Okay, so by the grace of some deity, only the pilot died this time. But can we please stop allowing jet fighter stunt shows over major metropolitan areas now? If this accident had occurred over San Francisco — well, enough said.
The arrogant disregard for civilian safety inherent in these shows has bothered me for a very long time.
(…adding: in San Francisco every year the Blue Angels spend two days during Fleet Week buzzing the entire city in tight formation — low altitude, wingtip-to-wingtip through the financial district and over residential neighborhoods. There’s apparently a similar show once a year in Seattle. A lot of people enjoy the spectacle, but it’s always struck me as a really terrible and unnecessary accident waiting to happen. And as the tragedy linked above makes clear, accidents do happen. Click through and you’ll read about people’s homes damaged by falling debris — it was a small miracle that no civilians were killed. If and when an accident like this ever occurs over a densely populated area, we won’t be so lucky…)
In which we play, “let me direct your attention to the first paragraph…”
1. Let me direct your attention to the first paragraph of Maureen Dowd’s column, which is all about John Edwards’ hair.
Whether or not the country is ready to elect a woman president or a black president, it’s definitely not ready for a metrosexual in chief.
Keep in mind that this sort of thing won MoDo a Pulitzer Prize a few years back, and weep.
2. Let me direct your attention to the first paragraph of a front page article that pretty much encapsulates everything I hate about the New York Times.
Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers live in the rough equivalent of private clubs — co-op apartment houses with rules that govern everything from admission to elevator-landing décor. In certain circles, the co-op-application-process horror story is as much a dinner-party cliché as the renovation-nightmare saga, the nursery-school-rejection narrative and indignation over excess packaging of food from Fresh Direct.
Do not miss Glenn Greenwald’s post about the latest eruption of psychosis from America’s right. It turns out, according to an article by British hack Melanie Phillips in the Spectator, that IRAQ HAD WMD ALL ALONG! And this is being covered up by FORCES AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS!!1!
Read Greenwald’s post for the horrifying details, including how it’s been embraced by the biggest conservative blogs here. I’ll just mention my favorite part, which comes from something Philips posted on her website:
…at Russian insistence, Saddam agreed to sell or transfer his CW/BW stockpiles to other Arab states in the weeks and months before the war.
Yes…you can see how this would happen. When faced with attack by a far more powerful foe, countries always attempt to give away their weapons. This is a pattern that’s repeated itself throughout history.
And it’s not just the WMD! My sources have informed me that just before the war:
• At Brazil’s insistence, Saddam agreed to give away Iraq’s artillery
• At Malaysia’s insistence, Saddam agreed to give away Iraq’s rifles
• At Burkina Faso’s insistence, Saddam agreed to give away Iraq’s forks
But as always, this bombshell is being covered up by FORCES AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS!!1!
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who helped engineer the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, said Sunday the problems in Iraq are more complex than that conflict, and military victory is no longer possible. […]
On April 9, the bound and beaten body of 29-year-old labor organizer Santiago Rafael Cruz was discovered at the Mexico City headquarters his employer, the Foreign Labor Organizing Committee. (FLOC)
Facing South has an an exclusive report on the murder, which many fear was retribution for attempting to organize agricultural guest workers across borders. Facing South has learned that Rafael Cruz’s body bore signs of torture and that he had been harassed and threatened prior to his murder. Yet police are investigating the death as a common crime, or an internal union power struggle.
I’m so sick of thecharges and counter-charges of "exploitation" of the Va-Tech massacre for political purposes.
If people of good will think that they have an apt political point to make, let them make it without assailing them for somehow taking advantage of the tragedy. That goes for both the gun control and the anti-gun control camps.
Current events should shape policy discussions.
It’s not a question of exploitation. It’s a matter of proffering solutions and offering critiques while our increasingly fragmented national attention is focused on an issue.
If Instapundit thinks that the concealed carry ban caused the tragedy, let him say so. I think it’s a dumb argument, but I don’t see why there should be any kind of inverse statute of limitations for offering it. Yesterday I made fun of some wingnuts for rifling through their personal anxiety closets in public, trying to come to terms with the killings–but I was mocking them for saying stupid and venal things, not for "exploiting" anyone’s death.
Trying to enforce an arbitrary line between "human" and "political" responses to tragedies is a political strategy in its own right.
Remember the intense pressure to avoid "politicizing" 9/11? I’m talking about the taboo against criticizing the president that went virtually unchallenged in the mainstream media for years after the attacks. The real effect of the taboo was not to keep our reactions to the tragedy pure. When we shut down serious discussion and debate, we ceded interpretation of our history to the Bush administration. We let them own it. Those who wanted to keep the reaction to 9/11 "above" politics ensured the ultimate politicization of the event. If we had challenged the president from the beginning, he might not have been able to use 9/11 to goad us into war.
The administration loves to shield itself from criticism by accusing its opponents of "politicizing" some gaffe or scandal, or "exploiting" some monumental failure for political gain. It seems like a lot of Americans, liberal and conservative, are still taking their cues from Bush in this regard.
When a gunman shoots 33 people, it’s only natural for the human mind to turn to larger questions, such as, "Are guns in school a good idea?" or, "Can we solve this problem with more guns?"
