More from the Our Lady of Imperial Suffering newsletter
If you’re the New York Times and you need a new columnist who’ll cover foreign policy, you obviously want William Kristol. After all, he’s the guy who said just before the war began, “we’ll be vindicated when we find the weapons of mass destruction and liberate the people of Iraq.”
I find the NY Times and Washington Post much more comprehensible if I just think of them as the church newsletters for a particularly unpleasant religion. OF COURSE the church elders choose writers who believe in transubstantiation.
I’m giving the Google ads a try (sidebar on the right). We’ll see if they actually produce any revenue or not, but looking at the first batch that popped up, specifically the ad for Mike Huckabee, I’d have to say their algorithms could probably use a little refining.
Words that every Democratic politician needs to tattoo on his or her forehead in reverse
So they’ll be reminded of them every time they look in the mirror:
Conservatism failed in the 1890s, again in the 1920s, again in the 1980s, and again at the beginning of the 21st century … Conservatives failed because conservatism is a failed ideology. The greatest periods of American history all rejected conservatism in favor of the ideals our nation was founded on.
The Real News, a year-old attempt to create a TV channel funded by viewer donations, has been doing some fantastic reporting on politics internationally and here. And I don’t just say that because I want to work for them.
Below is their new segment on Rep. Robert Wexler’s push to hold impeachment hearings for Cheney. Their site has a ton more great stuff, including pieces on Afghanistan, Canada knuckling under to the U.S. on torture, and the Israeli bombing of Gaza.
An explanation of the rationale behind the Real News is here. Just because there’s no journalism like this on CBS or ABC or Fox doesn’t mean—in a world with the internet and satellite TV—there’s no way it can be done and reach an audience. But it does mean we have to pay for it. (If you’re so moved, you can donate to the Real News here.)
And…if you haven’t already, it’s still well worth your time to sign the Wexler Wants Hearings petition. Wexler’s efforts actually are getting the congressional leadership’s attention.
Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq’s links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell’s 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.
Let’s take a second and really grasp that number. They didn’t do it once. They didn’t do it twice. Bush and his people said false things that started a war at least
… I find I must confess that after several minutes of thinking, I have no bloody clue how to end this post on an optimistic, inspiring, or remotely useful note. But there it is.
This seems like a good moment to remember this section of The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind:
As the meeting in Mr. Cheney’s office progressed, it became clear that the vice president was ready to weigh in on what the president should do to bolster the economy, and his standing with voters worried about the economy, as the second half of his term began. A package of tax proposals, led by a 50% cut in the individual tax on dividends, had been all but buried since Mr. O’Neill took his stand against it in early September…
After the midterms, though, Mr. O’Neill could sense a change inside the White House…Now Mr. Cheney mentioned them again, how altering the double taxation of dividends would provide some economic stimulus. Mr. O’Neill jumped in, arguing sharply that the government “is moving toward a fiscal crisis” and then pointing out “what rising deficits will mean to our economic and fiscal soundness.” Mr. Cheney cut him off. “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said.
Mr. O’Neill was speechless, hardly believing that Mr. Cheney — whom he and Mr. Greenspan had known since Dick was a kid — would say such a thing. Mr. Cheney moved to fill the void. “We won the midterms. This is our due.” Mr. O’Neill left Mr. Cheney’s office in a state of mild shock.
Without the Bush administration’s giant tax cuts for the richest people in America, the government would have more room to maneuver now. The options that remain today are less palatable.
Another important effect of the tax cuts is that a fraction of them will be used by recipients to support political resistance to any constructive actions to deal with our current problems. So it really was a win-win-win.
Like a lot of people who lived in New York under Giuliani, I was always astonished that his campaign didn’t melt down a lot sooner, like in the first week or two. A piece in the Times this morning revisits the good times:
In August 1997, James Schillaci, a rough-hewn chauffeur from the Bronx, dialed Mayor Giuliani’s radio program on WABC-AM to complain about a red-light sting run by the police near the Bronx Zoo. When the call yielded no results, Mr. Schillaci turned to The Daily News, which then ran a photo of the red light and this front page headline: “GOTCHA!”
