As you may have seen, Noam Chomsky was recently invited to speak to a class of cadets at West Point. For all our flaws, there aren’t many other countries that would allow such an unyielding critic of their foreign policy to speak to their officers-to-be. (In fact, in most places the people here listening seriously to Chomsky would have been hunting down and killing him.)
Moreover, it was broadcast nationwide on C-Span. It’s all such an embodiment of our best traditions it makes me a little verklempt.
The real fun comes during the Q&A, and I hope these young officers were taking serious notes. If Noam could impress someone as gung-ho as Pat Tillman, then he can reach pretty much anyone in uniform. And that’s a good thing.
Notice, too, how much respect the cadets show Noam. Of course, part of this is their training, prefacing each question and comment with “sir.” But I get the impression that the kids kinda dug the old man, who easily and graciously handled every query thrown at him….
When I was in the Army, we didn’t get speakers like Noam. We had to sit through assholes like Woody Hayes, the now-late Ohio State football coach. Hayes blustered on about the glories of war, talking about how we really stuck it to the Japs in the Big One. In fact, ol’ Woody dropped the J-word several times, causing a couple of Japanese-American officers to walk out.
The rest of Dennis’ thoughts, plus links to the C-Span video, are here.
A chance to be cynical about a government other than America’s!
I agree that the Zarqawi letter is unlikely to be real. The Associated Press has the entire text here, and after reading it, I’d put the chances of it being genuine as high as 5%.
But given this section, it doesn’t sound like anything the U.S. would produce:
The question remains, how to draw the Americans into fighting a war against Iran? It is not known whether American is serious in its animosity towards Iran, because of the big support Iran is offering to America in its war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Hence, it is necessary first to exaggerate the Iranian danger and to convince America and the west in general, of the real danger coming from Iran, and this would be done by the following:
1. By disseminating threatening messages against American interests and the American people and attribute them to a Shi’a Iranian side.
2. By executing operations of kidnapping hostages and implicating the Shi’a Iranian side.
3. By advertising that Iran has chemical and nuclear weapons and is threatening the west with these weapons.
4. By executing exploding operations in the west and accusing Iran by planting Iranian Shi’a fingerprints and evidence.
5. By declaring the existence of a relationship between Iran and terrorist groups (as termed by the Americans).
6. By disseminating bogus messages about confessions showing that Iran is in possession of weapons of mass destruction or that there are attempts by the Iranian intelligence to undertake terrorist operations in America and the west and against western interests.
Instead, it seems transparently to be the work of the Iraqi government, perhaps with an assist from their Iranian friends.
I think there’s a larger lesson here, too. The uranium-from-Niger forgeries were so blatantly stupid you’d assume they couldn’t be the work of the U.S. or Italian intelligence services. But generally speaking, subtlety and competence are not the strong suit of people who do this kind of thing. If they were subtle and competent they’d be in another line of work.
… but this was the first thing that occurred to me as well:
Now, “some” might say since the Bush administration has been proved to be planting propaganda in both the Iraqi and US press, since we’ve “found” many spurious documents in Iraq before, and since they are lying scumbags about virtually everything including whether the sun came up this morning — that we should be skeptical of such things. I am not one of those people. Clearly, the war is won and we can bring the troops home.
I think it’s really lucky, though, that al-Zarqawi was keeping such meticulous notes and blueprints. Why do you suppose he was doing that? Was he required to send regular reports back to headquarters? A potential book deal perhaps? Maybe he was a blogger.
I don’t want to distract from Greg’s latest post, directly below this one, with which I agree wholeheartedly.
Just a note for those who have been bugging me to restart the daily polls back up over at puduland… OK, your wish is my command. Can’t promise “daily,” but I’ll try to do a better job than “new once every month or so” the way it was during crunch time on the new book.
The first new poll comes in the wake of that Godless author’s (whom I won’t name here, because she depends on publicity the way hookworms feed on hemoglobin) latest exercise in projecting her own least-favorite personal traits onto liberals.
Prepare yourselves to be shocked. Are you ready for this? Apparently Parents Television Council, the American Family Association, and their thousands of deputies in the self-appointed moral police are completely full of crap. It’s bad enough that they’ve taken it upon themselves to decide what you and I should and shouldn’t be allowed to watch (and hiding their crusades behind “the children”), but they aren’t even watching the damn shows they’re complaining about :
Virtually none of those who complained to the Federal Communications Commission about the teen drama Without A Trace actually saw the episode in question, CBS affiliates said as they asked the agency to rescind its proposed record indecency fine of $3.3 million.
