Done With Mirrors

The Minefield

2008-08-15T17:36:00.002-04:00

Some Georgia articles today worth noting.

This time, it's definitely about oil.

Dreams of glory:

What should one make of the announcement from one of her chief admirals, Vladimir Vystosky, on the July 27 Navy Day holiday, that the Russian navy would add six carriers to its fleet--along with all of the necessary support ships that form a carrier battle group?

Above shabby realities:

Looking for an explanation that makes sense is to commit the error, as one Moscow colleague reminded me regularly, "of looking for logic inside Russian officialdom where none can possibly exist." The only explanation is more of the same irrationality that was the hallmark of the Soviet years. Announcing a robust presence with a high profile hides the basic structural defects of the Soviet military.

At the same time, the Russian government continues to shovel billions of dollars into the coffers of defense enterprises that are controlled by the inner circle of officials in the Kremlin. Which may be the ultimate explanation for an order to build carriers that cannot be built and which no one really needs. Just like arms sales to Venezuela, Algeria, and elsewhere, this aircraft carrier fantasy may end up being a wonderful mechanism for laundering money.

All in all not comforting in a nation that still has enough nuclear capacity to broil the world several times over.

Nor is this:

Perhaps the most telling illustration of what the Russians are doing in Georgia was something found found in the pocket of a Russian airman downed by the Georgian air defence: an obscene verse. The verse mocks the enemy - which is normal in wars. However, neither Georgians nor Ossetians are mentioned: the theme of this piece of doggerel was Russian troops humiliating Nato soldiers.

Whatever the humanitarian rhetoric, what Russia is really doing is a preventive strike against Nato, which happens to take place on Georgian territory. Moscow wants to teach Georgia a lesson for Tbilisi's open and defiant wish to become part of the west; it wants to send a message to the United States and Europe that it will not tolerate further encroachment on its zone of influence; and it wants to make clear to other countries in its neighbourhood (Ukraine first of all) that they are in Russia's backyard and should behave accordingly.

Which seems pretty clear to me: In Moscow, the spheres of influence still make music. Perhaps not in the exact ratios that Stalin and Churchill once agreed to. But Poland, as well as Ukraine, had best be thinking hard.

A senior Russian general warned Poland today that it was leaving itself open to retaliation - and possibly even a nuclear strike - by agreeing to host a US missile base.

General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the Russian armed forces' deputy chief of staff, issued the extraordinary threat in an interview with Interfax, a Russian news agency.

“Poland, by deploying [the system] is exposing itself to a strike - 100 per cent,” he was quoted as saying, before explaining that Russian military doctrine sanctioned the use of nuclear weapons “against the allies of countries having nuclear weapons if they in some way help them."

Would it matter to that thinking that the Western European powers went to war in 1939 ostensibly because Poland was invaded and occupied, and then left it that way after the war was over?

Finally, remember the words of Solzhenitsyn in his last interview:

Q: Recently, relations between Russia and the West have got somewhat colder. What is the reason? What are the West's difficulties in understanding modern Russia?

Solzhenitsyn: The most interesting [reasons] are psychological, ie, the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. This was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

This mood started changing with the cruel Nato bombings of Serbia. All layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when Nato started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.

So, the perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals. At the same time, the West was enjoying its victory after the Cold War, and observing the 15-year-long anarchy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It was easy to get accustomed to the idea that Russia had become almost a third world country and would remain so. When Russia started to regain some of its strength, the West's reaction – perhaps subconscious, based on erstwhile fears – was panic.

Friday Cat Blogging

2008-08-15T00:11:00.001-04:00

Layla Isis

George-ya

2008-08-14T21:31:00.004-04:00

"Georgia" and "Iraq" tend to get uttered in the same sentence a lot around here, usually in terms of complaining what a hypocrite George W. Bush is to complain about Putin's puppet's invasion of a sovereign state on phony pretexts.

Exactly the same!

E.g. here (in comments, but by the post's author):

For the record, to date, Russia has toppled ZERO governments in this decade, the US has toppled 2.

So where do we draw the line on the US?

Leaving aside the question of when progressives became so concerned with governmental stability and integrity of international borders, I'm trying to picture the Iraq venture if it had been done according to the Russian model. Some parallels do suggest themselves. You already had two separatist regions -- the Kurdish north and the Shiite south -- nominally under the protection of the U.S. (and its allies). You had any pretext you like for an attack based on infringement of that unhappy status quo -- no need to read the tea leaves on WMD when there were almost daily violations of the no-fly zone that one side never accepted.

You wouldn't have to trouble with nation-building or infrastructure reconstruction or keeping order while democracy goes through its romper room phase. No danger of being cheated by your friends in the new government, either.

Just calve off the parts you want, occupy them with full force, and turn lose the ethnicities and religions you favor to drive out the ones you don't. Take a few big bites out of the rump nation you leave behind, just to square off your fronts and make the point stick. Then let your enemy's friends figure out how to keep it alive.

Which, in the case of Iraq, would have been the governments and national oil companies of France and Russia.

For starters.

Remember Iraq?

2008-08-13T17:28:00.000-04:00

They do.

Ofcourseyourealizethismeanswar.com

2008-08-13T16:55:00.002-04:00

Interesting.

As it turns out, the July [Internet access] attack [against Web sites in the Republic of Georgia] may have been a dress rehearsal for an all-out cyberwar once the shooting started between Georgia and Russia. According to Internet technical experts, it was the first time a known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.

But it will likely not be the last, said Bill Woodcock, the research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that tracks Internet traffic. He said cyberattacks are so inexpensive and easy to mount, with few fingerprints, they will almost certainly remain a feature of modern warfare.

“It costs about 4 cents per machine,” Mr. Woodcock said. “You could fund an entire cyberwarfare campaign for the cost of replacing a tank tread, so you would be foolish not to.”

Somehow the line got out quickly in the U.S. that Russia was just sitting there minding its own and watching the Olympics when those hot-headed Georgians, drunk on U.S. neocon rhetoric, mugged them. The closer you look at the long-simmering feud over these "breakaway regions," the more you see the hands twisting the oven dials under the pot. You need a lot more information than most opinionators have offered to judge who wanted this boil-over right now.

The Ancient 'Computer'

2008-08-13T16:50:00.002-04:00

In words, pictures, and video. "Awesome" is the current most-overused word. But this is awesome.

Herbert Hoover

2008-08-13T10:27:00.000-04:00

I meant to post something two days ago on his birthdate on Herbert Hoover, one of the great Americans of the 20th century.

You might know him as just a joke on conservatives in Norman Lear's theme song for Archie Bunker. He belongs in a class with Quincy Adams as the men who did great service to their country over long lives, with a failed term in the White House in the middle of it.

Even in Europe, which ought to remember him when we don't, he's a footnote, a "did you know?" story.

He believed in Americans, and appealed to the best in us. If even one tenth of the statistics are right, he saved the lives of millions of people. Think of that!

Someday, perhaps, I'll get a chance to write about him. Not tonight, though.

Fear Itself

2008-08-12T20:39:00.001-04:00

Paul Krugman thinks the Republicans are scaring me away from nationalized health care with the phrase "socialized medicine."

No, sir, they aren't. I like the idea, or ideal, of basic health care for everyone. But some things Americans just do not do well. What scares me off from the notion is not GOP sloganeering. It's the VA Hospitals. The public school system. The "Social Security is broke" crisis that comes up every two years. The Farm Bill. When I think of national health care in the U.S., I think of the Post Office, with scalpels.

Georgia War

2008-08-12T19:48:00.001-04:00

Where it stands.

"Iraq" is the unspoken name in much of the public diplomacy -- which of course is not diplomacy at all but jockeying for world opinion. Bush framed his objection thus:

"Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century."

Key words being "neighboring" and "democratic." It's a nice try but he's clearly got a weaker hand here than he would have without the global ire over Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the first-linked piece, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says: "We have no plans to depose anyone, this is in general not in our political culture and not in the arsenal of our foreign policy. We do not depose, and we do not bring to the throne. Others do such things—as we know…"

No kewpie doll for figuring out which "others" he means there.

Echoes of 1956

2008-08-11T23:32:00.002-04:00

Some aspects of the current tragedy in Georgia remind me of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, especially the role of the U.S. I think this blogger gets it right:

For the USA, though, the lesson of 1956 is clear: don't encourage the fantasies of small countries that we are in no position to help. It raises expectations that we can't fulfill, and pushes other people into bloody confrontations.

One difference is, we had only scant and secretive contact with the Hungarian people in 1956, much of it through Voice of America broadcasts by Hungarian exiles that weren't even well monitored by the U.S. government. In cases like Georgia, it ought to be explicit, if it wasn't, how far we agree to go in their defense.

More on Hungary 1956. Also, thoughts along these lines from Michelle Malkin, who, of course, would have done more in 1956.

Rebranding Cindy

2008-08-11T23:27:00.001-04:00

Cindy Sheehan makes the ballot to oppose Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill says the speaker welcomes the challenge and has "the highest respect" for Sheehan.

I am sure. It's inside baseball to most of you, probably, but the AP slug on the story is BC-Pelosi-Sheehan Challenge

All through Sheehan's personal crusade against Bush, the AP slugs on her story were "PEACEMOM." AP keeps the same slugs on a story in a cycle; Supreme Court stories always are SCOTUS. Even if the story changes in nature, the slug generally stays the same for the sake of editors finding it again. If two children don't come home from school it will be MISSINGKIDS or something, even as the case evolves into a murder, a trial, a conviction. Even now, after almost seven years and many permutations in the news stories, the slug on any AP story on Sept. 11 begins with ATTACKS.

So the AP dubbed this woman "Peace Mom." Soon after, "Peace Mom" crept into AP's descriptions of Sheehan in, for instance, photo captions. Finally, it became her designation in the AP's headlines. 'Peace Mom' Cindy Sheehan returns to Texas for war protest. It was the Associated Press that gave her that name, then they quoted it, unattributed, in their headlines. They've also given her a much-airbrushed back story. Working overtime to nail down public perception where they believe it belongs.

But now that she's at war with the liberal Democrat from San Francisco -- for essentially the same reasons she warred on Bush, she's no longer a Peace Mom, I guess. The words "Peace Mom" appear nowhere in the Pelosi story.

Canarda

2008-08-11T22:54:00.000-04:00

Riots in Canada?

Oh, dear. Who is going to break the news to my co-workers. Who insist there is no crime, no violence, and no racism in Canada -- always in contrast to the horrible U.S.A. It's an idealized anti-America of the mind that I privately call Canarda. But of course they've lived there (in some cases while dodging the draft here back in the Vietnam Era) and I've only visited, so of course they know more about it than I do.

Here's the AP's description of things:

Montreal's mayor on Monday promised a swift inquiry into the shooting death of a Honduran teenager by police after the incident prompted violent clashes between angry youth and authorities in a heavily Haitian neighborhood.

A police officer was shot in the leg late Sunday, cars were set ablaze, stores were looted and firefighters were pelted with beer bottles in Montreal North, a multiethnic area referred to by local police as the Bronx of Montreal for its poverty and crime.

Several hundred officers in riot gear fanned out in the area, searching for a group of youths suspected of torching eight cars parked outside a fire station. Six people were arrested.

Crime, violence, and racism. Sounds a little less like perfection and a little more like everywhere else.

Little Things

2008-08-11T21:10:00.001-04:00

Switching into Andy Rooney mode here ...

These are little things that piss me off, because they're typically written by people who profess to know more than I do and thus instruct me. OK, Andy Rooney wouldn't have said "piss me off."

Here's Cernig, a smart guy who always leaves me with the impression that, if you disagree with him, he thinks it's because you don't know as much as he does. Or else you have neocon, which is a sort of incurable disease. In my case, the answer is "both."

He writes, "war with Russia over a tiny disputed ethnic breakaway region in a small Eastern European country isn't going to happen." Which I agree with as an assessment. But Georgia is south of the Caucasus, and I've always thought the Caucasus was the boundary between Europe and Asia. My knowledge tends to become outdated, but I looked it up and Georgia still seems to be in Asia.

It's a little thing, but for someone whose weight of argument seems tilted toward "I'm right because I know more than you do," it sticks. Sort of like watching a ballet master take a tumble off a street curb.

He also, by the way, says:

Saakashvili has absolutely no evidence, of course, for his claim that Russia "ordered it's proxies" to carry out attacks (It might have, but he can't prove even word one of it) ....

And then later says:

... the Bush administration almost certainly knew what Georgia planned far enough in advance to stop it, but didnt ....

Which is basically making the same sort of talking-out-the-ass statement he accuses Saakashvili of making. The difference of course being that Cernig isn't president of anything (so far as I know) and can't send armies to war. Which is a big difference. But in terms of someone sifting through his arguments, I imagine it's not a point that inspires much confidence.

As for what the Bush Administration knew or didn't know, I thought one of the enduring lessons of the last 8 years is the fantastic amount of what goes on in the world that's news to Bush when it gets into the newspapers. I thought that was one of the hammering points of his opponents. Of course you can have it both ways, if you presume a marvelous Richelieu-esque duplicity on the part of the boob from Texas, that he only pretends to be surprised so he can further his agenda, which thrives on chaos and American blundering.

As for Georgia, it's painful to watch. I like Georgia and its people and government, and the Russians seem to be using this excuse to mojo up after a long spell of humiliation. Like the Grenada invasion looked to some people back in the '80s. If the Russians had popped the first shot, we'd be in a different situation. If the Georgians had gone in with more care and less artillery, things would look different too. Instead, it's like watching a good friend go Leroy Jenkins into a minefield. You just wait till it's over and hope there's enough of him left to patch back together.

I also am sticking with Demophilus' early observation that this ultimately is about Abkhasia, not South Ossetia.

* * *

The Associated Press, meanwhile, in writing about Radovan Karadzic has taken to calling the slaughter of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica Europe's worst slaughter since World War II. [Other accounts vary -- "massacre" and "atrocity" also appear.]

But it's the "since World War II" that sticks in my craw. Which is only possible for AP to write because it and the rest of us have so long blocked out the period 1945 to 1950 in Europe, when truly nasty things were done on a large scale to subject peoples, often by our then-allies, often with at least the passive cooperation of the U.S. occupiers, and often to peoples who were deemed to have taken the wrong side in the just-ended war.

The exact details of who did what to whom are the subject of furious debate and have become hopelessly entangled in cranks and conspiracy-mongers, mainly because the stories largely have been left to such people by the academics. But the numbers, even in the most conservative estimates for some specific cases, go beyond Srebrenica's 8,000.

Two Words that End in 'O'

2008-08-11T17:43:00.001-04:00

Being 'bingo,' and 'ditto'

This is a fight to the death for power and the distribution of wealth. It is about ideology only to the extent that ideologies are masks for interests. Of course each contender is going to do whatever it takes to win, within the vague and shifting limits set by public revulsion. ... There are times when I find myself liking one or the other or both candidates and being saddened by the unrelenting vitriol that's spat at and about them. And other times when I think, Good! We test our candidates like gladiators. Whichever one is left standing might just be tough enough for the job.

... So, to put it as crudely as possible: the rich don't want to be taxed; the poor want more handouts; and everybody in between is trying to figure out whether life is better for them (us) under the frankly powerful or under those whose power derives from purporting to represent the interests of the powerless.

Realm of the Coin

2008-08-11T16:48:00.001-04:00

A direct hit, and a new, good word:

It is sometimes difficult when reading [linguist, progressive, and "Don't Think of an Elephant!" author George P.] Lakoff to know where his political advocacy ends and his cognitive-linguistics scholarship begins. When I ask him about that, he acknowledges that his political celebrity has put a strain on his scholarly work, but he insists that he has not abandoned linguistics for politics: "The work I do in politics is linguistics, it is linguistics about political subjects — it is advocacy linguistics." That means, he says, "I do a simple linguistic analysis, and then I say based on that analysis you should do this, this, and that. But it all rests on doing the linguistics."

Owen Flanagan, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University, is even more skeptical than [Steven] Pinker, declaring Lakoff a member of the "neuroenthusiasta," his term for cognitive scientists who overstate the implications of their research, and the journalists who breathlessly hype their findings. According to Flanagan, brain science is only helpful to the extent that it tells us something we don't already know. To illustrate his point, he offers an analogy: When children learn how to ride a bike, something changes in their brains. If a scientist offers parents a detailed description of that neurological transformation, it might be interesting, but it won't help children learn to ride a bike.

At one point, Lakoff makes Chomsky (an academic arch-rival) looks reasonable by comparison. He also wants to take credit for Obama. Take a number, George.

Caucasus War

2008-08-08T23:33:00.000-04:00

This has been a good blog for keeping up with it.

Thank You, John Edwards

2008-08-08T19:48:00.005-04:00

Thanks to you, men all across America -- guys who work hard and play by the rules -- will go home tonight to a little more bitterness, shorter fuzes, heightened suspicion. It's not much of a legacy. But it's what you've got.

Other than that, I don't think this story makes a damn bit of difference, unless you really thought this politician was somehow in a different category than the rest. If you want a different category, try Barney Frank. Who I'd vote for in a heartbeat if -- well -- straight talk and frankness were the sole considerations.

But think about it. There are tens of millions of Democrats out there with passionate beliefs, ideals, and thirst for change of one sort or another, and this man rode hard to be their standard-bearer, their sole knight in the crucial battle, knowing that his cardboard armor would crumple at the first hit.

Council Winners

2008-08-08T17:59:00.003-04:00

The latest batch of Watchers Council winners have been posted.

First place in the council went to Winning in Afghanistan by Joshuapundit.

Votes also went to Why Exploit Our Domestic Resources by Wolf Howling; What is a Windfall Profit? by Rhymes with Right; and Marin County’s Hidden Conservatives by Bookworm Room.

The last post reminds me that many blogs are strongest when they hew most closely to the daily realities of the people who write them. That is the one topic about which you may be assured I know more than you do: What happens to me day in and day out. But it is not possible to write a daily blog on world affairs or politics in that vein unless you are one of the 300 or so people who move and shake those places. In which case you probably don't want to broadcast your daily life.

Outside the council, the winner was Obama Be by Classical Values, which was worthy for recalling in detail the program for radicals (what we now generally call "progressives") outlined circa 1970 by Saul Alinsky. It's impressive to see how deeply it has taken root, so deeply that many people who swim in it daily never heard of Alinsky or realized that someone first spelled it all out. Hillary Rodham wrote her senior honors thesis at Wellesley College on Alinsky. Obama certainly owes him a debt, in his community organizer phase. Wikipedia sums up Alinsky thus:

Alinsky was a critic of a passive and ineffective mainstream liberalism. In Rules for Radicals, he argued that the most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends, and that an intermediate end for radicals should be democracy because of its relative ease to work within to achieve other ends of social justice.

Votes also went to The Forgotten Christians of Lebanon by Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, a post remarkable because not only does it detail a distant problem, it suggesting things that the average American can do that might help relieve it.

Laid to Rest

2008-08-06T20:03:00.002-04:00

I don't think we ever really understood Solzhenitsyn. When he came to America, we wanted him to like us and be one of us, which is generally how we treat foreign dignitaries.

Solzhenitsyn offers us the great lesson of a dissident who was a passionate nationalist. We don't see that type often here. Even more seldom do we grow them. Our dissidents tend to identify themselves as "citizens of the world" or of humanity, and to regard America, and especially American nationalism, as the world's great evil.

