Me: Frank Lynch

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For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes), with a weekly essay springing from one of Johnson's quotations.

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Is Karl Rove too busy? I mean, he could be very busy working with attorneys in preparation for something on the Plame case. I'm just trying to figure out the tin ear which the Crawford White House has shown of late. Cindy Sheehan was a much bigger presence than the White House expected, certainly, and the White House was not on its game with that whole thing going on for as long as it did. And the Iraqi Constitution developments certainly haven't made many Americans feel good about the noble goal. But most obviously we have Bush's reaction to the hurricane: everyone expected there would be huge problems thanks to the structure of New Orleans, yet Bush kept his public appearance schedule rather than hasten back to Washington to do what he's only doing now. You would have thought the WH would have learned something from the public relations problems they experienced over the tsunamis. Can their memories really be so short? Or is Karl otherwise engaged?
Link | | | 7:08 PM | Home

Right; as if... Over at NRO's The Corner, John Podhoretz had this to say:

One thing is for sure, Byron: No president, not this one and not any president who follows him, will ever again take a five-week vacation.

Now, you have to laugh about this. The President got his wake up call about extended vacations on September 11, 36 days after having been briefed that Bin Ladin was determined to strike in the U.S. Under those circumstances any reasonable person would have engaged in self-examination and considered whether or not there was more that could have been done; and as we know from Richard Clarke, August 6 was not the first Bush had heard about terrorist threats; Tenet's hair was on fire, remember?

You'd think that a real President might have made some vow for greater effort on his part, renewed diligence and so on. If he didn't do it after 9/11, what makes Podhoretz think Bush will do it now?

Sheer foolishness, in the eyes of Duckman GR:

[E]xpect exactly what we've gotten for the whole of george w bush's life, from him now.

Whether from incompetence, ignorance, greed, hubris, self loathing or some other disfigurement of mind and body, expect nothing less from the boy.

To expect otherwise is to simply enable him once again.

JPod needs to lower his expectations on the pupil's ability to learn any lesson here.
Link | | | 6:56 PM | Home

Is it time to reinstate the draft? When you have an emergency like Katrina has left, the National Guard is an important resource. But right now too much of the guard is tied up in Iraq, and not coming home any time soon. (The President has been clear about his resolve, and I'll take him at his word on that.) At the same time, recruitment for the regular forces has fallen off, and the Army has felt the need to target parents with appeals, so that more will feel good about their children serving.

Now, President Bush has talked about the noble goal he's trying to achieve in Iraq; it clearly means a lot to him, since being in Iraq has cost him a lot of political capital (as measured by national support, at least). Yet it should be clear to the President that the demands on our forces are unsustainable for the long term; we need the National Guard at home, and we need troops for the wars.

Not having enough troops in Iraq has increased the risk for our troops that are there; we need more boots on the ground, and we need the Guard at home. I think it's time we reinstated the draft, if Iraq is really so important.

And let's not single out the President here: there are a lot of people who support our presence in Iraq all around the country. Everyone who supports the idea of our involvement in Iraq should see the value of the draft: a draft will support the effort, and involve the entire nation in democracy's progress.
Link | | | 6:33 PM | Home

Kinda sorta bummed at myself. A few years ago we were in Scotland, with a basic notion of two hubs, Edinburgh and Inverness. A day trip (a spoke, if you want to continue the metaphor) out of Inverness took us to the Culloden battlefield, some cairns a bit further east, Cawdor Castle. No, it's not the site of Shakespeare's Macbeth, but yesterday I realized it was a stop on Johnson and Boswell's 1773 tour of the Hebrides. This week I've had Boswell's book in my briefcase, and there's no mistaking it: he mentions the hawthorn tree in the room and so on and so on. When we were there, I felt it was far less interesting than either the battlefield or the cairns; had I known then that I was walking in Johnson's footsteps I would have felt completely different; I'm sure I would have peppered the guide with questions along the lines of "and where did he have tea?"

