wednesday amid intelligence that has increased concern over the possibility of a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Sucn an attack could take place as early as this summer, according to several U.S. officials.

Attacks might take place before the November presidential election in an attempt to affect the outcome, the officials said.

From the Miami Herald:

TALLAHASSEE - There's a new phone service provider in Florida offering deeply discounted calling: the state Republican Party.

On Tuesday, the party began marketing local, long distance and high-speed Internet service to registered Republicans throughout the state. The twist: Five percent of every bill goes to the party.

The unusual fundraising gimmick has the approval of the Federal Elections Commission and appears to be the first of its kind in the nation.

It also means Florida's GOP, which helped usher in the largest phone rate increase in state history, is increasing the competition to the local phone companies that benefited most from it -- BellSouth, Verizon and Sprint.

The so-called affinity program operates much like the bank credit cards that give a share of their profits to environmental groups, universities and other causes, only this time the money will be directed to a political party.

Well, I knew the Florida GOP had some serious hang-ups (pun intended), but fundraising didn't seem to one of them.

I went with a couple of friends to see the 5:30 p.m. showing of Troy last night. We had the theatre pretty much to ourselves so we were free to make like the gang in Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and make snarky comments about the movie out loud if we were so moved.

Boy, were we.

Let's get the nitpicking out of the way first:

There's a subtitle early in the film announcing that we are seeing "The Port of Sparta." Sparta is land-locked; it's like announcing we are seeing "The Port of Las Vegas."

The city of Troy was located on the west coast of Turkey; therefore the sun should set over the ocean. In the film, the sun sets and rises over the ocean.

According to all three versions of the legend of Troy (Euripides, Homer, and Virgil), Agamemnon survives the war and returns home to face his own troubles (Clytemnestra, his wife, was not too happy to see him return home - she's got a little something on the side named Aegisthus.) He's killed off in the film - apparently leaving the playwright Aeschylus without source material for his trilogy.

The same goes for Menelaus - he and Helen are reunited in the legend.

Patroclus was not Achilles' cousin - he was his "close friend." (Some say they were lovers, but Brad Pitt doesn't do gay.)

The siege of Troy, according to Homer, lasted ten years. The movie seems to cover about three weeks from start to finish.

If Achilles is "invincible," why does he wear protective garments including a helmet, and carry a shield?

Speaking of "invincible," there's an assumption made by the director and the screenwriter that the audience knows Achilles is vulnerable only in one spot - his heel - because that's where his mother held him when she dunked him in the River Styx to achieve his invincibility. That's a pretty big assumption considering there's no backstory in the film about how Achilles became invincible and the climax of the film turns on that bit of knowledge. (And shame on director Wolfgang Petersen for delegating the luminous Julie Christie to just a walk-on as Achilles's mother.)

I have read a lot of reviews of the film and many of them give Brad Pitt high marks. Well, he looked good - his six months of hitting the gym have paid off in buffing him out, but then he took the thrill away when he opened his mouth. To be fair, it's not just Mr. Pitt; a lot of the dialogue was clunky and tortured, and the only actor who seemed to be able to get through it without contortions was the amazing Peter O'Toole as Priam. He has the style and the polish to carry off any role he's in. He is riveting, and in the film when he has a scene with Brad Pitt, you can really see the difference between an actor and a movie star. Pitt's bulging biceps are no match for the talent that O'Toole shows in just one tortured gaze. But that's the only truly inspired acting in the film. The rest of it clunks along like Wagnerian opera, and there's one death scene that goes on and on to the point where we were shouting at the screen, "Oh, die already!" Top it off with one of the worst film scores since Xanadu and it becomes an assault on the ears in both quality and volume.

I'll give the set and special effects designers high marks; they did a fine job of creating a believable fortress of Troy, although I was a little bothered by the Art Deco-ish Temple of Apollo - the statue out front looked like something that fell off the Chrysler Building. The battle scenes were appropriately noisy and bloody, although you could tell that some of the soldiers were faking their hits. There's enough exposed flesh of both the male and female variety to get the attention of straight and gay audiences, and the teenagers should be happy with the puppy-love story of Paris and Helen - neither of whom we care enough about to see in a movie all their own (Orlando Bloom brings back the soulful pout made famous by Robbie Benson in the 1970's). But it doesn't make up for the slapdash treatment of the source material. The final credits say "Inspired by The Illiad by Homer." Homer should sue. In the original poem, the gods play a major role in the story - at times the war seems to be nothing more than just a chessmatch for them. Director Wolfgang Petersen said he took the gods out because he thought they were "silly" and superfluous (as opposed to what screenwriter David Benioff did to The Illiad?). Shortening the timeframe from the original ten years to a three-week skirmish makes the whole thing seem petty and trivial like a gangland turf war, not the stuff of legend and mythology.

Throughout the entire film the characters seem obsessed with making their names immortal. That's a truly human instinct for wanting to be remembered, but if this was the greatest moment of these people's lives told in such a hackneyed and scene-chewing style, then Homer wouldn't have bothered to tell it, much less commit it to the annals of legend.

On the other hand, it would have been really fun to see what Mel Brooks or Monty Python could do with it...

[Updated to add another nit to pick.]

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 5:57 AM  

Last night on CNN Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made the comparison between the founding of democracy here in the US at the end of the eighteenth century and in Iraq in the twenty-first. The senator marveled that in "a thousand days" we will have accomplished what took the Founding Fathers twelve years to do between the time of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution.

As Josh Marshall points out, that's a rather gauche comparison, seeing as how we did not have an occupying power, rival gangs willing to commit suicide to prove a point, and international con men like Chalabi vying for the opportunity to set up a government.

It was not all beer and skittles once the Constitution was ratified. There was the matter of colossal growing pains as we worked out things such as the balance of power (Marbury vs. Madison), political scandal and intrigue (Aaron Burr vs. Jefferson), and an invasion by our former colonial rulers (The War of 1812). And then there is the little matter of the Civil War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. It took nearly four-score and seven years before this country even formed the idea of a truly united identity instead of the loose Balkan-type conglomeration we were before.

The United States may be a shining example of democracy today, but it has taken over two hundred years for it to get to this point. Even if we compress the time using the McConnell model, it will take over seventy years for Iraq to catch up. And as Josh points out, the closest historical analogy isn't the American Revolution, but the French.

Update: My Faithful Correspondent sent me the this e-mail as a follow-up:

May I speak to the calumny heaped on Aaron Burr? I'm reading a fascinating book by the man who ran the National Museum of American History among other things (the National Park Service and the finance committee of the Ford Foundation), Roger G. Kennedy. He frankly admits he has strong opinions, which make him something less than an orthodox historian in this instance. But the fact is, apparently, that Aaron Burr, although a member of the then republican "party" (there were no parties then, just "factions") was, along with John Jay, a member of the New York Manumission Society. In other words, they were fervent abolitionists. Other abolitionists were Ogelthorpe of the Georgia plantations and the Scots settlers in the Carolinas. But, against them were Jefferson's planter class who devised, supported and fought for the original concept of states' rights. The Virginians threatened to defeat the whole idea of a nation if they were prevented from keeping their slaves and their slave trade upon which their system of agriculture had long depended. Slavery was a necessary component in all the British colonies throughout the Caribbean and the young America. As you know, Virginia extended from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean over the Alleghenies and along the Ohio River almost to the Mississippi. George Washington fought a battle near what is now Pittsburgh in 1754 at the direction of the Governor Dinwiddie on behalf of the British government of Virginia and against the French who,with help from the indians, were encroaching south of Lake Erie, and seeking a passage for trade to the Caribbean and Europe.

The now-revered Thomas Jefferson spoke and wrote eloquently of democracy all the while he was running hundreds of slaves. The western lands were important to him and his slave-owning brethren because slaves breed and the plantation owners needed additional markets for the next generation of black labor. They continued to import slaves from Africa as well and looked to the west as a way to unload them. Always looking out for his financial interests, President Jefferson tried to come to France's assistance in helping to put down Toussaint L'Ouverture's nascent democracy in Haiti by means of enforcing a blockade on goods produced by the "Black Republic" and starving them out. He feared that freedom might be contagious and infect his "property". Eventually, he was stopped by John Marshall and the congress. Spain was also encouraging slave revolts in West Florida along the present Alabama coast.

As for Aaron Burr, he found to his surprise that his duel and the resulting death of Hamilton was not accepted by the general public, although duels were fought throughout the years of the early republic and before. Something in public concept of morality had changed. As a result, Hamilton was turned into a martyr even though he had provoked the duel. (That's another story: Kennedy, along with many others think Hamilton committed assisted suicide). Anyway to compress several complicated years into a generality: Burr was forced out; he was without a job, having lost the vice-presidency, and so he began investigating possibilities suggested to him by many friends of what could be done in the Mississippi territory. He had the idea of setting up a free-soil settlement north of New Orleans. Jefferson accused him of being a traitor, of attempting secession, and had him brought to trial. Unfortunately for Jefferson, Burr was acquitted three times. Burr was forced into exile, however, and his idea of establishing a settlement died aborning. Roger Kennedy believes he has been given a bad rap and I'm inclined to agree until persuaded otherwise. John Marshall, the first Chief Justice and designer of our federal judiciary, hated Jefferson and fought to keep him from imposing his concepts of government on the nation, as it was becoming. Crucial decisions were made in those years and it's a miracle this country was ever established as we know it.

So - you're right. All was not beer and skittles in the early years of this nation. The battle over slavery and the rights of planters to be free to keep slaves did not just begin in 1862. It had always been a filthy undercurrent, even during the framing of the constitution. John Adams wouldn't have been forced out after one term if slaves hadn't been counted as 3/5ths of a person, allowing the slaveholding southerners to vote him out and Jefferson in. Jefferson legacy of "Republicanism" and states' rights continue to this day, viz. Nixon's Southern Strategy and all those Good Ol' Boys running our current congress. The major portion of the voting public has no idea.

Bush's speech last night on his "clear vision" for Iraq landed with a thud, according to these observers in Salon.com. And these are not all left-wingers. Some snippets:

Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics." George W. Bush began and ended his speech with a brazen lie. He claimed that the United States is in Iraq to fight al-Qaida.... Before the war, Bush, Cheney and the neoconservatives did all they could to convince the American people that there was some link between Saddam Hussein's tyranny in Iraq and al-Qaida. They succeeded in deceiving a large number of Americans. Now Bush is trying the same trick again. He is trying to justify his failed and unnecessary war in Iraq by parading, once again, the corpses of those murdered by Osama bin laden and his followers in New York, Washington and Bali. The shamelessness of George W. Bush is matched only by his contempt for the intelligence of the American people.

Karen Kwiatkowski, lieutenant colonel, U.S. Air Force (ret.), served in the Pentagon's secret intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. President Bush has a five-step strategy toward Iraqi deoccupation. The soldier-scholars in the Army War College audience must have been wondering, "Where’s the rest of it?" No mention of deoccupation, only the mush of "We went to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power." And more troops will go to Iraq, more violence will be committed, and we will build a brand new American-style maximum security prison for the Iraqis. Afterward, we'll have a photo op as we bulldoze the cursed Abu Ghraib and build a city park in its place.... The Soviet invasion and subsequent puppetry in Afghanistan lasted 10 years, and four changes of leadership. Monday night, President Bush again asked the American people to be patient. After listening to his vacant, unrealistic and uninspired presentation to a controlled military audience, I think I understand why.

Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration; senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. My central concern is that the president has not yet recognized the mistakes he's made and therefore does not have a basis on which to improve the situation. He played fast and loose with the number of troops. And I think we're going to have to put more troops in Iraq in order to provide the security necessary to rebuild the infrastructure. Then he talked about how he's going to go to NATO and thank the 15 countries who provided support and, as he said, almost 20,000 troops. Well, 10,000 of them are British. That means you have to divide up 14 other countries to account for the other 10,000. The president is trying to give the impression that we have a lot of international support, when we don't.

Rachel Bronson, director of Middle East studies and the CFR-Baker Institute report on post-conflict Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations. The most disheartening aspect of the speech was the president's determination to continue to link the 9/11 terrorism with the Iraq war. He backed off a little, by saying that "Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror," but insisted upon defining "our terrorist enemies" in Iraq as those determined to impose Taliban-like rule country by country. Until the president makes clear that we have lost much support in Iraq -- not because of religious extremists, but because of a basic lack of law and order -- it will be difficult to fashion a truly workable strategy for success.

Michael Rubin, former political advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq; resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. President Bush successfully contextualized Iraq as an essential component of the war against terror. His reminder that the U.S. cannot afford to fail is important, especially in an election year where Democrats and Republicans alike seek to make Bush's management of the Iraq war a campaign issue. Bush was wise to let Iraqis know that Coalition Provisional Authority [CPA] would not simply transfer itself into an embassy on June 30; it will be a mistake if any American continues to occupy CPA headquarters in Saddam's Republican Palace on July 1. There were significant omissions in the Bush speech, however. Before the war both the State and Defense Departments underestimated the trauma of President George H.W. Bush's abandonment of Iraqis in 1991. Iraqis remain unconvinced that the U.S. will stick to its rhetoric and will not once again cut-and-run. While Bush rightly says that, "Whenever people are given a choice ... they prefer lives of freedom to lives of fear," he ignores the fact that Iraqis will not again put their necks on the line if they doubt U.S. committment to their future. Comments by both Secretary of State Colin Powell and CPA Administrator L. Paul Bremer in the past week suggesting that the U.S. might withdraw its troops shook Iraqi confidence in the U.S. Iraqis -- who fear the worst -- will notice that Bush did not roll back Powell's statements.

As'ad AbuKhalil, Arab media expert; professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus. George W. Bush is certainly concerned about his reelection. His plummeting popularity in the polls explains his need for "a major" speech on Iraq. He may have sounded convincing to those in the U.S. who know little about Iraq and who do not follow foreign affairs closely. But for Iraqis (and Arabs in general) Monday's speech will go down as yet another desperate effort to be added to the series of U.S. propaganda campaigns that followed Sept. 11 and the two subsequent U.S.-led wars....Bush and neoconservatives still foolishly refer to a "free Iraq" as a model for the region. They may be right -- if other Arab populations are eager to incorporate into their lives daily car bombs, shootings by soldiers at checkpoints, torture of prisoners by liberating armies, the rise of fundamentalist groups and violent militias, clerical control of political affairs, and many empty promises of democracy. Colonization does not work in the 21st century, and the Iraqis who suffered under Saddam will settle for nothing less than full independence.

We broke it - you fix it.

Check out this article by Elizabeth Drew in The New York Review of Books on the mindset behind the Bush campaign.

The Bush reelection campaign is strictly hierarchical and highly disciplined. To some extent, this reflects a difference between Democrats and Republicans, but it mostly reflects the unquestioned control that Karl Rove has over the campaign. Kenneth Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager who heads the "Bush-Cheney04" reelection committee, was Rove's deputy in the White House. Edward Gillespie, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, is entirely loyal to Rove. The only important figure in Bush's campaign who doesn't answer to Rove is Karen Hughes, who, though she left her White House job to return to Texas, has been advising Bush and will shortly join the campaign. Hughes and Rove are said to have conflicting views on some matters, Hughes believing that Rove caters too much to the far right and that in doing so he has given Bush too parochial an image. Hughes is understood to have pushed Bush to present himself during the 2000 election as a "compassionate conservative" and to put more emphasis on domestic programs, such as the prescription drug bill and the "No Child Left Behind" education act.

[edit]

Bush has told people that he wants a "mandate" in this election to carry out his deepest wishes. If he receives one, or believes that he has received one, it is altogether likely that the environment will be further damaged, civil liberties will be further threatened, the Supreme Court will likely be set in a radically conservative direction for many years to come, and there will be a greater effort to privatize or cut social programs. The President is likely to feel that he has an even freer hand in foreign policy and in the use of military power, and less need to be accountable to Congress. For these reasons—and probably some that we can't yet imagine—this is the most consequential election in decades.

Isn't it ironic that the only thing Bush does with any sense of purpose or determination is the attempt to get his half-assed administration returned to power? If Bush ran the war in Iraq as well as his minions Rove, Mehlman, and Norquist ran his reelection campaign, Baghdad would look like Vegas.

President Bush will address the nation tonight at 8:00 p.m. to talk about his "clear strategy" for Iraq. This will pre-empt the regularly scheduled programming on most of the networks, including the network television premiere of:

8:00 PM Channel 10 ABC

A Beautiful Mind
136 mins.

Four Oscars---including Best Picture and Director (Ron Howard)---went to this brilliantly crafted 2001 biopic about troubled mathematician John Nash (Russell Crowe).

The film chronicles Nash's days at Princeton in the '40s and his work at MIT, where he meets his future wife (Best Supporting Actress Jennifer Connelly). During the Cold War, Nash becomes obsessed with cracking coded Soviet messages, unaware of the tremendous threat facing him and his family. Best Actor nominee Crowe is astounding as Nash, who ages 47 years during the course of the film. Ed Harris and Christopher Plummer costar.

I wonder if his mother will be watching.

Update: ABC did not pre-empt the movie; they know propaganda when they see it; more credit to them.

Sung to the tune of The Beverly Hillbillies with apologies to Flatt & Scruggs:

Come and listen to my story 'bout a boy named Bush.
His IQ was zero and his head was up his tush.
He drank like a fish while he drove a car about.
But that didn't matter 'cuz his daddy bailed him out.

DUI, that is.

Criminal record.

Cover-up.

Well, the first thing you know little Georgie goes to Yale.
He can't spell his name but they never let him fail.
He spends all his time hangin' out with student folk.
And that's when he learns how to snort a line of coke.

Blow, that is.

White gold.

Nose candy.

