Month: June 2004

Circle Jerk

Yglesias notices that the tittering panel on Meat The Press got all breathless and aroused talking about the Clinton book this morning.

“Oh goodie! A chance to talk about sex!” And it really was sex. Maybe someone, somewhere out there was really concerned with the penny-ante legal charges against Clinton, but these people — quite obviously — were interested in sex. So fun! So easy to speculate about Clinton’s dick! So much more fun than looking into the intricacies of Bush’s foreign policy deceptions or budget trickery. Look — sex scandal!

This is how they got to be known as mediawhores. Day after day we watched this drooling, sophomoric obsession with Clinton’s zipper and the hunk of manhood contained therein which they couldn’t stop yammering about long enough to consider that they were making utter idiots of themselves on national television and fools of the entire country around the world. Not to mention their functioning as amenable tools for a right wing character assassination squad whose dark sexual proclivities we don’t even want to think about.

One of the most popular cultural phenomena during the era was Beavis and Butthead. If anyone ever wanted to see what they might have become when they grew up, all they had to do was watch a couple of the middle aged men and women of the Washington press corps go on and on in great detail about Clinton’s sexual issues, the psychology behind it and whether or not the country could survive such a serious assault on its morals. It was the journalistic equivalent of Beavis and Butthead’s ” heheh..heheh…heheh…she said ‘hard’…heheh”

As Matt noticed, it was (and is) all about the sex. There is a psychology at work in the national press corps — and in the congress at the time — that is worth someone taking a long look at. The level of sexual immaturity the media consistently displayed in the way they talked about it speaks to some bizarre case of mass arrested development. It’s just not normal for grown people to be so obsessive about public sex talk, particularly when the talk itself is so embarrassingly puerile.

It was a low point of low points for the media, at least until they deified Junior Bush in their own bizarre adherence to what they consider fair play. (“We were very hard on the last president, so we have to go really easy on this one. Wouldn’t want anyone to think we’re not fair and balanced.”) Today’s tribute to the “The Starr Report: Deep Throat Two” is par for the course.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of it all is the picture of Russert, Novak, Klein and Kay sitting around a waist high table, flushed, dewy and breathless, restlessly moving about on their chairs as they opine about how immoral and depraved Bill Clinton was for accepting the fellating gifts of a young woman. I don’t want to speculate about what might be happening under that table. But, I would suggest that such a squalid public display of early adolescent sexuality might just be more inappropriate than the acts they so sternly decry.

And, lest we forget, the public was not impressed with their little game of spin the blowjob, either. Clinton left office with the highest job approval rating in history. The press, on the other hand, has never been held in lower esteem.

Cockeyed Adventure:

One outside adviser to the White House said the administration expected the debate over Iraq’s ties to Al Qaeda to be “a regular feature” of the presidential campaign.

“They feel it’s important to their long-term credibility on the issue of the decision to go to war,” the adviser said. “It’s important because it’s part of the overall view that Iraq is part of the war on terror. If you discount the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, then you discount the proposition that it’s part of the war on terror. If it’s not part of the war on terror, then what is it — some cockeyed adventure on the part of George W. Bush?”

You tell us. We’d really like to know.

They know they’ve got a couple of big fat loogies hanging out there. The lack of WMD is bad enough. They can get away with it, sort of, because a lot of people thought he had them. But, this al-Qaeda connection has always been the Tin-foil Mylroie crowds’ special little fantasy. Clearly, they are afraid that this revelation will seriously damage them, so they are employing the always dignified “you can believe me or you can believe your lyin’ eyes” defense.

Let’s face it, for many people in this country (and probably the president himself) all the high flown phony rhetoric about “freedom and democracy” notwithstanding, this war is about killing arabs. For them,the terrorists were arabs therefore all arabs are terrorists. They couldn’t care less about WMD or terrorist connections to Iraq.They wanted to make an example of somebody. It’s pretty much nothing more than straight out bigotry.

As the salt of the earth, all American boy Bill O’Reilly put it:

O’REILLY: Because look … when 2 percent of the population feels that you’re doing them a favor, just forget it, you’re not going to win. You’re not going to win. And I don’t have any respect by and large for the Iraqi people at all. I have no respect for them. I think that they’re a prehistoric group that is — yeah, there’s excuses.

Sure, they’re terrorized, they’ve never known freedom, all of that. There’s excuses. I understand. But I don’t have to respect them because you know when you have Americans dying trying to you know institute some kind of democracy there, and 2 percent of the people appreciate it, you know, it’s time to — time to wise up.

And this teaches us a big lesson, that we cannot intervene in the Muslim world ever again. What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them, just like we did in the Balkans. Just as we did in the Balkans. Bomb the living daylights out of them. But no more ground troops, no more hearts and minds, ain’t going to work.

[…]

They’re just people who are primitive.

There you have it. In the eyes of this sophisticated John F Kennedy School of Government alum, the Iraqi people are prehistoric and primitive.

The problem for Bush is that the few sentient people who might vote for him may just demand a little bit more than that. Military people, for instance, who believed Bush’s argument that you had to “take the fight to the terrorists” only to find out that our military is being uselessly killed and overburdened and we aren’t even in the right country. And, I’m sure there are some decent religious types who would be disappointed to find out that the president led them to believe (and they know what he was saying) that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and it wasn’t true.

And then there’s the monumental disaster of the occupation what with all the torture and imprisoning of the people we are supposed to be liberating. It’s getting hard to think of any good reasons why we did this thing.

Republicans cannot win with just their racist base. Bush and his puppet masters have to keep trying to convince non-kool aid drinkers that he knows what he’s doing. They have decided that in order to do that they have to flat out deny reality.

Update: Reading A1 examines the game being played between Kean and Hamilton and Dick Cheney on the front page of the NY Times. Strange days.

Kenny Boy’s Got Troubles

Grandma Millie was quoted as saying, “Fuckin’ A.”

Glass Houses

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops approved a statement on Friday on “Catholics in Political Life” that brands politicians who support abortion rights as “cooperating in evil” and leaves the door open for bishops to deny communion to such lawmakers.

—–

Between 100 and 200 Roman Catholic priests around the world were moved from country to country after they were accused of sex offenses against minors, according to an 18-month investigation by the Dallas Morning News.

[…]

“We have found a systematic practice of moving the most serious abuse cases on to other countries to protect the accused,” Egerton said.

Egerton also said the newspaper found that some of the priests who were shuffled between countries spent long periods of time in the United States.

Don’t Make Trouble

At a time when almost everything I read pisses me off, this really sent me into orbit:

Charles Pierce:

“Concern has started drifting in like a cold, noxious cloud over the past couple of weeks. There seems to be a storyline hardening among the Heathers that ‘we’ are really getting along just fine, and that all the obvious emotion of this political year is merely sound and fury — good title for a book, by the way — ginned up by our political elites, that ‘Bush-hating’ is out of control, and that the ‘center’ is reasserting itself, and so is ‘civility.’ An implicit track here is that, you know, maybe, it isn’t such a good time to consider changing our current Strong Leadership.

You can see it in the reaction to Michael Moore’s movie, in the immensely silly Michael Barone column comparing this election to the one in 1864 (and, therein, C-Plus Augustus to Abraham Lincoln), and in the amazing performance of Aaron Brown Thursday night on CNN, when he cited a new Pew poll in which 57 percent of Americans think things are going well in Iraq — Oy! –and that Bush had edged slightly ahead of John Kerry for the moment. ‘And, if you check the electoral map, you’ll see he’s doing a little better than that,’ Brown concluded.

It wasn’t so much what he said, but how he said it. An unmistakable tone of reassurance. That we maybe don’t have to bother ourselves with the unruly business of self-government, especially those parts where people, you know, yell at each other. I fear that Kerry’s people may be buying this nonsense, too.

The problem with this, other than the obvious one of ‘It’s June, and who the f**k is Aaron Brown, anyway?’ is is that it leaves the “center” pushed way over on the right, and it consolidates the gains made by 25 years of rightist incivility. It began with those NCPAC campaigns run by that vicious closet-case Terry Dolan, proceeded through Lee Atwater and his lycanthropic brood (Hey, Karl!), and has emerged with renewed vigor already this year, and will continue to do so regardless of whether the Democratic party decides to play nice or not. This also, of course, was abetted by the endless herd of think-tank cowboys, endowment commandos, and honorarium-fattened hyenas that foul the national discourse, and also by a subculture of both actual and rhetorical violence — the stuff that’s limned bravely by David Neiwert here, in an invaluable post that takes Tucker Carlson down in the bargain.

All this concern erupted when the left started hitting back a little, and developing institutions and vehicles through which to do it. Well, for the moment, f**k civility. The center cannot be allowed to remain where it is. It has to be shoved back and shoved back hard. And if that means calling out ABC for criticizing Michael Moore’s methodology while continuing to employ –nay, PROMOTE — a corporate fabulist like John Stossel up through its news division, or if it means striking back at the people who go on television with their perpetual wounded victimhood and call people “Nazis,” well, I’m sorry, Aaron, that’s just the way politics is going to have to be for a while. Take a pill and go sit in a dark room until the vapors pass.”

Yes, yes, yes.

I can see what he’s talking about. The little sighs of “children, children” when Democrats get a little bit too uppity and turn the browbeating into a contest. The constant “reassurance” — telling us not to worry, the republic is safe, no need to get excited, everything will be ok. They did this during the Florida recount, led docilely by GOP operatives who put little bugs in their ears about saving the country from civil war. Then the likes of Aaron Brown and Brian Williams, the synchronized swimmers of media Olympians, immediately adopted stentorian tones and began to seriously calm the nation — most citizens of which were barely above comatose, thinking the recount was a really, really boring episode of The Real World with old, ugly people. The effect was, not surprisingly, to shut down protest against what was obviously an illegal and undemocratic power grab.

Now, in the middle of a war and a hard fought presidential campaign, the Heathers think it’s time to stop shouting. How fucking convenient. Once again we see the press being fed pure political propaganda (and you can bet this “restoring civility” notion comes right out of Rove’s shop) and not even knowing — or caring — that they’re doing it.

What the media is really saying, on behalf of the GOP, is that we liberals should should be the punch line of a very old joke: “Two Jews are lined up against a wall to be shot. When one asks for a blindfold and a last cigarette, the other whispers to him, “Don’t make trouble.”

Fuggedaboudit. Aside from the obvious point that Pierce makes about capitulating at the zenith of right wing power so as to make the center of American politics somewhere to the right of the Third Reich for the next generation, we just have to be prepared for all out political war and we are going to have to be brave enough to take the heat. That goes whether Kerry wins or not — in fact, it goes especially if Kerry wins.

Joe Conason points out today in Salon that the Clinton hating industry is already cranking up its machinery against JK. Indeed, I would imagine that a whole lot of these folks are actually hoping for a Kerry victory. They are, by nature, more comfortable being back bench fire breathers than real leaders with real responsibilities. They tend to implode whenever asked to actually govern. (see: Gingrich, Newt and Bush, Junior.) But, let’s not forget the huge sums of money these character assassins made during the glory days. I have no doubt that they are betting on a Kerry win as their ticket back into the big time. Defending the Empty Codpiece is not nearly as profitable.

And, once again the mediawhores are on pace to help them in any way they can. Right now, all it takes is for them to adopt the “shrill” line against anybody who opposes Bush in anything but the most respectful terms and we have the conditions for them to trivialize the election one more time. Hopefully, the fact that thousands upon thousands of human beings lost their lives in this little foray into republican governance will draw them up short and prevent another round of “I love you long time, GOP source.”

But, I doubt it.

Metrics

Last week I wrote a post featuring Lt. Col Stephen Jordan and his testimony that the White House had been “impressed” with the “flow of information” coming out of Abu Ghraib. Today, Spencer Ackerman, pinch hitting for Josh Marshall at Talking Points, references this USA Today article about the same fellow, connecting many of the same dots and more.

There seems to be a great deal of emphasis placed on the numbers game. From the USA Today article:

Sergeant First Class Roger Brokaw, told the paper. “How many raids did you do last week? How many prisoners were arrested? How many interrogations were conducted? How many [intelligence] reports were written? It was incredibly frustrating.”

From the Christian Science Monitor article I referenced in my earlier post:

Specialist Monath and others say they were frustrated by intense pressure from Colonel Pappas and his superiors – Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez and his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast – to churn out a high quantity of intelligence reports, regardless of the quality. “It was all about numbers. We needed to send out more intelligence documents whether they were finished or not just to get the numbers up,” he said. Pappas was seen as demanding – waking up officers in the middle of the night to get information – but unfocused, ordering analysts to send out rough, uncorroborated interrogation notes. “We were scandalized,” Monath said. “We all fought very hard to counter that pressure” including holding up reports in editing until the information could be vetted.

General Ripper, as well, seems to have been mighty impressed with the quantity of intelligence he got from prisoners in Guantanamo after he “took the gloves off.” From January’s issue of Vanity Fair:

According to General Miller, Gitmo’s importance is growing with amazing rapidity: “Last month we gained six times as much intelligence as we did in January 2003. I’m talking about high-value intelligence here, distributed round the world.”

Daily success or failure in guerilla wars is notoriously difficult to assess. Unlike a war for territory you cannot say that you took a certain hill or town. Political types are always looking for some measurement, some sign that they are succeeding (or failing.)

Billmon noted this back in October in an interesting post on Rumsfeld’s angst at being unable to assess success or failure in the WOT:

Above all, Rumsfeld cries out for “metrics” that can be used to measure progress in such a war:

“Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror,” he wrote. “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”

Billmon makes the obvious comparison between Rummy and the most recent war criminal sec-def, Robert McNamara, concluding:

The same mindset also spawned McNamara’s preferred metric: the infamous “body count.” In that earlier, more naive, era, it hadn’t yet occurred to management theorists that numeric targets can quickly become bureaucratic substitutes for real objectives, such as winning wars. So McNamara (and the military) had to learn it the hard way, as industrious field officers dispatched soldiers to count graves in Vietnamese civilian cemetaries in order to hit their weekly numbers.

I’m not sure what the equivalent might be today, although Rumsfeld’s memo points in a possible direction when it suggests the creation of a private foundation that could fund “moderate” madrassas (Islamic schools) to counteract the radical ones. Perhaps someday we’ll have a “moderate student count,” in which hard-pressed CIA officers dispatch agents to count child laborers in Pakistani sweat shops in order to hit their weekly numbers.

It looks to me as if they found a simpler metric than that. Like the mediocre, hack bureaucrats they are, they decided that they would guage success or failure — certainly they would report to the White House success or failure — based upon the sheer numbers of raids, arrests, interrogations, reports, confessions and breakdowns achieved, regardless of whether any of it resulted in good intel or enhanced security anywhere.

This was the only metric they could conceive of and in order to get those numbers up they had to detain large numbers of innocent people and torture them for false information to fill the endless reports of success on the ground in Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq. They could hoist up a huge pile of paper in a meeting with their president and say, “look at how much intelligence we’re getting. We’re really getting somewhere.”

McNamara quotes TS Eliot at the end of The Fog Of War:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

Well, not everybody apparently. Thirty years after the hell of Vietnam, it’s the same shit, different fools. Lyndon Johnson is laughing his ass off in hell.

It’s Here Already!

Take a look at the new Ronald Reagan stamp.

Spin Out

Commenter Ras_Nesta alerted me to some rather testy exchanges in this morning’s gaggle.

Q Scott, you said there is a misperception of what the commission said on ties to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, let me ask you this, did this administration commit any mistakes? Are you — in other words, are you considered a perfect government?

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m sorry? Do you consider what?

Q A perfect government. I mean you are not accepting any —

MR. McCLELLAN: You’re talking about the government in Iraq?

Q No, this government — the government of President George W. Bush.

Q You’re perfect.

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m sure that there are mistakes that are made, but talking about Iraq and talking about the economy and those decisions, those policy decisions were the right decisions. Let’s go to those issues. Just a general question about any mistakes —

Q As we’re talking about Iraq —

MR. McCLELLAN: The decision to go into Iraq was the right decision. We stand firmly behind it because it made the world a safer and better place, and it’s going to make America more secure.

Q You probably don’t see the headlines around the world today —

MR. McCLELLAN: If you have a specific — if you have a specific question, I’m glad to address it.

Q But you don’t think the commission is right with its conclusion about there is any — any ties between terrorism, al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, they talked about — they talked about the ties. They talked about the contacts between al Qaeda and the regime in Iraq. And they pointed out some of those high-level contacts that occurred. We pointed out some of those high-level contacts that occurred through Secretary Powell, and through Director Tenet. It’s perfectly consistent.

Q Scott, I’ve got a specific question. Who are the doom and gloomers to whom you are referring here on the economy? And by name?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think you hear from them. You know exactly who they are. They’re those who try to talk down the economy when the economy is moving in the right direction. We have overcome significant challenges over the last few years. And the economy is shifting into a higher gear.

Q We’ve already heard you say that. But I’m just wondering, you and your associates sitting over here like to lecture us about, who are you referring to when you mention critics or observers or whatever, so we’re asking you: Who are these pessimists?

MR. McCLELLAN: Peter —

Q I’m talking specifics. What are specific names?

MR. McCLELLAN: And, Peter, these people are well known. All you have to go is go and look and read the paper, or watch the news.

Q Well, give us a name here, Scott.

Does anyone know who Peter is? I’d like to buy the man a drink.