That morning, police officers appeared on Mr. Schillaci’s doorstep. What are you going to do, Mr. Schillaci asked, arrest me? He was joking, but the officers were not.
They slapped on handcuffs and took him to court on a 13-year-old traffic warrant. A judge threw out the charge. A police spokeswoman later read Mr. Schillaci’s decades-old criminal rap sheet to a reporter for The Daily News, a move of questionable legality because the state restricts how such information is released. She said, falsely, that he had been convicted of sodomy.
Then Mr. Giuliani took up the cudgel.
“Mr. Schillaci was posing as an altruistic whistle-blower,” the mayor told reporters at the time. “Maybe he’s dishonest enough to lie about police officers.”
Mr. Schillaci suffered an emotional breakdown, was briefly hospitalized and later received a $290,000 legal settlement from the city. “It really damaged me,” said Mr. Schillaci, now 60, massaging his face with thick hands. “I thought I was doing something good for once, my civic duty and all. Then he steps on me.”
Mr. Giuliani was a pugilist in a city of political brawlers. But far more than his predecessors, historians and politicians say, his toughness edged toward ruthlessnessand became a defining aspect of his mayoralty. One result: New York City spent at least $7 million in settling civil rights lawsuits and paying retaliatory damages during the Giuliani years.
… related: a page I did for the Voice when Giuliani declared war on an art museum in Brooklyn in 1999.
The primary is getting exhausting. It’s bad enough that anti-McCain smears get in-depth rebuttals by the media while anti-Obama smears get turned into debate questions. Now we have to deal with a fight on the Democratic side so nasty that it could drive voters away from the party and once again prove that Democrats have a supernatural ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. That said, despite how nauseating I’ve been finding the campaigns, there are some stark differences between the candidates. Here’s where I stand on the top three Dems.
Hillary Clinton - Right now, my approach towards the Democratic primary is ABC, Anyone But Clinton. She seems like a good enough person and I honestly believe that she’d be much better than any of the Republicans running for president. That said, I despise her campaign. I’m not to the Andrew Sullivan-level of irrational hatred, but I think the reasons for voting for her are largely bogus and the reasons to vote against her are mounting every day.
For starters, Clinton’s biggest selling point has been her “experience”, but as Timothy Noah wrote at Slate, Hillary’s claim of experience is incredibly dishonest :
[D]uring her husband’s two terms in office, Hillary Clinton did not hold a security clearance, did not attend meetings of the National Security Council, and was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. During trips to Bosnia and Kosovo, she “acted as a spokeswoman for American interests rather than as a negotiator.” On military affairs, most of her experience derives not from her White House years but from serving on the Senate armed services committee.
Even if she was able to claim Bill’s experience as her own, what is there to brag about? NAFTA? Welfare reform? Dont Ask, Don’t Tell? The Communications Decency Act? Easing media ownership laws? Defense of Marriage Act? If she wants to run on her husband’s record, then it’s worth pointing out that the Clinton Administration wasn’t the progressive paradise that she’s promising.
During the Clinton years, there was one big “accomplishment” that she can claim…her failure to enact universal healthcare. Considering that one of her biggest promises on the stump has been universal healthcare, I’d expect the “most experienced” candidate to have a better pitch in this regard than “second time’s the charm”. If Hillary can learn from the mistakes she made in 1994, who’s to say the other candidates can’t also learn those lessons?
Of course, another point against Hillary is that I don’t think she’s truly taken the lessons of the Clinton years to heart. She came into Washington in 1992 and the GOP establishment destroyed her and her husband. She was seen as arrogant for trying to use her position as first lady to strive for universal healthcare, demonized as a corrupt witch for Whitewater, and had to sit idly by while the GOP leadership in Washington dragged the nation through impeachment. Yet though all of that, she and Bill are still naive enough to believe that they can triangulate their way towards legislative victories and trust people who have shown them nothing but contempt.
