Here’s some great Chris Rock standup about Iraq. I don’t know if it’s new, but it’s new to me. Favorite line: “That train’s never late!”
UPDATE: I think this is from 2004. Well…I’ve had a lot on my plate for the last three years.
Dick Cheney eloquently explains why invading Iraq would be a truly horrible idea
Yurf
After reading Michael Ignatieff’s why-I-was-wrong-on-Iraq essay in the NY Times, Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings wonders this about the US media:
I think we really have to ask: why are people who are, by their own account, not just mistaken but completely clueless among the people who are given platforms to express their opinions?
I hate sounding snide about this, but for an adult to be asking this is really like an adult asking “why hasn’t Santa Claus come to my house with presents for me?”
George Orwell describes the right-wing blogosphere
The Scott Beauchamp affair is reminding me of this, from 1984:
A Party member…is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline…called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
At first it seems amazing that Orwell could have precisely described today’s right-wing blog world sixty years ago. But the right-wing blogs are just an outgrowth of human nature, which never changes. (In particular I’m always been struck by the consistency with which such people are unable to understand analogies.)
Bush administration official confirms War on Terror a political ploy
Here’s Scott Horton, writing for Harper’s:
I attended [a recent conference] in Italy with a group of European and American counterterrorism experts. A large team of U.S. Department of Justice officials, drawn from its uppermost echelons, was there, including three of the principal architects of the legal policies for the war on terror. In not-for-attribution comments, one openly acknowledged that the war on terror was cast in the first instance as a political ploy and that it was a conceptual failure. It was now essential for the Americans to move on to something else, he argued. None of the others challenged that view; indeed, two of them said that they agreed with it. So even inside of the Bush Administration, the war on terror has been written off as a scam that served its limited political purpose and is finished.
As George Bush said on September 19, 2001:
…through my tears, I see opportunity.