All of the 4,211 e-mailed complaints came from Web sites operated by the Parents Television Council and the American Family Association, the stations said in a filing on Monday.
In only two of the emails did those complaining say they had watched the program, and those two apparently refer to a “brief, out-of-context segment” of the episode that was posted on the Parents Television Council’s Web site, the affiliates’ filing said.
“There were no true complainants from actual viewers,” the stations said. To be valid, complaints must come from an actual viewer in the service area of the station at issue, the filing said.
“The e-mails were submitted … because advocacy groups hoping to influence television content generally exhorted them to contact the commission,” the CBS stations said.
These lying crybabies, who are apparently too stupid to use their V-chips, are but a very tiny minority compared to the millions who watched the broadcast :
About 8.2 million people saw the Dec. 31, 2004 broadcast, which was a repeat of an earlier airing of the same episode that drew no indecency complaints. E-mails about the episode began arriving at the FCC on Jan. 12, the same day the PTC sent an alert to its members, the CBS stations said.
The FCC in proposing the fines of $32,500 upon each of 103 CBS stations said they had “broadcast material graphically depicting teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy.”
Even if we took the 4211 complaints at face value, that’s still only 0.05% of the viewing audience for a show being responsible for more than $3.3 million dollars in fines. Predictably, PTC president Brent Bozell is wrapping his wrapping his little witchhunt in a patriotic package :
“Every complaint filed comes from a United States citizen who, last I heard, had the constitutional privilege to petition his government,” Bozell said. “Rather than these stupid legal maneuvers, CBS and Viacom should spend time pondering why it’s wrong to broadcast scenes of teen orgies in front of millions of children.”
Ahhh…it’s nice to see a patriot like Bozell defend our democracy by exercising his “constitutional privilege to petition his government”. Inspired by his bravery, perhaps we can use our first amendment right to email Brent and tell him that if he doesn’t like something on television he should change the fucking channel.
I know an embarrassing amount about the Iraq/WMD story. One side effect of being familiar with all this crap is I’m acutely aware of the precise way in which every claim made by war proponents was inaccurate. I mean that literally: every claim. Moreover, I don’t mean in hindsight, I mean based on what was known at the time.
Sometimes their claims were 20% false, sometimes 80% false, and sometimes 100% false. But they never once got things 100% right. And curiously enough, every “error” always fell in the same direction, that of making their case appear stronger.
One of these people was then-New Republic editor Peter Beinart, whom I’ve previously said unkind things about, here. So out of idle curiosity, I fact-checked one of Beinart’s statements in a recent interview (reg. req.) about his new book The Good Fight.
I won’t post here everything I wrote, because it’s long and frankly kind of boring if you’re not a huge freak. But if you are a huge freak, you can follow the link and get 100% of your daily recommended allowance of freakitude.
I’m still processing my thoughts on YearlyKos, which are mostly very highly way positive, with much florid praise for Kos himself and the volunteers who made it happen, but with a few concerns/suggestions re what we take away from it that I’d like to share with the rest of the class when and if I figure out how to state them coherently.
One definite high point for me — the first of many — was my very first moment at the conference. I was wandering the halls of the Riviera, a monument to greed made worse by its own simmering decrepitude, reminding me with every sight, sound, and smell of some of humankind’s least impressive qualities. And I was wondering if I was even in the right place.
This would be the Joe Wilson of blew-the-whistle-on-yellowcake-lies, CIA-wife-got-screwed, now-Scooter’s-in-trouble, Rove-might-be-flipped-to-nail-Cheney Joe Wilson. Yep.
But Joe Wilson is also the guy who once personally stared Saddam Hussein down in a way that Bush and Rove and the rest of the Chimpy Legion could never have mustered.
It’s September, 1990. About sixty of our fellow Americans in Iraq have sought safety by heading for the American embassy. So Saddam, thinking they’d be nifty to keep around as hostages, sends a note along saying he’ll execute anybody harboring foreigners. And what does United States Ambassador Joseph Wilson do?
Joe Wilson has one of the Marines on staff tie a big ol’ noose, puts it around his own neck, and calls a press conference, with one simple message:
And sure enough, Saddam backs down. And the Americans get out OK.
This was a guy whose hand I would want to shake, sixteen years later, even if the name “Valerie Plame” is never made public.
Can anyone really tell me that any one of the allegedly strong and brave Chimpsters, or any of their supporters — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hannity, Limbaugh, you name it — would have had even half the yarbles that Wilson has?