Yet once Hillary became a Senator, for all of her talk about the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, she was foolish enough to give the benefit of the doubt to people who have proved themselves to be untrustworthy. She voted for the Iraq war, the bankruptcy bill, declaring Iran’s revolutionary Guard a Terrorist organization, etc. She’s obviously not as bad as the Republicans in this regard, but for somebody who’s been through the bullshit she’s been through, I’d expect a little more skepticism.
For all the futile centrism of the Clinton approach to governing, that same “play nice” act doesn’t seem to apply to her fellow Democratic candidates. After New Hampshire, she claimed to have “found [her] voice”, but the last two weeks make it clear that her campaign’s new voice is just as vile and two-faced as the old voice. This good cop / bad cop horseshit she’s been playing with her surrogates is shameful to watch. The worst part is, it’s probably going to work. If they get Obama to argue back, then they can subvert his post-partisan appeal by making it look like both sides are being nasty. Or they might just get lucky and some of their slander will catch on.
The best thing I can say about Hillary right now is that if she becomes the nominee, we’ll have a Democrat who isn’t afraid to bring a knife to a gun fight.
Barack Obama - I’ll cop to being won over by his speeches, being inspired to the point where I start to believe that he’ll be able to unite people behind a progressive agenda. When the excitement of his speeches wears off, however, I can’t help but think that Obama’s insistence that he can unite Americans behind him is as naive as Clinton’s that her experience will enable her to get universal healthcare through Congress.
After watching Edwards’ campaign fail over the last few weeks, Obama’s become my de facto candidate of choice (ABC, remember?). Unfortunately, looking at the polling over the last couple of contests, I think he’s screwed. He does great with independents, but that doesn’t win him the Democratic nomination. I’ve long assumed that Obama is more liberal than Hillary, but that really isn’t based on anything more than a hunch. It certainly isn’t supported by the substance of his stump speeches.
But I still suspect that Obama’s got a lefty radical side that we’re not seeing on the campaign trail. I was clicking around a few political sites when I found this photo that really struck me :
Drawing a flowchart titled “Relationships built on self interest” that connects corporations, banks, and utilities and draws a line showing the flow of money to elected officials? This is the kind of stuff that only John Edwards has been talking about in this campaign, yet it looks like Mr. Kumbaya was teaching “Rules For Radicals” classes. Where has this Obama been?
Downplaying his liberal past (and present?) isn’t doing him any favors among Democratic partisans. While it hurts him that Clinton has been out-polling him among Democratic voters, the real kicker is that Obama got his ass kicked in Nevada. Like Iowa, the primary seemed tailor-made for Obama. Since Nevada allowed same day registration, Obama should have been able to mobilize a lot of independent voters to the essentially open Democratic primaries. Also, like Iowa, the fact that it was a caucus should have delievered Obama a lot of “second choice” support, but with Edwards only getting 4%, the assumption that Edwards supporters would automatically go to Obama now seems discredited. Doing poorly in that caucus doesn’t bode well for the rest of the primary campaign.
Which is a shame because he’d be a better president than Hillary.
John Edwards - At this point it’s a foregone conclusion that he can’t win the nomination. I still think he’d be a great president, but the media blackout of his campaign made it an uphill battle. Assuming he loses in South Carolina as bad as he did in Nevada, then I’m guessing he’ll drop out. Or maybe stick it out until Super Tuesday. In fact, the same media who spent the last year ignoring his campaign is now finally paying attention, but only to wonder aloud whether or not he’ll play “kingmaker”.
I hope he sticks around. It would be easy for Edwards to follow the standard losing campaign playbook and use a concession speech to drop out and maybe endorse either Obama or Clinton. Considering that Edwards has been bringing up issues that the other mainstream candidates would rather avoid addressing (like the stranglehold corporate lobbies have over our democratic process), it would be a letdown to lose his advocacy on the campaign trail. If Obama or Clinton want the support of the remaining Edwards voters, they should earn it by addressing the issues that Edwards has made the centerpiece of his campaign.
