Author: Greg Saunders

I’ve gotta hand it to you Mr. President. You may be unable to defeat an insurgency, but you can really beat a metaphor to death :

This new threat required us to think and act differently. And as the 9/11 Commission pointed out, to prevent this from happening again, we need to connect the dots before the enemy attacks, not after.
. . .
You know, there’s an interesting debate in Washington, and you’re part of it, that says, well, they didn’t connect the
dots prior to September the 11th — “they” being not only my administration, but previous administrations. And I understand that debate. I’m not being critical of you bringing this issue up and discussing it, but there was a — you might remember, if you take a step back, people were pretty adamant about hauling people up to testify, and wondering how come the dots weren’t connected.

Well, the Patriot Act helps us connect the dots. And now the United States Senate is going to let this bill expire. Not the Senate — a minority of senators. And I want senators from New York or Los Angeles or Las Vegas to go home and explain why these cities are safer. It is inexcusable to say, on the one hand, connect the dots, and not give us a chance to do so. We’ve connected the dots, or trying to connect the dots with the NSA program. And, again, I understand the press and members of the United States Congress saying, are you sure you’re safeguarding civil liberties. That’s a legitimate question, and an important question. And today I hope I’ll help answer that. But we’re connecting dots as best as we possibly can.

Now Mr. President, I’ve got a homework assignment for you.Sometime over the holidays, you need to read the two big 9/11 reports, the Congressional Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Failures and the one published by the 9/11 Commission (which can be found at Barnes & Noble). By “read”, I don’t mean having an aide verbally paraphrase the portions of the executive summary that agree with your worldview, but actually read the whole thing. If there are any big words, try sounding them out slowly and look up the definitions if you aren’t sure what they mean. When you’re done, come back and read the rest of this post.

[ Pause here to read the 9/11 reports and reflect on their contents. ]

Wow, that was a tough one, huh? What did you think? Do you think there are things that our government could have done better? Yeah, that’s right, we should “connect the dots”. Do you know what that phrase means? Look at the picture below :

Now if the picture above was the intelligence failures described in the 9/11 reports, what do you think those dots would represent? No, they don’t represent “evildoers”, they represent bits of intelligence. Number one, for example, might represent the “Phoenix Memo” that described a possible terrorist plot by terrorists to hijack a plane and crash it into CIA headquarters. Number two, could be the reports of suspicious men in flight training schools who wanted to learn to fly 747’s but didn’t want to know how to land. The third could be the FAA directive to commercial airliners that terrorists may try to board planes.The fourth could be the “chatter” that resulted in the PDB “Bin Laden determined to strike in US”. And so on….

So how do we put these disparate pieces of information together? Yeah, you connect the dots, but how does that work? In some places it means making sure any Arabic communications have been translated. In others it means ensuring that information is shared between various government agencies. And in others, it means cutting through bureaucratic red tape. And once those lines are drawn from one to two to three, then it means having someone step back with a view of the big picture and say “Hey, that’s George Washington”.

Which leads me to why I think you need a refresher course in dot-connecting. What happens when you order warrantless wiretaps, confiscate library records, and spy on mosques and peace protests? It doesn’t make the picture easier to see, it just adds a lot more dots. We don’t need to be making the whole thing more complicated, we need to make it easier to draw lines. That’s why the NSA wiretaps and the PATRIOT ACT are bad ideas. Yes, some portions of the PATRIOT ACT make it easier to draw the lines, but they don’t do much good when they’re lumped together with stuff that just makes the dot-connecting more confusing.

Did you like the movie Die Hard? I thought it totally kicked ass, but at the end of the day, it was just a movie. In real life, the bad guys don’t go wandering around giving monologues about their plans and motives. But that’s what I’m afraid is motivating your current obsession with collecting intelligence. Stop me if I’m wrong here, but it seems like you’re endlessly looking for a “smoking gun” like a wiretapped phone call saying “Tomorrow morning, me and my eighteen friends are gonna hijack planes and crash them into buildings. Don’t tell anybody”. But all this waiting around for something that isn’t likely to happen is fraught with two problems. Number one, you’re collecting so many phone calls and emails that there aren’t enough people around to translate them quickly enough. Number two, your search for obvious intelligence may lead to ignoring mountains of vague intelligence that could lead to the same conclusion.

