Me: Frank Lynch

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Another rejection of intelligence. On the stump for a Republican candidate today, here's the President:

Mr. Bush was disdainful of Democratic arguments that the war in Iraq has made the United States less safe than before by stoking anti-American resentment, thus creating a breeding ground for terrorists in the Middle East.

"Iraq is not the reason the terrorists are at war against us," he said. "I would remind the House Democrats our troops were not in Iraq when the terrorists first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993."

Of course, that is exactly what the intelligence agencies have concluded, that the invasion of Iraq has given the terrorists a marvelous recruiting tool. It's telling that Bush still hasn't absorbed that lesson: it's also regrettable that we would be led by someone so obtuse.

(In the same speech he also complained about Democrats not having a plan for Iraq. But c'mon, "being flexible" isn't a plan either, it's merely a tactic.)
Link | | | 8:45 PM | Home
 

Catching the wave of last year's trend. The Washington Post has a cautionary tale about the fleeting interests of the youth market, and how sites like My Space no longer have the luster they once seemed to have. As an oldish geezer, I'm a little amused by the way Big Business seems ignorant of the phenomenon, but not at all amused when it's played out with such heavy capital, seeing as how so many huge buyouts are helped by the mutual funds investments of so many people. (Maybe not, but if not, you're arguing that pirating DVDs is victimless. You choose.)

It's not like fleeting interest is a new phenomenon. Within my generation, how many people bought Boston's second album? Or Dan Fogelberg's "Captured Angel," in comparison to "Souvenirs"? Anyone able to name three singles by Danny and the Juniors?

That, of course, is pop music. It should be a relatively recent set of examples, and have great historical weight. How deep do we need to mine to give these capitalists caution regarding the young?
Link | | | 9:42 PM | Home
 

Completely bamboozled. Yesterday, showing that he'd learned the problems which "group think" created in sending us off to war in Iraq in the mistaken belief that we'd find WMDs there, the President held a gab-fest with a group of diverse thinkers, a bunch of conservative journalists. And today we got to read the results! NRO's Byron York was one of the happy campers invited to Circle Time at the Old Oval, and bought Bush's line that the problem is that the U.S. Gov't hasn't been reporting all the enemy its killed, to counteract the U.S. deaths. And colleague Cliff May buys it. It's sad, really: Bush, and these sycophants have so little respect for Americans' intelligence that they think the only way we measure progress is in body counts. That, of course, is the ploy they used to spur us into this war, but it's not as if the American people are completely myopic. We have memories long enough to recognize that we were sold a bill of goods over WMD; we know that we've lost a lot of our moral authority as a result of the way this war has been conducted; that there was little or no planning implemented regarding what to do with Iraq after Baghdad; that Rumsfeld has been woefully inadequate, with respect to the post-fall looting, his insensitivity about Abu Ghraib and inadequate body armor; and the reports of a dysfunctional administration. The fact that Bush and these wing nuts think that a victory can be eked out by reporting enemy body counts is simply pathetic.

We are a tough nation. We know what the stakes were in WWII. We saw progress in terms of battle lines; we recognized the threat to the allies. The bare facts are this: the sanctions were working in Iraq, and we all know that now, thanks to the reports of people like Kay and Duelfer. This war was unnecessary, and news that more of the enemy is getting killed won't improve that perception, especially when our intelligence departments have united in a belief that we've created more terrorists as a result of the invasion and it's become a major recruiting tool for them. So if we're killing more of them, does that really mean there are fewer? Don't insult us.
Link | | | 9:05 PM | Home
 

Go ahead, punk: make my day. Over at Think Progress, Joe Cirincione has highlighted a report that some in the Bush administration were rooting for North Korea to test its nuclear capabilities, seeming to prefer the "clarity" that such an action would provoke. See, they just don't like nuance anywhere, and prefer the simplicity of an overturned apple cart. They want provocation, because diplomacy is just too slow for a bunch of people who are used to problems being resolved in the 30 minute confines of a sit-com. Let's look at this crapola, and remember that the U.S. could have addressed Zarqawi in Iraq prior to the war, but preferred to use his presence there as an argument for war. Let's also remember Bush's famous "Bring 'em on" taunt.
Link | | | 8:06 PM | Home
 

The cost of war. Yup. Big. Mucho grande. And of course, let's not forget the opportunity costs of this expense, that is, all that we might have done instead. All those bleeding-heart concerns used to argue for gutting Social Security? Forget about. Social Security would be solvent beyond your wildest dreams. Education. Roads. Shifts to new energy. Forget about it, your addiction to Iraq ate all that up. At least we're safer from all those WMDs.
Link | | | 11:39 PM | Home