He lived in Vermont, and his heart never left Mother Russia. His courtesy to us, his gift to us in exchange for our hospitality, was to look at America as a patriotic dissident would, and say the things about it a dissident nationalist would say about us, if we had one, if Solzhenitsyn had been an American. We are only beginning to appreciate the gift.

The Coming Revanche

2008-08-06T17:06:00.003-04:00

From a review of Robert Kagan's new book:

In his recent speech before an adoring crowd in Berlin, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama implored leaders in the United States and Western Europe to “reject the Cold War mindset of the past” in their dealings with Russia. This was an implicit rebuke to his Republican opponent, John McCain, who has talked tough on Russia, going so far as to raise the possibility of kicking it out of the G-8 for its domestically illiberal and externally aggressive behavior. Kagan, an informal advisor to McCain, even compares “the mood of recrimination in Russia today” to German anger after the supposed humiliations of the Versailles Treaty—and we’re all familiar with what followed after the signing of that punitive accord. Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism, no doubt to be continued by his handpicked successor, Dmitri Medvedev, has been buttressed by the country’s astounding economic growth under his leadership: between 1998 and 2006, Kagan writes, the Russian economy has grown by more than 50 percent. Remember all the stories about Russian decline, the endless reports of soaring alcoholism rates and grinding poverty? They’ve gone the way of Boris Yeltsin, along with whatever hopes there were of Russian liberalism.

From Solzhenitsyn's last interview:

Q: Recently, relations between Russia and the West have got somewhat colder. What is the reason? What are the West's difficulties in understanding modern Russia?

Solzhenitsyn: The most interesting [reasons] are psychological, ie, the clash of illusory hopes against reality. This happened both in Russia and in West. When I returned to Russia in 1994, the Western world and its states were practically being worshipped. This was caused not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda.

This mood started changing with the cruel Nato bombings of Serbia. All layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings. The situation then became worse when Nato started to spread its influence and draw the ex-Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by millions of family ties among our peoples, relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a military bloc.

So, the perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals. At the same time, the West was enjoying its victory after the Cold War, and observing the 15-year-long anarchy under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It was easy to get accustomed to the idea that Russia had become almost a third world country and would remain so. When Russia started to regain some of its strength, the West's reaction – perhaps subconscious, based on erstwhile fears – was panic.

Aren't they describing the same thing, taking into account that they stand on opposite sides of it?

In the 1990s when Russia was down I longed for the West to give it a hand up, because it was the most self-interested thing we could have done. The Marshall Plan for a new millennium. Instead, the people I knew only salivated over a "peace dividend" they never saw anyhow.

His Fanatic Heart

2008-08-05T21:46:00.000-04:00

Ernst Haeckel

Live Not by Lies

2008-08-05T20:52:00.001-04:00

That should be your motto. Write it on your heart. Suffer for it, and thank your God for that privilege.

It was the title of an essay he wrote, dated the day the secret police arrested him to ship him into exile. It circulated secretly among Moscow intellectuals, but was published in full light of day for the world to read in "The Washington Post" on Monday, February 18, 1974. And therein lies all the mistake his government made in thinking it had silenced him.

When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: "I am violence. Run away, make way for me -- I will crush you." But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally -- since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies -- all loyalty lies in that.

The final grim pun, alas, does not exist in the Russian. It only makes the essay more potent in its American voice. As Solzhenitsyn himself proved to be, though he knew he never belonged here, to us, in the West. He landed luckily in rural Vermont, where small town people know the virtues of doing, not speaking.

On Thursday, June 8, 1978, he spoke to Harvard's graduating class and to all the West that would listen.

The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course there are many courageous individuals but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity and perplexity in their actions and in their statements and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable as well as intellectually and even morally warranted it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and weak countries, not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.

And he called us to our old standards:

"It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."

At that point, many turned away from him. He was not anti-Russian. He was not pro-American. It was a time that understood the world in those terms. But to pretend he was either would have been a lie, and that he would not do.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born the year the communists under Lenin took control of Russia. In his youth he was a good patriotic son of Russia, who bought the government's stories, studied diligently, and served with distinction in the war against the Nazis. But he had a penchant for telling the truth, and when he wrote disparagingly of Stalin in a letter to a fellow officer, he was sent into the gulag. By the time he came out, he had almost died -- twice -- and become a Christian. The crucible had tempered him into a man who would not live for any lie.

He wrote at the end of the first volume of "The Gulag Archipelago" that his years in prison had been a moral gift:

"It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an uprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: they destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more."

This William F. Buckley Jr. column appeared in National Review in August 1975. He was amused by the then-MSM's attempt to paint Solzhenitsyn as a right-winger by disillusioned liberals:

If Solzhenitsyn is a far rightist who appeals to the far right, he goes at it in a most unorthodox way. Having declared that the Russian people are the natural allies of the American workers, he commented in one of his recent speeches about “another alliance — at first glance a strange one, a surprising one — but if you think about it, in fact one which is well-grounded and easy to understand: this is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists.”

“This alliance is not new,” Solzhenitsyn reminded his audience. “The very famous Armand Hammer, who is flourishing here today, laid the basis for this when he made the first exploratory trip into Russia, still in Lenin’s time, in the very first years of the Revolution. He was extremely successful in this intelligence mission and since that time for all these fifty years, we observe continuous and steady support by the businessmen of the west of the Soviet Communist leaders.” Doesn’t sound to me like a typical far right talk ….

Solzhenitsyn went on to discuss a recent exhibit of the Untied States anti-criminal technology which the Russians brought up with fascination. The difference being that we were selling our scientific paraphernalia not to the law abiding for use against criminals, but to criminals for use against the law abiding: rather like inventing a guillotine for the purpose of chopping meat, and then selling it to Robespierre for other uses ….

Give the last word to Roger Scruton:

It is fair to say that the three-volume The Gulag Archipelago did more than any other publication to cause the scales to fall from the eyes of those who had been tempted to believe that communism would have been fine, had it not been perverted from its true course by Stalin. Solzhenitsyn showed the way in which, once accountability has been set aside, as it was set aside by Lenin in 1918, and once society had as a result been conscripted to a single goal, with all institutions gathered up into the collective advance, it is not "corruption" that leads to the triumph of evil. The conditions are now in place for evil to prevail, since there is nothing to prevent it.

Yet this evil should not be seen as an impersonal thing. Solzhenitsyn was far from endorsing the thesis of the "banality of evil" as Hannah Arendt had expounded it. Nor did he see totalitarianism as the ultimate source of the evil that it promotes. Rather totalitarian government is the great mistake, made for whatever noble or ignoble purpose, of putting the final goal before the present dilemma. It is this which gives evil intentions the same chance as good ones, which enables the criminal and the psychopath to compete on a level with the saint and the hero. Yet even in totalitarianism the evil belongs to the human beings, and not to the system.

The Joker Smiles

2008-08-05T16:47:00.004-04:00

The daily newspaper only looks like it's dying. In fact, it's already dead. Those 10 percent cuts in staff, those buyout offers for jobs that won't be re-filled: they're not the harbingers of the demise of print journalism. That's the death of it, right there.

Newspaper people know this. David Carr of the New York Times:

On Sunday, a fat-looking [Newark] Star-Ledger showed up, seemingly stuffed with inserts and ads, local sports and cultural coverage, prompting my wife to suggest, “It’s like a ham sandwich, it’s so thick, with lettuce, pickles and onions.”

It may still look like a sandwich, but some of the meat is about to go missing. Tom Moran, the political columnist of The Star-Ledger who retired earlier this year, shudders when he thinks about New Jersey, with its history of public corruption, without a fully-armed Star-Ledger looking over its shoulder.

“At least we could embarrass them and occasionally, the people would vote the bad guys out,” he said. “It’s a sad story not just for my friends who work at the paper. But for the state of New Jersey, if this continues, the bad guys will have a lot less to worry about.”

At the newspaper I know best, there no longer is an investigative reporter. There rarely if ever is more than one reporter working on a story, however big it sprawls. Whoever does the police beat is whoever isn't doing anything else that night.

At that rate, all you can do is keep up. Who in your town is going to smoke out the corruption, the scams, the bad business practices? Bloggers? Who gives any credence to what a blogger says? What blogger is going to spend a week going through a three-foot high stack of FOIA documents to find the 10 pages that matter? What blogger is going to call a first-amendment lawyer after sundown to shake loose an affidavit from a district magistrate who won't release it? How many will patiently schmooze the lunchcounter waitresses and bartenders who know where the bodies are buried in this town and cultivate them for the day you need to know what they know? And the ones with time, money, and will to do that work won't care about your state or county. They'll be busy making themselves players on the national scene.

Heroes

2008-08-03T22:43:00.002-04:00

He outlived the USSR.

From the New York Times obituary:

"It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and shall always triumph! Visibly, irrefutably for all! Lies can prevail against much in this world, but never against art." He quoted a Russian proverb: "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world."

Somehow, it seems to me it only could be a Russian proverb. An American would expect the truth to triumph in time to make a happy ending. Not after everything had been lost and crushed and ground down as fine as snow.

In the piece I quoted below, Madonna has this to say today about Michael Moore, on the day Solzhenitsyn died:

"There aren't a lot of role models for us in the world, or people we can look up to," she said. "People who are not afraid to stick their neck out, people who are not afraid to stand up for things and be unpopular, to go against the grain, think outside the box.

"And we need, and I need, Michael Moore in my life."

It's almost unfair of me to even mention the two truths at the same time. Almost. Moore: "I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire. I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it? There's millions that believe in what I do. Pretty cool, huh?"

The obituary:

By this time, Solzhenitsyn had completed his own massive attempt at truthfulness, "The Gulag Archipelago." In more than 300,000 words, he told the history of the Gulag prison camps, whose operations and rationale and even existence were subjects long considered taboo.

Publishers in Paris and New York had secretly received the manuscript on microfilm. But wanting the book to appear first in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn asked them to put off publishing it. Then, in September 1973, he changed his mind. He had learned that the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, had unearthed a buried copy of the book after interrogating his typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, and that she had died soon afterward in an apparent suicide by hanging.

And there isn't even a picture of Elizaveta Voronyanskaya on the Internet.

Hope

2008-08-03T20:25:00.003-04:00

AP still reports in detail what women celebrities wear to celebrity events. With men, it tends not to. In some cases, that can make for odd reporting:

Hundreds of fans cheered from behind barricades as Madonna, wearing a black dress, high heels and sunglasses, stepped out of a black sport utility vehicle that pulled up in front of the State Theatre. She hugged a waiting Moore, who sported an orange baseball cap, and posed for photos with him.

One hopes he was wearing more than that. If not, they ought to have told us where he had the hat.

Too Bad We Won't Get One

2008-08-03T20:18:00.001-04:00

I agree with this, but what do I know?:

The economic paradox we are facing is that we truly need an old-time Dem in office right now. We have got to change our policies enough to put some stimulus into the lower half of the income bracket, and we don't have too many options to do it. We don't have the money to send people checks all the time, and we haven't been saving for retirements so we can't cut taxes much or at all on the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. Our tax pyramid is sharp enough that we can't afford to raise them too much on the next 20% of the income distribution either, and if you target just the top you are asking for flight. Ronald Reagan did more to raise the incomes of the bottom half of the distribution than the modern Dems, which should tell us all something.

Death of the Monster

2008-08-01T22:48:00.003-04:00

Remember the monster album? It blasted out of the studio, or it crept up from under the charts. It came winged with anticipation, or it slithered into the playlists. Either way, it defined pop music. It was, for a time, inevitable, shooting out hit after hit like a Roman candle. Certain summers of my life are defined by certain albums, even if I never bought them or liked them. "The Wall." "Rumours." "Born in the USA." "The Joshua Tree." "Parallel Lines." "Tapestry." "Thriller." "Nevermind." "Frampton Comes Alive."

When did it die? And which hook-fest was the last? Off the top of my head I thought mid-1990s: Live (1994), Hootie and the Blowfish (1994), Alanis Morissette (1996). After that? Late '90s: Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, were they monsters? There was that one Linkin Park album.

Anything since 2000? Is it safe to say the monster rock album died with the millennium?

A Very Sad Book

2008-08-01T20:10:00.000-04:00

This [Tim Tzouliadis's "The Forsaken"] is a very sad book, the story of thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the "building of socialism." It was, in the words of the author, "the least heralded migration in American history" and a period when "for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving." Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag.

The history we know is false. No matter how hard they try, historians when they write can't purge themselves of knowing how it turns out. Usually, I suspect, they don't even try. To understand why people did what they did, you have to stand in the past and blind yourself, so you cannot see ahead.

In the 1930s, capitalism and liberal democracy looked like dead ends. The Soviet Union, filtered through the supposedly reliable reporting of Western observers who actually went there, seemed to be charging ahead with inspired workers and full production, where the U.S. was a land of cold chimneys and breadlines. In Germany and Italy, other collectivisms made monumental strides, under dynamic leadership, amid popular enthusiasm. That a certain brutality accompanied all this was known, but it had not yet become monstrous and even then the full degree did not become apparent to most people till after the war.

I wonder about "for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving." I don't have the right books on hand now, but it might be there were brief periods in the 1830s and perhaps 1850s, during severe economic downturns, when more people were leaving than arriving.

Memo to Campaign Journalists

2008-08-01T17:27:00.001-04:00

Take a vacation. Please. You're more embarrassing than the candidates. Look, everything is about to go quiet for a while because the Olympics are going to blot out the spotlight. Then we'll have the party conventions, which will utterly rewrite the electoral landscape. Then it gets real. Right now, nothing matters. Nothing. And when you insist on writing like it does, you get puerilities like this:

But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

Well, duh. He is a smoker, or was until very recently. We may be a nation of uneducated lard-asses, but we generally recognize smokers tend to be skinnier than non-smokers. Hell, even the government knows this.

The same goes for political bloggers, who beclown themselves by shrieking that McCain was "fearmongering" back in October 2001 when he suggested Iraq was a suspect in the anthrax mailings.

As Atrios recalls, shortly after 9/11, conservatives were pinning the blame for the anthrax attacks on Iraq, laying the groundwork for a subsequent invasion. John McCain was part of this fearmongering effort.

...

He preyed on the public’s fear at the time by claiming that the anthrax “may have come from Iraq”

O, the tyranny of hindsight! Back then, we knew very little. Except that at least some of the anthrax was "weapons-grade," the messages were overtly Islamist (or written to sound that way) and when you went looking for an entity capable of crafting that quality of fatal spores, and with the historical track record of doing such things, and with an immediate beef with the U.S., Iraq was on the short list. McCain qualified what he said with warnings that little was known: "There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq."

That hardly counts as "pinning the blame" and it didn't require a subscription to The New Republic to pencil in that dot connection at that time, however wrong it turned out to be.

Council Winners

2008-08-01T17:26:00.000-04:00

The latest Watchers Council winners are up. Thanks to Bookworm Room for hosting this week.

First place in the council went to Hating Israel more than loving palestinians by Soccer Dad.

Votes also went to “Ich Bin Ein Beginner!” by 2. Joshua Pundit; Nobody here but us biased chickens by Bookworm Room; and China by Hillbilly White Trash.

Outside the council, first place went to Barack Obama’s Stealth Socialism in Investor’s Business Daily.

Votes also went to On Obama’s Message by Jay Cost; Missing from that Berlin Speech by Jeff Jacoby; Will Obama Really Withdraw From Iraq? by Gregory Scoblete; Visiting Poland: A Warning by Maryland Conservative; and Anti-Patriot Act Poster Boy Kidnaps Own Kids by Patrick Poole.

Stating the Obvious

2008-08-01T17:16:00.001-04:00

"You don't understand al Qaeda," 9/11 plotter says

"He was not a soldier, he was a driver," [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed said according to a redacted English translation of his Arabic.

He described Hamdan, who has a fourth-grade education, as a "more primitive (Bedouin) person" who did not share bin Laden's ideology but wanted his money and was "only searching for pleasure and money in this life."

"He was not fit to plan or execute. But he is fit to change trucks' tires, change oil filters, wash and clean cars and fasten cargo in pick up trucks," said Mohammed, who called himself the military official responsible for overseeing al Qaeda cells abroad and "the executive director of 9/11."

... Prosecutors contend [Hamdan] had been part of a broad al Qaeda conspiracy since traveling to Afghanistan in 1996, and therefore shared the blame for al Qaeda attacks, such as the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in east Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and September 11.

Mohammed said those attacks succeeded precisely because they were kept secret from many members of bin Laden's inner circle, from other al Qaeda members and cells, from trainers at the camps and from what he termed "civilian employees" such as cooks, translators and computer engineers.

Referring to bin Laden, he said, "It is not logical that anyone who knew UBL or visited him or associated with al Qaeda (had) to be a terrorist trained to kill people as your bad media put it."

With the usual caveats about my ignorance and the risk of trusting the arguments of clever enemies, I'd say the mastermind killer's mocking makes more sense than the government's legal case.

This is About the Internet

2008-08-01T16:41:00.000-04:00

This is not about the Internet:

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

History Matters

2008-07-31T17:17:00.008-04:00

Herodotus, goddamn it.

This New Yorker piece eventually gets it right for a long stretch. But it opens with the highbrow journalist's (or is it the New Yorker's?) condescension to "this ostensibly archaic epic" and closes with a barf-making moral equivalence passage -- America is the Persian Empire, see! Bush I is Darius! Bush II is Xerxes! Iraq is Greece! The mighty, evil empire loses and fails! Which I guess means bin Laden, al-Sadr, and the grubby beheaders of Baqouba are Leonidas and Callimachus, eh, smart guy? Didn't go there, did you? But you edged around it so tightly you can't prevent the thought from finishing in your reader's mind, if not on your page. And it's repulsive.

Time always tells, as he himself knew so well. However silly he may once have looked, Herodotus, it seems, has had the last laugh.

I don't think he's laughing, and I don't think he ever looked as silly, even to you and your friends, as you do now.

The discovery that great works of the past are not dusty and dull, but share stylistic qualities with the radically modern, is nothing new. It could only surprise a journalist. Someone who never had heard how Tolkien rescued "Beowulf" from the philologists. "Cinematic" is the praise-word the surprised discoverers usually bestow, as though people of the past never made big pictures in their heads before Hollywood put them into dark rooms to watch movies. Sure enough, it turns up here.

Here is where the reviewer (Daniel Mendelsohn) get it wrong while getting it right:

But the persistent appeal of such scenes, in which the outnumbered Greeks unexpectedly triumph over the masses of Persian invaders, is ultimately less a matter of storytelling than of politics. Although Herodotus is unwilling to be anything but neutral on the relative merits of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy (in a passage known as the “Debate on Government,” he has critical things to say about all three), he ultimately structures his presentation of the war as a kind of parable about the conflict between free Western societies and Eastern despotism. (The Persians are associated with motifs of lashing, binding, and punishment.) While he isn’t shy about portraying the shortcomings of the fractious Greek city-states and their leaders, all of them, from the luxury-loving Ionians to the dour Spartans, clearly share a desire not to answer to anyone but their own leaders.