It also would have been nice to have made the tour a little more relevant for our daughter by putting the castle into some kind of context, even if she's bored with Johnson at this point.

I already have a long list of reasons to return to Scotland. I've been there three times, and don't feel like it's been nearly enough, so it's not like I'm looking for another reason. (And honestly, as nice as the people are, I think it's the terrain.) But I deeply regret not touring Cawdor Castle as a Johnsonian "should."

SIDEBAR: Just to give you a sense of Zoë's unusual Johnson awareness, in the fall of 2000 I had a huge spike in traffic on my web site a few minutes after 8 PM; it was odd, and I had no idea why. America was watching either the Gore-Bush debates or the baseball playoffs. But then, a few hours later there was another huge spike just after 11 PM. I was mystified, but I was sure it had something to do with television (east coast airings and west coast airings three hours later). Through message boards and a little investigation, I learned that Johnson was a question on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire." Now, here is where you get a sense of how a family context changes a kid's sense of what's normal. Walking Zoë home from school (she's like a second grader), I said to her, "I found out what all those visits to my web site were about. There was a question on 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' about Johnson, and it went like this: 'In 1755, Samuel Johnson published the most comprehensive what of his time? Was it, A, a thesaurus, B, a dictionary, C, a poetry volume,'" (I forget the details) and Zoë piped up "DICTIONARY. Everybody knows that."
Link | | | 1:03 AM | Home
 

Dig deep. The Mississippi delta area is in a heap of trouble, as you well know. Death tolls are rising, and much of New Orleans won't be habitable for a month — meaning, of course, that much of the city's population (as well as outlying areas) will be refugees. We gave $500 to the Kerry campaign last year, and that seems like a good starting point to me for us. Your mileage may vary, but think really hard on this.

On 9/11 (the very day) I posted a Johnson quote to encourage donations:

To wipe all tears from off all faces is a task too hard for mortals; but to alleviate misfortunes is often within the most limited power: yet the opportunities which every day affords of relieving the most wretched of human beings are overlooked and neglected with equal disregard of policy and goodness.

(It's from his Rambler #107.) I'm not arguing for any amount, or even that you donate at all, only asking that you think long and hard about it. Forego coffee shop trips for a week, anything. Give up beer for a couple weeks. You know the drill: find what you can within yourself.
Link | | | 11:05 PM | Home

Who's counting? The Associated Press's take on Bush's speech today:

President Bush on Tuesday answered growing anti-war protests with a fresh reason for American troops to continue fighting in Iraq: protection of the country's vast oil fields that he said would otherwise fall under the control of terrorist extremists.

I think this would be a new one. So yes, increment the counts, and yes, it's now officially about the oil. Any predictions on how the oil rationale will morph from here?
Link | | | 10:41 PM | Home

Time out for geeks. If you read a lot of blogs, you probably know that there are a lot of standard templates in use; while many sites look unique, I'm guessing about half follow a basic format set up by the software they use (be it blogger or typepad or what have you). I've always done this blog (as well as The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page) in home grown html. And when I've done my html coding I've been using WordPerfect instead of an html editor. I've been using WordPerfect for over eight years now, and the reason is/was, one, I already had it on hand and could deploy it, and two, it never started "thinking" about what I was doing and inserted code. MS Word, for instance, was always inserting code for IE, at a time when Netscape still had a presence.

Where I'm getting at is that I finally got fed up with my old version of WordPerfect (version 8) not always opening properly in Windows XP - - and when you have an urge to write, you don't want anything to get in the way. Sometimes it wouldn't load properly, and I'd have to shut it down and start it back up (a long process).

So I just installed the current version (12), and it's not behaving as I need it to yet. When I opened up an html doc in 8, it would prompt me to choose between opening it up as an ASCII text file (yes, that's what I want) versus an html web page (nope, can't work with that). Version 12 seems to automatically open it up as a web page, something I can't deal with when I'm writing... So, we have an email into tech support. Wish me luck, I'm sure this isn't a frequently asked question, as it can't be a frequent need.