The next thing you know there's a war in Vietnam.
Kin folks say, "George, stay at home with Mom."
Let the common folks get maimed and scarred.
We'll buy you up a spot in the Texas National Guard.

Cush, that is.

Country clubs.

Nose candy.

Twenty years later George gets a little bored.
He trades in the booze, says that Jesus is his Lord.
He says, "Now the White House is the place I wanna be."
So he called his daddy's friends and they called the GOP.

Gun owners, that is.

Falwell.

Jesse Helms.

Come November 7, the election ran late.
Kin folks said "Jeb, give the boy your state!"
"Don't let the colored folks get near the polls."
So they put up barricades so they couldn't punch their holes.

Chads, that is.

Duval County.

Miami-Dade.

Before the votes were counted the five Supremes stepped in.
Told all the voters "Hey, we want our George to win."
"Stop counting votes!" was their solemn invocation.
And that's how little Georgie finally got his coronation.

Rigged, that is.

Illegitimate.

No moral authority.
Y'all come vote now.
Ya hear?

This came from a friend of my Faithful Correspondent. Where the friend got it I have no idea. Or so she says.

Check out Eric Alterman's article Hawks Eating Crow in The Nation.

The Bush Administration has not made it easy on its supporters. David Brooks now admits that he was gripped with a "childish fantasy" about Iraq. Tucker Carlson is "ashamed" and "enraged" at himself. Tom Friedman, admitting to being "a little slow," is finally off the reservation. Die-hard Republican publicist William Kristol admits of Bush, "He did drive us into a ditch." The neocon fantasist and sometime Republican speechwriter Mark Helprin complains on the Wall Street Journal editorial page--the movement's Pravda--of "the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy, and thought, and with too little regard for the American soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the boastfulness of the civilian leadership."

But they're still going to work to re-elect Bush. After all, as he himself once noted, "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice - won't get fooled again." Or something like that. Whatever.

Thanks to the Faithful Correspondent for the tip.

Yesterday my car club had its annual cruise-and-brunch through South Miami and Coral Gables, ending at the 94th Aero Squadron restaurant out by the Miami International Airport. We had twenty or so cars in the cruise, plus another group that arrived for the brunch from our friends in Fort Lauderdale. The weather was perfect, and we all had a great time.

Photo by my good friend Bob

And even though the club is for antique autos - over 25 years old - I took the Mustang, cleaned it up, and went in the tour. I figure the age of the license plate on the front (1969 Ohio from my very first Mustang) at least gets me in the door.

From the Washington Post:

AUSTIN, May 22 -- President Bush, always a bit star-crossed in his leisure pursuits, suffered a new misadventure in athleticism Saturday when he fell off a bicycle.

The president was in mile 16 of a 17-mile course on his ranch in Crawford, Tex., when he fell from a mountain bike, suffering scrapes and scratches on his chin, upper lip, nose, right hand and both knees. But, true to form, Bush stayed the course: After getting cleaned up by the White House doctor, he completed his bike ride.

Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, immediately offered excuses for his boss. "It's been raining a lot, and the topsoil is loose," he said. In addition, Duffy reasoned, "He likes to go all out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes." Fortunately, Duffy reported, Bush was wearing a helmet and mouth guard.

The spokesman warned that Bush probably would be wearing a bandage on his chin when he arrived here Saturday night for a party for his daughter Jenna, who is graduating from the University of Texas this weekend.

For the president, there is something of a history of hapless encounters with sporting activities.

Years of running gave him two bum knees that have periodically left him limping his way to Air Force One. In December, doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center examined him with X-rays and magnetic resonance imaging and, finding some damage to both knees, recommended "cross training."

In other words, exercise such as mountain biking.

In January 2002, Bush was on the third floor of the White House residence, watching a football playoff game between the Baltimore Ravens and Miami Dolphins when he choked on a pretzel. This caused him to faint and fall, bruising and scraping his face. Bush was accompanied only by dogs Spot and Barney.

Then, in June 2003, Bush was visiting his parents at the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, when he fell from a motorized Segway scooter. Bush, who was holding a tennis racket that may have interfered with his coordination, did not hurt himself -- but the incident was captured by photographers and quickly beamed across the world.

Athletic miscues are a bipartisan affair, of course. Bush's Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry has fallen off a bicycle and taken a nasty spill while snowboarding. He blamed the Secret Service for the latter.

Bush's close calls predate his ascension to the presidency.

During the campaign in 1999, he scraped his right leg and hip when a truck trailer overturned near his jogging path in Austin. Bush dived for cover when chunks of concrete and wood were dumped behind him.

Around the same time, Bush went swimming in the pond on his ranch with his advertising strategist when the two men spotted cottonmouth water moccasins -- the only type of poisonous water snake in North America. That time, at least, Bush was not snakebit.

Speaking metaphorically, you wanna bet about being snakebit?

And what was with the crack about "not whistling show tunes?" It sounds like some kind of macho-bullshit butch-assurance just to make sure that somebody watching Spike TV doesn't think that mountain biking might not be manly enough.

What a phony.

The Washington Post reports that General Ricardo Sanchez not only knew about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, but was in the room when it happened.

A military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case stated that a captain at the prison said the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq was present during some "interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse," according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post.

The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath.

"Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?" asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.

"That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."

Shuck also said a sergeant at the prison, First Sgt. Brian G. Lipinski, was prepared to testify that intelligence officers told him the abuse of detainees on the cellblock was "the right thing to do." Earlier this month, Lipinski declined to comment on the case.

So far, clear evidence has not emerged that high-level officers condoned or promoted the abusive practices. Officers at the prison have blamed the abuse on a few rogue, low-level military police officers from the 372nd, a company of U.S. Army Reservists based in Cresaptown, Md. The general in charge of the prisons in Iraq at the time has said that military intelligence officers took control of Abu Ghraib and gave the MPs "ideas."

A Defense Department spokesman yesterday referred questions about Sanchez to U.S. military officials in the Middle East, warning that statements by defense lawyers or their clients should be treated with "appropriate caution." Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the senior military spokesman in Iraq, said Sanchez was unavailable for comment last night but would "enjoy the opportunity" to respond later.

Plan B is when a defense attorney attempts to get his client off by turning the evidence to indicate that someone else was responsible for the crime. Legal ethics dictate that the attorney has to have a good-faith belief that his claim is valid in order to avoid sanctions. This could be the start of that...or the chipping away of the facade.

Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

The announcement, made by jury president Quentin Tarantino, met with enthusiastic cheers from the audience in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, where Mr. Moore's film had received what many thought was the longest standing ovation ever at Cannes when it was screened here last Monday. "What have you done?" Mr. Moore asked Mr. Tarantino as he accepted the prize, looking both overwhelmed and amused. "You just did this to mess with me, didn't you?"

[edit]

The meaning of Mr. Moore's Palme, however, extends far beyond the cozy, glamorous world of Cannes. "Last time I was on an awards stage in Hollywood, all hell broke loose," Mr. Moore said in his acceptance speech, referring to his antiwar remarks at the Oscars last year. His new film, which does not yet have an American distributor, has already begun to stir passions in the United States, as the election approaches and the debate over the conduct of the war in Iraq grows more intense.

With his characteristic blend of humor and outrage - and with greater filmmaking discipline and depth of feeling than he has shown in his previous work - Mr. Moore attacks Mr. Bush's response to Sept. 11, his decision to invade Iraq, and nearly everything else the president has done.

"I did not set out to make a political film," Mr. Moore said at a news conference after the ceremony. "I want people to leave thinking that was a good way to spend two hours. The art of this, the cinema, comes before the politics."

He also said that Mr. Tarantino had assured him that the political message of "Fahrenheit 9/11" did not influence the jury's decision. "On this jury we have different politics," he quoted Mr. Tarantino as saying. It is also a film financed by Miramax, which distributes Mr. Tarantino's movies.

Mr. Moore noted that four of the nine jurors were American: Mr. Tarantino, Kathleen Turner, the director Jerry Schatzberg, and the Haitian-born novelist Edwidge Danticat. "I fully expect the Fox News Channel and other right-wing media to portray this as an award from the French," Mr. Moore said. Only one juror, the actress Emanuelle Béart, is a French citizen.

"If you want to add Tilda," he said referring to the British actress Tilda Swinton, "then you could say that more than half came from the coalition of the willing." (The rest of the panel was made up of Benoit Poelvoode, a Belgian actor; Peter von Bagh, a Finnish critic; and the Hong Kong director Tsui Hark.) [New York Times]

I wonder if Disney is re-thinking their decision not to distribute the film. After all, if there's one thing that appeals to Disney more than anything above all, it's the chance to make a pile of money, politics be damned. But according to Frank Rich, this is no ordinary Michael Moore rabble-rousing piece of left-wing populist propaganda (to use some of the more charitable terms for his previous work from various dismissive bow-tied pundits).

"Fahrenheit 9/11" will arrive soon enough at your local cineplex — there's lots of money to be made — so discount much of the squabbling en route. Disney hasn't succeeded in censoring Mr. Moore so much as in enhancing his stature as a master provocateur and self-promoter. And the White House, which likewise hasn't a prayer of stopping this film, may yet fan the p.r. flames. "It's so outrageously false, it's not even worth comment," was last week's blustery opening salvo by Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. New York's Daily News reported that Republican officials might even try to use the Federal Election Commission to shut the film down. That would be the best thing to happen to Michael Moore since Charlton Heston granted him an interview.

Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there's no question he's detonating dynamite here. From a variety of sources — foreign journalists and broadcasters (like Britain's Channel Four), freelancers and sympathetic American TV workers who slipped him illicit video — he supplies war-time pictures that have been largely shielded from our view. Instead of recycling images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on 9/11 once again, Mr. Moore can revel in extended new close-ups of the president continuing to read "My Pet Goat" to elementary school students in Florida for nearly seven long minutes after learning of the attack. Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we've seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is not the movie Moore watchers, fans or foes, were expecting. (If it were, the foes would find it easier to ignore.) When he first announced this project last year after his boorish Oscar-night diatribe against Mr. Bush, he described it as an exposé of the connections between the Bush and bin Laden dynasties. But that story has been so strenuously told elsewhere — most notably in Craig Unger's best seller, "House of Bush, House of Saud" — that it's no longer news. Mr. Moore settles for a brisk recap in the first of his film's two hours. And, predictably, he stirs it into an over-the-top, at times tendentious replay of a Bush hater's greatest hits: Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, Harken Energy, AWOL in Alabama, the Carlyle Group, Halliburton, the lazy Crawford vacation of August 2001, the Patriot Act. But then the movie veers off in another direction entirely. Mr. Moore takes the same hairpin turn the country has over the past 14 months and crash-lands into the gripping story that is unfolding in real time right now.

Wasn't it just weeks ago that we were debating whether we should see the coffins of the American dead and whether Ted Koppel should read their names on "Nightline"? In "Fahrenheit 9/11," we see the actual dying, of American troops and Iraqi civilians alike, with all the ripped flesh and spilled guts that the violence of war entails. (If Steven Spielberg can simulate World War II carnage in "Saving Private Ryan," it's hard to argue that Mr. Moore should shy away from the reality in a present-day war.) We also see some of the 4,000-plus American casualties: those troops hidden away in clinics at Walter Reed and at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in Fort Campbell, Ky., where they try to cope with nerve damage and multiple severed limbs. They are not silent. They talk about their pain and their morphine, and they talk about betrayal. "I was a Republican for quite a few years," one soldier says with an almost innocent air of bafflement, "and for some reason they conduct business in a very dishonest way."

It is far too much to hope that a piece of artwork can stop a war - Picasso's Guernica did not end Fascism - but then art does not succeed by being blatant, even if the tone of the work expresses outrage in Technicolor. It gets under the skin and works on the subconscious so that when our senses are yet again offended, we are willing to react and end the atrocity. But like some vaccinations they wear off. Michael Moore may have provided a booster shot to our collective immune system to fight off the same mindset that trapped us in Viet Nam forty years ago. And maybe he caught it just in time.

I met up with newly-relocated Florida blogger Kop of Kop's Blog for lunch today. He drove down from his place in Hollywood (yes, there's another one besides the one in California) and after a quick tour of my new place we walked to a local pub for burgers.

We had a great visit, talking about all of the things we have in common: growing up in the Midwest, swapping stories about going to concerts in places like Pine Knob and Meadowbrook, car talk, careers, sports (like planning to play hookey to catch a Marlins game) - and having a good time getting to know a fellow blogger and putting a face to a name or nickname, as it were.

Thanks for the visit, Kop, and let's plan another one soon.

David Brock is interviewed by Tara McKelvy at The American Prospect (web exclusive). Brock, you will recall, was once a hit man for the right wing, penning such screeds as The Real Anita Hill in which he labeled her as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty," plus numerous articles for The American Spectator and other rags. He has since repented, and I'm glad to have him on our side. Some highlights:

You spent $100,000 on an anti-Limbaugh ad for cable television. Clearly, you think he's more than just a big idiot.

One of the huge mistakes progressives have made is to write him off as ineffective and, frankly, as a crackpot. They seem to think he's nothing more than fringe nonsense. It's not the case. The Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, says he has more influence than Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, or Peter Jennings. And there's the viral nature of radio. That means he's reaching more than just his listeners. If there's one Limbaugh fan in an office of 10 people, well, that one person can poison the whole well with misinformation he's gotten from Limbaugh.

When I heard the things Limbaugh said about Iraqi prisoners, I thought, “If a liberal commentator said something like that, it would be on the crawl on FOX News and would be known all over the country.” But when a conservative says it, you publish an article about it and put it on a Web site, and you may still not get the word out to a big audience. That's one of the reasons we did the ad. Still, you'd like to get to a stage where you don't have to pay to get your point across.

You once talked about feeling uncomfortable with conservatives. How are things with the liberals?

There was a part of me that was never comfortable with the way people on the right would channel emotional aggression into politics. It's a significant part of what motivates the right wing. There's another part that had to do with the difficulty with sexuality. It's not only that I was gay. There was also the issue of subjugating my own values, such as the fact I was pro-choice, to the ideological movement. Part of my story was a recovery of values, and I couldn't have gotten out of the right wing if I didn't have a conscience. Afterward, I spent time in self-reflection and tried to become more balanced. There have been times when it's been hard -- like when I'd encounter people who worked for the Clintons or met people I'd written terrible things about. I think that is to be expected.

Remember, I didn't jump out of bed and do this. This has been a seven-year process. And, as a whole, the people I've met have been open to the idea that people can change. It helps if they read Blinded by the Right, to be honest with you. It also helps if they get to know me a little bit. Then they can judge my sincerity. Is there skepticism? All ideological converts face this. I think that comes with the territory. And, yes, there was a time when I thought about leaving Washington. But I felt if I have something to contribute, I should stay and find my way.

An interesting footnote to Brock's story is that when he was on the Right, he didn't keep his sexual orientation - gay - much of a secret. He writes in Blinded By The Right that he was hit on many times by well-known conservative men who, in public, proclaimed loudly their staunch support for family values and against the "homosexual agenda." But remember, a blowjob isn't sex, is it...?

How could I not post this story from the Sun-Sentinel?

NEW YORK - A lawyer who barked like a dog at a witness during a deposition has been fined $8,500 for misconduct and harassment of opponents.

The lawyer, David Fink, made false statements, failed to comply with court orders and engaged in frivolous conduct during a breach of contract suit over home furnishing designs, Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Charles Ramos said.

Fink's client Carl Levine represents designers of home furnishings to manufacturers and other licensees. He sued a married couple, Laurette Angsten and Kit Kittle, alleging they did not pay him money they owed for marketing their products.

During a deposition in which Kittle was giving sworn statements on Jan. 16, 2002, he referred to letters he had received from Fink. He called them threatening, "mad dog lawyer" letters, according to Kittle's lawyer, Samuel Friedman.

At the continuation of the deposition the next day, Friedman said, Fink started barking like a dog when Kittle was asked about the letters by Donald Creadore, the lawyer who had taken over Levine's case from Fink.

Friedman said Fink "behaved in a very mocking manner, making the witness feel intimidated, speaking over other people and making it difficult for the court reporter to record much of anything."

Friedman complained to Ramos about Fink's behavior.

"Mr. Fink was barking up the wrong tree," the lawyer quipped as he recalled the deposition. "I don't know what motivated him to bark."

After having a special referee review Fink's behavior, Ramos followed the recommendations and fined Fink, according to the judge's 54-page decision, which was published Thursday. The lawyer had already been assessed another $1,400 for previous misconduct in the case.

The special referee also recommended that Ramos report Fink to the disciplinary committee that monitors lawyers' conduct. Ramos' decision did not reveal whether he reported Fink, and Friedman said he did not know whether the judge had done so.

Fink did not return calls for comment. Creadore said he had no comment.

Meanwhile, the judge ruled against Levine in the underlying case, saying he was not entitled to royalties or commissions from Kittle and Angsten.

Take a look around The Liberal Coalition:

Words On A Page settles on a template (for now).

archy goes down to the ant farm.

Sooner Thought thinks about Log Cabin Republicans booted in North Carolina, as does andante at Collective Sigh.

Chris has a chat with a dittohead at work.

It's Craptastic looks at Bev Harris and her woes at being a whistlerblower on electronic voting.

edwardpig reports on reports of how high the chain goes at Abu Ghraib.

Musing's musings comments on Bush's amazingly irresponsible fiscal management to get re-elected.

NTodd shoots hoops with underlings. ("Psst! Let the teacher win!")

The Fulcrum cites one of my favorite writers, Josh Marshall, on the new neocon logic behind the deteriorating situation in Iraq: it's the fault of the Democrats who never wanted the war in the first place.

BlogAmy on yet another case of discrimination against gays.

Norbizness on literacy and sharing stories.