Anyone, at any rate, was preferable to the Persian overlord Xerxes, who in Herodotus’ narrative is the subject of a magisterial portrait of corrupted power. No one who has read the Histories is likely to forget the passage describing the impotent rage of Xerxes when his engineers’ first attempt to create a bridge from Asia to Europe across the Hellespont was washed away by a storm: after commanding that the body of water be lashed three hundred times and symbolically fettered (a pair of shackles was tossed in), he chastised the “bitter water” for wronging him, and denounced it as “a turbid and briny river.” More practically, he went on to have the project supervisors beheaded.

Herodotus’ Xerxes is, however, a character of persuasive complexity, the swaggering cruelty alternating with childish petulance and sudden, sentimental paroxysms of tears: it’s a personality likely to remind contemporary audiences of a whole panoply of dangerous dictators, from Nero to Hitler. One of the great, unexpected moments in the Histories, evoking the emotional finesse of the best fiction, comes when Xerxes, reviewing the ocean of forces he has assembled for the invasion, suddenly breaks down, “overcome,” as he puts it to his uncle Artabanus (who has warned against the enterprise), “by pity as I considered the brevity of human life.” Such feeling for human life, in a dictator whose casual indifference to it is made clear throughout the narrative, is a convincing psychological touch. The unstable leader of a ruthlessly centralized authoritarian state is a nightmare vision that has plagued the sleep of liberal democracies ever since Herodotus created it.

It's the stories in the histories that matter most. As in poetry and fiction. They teach us to be fully human. Not political. Not creatures of faction, class, race, or gender. But human. The great stories are stories of people, and ultimately there is no difference between the heroes whose names stand in memory after 2,500 years and those you never heard of, still living,

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,

or the slingers and foot-soldiers in the Anabasis, which is why we tell the stories over and over to ourselves and teach them to our children. This is what people can do! Even when all around them looks bleak!

It wasn't Xerxes' rage at the waves that I most remembered from that part of the story. It was what came just after in Herodotus' account:

As he marched out the army, Pythias the Lydian, dreading the heavenly omen and encouraged by the gifts given to him by Xerxes, came up to Xerxes and said, "Master, I wish to ask a favor of you, which would be a small favor for you to render, but would be a great favor for me to receive." Xerxes, thinking that he knew everything Pythias could ask for, answered that he would grant the favor and asked him to proclaim what it was he wished. "Master, it happens that I have five sons, and they are all bound to soldier for you against the Greeks. I pray you, king, that you have pity on one who has reached my age and that you set free one of my sons, even the oldest, from your army, so that he may provide for me and my possessions. Take the other four with you, and may you return having accomplished all you intended."

Xerxes flew into a horrible rage and replied, "You villainous man, you have the effrontery, seeing me marching with my army against the Greeks, with my sons and brothers and relatives and friends, to remind me of your son, you, my slave, who should rather come with me with your entire household, including your wife! You may now be certain of this, that since the spirit lives in a man's ears, hearing good words it fills the body with delight, when it hears the opposite it swells up. When you at one time performed well and promised more, you had no reason to boast that you outperformed your king in benefits; and now that you have turned most shameless, you shall receive less than what you deserve. You and four of your sons are saved because of your hospitality; but one of your sons, the one you most desire to hold your arms around, will lose his life!" Having answered thus, he commanded those charged to accomplish this to find the eldest of Pythias's sons and cut him in half, and having cut him in two to set one half of his corpse on the right side of the road and the other on the left side, and between these the army moved forth.

Which sounds rather unlike George W. Bush and a great deal like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. West is still West, East East, despite progressive polemics and the false weathercock of journalism.

Highways

2008-07-29T22:58:00.004-04:00

In researching the history of the federal highway system, I came across this account of its birth, full of fascinating anecdote and prominently featuring one of the favorite figures of this blog, Gen. Lucius D. Clay.

When Sherman Adams, the President's Chief Assistant, asked who should serve on the committee, the President said, "Call General Clay."

In a biography of Clay, Jean Edward Smith quoted an oral history interview in which General Clay recalled how he became involved in the President's Advisory Committee:

Sherman Adams called me down. This was in August 1954. We had lunch with the President, and they were concerned about the economy. We were facing a possible recession, and he wanted to have something on the books that would enable us to move quickly if we had to go into public works. He felt that a highway program was very important.

It's interesting to me that the national highway system often is presented, even by historians, as a Cold War solution to the problem of mobilizing a huge military or evacuating cities in the case of nuclear war. Those were part of the rationale that the government used to sell the plan. But the reasons discussed at the time of birth, apparently, focused on other fears from the early Cold War era: that with World War II over, the Great Depression would return.

In selecting members of the committee, General Clay's idea was that, "If we were going to build highways, I wanted people who knew something about it." He chose Steve Bechtel of Bechtel Corporation, Sloan Colt of Bankers' Trust Company, Bill Roberts of Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company, and Dave Beck of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. He chose them because, he said, "They knew what the highway system was all about" He added:

Steve Bechtel had more experience in the construction field than anyone in America. He wasn't involved in road building, but had a comprehensive knowledge of the construction industry. Bill Roberts built construction equipment; he knew what the problems were there. Mr. Colt was experienced in finance. We had to determine how we wanted to finance this, and so his experience was invaluable. And Dave Beck of the Teamsters certainly had an interest in highways, and he gave us labor representation.

... Although these men "knew what highways were about and how important they were," as Clay put it, none of them had been involved in the business of road building. Clay had rejected the suggestions he received from colleagues that he select such individuals as Robert Moses, the New York road builder, or a representative of the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO). He thought they represented "special interests" with preconceived ideas.

Which is typical Clay. People with the deepest knowledge of the sort of problems to be tackled. But not one of them an insider.

Where, today, would you find the equivalent of "Dave Beck of the Teamsters" to serve on such a board? Beck, ultimately convicted of corruption, may not have been a sterling choice even then. But does anyone think we're better off for not having "labor representation" in such a situation? With the direct challenge of communism -- not the wretched Soviet Union but the ideal of a worker-run economy -- a mere historical memory, do hardhats no longer count when important decisions are made?

The Post-Cold War Candidacy

2008-07-29T20:21:00.000-04:00

Gregory Scoblete (generally anti-Iraq War) asks, Will Obama Really Withdraw from Iraq? Which also might be titled, "Why Can't Barack be More Like Chomsky?"

The only way for Obama to truly deliver on his pledge to "end the war" in Iraq is to sketch out a new American compact with the Middle East - one that breaks fairly radically with the conventions of the past. This is not the same as promising bargaining instead of bombs and bluster, or arguing, as Obama has frequently done, that our resources are more urgently needed elsewhere. Rather, it is about recasting the debate over Iraq and the Middle East from what is the "responsible" thing to do to a debate about what we are responsible for.

He nonetheless asks a lot of good questions, which many Obama-skeptics on the right have not quite framed as well as he does.

To believe that Obama is serious about ending America's commitment to Iraq is to assume either that the progress Iraq has made to date is irreversible (which almost no one believes) or that he has placed the removal of U.S. troops from Iraq ahead of other regional interests. After all, it is impossible to maintain America's traditional sense of responsibility over events in the Middle East and simultaneously remove large numbers of troops from Iraq, come what may.

And this, which certainly is on target:

For many, Obama's reluctance to challenge the current principles of America's involvement in the Middle East is a reassuring "move to the center." To others, it is a reminder of how narrow the debate on foreign policy really is. Rather than debate the ends of American policy, we debate the means.

Followed by this provocative idea:

Such a narrow debate is one of the unintended consequences of America's Cold War victory. A broad, bi-partisan agreement on the nature of U.S. interests and the threat posed to them by the Soviet Union was vital - it allowed the United States to consistently contain communism even as presidential administrations (and thus tactics) changed.

Much like this consensus, our interests in the Middle East are largely derived from the Cold War era, when American power-balancing was necessary to reduce Soviet influence. Rather than adjust those interests when the threat from global communism disappeared, Washington remained content with the status quo. Today, our presidential candidates debate the utility of their policies in advancing agreed upon interests. They debate within the status quo.

I'll have to mull that over some more, since I recognize that I have a reflexive tendency to cast contemporary problems in terms of the Cold War, therefore I don't trust my snap judgments. It is undeniable that the Cold War severely warped America, and that our minds have not yet stopped flowing through the channels it carved in them. It's also true that U.S. journalism's fixation with the present tense overlooks even recent historical influences. That "journalism" includes blogs. So the Cold War is often the obvious thing left out in discussions of modern America and its policies.

Scoblete thus suggests Obama "fashion himself as a 'post Cold War' candidate, willing to realign America's foreign policy in response to the world as we find it today." One problem with that is that the Cold War warped the rest of the world, too. The modern geopolitical landscape is a post-Cold War battlefield, littered with rusting artillery and unexploded mines. Saddam was a bit of both.

His sunny expectation that Middle Eastern governments, left to themselves, would act in rational economic self-interest, that (he is quoting other writers here) "Middle-Eastern governments have even more incentive than do consuming states to worry about the security of oil production facilities, ports, and shipping lanes," seems overly hopeful. Didn't Iraq and Iran in the 1980s give the lie to that?

Scoblete attempts to sketch how Obama could take that path and dovetail it not with the anti-war movement, but with mainstream American politics, including conservative pathways. Good reading for those who like to be challenged.

[Hat tip, The Glittering Eye]

Somewhat along the same lines, the indispensable Brit David Aaronovitch reminds his fellow Brits, Eventually, we will all hate Obama too.

George W. Bush, of course, represents a particular kind of offence to European sensibilities. He blew out Kyoto, instead of pretending to care about it and then not implementing it, which is what our hypocrisies require. He took no exquisite pains to make us feel consulted. He invaded Iraq in the name of freedom and then somehow allowed torturers to photograph each other in the fallen dictator's house of tortures. He is not going to run Franklin Roosevelt a close race for nomination as the second greatest president of the US.

But even if he had been a half-Chinese ballet-loving Francophone, he would have been hated by some who should have loved him, for there isn't an American president since Eisenhower who hasn't ended up, at some point or other, being depicted by the world's cartoonists as a cowboy astride a phallic missile. It happened to Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq; it will happen to Mr Obama when his reinforced forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan mistake a meeting of tribal elders for an unwise gathering of Taleban and al-Qaeda. Then the new president (or, if McCain, the old president) will be the target of that mandarin Anglo-French conceit that our superior colonialism somehow gives us the standing to critique the Yank's naive and inferior imperialism.

Often those who express their tiresome anti-Americanism will suggest, as do some of the more disingenuous anti-Zionists with regard to anti-Semitism - that they, of course, are not anti-American, and that no one really is. But, coming as I do from an Anti-American tradition that wasn't afraid to proclaim itself, I think I know where the corpses are interred. For example, the current production of Bernstein's Candide at the English National Opera is a classic of elite anti-Americanism, in which we are invited to laugh at the philistine invocation of “Democracy, the American Way and McDonald's”. The laughter that accompanied this feeble satire showed our proper understanding that we, the audience, had a proper concept of democracy, and would never soil ourselves with an Egg McMuffin.

At which point it might be pertinent to note that Egg McMuffins are selling like hotcakes in Europe right now.

Europe is now McDonald's largest region by revenues, despite having roughly one-quarter the number of outlets as the US. Last year, revenues from company stores and royalties from franchisees topped $8.9 billion in Europe, compared with $7.9 billion in the US. It's a trend that analysts expect to continue when the world's biggest restaurant group reports second-quarter results on July 23. West expects US sales to rise by 3.4 percent, vs. 9 percent for Europe (19 percent if you include the foreign currency impact). This year, he reckons, McDonald's, the most American of brands, will generate 55 percent of its earnings outside the US.

McDonalds now serves more than 10 million customers a day in Europe. But there's a secret: They do it by being just a little less like McDonalds, and a little more like Europe:

McDonald's kept its trademark golden arches logo in Europe but got rid of the red accompanying it. Instead, restaurants feature a warm burgundy color. The pointy roofs are being phased out and replaced by simple olive green facades, and the bright neon lights in the restaurants were dimmed.

"French fries and cheeseburgers remain the best-selling items," the article notes, but even that might change:

"A huge chunk of the company's success comes from giving locals the kind of foods they like, instead of force-feeding American menu items to them," said Ron Paul, president of Technomic Inc., a Chicago-based restaurant research firm.

There's porridge in Britain and pasta freshly cooked to order in Italy. In France, there's a smaller-sized burger on a ciabatta roll slathered with a sophisticated mustard sauce — and served with a glass of wine.

The goal, you see, is not to bulldoze the world's cultures into one generic, bland mash. It's not even to force Romanian peasants to love McNuggets. It's to separate people from their money in a way that makes them feel like they're getting a good deal. And for all we know, measured in their terms, they are.

That's a hard game to beat us at. European philosophical approaches have attempted it for decades, generally with miserable results:

A group of young communist militants had proudly gone from France to Moscow in 1930. They enrolled at the Lenin School for foreign Communists and dutifully imbibed the texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin; they also undertook training in handling guns and conducting clandestine correspondence. The idea was that the French Communist Party should acquire a cadre of able potential leaders for the political struggles ahead. The curriculum also involved some weeks of work in a Russian factory. The French delegation had come to the USSR with an assumption about the effortless superiority of Russia’s workers as a revolutionary vanguard, so the sloppiness of the Soviet labor force came as a shock. Russian workers, unlike the French workers they knew intimately, lacked conscientiousness: They turned up late and did as little work as they could get away with, and they were uninterested in outsiders suggesting ways to improve efficiency. Waldeck Rochet, a young Frenchman, said to his friend Henri Barbé: “Were we to tell the French workers what we’re seeing here, they’d throw cooked apples at us. But we’re caught in a trap and compelled to stay.”

On Account of You I Nearly Heard

2008-07-28T16:26:00.001-04:00

The Opry.

Question for You

2008-07-25T21:40:00.002-04:00

Do you think race relations in the U.S. will be better or worse after an Obama presidency? And why?

Whose Camel, Whose Tent

2008-07-25T20:57:00.001-04:00

This is what happens when you decide to get involved in the Middle East.

We, the mighty superpower, think we're helping a weak and downtrodden country choose its leaders. Too late we learn they're helping us choose ours. Clever, clever people. Terrible at winning wars, but never lost an intrigue if a Western power was on the other side of it.

Nader is Right

2008-07-25T20:56:00.003-04:00

About this.

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader came to Harrisburg Thursday with unfinished business on his mind.

Nader wants relief from an $81,102 penalty for legal costs following court battles over his presidential nomination petition in 2004. He said he will file a challenge with the state Supreme Court.

Nader said those damages should be dropped in light of criminal charges brought this month by Attorney General Tom Corbett against 12 people with ties to the state House Democratic caucus. Among allegations of illegal activities, Corbett said House Democratic staffers were deployed on state time in a successful effort to get Nader knocked off the ballot four years ago.

One hundred percent right. The fines at least should be suspended pending the outcome of the investigation.

Council Winners

2008-07-25T19:58:00.002-04:00

This week's Council Winners have been posted. Soccer Dad is the host; the longtime admiral has sadly left the helm of the ship, but it sails on.

First place in the council went to Who knew? from right here. My thanks for the votes.

Second place was a tie between
Deconstructing the Socialists War On Law & Order In Britain at Wolf Howling and The moral of the story at Bookworm Room, which I recommend to fellow lovers of literature.

Votes also went to Horribly Wrong Part II by Soccer Dad, and Speak truth to power - just not to educators at The Razor.

Outside the council, the winner was Soldiers Recount Deadly Attack On Afghan Outpost at Stars and Stripes, a solid piece of writing, but I didn't vote for it because it wasn't a blog post.

Votes also went to When it’s Obama’s War by council alumnus Right Wing Nuthouse; “Obama Overflies Iraqi Mass Graves”, a take-off on alternate history by Confederate Yankee; Spot the Smiley Fascism by Colonel Robert Neville; The War is Over. We Won by the unstoppable Michael Yon; and Are We There Yet? Victory in Iraq and the 2008 Election by Baseball Crank. Interesting piece, but I'm surprised a sports fan would risk incurring the jinx by using "victory" in reference to a game still in progress.

Liberal Conservatives

2008-07-24T21:13:00.000-04:00

The way we talk about "conservative" and "liberal" (or "progressive") as eternal enemies masks something: There is, for instance, liberal conservatism.

Self-identifying conservatives, when they meet it, hardly know what to make of it and stare at it like a farmer with a two-headed calf.

Like this:

Alice Waters might not seem like a conservative. A veteran of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, who once cooked a $25,000-a-seat fundraising dinner for Bill Clinton, she eagerly compares her campaign for “edible schoolyards” — where children work with instructors to grow, prepare, and eat fresh produce — to John F. Kennedy’s attempt to improve physical fitness through mandatory exercise. Her dream of organic, locally and sustainably produced food in every school cafeteria, class credit for lunch hour, and required gardening time and cooking classes is as utopian as they come. The name she has given her gastronomic movement, the “Delicious Revolution,” strikes the ear as one part fuzzy-headed Marxism, the other Brooksian bobo-speak. This woman is not, as they say, one of us.

But by the end of this cover story in the "American Conservative," the crusade has been recast in terms of values, republican virtue, and libertarian action:

Renewing the culinary culture, and restoring the kinds of values that are necessary for the proper functioning of a healthy republic, is not the sort of thing that can be left to activists, environmentalists, and government bureaucrats. This is a conservative cause if ever there was one, and it is going to have to begin at home. The revolution is coming. And it’s sure to be delicious.

The writer can only come around to this notion by the roadways of his own ideological landscape -- by explaining that the prevailing mass-market and junk food culture is an outcome of central planning and excess government interference in the market. I'm not qualified to judge that, but my guess is it's more complicated than that (or that the same argument could be applied in other areas -- suburban tract housing, for example -- where the writer might not like it as much). Yet having cleansed the hippie Garden of Eatin' with a wave of his ideological fetishes, he may now safely enter therein.

Intellectual conservatism -- left or right -- is not historical re-enactment. It doesn't merely strive to save the past or seek to revive it in its full odor. It fights to preserve virtues and folkways that have been known to work, over time. And confronting new realities, it prefers the known devil to the new one.

Historians can tell you the past in our heads always is better than the reality was. We wish to conserve a better past, a carefully chosen past. This continual process of preserving-while-cleansing is a slow but sure way to make people better. By this method, as James Bowman might tell you, vicious, selfish honor codes like those that we abhor in modern Middle Eastern societies, which once prevailed among the peoples of Europe, morphed into medieval chivalry and eventually into the world of the Victorian Christian gentlemen.

Historical liberals -- not the minds our debased political language confines to that label -- would be doing this deliberately: They would understand people's reflexive reverence for their national and cultural heritage and use the best qualities in that heritage, stripped of the ugliness of the past, to herd the present toward the future. And they would have been unafraid of words like "virtue," "honor," and "morality." They would not have used them as James Dobson does. But they would have used them without shame.

In a 1995 Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute on the virtues of Victorian morality, Gertrude Himmelfarb, the conservative social historian, said:

It is this reluctance to speak the language of morality, and to apply moral ideas to social policies, that separates us from the Victorians. In Victorian England, moral principles were as much a part of public discourse as of private discourse, and as much a part of social policy as of personal life. Every measure of poor relief, for example, had to justify itself by showing that it would promote the moral as well as the material well-being of the poor -- and not only of the pauper receiving relief but of the independent laboring poor as well. In recent times we have so completely rejected any kind of moral principle that we have deliberately, systematically divorced poor relief from moral sanctions and incentives. We are now confronting the consequences of this policy. Having made the most valiant attempt to see the problem of poverty as the product of impersonal economic and social forces, we are now discovering that the economic and social aspects are inseparable from the moral and personal ones. And having made the most determined effort to devise policies that are ‘value free,’ that do not stigmatize the recipients of relief or the ‘style of life,’ we find that these policies imperil both the moral and the material well-being of their intended beneficiaries.