Bush has NEVER been a "stay the course" kind of guy. Yeah, right. Look, these people will say anything to retain power. ANYTHING, whatever the day seems to demand. They don't care about strategic goals because their only strategy is to retain power. You can't trust them with the reins of government, and you can't trust them that they will be judicious in decisions like when to war and when to risk your kids' lives. The generals, perhaps: if you read Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco," it seems like the generals have a better understanding of the costs of war. But Bush? Bush? BUSH!? What, are you kidding?
Link | | | 11:05 PM | Home

Workin' for the clampdown. Well, I have to tell you, among all the things I could possibly have decided to write about this morning, the word that someone in the U.S. State Department had suggested that history might judge us harshly for our arrogance in Iraq didn't rise very high (plenty of others rose higher, and life even higher still). But the other shoe falling has made it worth talking about: he got slammed. Someone decided that even though Condoleezza Rice had earlier spoken of our mistakes in Iraq, this was just too close for comfort. There will apparently be no mea culpas prior to the November election, thus preserving Bush's insane idea that elections are his singular accountability moments. Of course, if he really wanted to be accountable (hah!) he'd prod Senator Pat Roberts to complete that Senate investigation into whether or not the Administration abused intelligence in moving into war against Iraq. Remember that? (Most of you do...) The idea was that that perspective was going to have to wait until after the 2004 Presidential election, and now, two years later, they've held true to that. Geez, at this point they'd be lucky to have decided how many J's in "San Juan Hill." ("Wouldn't be pruudent," as Dana Carvey would have imitated Bush's dad over conclusions without rounds and rounds of committees.)
Link | | | 10:51 PM | Home
 

Lady Deborah Moody. An interesting sidebar to a photo hike I took yesterday which included part of Gravesend, a Brooklyn neighborhood just north of Coney Island. We encountered a school named after Lady Deborah Moody (whoever she was, I thought at the time), and while I thought it noteworthy that an NYC school might be named after someone in the British peerage, I didn't think it all that surprising, given all the Anglophile names which dot the Brooklyn maps. But it turns out she was really special, a 17th century progressive who came to the colonies for religious freedom, gave up looking for it in New England, and finally settled in what we now call Brooklyn. She also had a bit of the "city planner" in her, laying out the way the neighborhood should be designed and so on. More here.
Link | | | 6:39 PM | Home

How will it play in Peoria? The BBC web site is reporting that a new GOP ad, to come out tomorrow, will attempt to rejuvenate perceptions that Republican s are better in the war against terrorism than Democrats are. I haven't seen the ad, but this is a fairly risky proposition. Let's remember that a recent CNN poll showed more people had faith in Congressional Democrats than in Congressional Republicans for handling terrorism: see here; if it's not at the top when you click, look for the CNN poll dated 10/6 to 10/8, showing a shift from a Republican advantage to a Democrat advantage compared to the prior wave.

Now, part of the risk here has to do with the old Yale Communication studies conducted by Sherif and Hovland, and what they called the latitudes of acceptance and rejection. In short, their work dealt with the context in which your messages are heard: if you're already seen as credible, you can get away with saying something which isn't credible; it will actually be seen as more credible because you're already seen as being credible. However, if you are not seen as being credible, it's more difficult to persuade: your credible statements are seen as being less credible than they would be otherwise, and your incredible statements are seen as being even more incredible than they would otherwise be seen.

Given that brief description, the implications for the GOP are obvious: more Americans see the Democrats as superior on terrorism than the GOP. If the GOP comes out with a message that they should be our choice on the issue of terrorism, how much of America will laugh them off over their preposterousness? Right now the GOP doesn't have a lot of perceived credibility, when you consider Iraq, no WMDs, poor job growth, the budget deficit, Terri Schiavo, Mark Foley, Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham, Woodward's "State of Denial," complete ineffectiveness in spite of controlling every branch of government. A Hail Mary pass like Doug Flutie's is a very rare success, but it looks as if the GOP may not have much else it can play on.

And, if you think back to the Presidential election of 2004, the concept that the GOP is "better"against terrorism is easy to refute. OBL's taped message talked about how much Bush was draining our economy, he clearly wanted Bush re-elected (I'm not alone in this, Ron Suskind says the CIA drew the same conclusion), and a recently released intelligence assessment discussed how the war in Iraq was helping the recruiting of jihadists.

For the GOP to run on terrorism as if it's a strength for them is beyond absurd, it's the kind of denial of reality, white is black thing, which Orwell promised us in "1984."
Link | | | 6:25 PM | Home
 

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