Corrente on the Chalabi raid. Short version: we got scammed.

There's more - go check'em out.

By the way, am I the only blogger who hasn't changed templates? Happy Friday!

John Kerry's campaign has apparently settled on a new slogan/theme: "Let America be America again."

The words are from the poem by Langston Hughes:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes.

It's been more than thirty years since I last read that poem in full - I think it was in Mrs. Hankins's senior English class - and back then it was a powerful message. The country was still deeply divided over Viet Nam. Detroit, Toledo, Watts, Newark, and many other cities were still smoldering from the summer riots of 1967 and '68. Many of us were feeling disenfranchised, as if the promises and hopes of America were reserved only for the "Love It Or Leave It" crowd. And in the lines of the poem we heard anguish, anger, and bitterness - but also hope tempered with determination to take back what was rightfully ours.

As for a campaign slogan, it has a nice alliterative ring to it. Kind of rolls off the tongue in an Aaron Sorkin / Jed Bartlet ("The West Wing") kind of way. And I can almost hear a chorus of young strong voices singing it in the background at a campaign rally while images of all sorts of Americans - white, black, Hispanic, Muslim, gay, straight, Native - flash by on the Jumbotron. It also does a neat job of taking back a patriotic meme from the right-wing hijackers who act as if the only patriots are Republicans.

And in a sneaky kind of way, it raises the level of the campaign to literary heights. For that alone we should give the Kerry campaign high marks.

From CNN:

Pelosi questions Bush's competence
Republicans demand apology

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday sharply questioned President Bush's competence as a leader, suggesting his policy in Iraq is to blame for the loss of U.S. lives. That assessment drew a furious response by Republicans who called on the Democratic leader to apologize.

"The emperor has no clothes," Pelosi, D-California, told reporters on Thursday. "When are people going to face the reality? Pull this curtain back."

[edit]

Asked specifically if she was calling Bush incompetent, Pelosi replied:

"I believe that the president's leadership in the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment and experience in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers."

[edit]

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay blasted Pelosi, casting her comments as detrimental to U.S. troops.

"Nancy Pelosi should apologize for her irresponsible, dangerous rhetoric," DeLay, R-Texas, said. "She apparently is so caught up in partisan hatred for President Bush that her words are putting American lives at risk."

What's the big deal? Ms. Pelosi is merely repeating what has been rattling around the blogosphere for years.

Perhaps we should remind Mr. DeLay that when the Clinton administration was in office, his attacks on the president were a part of the daily grind, including when our troops were fighting in the Balkans. But back then he was doing nothing but fulfilling his patriotic duty as an American.

"O Irony, where is thy sting?"

A lot of bloggers have been covering the story about the Texas comptroller who disestablished the Unitarian Universalist Church because they have no set creed.

Well, as I noted in my comment at The Invisible Library, it's nice to see Texas taking on from Florida the dubious distinction of becoming the national laughingstock. Wear it in good health.

Peter at Kick the Leftist found this:

Last week Egyptian demonstrators protesting the abuse of prisoners at an Iraqi prison, which has sparked international outrage in recent weeks, blamed the abuse on what they called "homosexual American executioners."

The rally, held last Wednesday in Cairo, followed other protests throughout the Middle East over graphic photos depicting the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison at the hands of U.S. soldiers. Many of the abuses reported and depicted were sexual, including forcing nude male prisoners to pile on top of each other, and forcing them to simulate oral and anal sex with each other. Prisoners have also alleged being sodomized with broom handles and other objects.

According to a report in the Kuwait Times, 300 Egyptian protestors rallied in front of a banner that read, "Bring to justice the homosexual American executioners, their agents the traitors, their followers the enemies."

Thanks to the lead from TAPPED, we find that Andrew Sullivan is becoming more and more disenchanted with his darling boy:

What Bush doesn't seem to understand is that in any war, people need to be reminded constantly of what is going on, what is at stake, what our immediate, medium-term and ultimate objectives are. The president has said nothing cogent about Karbala; nothing apposite about al Sadr; nothing specific about what our strategy is in Falluja. Events transpire and are interpreted by critics and the anti-war media and by everyone on the planet but the president. All the president says is a broad and crude reiteration of valid but superfluous boilerplate. This is not war-leadership; it's the abdication of war-leadership.

But, as Garance Franke-Ruta points out, Sully isn't too upset to consider the alternative to this misery - looking to John Kerry as an alternative. Heaven forbid that no matter how rotten or inept your leader is, some conservatives would rather not vote at all than vote for (gasp!) a Democrat. Mr. Sullivan, an outspoken advocate for same-sex marriage and a harsh critic of the GOP for backing the Federal Marriage Amendment, is still willing to vote for that party. It makes you wonder what the hell it will take for him or anyone of the True Believers to come to their senses.

Ironically, they are always the ones who are knocking the Democrats for not having the courage of their convictions and considering all sides of an issue, seeing that as somehow a failure, without recognizing that blind obedience is a more dangerous - albeit easier - trait.

House Speaker Denny Hastert got snide with John McCain:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a rare public swipe at a fellow Republican, House Speaker Dennis Hastert on Wednesday questioned the GOP credentials of John McCain, a U.S. senator who has often challenged party orthodoxy.

Talking to reporters, Hastert pretended not to know who McCain was when asked about a recent statement by the GOP senator from Arizona. As other House GOP members stood behind him laughing, Hastert, R-Illinois, then expressed doubt that McCain was indeed a Republican.

The exchange started when a reporter asked: "Can I combine a two issues, Iraq and taxes? I heard a speech from John McCain the other day..."

Hastert: "Who?"

Reporter: "John McCain."

Hastert: "Where's he from?"

Reporter: "He's a Republican from Arizona."

Hastert: "A Republican?"

Amid nervous laughter, the reporter continued with his question: "Anyway, his observation was never before when we've been at war have we been worrying about cutting taxes and his question was, 'Where's the sacrifice?' "

Hastert: "If you want to see the sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed and Bethesda. There's the sacrifice in this country. We're trying to make sure they have the ability to fight this war, that they have the wherewithal to be able to do it. And, at the same time, we have to react to keep this country strong."

Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda National Naval Medical Center are two military hospitals in the Washington area.

McCain, a prisoner of war during Vietnam, later released a written statement, taking issue with the spending habits of Republican lawmakers.

"The speaker is correct in that nothing we are called upon to do comes close to matching the heroism of our troops," McCain said. "All we are called upon to do is not spend our nation into bankruptcy while our soldiers risk their lives. I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility. Apparently those days are long gone for some in our party."

Ironically, McCain spent his lunch hour at a Capitol Hill bookstore signing copies of his new book, "Why Courage Matters"

Mr. Hastert, whose toughest battle it seems has been fought when he was kept away from the buffet table at a Club For Growth fund-raiser, hasn't got the chops to hold John McCain's coat when it comes to making a sacrifice for his country. And while I am not one of those who would like to see Senator McCain as Kerry's VP choice (remember, this election is about the Supreme Court - as in who's going to sit on it in the next decade), I have a hell of a lot more respect for him than I do for any of the Republicans - Hastert included - who wouldn't know sacrifice if it jumped off the page and squirted cider in their ear.

From the New York Times:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 19 — About 40 Iraqis were killed Wednesday by American forces in an attack near the volatile border with Syria. American officials said they had fired on a suspected guerrilla safe house, but Iraqis said the Americans had strafed civilians at a wedding party.

American military officials said the attack occurred in the open desert on Wednesday evening, about 15 miles from the Syrian border and southwest of the town of Qusaiba. In a statement, American officials said they had called in air support after an American military operation in the area had come under hostile fire.

After the attack, the Americans said they had recovered "numerous weapons," cash and foreign passports.

Associated Press Television News broadcast film, said to be taken at the scene, showing a truck heaped with bloody bodies, many of them wrapped in blankets. Several of the bodies shown appeared to be those of children.

Both the American and the Iraqi accounts agreed that about 40 people had died. But some Iraqis and several reports in the Arab press said the attack had killed civilians, not insurgents.

Today is my mom's actual birthday - last weekend was just the celebration so the family could get together from places like Baltimore and Miami. My dad is taking her to a cozy little place for a quiet celebration, just the two of them, which is as it should be.

And, coincidentally, today is the thirtieth anniversary of my graduation from the University of Miami. The ceremony was held in the cavernous Miami Beach Convention Center. I sat with a group of my fellow drama majors and at the appropriate moment we all stood up, the president announced our degrees, and we sat down again.

Later we had a little party at a friend's house for both my graduation and Mom's birthday. In some ways it seems like only yesterday - and in some others, it seems like forever (how deep is that?) I had no idea that thirty years later I'd be back in Miami still in touch with friends from that time and still going in on weekends to the University of Miami's Ring Theatre scene shop to help build scenery, just like I did when I was a student. (Of course, Ken, I was a skilled carpenter then, too.)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

I got the following e-mail this morning:

The following is sent on behalf the MDCPS Police:

After many concerned emails regarding the validity of the email message shown below the content was researched and was found to be a hoax. Please disregard.

Thanks for clearing that up. I guess we can let the UPS guy out of the storage closet now; he was starting to whimper.

There's a follow-up in The Blade to the story I posted last week about the dust-up in Bedford Township, Michigan over the invitation by Brandon Spader, a high school student in Lambertville, Michigan, to Senator John Kerry to speak at his high school graduation.

LAMBERTVILLE - The Bedford Board of Education last night decided not to stand in the way of presumptive presidential nominee John Kerry's plan to speak to the district's high school graduating class during its commencement next month.
A lone board member who had opposed the Democratic Massachusetts senator's speech at the June 6 graduation reversed his position last night after three hours of listening to nearly 80 people - most of whom supported the senator's visit.

"I think we had this forum for the purpose it was intended," said board member Steve Lennex after he decided against entering a motion to consider an alternative to Mr. Kerry.

"It became clear to me that he should come," he said. "I'm only sorry this affected my kids."

His daughter, who is in the graduating class, was in tears as she hugged Mr. Lennex after the meeting.

"My main concern was that it was divisive," Mr. Lennex, a Republican, said. "I still have concerns, but I think there is a consensus … John Kerry is going to come on June 6."

The divisive issue of the presidential hopeful's speech drew nearly 250 people to an at times contentious special meeting last night at Monroe Road Elementary.

Suzanne Johnson, a senior and student council president, drew two standing ovations during a powerful speech she delivered in favor of Mr. Kerry speaking at the graduation.

"Some individuals are trying to shield us from a political arena that many of us are already members of. We have been raised in a world of politics and democracy," Miss Johnson said. "Isn't ironic? A student sought out and brought in the most auspicious event that has ever graced Bedford, and some school board members are working to stop it."

The issue arose when Bedford senior Brandon Spader asked President Bush and Mr. Kerry for interviews for the high school newspaper. Mr. Kerry's campaign responded by volunteering him as a speaker for the graduation ceremony at the University of Toledo's Savage Hall.

Mr. Lennex said he had support from community members and parents who were concerned that the ceremony would become a media circus if Mr. Kerry were allowed to speak.

"Obviously, all the people who called me didn't come tonight," he said.

Carolyn Miller, a Temperance resident whose son is in the graduating class, criticized Mr. Lennex.

"The only political hijacking has not been by Senator Kerry, but by one member of the school board running for re-election," Ms. Miller said.

Mr. Lennex, a real-estate broker, is on the June 14 ballot for re-election to the school board.

Wow, what a pleasant surprise. Way to go, Brandon.

From the Miami Herald (registration required):

Camilo Mejia's family and supporters see him as a once-confused teenager who joined the Army so he could go to college, then showed courage in leaving it when he became morally appalled at the ''war for oil'' and the treatment of prisoners.

But the military and many fellow soldiers see someone else in Mejia, now 28, who left Iraq on a 15-day leave and never returned: a coward who abandoned his fellow troops in a time of war; an opportunist who joined the armed forces for the paid tuition, but then didn't have the gumption to follow through when called into combat.

A deserter.

That word makes him shiver as he sits in his room at Fort Stewart, Ga., explaining how he came to the decision not to return to the war, as a conscientious objector.

"This was not easy for me," he told The Herald in a telephone interview. "I was an infantryman for nine years. I was a trained killer. This was never my intention."

Mejia will be defending his actions today when he goes on trial for desertion. He may be the first combat veteran from Operation Iraqi Freedom to be court-martialed in the United States on such charges. The staff sergeant has pleaded not guilty.

If convicted, he could get a year of hard labor, two-thirds reduction in monthly pay, demotion in rank to the lowest enlisted level and a bad-conduct discharge.

Back when this story broke last winter, I made light of his claim that he was a C.O., saying it was a little late to find this out. I now see that he may have had a greater insight to what it was like in the military. I wish him the best in his effort to prove that you do not abandon your moral convictions - no matter how or when they emerge - when you put on the uniform.

(PS: Is it an unfortunate coincidence that the Herald chose to place a Bush/Cheney ad on the same webpage as this story? Let's hope so.)

Take a look at the new look at The Liberal Coalition. Thanks to Michael at Musing's musings for his time and effort in sprucing up the place. Maybe the Fab Five should consider adding him as the Website consultant?

One crude bomb with a trace of sarin gas? See, I told you the war was justified.

According to Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times:

The administration, in trying to see its way through both the phony crossfire and the real one, has been rattled by the fake war. Someone in the White House needs seriously to stiffen the Bush rhetoric. When the president talks about "staying the course" and "bringing to justice" the killers, he sounds like Bill Clinton, who pledged to stay the course in Somalia and bring to justice the terrorists, and did neither. Bush has to go back to speaking Rumsfeldian, not Powellite: He has to talk about winning total victory, hunting down the enemy and killing them.

He also needs to promise himself that he'll never again apologize to some Arab despot -- even relatively benign ones, like the king of Jordan -- for events in Iraq. If he feels the need to apologize, he should apologize to the American people for apologizing to the Arab world. This isn't just because what went on in Abu Ghraib is a picnic -- well, a Paris Hilton video picnic -- compared to what goes on every day in the prisons of our Arab "allies." More important than that, the Bush apology buys into one of the most fetid props of the region's so-called stability -- "pan-Arabism." If U.S. troops "humiliated" some Portuguese prisoners, the president wouldn't apologize to the king of Norway or the prime minister of Slovenia. So why, when U.S. troops humiliate Iraqi prisoners, would he apologize to Jordan's King Abdullah or Egypt's thug-for-life? "Pan-Arabism" is one reason why the region's a sewer. If Iraq succeeds, it will be by breaking with regional solidarity.

In other words, according to Steyn, real men don't apologize. They just scratch themselves and grunt, I suppose. But this guy has nothing on Michael Savage, according to Salon.com's Right Hook:

On May 11, while repeatedly calling Abu Ghraib "Grab-an-Arab" prison, he launched into this little tirade:

"I think there should be no mercy shown to these sub-humans. I believe that a thousand of them should be killed tomorrow. I think a thousand of them held in the Iraqi prison should be given 24 hour[s] -- a trial and executed. I think they need to be shown that we are not going to roll over to them ... Instead of putting joysticks, I would have liked to have seen dynamite put in their orifices and they should be dropped from airplanes ... They should put dynamite in their behinds and drop them from 35,000 feet, the whole pack of scum out of that jail."

The next day Savage added that Arabs were "racist, fascist bigots," and purported to speak for a majority of Americans regarding the war. He offered several all-American solutions to our problems in the Middle East.

"Right now, even people sitting on the fence would like George Bush to drop a nuclear weapon on an Arab country. They don't even care which one it would be. I can guarantee you -- I don't need to go to Mr. Schmuck [pollster John] Zogby and ask him his opinion ... The most -- I tell you right now -- the largest percentage of Americans would like to see a nuclear weapon dropped on a major Arab capital. They don't even care which one...

"I think these people need to be forcibly converted to Christianity ... It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings."

What a classy guy. Why he didn't get that job in the Protocol office at the State Department is a mystery to me.

A couple of notes from the campaign trail.

The War Room at Salon.com notes that Bush may be losing some support from his evangelical Christian base:

Evangelical Christians -- who accounted for an estimated quarter of voters in the 2000 election -– skew for George W. Bush, without a doubt. But even if a small percentage stays home in November, that's bad news for Bush. Getting evangelicals to the polls in November is why Bush is talking up the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage again.

But a Reuters story [on May 18] suggests that like millions of other Americans, evangelical voters will make their decisions in November based on more than the issue of gay marriage. They, too, are feeling alienated, let down, and misled about the disaster in Iraq. And, like many of their fellow Americans, what's happening in Iraq may prevent them from turning out for Bush in November. They most likely won't turn to John Kerry. But they may just stay home.

This prospect makes Republican fear-mongering over controversial issues like gay marriage all the more likely. But will the trick work? A New York Times story over the weekend suggested it may not. There may be opposition to gay marriage among religious voters, but people in the pews don't seem to be galvanized by it. As a befuddled Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, told the Times: "I don't see any traction. The calls aren't coming in and I am not sure why."

Maybe it's because many voters, evangelical or otherwise, get that America has bigger problems right now than who's getting married at City Hall, even if Bush tries to convince them otherwise.

Highlights from the Zogby poll of May 16:

Bush's job approval is down to 42 percent. His approval on Iraq is down to 36 percent. Kerry is up by five points in the horserace (47-42). Right track/wrong track is at 54/40. The percentage who say it's "time for someone new" is at 53 percent. Kerry favorability is at 55 percent. Bush favorability is at 52 percent. Bush and Kerry are tied in the red states (45-45).

Kerry leads in the Blue states (49-38), the East (53-36), the West (45-44), the central Great Lakes (47-41), and among progressives, (81-12), liberals (79-12), moderates (55-30), Hispanics (59-39), African-Americans (85-6), Democrats (84-9), and Independents (46-37).