What happened between then and now is a great knot waiting to be cut, a knot with 100 threads called the 20th Century.

Us and Them

2008-07-24T16:58:00.003-04:00

For some reason the TypeKey comment registration program never works for me, even though I have an account there and log into it. Michael J. Totten uses it at his site, and thus I am unable to comment there. He has a recent post up about the sad state of affairs in Lebanon. One weakness of blogs is that the first comment on a thread often can be a hijacker, and that was the case (deliberately or not) with this one. Someone going by the handle Good Democrat posted this:

All those who resort to the constant use of violence are doomed in the long run. One of the things that fell the massive Roman Empire is its constant warmongering. Americans should take note. Hezbollah should take note. Hamas should take note. Al-Qaeda should take note.

It's off and running from there, with other commenters trying to knock this down and often not quite hitting the mark. Here's what I would have added:

America is not averse to using violence to confront violent movements and governments -- those that only understand carnage and resort to compromise or diplomacy only when all bloody avenues seem temporarily blocked. That sets us apart from much of the rest of the modern West and irritates a great many Americans, such as, probably, Good Democrat. It does not, however, make us the moral equivalent of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or al Qaida.

It seems prudent, to me, to reserve the right and preserve the ability to tangle with vicious, fanatical, honor-obsessed organizations in a way they will fear and respect.

Having thews of honor culture and a respect for the prudent use of force also makes us -- or, typically, our military professional class -- more suited to understanding such qualities and working with them when that need arises, as it has in many places in Iraq.

In other cases, America is capable of diplomacy and occasionally even good at it. Even when dealing with the Soviet Union in its worst nightmares, we were able to maintain a mostly diplomatic relationship that kept the violence (there was plenty of it) on the sidelines and under the rugs. I doubt Hezbollah could have gone 15 minutes without chunking a missile at someone under similar circumstances.

Rock the Nanny State

2008-07-23T23:42:00.000-04:00

Poking around on the Happy Flu chart I landed on this clever site and found this story, which, maybe everybody blogged the living hell out of it when it was published but I was on vacation that week so I never noticed. Anyway, I'm grinning at it tonight. Straight out of Manchester, England:

Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets.

With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.

They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester – including on a bus – and proceeded to play to the cameras.

Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.

"We wanted to produce something that looked good and that wasn't too expensive to do," guitarist Tony Churnside told Sky News.

Little Engines

2008-07-23T20:27:00.005-04:00

The place where I now live is a deeply conservative place. It is powerfully Republican, but that's not what makes it conservative. It's conservative because people here keep doing things the same way long after everyone else has given it up.

There was a bank here that had been around since the National Bank Act of 1863. It was one of the original U.S.-backed banks, and it was where local people had stashed their pennies since Lincoln was president. But it grew too fast and got out of its depth after deregulation, and last year it collapsed when regulators looked at the books and discovered a huge amount of fraudulent loans to companies far out of state. It got bought up by a big commercial bank from the other end of the state.

The new owners formally took charge this summer. When the future writes the history of America, it may pick up on little things as signs of our impending decline; the rattle of loose lugs in the hub that, in retrospect, signals the wheels are starting to come off.

They may pick the moment, sometime in the 1980s as far as I can tell, when a passbook savings account became a waste of time and money for Americans. Banks basically began to make sure anything you made in interest on a savings account would be eaten up in fees.

Around here, typically, it took a little longer. My son, now 17, got a savings account when he started earning a little money. We wanted him to see how money put away now, rather than taken at a run to the comic book store, can be there when you need it. Also to see how money can grow. This last was dubious, though. When I was a kid you could make 4 percent a year in a savings account or better. My son got a measly 1 percent. But at least he was saving.

More than money grows. Turning to see if anyone is behind you before you let a door swing shut. Holding on to the candy wrapper till you reach the trash can at the end of the block rather than letting it fly from your hand onto the sidewalk the minute you pop the treat into your mouth. Turning off the lights when you leave the room. Little things learned young grow into habits of mind that become behaviors. They are the scaffolds of character. You do it through your life because it feels right, even if most likely the trash can already is overflowing because people have stuffed their household garbage into it. The world, or at least the neighborhood or nation where you live, is just a little brighter than it might have been without you. Which is, in the end, what makes a life worth it.

The new bank sent out notices to savings account holders this month. To keep an active savings account, you had to keep a minimum of $400 in it. And if you made more than three withdrawals a year from it, the minimum rose to some exorbitant figure, $1,500, I think. Translation: We are a big bank that deals with big, important customers. You are not one. We don't want your pennies.

A few years ago I read an article in the Kansas City Star, now unfortunately no longer at the Web address where I then found it. It was datelined Waukegan, Ill., and it told the story of a group of children singled out by comedian Jack Benny for a comical gift of trust funds "in the whopping amount of $39."

Benny's whole schtick -- vain and stingy, among other things -- is ancient history now, so the savings account story takes some explaining. "The story started on Oct. 5, 1961, the day a junior high school was named in Benny's honor in Waukegan, which he often mentioned on his popular radio and TV programs.

Benny announced that he would show his gratitude for the honor by starting $39 trust funds for every baby born in the city on that day.

He hoped that money would grow with interest over the years and become a nice bonus when they turned 39, Benny's mythic age.

But the joke flopped. By the time the Waukegan kids hit 39, the accounts were dead.

[Doug] Jondal remembers his Benny Baby bank statements being the first mail he ever received. Because the account wasn't active and below $100, the bank began charging fees, he said.

"Whenever they added a nickel interest, it was offset by a charge that kept it from ever going over $100," he said.

Jondal thinks he finally got a $98 check from the bank when he was in his late teens and probably spent it on a motorcycle tire or motocross gear. Though Benny Baby status wasn't a defining moment in his life, Jondal said he's glad it happened.

It's history now. Those kids, like many of the rest of us who were little kids in the 1960s, had an experience our children never will now. Whether it tutored us in the habits of thrift or not is an open question. What's not open to question is that our children won't have the chance. The neighborhood, and the nation, won't either.

Of Course They're Revolting

2008-07-23T12:53:00.000-04:00

They haven't bathed in weeks.

Happy Flu

2008-07-22T22:23:00.001-04:00

See if this works ....

As Sinatra Would Say

2008-07-22T22:09:00.000-04:00

"That's life".

Noooooooooooooooo, I screamed at him. He jumped. “Whats wrong? What happened?”

You just drowned my ants!

A Southern Story

2008-07-22T21:15:00.000-04:00

The Civil War in black and white.

He asked [Newspaper publisher W.T.] Anderson to help start a Christmas fund for the old soldiers. Anderson, said Pittman, "jumped all over it" and had an article written about Yopp's life and what he was trying to do for the soldiers' home.

They hoped to raise $100, Pittman said.

"The readers of The Telegraph just loved it. Schoolchildren were raising money, and churches, and before they knew it, they had $200."

The fund drive became an annual event, with the money presented to the veterans during a holiday program at the home. The Dec. 23, 1918, edition of The Telegraph ran a photo of Bill Yopp "playing Santa" and presenting a cake and other "goodies" to Thomas Yopp - and $175 to the home.

Gov. Hugh Dorsey attended at least one of the programs and "took Bill under his wing," Pittman said.

The governor arranged for him to speak at the state Capitol to a group of influential politicians. Yopp convinced them to reinstate the pension in 1920.

Bill Yopp, the dynamic philanthropist on the newspaper staff, and Thomas Yopp, the impoverished veteran languishing in the institution, weren't brothers. They weren't even related. Bill was a former slave. Thomas, a Confederate captain, was his former owner and master.

Nice to see a modern newspaper tell the story.

57 States

2008-07-22T21:10:00.000-04:00

This happened a few weeks ago, when Dick Cheney said the Chinese were drilling for oil a few dozen miles off the U.S. coast and then backtracked and said he had been misinformed about that.

The newspaper where I work ran a story about that. Of course, Cheney looked foolish; he should have known better.

The next day, I was on the wire desk and a call came in from a surly reader. He demanded that we also print, and play prominently, a story about Obama having made some reference to "57 states" in the U.S.

I told him, no, we weren't going to do that. For one, Obama's gaffe had happened a couple of weeks ago and wasn't news. I might also have added that a verbal flub by a candidate was one thing, and a key misconception by a high-ranking administration member was another.

The caller hung up utterly disgusted with me and confirmed in his notion that his media was biased. Well, he had a point, but it wasn't the one he was making. It was closer to the one this site made about the same time.

After the conversation ended, some of the other editors, including the editorial writer, came over and asked me what it was about (the tone of the exchange obviously had been hostile). I explained what the man had said. And I discovered that not one of the other journalists I worked with had heard anything about the "57 states" gaffe.

Now, this is a crew that can go on for hours and hours reciting Bush II garbles, from his candidacy as well as his presidency. They still can do Bush I mockery like 1990 was just yesterday. They even have on the tip of their tongues slips and boners from the Reagan administration. Any mention of "ketchup" sure to be followed by, "and that's a vegetable, you know. Reagan said so."

They were so surprised by Obama having said something even Dan Quayle didn't manage that they had to look it up online before they believed it. It has never been mentioned in the office again.

Hee. Haw.

2008-07-22T17:34:00.002-04:00

The syndicated newspaper TV columnist our paper publishes every day has a fairly conventional journalistic progressive/left worldview, which I know because, being a columnist, he has no need to muzzle himself. You might not think writing about TV shows would offer much opportunity to preach political and social agendas, but there's always a PBS documentary or a CNN special report to hang it on.

Or even typical prime time sitcom fare. Here he is writing (for tomorrow) about some new show that tries to make hay out of the usual joke-butts: redneck rural Southern Americans.

"The stereotypes of trailer-park denizens, Texas bars, church ladies gone astray and Valium-guzzling women with big hair may be off-putting to some, but I can’t imagine they are the target audience for 'Sordid Lives' anyway."

OK, now do the usual substitutions -- stereotypes of any ethnic/social/sexual/religious subgroup for the one described above -- and see if you still think "but it's OK, because they're not the ones who are supposed to be watching it." One wonders if the columnist (one Kevin McDonough) feels that way, too. Or if, deciding his first justification doesn't quite work, he's got another one beside "but it's OK because I think the world is better when one subgroup is mocked and belittled in front of the nation for our entertainment."

Who's sayin' "Hussein?"

2008-07-21T22:26:00.004-04:00

QC Examiner picks out the nut from a recent poll:

[A] recent Pew Research Center Report says that the belief that Obama is a Muslim is bipartisan — 12% of both Republicans and Democats believe this.

Further, the poll found that questions about Obama’s faith appear to have a strong influence on candidate preference among the Democrats who either believe Obama is a Muslim or who didn’t know his religious beliefs. Republicans — not so much.

Who Knew

2008-07-20T22:03:00.003-04:00

We live in a time when the gap between what people think has happened and what has happened is enormous. The Iraqi antiquities museums and ancient archaeological sites were carefully preserved for decades, then damaged by the wanton American attack on Saddam in 2003 and viciously looted of everything after the invasion because the U.S. did not protect them. Except they weren't, apparently. But it will take a generation at least for reality to catch up to a politically convenient topos.

Here's another one that keeps coming up in discussions around me. I don't know how it is for you, but many of my peers in journalism take it as self-evident that certain Democratic politicians who opposed the Iraq War from the beginning did so because they were "right" about the reality of Iraq and the consequences of an invasion, and they were "not fooled" by the Bush Administration sales pitch for regime change then and there.

It looks like this:

In the end, 156 members of Congress from 36 states had enough information and personal insight and wisdom to make the correct decision for our national and the world community.

These discerning, courageous leaders are exactly what our country needs to lead us out of the present abyss in Iraq under the Bush Administration. We can trust their judgment!

Most often, this year, this has been brought up to scold Hillary Clinton, who voted in favor of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, which opened the door for the overthrow of Saddam.

The resolution passed the Senate Oct. 11, 2002, by a vote of 77-23. The 23 who voted against it -- and who now have taken on an aura of "discerning" "courageous" "rightness" to my anti-war friends -- were:

Daniel Akaka (D-HI)
Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)
Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
Robert Byrd (D-WV)
Kent Conrad (D-ND)
Jon Corzine (D-NJ)
Mark Dayton (D-MN)
Richard Durbin (D-IL)
Russ Feingold (D-WI)
Bob Graham (D-FL)
Daniel Inouye (D-HI)
Ted Kennedy (D-MA)
Patrick Leahy (D-VT)
Carl Levin (D-MI)
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)
Patty Murray (D-WA)
Jack Reed (D-RI)
Paul Sarbanes (D-MD)
Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Paul Wellstone (D-MN)
Ron Wyden (D-OR)
Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)
Jim Jeffords (I-VT)

So I went looking to see if they truly were among that perhaps mythical sect of American leaders who were not fooled by Shrubbie McChimplerburton's propaganda on Saddam's non-existent WMD. Of course anyone can claim that -- now. The trick is to prove you really knew it back then. With senators, their stated opinions are on the record.

Here's what I can find on the Senate's anti-war immortals and their opinion on Saddam and WMD as of October 2002. Most are from floor speeches or debates during the discussion of the resolution. In all cases, emphasis is added by me:

Akaka: "Saddam Hussein is not the only dictator who oppresses his people, attacks his neighbors, and is developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD)."

Now, you can parse that and reply, "he does not say Saddam HAS the weapons; only that he is developing them." (Even that turns out to have been an exaggeration of Saddam's capabilities in 2002.) But I submit that is not a legalistic cleverness on Mr. Akaka's part, simply a casualness of rhetoric. As you will see, his fellow die-hard opponents of the 2002 Iraq measure had no qualms about making positive assertions at this point about Saddam's WMD. And Akaka continued to vote alongside them for resolutions that made positive assertions about them.

And if Senator Akaka or any of them had had an inkling that no WMD at all would be found, rather than hinting at it in Akaka's soft phrase they would have brayed it from the rafters, since they had already emptied every possible point of argument in the bin, including but not limited to Bob Byrd's Loeb Classics library, Herman Goering, and the D.C. Beltway sniper.

Later (Oct. 10), Akaka said:

Congressional testimony, reports by the intelligence community and outside analysts, state that Iraq’s WMD capability is much less now than it was before the Gulf War. A recent CIA public report states that Iraq’s chemical weapons capability "is probably more limited now than it was at the time of the Gulf war ..." Although it is probable that Iraq’s biological weapons program is more advanced than it was before the war, its delivery capability, according to the respected Londonbased International Institute for Strategic Studies, "appears limited." I agree that we must neutralize Iraq’s WMD threat. The question is how to do that most effectively while minimizing the loss in American lives.

The argument that an inspection system cannot guarantee the elimination of Iraq’s WMD program is certainly true but misses the point. There are few absolutes in this world. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld insists that we need American troops on the ground, rummaging through every Iraqi nook and cranny for evidence of WMD. Even with our troops doing so, there would be no guarantee that every item would be uncovered or how long it would take. ....

But what aggressive inspections can do is destabilize the Iraqi WMD program, keep it bottled up, frustrate efforts at gaining new technologies and additional supplies, and force Iraqi technicians to hide and keep moving constantly. It will not be disarmament, but, if implemented effectively, it will be dismemberment of the Iraqi WMD program, splitting it in parts and preventing it from becoming whole.

The argument has its merits. But for my inquiry here, it hardly sounds like the words of someone skeptical over the prevailing intelligence about Saddam's WMDs. Rather than being right about them, Akaka was wrong like everyone else in the Senate and the Administration. Unlike the supporters of the resolution, who embarrassed themselves with absolutist "slam-dunk" rhetoric, his statements were more tempered. But they were aligned to the prevailing wisdom, and thus as wrong as it turned out to be.

Akaka also ponders what sort of Iraqi government might follow Saddam and asks some questions about it, such as: "Can we be assured that the new regime will be committed to getting rid of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, especially as Iraq’s traditional adversary, Iran, has an even more advanced program of weapons of mass destruction?"

The positions of the other nay-saying senators turn out to be essentially the same.
Boxer: said in a Senate floor speech Oct. 3, 2002: "I do not doubt that Iraq is up to no good. I know they are. That is why I voted for the Iraq Liberation Act. We know that Iraq has biological and chemical weapons and that they used them against Iran and against its own Kurdish minority. We know that following the Persian Gulf war, Iraq promised to abide by the demands of the U.N. but failed to live up to its commitment. They have not allowed unfettered inspections. They have lied about chemical and biological weapons programs. And they continue to seek the capability to produce nuclear weapons."
Byrd: said in a Senate floor speech on Oct. 3, 2002: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capability. Intelligence reports also indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons but has not yet achieved nuclear capability."

And also, later in the same speech: "Iraq may be a weaker nation militarily than it was during the Persian Gulf war, but its leader is no less determined and its weapons are no less lethal. During the Persian Gulf war, the United States was able to convince Saddam Hussein that the use of weapons of mass destruction would result in his being toppled from power. This time around, the object of an invasion of Iraq is to topple Saddam Hussein, so he has no reason to exercise restraint."

He seems to have forgotten his own words by the time of this interview:

But shouldn't they have questioned more vigorously the administration's rationale for the war?

Well, I have no reason to doubt that they did question it. In our conferences, I don't remember any senator who did not question to some degree -- but [it was] not enough. As far as I was concerned, I didn't believe it, and said so at the time. But this administration misled senators and House members. I think the stories this administration told -- I remember the vice president, I believe it was on Aug. 26, 2002, when he spoke before the VFW national convention, said something like, "Simply stated there is no doubt that Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." That's the vice president of the United States, and he's saying, "There is no doubt that Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." And Rumsfeld said, "We know where they are. They're outside Baghdad, in the north, in the east, in the west." Now, that's what I'm sure John Kerry and all the other senators who voted that way [based] their decisions on.

And so did the senators who voted against giving the president the authorization to use the U.S. armed forces to deprive Saddam of such weapons. They had their reasons, some of them good, patriotic, Constitutional, American, Christian reasons. But I think they should not pretend a knack for seeing through Bush & Co. lies, or a godly judgment about what is hidden in foreign lands, is among them.]
Conrad: "Saddam Hussein is a menace to the whole region of the Middle East, and a vicious tyrant who harms and oppresses his own people. He has waged war against neighboring nations, and he has attacked the people of his own country.

He has acquired chemical and biological weapons. He is attempting to acquire nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver those weapons using ballistic missiles."

Again, it is possible to raise the Akaka objection, that he is not saying anything about Saddam in the present tense. But Conrad, too, never even hints toward a positive assertion that Saddam may now have no WMD, and that that assertion was a propaganda fiction published by the White House.
Dayton: Submitted an amendment (SA 4870) to the joint resolution S.J. Res. 45, to authorize the use of force against Iraq, reading in part: "Since Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations." The amendment never came up for a vote.
Durbin: "There is no one in this Senate Chamber making apologies for Saddam Hussein or his weapons of mass destruction."
Feingold: "And with regard to Iraq, I agree that Iraq presents a genuine threat, especially in the form of weapons of mass destruction: chemical, biological and potentially nuclear weapons. I agree that Saddam Hussein is exceptionally dangerous and brutal, if not uniquely so, as the President argues. And I agree, I support the concept of regime change."

