Cheney, Rumsfeld, Libby & co. didn’t start fixing the intelligence around the policy in 2002. That’s been their MO their entire careers. What they did regarding Iraq was completely predictable, and in fact was predicted by people who knew their history.
The best known pre-Iraq example is the “Team B” affair from the mid-seventies, where they made up lots of stories about how the Soviet Union was just about to overwhelm the U.S. with their overwhelming overwhelmingness. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union collapsed. Whoops!
There are other episodes almost no one knows about, though. One is the effort by Cheney and others in the eighties to cover up Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, as well as the way we and the Saudis were helping. (They couldn’t let the truth get out because Pakistan was helping us with our proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which of course turned out to be a giant success in its own right.) In order to do this, they had to crush a government nuclear analyst named Richard Barlow who was loudly warning about what Pakistan was up to.
Today the Guardian is running an excellent story about Barlow—what they did to him, what’s happened to him since, and the chance he may receive a small measure of justice. It provides a real glimpse into how the US government truly works, which is why it appears in a foreign publication. I encourage you to read it all.
CNN today: Annalissimo Francisco Franco is Still Dead
Watching CNN today, 11:14 am Pacific Time, as they’re coming back from a commercial.
"Three of the stories we’re working on…" the anchor intones, deeming these the most worth highlighting:
Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize,
Ted Kennedy undergoes surgery, and
"Eight search warrants have been served in the death of Anna Nicole Smith…"
Do we have to? Annalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, again splashed across literally hundreds of newspapers and TV stations? Thankfully, it’s hardly the wall-to-wall all-else-annihilating festival of eight months ago (see this cartoon video for more — and shouldn’t all media commentary be done in cartoons with cool background music?). But still. Aagh.
As to what we might be missing today, amid the wasted minutes of Anna Nicolitude: you’ve probably heard that the US and Russia are getting tense. So are the US and Turkey, just as Turkey and the Kurds could blow up any minute, with large implications for Iraq. To the good, Israel and the Palestinians are making headway for once, but in Sudan, things blew up again in Darfur the other day, and peace talks in South Sudan have gone wobbly, after decades of war there which have killed at least 1.5 and probably 2 million people.
(Sadly, the likelihood of this last was fairly predictable; turns out southern Sudan has been in a state of civil war since the 1950s, with the exception of one 11-year break that ended in 1983 and this fresh flail at peace starting in 2005. None of which I recall even hearing about until writing Who Hates Whom. Despite the death toll. Depressed sigh.)
That’s the headline of this front-page story in today’s Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper, concerning how the African nation of Malawi has rapidly transformed its food economy from famine to surplus, saving countless lives:
Back in the 1990s, the Malawi government gave the poorest farmers a package of fertilizer and seeds every year. The program was so popular that in 1999, they made it universal, for all farmers, and posted a large national surplus.
But starting in 2000, the donor nations on whom this country depends for nearly half its budget forced the government to scale back and then finally to scrap the policy, saying it “distorted the market” and would prevent a sustainable agricultural base.
The result? Smaller and smaller harvests and two years of famine.
[snip]
Starting in 2006, and on a larger scale this year, the government distributed coupons to low-income farmers to allow them to purchase 50-kilogram sacks of fertilizer for 950 kwacha($7) rather than the market price of 4,500 kwacha. As a result, the average farmer’s yield jumped to two tonnes a hectare from 800 kilograms.
Bottom line: food production is up 150%. But at what cost?
The fertilizer subsidy cost the government $62-million - 6.5 per cent of the total government budget, a “whack of cash” in the words of one top economist - but that pales in comparison to the $120-million the government spent importing food aid in the 2005 famine. And the sale of maize to Zimbabwe and other countries will inject an additional $120-million into the national economy…
In other words, the subsidies only cost half as much as previous measures, and generated enough income to pay for themselves. Twice over. In addition to ending the famine.
This is, of course, pure sacrilege to those who hold “free” markets as a hallowed force of religious power. (Odd to see it front-paged in a national newspaper. Of course, I’m not in the US at the moment. I’m in Canada, where comparatively well-funded public health, transport, and educational systems would have destroyed the economy by now, if some disembodied heads on CNBC were even lightly tethered to earth.)
My point here is not to promote or decry any particular economic agenda — I have none, personally — but to yearn for the sort of open-minded pragmatism that allows, y’know, a newspaper to actually report something useful like this without being instantly denounced for a breach of ideology.
What worked in Malawi may or may not work anywhere else. But it worked in Malawi.
Ideology apparently helped cause a famine. Moving past ideology helped stop one.
This week has been like a gourmet, five-course meal of wingnuttery. Naturally, the main course was the stalking and harassment of 12-year-old Graeme Frost. That alone would be a week’s worth of conservative lunacy, but it was complimented by an even more hilarious side dish. When Ezra Klein decided to take Michelle Malkin at her word that she wanted a “a good-faith argument” on the merits of SCHIP expansion met, not did Michelle show her true colors by cravenly turning down his offer to debate, but one of her fans took the absurdity to another level by challenging Ezra to a boxing match.