(If you've ever looked at web page source code, look at mine: unlike practically every other site on the web, my lines wrap; that's because I'm using WordPerfect. But it sure does make it easier to review my code...)
Link | | | 10:27 PM | Home

The latest poverty figures are out, and they're not good. According to the US Census Bureau, 12.7% of America was below the poverty line in 2004. This is the highest level it's been under Bush. Let's review the figures:

• 2000: 11.3% (last year of Clinton's term)
• 2001: 11.7% (Bush's first year)
• 2002: 12.1%
• 2003: 12.5%
• 2004: 12.7%

Let's grant Bush some slack for the first year or two, since the economy was sliding as he came into office, and shortly afterwards the U.S. went into one of the briefest recessions in its entire history. But that was so 2001, and we should be well out of it by now, don't you think? And do we want to still blame nine-lem for the sorry state of the nation's economy, four years after the fact? I think not.

This is really frustrating for the editors of the Wall Street Journal, of course. One of their columnists had expressed frustration that cutting taxes was a tough political sell because there were too many "lucky duckies" who were too poor to pay income tax, and thus saw no selfish value to the arguments for cutting taxes. But never you mind: we've got the argument of the President of the United States, who has told us on several occasions that we need to keep the tax cuts in order to keep the economy growing. His economy, maybe; I don't doubt that there are people who are doing well these days, but I don't know any of them. (Maybe if he hadn't cut taxes we could afford to properly armor our troops. Whaddaya think?)

One of the early arguments Bush raised for changing Social Security was based on the demographic differences between whites and blacks: that once they reach retirement age, the average black has fewer years left in his or her life span than the average white. (Note that I've framed this among those who reach retirement age, not just overall life span.) It's true, and as a result blacks have fewer years to collect retirement benefits. But setting aside the differences in disability benefits which take away some of that disadvantage, you have to believe that life span is effected by poverty. If the President was so concerned about Americans' life spans, he'd stop taking so many long vacations in Crawford and actually work to decrease poverty. The health of the economy is not just about his socio-economic class.
Link | | | 9:36 PM | Home
 

Extremely funny. For a long time I was convinced that Kevin Guilfoile's reinterpretation of Don McLean's Starry, Starry Night (in terms of a Green Bay Packers game) was the funniest thing I've ever read. (Seriously: Go, bookmark it, and come back.) But I read something today during lunch which is a strong contenduh. The back story is that over at Think Progress, Judd Legum pointed out that not only had SCOTUS nominee John Roberts exposed himself to charges of conflict of interest in not recusing himself from a Bush-relevant case while he was interviewing for the SCOTUS slot (as I had, here), Legum went on to share a prior opinion from Roberts indicating Roberts knew damned well better than he'd behaved. Got it? OK, well, someone at Think Progress noted a response from a conservative blogger suggesting Legum is a 12 year old. Really, if you want to read someone who's really thick (and not behaving very well, either), this is for you.
Link | | | 7:32 PM | Home

Where does the buck stop? Someone I love forwarded me the contents of an "open letter to Cindy Sheehan." It can be found on the Internet in several places, sometimes with an email address (the mailbox is full, don't bother). It seems to have appeared on August 17, and it goes as follows:

August 17, 2005

An Open Letter To Cindy Sheehan -- From the Proud Father of a U.S. Marine

By Brantley Smith

Ms. Sheehan,

By your actions over the past two weeks it is clear that you missed an important aspect of Civics 101: With rights come responsibilities. You certainly have the right to voice your opinion against the war in Iraq and the President's policies. You even have the right to camp outside the President's home in Crawford and demand he meet with you. Your status as a mother who has lost a child in the war also gives your words and actions a credibility and a larger audience than otherwise would be the case. Now that your supporters have given you a broad forum from which to be heard, making you a national figure, its time you considered your responsibilities to all of us. I have a daughter set to deploy to Fallujah in two weeks and I have a serious concern with how your irresponsible and short sighted actions might impact on her. She is, after all, a volunteer, like your son, and she is going in harm's way because she believes it is her responsibility to protect your rights and freedoms.

Well meaning people like you always seem to forget the law of unintended consequences and in your vanity and arrogant self-righteousness never bother to think through what it is you are trying to do versus what you may actually accomplish. I am here to inform you, Ma'am, that you will not change the policy of our government by sitting outside Crawford making a spectacle of yourself in the name of your rights to free speech; what you will do is provide more propaganda for our enemies and cost the lives of even more brave and selfless American warriors. How long do you think it will be before you become a star on Al Jazeera? For all I know! , it may have already happened. One thing is certain, though, and that is that your actions and words will further embolden a ruthless and evil enemy and more American blood will be shed and some of it will be on your hands. I pray that my daughter will not be one of them. If she is, then I will hold you and those like you partly responsible. Yes, my daughter's fate will depend mostly on her own courageous decision to serve, but only the most naive among us can deny the impact our own words and actions here in America have in a world grown smaller by the revolution in communications technology.

I am sure you believe that you are serving some great cause by putting our servicemen and women in more danger and that you can, by your irresponsible exercise of free speech, help end a policy you disagree with. Your emotion may be compelling but the reality is that you will not set in motion any process that will change or undo what has been done. The war will go on because to end it now would dishonor the sacrifice of all of our fellow countrymen who have died in the cause of fighting terrorism. Rational Americans will not allow that. Too much is at stake. Unfortunately, shallow and irrational ones, such as yourself, will continue to put the lives of our sons and daughters in danger by aiding and abetting an enemy who sees propagandizing in the mass media as its main weapon in a war it could otherwise not win standing on its own wretched and evil justification of radical Islam, or by force of arms. You, Ma'am, have joined forces with an evil you neither understand nor apparently have tried to comprehend. You direct your anger toward our country while the enemy plots to kill and maim the innocent. You make a mockery of responsible free speech while thousands of young men and women fight desperately to preserve your safety. Instead of honoring your son's sacrifice you are inspired to comfort an evil enemy.

You clearly do not understand the challenge we face as a nation and have not tried to put it in historical perspective. It is a sad fact that it is those of your thinking that have led us to where we are today. Decades of appeasement to these haters of everything we hold dear has cost thousands of American lives from Beirut to New York and in dozens of other forgotten places. Remember Lockerbie? The Achille Lauro? The USS Cole? We as a people were dragged into this war, much like December 7th, 1941, and we must fight and win it wherever the enemy hides and against whomever would support him.

Make no mistake about Iraq. It is both a legitimate and crucial campaign in this much larger, global war of radical Islam's making. These people hate us for who we are, not what we have done. We did not bring this on ourselves, as many would have us believe, by our policies and actions abroad. We brought this on ourselves in 1775 when the Founding Fathers embarked on a course of freedom, tolerance, and liberal democratic and social ideals.

These haters of all we hold dear strive to destroy forever a government" of the people, by the people, and for the people" that Abraham Lincoln hoped would never "Perish from the earth". They would replace it with an oppressive world theocracy unlike anything modern history has ever seen for its ruthless disregard for personal freedom and liberty. If more appeasement is your answer for an alternative policy, spare us. We have suffered enough from cowardice and inaction.

An historical analogy screams to be let out here. It is one of two men, both! named Chamberlain. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a school teacher turned soldier in the American Civil War, found himself in the crosshairs of history on a warm July day in 1863 on a small hill in Pennsylvania. Commanding the 20th Maine Regiment on the extreme Union left at Gettysburg he was in a most perilous position. Should he fail to hold against a strong Confederate attack, the Union could be lost. You see, he was serving in an increasingly unpopular war at home against a resurgent enemy, and for a President fighting for his political life. Colonel Chamberlain, stoic but determined, refused to yield. His small regiment held against an onslaught of Confederate attacks, an action many historians believe turned the tide of the war. He was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The other half of this analogy focuses on Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain in the years preceding World War II. His story is widely known. Through his policy of appeasement and a lack of moral courage, he handed Adolf Hitler much of Europe. Which side of history have you chosen, Ma'am?

Your son died in the service of freedom and my daughter will go in harm's way to protect and preserve it. Honor their sacrifice, Ma'am, by exercising it responsibly.

I will pray with you and I will grieve with you but I will not stand by silent while you needlessly and arrogantly endanger the life of my daughter and her comrades in arms. Please bless us with your silence and go home.

Brantley Smith

Proud father of a United States Marine

Tullahoma, TN

I feel for any parent in this situation who has a son or daughter in the armed forces, knowing they are in harm's way. Parental instincts make you want to defend that child against any threat, imagined or not. Smith's accusation against Sheehan, of treason, and Sheehan threatening the safety of his daughter, however, are clearly misdirected. Sheehan has a right to speak out against the war, and if her actions are wrong (which I don't think they are), then perhaps Smith has a bone to pick with the framers of the Bill of Rights, who clearly believed such speech should be protected. Blame them, not Sheehan.

The framers are of course dead, so how about if we think about the far greater actions of the President of the United States, and all his administration, and all they've done to create this unnecessary war in Iraq? Everyone knows (or should know) that the Administration cherry-picked information which supported going to war, and didn't think hard enough about contrary information. The aluminum tubes, of course; defectors who'd said all the weapons were destroyed years ago; the word from inspectors on the ground that Iraq had no significant stockpiles of WMD (and now, of course, we know there were none).

We also know that munitions were not carefully protected after the invasion (al Qa Qaa, remember?), and that looted arms are not in the hands of the authorities. We also know that the President actually urged the insurgency on with his braggadocio of "Bring 'em on."

Yeah, you can disagree with Cindy Sheehan. You can even wish she'd pipe down. But to blame her for risking the lives of our troops when fault clearly lies first and foremost with the Bush White House is simply flat out wrong.
Link | | | 8:14 AM | Home
 

Prayers for New Orleans LA. About a half-million people have been told to evacuate, as hurricane Katrina has had winds measured at over 175 MPH.
Link | | | 12:26 PM | Home

It's come to this. David Brooks' current column at the New York Times is about a revisited strategy on dealing with insurgents. Much of the column is shocking, in how it confirms how rudderless the current efforts in Iraq are (even as our troops are being asked to lay their lives down). I'm not a student of wars, and can't really evaluate the strategy, but the thumbnail is it that involves setting up protected sanctuaries for civilians, doing good reconstruction work, and letting the civilians see the merits of your intervention; and from there, expand to other areas. Root out insurgents and put yourself on a convincing defensive posture. But why am I not comforted by this line?

But the strategy has one virtue. It might work.

Why does that line sound to me like some B-grade movie? (Echoes of Gimli in The Return of the King: "Small likelihood of success; certainty of death; what are we waiting for?") If we're going to start adopting strategies because they make us feel like cowboys in against-all-odds movies again, then we're in a heap of trouble. All Brooks has really done in his column is cite the need for a strategy, call one out, and not really discuss its merits or flaws. (Perhaps he's not qualified to do more — in which case maybe this column should have been written by someone else: spend the bulk of it on the need for a strategy, and how the Administration has failed us, rather than an idea he can't really form an opinion of.)
Link | | | 11:54 AM | Home

Do as I say, not as I do. Over at Social Security Choice (a web site favoring private accounts), Jonathan Swanson urges readers to go to the Rock The Vote web site and leave comments in favor of privatization (he even provides a link, helpfully). Wanna know what's moronic about this? Social Security Choice doesn't allow comments. The utter hypocrisy of this appeal is astounding.
Link | | | 10:49 AM | Home

Talk about CRICKETS! I'm tellin' ya! US Rep Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) has been trying to maintain a discussion on changing Social Security, even holding town hall discussions with sparse gatherings of constituents during the recess:

Kingston, who as vice chairman of the House GOP caucus is the party's point man on the issue, continues to carry the torch. As a pair of town hall meetings Friday in south Georgia showed, it is a lonely job.