Feingold also said, in a floor speech Oct. 9, 2002:

"Before we vote on this resolution, we need a credible plan for securing WMD sites and not allowing materials of concern to slip away during some chaotic course of action. I know that is a tall order, but it is a necessary demand."

An appeal to the danger posed by Saddam's WMD as a reason to proceed cautiously before going to war against him: An argument used almost universally by the opponents of the Bush-approved authorization resolution.
Graham: "Saddam Hussein’s regime has chemical and biological weapons and is trying to get nuclear capacity. But the briefings I have received suggest our efforts, for instance, to block him from obtaining necessary nuclear materials have been largely successful, as evidenced by the recent intercept of centrifuge tubes, and that he is years away from having nuclear capability."
Kennedy: "The question is not whether we will disarm Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction but how. And it is wrong for Congress to declare war against Iraq now before we have exhausted the alternatives."

And in a Senate floor speech on Oct. 4, 2002, he said: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
Leahy: "The question we face is not whether Saddam Hussein is a menace to his people, to his neighbors and to our national security interests. The Iraqi regime has already invaded Iran and Kuwait, gassed members of its own population, and repeatedly flouted international conventions against armed aggression. It is clear that Iraq has tried to develop a range of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, with which Iraq might threaten the entire Gulf region."
Levin said in a Senate floor speech Oct. 4, 2002: "At the outset, it must be noted that, whatever differences there may be among us, the one thing on which we can all agree upon is that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the Middle East. He has used weapons of mass destruction against his own people and against Iran; he has launched invasions of Iran and Kuwait; and for the last eleven years he has defied the will of the entire world as expressed in United Nations Security Council resolutions by refusing to destroy his weapons of mass destruction and prohibited ballistic missiles."
Mikulski, in a Senate floor speech Oct. 8, 2002, in support of the Levin amendment, said:

But make no mistake, I firmly believe that Saddam Hussein is duplicitous, deceptive, and dangerous. I despise him. Saddam is a brutal, totalitarian dictator and history shows us how dangerous Iraq is under his rule. He invaded Kuwait and used chemical weapons against his own people. I do believe he has developed chemical and biological weapons, and I also believe he is pursuing nuclear weapons, defying the will of the international community and also denying the agreement that he made at the end of the gulf war.

In voting against the authorization, she said:

"Iraq has grim and ghoulish weapons to carry out his evil plans. As part of the Gulf War cease-fire agreement, Saddam Hussein committed to destroying its chemical and biological and nuclear weapons programs and longerrange missiles. Instead, Saddam Hussein is trying to add nuclear weapons to an arsenal that already includes chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles."
Stabenow said in a Senate floor speech Oct. 4, 2002: "The issue before the Senate is not whether the regime of Saddam Hussein is good or evil. We know, in fact, that he is a despicable dictator. He has gassed and poisoned thousands of his own people. He rules not by choice but by decree, backed by brutal force, and he blatantly defies United Nations resolutions by his continual development of weapons of mass destruction. I strongly oppose his regime. He is a growing threat to the United States and our allies, and his policies have devastated the lives of his own Iraqi people."

And later in her speech she asked: "Given the widely supported belief that Saddam Hussein has biological and chemical weapons, how do we assure he will not use them against us when we attack him first?"
Wellstone: "I support ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction through unfettered U.N. inspections, which should begin as soon as possible. Only a broad coalition of nations, united to disarm Saddam, while preserving our war on terror, is likely to succeed. Our primary focus now must be on Iraq's verifiable disarmament of weapons of mass destruction. This will help maintain international support, and could even eventually result in Saddam's loss of power."
Jeffords: "Once again, we need a strong United Nations to step up to Saddam Hussein. The United Nations must take the lead in enforcing its demands that Iraq give up its biological and chemical weapons stockpiles and production capabilities. The United Nations also demanded that Iraq dismantle its nuclear weapons program."

They voted "no" in spite of believing that. In fact, their language regarding Saddam's WMD is not all that different from that used by Democrats who voted for the authorization. Hillary Clinton's vote on that measure haunted her through the campaign of 2008. But her language was not much different than those who were held up as wiser heads on the issue:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. ... It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Or, for that matter, the position taken (and later repudiated) by John Edwards: "Saddam Hussein’s regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies, including our vital ally, Israel. For more than two decades, Saddam Hussein has sought weapons of mass destruction through every available means. We know that he has chemical and biological weapons. He has already used them against his neighbors and his own people, and is trying to build more. We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons, and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal.

Iraq has continued to seek nuclear weapons and develop its arsenal in defiance of the collective will of the international community, as expressed through the United Nations Security Council."

Here's Joe Biden on the WMD question:

For two decades, Saddam Hussein has relentlessly pursued weapons of mass destruction. There is a broad agreement that he retains chemical and biological weapons, the means to manufacture those weapons and modified Scud missiles, and that he is actively seeking a nuclear capability. It remains less clear how effective his delivery vehicles are, whether they be the al-Hussein missiles, with a 650 kilometer range, short-range missiles, or untested and unmanned aerial vehicles for the dispersion of chemical and biological weapons.

Shifting weather conditions, the likely incineration of much of the chemical or biological agent in a warhead explosion, and the potential blowback on Iraqi forces, all complicate the Iraqi use of these weapons. But we are right to be concerned that, given time and a free hand, Saddam would improve this technology.

In fact, the belief in Saddam's WMD was a key part of the argument for voting against the war:

"This appears to suggest that an attack on Iraq could trigger the very thing that our president has said he is trying to prevent, the use of chemical or biological weapons by Saddam. In view of this report, the policy of a pre-emptive strike is troublesome. Haste in attacking Iraq would place untold numbers of people in harm's way."

So said Rep. Donald M. Payne, D-N.J., "a leader of the effort to defeat the war resolution."

Boxer, in her Senate floor speech cited above, included among the reasons to be cautious about authorizing war:

Will Iraq use chemical or biological weapons against our troops?

Will Iraq launch chemical or biological weapons against Israel? How will Israel respond? What impact will that have?

How will we secure Iraqi chemical and biological weapons once the fighting starts? How do we make sure such weapons do not get into the hands of terrorists or terrorist nations? How do we make sure that Iraqi weapons experts, from Iraq, do not migrate to terrorist organizations or terrorist states?

And a week later:

"Will weapons of mass destruction be launched against our troops? Against Israel? If you read the CIA declassified report—declassified report—they are telling us that the chance that he will use them is greater if he feels his back is up against the wall. Everybody knows the underlying resolution implies regime change. It implies regime change. What I think is important about the Levin resolution is that it goes to the heart, the core of the matter, which is dismantlement of the weapons of mass destruction. If Saddam knows his back is against the wall, he will use these."

All of which were good, legitimate questions at that time.

Kennedy, too, raised this specter in his floor speech: "Such a war would also pose great risks to our armed forces. Some who advocate military action against Iraq assert that air strikes will do the job quickly and decisively, and that the operation will be complete in 72 hours. But there is no persuasive evidence that air strikes alone over the course of several days will incapacitate Saddam and destroy his weapons of mass destruction. Experts have informed us that we do not have sufficient intelligence about military targets in Iraq. Saddam may well hide his most lethal weapons in mosques, schools and hospitals. If our forces attempt to strike such targets, untold number of Iraqi civilians could be killed."

And later: "We cannot go it alone in attacking Iraq and expect Saddam to keep his weapons of mass destruction at bay against us or our ally Israel."

Others among the opponents of the authorization spoke in similar terms:

Wellstone: "Unlike the gulf war, many experts believe Saddam would resort to chemical and biological weapons against our troops in a desperate attempt to save his regime if he believes he and his regime are ultimately threatened."

Durbin: "As we know—it has been declassified this week—our intelligence community tells us the most likely scenario of weapons of mass destruction to be used against Americans is if we launch an invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein knows today if those weapons move or are used in any way against us and our allies, he will pay a terrible price."

Then there is the Levin amendment (SA 4862), a Democratic alternative to the joint resolution authorizing use of military force to disarm Saddam, requiring that first all diplomatic means be exhausted. It would have required President Bush to get approval from the U.N. Security Council or Congress before launching an attack.

Its language on WMD was unequivocal: Congress supports: "the President's call for the United Nations to address the threat to international peace and security posed by Saddam Hussein's continued refusal to meet Iraq's obligations under resolutions of the United Nations Security Council to accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless of its weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons-usable material, ballistic missiles with a range in excess of 150 kilometers, and related facilities, and to cease the development, production, or acquisition of such weapons, materials, and missiles;"

The text was “To authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces, pursuant to a new resolution of the United Nations Security Council, to destroy, remove, or render harmless Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons-usable material, long-range ballistic missiles, and related facilities, and for other purposes.”

The language here is blunt:

Iraq continues to develop weapons of mass destruction, in violation of its commitments under United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 (1991) and subsequent resolutions, and the regime of Saddam Hussein has used weapons of mass destruction against its own people and other nations.

The co-sponsors were: Reed, Bingaman, Boxer, Mikulski, Stabenow, Akaka, Jeffords, and Corzine. The amendment was postponed indefinitely, but voting "yea" on it were the sponsors, as well as the rest of the 23 naysayers to the authorization (along with Feinstein, Harkin, Kohl, and Rockefeller).

I have not found significant speeches from Bingaman, Chafee, Corzine, Inouye, Murray, Reed, Sarbanes, or Wyden in the period leading up to the vote. If they thought differently from their peers quoted above, apparently they did not say so in public. They voted for the same measures as the others.

The researching of this was enlightening. I don't suppose writing about it will make a damn bit of difference.

This is about the Movies

2008-07-20T17:36:00.001-04:00

This also is true about many other things in the late 20th century.

[Pauline] Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. [Screenwriter Paul] Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. "It was fun watching the applecart being upset," Schrader said, "but now where do we go for apples?"

Council Winners

2008-07-20T14:42:00.003-04:00

OK, vacation is over. Time to return to my various responsibilities.

Including catching up on Watchers Council winners.

The winners from July 17 in the council was Critiquing The Obama Manifesto On Iraq by Wolf Howling.

Votes also went to It's official: Obama doesn't flip-flop, he just does nuanced "rephrases" by Bookworm Room, and Will Israel Attack Iran? by JoshuaPundit.

Outside the council, the winner was Sleepwalking Into Islamization by Melanie Phillips. Votes also went to Let Me Put It In Pictures For Our Progressive Friends by Doug Ross & Journal; and A Good Man by Harris County Criminal Justice System.

The winner in the council for the week of July 11 was American Whining and the Culture of Dependency by The Razor.

Votes also went to Identifying Obama's Real Position on the Second Amendment by Wolf Howling; You May Now Assume the Risk by Soccer Dad; and Narcissism In Another Color by Joshuapundit.

Outside the council, the winner was Is Gun Control Behind Our Loss of Civil Liberties? by Bishop Hill. Votes also went to Former CIA Agent in Iran Comes In from the Heat at Pajamas Media; and There Oughta Have Been a Law! by Classical Values.

The winners from the week of July 4 were:

In the council, Patriotism by Hillbilly White Trash. Votes also went to The Supreme Court: Originalism, Activism, and America's Future by Wolf Howling; and Obama's 8 Years As State Legislator Makes Him Better Qualified by The Colossus of Rhodey.

The non-council winner was Sacramento Host Breakfast by 365 and a Wakeup. Votes also went to Honestly, Is John Aravosis a Piece of Excrement Or What? by Right Wing Nut House; Reverberations of Al-Dura by ShrinkWrapped; and "THE TALK" -- On Patriotism by Thought You'd Never Ask.

Che Away

2008-07-04T21:17:00.000-04:00

Oh, how I hope this gets around.

The T-shirts with images of Ernesto "Che" Guevara convinced Ingrid Betancourt. She assumed the men with the iconic revolutionary on their chests were ushering her into the helicopter for transfer to yet another rebel camp.

Instead, Betancourt, along with 14 other hostages, was taking her first steps toward freedom after six years of captivity at the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Less than 24 hours later, she would be reunited with the two children she hadn't seen since her capture.

The white helicopter Betancourt climbed into was piloted by Colombian troops, and the six men wearing Che shirts were soldiers who tricked the rebels into following "orders'' to move the prisoners.

... "The helicopters arrived, and these absolutely surreal characters came out," said Betancourt, gripping rosary beads after she landed at Bogota's military airport. "They were wearing Che Guevara shirts and I thought, it's the FARC."

... After the unmarked helicopter flew over the jungle and out of range of the FARC camp, the hostages saw the men in Che T- shirts spring on their captor. Gerardo Antonio Aguilar Ramirez, known by his alias as Cesar, was tied up, stripped and blindfolded. Then the Colombian troops revealed their identity.

To think that those contemptible T-shirts celebrating that heartless murderer and fool will cease to be the height of celebrity counterculture chic. To think that the image of Che now will arouse suspicion of duplicity and mole-paranoia in leftist authoritarian "freedom fighters." It ranks up there with Betancourt's freedom, Chavez' chagrin, and the Colombian military's competence as good outcomes of this good news.

Hey, Baby

2008-07-04T16:44:00.001-04:00

Twobama

2008-07-04T01:48:00.001-04:00

OK, come November, will it be possible for me to vote for the Obama of the first news conference cited here, to the exclusion of the Obama from the second news conference?

Dying on the Floor

2008-07-04T01:36:00.001-04:00

When I see stories like "Video shows woman dying on Brooklyn hospital floor" I don't even have to turn on the computer to know that someone is spinning this fast as the final word in the argument on whether America needs guaranteed, government-directed health care. And someone else spinning it to say, no, in fact government-run health care only will mean more of this sort of scene.

And maybe somewhere, someone writing about how all that misses the point and no system will work well in a place -- a nation -- where people watch that and allow it to happen, in a hospital. And how that might be the problem, even though it's pricklier.

Now It Can Be Told

2008-07-02T00:19:00.001-04:00

Poodles in World War II

Manhattan Projects

2008-07-01T23:39:00.000-04:00

How we do love them.

John McCain's offer of a $300 million prize to the inventor of the next generation of electric car batteries may be a political gambit, but it's still an idea worth pursuing. It also shows more leadership on the nation's energy needs than the current occupant of the Oval Office has shown in two terms.

... In an editorial this week on the need to increase the domestic oil supply, something else McCain has called for, we urged the creation of a Manhattan Project-like effort to wean the nation off its reliance on fossil fuels and toward cleaner, affordable and reliable sources.

I wish it could be that simple. But ordering up a new technology, even if price is no object, is unlikely to succeed.

There must be a foundation of knowledge before a new technology can be erected. And this work of foundation-building often is done by men or women working on the fringes of science, untangling mental knots out of sheer intellectual curiosity with no practical aim in sight. They are hardly the kind of people who would be appointed to high-profile government-sponsored committees, or who would go gunning for a $300 million prize. They usually don't work well on committees at all and don't think much about cash. And their work is the kind that's a sitting duck for Congressional yowls about "waste of taxpayers' money."

For instance, the original Manhattan Project grew out of the theories of Albert Einstein. When he did this work, he was a young Swiss citizen with an undistinguished academic record, who had failed to find a teaching job and instead accepted a position as technical assistant in the Patent Office in Bern. How likely would Congress, in 1905 or today, be to grant money to an uninspiring Swiss Jew who wants to use it to support himself while he imagines what the world would look like if he rode on a beam of light?

The Manhattan Project came about because scientific developments had reached a point where a concentrated effort to produce a fission "atomic" bomb was likely to yield a practical result. That's when Einstein, Teller, and Szilard gathered in July 1939 on Long Island and wrote to Roosevelt. But ultimately, it was nothing more than a practical application of what began with the work of the obscure patent clerk in Bern.

Carl Sagan, as part of "The Demon-Haunted World," wrote a digression into imaginary history. He wonders what would have happened if Queen Victoria in 1860 had sought some medium to communicate words, sounds, and pictures throughout her far-flung empire. She would have called together the most prominent men of science in the land, and they probably would have tried to develop something based on the telegraph, which was then the height of technology.

Then he describes J. Clerk "Dafty" Maxwell, the socially inept man who would in fact develop the equations that lead to radio and television. He makes it all too clear that Maxwell never would have come to the attention of Victoria's committee-choosers of 1860, much less been offered a seat at the table. And if he had been, it likely would have deflected his research and rumination down an unproductive path.

Maxwell wasn't thinking of radio, radar, and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnetism; Newton wasn't dreaming of space flight or communications satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon. Roentgen wasn't contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it 'X-rays'; Curie wasn't thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Fleming wasn't planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mold; Watson and Crick weren't imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry of DNA ....

If the next energy breakthrough happens in our lifetimes, don't look for it from a New Manhattan Project. Such an effort would be useful for turning a breakthrough discovery to practical use. But getting there will require a first step of imaginative genius, probably from a mind you wouldn't suspect. For the U.S. to support that, it would have to be willing to pitch money into open-ended research by intellectually curious Poindexters who can offer no practical justification for their staring at the stars.

Puppies

2008-07-01T22:57:00.001-04:00

Offend.

The History of Feminism

2008-07-01T17:37:00.001-04:00

Camille Paglia version. Her views tend to be ones I agree with on this topic, but then I'm not a feminist, a woman, or a student of the movement. Reading this, I suspect she might find something to agree with in my notion of Floride Calhoun and her sorority as one strand of what made up American feminism.

Poetry Matters

2008-07-01T17:11:00.003-04:00

Jay Parini touches all the bases in this argument for why poetry matters. It doesn't matter that he does, though. Poetry still doesn't matter. Like much else, it was killed by the 20th century.

In the 20th century, something went amiss. Poetry became "difficult." That is, poets began to reflect the complexities of modern culture, its fierce disjunctions. The poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens asked a lot of the reader, including a range of cultural references to topics that even in the early 1900s had become little known. To read Pound and Eliot with ease, for instance, one needed some knowledge of Greek and Latin poetry. That kind of learning had been fairly common among educated readers in the past, when the classics were the bedrock of any upper-middle-class education. The same could not be said for most readers in the 20th century — or today, when education has become more democratized and the study of the classics has been relegated to a small number of enthusiasts. The poems of the canonical poets of high modernism require heavy footnotes.

I'm inclined to take Hugh Kenner's observation that Pound and Eliot (the rest were following or reacting), after World War I, wrote poetry for an age in which poetry already was dead. Living in Europe, to them, Western civilization lay crushed (and how much of it did we ever get back?), the ancient libraries shelled and gutted, a generation of readers, critics, and writers gassed and rotting in the trenches. They wrote for the past, or directly for the anthologies, complete with numbered lines and footnotes, in hopes a future generation would arise and find the poems like time capsules.

Poets since have never gone back to that point and tried to recover the trail.