Bush leads in the South (47-43) and among conservatives (71-19), Whites (46-42), Asians (63-37), Republicans (81-8), and Libertarians (80-0). Not exactly a majority coalition. [TNR Campaign Journal]

I'm reminded of the Roadrunner cartoon where Wile E. Coyote is stuck on the edge of the cliff, clinging to a tiny tree with the bottom of the canyon thousands of feet below. He breathes a sigh of relief until he hears the soft clink of a small stone falling away as the tree begins to come loose, followed by another and another....

Tony Randall has died at the age of 84.

Most people remember him as the fussy Felix Unger in the TV version of The Odd Couple, but he had a long stage career, including creating the role of E.K. Hornbeck in the play Inherit The Wind in 1955. Hornbeck, a thinly-disguised version of H.L. Mencken, was the cynical observer of the foibles and flaws of mankind, himself included. After his success with The Odd Couple, he founded the National Actors Theatre in New York that provided a place for new talent in the theatre and staged some highly-praised productions.

Here's a list of his film and TV credits from the Internet Movie Database.

He'll be missed.

[Update to add IMDb link.]

I got the following e-mail today, sent on behalf of the Chief of Police for the school district:

Government Warning regarding purchase of UPS uniforms:

There has been a huge purchase, $32,000 worth, of United Parcel Service (UPS) uniforms on eBay over the last 30 days. This could represent a serious threat as bogus drivers (terrorists) can drop off anything to anyone with deadly consequences! If you have ANY questions when a UPS driver appears at your door, they should be able to furnish VALID I.D

Additionally, if someone in a UPS uniform comes to make a drop off or pickup, make absolutely sure they are driving a UPS truck. UPS doesn't make deliveries or pickups in anything, except a company vehicle If you have a problem, IMMEDIATELY call your local law enforcement agency right away!

TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY! Tell everyone in your office, your family, your friends, etc. Make people aware so that we can prepare and/or avoid terrorist attacks on our people! Thank you for your time in reviewing this and PLEASE send to EVERYONE on your list, even if they are friend or foe. We should all be aware!

Kimberly Bush-Carr
Management Program Specialist
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Bureau Customs and Border Protection
Washington, DC 20229

Just based on the writing style - the extraneous exclamation points, the lack of proofreading (missing or misplaced punctuation), and the overuse of ALL CAPS - makes this look more like a high school prank than a serious message from Homeland Security.

What's really disturbing is that the chief didn't check this out before sending it out to "ALL LOCATIONS." What's next..."Be on the lookout for alligators in the sewers!"

I was awakened this morning by birds chirping and a nice sunrise. I had a pleasant drive in to the office, and a nice cup of coffee as I settled in to work. So I guess all the dire predictions of doom, destruction, fire, brimestone, and misery from the right wing because of this didn't happen.

Isn't it nice how life just goes on?

As I've been saying, if what both Newsweek and The New Yorker say about the background and the chain of command in the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib is true, then the shit is about to hit the fan, according to Fred Kaplan in Slate.

Read together, the magazine articles spell out an elaborate, all-inclusive chain of command in this scandal. Bush knew about it. Rumsfeld ordered it. His undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Steven Cambone, administered it. Cambone's deputy, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, instructed Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had been executing the program involving al-Qaida suspects at Guantanamo, to go do the same at Abu Ghraib. Miller told Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Brigade, that the prison would now be dedicated to gathering intelligence. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, also seems to have had a hand in this sequence, as did William Haynes, the Pentagon's general counsel. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, learned about the improper interrogations—from the International Committee of the Red Cross, if not from anyone else—but said or did nothing about it for two months, until it was clear that photographs were coming out. Meanwhile, those involved in the interrogations included officers from military intelligence, the CIA, and private contractors, as well as the mysterious figures from the Pentagon's secret operation.

That's a lot more people than the seven low-grade soldiers and reservists currently facing courts-martial.

[edit]

Much is at stake here—budgets, bailiwicks, careers, reputations, re-elections, to say nothing of national security and the future of Iraq. Get ready for a bumpy ride.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo thinks this could be bigger than Iran-Contra or even Watergate. And for those of us of a certain age who remember Watergate all too well, that's saying a lot. But at least no one was tortured, sodomized, or beheaded because of Watergate (although G. Gordon Liddy would have willingly done all three for his president).

The one big difference between Abu Ghraib and Watergate is that the full impact of Watergate was not felt until after Nixon was safely re-elected in 1972. While Woodward and Bernstein were on the faint trail of the money connections between the original seven burglars of the Democratic National Committee in June of 1972, it was not until the following winter that pieces began to fall into place, and it would be another eighteen months after that before Nixon resigned. Abu Ghraib is on the fast track to blossom into a full-fledged clusterfuck (no pun intended) before the Republican National Convention.

I suppose we have cable TV and the internet to thank for keeping the story going, but in truth it has been good investigative print journalism by the likes of Seymour Hersh (or Michael D. Sallah, Mitch Weiss, and Joe Mahr, the reporters at The Blade who broke the story on Tiger Force) who did the real reporting. It's good to see that kind of work still gets results and brings out the truth.

David Brooks says that we are in "shakeout" mode in Iraq, and while we're bound to make some mistakes, the overall effort is worth the effort.

American history sometimes seems to be the same story repeated over and over again. Some group of big-dreaming but foolhardy adventurers head out to eradicate some evil and to realize some golden future. They get halfway along their journey and find they are unprepared for the harsh reality they suddenly face. It's too late to turn back, so they reinvent their mission. They toss out illusions and adopt an almost desperate pragmatism. They never do realize the utopia they initially dreamed about, but they do build something better than what came before.

This basic pattern has marked our national style from the moment British colonists landed on North American shores. Overly optimistic about the conditions they would find, the colonists were woefully undercapitalized, underequipped and underskilled. At Jamestown, there were three gentlemen and gentlemen's servants for every skilled laborer. They didn't bother to plant enough grain to see them through the winter.

But they learned and adapted. Settlement companies were compelled to send more workers, along with axes, chisels, scythes, millstones and seeds. Eventually the colonies thrived.

I think there might be some Native Americans who would find Mr. Brooks's comparison somewhat odious and foreboding.

By a vote of 7-2, the Miami-Dade County Public School Board of Education has officially hired Dr. Rudolph "Rudy" F. Crew as the new Superintendent to replace Merrett R. Stierheim, who is retiring June 30. His compensation package, including salary, bonuses, moving and housing allowance, taxes (paid by the school system), plus a car and a lot of other perks, totals over $700,000. Let's hope he earns it.

[Updated to add link to the contract.]

From Talking Points Memo we find that White House counsel Alberto Gonzales wrote a memo to Bush in 2002 suggesting that the Geneva Conventions were no longer relevant in the war on "terra."

"As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," Gonzales wrote to Bush. "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Gonzales concluded in stark terms: "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

You can forget about that Supreme Court appointment, Alberto.

Despite all the hoo-ha and the gnashing of teeth by the Religious Reich, the day has finally arrived in Massachusetts for gay marriage. And while the court challenges will go on for years and there will be setbacks, a cog has shifted in the universe.

And it's a masterful piece of cosmic timing that it comes on the day marking the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Andrew Sullivan notes the anniversary and the beginning of a new era.

With apologies to the late Ricky Nelson, I got home too late last night to catch The Sopranos (thank Dog for HB02 tonight) but caught the last episode of The Practice. I liked that show until last season when it jumped the shark with Lindsay being convicted of murder and spending the first few episodes looking like a refugee from an Ida Lupino prison movie. I was very happy to see James Spader come on board, and if Fleet Street, the spin-off with him and William Shatner, follows the trail they started over the last couple of teaser episodes, it could provide an interesting diversion. Or it could be another AfterM*A*S*H.

The reason for my late arrival was a mechanical problem with the plane leaving Toledo (some loose screws on a panel - which sounds like the McLaughlin Report - needed to be dealt with) which delayed the flight for an hour and a half. That had no effect on my connection in Chicago - I had a three-hour window - but my flight from Chicago to Miami was delayed 45 minutes because of... actually, they never really said other than another mechanical problem with our original plane somewhere else which made us wait for another plane coming in from Detroit. Anyway, I got home safe and sound; the only phone message was from an elderly woman speaking in Spanish. Another wrong number, I hope. I guess I have to go back to the "LISTEN CAREFULLY" message.

Being offline, though, I missed the dust-up over Sec. Powell being cut off Meet The Press by his press aide. I had seen the original interview at 11:00 a.m. in Toledo, and by the time I got to Miami eleven hours later it had turned into a full-fledged diplomatic flap. By this morning it had faded from the news cycle (I had to dig that link up at the AP archives).

It's good to be home, even though I had a great time with my folks and our friends gave Mom a great birthday party. There's nothing like sleeping in your own bed.

From The Blade:

A huge turnout is expected at a special Bedford Public Schools Board of Education meeting Tuesday to discuss the controversy over Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's plans to speak at its high school graduation on June 6.

"It's going to be one heck of a meeting," board member Laura Senters said yesterday after board president Bill Henning confirmed that the issue had been added to the agenda.

Two board members on opposite sides of the Kerry speech asked Mr. Henning to add it to the meeting that had been called to discuss labor negotiations.

Requesting the addition were Steven Lennex, who called plans for Mr. Kerry's speech "a hijacking of our graduation," and John Mohr, who called it "something the kids will truly remember." Both have daughters in the graduating class.

Mr. Lennex has said he is the only school board member - but one of many community members - opposing Mr. Kerry's commencement address. He promised to offer alternatives Tuesday, including allowing Mr. Kerry to use school facilities for a speech another day and inviting President Bush to do the same.

He said the board could ask that Mr. Kerry grant an interview to student newspaper co-editor Brandon Spader. Mr. Spader, a senior, had asked President Bush and Mr. Kerry for interviews for the high school paper, The Goal Post.

The Kerry campaign responded by volunteering Mr. Kerry as a speaker at Bedford's graduation in the University of Toledo's Savage Hall. The school has not traditionally had guest speakers at commencement, but administrators agreed to have Mr. Kerry, without a formal vote of the school board. President Bush did not respond to Mr. Spader's request for an interview.

[edit]

Mr. Lennex, a Republican, said his opposition was unrelated to politics and declined to discuss his political affiliation or a $30 contribution he gave to the Bush campaign. That contribution is listed on the Bush campaign's Internet site.

Alec Byrne, president of the Bedford Township Republican Club, said Mr. Lennex is one of the club's 25 active members and "an active, grass-roots, conservative Republican."

Mr. Henning said a speech from Mr. Kerry seems like it should fit perfectly with the motto at the high school's front doors, "Enter to learn - depart to serve."

Ms. Senters, a Democrat, said she considers Mr. Kerry's appearance "a huge honor" and was surprised by the division it created. "I thought people would be delighted," she said.

Of course, if Mr. Bush had said he would come, Mr. Lennex would be the first to defend the action as part of the president's job to carry his message of peace and freedom throughout the galaxy.

Kudos to the kid for inviting both men; maybe the "grown-ups" in Bedford Township could learn something from their children.

Seymour Hersh's next installment is here in The New Yorker, detailing Rumsfeld's authorization to "do what you want" to prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

A Pentagon spokesman is saying it's all lies. Of course he is. Anyone who knows anything about special forces knows that the IMF disclaimer is bone-chillingly true: "If any of your agents should be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions."

This effectively hangs the lower-level troops and commanders out to dry with no other option than to point fingers elsewhere. And while they may be right - that the blame lies up the chain of command - they will never get anyone in flag country to admit their complicity. In a way I feel sorry for the accused, but "I was only following orders" hasn't worked since 1946.

Family duties and stuff like that take precedence. Check out the Friday Blogaround, or get outside and enjoy a nice spring weekend!

From Joe Conason in Salon.com:

When the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" launched its campaign against John Kerry 10 days ago, leadership and guidance were provided by Republican activists and presidential friends from Texas -- notably Houston attorney John E. O'Neill and corporate media consultant Merrie Spaeth. Indeed, although the group made its debut at a press conference in Washington, it looked and sounded like a Texas GOP operation.

On closer inspection, the ostensibly nonpartisan "Swift Boat Vets" seem to have another pair of significant sponsors with deep and long-standing Republican connections in Missouri. Both are officers of Gannon International, a St. Louis conglomerate that does lots of overseas business in, of all places, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Ties to Gannon can be traced via the Swift Boat Vets Web site (as an alert reader advised me last week). On April 14, the site was registered under the name of Lewis Waterman, Gannon's information technology manager, at 11301 Olive Boulevard in St. Louis, the firm's headquarters address. Although Waterman wouldn't discuss why he had set up the Web site, he didn't deny that his boss, Gannon president and CEO William Franke, had asked him to do so.

"The information about my client is confidential," said Waterman. He acknowledged knowing, however, that his boss Franke is a Navy veteran who served in Vietnam on swift boats. Gannon vice president Stephen Hayes, who oversees the company's office in Alexandria, Va., is likewise a swift boat veteran who first met Franke when they served together in the Mekong Delta.

[edit]

None of Gannon's profitable activities in the communist republic would be possible, of course, without the approval of the Hanoi government, which Franke has described as "strong" and "stable." Nor would Gannon be conducting business in Vietnam without the Clinton administration diplomacy, assisted by Sen. Kerry, that established diplomatic and trade ties with the United States in 1994. Franke first began traveling to Vietnam on behalf of Operation Smile, an American charity that provides plastic surgery to children abroad. The relationships he established during those humanitarian missions provided a considerable advantage in doing business under government auspices.

It was also during those early visits to Vietnam, as he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that Franke reached a clearer understanding of the war he had once fought as a young Navy lieutenant.

"As I looked back 20 years, I saw that it was a very imperial relationship we had with these people," said Franke in 1989. "We were young. We were there because we were told to be there and that they were the enemy. This time I saw them as human beings who had fears and hopes the same as we."

Yet he evidently cannot forgive John Kerry for reaching the same conclusion about that war and its victims, so many years before he finally did.

The trouble with flagrant irony is that the folks who are doing their best to demonstrate it have no idea they're doing it.

The plans had been in the works for months. Coded messages had been sent. Sly contacts with appropriate parties had been set up and sworn to secrecy. Finally the day arrived. I left no clues behind...no hints in the blog that today would be anything other than an ordinary day. It was all very neat.

The big project that I alluded to in the Friday Blogaround was, in reality, an airline ticket from Miami to Toledo to surprise my mom for her birthday this weekend. But when I walked out to the curb at Toledo Express Airport and saw the familiar car, who should be sitting in the passenger seat: Mom. "Fancy meeting you here," she said.

It turns out that the secret couldn't be kept. Too many things had to be cancelled (a trip to Columbus for a Kerry delegation meeting), too many people let in on it. I don't think my dad caved under the pressure; he just decided that it was better to let Mom in on it. So, the surprise was on me.

We had lunch at Loma Linda, one of the finest Mexican restaurants in the world (trust me - Toledo does have good Mexican food), and tomorrow we're going to go check out Oak Openings, the land conservancy project that's part of the work my dad has been doing with The Black Swamp Conservancy. Then the party, then back to Miami on Sunday afternoon. (Thanks, Chris, for watching the house...again! I owe you dinner.)

Happy Birthday, Mom.

A lot of bloggers have done some spring cleaning and spruced up their sites. And they've also managed to keep doing some good writing at the same time. Check out the new digs at Dohiyi Mir, Rubber Hose, The Invisible Library, Chris "Lefty" Brown, Blah3, and Unpopular Ideas (and if you've redesigned and I missed it, send me a housewarming note). I've been mulling over a new template, but can't decide which one. Suggestions welcome.

As for what's out there this week that caught my eye:

Mike at Musing's Musings on the family feud in the Republicans.

Echidne of the Snakes on the role of women in Abu Ghraib.

Collective Sigh on Powell's assertions.

Pen-Elayne catches up on her reading.

Wanda on her support for Kerry.

The Fulcrum gets back to work but has pictures of his vacation.

archy looks at Media Matters, the new site put up by David Brock, and his take-down of Rush.

iddybud has a link to send condolences to the Berg family.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat on this dim world.

That's it for now; I have a big project on my desk that will occupy me most of the day, but check out the blogroll and the rest of the gang at The Liberal Coalition. Happy Friday!

From the Washington Post:

BAGHDAD, May 13 -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made a surprise visit to the Iraqi capital Thursday and visited the Abu Ghraib jail facility that is the center of allegations of prisoner abuse.

To raucous applause, Rumsfeld told the troops in a cramped hall in the prison that he values their efforts in helping to make Iraq a free society, but he also tried to offer a morale boost to a unit that has been peppered with conflict in recent weeks.

"In recent months we've seen abuses here under our responsibility, and it's been a body blow for us," Rumsfeld said in somber tones over a dusty and hot gathering at the prison. "It doesn't represent America. It doesn't represent American values. It doesn't represent the values of you here in this room."

The brief trip comes amid controversy in Washington about the abuse allegations and questions about leadership within the military's chain of command.

Rumsfeld said the whirlwind trip is not intended to quell Iraqi concerns about those abuses, although he acknowledged that he would speak to officials of the occupation authority as well as those in charge of U.S. detainee operations in Iraq to hear their thoughts on the situation.

[edit]

That tour was bleak. Under a hazy sky, detainees rushed to the edge of concertina wire fences, their raggedy clothes flapping in the wind, many giving thumbs-down gestures to the convoy. Some raised their arms, others shouted, some just stood and watched.

"What are you going to do about this scandal?" read one handwritten sign held by two detainees, who chased the buses as they turned a corner. Another detainee stood nearby and waved a bandaged stump of a leg. "Help," read another sign.

If this was designed to deflect criticism and boost morale - like Bush's Thanksgiving trip - it will probably have the same results.