Adding to the right wing dipshittery, John Gibson’s analysis of yesterday’s school shooting included the observation that “Hip-hoppers do not kill themselves.” Fox News asked viewers if Air America was in a “War on God?” (Does that mean that the all-powerful God is losing?) And, you probably already guessed this, Ann Coulter said some more crazy bullshit that will help her sell more books and get her booked on more cable news shows.
For your digestif, here’s Iain Murray at The Corner suggesting that Al Gore should share his Nobel Prize with Osama Bin Laden.
The Republicans believe that people should be completely destitute, living in a one room shack and working two jobs before they “deserve” subsidized health insurance. The middle class who are one car accident or one cancer diagnosis away from losing their jobs, being unable to afford either the cadillac COBRA plans from their employers (my last one here in California was $1700.00 a month and I’m healthy) must not be allowed to keep ANY assets.They must be, as Steyn’s pal wrote, “dying on the streets with sores on their bodies” before they qualify for aid.
But, of course, neither will they necessarily even be able to buy private health insurance at any price even if they do live in a one room apartment with their four kids and work two jobs. (I was turned down recently because I had had gum surgery in 1996.)
This is the world in which we live. Insurance companies only want to cover young, healthy or rich people. And even if you manage to pay the expensive premiums with huge deductibles, they will try to find a way to avoid paying for your care anyway. That’s the way it works. If you are lucky enough to have health insurance at your employer you’d better hope you never lose that job. More importantly, you’d better hope you never get sick.
Related cartoons (in reverse chronological order) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Read at your own risk; it’s particularly depressing to see how relevant sixteen-year-old cartoons on the topic remain.
The recent run of outed Republican Sexual Hypocrites reminds me of the moment — and I remember this quite clearly — at which the phrase “going postal” entered the lexicon. You read about one postal worker going on a gun rampage, and then another, and then yet another — and then suddenly it seemed to click for everyone, that there was a distinct pattern emerging, that these weren’t simply troubling isolated incidents but rather a symptom of some larger problem (i.e. the soulless monotony of the job).
We’re clearly at that pattern recognition moment now, the moment at which it becomes obvious to everyone that there’s more going on here, that some not insignificant percentage of sanctimonious moralizers are in fact leading personal lives significantly at odds with their public pronouncements. To put it politely.
I’m just not sure what the phrase should be in this instance. “Going Republican”?
With people like Craig and Vitter and the diving suit guy, it’s hard to not imagine that everyone would have been a lot happier if they’d just been able to accept what they were, rather than making it their mission in life to project their personal denial onto society at large. Especially the diving suit guy, who really should have just moved to San Francisco and hung out with the rubber fetishists, rather than going to Liberty University and hanging out with Jerry Falwell and, ultimately (and quite literally), dying of shame.
Which is not to suggest that there are no boundaries. The key words here would be “consenting” and “adult” — get beyond that, and you cross the line from pitiable to repulsive. Which brings us to the case of Klutzo the Christian Clown. (More after the fold).
The entire situation is highlighting the profound differences in vision that the left and right have for what government and economy is for. I think that it really gets to the heart of it, actually. The left generally seeks a society with widespread middle class prosperity, where all people have access to the good life, defined as having roughly these things:
* Decent housing with some privacy.
* Education.
* Useful employment with a fair wage.
* Health care.
* Enough free time to pursue some pleasures in life and have a family life.
* The ability to retire.
* The right to free and equal participation in society.
* The right to self-determination.
Of course to have these things, we can’t have an elite hoarding all the wealth (generated by the workers, mind you) for themselves. We can’t have Enron holding entire states hostage so they can charge grandmothers $400 a month for electricity. The elite will have to suffer sharing some of their wealth with the people who actually create it. It’s this point that is up for contention.
Are there even a thousand really poor people in all of America? Really poor. Dying-on-the-sidewalks-with-open-sores poor?
There you go—anything less than reducing the population to a bunch of people dying on the sidewalks with open sores while the rich blow by us in armored vehicles is spoiling America.
TBogg has more on the writer whose skepticism Amanda highlights. Turns out she’s Canadian, and a beneficiary of the health care system there. If there is a God, at least we know s/he has a fine sense of humor.
OCTOBER 8–An Alabama minister who died in June of “accidental mechanical asphyxia” was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask, according to an autopsy report.
Investigators determined that Rev. Gary Aldridge’s death was not caused by foul play and that the 51-year-old pastor of Montgomery’s Thorington Road Baptist Church was alone in his home at the time he died (while apparently in the midst of some autoerotic undertaking). While the Montgomery Advertiser, which first obtained the autopsy records, reported on Aldridge’s two wet suits, the family newspaper chose not to mention what police discovered inside the minister’s rubber briefs.
The late Reverend was a Liberty University graduate and former Jerry Falwell employee. More here.
… and more at Hullaballoo, including an extraordinary graphic from the website of the Rev’s church.
Trita Parsi, now head of the National Iranian-American Council, has written for Rootless Cosmopolitan on some little-known history of Israel-Iran relations. Based on his book Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, it’s the kind of thing that tends not to make it into books, and certainly not onto the Learn Nothing From History Channel. The book’s website is here, and its Amazon page is here. And here’s Parsi recently on Democracy Now!:
