Me: Frank Lynch

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For something less spontaneous, I maintain The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page (over 1,800 Johnson quotes).

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Nooooooo! Gators' hoops coach is heading to the NBA. (Is there an html tag for "extremely bummed"?)
Link | | | 8:14 PM | Home

Shorter Powerline: F**k the rest of the world, we're too good for it.
Link | | | 12:20 AM | Home
 

So, after all is said and done, Valerie Plame was covert and the White House showed no caution over her status. For details on her covert status, see this report on a Libby sentencing brief. But at this point it's pretty clear, and while the Right may try and distract with this quibble or that (it was Armitage who blew the identity to Novak, not the White House; anyone with a telescope could have read her license plate as she drove in to Langley; no one was convicted of blowing her cover; and so on, and so on...), several facts remain:

• The White House was in a campaign against the truth about the supposed Niger yellowcake;
   
• In their efforts to keep the truth hidden, people within the White House lacked the prudence to keep her name and role quiet (you would think that when someone is an employee of the CIA, this would cause you to be careful when speaking about her, but no, not this White House;
   
• Bush announced that anyone involved in the leak would be sent packing, but this wasn't done; in fact, Bush did little or nothing to investigate — and on judgment you'd gave to figure it was because Bush was party to White House efforts to discredit Joe Wilson's investigation into the supposed yellowcake deals.

Remember this outrageous claim Bush made?

I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business.

Sure, Mr. President: and that's why every time the question came up in later question and answers you always hid behind an ongoing investigation and were never frank with the American people.

If anyone on the Right wants to continue to believe that there was no harm done to the country when Plame's position was revealed, they need to remember that the CIA saw sufficient harm to ask for an investigation: not the press, not the tinfoil hat brigade, not Michael Moore, not Cindy Sheehan, not moveon.org, not the New York Times or the Washington Post, not the ACLU or Planned Parenthood or the people of San Francisco, but the CIA, those best in a position to know.
Link | | | 10:19 PM | Home
 

Public service. After this weekend, I'm wondering if our opportunities for public service aren't limited by our imaginations... such as in "what a great idea!" We were visiting friends in Delaware this weekend, and in my photography fixation I corralled Doug into touring some cemeteries. He was very obliging, and on Saturday I think we went through maybe seven or eight cemeteries, at least on a drive through basis. None of these were of the scope of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery or Queens Calvary, these were all cemeteries which you could "do" in less than an hour for photography on the rush, no long hikes. Some you could breeze through in the car in a few minutes and dismiss for their photographic opportunities. Which of course is not to say that they don't meet their true purpose, a suitable place for burial.

One of the first cemeteries we went to (we were around Wimington, by the way), was Mount Zion Cemetery. Mount Zion Cemetery deserves more attention than it gets; Doug's daughter Anna went there as part of a school project and did some maintenance, so the fact that that task falls on school projects should give you an idea of how little attention it gets.

Anyway, one of the most striking aspects to me was the high proportion of "veteran" tombstones which are there: those small, fairly blank stones saying little beyond name, dates of birth and death, and how they served in the military. Doug and I wondered whether the high proportion had anything to do with whether or not there were national cemeteries anywhere close: you don't see many of these tombstones in most cemeteries in Brooklyn or Queens, but there's a national cemetery in Cyprus Hills.

At any rate, Wilmington's Mount Zion Cemetery has no guards at its gate and is fairly untended. When Doug drove through the gate it seemed odd that there were a couple cars ahead of us, and the party ahead of us and we exchanged pleasantries to make sure that no one was in any one's way.

Here's the public service thing: they were there because a kid who was working towards an Eagle Scout had a project to map the cemetery and develop a grave locator; the last time anyone had even inventoried all the graves was about 70 years ago; an inventory is a mere listing, and it doesn't say where any grave is. In better maintained cemeteries, directions to specific graves are common; maybe my perception of "common" is biased from living in NYC, but be that as it may, this Scout's effort to inventory and map this cemetery counts for something: it is a small, good thing. It doesn't deserve headlines in the paper ("Area Man Maps Cemetery"), but it deserves an awareness of some kind. The few people who will come to this cemetery in later days (I presume there will be few) will benefit from this young man's efforts, his fastidiousness in spray-painting rows of graves and marking their locations.

This small effort - - one which will not end poverty or bring world peace - - deserves credit nonetheless. It is what it is, and while those of us who can end hunger and bring about world peace shouldn't lower their goals and map small cemeteries, it's a demonstration that there are ways which we can help out, lying dormant like a volcano: we just need to think hard to find ways to give back.

Any suggestions?
Link | | | 11:59 PM | Home
 

America "gets it." Bush doesn't. The latest polls show that fewer Americans support the war in Iraq than ever before, with a solid majority (61%) now recognizing we should never have gone in in the first place. Now more than ever, this is Bush's war, not America's, not mine, and probably not yours either.