Perhaps we can learn something from our forebearers.

From the New York Times:

The explicit nature of the photographs left the lawmakers deeply conflicted over whether the images should be made public. Some who previously favored a public release said they had changed their minds and were swayed by remarks from military personnel that to do so would violate the prisoners' right to privacy and protection from humiliation under international law.

Flash back to the release of the Starr report in 1998. It was on the internet before the documents were delivered to Congress. The lawmakers weren't too concerned about the "right to privacy and protection from humiliation" then, now were they?

The Right Wing is all set to blame everybody left of Atilla the Hun for Abu Ghraib; gays, women in the military, porn, liberal academia, feminists, Hollywood, journalism; you name it. See the list here and here from Timothy Noah's Chatterbox columns in Slate.

One name is noticeably absent - Bill Clinton. But don't worry, campers; someone will get around to him soon, I'm sure.

From his column today in the New York Times:

I admit, I'm a little slow. Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion — as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did — I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to change course because confronting their mistakes didn't just involve confronting reality, but their own politics.

It reminds me of the old farmer who, every time he saddled up his mule to ride into town, would bash it right between the eyes with a two-by-four. When confronted with his apparent moment of animal cruelty, the farmer shrugged and explained, "Ya gotta get his attention first."

In Salon.com, James C. Moore has a fascinating profile of Karen Hughes, who has turned her dedication to George W. Bush into a cult-like devotion. Here's a snippet:

In the carefully rendered world where Hughes lives, the weapons of mass destruction are not missing; they have only to be discovered. Terrorists hate freedom and liberty and equality, instead of hating Americans. A man who won a Silver Star for shedding blood for his country needs to explain himself, while a young lieutenant who skipped out on an officer's commission and a coveted pilot's slot has "served honorably." On Planet Hughes, life is returning to normal in Iraq, the horrors are diminishing and the casualties of Americans and Iraqis are not that significant. It's a happy place where presidents never make mistakes and there is never anything to be sorry about. One can almost see her in the back of the room, her mouth rounded with expression and secretly moving in unison with the president as he speaks the words "Donald Rumsfeld is a superb secretary of defense."

After all of the troops have come home, a powerful cleric is ruling Iraq with a theocratic government and Bush has been retired to his ranch by an angry electorate, the president's closest friend will be undaunted. Years from now, when historians begin to insist that Iraq was the greatest geopolitical mistake ever made by an American president, she will be there disputing their interpretations.

Karen Hughes will always believe.

Read the rest (subscription/Day Pass required). It's creepy.

Polling is a notoriously inexact science - the equivalent of reading tea leaves with computers, as one pollster noted - but an article in The Washington Monthly by Chuck Todd on the historical aspects of past elections provides insight as to what might happen in November.

Over the last year, most political TV shows handicapping the upcoming presidential election have repeated the refrain that the race will be extremely tight. Last month, CNN's astute commentator Jeff Greenfield hosted an entire segment on how easily this election could turn out like 2000, with President Bush and Sen. John Kerry splitting victories in the popular vote and the electoral college. Greenfield even threw out the possibility of an electoral college split of 269-269, brought about by a shift of just two swing states that went for Bush last time, New Hampshire, and West Virginia. He ended his feature with the conventional wisdom among Washington pundits: "We're assuming this election will stay incredibly close." Reporters covering the campaign echo this expectation, sprinkling their campaign dispatches with references to the "closely fought" electoral race and "tight election."

[edit]

There are perfectly understandable reasons why we expect 2004 to be close. Everyone remembers the nail-biting 2000 recount. A vast number of books and magazine articles describe the degree to which we are a 50/50 nation and detail the precarious balance between red and blue states. And poll after poll show the two candidates oscillating within a few percentage points of one another. There are also institutional factors that drive the presumption that the race will be tight. The press wants to cover a competitive horse-race. And the last thing either campaign wants to do is give its supporters any reason to be complacent and stay home on election day.

But there's another possibility, one only now being floated by a few political operatives: 2004 could be a decisive victory for Kerry. The reason to think so is historical. Elections that feature a sitting president tend to be referendums on the incumbent--and in recent elections, the incumbent has either won or lost by large electoral margins. If you look at key indicators beyond the neck-and-neck support for the two candidates in the polls--such as high turnout in the early Democratic primaries and the likelihood of a high turnout in November--it seems improbable that Bush will win big. More likely, it's going to be Kerry in a rout.

Read the rest here.

Polls have been wrong in the past. Just ask the editors of The Literary Digest who predicted that Alf Landon would beat FDR in his first bid for re-election in 1936, or the editors of LIFE magazine who were so confident that Thomas E. Dewey would beat Truman in 1948 that they ran a spread with Gov. Dewey as "the next president." So we can't just sit back and hope that historical trends are right. This time we have to make them happen.

An article in the March 1 edition of The American Prospect by Elizabeth Benedict got me to thinking about writers and writing. It also got me thinking about the foundation of where I come from as a writer and what forms my expression in words.

Twelfth in a Series
(Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three) (Part Four) (Part Five) (Part Six) (Part Seven) (Part Eight) (Part Nine) (Part Ten) (Part Eleven)

I was setting up my little stereo system last week after unpacking. To test it, I pulled out an old CD that I hadn't played in a long time; Nether Lands by Dan Fogelberg. The title song is the first cut, and my response, as always, was immediate and overwhelming. For a few moments I was glad I was alone in the house because I was sobbing uncontrollably.

That song always has that effect on me. I connect it with so many memories of living in Colorado (the album was recorded in Nederland, Colorado, up the canyon from Boulder), of spending my summers in Rocky Mountain National Park, and the lyrics get right to me, especially the line,

I've seen the bottom and I've been on top, but mostly I've lived in between.
And where do you go when you get to the end of your dream?

I used the song when I directed a production of The Hunter in 1984 along with the second movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony. To me, both pieces added a great deal to the telling of the story, even if they only meant it to me. (I can't tell you how many times I've wondered where I will go when I get to the end of a dream.)

I'm not particularly musical. I like listening to it, I have a decent collection of albums ranging from Bach to The Police, and I know enough about it to prefer listening to a good classical radio station over some of the crap that's out there now. I took voice lessons as a part of my theatre training and I can get by passably if I have to in a solo. I took folk and classical guitar lessons when I was in high school and did well enough to play at camp in groups and by myself, and I took piano lessons when I was ten or so to the point where I can sit down and thump something out if it's in C.

So what does that have to do with my writing? I don't know the conscious connection, but when I look back at my work, I find that music is threaded through the stories as a part of the element. It seems to set the tone, as it were. When I wrote The Hunter, Dvorak's plaintive tunes suggested mountains and wilderness, and the first line of Nether Lands, "High on this mountain, the clouds down below, I'm feeling so strong and alive," conveys many of the feelings of the main character. Dark Twist, the play about the boarding school, cites The Doors' Strange Days, an album that got me through many lonely times at St. George's by pretty much summing up how I felt about the place. The title of The Purer, Brighter Years is drawn from a line in a hymn that is sung every Sunday in the chapel near where my family spent our summers.

It is the winds of God that dries my vain regretful tears,
Until with braver thoughts shall rise the purer, brighter years.
If cast on shores of selfish ease or pleasure I should be;
Lord, let me feel thy fresh'ning breeze,
And I'll put back to sea.

The play is about an elderly woman who gives up living in a retirement home to spend her last years living in her house on Lake Michigan, so I thought the sentiment was perfect for Bessie as she took up her life in the northwoods.

The connection, then, must be what we called in acting class "sense-memory recall." If you want to evoke a memory of something, use something from another sense - a smell, a sound, an image - to bring it back and work from there. The sense of smell works best, according to psychologists, but since Smell-O-Vision doesn't work on the stage or the page (no, I'm not going to include Scratch-n-Sniff in my manuscripts), sound is the next best thing to pull out the memories. Radio stations have figured this out, especially in targeting the baby boomers; why do you think the "Classic Rock" format with hits from the '60's and '70's is so widespread? Play a cut by the Beach Boys and suddenly it's the summer of 1967 when you were young, strong, and in love: pliable to buy whatever the advertiser wants to sell you.

When I sit down to write I hear music in the background - either real or imagined - just as I hear the dialogue and see the movements of the characters. It's part of finding the Muse and including her in the process of turning thoughts to words. It's an incredibly personal thing - I never know exactly what feelings will come through. But just as Nether Lands brings out my own memories, maybe in some small way the words and images it helps form will convey those feelings to the reader. And that is the whole point.

Via Rubber Hose comes this link to a story on the anger of the family of Nicholas Berg.

Michael Berg lashed out at the U.S. military and Bush administration, saying his son might still be alive had he not been detained by U.S. officials in Iraq without being charged and without access to a lawyer.

Nick Berg, a small telecommunications business owner, spoke to his parents on March 24 and told them he would return home on March 30. But Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. He was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days.

His father, Michael, said his son wasn't allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer.

FBI agents visited Berg's parents in West Chester on March 31 and told the family they were trying to confirm their son's identity. On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day Berg was released. He told his parents he hadn't been mistreated.

Michael Berg said he blamed the U.S. government for creating circumstances that led to his son's death. He said if his son hadn't been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave the country before the violence worsened.

Ironically, Nicholas Berg was a supporter of the Bush administration and believed the war was justified.

From TAPPED:

RUMSFELD MUST GO, DAY 6. The number of media outlets calling for Donald Rumsfeld to leave his post has mushroomed in recent days, including some of the leading papers in battleground states.

Jim Jordan and colleagues at the Thunder Road Group, who send out regular e-mail updates for America Coming Together that are every bit as pleasantly vicious as the Center for American Progress's Progress Report, though with little of the editorializing, have pulled together a nice list of the regional papers calling for Rumsfeld's head:

Kansas City Star, May 10:

“Washington must prove to the world it is serious about reclaiming the moral high ground and holding accountable those who were responsible for this debacle. This requires the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld… a new defense chief is needed to deal with the world's anger.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 9:

“Last week, we called upon Rumsfeld to resign for a series of costly miscalculations: exaggerating the Iraqi threat before the war, underestimating the cost of the war, mishandling the occupation and botching the prison abuse investigation. Rumsfeld rejects all of those as reasons to resign.

“But Rumsfeld said he would leave if he is no longer effective. American citizens and soldiers need a defense secretary who can concentrate on the volatile situation in Iraq and on protecting our troops, not one engulfed in scandal and focused on protecting his own hide.

Army Times, May 10:

“Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war…

“But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons. There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers… but while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership…

“Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.

Philadelphia Inquirer, May 9:

“Donald Rumsfeld should resign as U.S. secretary of defense. If he lacks the decency and courage to do so, President Bush should fire him…

“He has to go. When you say you stand for a sacred principle such as human rights, you must stand for it. You can't treat it as an option to be discarded when inconvenient.

“He must go. If President Bush can't see that, then he must not grasp the risks that events in Iraq now pose to America's security and moral standing.”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 7:

“If President Bush really wants to clean this stain off America, never mind his administration, he needs to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld”

Toledo Blade, May 7:

“Donald Rumsfeld owes it to President Bush to fall on his sword and resign”

Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 7:

“Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, should resign immediately. If they do not, they should be fired...”

Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 7:

“It is time for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to prepare the final document of a long and sometimes illustrious public career: his letter of resignation…”

Arizona Daily Star, May 7:

“If Rumsfeld were sincere in serving the president, he would resign...”

Des Moines Register, May 7:

“His resignation would be appropriate, but it would leave unanswered the question of whether some responsibility extends even higher up. Rumsfeld, after all, has always acted with the full confidence and complete agreement of President Bush. But presidents don't resign over such things -- they do damage control instead.”

The Kerry campaign, for its part, is holding a petition drive calling for Rumsfeld's ouster. So far, more than 320,000 people have signed it, according the the Kerry campaign.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but those papers don't exactly sound like a collection of the leaders of the SCLM.

The New York Times' lead editorial for today starts off with this thought:

The administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers in the battlefield, far away from President Bush and his political team. That cynical approach was on display yesterday morning in the second Abu Ghraib hearing in the Senate, a body that finally seemed to be assuming its responsibility for overseeing the executive branch after a year of silently watching the bungled Iraq occupation.

The senators called one witness for the morning session, the courageous and forthright Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who ran the Army's major investigation into Abu Ghraib. But the Defense Department also sent Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, to upstage him. Mr. Cambone read an opening statement that said Donald Rumsfeld was deeply committed to the Geneva Conventions protecting the rights of prisoners, that everyone knew it and that any deviation had to come from "the command level." A few Republican senators loyally followed the script, like Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who offered the astounding comment that he was "more outraged by the outrage" than by the treatment of prisoners. After all, he said, they were probably guilty of something.

Aside from Sen. Inhofe, they can look to their own pages for another example of Admin-spin, William Safire:

Last month, Democrats joined a book-promoting author to try to place the blame for failing to stop Al Qaeda's attacks on an unconcerned President Bush and the bumbling heads of the C.I.A. and F.B.I.

This month, Democrats led by Michigan Senator Carl Levin are imputing blame for the pornographic sadism of a dozen guards and interrogators to a chain of command on up to Donald Rumsfeld and Bush. The abuses, Levin charged, were "clearly planned and suggested by others."

[edit]

Those of us who believe in the nobility of exporting freedom cannot trivialize the scandal. But we need not let our dismay at the predations of some self-photographing creeps overwhelm the morally sound purpose of our antiterror campaign. Nor should the dereliction of some officers detract from the brave and upright service of almost all our warriors.

Though polls show that most Americans understand this, the atmosphere in the BosNyWash corridor is that of panic. Even some of my hard-line brethren are urging that we throw a few leaders off the sled to palliate the pack in pursuit; others offer an emergency exit strategy that is "cut and walk fast."

Mr. Safire is an old hand at deflecting damaging news - he was a speechwriter for Richard Nixon - and he has an almost spasmodic ability to point to others; you don't think he doesn't mean to include Hillary when he talks about the "BosNyWash corridor," do you? (It's almost like a drinking game with Safire: every time he mentions Hillary and her nefarious plans to become president, you take a shot.)

Fortunately there are more cooler heads that will prevail, including some Republicans such as John Warner and Lindsey Graham, as noted by Talking Points Memo:

Graham has become some mix of the star and the conscience of these proceedings because of his specialized knowledge as an Air Force JAG and his ability to see that this goes beyond partisan politics, threatening as it does not only America's honor, but (in a way someone like Inhofe could probably never understand) also her power.

Graham got it exactly right today when he said: "When you are the good guys, you've got to act like the good guys."

What's really ironic is that the more the spinners try to make the public look elsewhere and take the heat off the administration, the more cynical they sound about finding the truth and more blantant about doing nothing else but saving their own asses.

Senator 'Outraged by Outrage' at Prison Abuse

As others condemned the reported abuse of Iraqi prisoners, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe on Tuesday expressed outrage at the worldwide outrage over the treatment by American soldiers of those he called "terrorists" and "murderers."

"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," the Oklahoma Republican said at a U.S. Senate hearing probing the scandal.

Inhofe is an idiot. To quote the immortal Hawkeye Pierce, "I'll see your outrage and raise you two despises."

Cheney Gets Good News from Heart Checkup

Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a history of heart problems, underwent a regular cardiovascular checkup at a Washington hospital on Tuesday and later emerged with good news from his doctor, a spokesman said.

Cheney, 63, spent part of the morning having an EKG, an echocardiogram and a stress test at George Washington University Medical Center. He resumed his regular duties before midday.

"The vice president was told by his doctor that all the news was very good," said Cheney spokesman Kevin Kellems.

He actually has a heart? Could have fooled me; I thought Borgs had cybernetic implants.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 3:27 PM  

From the New York Times:

Video Seems to Show Beheading of American

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: May 11, 2004

Filed at 12:53 p.m. ET

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- A video posted Tuesday on an Islamic militant Web site appeared to show a group affiliated with al-Qaida beheading an American in Iraq, saying the death was revenge for the prisoner-abuse scandal.

The video showed five men wearing headscarves and black ski masks, standing over a bound man in an orange jumpsuit who identified himself as an American from Philadelphia.

After reading a statement, the men were seen pulling the man to his side and cutting off his head with a large knife. They then held the head out before the camera.

From the New York Times:

General Cites Command and Training Lapses in Prison Abuse

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, the Army general who wrote the report about abuses of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers, said today that rampant failures of leadership, training and discipline led to the violations at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.

He said leadership failures could be traced as high as the brigade commander; Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which oversaw the prison facilities during the time the abuses were committed.

Republicans: "We're trying to figure out a way to blame this on Clinton. Check back with us on Crossfire."

I admire writers who can say in a few words what some of us (including me) take paragraphs to say. Anne at Peevish does just that.

Joshua Michael Marshall has a very detailed analysis of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report on prisoner abuse in Iraq.

The key passage is probably on page 11 where it states that "methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information. Several military intelligence officers confirmed to ICRC that it was part of the military intelligence process to hold a person deprived of his liberty naked in a completely dark and empty cell for a prolonged period [,] to use inhumane and degrading treatment, including physical and psychological coercion, against persons deprived of their liberty to secure their cooperation." [italics added by JMM]

As much as we'd like to believe that our system is somehow better than everybody else's, when it comes right down to it, it's not just a "few bad apples." It's an orchard.

Oh, shit.

David Brock's new book is excerpted in Salon.com.

For the first time since 1929, the Republican Party controls all three branches of government. Fewer people identify with the Democratic Party today than at any time since the New Deal. Conservatism seems the prevailing political and intellectual current, while liberalism seems a fringe dispensation of a few aging professors and Hollywood celebrities. People ask me, a former insider, how the Republican Right has won political and ideological power with such seeming ease and why Democrats, despite winning the most votes in the last three presidential elections, seem to be caught in a downward spiral, still able to win at the ballot box but steadily losing the battle for hearts and minds.