"I believe there's a problem" with Social Security, Kingston told 40 constituents assembled at South Georgia College. "Can we get agreement on that?"

Only a couple of hands went up.

"What about the cap" on wages? he asked, raising his hand to indicate he was taking a poll. "Should we lift that?"

No response.

Kingston, standing behind an arrangement of artificial daisies, continued. "What if we raised the tax on Social Security?"

Nothing.

"Should we raise the retirement age? Not one person? Come on, somebody?"

Nobody.

Indifference also greeted his questions about who supported Bush's plan for wage indexing and personal retirement accounts.

"Not one of y'all raised your hand to anything," he said finally. "Do you agree with me that it's Friday morning?"

Tough room.
Link | | | 10:26 AM | Home

Happily citing the British. We all remember the famous 16 words from Bush's 2003 State of the Union address ("British Intelligence has learned...") and how they were technically correct because it was a statement of what Britain had learned. And we also know how frequently Bush draped himself in the appearance of propriety by having Tony Blair at his side over Iraq. (Would the war have happened without Blair? I very much doubt it.) So surely Bush will be citing this:

The [UK] government was warned over a year ago by its most senior Foreign Office official that the Iraq war was fuelling UK Muslim extremism, it has emerged.

Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Michael Jay issued the warning in a May 2004 letter, leaked to the Observer.

The letter to Cabinet Secretary Sir Andrew Turnbull said British foreign policy was a "key driver" behind recruitment by extremist Muslim groups.

Do I hear crickets, Mr. President?
Link | | | 9:59 AM | Home
 

Flypaper "strategy." If you're not in the habit of venturing into the conservative blogs, this post should be a reminder that your reading needs to be more diverse.
Link | | | 10:46 PM | Home

Chuck Hagel? I'd seen CNN's "Dead Wrong" last week, and so didn't pay it a lot of attention tonight, but I passed through a room where it was on tonight as David Kay (former head of the Iraq Survey Group, the President's hand-picked group that was supposed to find out the "truth" about WMDs in Iraq) remarked about our loss in credibility and what it would mean for the future. This is a paraphrase, but the words were along the lines of "What will we say to world the next time, when we think it's a 'slam dunk,' in the words of George Tenet."

Because so many are already thinking about the 2008 Presidential elections (Patrick Ruffini has already set up a newsfeed on the various candidates!) you have to wonder if it makes sense to think about the various Republicans who might vie for the nomination in 2008 and whether or not their positions on Iraq will impact their chances. From my perspective, much hinges on whether or not the party as a whole will be in denial about whether or not it was a mistake to invade Iraq over mistaken intelligence. As I've long said, if it's true that the problem was that we lacked human intelligence, then why did we pull the plug so early in 2003 when we actually had inspectors there, inspectors who were telling us that they hadn't found anything worth warring over?

So why do I bring up Chuck Hagel? In the current situation, his recognition of the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam go far, but they don't go nearly as far as what he said pre-invasion. Before the invasion he was talking about how we needed to be careful about invading Iraq, because if we're really fighting a long-term war on terror, there was so much more to come afterwards, and we couldn't afford to alienate our allies so early in the game, over such small fry as Iraq. It's not as if he was saying "I don't believe the intel" so much as he was moderating his reactions to the evidence on the table thus far. (If you want a time capsule, read what I wrote about this on March 2, 2003; but note that the context is different from this blog, I'm wrapping it into an essay on a Samuel Johnson quote. But the links and the discussion are still valuable.)

I know that Iraq is only one issue, but if you remember how Kerry approached it in the debates, his basic position was that he could do more in dealing with foreign powers because he was not Bush; Hagel has that same advantage, because like Kerry he expressed early skepticism about the Iraq war.

Now, in my book that's a positive. I don't know, though, whether or not it could carry him to the nomination: much will be decided in the next few months - - we hear about Bush's sinking approval ratings, but not enough about how they sink among Republicans, and that's a key figure in the Hagel Futures market.