Meanwhile, for the few for whom it still matters, here Adam Kirsch reviews Stanley Plumly's new “Posthumous Keats”:

Yet the consolations of poetry, as “Posthumous Keats” reminds us, last only as long as the poem lasts. The sublimity of the odes did not stop Keats from suffering in body and mind, or from cursing the fate that allowed him to taste the pleasures of life and art so intensely, only to snatch them away. “Keats, of all poets, cannot be divided between the artist and the man,” Plumly writes. But in a sense it is precisely the violent sundering of the artist and the man that is Keats’s tragedy. The poet saw autumn as fulfillment, the season that “set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease.” The man died in winter, in a foreign country, certain that his work had not kept the promises his imagination made. “Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?” he asked in one of his last letters home. “There must be,” he decided. “We cannot be created for this sort of suffering.”

We All Live at the P.O. Now

2008-06-30T21:26:00.000-04:00

When Andrew Jackson took office as president in 1829, he appointed friends and supporters to federal patronage jobs. Most people back then knew only one federal employee in person: The town postmaster. As these jobs changed hands in 1829, often for the first time in anyone's memory, the people in America's towns were shocked -- at the evidence of a real federal government.

John Barton Derby wrote: "They go about the streets and ... seem to be saying to themselves, 'E'cod! -- there is a United States government, or I'm darned!' For so beautiful is the system of government continued by our wise forefathers, that while the general government of the United States poises and holds together the whole, no man in the country ever feels its direct action (when it is peacefully and constitutionally administered), excepting in the appointment of a postmaster of his village. And it is only by some irregularity in the system, that he becomes conscious of subjection to higher powers than his own paternal state government."

Which is a charming illustration of the original and intended scope of federal government in the United States. Yes, I find my state legislature even more ridiculous than Congress, but at least if I don't like the way my state operates I can move to another one and still be a U.S. citizen.

But it also illustrates what might be, with perspective, America's great contribution to the world: We are a nation dedicated to the free flow of information. We have contrived since our birth to spread information as widely and freely as technology will allow.

Postmasters (generally local innkeepers or store owners with space to hold mail till people called for it) in 1831 made up 76 percent of the entire federal civilian work force. There were 8,700 of them. The U.S. Army at the time numbered a mere 6,332 men. The post office delivered not just letters, but newspapers, journals, pamphlets, business receipts and bills, and all manner of reading material. In fact, it delivered more newspapers (16 million) than letters (13.8 million).

DeTocqueville was shocked, when he arrived at the absolute frontier of Western civilization (then located in Michigan) to find regular mail delivery there and citizens living in rough-hewn log cabins who were fully conversant on the goings-on in Washington, D.C., as well as the goings-on in Paris. French peasants 30 miles from the capital knew less about it than the Michiganers did.

Thanks to the post office. By 1828 America had almost twice as many offices as Great Britain and five times as many as France. Postal service in Canada was so poor people often routed their letters through the U.S. Contemporaries reckoned that, if ancient figures like Plato or Herodotus could visit modern America, many things would surprise them, but only the post office would really impress them. They spent a lot of time in those days thinking about such things, since America was deliberately built on classical models. And, about the post office, they might have been right.

Well, what the post office was to the 19th century, the Internet has been to the 21st. And in the 19th century as in the 21st, some people mistook the free flow of information for a force that would promote unity and harmony of interests in the nation and the world.

It didn't. One of the first major controversies in the run-up to the Civil War involved the abolitionists swamping the Southern mails with pamphlets meant to convince slaveholders of the error of their ways or foment servile wars and racial butchery (depending on your point of view). In 1835, a Charleston mob ransacked the city's post office and burned bags of abolitionist literature, an act supported by state politicians.

One of the principal and long-running moral controversies of the 19th century involved the propriety of delivering mail on Sundays.

Running the post office sucked the federal government into controversies over social institutions and arbitration of public morality. The federal government never had been set up to do such things and it did them awkwardly.

Folly of the Day

2008-06-30T17:13:00.001-04:00

Has to be this.

Saint-Lô

2008-06-29T22:53:00.000-04:00

Among the pictures in my uncle's packet of photos that he traded cigarettes for on the beaches of D-Day are a few like this one above.

If you start at Omaha Beach in Normandy and walk straight inland, you soon come to the town of Saint-Lô.

Which is pretty much what the U.S. Army did in 1944.

But before it could do that, it had to disable Saint-Lô as a German command and supply center and as a key transport junction. Which meant it had to bomb the hell out of it at the moment the invasion began. With only the most cryptic prior warning to the resistance, and none to the general population.

Now, imagine what al-Jazeera or BBC or CNN would do with this:

Mr. Leclerc was called by a young boy, whose brother and sister were buried under their house. "We dig through stones, bricks, earth, clothes, things. We throw mementos at the feet of the mother, who collects them in a neat little pile. It goes on for hours, and night falls. Some men leave, to go across the street, there are six victims under the ruins, a whole family. We find the remains of a bed, the boy's bed, empty. We keep looking ... What for? There can only be squashed bodies in there, under such a mass of burnt beams, collapsed walls and plaster dust. Then, suddenly, a hand touches something soft. It is tiny, and warm. We dig deeper, faster, half an hour more, and now, a muted yell. We find the foot, the leg, blood. At last, we retrieve the little mass of living flesh, covered with dust. Now, the only light comes from the fires. The little boy is still in there. We go back to work. A new miracle, a cry :"Mommy". He wants to cry, he does not understand. "What happened?" A priest, his black habit covered with white dust passes by on his way to the hospital, we give him the little girl, he takes her in his arms. She is dead."

...

From the shelter of his barn, Mr. Herpin saw the "bombed out" arrive at the farm, "absolute ghosts barely able to stand on their broken limbs; their faces pale and scarred, their eyes staring into space, their hair plastered with dust. Their clothes, when they have any left, are torn, they are covered with bloody wounds. And above all, I remember that awful impression of seeing fellow human beings, acquaintances, friends, so deprived of everything, so humiliated, so broken, from whom all dignity had been stolen, brought down to the level of exhausted beasts .... And yet we are seeing only the lucky ones, those who, against all hope, were able to escape being crushed or burnt to death. There are nearly no complete families: here, it is a mother with her child, there a grandmother and her grandson, or a father alone. Some speak with their eyes down, and, listening to them, one can guess at the tragedy of that night: the race to the shelter, the awful [con]flagration, the screams of the wounded and of the dying, the exits buried, the holes one digs with bare hands, and then, the escape amongst the ruins and the corpses, and the profound joy of being alive, even though everything is lost. Most, though, are silent, vanquished by the pain and the memory of the terror they just lived through. They lie on the ground, in the dirt, and they beg for water."

Surely, today, they would have been there, cameras at the ready. They would have been broadcasting all along, and been able to show the peaceful life in the sleepy French town under German occupation, and how Allied bombs shattered it. They would not have been allowed to broadcast locals being shipped off to slave labor camps, but they wouldn't have minded that and no one would have much complained. How can you complain about what you don't see?

When we were looking through the shoebox of photos and that one at the top of the post came out, my uncle explained the story of the bombing of Saint-Lô and its strategic importance. If it wasn't for the slaughter of that town, they might never have got off that beach. If life is often a choice between bad and worse options, war always is.

Arthur Miller wrote that Ernie Pyle "told as much of what he saw as people could read without vomiting." Today? No civilized people can stand a war for long, in the age of the television camera. No civilized people who can see it will stay in a war.

But uncivilized people certainly will.

More on Jokes

2008-06-29T20:30:00.003-04:00

Look, a philology joke!

“In some languages,” said the Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin, “a double negative yields an affirmative. In other languages, a double negative yields a more emphatic negative. Yet, curiously enough, I know of no language, either natural or artificial, in which a double affirmative yields a negative.”

Suddenly, from the back of the hall, in a round Brooklyn accent, came the comment, "Yeah, yeah.”

Ranks right up there with the one about the freshman crossing Harvard Yard on the first day of classes who accosts an upperclassman and says, "Can you tell me where the library's at?"

He gets a chilly reply: "My good man; at Hah-vard we do not end a sentence in a preposition."

Freshman frowns, thinks for a second, then says, "OK, can you tell me where the library's at, asshole?"

The former is from this review of a new joke book.

Another review of it, here, offers this scientific perspective:

A team of researchers at Bowling Green State University reported in 2000 that rats produce an ultrasonic chirping during play and when tickled by humans. These chirps appear to be contagious, and young rats prefer older rats who produce more of them.

Rats and humans had a common ancestor about 75m years ago, and humour has clearly come a long way since then. Nobody has caught rats, or even chimps, trying to tell a joke. But another finding from recent research is that pre-packaged jokes are a less important part of humour than people may think. Jokes have a long and fascinating history -- which is engagingly told in a short book, "Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes", by Jim Holt, to be published in America in July and in Britain in October. But it seems that only about 11% of daily laughter is actually occasioned by jokes. Another 17% is prompted by media and the remaining 72% arises spontaneously in social interaction.

That reviewer, Anthony Gottlieb, notes in his blurb that "he is working on a book about nothingness," which might contribute to your daily 17 percent.

This review, meanwhile, pokes deeper into the psychology:

Laughter is one of the most treacherous of all fields of history. Like sex and eating, it is an absolutely universal human phenomenon, and at the same time something that is highly culturally and chronologically specific. Every human society in the world laughs, and whatever their race or language, people make almost exactly the same sound in doing so.

[What about the deaf?

This study investigated whether laughter occurs simultaneously with signing, or punctuates signing, as it does speech, in 11 signed conversations (with two to five participants) that had at least one instance of audible, vocal laughter. Laughter occurred 2.7 times more often during pauses and at phrase boundaries than simultaneously with a signed utterance. Thus, the production of laughter involves higher order cognitive or linguistic processes rather than the low-level regulation of motor processes competing for a single vocal channel. In an examination of other variables, the social dynamics of deaf and hearing people were similar, with "speakers" (those signing) laughing more than their audiences and females laughing more than males.

There you go.]

Part of what makes humor fascinating is that it is as universal as breathing, yet so idiosyncratic that a joke has to be put together with the precision of a recipe to work. And it typically only works the first time. What's funny last week isn't funny this week, and what's funny on my block might just get blank stares on the other side of town. From the NYRB review:

Never mind what we may share with the primates; it is often hard for the English to share a joke with their neighbors across the Channel, or to respond to cartoons penned a century ago. It is all very well for comedians to claim that "the old ones are the best," but anyone who has picked up a nineteenth-century copy of a comic magazine such as Punch is almost bound to have been disappointed. Even when they are not referring to the minutiae of some now forgotten political crisis, the vast majority of the cartoons simply don't make you laugh. It is sometimes easy enough, on a few moments' reflection, to get the joke and to see why it might once have seemed funny; but that is a very long way from feeling the remotest temptation to laugh oneself. In that sense laughter does not travel across space, time, or even necessarily—as any encounter with a group of under-fifteens will tell us—between different age groups in a single community.

The writer then delves into the topic of ancient humor, one of the most vexing and absorbing puzzles. What sorts of things made ancient people laugh? Can we tell from the text what the jokes are? I'm certain the coast guard in "Beowulf," for instance, is there for comic relief, but that's just a hunch. I can't prove it. No one can.

Read the 3rd C. B.C.E. comic mimes of Herondas, if you can find them. Those certainly were meant to be humorous. But it's maddening to try to trick out the humor in them now. To "Get it," you have to know about ancient schoolmasters or whore houses in a way that everyone then knew, but even scholars now don't.

A related problem is accents, which are not only humorous when put to good use (confusion from words that sound alike in a different accent) but present an instant way to tag a character with a set of stereotypical features and a rough back-story.

They were common in ancient Greek drama, but they present a problem for a modern translator, whose audience knows no proper Greek, much less the local shades. Ezra Pound worked one comedic Greek character into modern expectations by using minstrel show dialect ("made the watchman talk nigger," as Pound put it). But already less than 80 years later, that's impossible.

Consider Lampito in "Lysistrata." Typically, in U.S. productions, she has a thick Appalachian, hillbilly, or Deep South accent. Probably the women of the Wild West, of all the regions in the U.S., would bear the closest parallel to Lampito the Spartan, but that region lacks a strong accent for the stage. In translations made in Britain, however, Spartan dialect typically was rendered into Scottish English. It does have a resemblance to it, with its flattened vowels, and there's a cultural overlap, in suggestion of rudeness, stinginess, female toughness, and love of warfare. During the Cold War, a Russian accent sometimes was used for Spartan.

What lasts, whether in Herondas or Seinfeld, is the humor that comes from the most basic human situations, the ones unchanging over millennia, which even the rats and the apes would recognize if they could. Love, marriage, sex, bodily functions, child-rearing. According to the NYRB article, a version of this joke (this is Freud's version) is one of the oldest jokes known, and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be the ur-joke:

A royal personage was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: "Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?" "No, your Highness," was the reply, "but my father was."

Why Wolves Love Sheep Law

2008-06-29T20:24:00.001-04:00

In the perfectly non-discriminatory nanny state, the school bully will be invited to your birthday party. Or else.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Officials at a school in Sweden have confiscated birthday invitations handed out in class by an eight-year-old boy.

The reason: they see it as a matter of discrimination.

A Swedish newspaper says the school in Lund, southern Sweden, seized the invitations because the boy failed to invited two boys because they were not his friends.

The newspaper Sydsvenskan quotes officials as saying they had a duty to prevent discrimination.

...

The father told the newspaper that the two classmates were not invited because one had bullied his son and the other had not invited him to his birthday party.

Where's White?

2008-06-27T22:48:00.001-04:00

Where in America today would you seek another William Allen White?

He came to mind while I was writing about Roosevelt edging America toward war on the side of Britain during 1940. White, a loyal Republican small-town newspaper editor, loathed Roosevelt.* But he did what he thought was right.

The last quarter century of White's life was spent as an unofficial national spokesman for middle America. This led President Franklin Roosevelt to ask White to help generate public support for the Allies before America's entrance into World War II. White was fundamental in the formation of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, sometimes known as the White Committee.

* From an editorial published in 1943, shortly after Roosevelt returned from the Casablanca Conference: "We who hate your gaudy guts salute you."

Council Winners

2008-06-27T18:43:00.005-04:00

Council Winners have been posted for the week of June 27.

First place in the council went to South Africa's Neville Chamberlain by The Razor. It was a good post: Balanced, informed, with a strong opinion and great sourcing. And I learned some things I didn't know before.

Votes also went to The Whole Shebaa-ng by Soccer Dad, which walks the reader through some dot-connecting in the current Middle Eastern diplomacy and reaches a conclusion many, whether they like it or not, find inescapable:

Acceding to Syria's and Hezbollah's demands will only serve to strengthen them. If Israel gives in here, Hezbollah will make new demands. Better that Israel should be (unfairly) portrayed as unreasonable than that Iran's proxies should be strengthened even further.

And to More Quincy from right here, and to Warped by Joshuapundit, about a recent Nicholas Kristof column about Israel.

Dick Morris Gets One Right by Hillbilly White Trash. What he, via Morris, sees looks like this:

The Law enforcement approach equals the Word Trade Center in rubble, the Pentagon damaged and Flight 93 and its passengers scattered across a field in Pennsylvania.

The military approach equals most of al Qaeda leadership dead or captured, 20,000 al Qaeda fighters dead in Iraq, no terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11 - and a handful of video tapes of Osama bin Laden's ravings being broadcast on al Jazeera.

Which approach to terrorism leaves you feeling safer?

Outside the council, the winner was Why You Should Apologize -- Ineffectively and Dishonestly -- For What You Didn't Do by Classical Values, which tells a family history tale that illustrates the irresolvable complications inherent in the notion of slavery reparations. [My version of that post was done here].

Votes also went to The Unconscious Roots of Media Bias by ShrinkWrapped, which takes off on the same Kristof column Joshuapundit disliked, but unfortunately doesn't seem to differentiate news coverage from editorial page work.

Other votes went to Big Gains in Iraq? by Abu Muqawama, a nice clear-headed and unbiased summation of where things stand; Obama's Lack of Ordinary Modesty by American Thinker, the mere mention of which here is likely to activate that 24-7 Obama truth squad.

Usually, wide-eyed Obama attacks leave me cold, but it's hard to not detect a certain hubris in speeches like this: "generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick, and good jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal."

Votes also went to An Almost Unfathomable Ignorance of History by Brits At Their Best. I like this blog, in part because it has said nice things about my books. The picture it paints here is tragic, of a Britain fed up with its own Britishness and seemingly on a lemming-like march to nonidentity.

Recently, by coincidence, the serious fiction writer Nicholson Baker and the right-wing extremist commentator Pat Buchanan both published books suggesting World War II was not the good war, that it was avoidable but Churchill and Roosevelt provoked it, that the Allies committed war crimes, and that it served a few while sacrificing millions.

Reviewers -- the few who read them -- were quick to dismiss both books, sometimes even rolling them into a single article (which probably appalled the good liberal pacifist Mr. Baker; I suspect Mr. Buchanan is beyond appalling). Both books now seem consigned to oblivion.

But before they go, I would point out that -- except for the conclusion about it not being a good war -- there are kernels of truth in the individual charges made, as I understand them.

Specifically, Churchill (along with Roosevelt and others in the U.K. and U.S.) did provoke Hitler and the Japanese. Deliberately. And they put their countries on a wartime footing as fast and far as they could, in a time of peace. They thought the clash of these civilizations was inevitable, and better to start it before the enemies had built their power to too great a degree to be overcome.

Churchill was not the sort of man who would walk past a scene of the strong bullying the weak and mutter thanks to God that it wasn't him under that rain of fists. He wouldn't have stood at a safe distance and criticized the brutality but done nothing. He'd be looking for a way to get into that scrap and change the outcome.

It's that damned Anglo-American quality which so infuriates the rest of the world. The tendency to want to jump into a fight where you don't have a clear self-interest, just because it's not a fair fight or a just one, and you want to use your power and skill to set it right. What is fair and just is, by definition, your interest.

Are there other possible motives? Always. Are there likely beneficiaries among your friends? Always. Does that mean the impulse is not real or pure? No. But the rest of the world has convinced many Anglo-Americans that this quality in their culture is the main obstacle to peace in the world and must be banished.

Those who agree with that would do well to remember an earlier president with that trait strongly in evidence, and ask whether their politics aren't better suited to the accommodating James Buchanan, Old P.F., rather than the man who succeeded him.

Votes also went to The Card by Stop the ACLU (the "Card" being the race card; the players being Obama supporters); Alcoholism Progression by Dean's World, a gripping example of powerful personal blogging; and Is There A Pattern Here? If So, Is There A Name For It? by Discriminations, another Obama post.

Sorry State

2008-06-27T17:24:00.002-04:00

Newspapers are dying. This is not a drill.

People have been talking about the inevitable demise of the print newspaper ever since the Internet came along in the early 1990s. Back then, it seemed a distant forecast, like astronomers' talk of the eventual death of the sun.

Now the death of the "Sun" seems a lot closer:

Officers of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, which represents nearly 400 [Baltimore] Sun workers in the news, advertising, circulation, building and finance departments, said yesterday that they were told by Sun management that 55 to 60 jobs would be cut in the newsroom, which would be a reduction of roughly 20 percent.

That's just one news item from the past week. Here are a few more:

[Martin] Gee, a veteran designer and illustrator, drew industry-wide attention this spring when he created a poignant photo display of images from the [San Jose] Mercury News that represented the emptiness of the paper following recent cutbacks. He posted them on his Flickr page, which was eventually linked to by numerous other Web sites.