The gun lobby knows how this game is played. The Second Ammendment foundation accused gun control advocates of dancing in the blood of the victims. That was a bad faith attempt to shut down legitimate discussion by shaming their critics. Of course, they do this every time there’s a gun-related tragedy. Every time we defer to them, we miss an opportunity for a national conversation about guns, and so, the status quo is perpetuated indefinitely by bullying rather than real consensus.
I agree with Jeralyn that we shouldn’t make policy based on any individual crisis. Whatever policy we do adopt has to be based on a sober assessment of the big picture, the costs and benefits that will accrue to a whole society over many years. On the other hand, human nature is such that it sometimes takes a crisis to focus attention.
Why not have an honest and respectful debate about gun control, or misogyny, or any other issues that might arise in our attempts to understand this tragedy? Obviously, it’s still very early in the investigation, and nobody has all the facts. On the other hand, it’s never too early to start asking questions.
The taboo against "political" arguments in the wake of tragedies infantilizes the public and cheapens our discourse. If we rule out substantive discussion, we’re left with a residue of content-free sentiment. If we refuse to debate, analyze, contextualize, or explain, we turn mass killings vacuous celebrity deathfests.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has wisely postponed Alberto Gonzales’ testimony in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.
a) The AG might actually want to take some time off from dress rehearsals to help enforce some laws; and, b) the media will be completely saturated with coverage of the Tech tragedy for the next several days.
I had a chance last night to see a small sneak preview of an unreleased documentary called “Taxi to the Dark Side” by filmmaker Alex Gibney (who was nominated for an Emmy Oscar for his last film, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”), which examines, basically, how we got from there to here — how we became a nation whose government openly renounced the Geneva Conventions and officially sanctioned the use of torture.
I have to be honest, it’s not the easiest thing to sit through. The film, which primarily focuses on abuses at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, contains footage of the Bagram base that’s never been seen anywhere else, as well as the shockingly familiar still images from Abu Ghraib, uncensored and high res. The filmmaker, who attended last night’s screening at Yale, described it beforehand as a sort of murder mystery, using as its springboard the story of Dilawar, the young taxi driver who was apprehended by Afghan militia and turned over to the U.S. military at Bagram, where he was, in fact, eventually murdered. And that’s not hyperbole — the official coroner’s report lists the cause of death as “homicide.” (The film notes that out of more than 100 deaths in U.S. custody, 37 have been officially declared homicides by the U.S. military itself. Perhaps even more shocking is the fact that only seven percent of Guantanamo detainees were were actually apprehend by the U.S. military — the rest have been turned over by Afghan warlords, Pakistanis, bounty hunters, etc., any of whom may have had agendas having nothing to do with the American war on terror. Dilawar’s captor, for instance, turns out have been the person actually responsible for the rocket attacks of which the taxi driver was wrongly accused).
If you’ve been following all these stories over the past few years, there’s not a lot here that you probably don’t already know — but it’s still overwhelming to see the entire case laid out in such a methodical manner. In addition to the footage mentioned above, the film presents its case through interviews with guards and interrogators from Bagram, as well as former JAGs and other military officials. I’m sure they’ll do it anyway, but it’ll be hard for the usual suspects to paint this as a partisan hit piece when probably 80% of the talking heads are military and/or Republicans. Interspersed with their descriptions of the abuses are shots from the State of the Union in which Bush assures the audience, with a steely Clint Eastwood look in his eye, that the United States has illegally hunted down and murdered foreign nationals (I’m paraphrasing slightly, of course) — and gets a standing ovation from both sides of the aisle. Or when Alberto Gonzales, testifying before Congress, is asked about confessions obtained under duress, and stares into the camera for a full thirty seconds, face twitching as he tries to think of a suitable lie. (At the moment, it seems a bit obscene to me that the thing that’s ultimately going to bring Gonzales down is not his advocacy of torture, but rather the partisan firings of U.S. Attorneys.) Not to mention the footage of Dick Cheney explaining to an approving Tim Russert that the United States, like the rogue cop in a buddy flick, was going to have to throw the book away and play by its own rules for awhile.
Watching this film, I had a strange sense of being “unstuck in time,” to quote the late, great Kurt Vonnegut — as though I were watching it twenty years from now, trying to understand the madness into which this country descended in the years immediately following 9/11. (The footage of Rumsfeld, in particular, was like watching contemperanous footage of MacNamara justifying Vietnam.) If there’s any justice in the world — and one doesn’t come away from this movie filled with overwhelming hope that there is — Gibney will have settled once and for all the question of whether or not these abuses were the official policy of the United States government, sanctioned at the highest level.
“Taxi to the Dark Side” premieres at the Tribeca film festival in New York City at the end of the month, and with any luck will pick up a distributor there. If you know anyone who thinks that Rush Limbaugh’s line of “Club Gitmo” t-shirts are the funniest damn thing they’ve ever seen, you’ll want to try to steer them to a showing.
(Edited for accuracy; I didn’t have a notebook with me last night. The 7% figure refers to Guantanamo detainees, not detainees in the entire overseas detention system, as previously stated.)