There are occasions where a candidate with broad national appeal yet low party appeal might make a strong showing as a third party candidate (as I've said earlier, Giulani is of this ilk). I don't think Hagel has the same national appeal, though, and I think his opportunities as a third party candidate are really limited. Too bad for the GOP if the GOP can't embrace him though, because he's got the credentials on a major issue already.
Link | | | 10:12 PM | Home

Time for the President to pony up. In his radio address today, the President asked for more resolve regarding Iraq from Americans. (Full text, unfiltered, here.)

War and the nurturing of a new government (the President is loath to say "nation building") is a long process; if Americans are impatient, I suspect that one of the big reasons for that is that too many of those who were calling for an invasion in the first place were predicting cake walks and candies and sweets. Even Cheney, remember, predicted we'd be greeted as liberators.

So let's get real, Mr. President: if America is impatient, it's because your administration built too-high expectations. And, since in the 2000 debates you said you were against nation building ("The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place."), what was America to expect from your time horizon?

It's time for him to pony up, not with a time line for withdrawal — that would be irresponsible — but with a progress plan, a statement of what he will accomplish and when it will be done. Perhaps if the White House Press Corps were capable of remembering its place and stop attending the Crawford BBQs, these points will be raised, without the brush-off that the President refuses to give a "time line." A progress plan is something completely different.
Link | | | 5:33 PM | Home
 

CNN is repeating its documentary "Dead Wrong," on the intelligence failures surrounding the conclusions that Iraq had WMDs. If you didn't see it last Sunday night, it's on tomorrow night, Saturday August 27, at 8 PM Eastern. Don't miss it. (I had good things to say about it here.)
Link | | | 9:01 PM | Home

Christopher Hitchens and Jon Stewart. A lot of traffic coming here in search of the video, due to the fact that I've recently mentioned them both in another post. But if you want to see the video of Hitchens on last night's Daily Show, you'll have to go here, to the Crooks and Liars web site.
Link | | | 8:57 PM | Home
 

Trust me. Donald Luskin wants us to trust him when it comes to Social Security privatization: markets will do better. Yeah, trust his acumen.
Link | | | 12:21 AM | Home
 

I hate it, but it's in line with the idea of interstate commerce. California has long had different standards for auto emissions than the rest of the country, and because of the proportion of the market that it represents, California has had the market position to drive fuel standards. That would change, however, under new Bush rules which prohibit states from requiring higher standards. The rules are another bone for automakers, who don't want the legislated difficulty of crafting products for different markets under different local requirements.

It may be time for the states that want to work for a better environment on their own to seek other methods. I don't know if it would pass muster, but maybe a huge tax on licensing fees when vehicles don't meet local standards? That way the burden isn't put on Detroit, and their sales aren't "banned;" but owners are encouraged to bear the burden their cars place on the local environment. The statute (as quoted at the link) bars states from trying to reduce emissions below the federal standard; this would be the local governments not trying to limit emissions so much as recoup the environmental costs of the emissions. Any legal scholars out there?
Link | | | 11:34 PM | Home

What will we tell the troops? The editors at the New York Times noticed that in Utah Bush focused on yet another reason for staying the course in Iraq, "to keep faith with the men and women who have already died in the war." (These words are the Times editors' paraphrase, but they provide supporting quotes from the President. The full text of what President Bush said is here.) In truth, I don't know if this is the first time Bush has argued this one, so don't go incrementing your "reasons for the war" count yet, check it against what you already have. But as I noted yesterday, the Army continues to try to recruit new troops, and now they're leveling a campaign at the parents of potential recruits. So what we now have is wonderful cycle which, while not self-perpetuating, is of the Administration's invention: send your sons and daughters to an uncharted war, so that some of them may die, so that I can plead for ongoing involvement and recruit more.

