Again, there was no charge (unless you count parking tickets!) Bob Harris was worth it!
It seems from the context the writer was actually trying to say that hearing my talk was worth (a) the trip, (b) the bother, (c) the cost of a parking ticket he or she must have gotten, or (d) some object of value, possibly forgotten in the giddy excitement of a trip, a bother, and a parking ticket.
I almost wish it was actually meant as an insult. (Maybe it is!) Free — and worth it! That’s outstanding.
And I feel much obliged to the writer, either way.
Above the fold, half of the page is devoted to a color photo of the Gropenator as he strides through Times Square like a commander in a posed photo op.
Below the fold, a teeny picture of his opponent, face partly obscured, his head down on his hand with a look of amused resignation on his face.
The story, believe it or not: an allegedly objective look at — wait for it, this is fabulous — how the media is getting used by Schwarzenegger, and how his opponent just can’t get a fair break.
Accompanied by a photo of Arnold that is more than eleven times larger by area. And Angelides isn’t mentioned by name — in fact, there’s no mention that Arnold even has any political opposition whatsoever — until the fourth paragraph.
The story continues on page A17. With only one picture — of Arnold, of course — and the new headline:
Arnold Staying Front and Center
Well bloody hell yes he is.
I am starting to think that irony got killed by a drunken mob in a bar fight sometime around 2002. Would explain a lot.
UPDATE: And Arnold is crossing diagonally, a form of jaywalking which is a $50 fine for us ordinary civilians. Of course, Der Ubermensch is above such mundane considerations.
Looking at the Connecticut Senate race, it seems to me that the one thing that Lieberman undoubtedly has over Lamont is his seniority in the Senate. All things being equal, a Lamont win should have a slightly negative impact for the people of Connecticut, since replacing a Senator with as much clout as Lieberman would mean state interests would be in the hands of a junior Senator. That’s the theory anyways, but the most damaging exchange from yesterdays debate, as David Sirota notes, highlighted just how little Lieberman has done to represent the people of Connecticut.
I want to say I believe the most damning line of the whole debate came not when Lieberman lied, but when Ned got him on the defensive with the facts and Lieberman refused to give a straight answer about why Connecticut is 49 out of 50 in its rate of federal investment. He said that’s because Connecticut is a wealthy state - and then refused to answer why when he was first elected Connecticut used to get 88 cents back for every dollar it sent to Washington, and now it gets just 66 cents back. Apparently, Lieberman hasn’t been to places like Bridgeport or New Haven in a while. If he had been, he would understand just how out-of-touch it is for him to dismiss his failure to deliver as totally acceptable because he thinks everyone in Connecticut is rolling in cash.
Think about that for a minute. The beltway chattering classes are in love with Joe Lieberman. The Democratic Party insiders are close enough that even after the Lieberman campaign’s string of anti-Democrat insults, they still refuse to completely throw Joe under the bus. The Republican party has more respect for Lieberman than their own Senate candidate. At a glance, it seems that Joe Lieberman is one of the most powerful Democrats in the country, yet despite all the praise he gets in Washington, the people of Connecticut are getting less than they were before Joe came to town.
One of the big myths about the CT Senate race (which has been milked for all it’s worth by the Lieberman campaign) is that lefty bloggers hate, hate, hate Holy Joe. Even now, after all of the things Lieberman has said and done to undermine his party, I still wouldn’t characterize my feelings towards him as anger. I can’t speak for all of my fellow bloggers, but I have little doubt that Joe Lieberman is a decent person. He’s like an old friend or a roommate that keeps making the same stupid mistakes over and over and over again. Being a dummy doesn’t make you a bad guy and I’m willing to concede that Joe’s probably sincere in his mushy approach to politics, but watching him can be so…
damn…
frustrating.
Contrary to what Lieberman supporters would have you think, questioning Joe’s ability isn’t an ad hominem attack. Joe Lieberman has in some respects been a reliable Democrat, but politics is about a lot more than just your voting record. When you’re picking somebody to represent your interests and values in Washington, political judgement is as important a factor as any to watch and it’s that measure by which Lieberman has repeatedly failed.