Which all leads me back to the 9/11 reports that I had you read earlier. Remember the conclusions they reached? It wasn’t that they didn’t have enough information to foil the hijackers, but that they didn’t, say it with me, Connect. The. Dots. So what is the lesson here? That the problems leading up to 9/11 weren’t with intelligence collection but with analysis of that evidence. Got it?

Since it’s easy, fun, and the bulk of my mental energies are devoted to other tasks, I’m gonna waste another post bashing Bill O’Reilly for his absurd Christmas crusade. This time, the object of O’Reilly’s rage is the Daily Show, because O’Reilly is too fucking stupid to tell the difference between social commentary and satire. Brad Blog and Media Matters are all over this one, but I wanna start my two cents with a nitpick. Here’s what he said on his radio show :

O’REILLY: [Laughs] There you go. Jon Stewart, “Secular Central.” Oh, I’m sorry, Comedy Central — and I like Stewart, but we know what he’s doing over there.

And here’s what he said on Fox :

O’REILLY: Predictably, the opponents of public displays of Christmas continue to put forth counter-arguments on ‘Secular Central.’ I — I mean, Comedy Central.

A joke so funny you had to tell it twice, huh? Good work you bigoted, half-witted sexual predator — whoops, I meant, Bill.

While it’s funny occasionally, the faux-Freudian slip shtick gets old really, really fast. It’s bad enough that Bill and his staff of writers aren’t clever enough to write two different jokes, but the fact that he told the exact same “slip of the tongue” joke on the same day is simply pathetic. For that, Bill, I award you the Dennis Miller Memorial “I Don’t Want To Get Off On A Rant Here” award for fraudulent spontaneity. You can put it on the mantle next to your Peabody award.

What’s funnier than O’Reilly’s unfortunate attempts at humor, however, is that O’Reilly is targeting Jon Stewart. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Bill, but Jon Stewart is a Jew and Jews don’t celebrate Christmas. When you’ve sunk to the point that you’re attacking non-Christians for not celebrating Christian holidays, your witchhunt has completely jumped the shark. I say you hang this one up and prepare for your next crusade. Here’s a suggestion : Did you know that those anti-American bastards in Canada don’t even celebrate the Fourth of July?! If we can stretch that one between May and July sweeps weeks, then we’re good as gold.

The other day I was talking to my friend Josh about ways to destroy Christmas and he brought up an interesting point. The unending wave of inclusion and good-will that O’Reilly is attacking isn’t the fault of secular progressivism, but good ol’ fashioned capitalism. At some point, retailers noticed that the shameless orgy of consumption we experience between Thanksgiving and New Year’s was only sucking in Christians. Rich Uncle Pennybags figured out that a simple semantic change from “Merry Christmas” to “Happy Holidays” (which, until recently, was considered a kind thing to say) would broaden the base of consumers to include the 20% or so of Americans that don’t celebrate the pagan celebration that was turned into Jesus’ birthday. It’s not an attempt to diminish Christianity or make the country more inclusive, it’s just an attempt to make more money.

Which reminds me of this speech by Ned Beatty from the movie Network :

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal — that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

I can imagine a similar exchange happening between the CEO of Wal-Mart and O’Reilly any day now. This isn’t about Christmas or Chanukah, Target or Macy’s, liberal or conservative. It’s about dollars and cents, Mr. O’Reilly. You’re dealing with market forces much bigger than you and your sad, little show. The invisible hand that controls this economy will not stand for a disruption in the bottom line, am I making myself clear?

For all of you conservatives who love to praise the “free market”, let me call bullshit on this enduring lie that the President frequently cites to sell his immigration plan. From yesterday’s speech :

As we enforce our immigration laws, comprehensive immigration reform also requires us to improve those laws by creating a new temporary worker program. This program would create a legal way to match willing foreign workers with willing American employers to fill jobs that Americans will not do. Workers would be able to register for legal status for a fixed period of time, and then be required to go home. This program would help meet the demands of a growing economy, and it would allow honest workers to provide for their families while respecting the law.

The “jobs Americans won’t do” lie was also recently advanced in the Washington Post by a spokesman for the Labor Department and a “panicking” farmer (via Kevin Drum) :

“There are just some jobs people don’t want to do,” Nassif said. “It’s the most developed nation in the world using a foreign workforce, and people need to recognize that. We need to make them legal.”

Jack Vessey said he listed openings for 300 laborers at the state office of employment last week to prepare the lettuce fields for harvest. “We got one person,” he said. “He showed up and said, ‘I’m not going to do that.'”