It occurs to me: while a lot of people have heard of this incident, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any stills or footage of Wilson with the actual noose around his neck in Baghdad. I’d like to post it. I think that’s an image people should think of when they think of this guy. But I can’t find it with Google and the other search engines I’ve tried.
Is it out there? Anyone out in the vast Overmind who knows a link, has a copy, or is able to introduce me to a skeevy video guy in a back alley somewhere? If so, let me know via my email over at BobHarris.com. Thanks!
Whoever said Cindy Sheehan et al were infallible? Not a single fucking person. MaxSpeak will donate $20 bucks to the charity of your choice (I’m no Bill Gates, so back off) for anyone who can produce a quote from someone not posting to Democratic Underground to the effect that Ms. Sheehan or the 9-11 widows are infallible or above criticism for their substantive remarks.
The real problem with said critics is that it is not so easy to immediately dismiss them with ad hominem, the preferred mode of discourse for jingoists, economic royalists, and other political prostitutes of the Right. Ann of a Thousand Remainders is really complaining that she can’t employ her usual tools as easily, though for her it wasn’t much more difficult, as we have seen.
The mainstream media pundit machine cannot disintegrate into a smoking pile of rubble soon enough for me.
For years Peter “Pe-Nart” Beinart has attempted to speak in complete gibberish. And he’s gotten close—70% gibberish, 86% gibberish, 93% gibberish. But it’s only in a recent Q & A with Kevin Drum about Beinart’s book The Good Fight that he has reached his goal of 100% (reg. req.):
Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.
This is outstanding work. The only way his point could be improved would be to put it like this:
Seriously: in what sense can jihadism be said to “sit at the center” of global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion? In what possible way can these all be claimed to be greater threats to the U.S. than to other countries?
You may wonder, then, why Beinart’s saying something so blatantly absurd. The answer is that the “liberalism” he espouses is incoherent. The Cheney platform—Let’s Rule The World By Hate And Fear—at least has an undeniable internal logic. So too does a radical evaluation of U.S. foreign policy. They both tell coherent stories. But the mushy tale “I, Peter Beinart, will run the planet except I’ll be nice” simply doesn’t make sense. Thus he doesn’t have any alternative to saying preposterous things.
This preposterousness reaches its noisy climax when he argues the Bush administration has become “sincere in its commitment to democracy.” Specifically he has in mind Bush himself (!), Wolfowitz (!!), Elliot Abrams (!!!!!!) and arguably Cheney (!!!!!!!$#@#$????).
SURE. They’ve spent their entire careers thwarting democracy in the United States. This indicates their commitment to democracy. Elliot Abrams lied to Congress about Iran Contra. Why? I guess because of his commitment to democracy. Paul Wolfowitz berated the Turkish army, with its long history of coups, for allowing Turkey’s parliament to vote against assisting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. That’s thanks to his commitment to democracy. The entire administration lied us into war, then ferociously covered it up. It’s the ultimate commitment to democracy.
Power really does corrupt. And we’ve been so powerful for so long there’s very little left in our political classes but intellectual and moral corruption. That is to say: we’re really in trouble.
BONUS: Beinart also informs us “understanding intellectual history is important not because the historical analogies are exact, but because most people don’t think of great ideas de nouveau.”
That’s right, de nouveau. As long as we have generals who talk like this, I can’t see anything but overwhelming political victory ahead.
UPDATE:Could I have been wrong about the precise nature of Beinart’s gibberish?
The “jihadism at the center of everything” part I still think is absolutely meaningless. But I believe Jethro, commenting here, is correct that I misunderstood Beinart—that rather than meaning global warming et al are greater threats to the U.S. than they are to other countries, “Beinart was trying to say terrorism and global warming threaten the US more than any particular country threatens the US.”
Of course, this is still nonsensical. Among Beinart’s chorus line of catastrophe—terrorism, global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion—only global warming might compare to today’s greatest threat to America, which is obviously nuclear weapons. The one thing that currently could actually obliterate us is ICBMs—i.e., Russia’s and perhaps someday China’s nuclear arsenal.
So I may have incorrect about the exact way Beinart wasn’t making any sense. But I remain correct about the overall non-sense making.
This preposterousness reaches its noisy climax when he argues the Bush administration has become “sincere in its commitment to democracy.” Specifically he has in mind Bush himself (!), Wolfowitz (!!), Elliot Abrams (!!!!!!) and arguably Cheney (!!!!!!!$#@#$????).