Much has been written about Lieberman’s fetishization of “bipartisanship”, but the problem isn’t his willingness to work both both sides of the aisle, but the way that he’s chosen to do it. Rather than be a true centrist with a mixed record, Joe Lieberman tends to vote Democratic, but lend his voice of support to every bullshit right-wing meme that comes down the pike. For Dems, it makes Joe look like a back-stabbing fool and for Republicans it makes him look like somebody who’s not willing to back up his words in the halls of Congress. Either way, Joe Lieberman’s bizarre notion of what constitutes “bipartisan” just doesn’t work. At least, it hasn’t worked for the people of Connecticut.
Sometime last winter, I was commissioned by Harper’s magazine to do a page for a theme section they were planning, on how the Bush administration’s time in office would be taught to future generations of schoolchildren. My piece was accepted but for whatever reason the section was killed, leaving me with an orphaned cartoon page. It was too long to recycle into the weekly strip, and I guess too specifically focused for the other shortlist clients that might run a piece of mine on occasion, so for awhile it was looking like something that might never find a print home (and I’m still old school enough to care about things like that). But then someone from Tin House magazine sent me an email, and they were wondering if maybe I had anything that hadn’t been published yet, that they might use in their upcoming comics and graphics issue. Happily for both of us, I did and they did and you can read more about the issue here.
Spent a number of hours in the car this weekend, due to a family gathering (happy 90th, Martin!), and along the way heard Bill O’Reilly complaining to his radio audience, at length, that Oprah won’t have him on her show. Apparently this is one of Bill’s new crusades, because he just spent at least five or ten minutes on his tv program exposing Oprah’s liberal bias! O’Reilly is especially miffed that Frank Rich was recently given a full hour on the program.
O’Relly: In the interests of full disclosure, Oprah has declined to interview me, even though I’ve had four number one best selling books including the current one, Culture Warrior. But it was the O’Reilly Factor for Kids that really confused me, here we have the bestselling non fiction children’s book of 2005, Oprah as you know is very interested in protecting the kids, so why then was there no interest in talking about the Factor for Kids? You can call it sour grapes if you want, I know I’m gonna get those kind of letters, but facts are facts.
Well, this is just a crazy guess, maybe Oprah didn’t think that a married man who likes to talk dirty on the phone to his female employees was actually a terrific role model for kids. (Incidentally, a little key to decoding O’Reilly — whenever you see him go off on a rant about “far left websites who just want to destroy people,” what he’s talking about is the fact that the Smoking Gun published Andrea Mackris’ court filing. The only reason O’Reilly still has a career as a public moralist is that Mackris was paid what was presumably a very large sum of money to quietly go away.) (Also: I swear, I don’t understand why any liberal who goes on that show and wants to throw O’Reilly off his game doesn’t bring up loofahs and falafels and sexual harassment. Mister Splotchy Face’s head would explode before the end of the segment.) (But I digress.)
Later in the segment, he brings Michelle Malkin in to back him up.
Malkin: It’s not just Oprah and the View that are dominated by liberals, but you have liberal women’s magazines too. You know, the question for us is, who represents us, who is giving voice to us, you know, we like fashion and beauty tips, we like to talk about celebrities too, and we don’t want to have Frank Rich rammed down our throat at three in the afternoon.
Anything I could add to that would be superfluous.
The International League of Frothing Lunatics (plus a brief announcement)
Short pre-post mini-post: Dennis Perrin’s regular job is trending downward, and as he lines up new stuff he needs to raise a few bucks to justify the time he spends on his site. Unlike some people (e.g., me), Dennis actually is a productive member of society with a family to support, so I hope his regular readers can head over and drop some money in the tip jar. As a bonus, at the same link there are clips from South Park, the Ben Stiller Show, SNL, and Fridays.
Now, back to the regular post.
• • •
Ralph Peters, a columnist for the New York Post, is one of America’s premier frothing lunatics. He famously took a trip to Iraq earlier this year, after which he explained the situation there “is considerably more promising than the American public has been led to believe.” Also, morale in the Iraqi army has “soared” and there’s been a “surge in the popularity of U.S. troops.” This wonderful news has been kept from us by the secular rootless cosmopolitan media.