The key to unraveling this bullshit is that the anonymous laborer quoted above likely ended his gripe with “unless you pay me more”. The President wants you to think this is because American workers are shiftless elitists, but it’s the employers and their shills who are the assholes here.

What people like the George W. Bush don’t understand is that capitalism is not a one-way street. When the demand for workers is high and the supply of laborers is low, the rational solution would be for employers to raise wages, increase benefits, or both to ensure that supply catches up to demand. But that would mean actually spending more money, and we can’t have that.

Instead, employers have found a way to get around their obligations by employing “undocumented” workers (and thus creating a demand for illegal labor). Why are these men and women willing to do the same job that Americans are unwilling to do for less money? Well, they’re here illegally, for one. They probably don’t speak English well and have little familiarity with existing labor laws. They’re doing a job that’s unskilled while under the constant threat of deportation. Sounds like the new face of indentured servitude to me, but the President and his allies are trying to figure out ways to make it acceptable.

But here’s the key to all of these proposals : These illegal workers aren’t being offered citizenship, but membership in a “guest worker program”. Bush and co. don’t give a damn about the working class in this country, they just want to make sure that the crooks aren’t penalized for breaking our labor laws. The solutions bandied about would create a pseudo-citizenship which will protect employers but do little to lift immigrant workers from the bottom rung on the economic ladder. When residence is closely tied to employment, the threat of deportation doesn’t go away, it just gets hidden a little better.

Which makes this whole debate even more galling. Immigrants are being exploited, American workers are getting screwed, and the whole debate is happenening as if these two groups of victims are on opposite sides. If you want to stop illegal immigration, you don’t need to build a fence. The supply of illegal labor will go away once the demand for it ceases. We don’t need new plans, we need to rigorously enforce the laws already on the books. If that means that employers are going to have to pay more to the people doing the jobs that “Americans won’t do” and pass those costs on to the consumer, then it’s hardly our place to question the wisdom of the invisible hand, right?

Also, it should be stressed again that George Bush and his allies should be ashamed of themselves for slandering us with their anti-worker rhetoric. Aren’t you paying attention, America? The President of the United States just called you an indolent snob. He thinks you’re too lazy to do an honest day’s work and too effete to do work that will get your hands dirty. Doesn’t that piss you off? It should.

Over at Crooks & Liars, where I’m guest posting for a couple of days, I posted this link to the Democratic party’s media contact page :

All you have to do is enter a zip code and it will bring up a form for you to contact multiple local and national media outlets at the same time. This is an especially useful resource if you wanted to, let’s say, contact the Arizona Daily Star and tell them that John McCain is a fraud whose “toughness” only comes out when it’s politically safe to do so or The Greenville News to tell the people of South Carolina that their Senator wants to destroy some of our most basic rights as Americans. With the public finally starting to wake up to the moral cowardice of the Republican majority, I can think of quite a few places that could use a friendly reminder that their representatives are part of the problem. So take advantage of the Democratic media contact page, folks. It’s a damn good resource that people don’t use nearly as often as they should.

The blogosphere is great at feeding and directing outrage, but not necessarily as good at actually channeling that outrage into something constructive. Writing a letter to the editor is the easiest thing in the world to do, and this just makes it easier. While I always encourage people to contact their representatives, going over their heads and taking your message to their constituents can help change of the minds of the only people Congressmen fear : voters who can put them out of a job.

Also, at the risk of turning this into a Corner-ite blogger conversation, let me just say that Conservative Jones, boy detective was one of the “smartest”, “edgiest”, and funniest TMW strips I’ve ever read. I’ve been meaning to email Tom privately to tell him how much I like it, but a strip that still makes me laugh out loud a month later deserves some public props.

Once again, a conservative rant is spreading throughout the liberal blogosphere and I’m more interested in word choice. In this case, it’s Bill O’Reilly’s McCarthyite rant against his enemies and his use of the word “guttersnipes”.

What is a guttersnipe?? I just assumed it was one of those made-up conservative insults like “assclown” or “crapweasel”, but it actually appears in the dictionary :

gut·ter·snipe n. : a child who spends most of his time in the streets especially in slum areas (Synonym: street urchin)

So when Bill O’Reilly is trying to find term to smear his enemies, this is what he compares them to :

I know conservatives don’t care about the poor, but when did poverty become an insult to these people?