I don't think this is a pyramid scheme, but it sure is something, and it smells really bad.
Link | | | 8:15 AM | Home
 

Lovely support for the troops. Your slogan here.
Link | | | 6:53 PM | Home

How can you ask a parent to have their child be the last to die for a mistake? The Army has a new campaign of recruitment commercials, aimed at the parents. The marketing reasoning is simple, since recruitment numbers have fallen and parents are much of the reason why. I don't think mortality alone is sufficient explanation, though: surely it's bad enough to contemplate the mortality of your child, but when the President isn't forthcoming about mileposts and timing and making himself accountable for progress, why would you let your kid bear the burden? (And you also have to believe that the President's failure to define the "noble cause" can't be helping, either.)
Link | | | 5:33 PM | Home

Eloquently put. James Wolcott, doing the turnaround stomp down on Michael Ledeen for his attempted slam on Chuck Hagel:

Two years ago, Ledeen sneered about Hagel's "wimpery" about Iraq (a sneer I'd wager Ledeen wouldn't dare be man enough to repeat to Hagel's face), but it's Hagel who's been vindicated. The fact is that Ledeen and his neocons got the war they wanted, it was waged according to their blueprints, and it's their fuck-up, their moral responsibility, their historical bloodstain, their arrogant, ignorant, blundering, inexcusable mess. It says something about Ledeen's depraved indifference toward the consequences of his own lobbying efforts that he still thinks at this late date that he can get away with being droll.

Nice in-your-face rejection.
Link | | | 12:49 AM | Home

What makes an anti-Semite? In an email exchange initiated by me (I'd challenged a blog post), a blogger insisted that Cindy Sheehan was not only psychotic but also anti-Semitic, and pointed to Christopher Hitchens' recent piece in Slate, as well as his later characterization of her statements to say that she'd claimed her son was killed by a "secret Jewish cabal." Let's start with Sheehan's own words, as quoted by Hitchens in his Slate article:

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agendas after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy not for the real reason, because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy.

"PNAC" refers to the "Project For a New American Century," and seeing as how they not only have a web site anyone can access (here), but that they'd openly put themselves on the map with letters to Clinton dating back to 1998, I'm not sure Hitchens' recasting of them as "secret" is justified. I certainly don't see the word "secret" in Sheehan's statement, so I'm not sure where Hitchens cooked it up. Maybe it's just me.

So what about the "Jewish" part? Is a reference to the Project For A New American Society some kind of code for "Jews in the Pentagon," as G. Gordon Liddy suggested?

Let's start with the list of people who signed the PNAC's Statement of Principles. Now, I confess I don't know the religion of everyone involved, but some of the people there are Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Gary Bauer, William Bennett, Steve Forbes, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld. Yeah, there are signers I left out whose names "sound" Jewish, but Steve Forbes' dad Malcolm was a Scot, right? Gaffney? Quayle? And Bauer, isn't he a leading conservative Christian? Jeb Bush, has he been seen in temple? So I'm not sure the "Jewish" label is very accurate, and when you consider prominent people who don't seem to support and could well be Jewish (Al Franken, Eric Alterman, Jon Stewart, to name a few off the top of my head... And Levin and Schumer, in the Senate) it seems there are plenty who are Jewish who don't support the war. So I'm not sure you can make the claim stick that war supporters are singularly Jews, much less some secret cabal.

So what are we left with, "cabal"? I don't know, I kind of think the openness of the PNAC kinda negates the cabal part. If anything, this whole idea starts to sound like the irresponsible flippancy of a couple of hotheads trying to score points while in the spotlight. They should be ashamed. And I'm truly sorry for anyone who's been taken in by this sort of language.

As for the Israeli aspects Ms. Sheehan cited — well, go back and read the 9/11 Commission Report. It's in there, gang: the Islamist extremists resented our foreign policy.

I could criticize the lack of sensitivity Ms. Sheehan has used in the way she's described international relations, but it's tougher to criticize the basic points she's raised. Really, read the words she's said, and compare them to how she's been smeared. Those who smear her have to start holding themselves to a higher level of truth; but then, since so many war bloggers have been so effective at helping send a couple thousand troops off to their deaths, they may be feeling a little triumphant these days. Especially with that new constitution, and all.
Link | | | 12:25 AM | Home
 

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