Recently Peters wrote an article for something called the “Armed Forces Journal.” (While it calls itself “the leading joint service monthly magazine for officers and leaders in the United States military community,” it’s actually owned by Gannett, not the government.) The article explained what REALLY needs to be done in/to the Middle East: a massive redrawing of every country’s borders based on ethnicity and religion. Peters’ suggested map of the future appears below. Sure, this would require staggering ethnic cleansing, but as Peters says, “ethnic cleansing works.”
Now, when I first read this article I made a prediction to myself: this will be circulating among the mideast’s frothing lunatics for DECADES. This is standard. The frothing lunatics in any society seize upon the statements of the frothing lunatics on the other “side,” and scream incesssantly that these statements represent actual plans with actual power behind them.
GEORGE BUSH: If we don’t stop them, Al Qaeda will create a caliphate across the mideast! After all, that’s what Ayman Zawahiri said they’ll do!
OSAMA BIN LADEN: If we don’t stop them, the crusaders will invade our countries, kill our leaders, and convert us to Christianity! After all, that’s what Ann Coulter said they’ll do!
One amusing results of this is the statements by one side’s frothing lunatics are sometimes far better known in other countries than their own. (E.g, that specific burst of Coulter’s insanity may well be spoken of more often in Saudi Arabia than it is here.)
Certainly this turns out to be the case with Peters. His wee screed was likely read by fewer than ten normal Americans. Meanwhile, among his counterpart frothing lunatics in the mideast…
NEWSWEEK’s Michael Hastings first heard the article being discussed at a dinner party in Amman, Jordan, while he was on his way into Iraq last summer. “I saw it next in a Sunni mosque in Baghdad,” Mike wrote me over the weekend. “The imam had actually printed the map and put it up on the bulletin board with an article in Arabic attached explaining it was the American-Zionist plan to shaft the Sunnis.” A couple of weeks ago, Mike was on the trail of the Kurdish guerrillas of the PKK (branded terrorists by Ankara and Washington), who are fighting to break off a big chunk of southeast Turkey. He found them holed up in the quasi-independent Kurdish portion of Iraq. “They were talking about the same map,” says Hastings.
YES, I WAS OH SO RIGHT.
I love understanding the world, even when this understanding indicates that we’re all going to die.
One problem is that the people dismissing – or in some cases, rabidly attacking – the results of this study, including governmental officials who, arguably, have an interest in doing so, have offered no other alternative or not even a counter estimate. This is called denial. When you have no hard facts to discredit a scientific study, or worse, if you are forced to resort to absurd arguments, such as “the Iraqis are lying,” or “they interviewed insurgents,” or “the timing to publish this study was to affect American elections,” or “I don’t like the results and they don’t fit into my world view, therefore they have to be false,” it is better for you to just shut up. From the short time I have been here, I am realising that some Americans have a hard time accepting facts that fly against their political persuasions.
Now I am aware that the study is being used here by both sides of the argument in the context of domestic American politics, and that pains me. As if it is different for Iraqis whether 50,000 Iraqis were killed as a result of the war or 600,000. The bottom line is that there is a steady increase in civilian deaths, that the health system is rapidly deteriorating, and that things are clearly not going in the right direction. The people who conducted the survey should be commended for attempting to find out, with the limited methods they had available. On the other hand, the people who are attacking them come across as indifferent to the suffering of Iraqis, especially when they have made no obvious effort to provide a more accurate body count. In fact, it looks like they are reluctant to do this.
A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.
Thousands of Iraqis are fleeing the country every day in a “steady, silent exodus”…
Up to 1.6 million Iraqis now live outside their country — mostly in Jordan and Syria, and in increasing numbers in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, the Gulf states and Europe.
How to keep your all-encompassing fantasy world intact
When the new Lancet study came out estimating excess Iraqi deaths at 655,000 since the war began, America’s right wing knew one thing right away: it was wrong. That was certain.
Unfortunately, they then had to go to the trouble of deciding why it was wrong. And keeping an all-encompassing fantasy world functioning is hard work. Reality is a powerful and remorseless foe. So you can understand why Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review didn’t quite feel up to it. She outsourced the job to someone working on Capitol Hill who emailed her this:
The article below will be a story today, even though it shouldn’t…Even Human Rights Watch said the earlier report by these same researchers was “certainly prone to inflation due to overcounting.”