Walking the beach in Bocagrande a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across some Colombian teenagers burying a male friend in the sand.
The Colombian kids, being just like kids everywhere, were giving the guy a large pair of sand breasts and giggling naughtily. Like they were the first ones who ever thought of it.
Flashback: for longtime readers, this is exactly what a bunch of kids in Singapore were doing, too. The only real difference was the weather.
All over the world, wars and languages and cultures may divide us, but humanity still seems united by one powerful force: teenagers always seem to get a big kick out of sand hooters.
It’s goofy stuff like this that makes me think humanity almost has a shot.
Network executives still seem to have some vestigal sense of entitlement, leftover from the days in which a show was not considered successful if it did not not capture some significant percentage of the entire viewing audience of the country, which obviously isn’t going to happen as frequently in a world with 500 channels and a gazillion websites. As a result, I’ve started thinking of any given television series as a sort of extended movie, because chances are if I like it, it’s not going to last much longer than one or two seasons.
Basically, the networks are training me not to watch their programs until after they’ve been cancelled and released on DVD. I’m no MBA, but it seems like a short-sighted business strategy to me. I mean, consider the case of Firefly. The Fox network was sitting on what, in retrospect, could clearly have been the next major sci-fi franchise, with years of syndication and spinoffs and action figures and all the rest. But someone thought it was a better idea to kill the show in its infancy, and what we’re left with is a DVD set of some of the finest episodic television ever produced, a cliche-ridden, so-so movie, and a lingering sense of promise unfulfilled.
There are exceptions, particularly as smaller networks strive to carve out a space for themselves, the show Mad Men, on AMC, being one of the most notable. And again, I will say, if you have not yet had the pleasure, get thee to iTunes and get caught up. You’ll thank me. It’s the best televised drama I’ve seen since the early seasons of the Sopranos (and was in fact was created by a Sopranos writer). [UPDATE from a reader: “AMC is about to start rerunning Mad Men from episode 1 (starting Monday at midnight), so folks won’t have to go to iTunes to see it from the start.”]
While I’m on the topic — there was a show last year, Jericho, that I missed initially, but thanks to the twin miracles of easy downloads and video iPods I caught up with during a time of frequent, tedious train travel. The premise of that one is that domestic terrorists have set off nuclear bombs in a couple dozen American cities, and the plucky survivors of one small midwestern town struggle to maintain their innate decency in the face of societal collapse. Clearly this is one that could have gone either way, and there’s nothing exactly brilliant about any of it — but somehow it all comes together into something that transcends the sum of its parts, and becomes quite compelling. So of course it was cancelled, but with a twist — after a noisy grassroots campaign, the network bought an additional seven episodes, which will start airing in February. For what it’s worth, I have it on good authority that the show takes an explicitly political twist in the new season, as an authoritarian, warmongering administration of questionable legitimacy seizes power in the wake of the terrorist attacks and begins to rewrite the Constitution to its own ends.
So I’ll be looking forward to that, if only for another seven hours of the extended movie that is Jericho (and with some degree of gratitude that the show did not end forever on last season’s cliffhanger) — but as I say, overall I find that I am less and less inclined to bother with network television at all, and I suspect I am not alone in that.
Of course, until they settle the writer’s strike, it’s all a moot point. Pretty soon it’ll just be all reality shows, all the time, American Gladiator and Celebrity Rehab (an actual show, by the way), each one stupider than the last, until we are eventually living in the world of Idiocracy, and audiences are endlessly entertained by a single shot of a naked hairy butt on screen farting.
Tell Congress to investigate Pentagon video of Iranian “threat”
Are you the kind of weirdo who thinks Congress should investigate when the Pentagon essentially fabricates a video of U.S. ships being “threatened” by Iran? Just because it could, you know, lead to a massive war based on lies? (Gareth Porter has an excellent run down of how things happened, here.)