While it is not the only answer, my answer is: It's the media, stupid.

When I say this, in a more respectful way, to folks outside the right wing, I usually get either of two responses. Those who receive their news from the New York Times and National Public Radio give me blank stares. They are living in a rarefied media culture -- one that prizes accuracy, fairness, and civility -- that is no longer representative of the media as a whole. Those who have heard snippets of Rush Limbaugh's radio show, have caught a glimpse of Bill O'Reilly's temper tantrums on the FOX News Channel, or occasionally peruse the editorials in the Wall Street Journal think I'm a Cassandra. They view this media as self-discrediting and therefore irrelevant. They are living in a vacuum of denial.

[edit]

Those who understand what I mean are either members of the media itself, have read media-criticism books or Internet sites devoted to the subject, or are in the political trenches every day dealing with the media. The gap between those who recognize right-wing media power for what it is and those who don't is wide and deep, as if they inhabit parallel universes. The gap is dangerous to democracy and needs to be closed.
I know there is a Republican Noise Machine because I was once part of it. From the Washington Times, to a stint as a "research fellow" at the Heritage Foundation (the Right's premier think tank), to a position as an "investigative writer" at the muckraking magazine The American Spectator, and as the author of a best-selling right-wing book, I forwarded the right-wing agenda not as an open political operative or advocate but under the guise of journalism and punditry, fueled by huge sums of money from right-wing billionaires, foundations, and self-interested corporations.

By the time I said good-bye to the right wing in 1997, what was once a voice in the wilderness was drowning out competing voices across all media channels. The most influential political commentator in America, Rush Limbaugh, and his hundreds of imitators saturated every media market in the country, providing 22 percent of Americans -- not only conservatives but independent swing voters -- with their primary source of news. Conservatives had changed the face of the cable news business with the establishment of the top-rated FOX News Channel, a slicker broadcast version of the Moonie Washington Times. Pundit Ann Coulter and her fanatical ilk topped the best-seller lists, becoming superstars in the world of political punditry. The Spectator juggernaut -- which had a circulation of three hundred thousand per month at its height in the early 1990s -- had been replaced by Internet gossip Matt Drudge, who gets more than 6.5 million visitors to his site every day. Although enormous subsidies were still being pumped into right-wing media that did not turn a profit, right-wing media also had become a multibillion-dollar business, a development that powerfully affected all other commercial media.

The lies, smears, and vicious caricatures leveled against Bill and Hillary Clinton by this right-wing media, and then repeated in virtually every media venue in the country, have now been well documented, not least in "Blinded by the Right." In that book, I compared the anti-Clinton propaganda to a virus as it seeped off the pages of the Spectator into the minds of every sentient American. My memoir ended in 2000; what I did not fully comprehend then, but what is apparent to me now as I have watched the politics of the last few years unfold, is that the virus was not Clinton-specific. In fact, it had nothing to do with the Clintons per se; rather, in different strains, it would afflict any and every political opponent of the right wing, including Al Gore, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, and the mourners of Senator Paul Wellstone, every major Democrat seeking the presidency in 2004, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org. What we have here, as a criminal investigator might say, is a pattern.

[edit]

My view is that unchecked right-wing media power means that in the United States today, no issue can be honestly debated and no election can be fairly decided. If California voters recall their governor in the belief that the state budget deficit is four times higher than it actually is, if Americans think Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 before hearing any evidence, if 19 percent of the public thinks it is in the top 1 percent tax bracket, if Americans view criticism of the government's national security policies as tantamount to treason -- thank the right-wing media and those who abet it.

Read the rest here (subscription / Day Pass required).

The Right Wing has it so knocked. They can just make shit up. Meanwhile, people with scruples...

From CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush praised embattled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday, saying, "Thank you for your leadership. You are courageously leading our nation in the war against terror.

"You are doing a superb job. You are a strong secretary of defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude."

Bush delivered his statement at the Pentagon amid the continuing controversy over abuses committed by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison and calls for Rumsfeld's resignation.

That's Washington for "There's a pistol in the top drawer of your desk. You know what to do."

My Faithful Correspondent shared an e-mail thread with me that started when she was included in an e-mail by one of her fellow Democrats. It began as a letter to the editor of The Blade. He cc'd his Republican niece (RN), who replied and evoked a response from FC.

----- Original Message -----
From: dan ryan
To: letters@theblade.com
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 12:59 PM
Subject: Kerrys Medals deserved

The Republican campaign is really absurd in trying to negate the importance of the medals that John Kerry so justly deserved. There is a process the military goes through in determining whether these acts are truly fit to be awarded. Of course this administration's president and vice president would not be aware of this, not having served in combat. This is one that
should backfire on them.

Daniel Ryan

----- Original Message -----
From: Republican Niece
To: letters@theblade.com ; dan ryan
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 1:16 PM
Subject: Re: Kerrys Medals deserved

Thank you Uncle Dan for your opinion. I don't know enough about it to persuade my thinking. I know I don't like Kerry at all. I honestly don't want either one in the presidency. I was told that I need to pick the lesser of two evils. I am voting Bush again. Still love me??

Your niece

----- Original Message -----
From: Faithful Correspondent
To: Republican Niece
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 3:38 PM
Subject: Re: Kerrys Medals deserved

Tut tut, Carla - you don't want an anti-woman, anti-environment right wing religious fanatic controlling your life for another four years do you?

. . . .a friend of your Uncle Dan's

----- Original Message -----
From: Republican Niece
To: Faithful Correspondent
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 4:09 PM
Subject: Re: Kerrys Medals deserved

FC,

I don't know about all of that. What can I say? I do like Bush over Kerry.

RN

----- Original Message -----
From: Faithful Correspondent
To: Republican Correspondent
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: Kerrys Medals deserved

Are you registered to vote? Better take care of that first. Your Uncle Dan is a smart guy. Listen to what he says. I can send you some information, but not until you register.

----- Original Message -----
From: Republican Niece
To: Faithful Correspondent
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2004 8:21 PM
Subject: Re: Kerrys Medals deserved

Yes I am registered, have been since 1988. Yes, my uncle is a smart guy I agree. However, I am a Republican and voting for Bush. I do not like Kerry, I think he is a joke, and an embarrassment.

Thank you for the offer, but please do not send my any information on politics. I am not all that involved and do not care to be.

----- Original Message -----
From: Faithful Correspondent
To: Republican Niece
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2004 10:14 AM
Subject: Re: Kerrys Medals deserved

sorry - thought you were about 20 years old.

----- Original Message -----
From: Republican Niece
To: Faithful Correspondent
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2004 10:52 AM
Subject: Re: Kerrys Medals deserved

FC,

That's ok. I know you were trying to be helpful. I honestly didn't mean to sound rude. I used to be Democrat, but I agree with the Republican view on more issues than democrats, so I changed my party.

Take care,

RN

----- Original Message -----
From: Faithful Correspondent
To: Republican Niece
Sent: Friday, May 07, 2004 2:12 PM
Subject: Re: Kerrys Medals deserved

I used to be a Republican, but Richard Nixon cured me. I'm a liberal Republican turned Democrat. This particular candidate the Dems are running is so strong, so intelligent, so honest and will be so good for our country that I'm anticipating a landslide. What we have in office now is just plain scary. In fact, anything (even Dennis Kucinich would be an improvement - at least Dennis is smart:) )

Better get on board.

FC

[FC added to me: "There was no reply to this last piece of self-indulgence."]

In other words, "Don't bother me with the facts; my mind is made up."

I especially like the line about Kerry being "a joke and an embarrassment." Compared to the present administration? Are you out of your mind, RN?

We have our work cut out for us, boys and girls.

Read it here. It has pictures and everything.

Nancy Reagan spoke out in favor of stem cell research over the weekend:

Former first lady Nancy Reagan endorsed human embryonic research Saturday night at a star-studded fund-raiser.

Such research is generally opposed by political conservatives and many anti-abortion groups because it involves the destruction of days-old human embryos. President Bush signed an executive order in 2001 limiting research to existing embryonic stem cell lines.

However, Reagan and others believe the use of stem cells taken from embryos could lead to cures for such illnesses as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, which afflicts Reagan's husband, former President Ronald Reagan.

"Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him," she said. "Because of this I'm determined to do whatever I can to save other families from this pain. I just don't see how we can turn our backs on this."

The Republican former first lady became one of the first conservative public figures to support human embryo research when she first spoke in favor of it more than three years ago.

Say what you will about Ronald Reagan and his legacy - which in light of the current administration, doesn't seem all that awful (my God, what have they driven me to?) - anything that can be done to treat or find a cure for such diseases is worth all the real science we can muster. I'd love to hear the phone conversation between Mrs. Reagan and Dubya over this particular topic.

This one is from Dan Payne in Salon.com (subscription / Day Pass required).

Last week, as the Bush campaign and the news media continued to question John Kerry's heroism during and after the Vietnam War, I detected the beat of what I call the Bush family's Texas two-step: "Wimp" your opponent, then "weird" him. Make him look soft on defense, then show him to be out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans.

When I discussed this with a friend from Bush War I, the one against Michael Dukakis (I made TV spots for Dukakis during the presidential primaries), we were struck by the banality of the Bushes' strategy. In 1988, opposing Dukakis, they ran against a Massachusetts liberal. In 2004, opposing Kerry, they're again trying to run against a Massachusetts liberal.

[edit]

Sadly, such attacks are nothing new to Democrats running for president. Republicans have been painting Democrats as dangerously soft on defense since Nixon massacred George McGovern (an honest-to-goodness World War II hero bomber pilot) in 1972. The modest McGovern chose not to discuss his heroism during that campaign; in the Midwest, such a declaration would have been considered boastful. Besides, he was the antiwar candidate. That year, Massachusetts became enshrined as America's most liberal state when it was the only state in the union to choose McGovern over Nixon. At the same time, in the same state, an antiwar Vietnam veteran lost a race for Congress. His name: John Kerry.

[edit]

Whether the Texas two-step succeeds will depend in large part on the toughness and discipline of Kerry and his campaign. It will also depend on whether members of the news media use this early phase of the campaign to find better ways to cover the race, the smears and the candidates -- or approach the Bushes, as they have so often done, on bended knee.

While I'm inclined to say that it's not the same race and Kerry has vowed to respond to every charge, it's worth reading because the more people who are aware of the tactics used in 1988 to "wimp and weird" the Democratic candidate by the Bush cabal, the less chance they have have of succeeding.

Public relations and our image abroad are more important than competent leadership in the Pentagon.

From WTVJ Channel 6:

LONGBOAT KEY, Fla. -- Rep. Katherine Harris, the former Florida secretary of state who oversaw the disputed 2000 presidential election, admits she's responsible for a vote going uncounted -- her own.

Harris forgot to sign her absentee ballot when she voted in Longboat Key's local election on March 9.

"I feel terrible," the Republican said Friday. "It's a mistake. I regret it."

Harris said she was in a rush to catch a flight to Washington, D.C., when she handed the unsigned ballot to her husband to send in. She said she usually votes in person and has never had trouble before.

"I know how important voting is," Harris said.

The election decided the fate of a proposed community center, a Longboat Key Town Commission seat, and a term-limit proposal for town officials. Harris later received a letter from the supervisor of elections informing her that her vote did not count.

As secretary of state, Harris oversaw the disputed count that gave George W. Bush a crucial 537-vote victory over Al Gore in Florida. Harris said all along that she simply followed the letter of the law, but she became a darling of GOP activists and was elected to Congress in 2002.

There's a scene in Star Wars (the episode that came out in 1977...what is that, Episode IV?) where Luke, Han, and Leia have all ended up in the bottom of what turns out to be a huge trash compactor. Han is not impressed with Luke's leadership so far, and says so. Luke retorts, "It could be worse." At that moment, the trash compactor kicks in, and the walls start to close in. Han replies, "It's worse!"

Just recast that little scenario with members of the Bush cabinet (Condi as Leia?) and you have the current situation in the White House with the Iraqi prison scandal. And as Rummy said, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

I don't need a holiday - manufactured or not - to say thanks to my mom for everything she's done for me. I also feel blessed to have her as a friend, confidante and faithful correspondent.

Love you, Mom.

Today marks the six-month anniversary of Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Special thanks to NTodd at Dohiyi Mir who coached me through the set-up and offered good advice and also provided the impetus to get The Liberal Coalition off the ground back in December. And thanks to Steve Bates at The Yellow Doggerel Democrat and upyernoz at Rubber Hose for being my first links (after NTodd) back on Saturday, November 8.

Thanks to all the readers, commenters, and friends who've had suggestions, ideas, thoughts, and brickbats for me and this operation, and to all the other bloggers who've linked to it. I'm glad to be a part of this brave new world.

Last night over an excellent Mexican dinner, my Good Friend Bob said that the thing that pissed him off the most about Secretary Rumsfeld's testimony was that the secretary seemed more upset that the pictures were released to the press than what was in the pictures.

Forget the fact that Abu Ghraib is now shorthand for American foreign policy and arrogance in the Arab world. Forget the fact that any American POW in the hands of the Iraqi insurgents will receive the same treatment as depicted in the pictures. Forget the fact that all the arguments we ever had for invading a sovereign nation - WMD's, ties to Al-Qaeda, the torture and rape rooms - are all gone. Our moral authority, shaky at best to begin with, has been destroyed. And the one thing we had going for us - the higher ground of the ideals of democracy - is gone.

To worry about who let the press in on this says more about the priorities of this government than all the apologies and flagellation on live TV in front of Congress.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

A group of guards at the Broward County Main Jail kicked and stomped on a handcuffed, naked inmate Wednesday night until he was unconscious, according to several inmates who said they witnessed the beating.

"The way they whupped on that guy last night was unbelievable. He was naked and handcuffed, lying on his belly, and three guys were still beating on the guy," said William Brainard, an inmate awaiting trial on charges of exploiting the elderly. "I believe if you get in an argument with a deputy, they have to subdue you. But even after they had him subdued" they kept kicking and hitting him, Brainard said.

"There was so much blood in that room, it looked like a murder scene," he said.

Five inmates said they saw the detention deputies beat inmate Alvin Bell in a small supply room in cellblock 7A, a room used to strip-search inmates when they return from court appearances.

Fort Lauderdale Fire-Rescue medics responded to the jail and rushed Bell, 30, to the hospital with severe traumatic injuries about 7:40 p.m.

Bell's lawyer, Maurice Graham, who visited him at Broward General Medical Center on Thursday night, said he was stunned to see Bell's swollen, bruised face and the cut above his right eye that might need surgery to repair.

"It really looked like a savage beating that got out of control, really out of control," Graham said.

Maybe that's why some say it's no big deal about what happened in Abu Ghraib - it's as American as cherry pie.

First, take note of some new additions and some changes to the blogroll:

Sticks of Fire and Steve Koppelman (not to be confused with Kop's Blog). Both are Floridians and both have a unique style. Stop by and say hi to them. Sofarsogoo, a regular visitor to many of The Liberal Coalition sites, has started his own blog, Unpopular Ideas. It's good to see that happen. Also, Wonkette, who's gotten herself quite a name among the blogosphere for gossip and just plain fun writing, joins the lineup.

Some of our friends have gone into the shop for touch-up work and emerged in great shape, including Dancing with Myself and Blah3. Check them out.

Among my fellow writers, here's a look at what's caught my eye:

Michael at Musing's musings is in the middle of finals.

corrente has the goods on the final episode of Friends.

Wanda (Words on a Page) wonders about the true nature of Americans.

Elayne is all moved in to her new place and even has her DSL hooked up. She gives us a tour of New York City on her way to work.

NTodd always has worthy and cogent commetary on current events, but he is also an excellent photographer. Makes me almost (almost) wish I was up in Vermont for a crisp cool spring morning.

A lot of us are up in arms about the Iraqi prisoners. Rivka at Respectful of Otters looks at the psychological aspects. Scout (And Then...) thinks it's time for Rumsfeld to go, as does Guy at Rook's Rant. Andante of Collective Sigh notes the postponement of the release of the U.S. report on democracy and human rights for "technical reasons." Jesse has the perfect response to Bush's lack of knowledge from John Kerry, while Peter at Kick the Leftist has the responses of some who will do anything to make it sound like it's no big deal what went on in Abu Ghraib. Sheesh. The Invisible Library has been posting dispatches from Baghdad. Read the latest and then scroll back for more. And of course, to top it all off, Steve has a bit of doggerel that catches what should happen to Mr. Secretary of Defense perfectly.

archy notes that sanity finally prevailed in Darby, Montana.

Happy Furry Puppy Storytime offers prayers.

Goldberg and Guthrie go to the theatre.

Lisa of the delightful Kamikaze Kumquat on dealing with the issue of the brain-dead in Florida. No, not just Jeb...

Liz at Life as a Spectator Sport mulls over the abuse of religion by the Bush administration.

Like I always say, this is just the beginning of the list of the good stuff out there in the sidebar of this and many other blogs. In the meantime, Happy Friday!

Rush has compared the behavior of the Americans torturing the Iraqi prisoners to fraternity pranks - boys will be boys and all that. Just blowing off a little steam.

This from a guy who took 10,000 Oxycontin pills and denied having a problem with addiction. So when it comes to being a judge of what's "just a little," Rush is not exactly the source authority you're looking for.

As far as I know, Rush is using the term "fraternity prank" in the generic sense since I don't think he ever went to college. And judging by his former appearance, the only frat that he would have belonged to was Eta Bita Pi. If anything, he would have been the guy who would never have been rushed to join a frat (pun intended).

And if it was just a bunch of "fraternity pranks," why are the reports beginning to come down from reliable sources via TPM that Rumsfeld is on the verge of getting his hat (and his ass) handed to him?

From the Sun-Sentinel:

Some parents are upset over the timing of a school field trip that sends Broward County students to Orlando theme parks in the middle of Gay Days.

Gay Days, which is expected to bring about 140,000 people to the Orlando area in early June, is advertised as "creating a gay and lesbian atmosphere" throughout the region by organizing "theme park visits, over-the-top dance parties, and round-the-clock good times."

"If [students] were going to New Orleans, you wouldn't pick the week of Mardi Gras," complains Joanne Williams of Deerfield Beach, the parent of a seventh-grader.

The principal of Lyons Creek Middle in Coconut Creek is offering refunds for the June 4 trip, saying she was unaware of the timing when the trip was scheduled. But she maintains that parents should not be concerned in the first place.

"We plan this trip every year, and it's pretty much at the same time, and we've never had any problems," Principal Barbara Barrs said.

School district officials acknowledge other Broward schools will be visiting Orlando the same week, June 1-6, but would not say which schools.

"To cancel the trip solely because of other scheduled events happening would unfairly deprive the students of this experience without a rational reason in the absence of any apparent threat to the safety and well-being of the students," said spokesman Joe Donzelli.

Planners say Gay Days is a way for gays and lesbians and their families to be themselves on vacation.

Some Lyons Creek Middle parents argue that moms and dads -- not the schools -- should decide what they want their children exposed to. Two mothers say their children will not attend and a third has received a refund. They say more parents would probably feel the same if they knew about the timing.

Williams says she knew because she was in Orlando visiting with her family a few years ago when Gay Days happened to be going on. At Disney World and Universal Studios, she and her husband were offended by men groping each other in the streets, she said. She had her family left Disney early when, she says, she saw men wearing sexually explicit T-shirts and her husband saw a man in drag with no underwear beneath his skirt.

"To put your child in that, it's inappropriate," she said. "They are kids. If they see something, they could make comments and it could upset who they are talking to."

Mike Record, a gay teacher at Plantation Middle School, says he has been to the parks during Gay Days and "very little goes on that a parent would have to be concerned about." He called concerns to the contrary "homophobia."

"The perception that children don't belong among gay people is what [we] have been fighting for so long," he said. "It feeds into that perception that gay people are pedophiles."

Veronica Clemons, a spokeswoman for Disney, also disputes the mother's version of what Gay Days is like. Disney is not an event sponsor but welcomes all guests -- and requires them to abide by its policies, she said.

"It's pretty much business as usual, it's just a little busier. We expect all our guests to behave in a way that will not intrude on others," she said.

She added that the park has no more problems with behavior during Gay Days than it does on average. Chris Alexander-Manley, vice president of marketing for gaydays.com, said the park does not let in guests wearing drag and, when men have changed into drag inside the park, Disney has asked them to change back or leave.

He added that many of the gays and lesbians who attend Gay Days bring their families and also want a family-friendly atmosphere.

"If they are saying there are orgies in the streets and inappropriate behavior, those are lies," he said. "It's just a good time."

It's not like you're going to run into the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence singing a chorus of "Your Son Will Come Out Tomorrow..."

My Faithful Correspondent sent on this commentary by Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post, and wonders what the BBWW readership thinks Senator Kerry should do if he's elected.

As in a classic fairy tale or a not-so-classic game show, John Kerry finds himself in a closed room staring at three closed doors. One is labeled "Reduce U.S. Forces in Iraq." The second door reads "Maintain Troop Levels"; the third says "Increase Them."

And here's Kerry's problem: The risk of opening any of those doors exceeds the rewards.

If Kerry calls for downsizing our occupation force by so much as one buck private, the Republicans will go calculatedly berserk. He'll be yet another Massachusetts wuss and, worse yet, a geo-strategic flip-flopper -- backing off his current stance of maintaining or, if need be, increasing our force in Iraq.

The considerable irony here is that Kerry has maintained the same position on the war since he voted to authorize our intervention back in the fall of 2002: in favor of ousting Saddam Hussein but insisting we needed the backing and aegis of the United Nations and NATO to have the troop strength and legitimacy required to rebuild the nation. The flip-flopper on Iraq has been George W. Bush, who was single-minded when it came to getting Hussein but whose views on controlling postwar Iraq have gone from a truculent unilateralism to a Kerry-esque acknowledgement that we need the United Nations to run the place until an Iraqi government can assume sovereignty.

But say Kerry keeps to his current position, choosing to maintain or boost troop levels depending on the level of chaos that Iraq is suffering. Behind either of those doors stands Ralph Nader, with a new and more compelling raison d'être for his candidacy than he's had thus far. Nader now calls for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq within six months -- a position that recent polling shows is shared by more than 40 percent of the electorate, including, surely, tens of millions of Democrats and left-leaning independents.

Recent events - exacerbated by the treatment of prisoners - make it an even harder choice.

Noam Scheiber at The New Republic's &c has his own take on it.

Well, dear reader; what say you?

The Washington Post has released more photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq, including one showing a soldier holding a leash tied around a man's neck. He is naked and lying on the floor.

Mixed in with more than 1,000 digital pictures obtained by The Washington Post are photographs of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of one another while soldiers stand around them. There is another photograph of a naked man with a dark hood over his head, handcuffed to a cell door. And another of a naked man handcuffed to a bunk bed, his arms splayed so wide that his back is arched. A pair of women's underwear covers his head and face.

The graphic images, passed around among military police who served at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, are a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago on CBS's "60 Minutes II" and published by the New Yorker magazine. They appear to provide further visual evidence of the chaos and unprofessionalism at the prison detailed in a report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. His report, which relied in part on the photographs, found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" that were inflicted on detainees.

This group of photographs, taken from the summer of 2003 through the winter, ranges widely, from mundane images of everyday military life to pictures showing crude simulations of sex among soldiers. The new pictures appear to show American soldiers abusing prisoners, many of whom wear ID bands, but The Post could not eliminate the possibility that some of them were staged.

The photographs were taken by several digital cameras and loaded onto compact discs, which circulated among soldiers in the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cresaptown, Md. The pictures were among those seized by military investigators probing conditions at the prison, a source close to the unit said.

This doesn't sound like "a few bad apples." This sounds like a whole orchard.

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON, May 5 — President Bush on Wednesday chastised his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, for Mr. Rumsfeld's handling of a scandal over the American abuse of Iraqis held at a notorious prison in Baghdad, White House officials said.

The disclosures by the White House officials, under authorization from Mr. Bush, were an extraordinary display of finger-pointing in an administration led by a man who puts a high premium on order and loyalty. The officials said the president had expressed his displeasure to Mr. Rumsfeld in an Oval Office meeting because of Mr. Rumsfeld's failure to tell Mr. Bush about photographs of the abuse, which have enraged the Arab world.

In his interviews on Wednesday with Arab television networks, Mr. Bush said that he learned the graphic details of the abuse case only when they were broadcast last Wednesday on the CBS program "60 Minutes II." It was then, one White House official said, that Mr. Bush also saw the photographs documenting the abuse. "When you see the pictures," the official said, "it takes on a proportion of gravity that would require a much more extreme response than the way it was being handled."

Another White House official said, "The president was not satisfied or happy about the way he was informed about the pictures, and he did talk to Secretary Rumsfeld about it."

The disclosure of the dressing-down of the combative Mr. Rumsfeld was the first time that Mr. Bush has allowed his displeasure with a senior member of his administration to be made public. It also exposed the fault lines in Mr. Bush's inner circle that have deepened with the violence and political chaos in American-occupied Iraq.

See what happens when you let the president actually watch TV? I guess it was Rumsfeld's turn to hide the remote control from Bush, and he blew it.

An article in the March 1 edition of The American Prospect by Elizabeth Benedict got me to thinking about writers and writing. It also got me thinking about the foundation of where I come from as a writer and what forms my expression in words.

Eleventh in a Series
(Part One)
(Part Two)
(Part Three)
(Part Four)
(Part Five)
(Part Six)
(Part Seven)
(Part Eight)
(Part Nine)
(Part Ten)

I remember once years ago showing one of my plays to a colleague in grad school - I think it was Dark Twist. He read it, handed it back and sighed, "It's so you." Although I don't think he meant it that way, I took it as a compliment and was flattered.

There's no such thing as "true fiction." All the characters I create are me or an aspect of me, and if I model them on people I know, it's as if they're being seen through my eyes. Even the women sound like me, I suppose, although I must say that I have been accused - fairly - that I don't write stories with a lot of female characters. I don't know why that is; perhaps it's because I don't have a lot of "issues" with women and it's tough to write interesting characters if you get along well with them.

One thing I've learned as I write is that we human beings spend a lot of our adult lives making up and making amends for the slights and traumas of childhood. Writing is a wonderful way to change history. I was a geeky, scrawny teenager with terrible grades, so Bobby is strong, good-looking, and a B+ student. He makes friends easily; I did not. But I also gave him some struggles that I never had. He has a distant relationship with his parents; I am close to mine. And Bobby is, by the age of twenty, on the way to being an alcoholic. I don't drink, but that's because I've seen the effect it has on others and I'd rather not take the chance. He's me, just as is Richard, the narrator of Bobby's story, or Lee in The Hunter and the sequel The Purer, Brighter Years, Paul in Dark Twist, and Donny in Can't Live Without You. They're just different facets of the same person. Is there some deep psychological purpose in exploring all these different people with unique personalities and quirks? Is there some kind of multiple-personality disorder going on, or is it just a healthy form of artistic expression and exploration? Hell if I know; I'm just the writer.

Why do writers feel the need to change history? And what makes them think that anyone else could possibly care to read about their personal lives and the little mundanities that go with it? Is it all just a big ego trip?

I don't presume to speak for other writers. For me all I know is that there is something that is completed when I write a story. It is as if the struggle to get thoughts from my head through to the keyboard and into some coherent form on a page or a dance of electrons resolves and reshapes whatever it was that compelled me to tell the story in the first place. The characters that populate the story are my messengers and metaphors. (I have a friend - a fellow playwright and set designer - who describes actors as "props with feet.") As I said in the previous installment, it really doesn't matter to me whether or not the story is published or the play is produced. To me the act of completion is in the telling in my own words, not in having to tell the world. I save that for blogging.

From Salon.com (subscription / Day Pass required):

With just months to go in an election that ought to be a referendum on President Bush, the New York Times runs a front-page story: The Democrats are in serious trouble. Although Bush's approval ratings are low, the presumptive Democratic nominee can't get any traction. His campaign "continues to confront a cloud of doubts and reservations," the Times says, and voters are complaining that he hasn't offered the country a clear vision for the future.

It may sound like the Times on John Kerry in 2004. In fact, it's the Times on Bill Clinton in 1992.

The media began making funeral plans for the Kerry campaign over the weekend, and the New York Times led the way with a gloomy front-pager by Adam Nagourney. As it turns out, the predictions of Kerry's demise were more replay than revelation. It's certainly true that Kerry has problems -- his campaign lacks the money, the organizational structure, and the message discipline of the well-oiled Bush-Cheney machine -- but we've heard this before.

The Times painted an equally dour assessment of Clinton's prospects in a front-page piece in April 1992 headlined "Clinton Dogged by Voter Doubt." The Times said then that unnamed "political professionals in the Democratic Party" were troubled that Clinton hadn't made a better impression on the nation's voters. Nagourney's piece Sunday reported that "Democratic Party officials" have similar worries about Kerry.

But there's a key difference here: In April 1992, the New York Times/CBS News poll showed Clinton trailing President George H.W. Bush, 49 percent to 40 percent, among registered voters. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows Kerry and President George W. Bush in a statistical dead heat.

Clinton beat Bush 43 percent to 37 percent in November 1992.

[edit]

What's causing it is the widespread perception that Kerry should be squashing Bush right now. Bush has just had the worst month of his presidency. His war on Iraq seems to have spiraled out of control: More than 130 U.S. troops -- and 10 times as many Iraqis -- were killed in April, and the United States has lost the support of Spain and several other coalition members. The bipartisan commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11 has raised questions about the administration's inattentiveness to warnings of terror, and revelations from Bob Woodward and others have made it clear that Bush was obsessed with ousting Saddam Hussein even as U.S. troops were being deployed in Afghanistan. Bush stumbled through a rare prime-time news conference, and allegations that the president was AWOL during Vietnam resurfaced among stories of Kerry's war heroism.

Instead of running laps around Bush, Kerry is neck and neck with him in the national polls and still trying to define himself while defending against Republican attacks. "George Bush has had three of the worst months of his presidency, but they are stuck and they've got to move past this moment," Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's presidential campaign, told the Times.

Democratic analysts and strategists told Salon, however, that they think concerns about Kerry's progress are overstated. "The Democrats are overeager," says Ann Richards, the former Texas governor who branded Bush the elder as a spoiled rich kid and then lost a re-election bid to Bush the son. "They're anxious for this contest to gel, and it's too early for that."

Richards said Democrats are unaccustomed to having a presumptive nominee so early; at this point in the Clinton-Bush race, Clinton was still fending off former California Gov. Jerry Brown. "They are extremely impatient, and when that's expressed to me privately by well-intentioned individuals, I tell them to focus their attention on what they can do, not what the nominee should be doing."

[edit]

But Kerry needs more than offices and staff; he needs high-profile help to help him fend off Bush-Cheney attacks. While Bush has a hatchet man for a vice president and a cadre of Republican senators happy to lead the smear du jour against Kerry, it is frequently Kerry alone who must answer. While Kerry has relied in recent months on help from Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., they have faded from the scene of late -- perhaps the press simply no longer considers them news -- and no one has taken their place. The Democrats' would-be surrogate in chief, Bill Clinton, has been holed away in Chappaqua finishing his long-awaited memoirs amid speculation that instead of boosting Kerry's profile this summer, he might actually steal the limelight.

[edit]

Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress, says it's possible that the Bush-Cheney attacks on Kerry's war-hero status may be driving down Kerry's numbers in states that are safely Republican but may not be helping Bush in swing states. "It looked like Bush was making some headway in the battleground states at the end of March, but in April things may have gone the other way," he said.

Presidential elections don't turn on the national vote -- just ask President Al Gore -- and Teixeira said that polling from critical swing states is so sporadic and inconsistent that it's hard to make solid predictions about Electoral College numbers. But like many other Democrats, he says any panic about Kerry's prospects is "way too much, way too soon."

"We're six months away from the election," Teixeira said. "People think that just because Bush got a lot of bad news, Kerry should be 10 points ahead. I think they're kidding themselves."

Kerry has made mistakes, Teixeira said, and he'll have to start performing better. But beating Bush is "quote, doable," he said, and Kerry can do it. "It's a fair statement that Kerry is going to have to run a good campaign to beat him, but it's far too early to conclude he's incapable of doing it."

To quote the immortal Dr. Who: "Don't Panic."

The Detroit Tigers have slipped below .500, the Red Wings are out of the playoffs (you should have heard the coverage on CBC Radio 2 about the Calgary Flames; they were positively giddy), and the Florida Marlins have lost four in a row. But the Miami Heat make the NBA semis.

From CNN:

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A federal judge on Monday upheld a land swap that permits the Mormon church to restrict speech on a block of Main Street that it purchased from Salt Lake City.

U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball dismissed a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and others that said the deal violated the First Amendment by limiting speech and effectively endorsing the church.

The ACLU said it would appeal to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

Alan Sullivan, attorney for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said the church was gratified by the ruling. "The church wants the plaza to be an oasis of peace and beauty in the midst of our busy city, a place that everyone can enjoy," he said.

The city gave the church control of the plaza that it had purchased earlier in exchange for church-owned land elsewhere and more than $4 million.

Lee Siegel, a writer and one of the plaintiffs, said: "I did not expect a ruling in favor of ... fundamental constitutional right from any federal judge who's a product of Utah and its theocracy, which suffers from a severe and unhealthy allergy to dissent."

Any lawyers out there care to elucidate on whether or not property that is open to the public but controlled by a private entity (such as a church) is subject to the First Amendment? I thought that if you provided public access, you were obligated to honor the laws of the land. Silly me.

Disney bans Michael Moore's new film from distribution:

May 5, 2004

Friends,

I would have hoped by now that I would be able to put my work out to the public without having to experience the profound censorship obstacles I often seem to encounter.

Yesterday I was told that Disney, the studio that owns Miramax, has officially decided to prohibit our producer, Miramax, from distributing my new film, "Fahrenheit 911." The reason? According to today's (May 5) New York Times, it might "endanger" millions of dollars of tax breaks Disney receives from the state of Florida because the film will "anger" the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush. The story is on page one of the Times and you can read it here (Disney Forbidding Distribution of Film That Criticizes Bush).

The whole story behind this (and other attempts) to kill our movie will be told in more detail as the days and weeks go on. For nearly a year, this struggle has been a lesson in just how difficult it is in this country to create a piece of art that might upset those in charge (well, OK, sorry -- it WILL upset them...big time. Did I mention it's a comedy?). All I can say is, thank God for Harvey Weinstein and Miramax who have stood by me during the entire production of this movie.

There is much more to tell, but right now I am in the lab working on the print to take to the Cannes Film Festival next week (we have been chosen as one of the 18 films in competition). I will tell you this: Some people may be afraid of this movie because of what it will show. But there's nothing they can do about it now because it's done, it's awesome, and if I have anything to say about it, you'll see it this summer -- because, after all, it is a free country.

Yours,

Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com

Well, if Mel Gibson was able to find a distributor for his little art-house movie about a political agitator in the Middle East, I'm sure Michael will be able to find one as well.

I have my own personal history with the draft - I was a conscientious objector in 1970 - but this op ed piece in today's New York Times makes a very good case for bringing it back.

There are no immediate family members of any of the prime civilian planners of this war serving in it — beginning with President Bush and extending deep into the Defense Department. Only one of the 535 members of Congress, Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota, has a child in the war — and only half a dozen others have sons and daughters in the military.

The memorial service yesterday for Pat Tillman, the football star killed in Afghanistan, further points out this contrast. He remains the only professional athlete of any sport who left his privileged life during this war and turned in his play uniform for a real one. With few exceptions, the only men and women in military service are the profoundly patriotic or the economically needy.

It was not always so. In other wars, the men and women in charge made sure their family members led the way. Since 9/11, the war on terrorism has often been compared to the generational challenge of Pearl Harbor; but Franklin D. Roosevelt's sons all enlisted soon after that attack. Both of Lyndon B. Johnson's sons-in-law served in Vietnam.

This is less a matter of politics than privilege. The Democratic elites have not responded more nobly than have the Republican; it's just that the Democrats' hypocrisy is less acute. Our president's own family illustrates the loss of the sense of responsibility that once went with privilege. In three generations the Bushes have gone from war hero in World War II, to war evader in Vietnam, to none of the extended family showing up in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[edit]

If this war is truly worth fighting, then the burdens of doing so should fall on all Americans. If you support this war, but assume that Pat Tillman and Other People's Children should fight it, then you are worse than a hypocrite. If it's not worth your family fighting it, then it's not worth it, period. The draft is the truest test of public support for the administration's handling of the war, which is perhaps why the administration is so dead set against bringing it back.

When David Brooks says Kerry is "doing exactly what he should be doing right now," the Senator had better re-examine what exactly it is he is doing.

From The Globe and Mail:

Portland, Ore. — A Canadian civilian says in a lawsuit that he was tortured by U.S. troops in Iraq and saw Iraqi prisoners suffer even worse mistreatment — the latest allegations of human rights abuses to surface against coalition soldiers.

Hossam Shaltout, 57, claims in a suit filed with the U.S. Army Claims Office on April 30 that he was beaten after being taken to the Camp Bucca detention centre shortly after the launch of the U.S.-led invasion.

"I saw Iraqis tortured more than I was. They did unspeakable things to Iraqis," Mr. Shaltout said Monday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The allegations coincide with a larger scandal involving alleged mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq. Photos made public last week showed U.S. soldiers humiliating Iraqis at the U.S. Army-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

"Isolated incident," eh?

From CNN:

"Peace and freedom depend upon this election. Prosperity for the people depend upon this election," Bush said while wrapping up a campaign stop with about 1,200 supporters in Niles, in the southwest corner of Michigan.

[edit]

"See, I believe that the best way to generate economic growth is to let people keep more of their own money. There are some people in Washington who think the best way to generate jobs and growth is to grow the size of the federal government."

Seeing as how Bush has waged a pre-emptive war against a sovereign nation, banished people to Gitmo without benefit of due process of law, overseen an economy that has lost millions of job, and expanded the federal government to giddy proportions, he's making every argument possible for the election of John Kerry.

Remember the story about the White House underestimating the cost of the new Medicare bill? Remember how Richard Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, said that his job security was threatened by then-Medicare administrator Thomas Scully if he told Congress the true cost of the bill? Well, it turns out that Mr. Scully may have violated Federal law.

In a report made public Monday, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said efforts to keep Richard Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, from giving Democratic lawmakers his projections of the bill's cost - $100 billion more than the president and other officials were acknowledging - probably violated federal law.

Recent estimates set the bill's cost at more than $500 billion.

Foster testified in March that he was prevented by then-Medicare administrator Thomas Scully from turning over information over to lawmakers. Scully, in a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee, said he had told Foster "that I, as his supervisor, would decide when he would communicate with Congress."

Congressional researchers chided the move. "Such 'gag orders' have been expressly prohibited by federal law since 1912," Jack Maskell, a CRS attorney, wrote in the report.

The report was requested by committee Democrats after majority Republicans refused to subpoena Scully and White House adviser Doug Badger to testify about their roles in keeping cost estimates from lawmakers.

Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Calif., the committee chairman, said he would be willing to issue subpoenas if laws had been broken.

A spokesman for Thomas did not immediately respond to requests for comment.[AP]

Given Rep. Thomas's history with this White House - fawning sycophantic obsequiousness - rest assured that Mr. Scully's freedom is not in jeopardy.

CBS News held the Iraqi prisoner abuse story for two weeks at the request of General Richard B. Myers. Citing the possible dangers to American hostages and the tension in Fallujah, General Myers called Dan Rather eight days before 60 Minutes II was planning to air the story and asked him to sit on the story. Only when it was apparent that The New Yorker was about to break the story did CBS air the story last week. [Salon.com/AP]

Kind of makes you wonder what other stories are being held back, doesn't it?

From History News Network:

"A splendid little war," the secretary of state called the brief, victorious action. "Benevolent assimilation" was the name of the White House policy that guided U.S. occupation forces. "It should be the earnest and paramount aim of the military administration," the president wrote, "to win the confidence, respect and affection of the inhabitants by assuring them in every possible way [the] full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of a free people substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule."

Not a bad description of the war and postwar goals of the United States in Iraq. A bit dated, however. The year was 1899. John Hay was secretary of state; the president was William F. McKinley and their subject was America's occupation of the Philippines, after our victory in the Spanish-American War. Hay's and McKinley's current successors should have given their experience some careful study. The strategic confusion, administrative backtracking, mixed signals and mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq bear a striking — and worrisome — resemblance to what happened in the Philippines a century ago.

The decision to go to war with Spain, as was the case with Iraq, was made and marketed in a hurry. McKinley had a real incident to deal with: an explosion had severely damaged the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor. A hastily convened Navy inquiry concluded that the probable cause was a mine — obviously Spanish, the press and pro-war politicians concluded. (Ultimately, it was found to have been a fire in a bunker adjacent to a magazine.) War fever soared, fueled by atrocity stories about Spain's harsh treatment of Cuban rebels.

It was not Cuba, however, but Spain's colony in the Philippines that the victorious Americans occupied. McKinley's expansionist advisors — Theodore Roosevelt and the Navy strategist Alfred T. Mahan — had long advocated a U.S. strategic presence across the Pacific. It was Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, who ordered Adm. George Dewey to engage the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. Victory was swift and complete.

What, then, to do with the Filipinos? Many distinguished Americans, among them Mark Twain, former President Grover Cleveland and Harvard President Charles Eliot, opposed the idea of an anti-colonial country acquiring a colony. Most Filipinos wanted independence. Well-armed local militias had already fought the Spanish governors, and Dewey, for one, wanted to support them. In the end, however, Washington's hawks won the argument: McKinley, who had to search for the Philippines on a map, decided its people needed American guidance to be really free.

A peace might have held, if the U.S. government had agreed to a protectorate. Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of what was fast becoming a Philippine national army and not yet fiercely anti-American, liked the idea because it would allow his country to develop with a goal of ultimate independence. But McKinley dithered. When he finally decided on annexation, the opportunity for compromise had expired. By February 1899, Aguinaldo's army and newly arrived U.S. infantry reinforcements were shooting it out.

McKinley's assurances of "individual rights and liberties" for Filipinos went up in smoke, as village after village was torched. Angered by guerrilla ambushes, U.S. volunteers, most of them racist to begin with, eagerly executed the "kill-and-burn" orders of their Indian-fighter commanders. In turn, Aguinaldo's men slaughtered isolated American units, whose comrades responded in kind. U.S. reinforcements kept arriving. By mid-1900, 75,000 U.S. troops were in action, almost two-thirds of the entire army.

Worried about the slaughter — "the blood-stained trenches around Manila, where every red drop, whether from the veins of an American soldier or a misguided Filipino, is anguish to my heart" — McKinley turned to civilian leadership. William Howard Taft was dispatched to the Philippines to become the archipelago's first civilian chief executive, to the chagrin of Brig. Gen. Arthur MacArthur, who as military governor had sought to keep civilians out. Under Taft's leadership, the Americans sponsored huge programs in education, public health and economic improvement. Meanwhile, MacArthur's army ruthlessly pacified the country, ignoring its civilian advisors. Filipinos were alternately terrified, gratified and confused.

On July 4,1902, President Roosevelt officially declared the end of the "great insurrection." It had lasted more than three years. American casualties were 4,234 dead, almost 3,000 wounded. Thousands more died later of diseases they had contracted in the Philippines. The American casualty count in the Philippines was almost 10 times what it was during the Spanish-American War. Some 20,000 Filipino soldiers were killed. Nearly 200,000 civilians died in the insurrection, either from the actual fighting or from the disease and pestilence it spawned.

Despite Roosevelt's announcement, heavy fighting continued until 1913, largely against the Moros, the archipelago's implacable Muslim minority. Taft imported shiploads of eager young American teachers to set up a nationwide public education system for his "little brown brothers." Commerce in the archipelago picked up, although the economy was rigged to help American exporters. The first legislative elections were held in 1907. By 1910, having weathered a decade of spasmodic "good-cop, bad-cop" U.S. governance, Filipinos were not doing badly. "Americanized," historian Stanley Karnow put it, "without becoming Americans," they were at last enjoying something close to McKinley's promised peace.

Throughout the long decade, however, the Americans made costly and needless mistakes. They occupied the islands without knowing a thing about them — and never took the time to learn. McKinley's pledge to "Christianize" the Philippines sounded odd to overwhelmingly Catholic Filipinos. Nor did they think of themselves as "aborigines." During the first year of occupation, American administration was vacillating and inconsistent. Annexation was imposed without explaining it to the Filipinos, whose Malay-Latino culture was held in contempt by the Americans. Communications between occupiers and the occupied was generally lacking, except for the few Filipino leaders who understood English. Worst of all was the contradiction between the occupiers' lofty democratic proclamations and their alternately repressive and patronizing behavior.

Yet, in comparison with the U.S. challenge in Iraq, McKinley had it easy. The Philippines in 1899 was largely agricultural, a land of small farms and villages with only one large city. The population of 21st century Iraq is 70 percent urban, and its vastly more complex infrastructure is now in ruins. In the sequestered world of the early 1900s, Americans could run their colonial occupation without outside interference. There were no denunciations from fatwa-quoting mullahs in Egypt and Pakistan, no Al Jazeera cameramen feeding anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, no troublesome kibitzing from Europe and the U.N.

McKinley's goal was simply annexation — "benevolent assimilation," as he put it. President Bush's goal for Iraq is far more ambitious: to create a new working democracy as soon as possible. "America's interests in security and America's belief in liberty both lead in the same direction: to a free and peaceful Iraq," Bush said in February. But with suicidal guerrillas roaming the streets of Baghdad, basic services such as water and electricity unreliable and local law enforcement almost nonexistent, the costs in men, material and attention could dwarf those experienced in the Philippines. Happily for McKinley, he never had to face such perilous choices in his occupation, nor worry about equally pressing problems in North Korea, Afghanistan and the West Bank

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? We get attacked by one country or group based in that country - Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan - and we respond by attacking and annexing another - Iraq. This is the price we pay for having a president who is "incurious" about history.

David Brock, the recovering conservative who wrote Blinded by the Right, a journal of his travels through the Dark Side of politics and his ultimate redemption, has begun a website called Media Matters for America (and thanks to edwardpig for pointing it out, who got it from Atrios). It's now linked on the Websites sidebar. Check it out.

Thanks to the gentle urging of my Faithful Correspondent, I have added the link to Minnesota Public Radio's Writer's Almanac hosted by Garrison Keillor. This link provides the narrative to this daily radio program that acknowledges the birthdates of famous (and not-so-famous) writers, and concludes with a poem. It is an oasis of calm and literacy in a day of tumult and stress.

Today, by the way, would have been William Inge's 90th birthday. You've heard of Inge, haven't you? I understand there's a festival or something somewhere that honors him...

And it's also another famous writer's birthdate:

It's the birthday of Niccolo Machiavelli, born in Florence, Italy (1469). He was a prominent statesman, but in 1512 he was accused of conspiring against the government. Florence had just fallen into the hands of the Medicis, and Machiavelli was seen as a threat to their rule. He was tortured and imprisoned for three weeks, and then sent into exile. He went to live on his family farm and began writing a pamphlet to try to gain the favor of the Medici family. That pamphlet became his masterpiece, The Prince (1532), which is full of practical advice on how rulers can stay in power. Among other things, he advocated killing potential rebels, and said that it's better to be feared than to be loved.

Machiavelli has never had a good reputation. Shakespeare referred to him as "Murderous Machiavel," and others in the sixteenth century called him "Old Nick," a nickname for Satan. In 1827, poet and philosopher Lord Macaulay wrote that he doubted "whether any name in literary history be so generally odious." Twentieth-century philosopher Bertrand Russell called The Prince "a handbook for gangsters." Some people say Machiavelli was a big influence on dictators like Hitler and Stalin. Today, the word "Machiavellian" has come to mean "marked by cunning, duplicity or bad faith."

Machiavelli's main point in The Prince is that the most important task for a ruler is to keep his country secure and peaceful, using whatever means possible. Sometimes, this means doing things that most people would consider immoral, but Machiavelli said that that's just part of the job.

He was cynical about human nature: he argued that it was natural for most people to be selfish, and so a great ruler has to accept that he lives in an immoral world. He wrote, "A man who might want to make a show of goodness in all things necessarily comes to ruin among so many who are not good. Because of this it is necessary for a prince, wanting to maintain himself, to learn how to be able to be not good and to use this and not use it according to necessity."

He also argued that most people value their property more than the lives of their friends and family, and so in some situations it's okay for rulers to kill their citizens, but it's almost never okay to take away their property. He wrote, "Men must be either pampered or crushed, because they can get revenge for small injuries, but not for grievous ones. So any injury a prince does a man should be of a kind where there is no fear of revenge."

Despite Machiavelli's hopes, The Prince didn't win over the Medicis. A few years later, a new republic was established in Italy, but his name had already become so associated with evil and violence that he wasn't able to get another government job for the rest of his life. He wrote two more books, and died in 1527.

Does Old Nick sound like anyone we know...?

I remember the old days when Republicans stood for fiscal frugality, railed against over-reaching government intervention, held to a somewhat isolationist foreign policy, believed in free trade abroad and laisez-faire regulation for businesses at home, and advocated a fierce defense of personal liberty tempered with personal responsibility. But according to a scion of an old California Republican party, that's not true anymore:

If you're fiscally responsible, this is not your party. If you believe in a moderate foreign policy characterized by alliances, free trade and the ability to operate in an international environment, this is not your party. If you believe in limited federal government, this is not your party. If you believe that the government should stay out of your bedroom, this is very definitely not your party. In fact, I would argue that unless you believe in the American imperium, imposed on the world by force, or unless you believe in the literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations, this is not your party.

Not surprisingly, this person has reasons not to trust the current "Republican" administration.

From Salon.com/AP:

L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, said Sunday he regrets a statement he made more than six months before the Sept. 11 attacks that the Bush administration was "paying no attention" to terrorism.

Bremer said any implied criticism that President Bush was not acting against terrorism was "unfair."

Ahead of the November election, Bush is facing criticism he didn't make terrorism his No. 1 priority before the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center and then weakened the war on terror by invading Iraq and shifting the focus from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. The resurfacing of Bremer's comments added to administration frustrations.

Just to remind you, here's the original story that I posted last week with the link to the article in the Chicago Reader that cites Bremer's original speech where he knocks the Bush administration stance on terrorism.

I guess Bremer woke up with a horse's head in his bed.

Read the Seymour Hersh article from The New Yorker here. Here's the main point:

A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added—“detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their “extremely sensitive nature.”

The New York Times also follows up with a story that says the torture was not isolated to Abu Ghraib, but throughout the entire Iraqi prison system under the U.S. military.

I thought we were better than this.

I was too tired last night to stay up and watch Nightline's broadcast of the names of the dead. I'm assuming that my local ABC affiliate ran it - they're owned by Post Newsweek, so you know they're a hive of radical liberals anyway; look at the story they're running on their website about Sen. John McCain's vigorous protest to Sinclair Broadcasting's pre-emption of Nightline. While I disagree with the senator that the war was justified, he's right on the money that the program is a way of honoring these people.

Although I have no first-hand knowledge of Sinclair Broadcasting's political views, not having lived in an area covered by them, I have heard anecdotally that they are big contributors to conservative causes, including the RNC and the Bush-Cheney campaign. Well, fine. They along with anybody else - including other local media outlets like Clear Channel, Jaycorp, Storer, and so on - are free to exercise their rights to support the candidates of their choice. However, I don't think they have the moral obligation to be the nannies over their audiences. After all, one of the most cherished conservative causes is the right for people to choose for themselves what to do and say without interference from a larger entity such as the government. But, apparently, Sinclair thinks it's perfectly acceptable for a corporation to decide to choose what people can do: watch Nightline, for example. And aren't conservatives always using the label of "the nanny state" to describe their idea of Hell if the liberals took over?

Over all of this is the presumption on the part of Sinclair that their audiences are too stupid to know propaganda when they see it. I'm not saying that the Nightline broadcast was propaganda, but if it was, don't you think we're smart enough to figure it out and switch over to watch Leno or a Cheers re-run? Once again we're being treated to the idea that "we know better than you do" as if the entire country is five years old.

Granted, there are people on both sides of the aisle who feel it is their mission in life to make the world safe from crony capitalism, environmental hell, televangelism or godless communism, creeping socialism, and the homosexual agenda (whatever that is). We are now protected against everything from insurance fraud, hot McDonald's coffee, and exploding bottle caps, and we are PC'd to death. Everybody's trying to protect me from the bumps and rolls of life, and I hate it. And I especially hate it when people like Sinclair want to impose their views on me to protect me from something only they see as insidious.