Now, the Human Rights Watch part is true. Here’s the passage from an October 29, 2004 Washington Post story:
“The methods that they used are certainly prone to inflation due to overcounting,” said Marc E. Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, which investigated the number of civilian deaths that occurred during the invasion. “These numbers seem to be inflated.”
Mr. Garlasco says now that he had not read the paper at the time and calls his quote in the Post “really unfortunate.” He says he told the reporter, “I haven’t read it. I haven’t seen it. I don’t know anything about it, so I shouldn’t comment on it.” But, Mr. Garlasco continues, “like any good journalist, he got me to.”
Mr. Garlasco says he misunderstood the reporter’s description of the paper’s results.
Few reporters, apparently, understood what the study actually said. Fewer still called Garlasco after he himself had time to read it. “I hate the interview I did for The Washington Post,” he says. “I was on the train, I hadn’t read the report yet [when the Post’s reporter called for comment]. In general, I’m not as negative as that [Post] report made me seem. This is raising issues that are not heard of much in the U.S.”
This is not incredibly difficult information to come by. If you search Google for “Garlasco Lancet Iraq” you’ll find Garlasco’s repudiation of his original statement in four out of the top five results. (The other is the original Washington Post story.)
So, you might ask: how on earth could this Capitol Hill staffer be unaware of this? I mean, wouldn’t you expect someone at the center of power would know the MOST BASIC INFORMATION about a gigantic war he helped start?
Well, you’ve obviously never constructed an all-encompassing fantasy world. It doesn’t matter if there are four pieces of evidence demonstrating the difference between your fantasy and reality. Or four hundred. Or four million. All you need is ONE piece of evidence saying that the world’s as you desire it to be. Once you’ve got that, everything else can be ignored forever.
Still, an important aspect of fantasy worlds is that it’s easier to maintain them when there are others inside with you. That way you can all swap stories about how the sky is green and rain falls up. “Did you hear?” you can say to your friend Kathryn Jean Lopez. “Even Human Rights Watch says the sky is green. And Amnesty International just admitted that rain falls up!” Then Kathryn will wander off and deliver this important information to the other fantasy world residents. Best of all, the others may eventually repeat this back to you, without you realizing you originated it. And so you will sleep well at night, certain in the knowledge the sky is green and rain falls up.
Then you will all live happily ever after, right up to the point you finally destroy America.
Sergeant Krause, who served with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, lives in a quiet middle-class subdivision not far from Fort Campbell, which is on the Tennessee-Kentucky border. Sprawled in his living room in jeans and a polo shirt, he seems happy. He’s safely home after serving three nerve-racking combat tours — one in Afghanistan and two yearlong tours in Iraq. He’s engaged to be married and will receive a degree soon from nearby Austin Peay State University. His commitment to the military, which he made while still in high school in Huntsville, Ala., will end in a few months.
But there is a definite edge in his voice, an undercurrent of bitterness, when he talks about the tiny percentage of the American population that is shouldering the burden of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We’re nowhere close to sharing the sacrifice,” he said. “And it should be shared, because it’s only in that sharing that society will truly care about what’s going on over there.
“Right now it’s such a small minority of families who have a stake in all of this. I hear people say things like, ‘We lost a lot of good people over there.’ I sort of snap around and say, ‘We? You didn’t lose anybody.’ You know what I mean?”
WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 — Two months after a tumultuous Senate primary that was hailed as a watershed moment in American politics, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut appears to be comfortably ahead of his challenger Ned Lamont in their general election rematch.
Democrats here are convinced that Mr. Lieberman stands a good chance of returning to the Senate as an independent, and many have reassured him that he will not be stripped of his seniority if he wins, according to people in several Senate offices, who were granted anonymity to speak of the sensitive situation amid an intense political climate.
Here’s one scenario: the Democrats win control of the Senate by a slim margin. Lieberman wins re-election, thanks in part to timid Democrats who are afraid to campaign against him. He then switches parties as a final “fuck you” to the party whose values he so clearly despises, handing control of the Senate right back over to the Republicans, and leaving the Democrats who promised him he could retain his seniority standing there like the chumps they are.
The Democrats have a nominee in this state. They should support him.