Intellectually you can make the argument — however so tenuously — that we need to be in Iraq because that's where the terrorism action is, but that argument is so easily quashed it's silly to stake your reputation on it. I mean, Heathrow didn't shut down last August because of Baghdad. The fact is that the terrorists are not holed up in Iraq, but that our foreign policies, coupled with Tommy Frank's blinking in Tora Bora and letting OBL escape, have catapulted terrorism into a bigger threat after September 11 than ever before.

Careful readers of this blog (both of you, that is, out of about four readers) will remember what I've frequently mentioned, how OBL basically announced that Bush was his puppet before the 2004 election. Obviously it's overly simplistic (and wrong) for Bush to emphasize the terrorist dimension in what is going on in Iraq, when so much of it is an eruption of ages-old sectarian animosity.

Clearly, Sadr doesn't see it as an Al-Qaeda thing, he just plain wants us out. And for Bush to try and tell us that Sadr is going to hunt us down is pure demagoguery. Sadr didn't attack us before we invaded Iraq, that was Al Qaeda, and Bush is still trying to do this smoke and mirrors conflation. He needs to separate who we're dealing with in Iraq from who we were dealing with in Afghanistan (it's hard work, I know) in order to best deal with the problems we're facing in each situation. But no, he doesn't want to acknowledge the fact that he can't think about two different concepts differently.

By the way, we're moving into a three-day weekend here in the US, in observance of Memorial Day. We're leaving town in the morning, and there won't be any more posts until late Monday at the earliest. (If you really want something else to read, you can read about Krazy Kat.)
Link | | | 8:46 PM | Home
 

Stale wine in a plastic bottle. Bush can do no right: not that it's a matter of the world's perceptions, but that he is so locked in a groove, it's like a bad joke about Neil Young guitar solos: not just the same riff, but the same note, endlessly repeating. Of course, when Neil Young succumbed to the repetition it might only last a few bars; but Bush's constant refrain has now been going on for years. If it were music, it might make us compare to Philip Glass, but as people's lives are at stake, I have no choice but to compare it to the work of the devil.

Today, Bush gave a press conference in repetition overdrive:

• "Our new strategy is designed to help Iraq's leaders provide security for their people and get control of their capital, so they can move forward with reconciliation and reconstruction." (This is not new, don't be fooled, same old unfulfilled promises.)
   
• "This summer is going to be a critical time for the new strategy." (Ever hear anyone complain that jury duty couldn't have happened at a worse time? No one ever points out a better time, and there has never been a time on the Iraqi calendar which the Bush Administration has characterized as anything but critical. They want to constantly keep us on the edge. Guess why...)
   
• "We're going to expect heavy fighting in the weeks and months. We can expect more American and Iraqi casualties." (This is what they've told us every time an election approaches, every time there's a holiday, every time there's an election here, every time a Boy Scout carves a new neckerchief... We must always, therefore, expect continued violence: there is no reason to expect that any action we take will lead to increased violence or lessened violence. It will go on. Time for the Bushies to read Ecclesiastes, don't you think?)

In short, Bush is trying to tell us these are special times, but there's nothing in his language which is different from prior times. He is bankrupt, plain and simple, and has exhausted his credibility. There may well be a wolf out there, but this boy has cried wolf so many times the world can be forgiven for not believing his constant complaint. And trying to turn the amplifier up to eleven only makes it louder, not more credible.

God save us: we have an unbelievable President who is constantly crying wolf.
Link | | | 11:12 PM | Home
 

At this point it should be crystal clear that Bush doesn't support the troops. With the Democrats showing greater willingness to compromise in order to fund the troops, their flinching in Bush's game of chicken shows that they aren't interested in making the troops pawns. Bush, however, has consistently demonstrated that he only supports his own stubborn vision and not the troops themselves.

Cast your memories back to how he threatened to veto a bill supporting the troops merely because he didn't like the way the Iraqi reconstruction was being funded; think about how long he kept the troops under-armored, and left Rumsfeld in place in spite of that callous remark about the under-armoring when asked about it by the troops; think about how long Wolfowitz kept his position in the Pentagon in spite of not knowing how many troops had died, when asked in Senate testimony; think about how Bush argued that we needed to stay in Iraq in order to honor our prior fallen — essentially announcing that some kind of macabre pyramid scheme was in place.

I'm willing to accept that Bush no longer drinks, and is a reforming alcoholic in that sense, but because he repeatedly commits the same mistakes, I think there's room to question the depth to which he's reformed: to me it doesn't seem as if he is able to recognize the futility of past efforts, and continues to dig himself (and us) in an ever-deepening hole. Unfortunately he has the dice, the troops, and the country, and is doing everything he can to hold us hostage to an exercise in self-immolation.

Why are we bothering with a no confidence vote in Gonzales? Why not a no confidence vote in Bush's Iraq policy?
Link | | | 9:52 PM | Home
 

The sad thing about Jimmy Carter is that he's becoming less relevant, now that he's backed off his negative comments about Bush. They were probably more accurate when he "didn't mean them." The opinion of a Nobel Peace Prize winner counts for a lot more than those who go into "barf alert mode" every time Carter's name gets mentioned.
Link | | | 9:41 PM | Home
 

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