E&P reprinted many of the images in the June issue, with a story by Editor Greg Mitchell in which Gee stated: "I love this paper," adding, "it's the one I grew up with." Gee told Mitchell at the time that he was not reprimanded for the display, but "our editor wrote a memo saying we should not dwell on the past."

He also said in that piece: "I am probably on the top of the list for the next round of layoffs." Gee could not be reached for comment Friday, but several sources confirmed his layoff, which also was reported on a number of Web sites.

Eight others at the Merc also got the axe. Meanwhile ...

Boston Globe unions have been asked by management to take an across-the-board 10 percent pay cut to help trim costs, while the newspaper also looks at consolidating its printing plants, according to several union members.

The Globe has just completed a round of buyouts that led to the departure of several high-profile staffers, and a top union official vowed yesterday to fight the proposed pay cut.

... The Boston Herald officially announced plans yesterday to outsource its printing operations and lay off 130 to 160 press operators, electricians and other production-related workers later this year. Herald owner and publisher Patrick J. Purcell said there are no plans to cut newsroom staff.

And in Texas:

The [Fort Worth] Star-Telegram announced that 130 positions would be eliminated through layoffs and voluntary buyouts.

Rumors about a corporate-wide downsizing had surfaced the week before. First thing Monday morning, the McClatchy Co., the Star-Telegram’s parent, announced a 10 percent reduction in staffing.

Even one-time flagships are foundering:

The [Hartford] Courant, the state's largest newspaper and owned by Chicago-based Tribune Publishing Co., will cut 60 newsroom positions. The paper's news pages will be reduced by 25 percent.

The Charlotte Observer is shrinking its staff by 11 percent, or 123 jobs.

No region of the country is immune:

The publisher of the Palm Beach Post said on Wednesday it would cut 300 jobs from its payroll of 1,350 because of a slump in ad revenues, increased competition from the Internet and an overall tough economic environment.

About 130 newsroom jobs will be cut, Palm Beach Post Publisher Doug Franklin said in a memo to staff.

Even the real estate is on the block:

CHICAGO, June 25 -- Tribune Co. is considering selling its iconic headquarters on Chicago's Magnificent Mile and buildings in Los Angeles.

The media conglomerate said Wednesday that it asked real estate firms to explore "strategic options for maximizing the value" of Tribune Tower, a Gothic landmark completed in 1925, and Times Mirror Square, the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times.

Smaller papers are bleeding, too.

PORTLAND, Maine - The Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram are eliminating 36 jobs and closing their four news bureaus in response to a continuing decline in advertising revenues, their publisher said Thursday.

One publisher estimates 19 of the top 50 U.S. newspapers are in the red. Even those who survive will change the way they do business. This is a harbinger:

The newspaper industry is taking a beating, and now the Orange County Register is outsourcing some copy editing work to a company in India.

And in Pittsburgh:

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has eliminated stock market tables and Monday business pages, and will trim general news pages when possible, all to cut expenses, Executive Editor David Shribman said Friday.

And that's just the newspaper layoff news from the past week.

Which made this story sort of grimly amusing:

U.S. newspapers got a failing grade for gender diversity in their sports departments and a C for racial diversity, according to a study released Thursday.

Seventy-eight percent of the staffs at Associated Press Sports Editors newspapers and Web sites are white men, the study found. Just 5 percent of sports staffs are black men and just under 3 percent are Latino men. Only 11.5 percent are women.

Yes, believe it or not, top newsgathering organizations still wring their hands about their own "diversity." This was a big deal back in the mid-80s, when someone pointed out that the media, having scolded the rest of corporate and governmental America about integration, had one of the least-integrated businesses in America.

There was a rush to bring more "diversity" into newsrooms -- generally that meant race. It didn't mean gender, because already by that point newsrooms were becoming pink-collar ghettos. It sure didn't mean adding more conservatives or veterans or committed Christians.

That was then. We had sensitivity training. Most of the people who sat in that room with me are out of journalism now. To be talking seriously about making changes for the sake of diversity in this climate is like talking about making staff changes on the "Titanic" while its bow is under water.

Yet there they are:

"Dr. Lapchick's report is a mirror that forces us to look at ourselves," said Garry Howard, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's assistant managing editor/sports and APSE second vice president. "I still feel the future will be better."

... "The 'F' grade is jarring," said Jenni Carlson, president of The Association for Women in Sports Media. "Sports departments need to be held accountable for the diversity of their staffs, and right now, the lack of gender diversity by and large is appalling."

... Lapchick said APSE was the only organization that had ever approached him asking to be surveyed. He suggested "individual newspapers do diversity management training to make those newsrooms — and I would say this about any organization — more welcoming places, so people don't think that they were hired simply because they were a woman or a person of color."

At least the industry that's blind and deaf about everyone else's world is equally so with regard to its own.

Incoming

2008-06-27T17:12:00.002-04:00

Is a growing national income inequality bad for everyone, rich and poor and in between? This writer thinks so.

Hope

2008-06-26T20:06:00.002-04:00

2009 will close out the most fundamentalist Christian, right-wing, and philosophically authoritarian White House in U.S. history.

Signs are that it will be followed by the administration of a man whose political inner circle could become the most America-skeptic, left-wing, and statist kitchen cabinet in U.S. history. All built around a personality cult.

No wonder a secular, traditional, patriotic political independent like me feels this just is not my millennium.

We come from an administration where political loyalty and a sheepskin from Pat Robertson's law school was the ticket to authority in the Justice Department. Political loyalty and a skepticism about the universe being more than 10,000 years old was a ticket to blue-pencil authority over government science reports. Political loyalty and a correct position on Roe v. Wade, for pity's sake, was the ticket to getting a job overseeing the desperately essential work of building up Iraq after we took control of it.

We head for an administration where -- we'll see. At least one odious, unrepentant '60s rich boy radical friend of Barack won't be making policy decisions in the Department of Education or channeling millions of tax dollars to his pet causes. But only because the accidental searchlight of scandal happened to light on Bill Ayers. Every week or so seems to bring up another like him. Even at this rate and with seven months left, some are bound to get through.

Obama, in his short political life, seems to have been in a MoveOn-colored cocoon, so that when he sits down at a Pennsylvania farm wife's kitchen table he might as well be the leader of another country. Benevolent visionary or not, that difference remains.

McCain doesn't matter. I like him well enough, but this election isn't going to be about him.

I keep thinking of Harold Macmillan's quip that watching the Kennedies come to power in Washington, D.C., was "like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian city." This election is really about Hope: I hope the real Obama is more in his rhetoric than his friends.

A Well-Regulated Grammar

2008-06-26T16:38:00.002-04:00

I don't own a gun, but I do own a Latin grammar.

I haven't had a chance to trace the history of the amendment before it passed. It occurs to me that I might not have it in any books.

Think Globally, Act Stupidly

2008-06-25T20:34:00.002-04:00

Here's that rarest of birds, a reasonably detached scientific estimate -- numbers! Lots of them! -- of various things people think they can do to help solve the global energy crisis. Turn off your appliances? Forget it: Skip one hot bath a week and you can leave your TV on for months.

It also looks at some of the possible models for one nation (Britain, in this case) to work toward "sustainability," eco-friendliness, and energy independence (not always all possible at once). And at what they'd look like. The model most glamorous to the severest friends of Gaia turns out to be the most brutal to her:

It’s worth noting that in earlier analysis, [Professor David J.C.] MacKay [of the Cambridge University Department of Physics] suggested that pumped storage on this scale would be very hard to achieve using existing lakes and lochs. In actuality, vast amounts of seawater would probably get pumped up and down mountains and cliffs routinely to bridge the huge demand swings of a mostly-electric Britain and the massive variations in a mostly-wind powered grid.

MacKay made no effort to cost plan G, but he offers maps and figures indicating the staggering scale of the engineering. Britain would be literally covered with — and girdled by — massive wind farms, tidal barriers and wave barrages, and every sizeable body of water in the land would rise and fall to the strange new tides of the national grid. We would have literally rebuilt the British Isles as a single mighty renewable generator, pouring concrete and erecting steel on a scale so far matched only by human habitation — industrialising the land and sea in a way that would make intensive agribusiness look like a wildlife refuge. And still we’d be importing power.

That’s the reality of the Greenpeace plan for the UK, in hard numbers. You can see why MacKay is worried about their response.

Bonus points for using "sizeable."

Comic Wisdom

2008-06-24T21:03:00.001-04:00

D.L. Hughley at the BET Awards tonight: "Like, how bad a president is George Bush, when the country goes, 'You know, we'll try the black guy?'"

Council Winners

2008-06-24T20:13:00.000-04:00

Watchers Council winners have been posted for the week of June 20.

First place in the council went to Judicial Activism Run Amok by Wolf Howling. This post dealt with Boumediene v. Bush, as did several nominees this week. Wolf, like most of the posts nominated on the topic, sees it as a travesty:

The case of Boumediene v. Bush is far more of a policy document than a reasoned Supreme Court decision. Indeed, the 'reasoning' of Justice Kennedy, who penned this travesty, is sophistry of the highest order. The outcome of his "reasoning" is a gifting of Constitutional rights to foreign prisoners of war and a vast intrusion of the judiciary into the enumerated powers of the Congress and President. It promises true havoc.

I suppose it's an election year thing; it puzzles me that so many people on both sides of this one are so adamant that their interpretation is the only possible honest one, and that anything else is treason or fascism. It seems to me there's reasonable grounds to be wary of granting the habeas corpus rights of an American citizen to suspected alien pseudo-paramilitaries swept up on distant battlefields in Asia. That seems like something we'd want to consider carefully before rubber-stamping.

On the other hand, I appreciate the logic of innocent-until-proven, and the requirement to give such scooped-up riff-raff a decent avenue to prove they are not what they are alleged to be. And in general the principle that Americans ought to be as generous as possible with human rights, in the name of our ideals.

I agree with Richard A. Epstein about the flaws in the recent decision:

Yet Boumediene is rich in constitutional ironies. In addressing whether non-Americans detained outside the United States are entitled to habeas corpus, the court passed up an opportunity to clarify the law, and instead based its reasoning, flimsily, on a habeas corpus case that was decided just after World War II. This is too bad, because issues as important as habeas corpus should turn not on fancy intellectual footwork but on a candid appraisal of the relevant facts and legal principles.

At the core of the dispute in Boumediene is the Constitution’s suspension clause: “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Unfortunately, the text neglects to specify the grounds for granting habeas corpus. And historical precedent is inconclusive on the question of when it should be available to aliens held in American custody outside the United States.

Everyone rightly waves the flag for habeas corpus, but ever since 1861 it's been know that the Constitution is practically hazy on the circumstances under which it applies, and under which it can be suspended, and by whom. It's still so.

Votes also went to Admitting Defeat in the Rhetoric War by Cheat Seeking Missiles, in which Laer contrasts President George W. Bush's wartime rhetoric to Franklin Roosevelt's.

That's a bit unfair, I think, as some of Bush's addresses on this topic -- when he has made them -- have been sterling. They haven't been the same type of rhetoric Roosevelt gave, because that was a different type of war, by our choice.

What Laer might be wishing is that the war was fought more in the Eisenhower style than in the clumsily sensitive and politically delicate climate of the Bush White House. Roosevelt led a war to unconditional surrender, and his commanding general, Eisenhower, warned the Germans we came as conquerors, not liberators. In this war, we profess to come as liberators -- and I think the record in Iraq and Afghanistan shows we mean it -- and that is a much more delicate path to tread. The jury's still out on whether we have the patience for it.

Either way, he's right, I think, in his assessment of what is coming next:

We are in a quandry. The candidate with the rhetorical powers to patch things up has the wrong policy, and the candidate with the right policy is perhaps even worse rhetorically than Bush. McCain might want to make his #1 qualification for running mate "soaring rhetorical power."

And votes went to What the Free World Would Do Well To Emulate by The Colossus of Rhodey, a strong post on how, as Mark Steyn (quoted in the post), says, "[T]he bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins" is that "Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world."

Steyn also says: "The problem with so-called hate speech laws is that they're not about facts. They're about feelings." Especially in the case of the Western nations other than the U.S., where laws forbid such speech, but the government only gets involved after some person or group speaks up and claims offendedness.

I disagree with the part of the post that imputes a fondness for this type of law to a simple lust for power by liberals:

What is it about this liberal desire for the restriction of speech and expression? The answer is simple: Power. If you can restrict and punish expression which you do not like, you'll always get your way.

I think there are fair and honest ways that can lead a person down a primrose path, including this one. Of course it always helps if you're the kind of person eager to silence dissent and enthrone one human vision as God's. But that is not restricted to liberals.

Votes also went to Say It Loud, Say It Proud: I Am a Racist! by Bookworm Room, anticipating the response she expects from people when she doesn't vote for Obama; and to A Rose By Any Other Name -- Tiptoeing Around Jihad by Joshuapundit.

Outside the council, the winner was After the Charge at Miserable Donuts, another winning post from a sterling milblog. I really think when you look back on this decade, one thing that will stand out is the emergence of the milblog voice. It's not great writing, but at its best it's great description. And in other cases it's great horse-sense analysis. Here's a sample of the latter from this one:

The Iraqis paused to mourn their dead, caught up on some rest, maintenance and refitting – and went back to operations. Their progress is never enough if you hold them to American military standards, but is undeniable by anyone who watched them throughout this time. They are slowly and inexorably gaining strength, experience and an identity of their own. It was elements of three Iraqi Army divisions and two National Police brigades that won in Basrah. We, the Coalition, helped – and I believe that our help kept the casualties and damage down - but make no mistake, this was an Iraqi victory won by the Iraqi Security Forces. The people of Basrah are why the ISF are winning the post-battle too. They have experienced militia/religious fanatic/thug rule and they don’t want any more truck with it. It is the ordinary Abduls, Hattams and Fatimas of Basrah who point out the weapons caches, told the ISF where the JAM and Iranians were hiding, and it is they who are getting to step out into the light at last.

Votes also went to Obama and Taxes: An Unchanged Liberal Agenda at Lone Star Times; The United States Supreme Court Versus America: Awarding "The Privilege of Habeas Corpus To Terrorists", Hugh Hewitt's take on Boumediene; Why Irish Voters Rejected the Lisbon Treaty at The Brussels Journal; and Serlo the Mercer and Magna Carta at Brits At Their Best.

Wishes and Horses

2008-06-24T16:55:00.002-04:00

Who I wish Obama would pick for a running mate? Jim Webb

Who I wish McCain would pick for a running mate? Sarah Palin

My prediction for November? Better get used to the sound of "President Obama," barring a tragedy or a mega-scandal. It's going to be a bumpy ride when the saint takes the wheel. It could be great, ultimately. Or not. Better be prepared to be patient and to make yourself useful in case the predictable bad moves turn out as badly as we predict they will.

What do you think?

Carlin

2008-06-24T16:45:00.001-04:00

How did he do it? He probably was on network TV as much as the Smothers Brothers. Yet he always managed to seem to have just stepped into the studio from some counterculture happening, and to be headed off to another one after the cameras stopped rolling. He always kept the aura of the hippie who never surrendered, never cut his hair, never came in out of the rain and made peace with the establishment. But who was glib and just soft-edged enough that it kept inviting him back for dinner.

Jaw-Dropper

2008-06-24T16:18:00.002-04:00

Guess who said it?

“If I were to watch the news [about Iraq and Afghanistan] that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts.”

Did you guess MSM reporter who covers Iraq?.

Lots of jaw-droppers in that article.

Word

2008-06-23T16:58:00.002-04:00

A journalist never should be suffered to feel loved by his audience. Feeling loved is potent. So is feeling rich. Even the strongest, unknowingly, will bend to what will keep the feeling alive.

A journalist should be, at best, respected. So that one faction, gloating over his evisceration of their mortal enemies, know in their hearts, "He would treat us the same, if he discovered our crimes."

It was famously said of a politician, "We love him for the enemies he has made." It was an unworthy enkōmion for that or any politician. In journalism, however, the enemies one makes are proof of professional integrity. But the reaction is not "love."

To be loved? No, never. To be feared and respected, always. A journalist should embrace the pariah role. Unbribability only can be proven by poverty.

Signs of Trouble

2008-06-22T19:57:00.002-04:00

I see from skimming the wire tonight that the New York Times has Dexter Filkins reporting from Kabul. That's a sign of something. He was one of their four core reporters during the Iraq invasion. For what seems like years, Carlotta Gall has been holding down Afghanistan for the Times almost single-handedly.

Friday Cat Blogging

2008-06-20T00:20:00.001-04:00

Petite Jamilla ... again. Yeah, she's sort of taking over. I don't think you'll mind too much, though.

Seven Sees

2008-06-19T23:23:00.002-04:00

I got Sevened by Dave at The Glittering Eye.

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

I swore I had done this one before, but I couldn't find it searching the dashboard. Until I realized it was eight things last time -- and it was Dave who got me then, too.

So, add these seven to those eight and you've got me fifteen ways to weird:

I can eat box macaroni and cheese every day and drive a beater car for years, but I believe in not scrimping when it comes to the important things in life. By "important things" I mean beer and socks. My wife and I have been known to drop $100 on a case of good Belgian.
My son recently was voted "most unique" in his high school class.
My two favorite vacation destinations are the Florida Keys and the German Alps -- and I don't sail or ski.
Speaking of women roughly my age, I think Gina Gershon is roughly hot.
In high school, I lettered in swimming four years.
I have dyslexia.
I am distantly related to "The Sundance Kid."

Here's my "martial discord" picture.

Which also could qualify for Dave's brief misreading of the line as "marital discord." Note the inscription on the club!

Tags, tags, tags. I'm terrible at tags. Probably most people I'd think of already have been tagged. Tag yourself and say I did it!

Pacifica, An Imaginary History

2008-06-19T23:03:00.003-04:00

And so they were pacificists -- pacifists along more practical lines, who, though they never would attack another nation, would all tenaciously and vigorously defend their island should it ever be invaded.

It was written into their constitution. Like the pure democratic Greeks of antiquity, every citizen was an arrow in the communal quiver, a spike up on the battlements. There was thus no need for that bane of freedoms, the standing professional army.

An invasion seemed unlikely most of the time, but the islanders were wise enough to know the world did not share their ideals. That wolves still prowled, and that a nation with offshore drilling capacity could not flaunt its defenselessness and survive for long.

The idea of self-defense was taken very seriously. Monthly drilling was mandatory. This caused some difficulty at first, since the pacificist constitution specifically forbid "coercion of the individual" for any purpose, but after some debate a clever jurist found a soft spot in "of the individual." The council were not impressing citizens into the drills as individuals, but collectively, and such collective coercion was not outlawed.

Loyalty was highly prized. Spies or double agents or saboteurs were jealously watched for in high positions, and accusations frequently hurled. A people's defense would fail if such traitors were permitted to freely plot and sap.

Along with loyalty, bravery was prized most. Or what they called bravery, which was not on the whole equivalent to the thing we mean by that word. It had no stoic or patient quality; it seldom referred to anything but fighting. The islanders were careful to let the world know they were a fighting people. Their bravery might come closer to what we call bravado: A need to prove to peers your toughness and readiness to defend.

It was an edgy, brawling place, with more pistol ranges per capita than even Texas.

More Quincy

2008-06-19T17:51:00.001-04:00

If I could bottle any figure from America's past and slip a few drops in the drinks of our current crop of leaders, I'd pick John Quincy Adams.

Adams took his seat in the U.S. Senate on Oct. 21, 1805. Within 10 days he had made a nuisance of himself. He probably would have accomplished it sooner, but not much business was being done in the Capitol that month, it being horse racing season in Washington.

Sen. John Breckenridge had introduced a simple resolution to wear black for a month to mourn the recent deaths of three patriots. Probably everyone expected it to breeze through as a pro forma, but the new guy from Massachusetts rose and objected to it; "I asked for the constitutional authority of the Senate to enjoin upon its members this act."

Whether it was the polite thing to do was less important than whether it was within the limits of the powers and duties defined for the various branches of the government by the Constitution. Whether Adams approved it or not -- one of the patriots to be so honored was his father's cousin Samuel Adams -- mattered less than whether it would deform in the slightest degree the structure of the government.

Breckenridge replied that the motion was "merely conventional" and "not binding."

"I then objected against it as improper in itself, tending to unsuitable discussions of character, and to employment of the Senate's time in debates altogether foreign to the subjects which properly belong to them," Adams wrote in his diary. Those who don't consider JQA among our most humorous presidents will perhaps miss the drollery of the next line in the entry. "This led to a debate of three hours ...."

Adams did not succeed in stopping the resolution, only in having it re-structured. As the resistance indicates, the tendency in the federal government to decide what the politicians want to do, then figure out a way to do it that is not terribly unconstitutional, was thriving as early as 1805. It is now so dominant that the narrow constitutional objection is too rarely heard even from people who might invoke it in their own interest.

Adams was in and out of Congress till his death in 1848, and literally till the end he was on his feet objecting to some activity underway for which he found no authority in the Constitution. Like Jackson and Polk and others among his peers he used this objection against schemes he disapproved. But he also was alert to it in the case of projects he supported, and in such cases urged that the Constitution be changed, rather than ignored.

Above: Adams by Sully

Newsroom Chatter

2008-06-18T22:23:00.002-04:00

Some gems from your friends in the MSMs.

"Last time I checked, (Hugo Chavez) was the elected president of a constitutional republic." [I.e., not a demagogue or a dictator. Chavez is enormously popular here.]

"It's difficult to believe anyone could be more right-wing than George Will." [Will's columns, when certain editors are forced to read them, set them off in fits of choking rage.]

The WMD Betrayal

2008-06-18T21:51:00.004-04:00

The rest of America has blame enough to bear for what those endured who went to Iraq on our mission -- military and civilian -- and for what the Iraqis suffer. We could have done better. We let them down. We let them all down.

But we -- and they -- were let down in turn by this administration. I think the critics have it right who say that Bush and his inner circle were trapped in a permanent campaign mentality. They seemed unwilling or unable to lead, rule, or govern. But they were relentless at sapping domestic opponents and building majorities that would hold together just long enough.

As in all things, the Bush Administration was not the first to employ a bad executive policy; it merely took the bad policy to excess. Karl Rove was the manifestation; no purely political adviser should have a permanent home in the White House, and no war decisions ought to be made for political reasons (as they were, say, in Fallujah in 2004).

When it came to Iraq, I think, they couldn't help themselves. They did the one thing they knew how to do. They put together a platform with mass appeal. They lured in independents and pried key constituencies away from their opponents. They played on doubts and fears -- everything the Bush campaign squad did to beat McCain in 2000.

When you're running for office, you don't take the same message into every church, campus, or union hall. You tailor and weight the words to suit the audience. That's why the White House's run-up-to-war rhetoric seems so disjointed and scattered. Saddam's alleged ties to 9/11; the humanitarian justification; draining the swamp and spreading freedom. And, most potent of all, the WMD What-If.

The truth of that guessing game was somewhere on a scale between "Saddam has no WMD and no chance to get them" and "Saddam has stockpiles of the most lethal weapons, including nukes." How much risk are you willing to take? That was how the administration pitched it to the center, to the mass of Americans unmoved by emotional or visionary or utopian or conspiratorial arguments. The pitchers were Powell and Rice, the cabinet voices with the most appeal to the moderates. The sober, calculating set of people who think of themselves as guided by common sense, not partisan propaganda. Including a great many in the media.

Which is why the failure to find significant stockpiles or an active program hurt so much. The Saddam-did-9/11 zealots weren't going to be dissuaded by evidence of any sort. To the drain-the-swamp/humanitarian justification people, the WMD argument was secondary, if still important. Its unravelling did not seem at first to derail their hopes. Their justification for war lay elsewhere.

But I think the media had gone along, and most of the pundit class, and a great many voting people, on the basis of the WMD What-If. To discover the Administration had gambled on that and lost so badly -- gambled our trust and international credibility -- turned a great deal of opinion sour. It became "Bush's War" to a new set of people who felt betrayed. Some joined the anti-war protesters. Many just sat it out.

No doubt it had an impact on a great many people who went to fight the war at our bidding, and their families who endured their absences and feared for them. But they still managed to do what we asked, even when we asked impossible and contradictory things. No matter what you might glean from watching TV news, the better part of us has been in Iraq these past five years.

That none of this was historically unusual in wars ("Mr. Madison's War," "Mr. Polk's War," "Mr. Lincoln's War") hardly mattered. That some chemical weapons actually turned up in Iraq hardly mattered. That most other credible voices, including anti-war ones, also presumed until May 2003 that Saddam had some level of WMD (Ralph Nader and Scott Ritter, I think, were notable exceptions who came out and predicted he didn't -- but that was a guess, too), didn't matter, either.

In America, you can win elections by bluff. Then you've got four years to govern while the people discover the bluff, and when it's time to run again, you can start over with a new bluff. It doesn't work that way in war. You have to get it right every day.

Like this post itself, the Iraq War became, to the 99 percent of Americans who weren't over there, a political matter. It was about the domestic relationships, the hostilities and betrayals and lies and slanders. About who was going to be forever excluded from the national debates hereafter.

[I was not a WMD What-If backer of the invasion, though I admit the argument had an influence on me. I came around on the humanitarian/draining the swamp side. If anything, what I learned in reading the oil-for-food revelations made me more fearful of Saddam's potential for destructiveness, measured in terms of the near future, than I was before the war.]

[I should add that this is a post about one aspect of the war and the history of it; it is not a complete statement of my views about it. It is about what I think happened in our country, in part, not about what ought to have happened or what ought to happen next.]

Doors of Perception

2008-06-18T20:43:00.002-04:00

Do you think the Christian right would drop its opposition to legal recreational drugs if it discovered how many people have been in the presence of God while on acid, or pondered the morality and mortality of their lives while toked up?

Humor Dissected

2008-06-17T21:47:00.002-04:00

Iron Curtain humor

'What is the difference between communism and capitalism?' 'Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; communism is the exact opposite.'

'Capitalism stands on the brink of the abyss. It will soon be overtaken by communism.'

Uniquely of its times. And, perhaps, there's an indigenous Eastern European/German quality to much of it. But what also impresses me is how timeless and universal humor always is. You can find the same jokes across every culture where the language allows them to be made.

'Is it true that half the Central Committee are idiots?' 'No, that's rubbish. Half the Central Committee are not idiots,' is a version of a story told about Disraeli: 'Mr Speaker, I withdraw that statement. Half the Cabinet are not asses.'

How many versions of that joke exist? Why do we all still feel delight at the discovery that we don't always appreciate the difference between converse and reverse?

The second joke above, the "abyss" one, is a sly version of the old mixed metaphor. The other three are various plays on the idea that you can reverse certain statements and still be saying the same thing. Such forms probably make up a greater percentage of the humor output of totalitarian systems than democratic ones.

There's at least one American historical variation on this joke, involving Lincoln's appointment of Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania as Secretary of War at the start of his administration. It was patronage for a state that had swung the election for the Republicans, but Cameron was notoriously corrupt. When Lincoln asked Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens if Cameron was corrupt, he replied, "Well, I don't think he would steal a red-hot stove."

Cameron heard about it and demanded a retraction. Stevens then told Lincoln "I believe I told you he would not steal a red-hot stove. I will now take that back."

Grist for the Diploma Mill

2008-06-17T16:57:00.000-04:00

For those of you who enjoy seeing academe slagged.

What the university offered, then, became no different from the fare of a television station, a local movie theater, rap concert, or a government bureaucracy: the more the campus devolved into popular life, the less it had to offer anything of rarity or singular beauty—confirming Plato’s pessimism that the radical egalitarian appeal to mass appetites must lead to arts of a lesser and more accessible quality. If half-educated strippers and sex entertainers are deemed street artists or populist philosophers, then they can now be welcomed to campus, exempt from both the charge of sexual exploitation and pornography by reciting anti-American poetry and offering anti-Western quips as they unclothe and fondle themselves before cheering college audiences. A Ward Churchill is the emblem of today’s university provocateur and entertainer, posing as the everyman professor with beads, buckskin, and an automatic rifle, enhanced and protected by bogus credentials and a faked identity.

I recuse myself from all comment in such cases. I am far out of the shadow of the ivory tower and have a great antipathy for it, based on prejudice and experience. The schadenfreude I feel in reading passages where it is roundly dissed tells me I am a poor judge of the quality of the criticism.

Interesting Graph

2008-06-16T23:28:00.004-04:00

Higher in Spain than in Britain? Higher in India than in America? U.S. and China have about the same feeling about him?

And, by the way, John Edwards' chosen blogger proves again that she reads her progressive narrative better than she reads the words on the page. She shows this chart from the report and writes: "A new World Public Opinion poll of 20 nations finds that just 2 percent say that they have 'a lot' or 'some' confidence that President Bush will do 'the right thing regarding world affairs.'" As a commenter quickly points out, it's 2 nations out of 20 (10 percent), not "2 percent" of either people or nations.

UPDATE: I was wrong. It's a different blogging Amanda, not the one Edwards wanted. Thanks to commenters for pointing that out.

Lefty

2008-06-16T23:13:00.001-04:00

I never knew Obama was a fellow left-hander. Looking at this, he's really a left-hander, with that deformed way of writing we tend to have. It's to keep from smearing what you've just written in dragging your hand over it. (Think about it: Right-handers don't have that problem.) And when you're signing a book that's going to be a keepsake, you want to be especially careful about that. So, yeah, I recognize this posture, and it's about as uncomfortable as it looks.

Other Hands

2008-06-16T23:03:00.001-04:00

Ever since I was a teenager I've bought used books. I like them clean, not marked up, but I also enjoy, somehow, knowing that this paper has been touched by other hands and these words have flowed into other minds. If the book has an interesting signature on the flyleaf, a "discarded" stamp from some rural library, or an odd bookplate, so much the better.

When I was younger, I'd buy them at the local thrift shop, so they mostly were from close to home. Most were old novels or story collections -- I got my Dumas, Scott, Poe, Hawthorne that way. But with time my interests have grown more arcane, and with Internet resources like Alibris and Powells, I buy a book now because usually it's the only copy available, and I get it from wherever it comes from.

I've bought several older, thorough, obscure language dictionaries in the last 10 years or so. Not the kind of thing most people would want to load down on their shelves: Thick blocks of book, mostly in German, published in the early 20th century. Really fine books, if you enjoy a well-made book.

Their provenance, where they've been before they arrived in my hands, began to interest me the other night when I was looking something up in a German-language dictionary of French etymology printed at the university press in Heidelberg in the 1920s. The bookplate was a pen-and-ink sketch of an idyllic tropical scene, with dark-skinned people diving in calm waters beside a hut and under a palm tree. And the name was like something from Waugh: Peter Antony Lanyon-Orgill. It occurred to me that the Internet which brought me this book might tell me who he was.

I looked over my shelf for other names to research, and realized I had two of his books -- the massive Oxford Sanskrit-English dictionary also has his nameplate on it.

As I suspected, he wasn't hard to find. To my delight, he was a sort of brilliant, bold, and controversial Cornwall character, characterized as a "fringe" figure in some quarters, cited as an authority in others.

Peter A. Lanyon-Orgill (1924-2002) made himself a place in every bibliography of Pacific linguistics without, it could be argued, ever making any original contribution to the field. At one extreme his publishing activities verged on fraud and plagiarism, but from another point of view he made available work which otherwise might have languished unknown in manuscript form. Throughout it all, in parallel with his real life as a schoolmaster, he constructed an apparently imaginary scholarly career, complete with field research, advanced degrees, and learned colleagues, all largely of his own invention.

His ancestor had sailed with Captain Cook, but his own writings elicit dire warning in scholarly books about the mysterious Easter Island writing systems.

Apparently his library was broken up and sold when he died, which is how I came to own a little part of it, which I cherish more today than I did yesterday.

AP vs. the Bloggers

2008-06-16T18:06:00.002-04:00

The Glittering Eye has a good post on it.

Apparently the crux of the suit is "fair use."

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

Good Lord, thank the heavens it wasn't the "New York Times." They can't write a lede up there in less than 40 words.

Eighty words or less seems seriously, absurdly small. Especially because one of the things blogs do well, and indispensably, and uniquely, is "fisk." And to do that, you have to basically reprint the entire article, rebutting it line by line, including the structure.

What is the AP thinking? I think Dave is on the right track here:

Does the Associated Press have a cause of action at all? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a blogger quote the Associated Press but I’ve seen lots of bloggers quote various newspaper and other web sites in which Associated Press material is included. Wouldn’t the newspaper or other A. P. subscriber need to be the complainant? Perhaps some smart lawyer could straighten me out on this.

I'm neither smart nor a lawyer. But the AP is still, at its roots, a consortium of newspapers and broadcasters (it began with the New York press pooling its coverage to exploit the one telegraph wire that could carry news back east from the Mexican-American War).

Anymore, three-quarters or more of AP coverage is generated by AP itself, but the rest is still passed up and passed around by the member papers. Who pay for the right to use this copy and illustration as they see fit.

And they pay a lot. An AP subscription is well into six figures, even for a moderate-sized daily newspaper in a small city (subscription rates are scaled by circulation). You get a lot of gear with this: Satellite dishes, etc.

But the amazing fact is, AP has been giving away the same content online for years now. I've been astonished by this. One night a few years ago when I was working as wire editor, the power failed downtown and we couldn't work on our computers. I went home, six blocks away, where all the lights were on, and was basically able to do my job from my household Yahoo account: I could see all the stories, see all the pictures. The only thing I couldn't do was move them into the newspaper's pagination system.

Why on earth is the AP charging newspapers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for this content, which the publishers then have to turn around and try to sell to the public, when anyone can see it in full, for free, online?

It takes a bit of effort to get directly onto the AP site or its photo stream. Almost nobody links directly to AP, as Dave notes. On the other hand, all it takes is for the newspaper in Boise, say, to post up an AP story on its Web site, and everyone in the world can read it for free.

I don't think the AP wants to do much about that; at least the Boise paper's Web advertisers get exposure, in that case. Though whether the reader from Bangladesh wants to download the coupons for the free undercarriage car wash in Boise is a dubious proposition.

But when the article appears whole as a Freeper post, no one anywhere in the AP's food chain benefits at all, and it is a net detriment to all the member organizations.

That's why I think they attempt to draw this line in the sand. What they don't seem to realize, or want to realize, is that the sand they're drawing in already is 8 feet underwater, thanks to the dam they allowed to collapse 10 years ago or more and can't fix now.

Questions

2008-06-15T23:25:00.003-04:00

For a Christian economist. Devise a system of economics that guarantees fairness in a land where, to many, pennies are precious, and, to a few, millions are chaff. For a culture of unrestrained freedom, as ours must be, surely will arrive at this. Where one's very time in life -- the precious hours between the sleep and the sleep -- can be bought and sold.

For a global warming zealot. Study the state of the world and of scientific knowledge in 1908. Forget everything discovered or revealed since then. Decide what a person in 1908 would see as the great pressing crises facing the human race, and devise a policy, using existing technologies, to combat or address them.

[Here's a hint, from 1899:

A Chicago Daily Tribune story featured scientists speculating about a future in which people's hands and feet will get smaller because of labor-saving machines, a time when "the hat will vanish and the hair will improve" and when everyone will live around the equator because of global cooling.

"Man will develop more in the 20th century than he has in the last 1,000 years,"' one scientist said.]

Just Once

2008-06-15T20:39:00.003-04:00

I know this is mean-spirited of me. But just once, on Father's Day, I'd like to see a different kind of story as the lede feature in the Sunday paper.

Not that I have anything against celebrating the happiness of the man who ditched his babies and their mother when he was 20 and went to drink and shoot up and ended up a homeless alcoholic, and now, 10 years later, is getting back in touch with his son and daughter. [Thanks to some intervention treatment program hosted by some rescue mission. Funded by some bill pushed by some state senator. And it's all threatened by federal budget cuts thanks to Republican parsimony and the war in Iraq. Et cetera.]

But I wonder, where is the dad who stayed? The dad who came home every night to his family in spite of his demons. He took shit from abusive bosses and said nothing, because his kids needed the paycheck. He could have tossed it all to the wind and let the demons rule, but he didn't. Perhaps they were kept at bay only by the strength of the mutual love he had with his son and daughter.

It is all over-simple from a God's-eye view. Perhaps the father who stays warps his children; perhaps the father who leaves allows them to develop strength they would not otherwise have.

But in the over-simple world as we experience it, isn't there a place for the dad who stayed? I'm sure the other man's tale is uplifting, in a sad way, but might not this be, with the writer's touch?

Don't Mean a Thang

2008-06-15T20:22:00.000-04:00

Never trust neo-progressives who claim to be champions of the American poor and the working folk, but who reflexively despise country music or can't be bothered to tell classic country from bad country.

"Country music made between about 1950 and 1970 is a secret history of rural, working class Americans in the twentieth century -- a secret history in plain sight. . . . Country music knows that the dark heart of the American Century beat in oil-field roadhouses in Texas and in dim-lit Detroit bars where country boys in exile gathered after another shift at Ford or GM. Bobby Bare might've pleaded in 'Detroit City' that he wanted to go home. But we all knew he wouldn't, that he couldn't. Country profoundly understands what it's like to be trapped in a culture of alienation: by poverty, by a [lousy] job, by lust, by booze. ... If you truly want to understand the whole United States of America in the twentieth century, you need to understand country music and the working people who lived their lives by it."

The operative phrase, of course, is "want to understand."

1-21-09

2008-06-13T22:41:00.001-04:00

Europe wakes up with a hangover.

My biggest worry, in fact, is that Mr Obama wins and the Democrats get a huge majority in Congress. The new president will be focused hard on two big policy challenges in Washington - dealing with Iraq and reforming US healthcare. He won't have a lot of political capital to spare to stand up to a resurgent Democratic Party in Congress over trade policy, and the US could slide further towards protectionism.

Meanwhile, a big Republican defeat in November is quite likely to result in a very nasty isolationist turn inside the opposition party. The neoconservatives - those bad guys who believe that the US should spend blood and treasure trying to bring democracy to the great unwashed - will be discredited. President Obama could find himself under pressure from both parties in Congress to put US interests first.

All of this means that the new president will have to spend a fair amount of time on trips to Europe explaining to his admirers why he really isn't able to deliver that much.

Why Obnoxious is Sometimes Necessary

2008-06-13T22:40:00.000-04:00

You know, ... yeah.