Flounder (as Susan calls him) went on to repeat the new mantra:

R. McCLELLAN: The President is going to continue to talk about his optimistic, positive vision for this country and how we can build upon the policies that we have implemented to get our economy growing stronger. Our economy is growing stronger every day. New jobs are being created. This administration acted decisively to get our economy out of a recession and get it growing stronger. And all you have to do is look at the news, and you’ll see who those individuals are.

Don’t worry, be happy.

Is this is some lameass, obvious, “morning in America” bullshit, or what? The best they can come up with is some warmed over 20 year old bullshit from a dead man and it isn’t even half true. Why not “chicken in every pot,” it’s more fitting.

An entire week of wall to wall slurpy Republican soul kissing and the best Bush could pull out of it was a 3 point bounce? Let’s not kid ourselves, it may be 1984 again, but it’s Orwell’s version this time, not Ronnie’s.

Fool Me 2,653 Times…

Peter Beinert has some second thoughts about trusting Republicans.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, I tried hard not to be partisan. I distrusted the Bush administration and feared it would be politically empowered by the war. But such thoughts felt petty and limited at such an important time. And so I evaluated the arguments for war on their merits, irrespective of my feelings about the people making them. Doing so made me feel superior to the Democrats, who, I suspected, would have supported an Iraq war waged by Al Gore, and to the Republicans, who had opposed the Kosovo war because it was waged by Bill Clinton.

But, in retrospect, my efforts not to be limited proved limiting. Partisanship, it turned out, was an extremely useful analytical tool in understanding the Iraq war. Had I not tried so hard to cleanse myself of it, I might have seen some of the war’s problems earlier than I did.

This was a partisan war. By partisan, I don’t mean that it was led by Republicans. It was partisan in the sense that the people who formulated it prized group loyalty above all else. They divided the world, the country, and even their own administration into people who could be trusted and people who could not. And, unfortunately, the people who could be trusted knew much less about how to build democracy in Iraq than the people who could not.

[…]

For conservatives, the right lesson of Iraq is that, if you apply a loyalty test to this country’s best sources of knowledge–the academy, the press, and the government itself–you’ll lose the war on terrorism through sheer ignorance. For liberals, the lesson is to see conservatives as they are, not as you’d like them to be. I’ll try to remember it next time.

For some of us, it was enough to watch the “conservatives” engage in a decade long smear campaign, impeach a president over a private sexual matter and then steal an election to prove that they are “not as we’d like them to be.” But, those were such fun times for the press, when they all got to pretend like they were happenin’— talkin’ ’bout the nasty ‘n shit, all the while cluck clucking like a bunch of women’s temperence workers over the horrors of sexual incontinence. They just couldn’t bear to see the party end. The deification of Bush after 9/11 was just the latest chapter in their lazy acceptance of GOP political propaganda.

It was, in fact, another example of that which Beinert finally realized perpetuated the failure in Iraq — myopic, group loyalty so profoundly disdainful of anyone outside of it that they cannot be trusted to even carry out their own plans successfully. The modern GOP lives in a little world of its own, made even more parochial by the advent of its own media infrastructure. The people who are in charge are second rate thinkers who rose to the top because the pool was so small to begin with.

In America today, there is no such thing as bipartisanship. It didn’t have to be this way, but it is. The Democrats compromised with the other side until they came this close to selling their souls and got nothing but the boot on the neck in return. They can go no further.

And the press actually did sell its soul for some cheap, tabloid thrills and a puerile story line about Democratic weakness and Republican strength. It’s way past time for them to rub the cobwebs from their eyes and recognize their snooty superiority is simply an excuse for applying a lazy “he said she said” journalistic ethic so they could go home early and chatter about the perfidy of politicians — who are, in their minds, all alike.

After the last decade, it’s quite obvious they are not.

Another Snootfull ‘O Freedom

A suicide car bomb in central Baghdad ripped into a throng of men waiting at a recruiting station to sign up for the new Iraqi army today, killing at least 35 people and wounding at least 138, hospital officials said.

[…]

The explosion at the army recruiting station in Baghdad caused by artillery shells packed into a car raised questions about whether the Americans and Iraqi security forces could even protect men willing to sign up.

Saddam was a madman who tortured and gassed his own people and all, but nobody ever said he didn’t have some good ideas:

Iraq’s new defense minister, Hazim al-Shaalan, promised a bloody crackdown on the insurgents. “We will cut off their hands and behead them,” he said.

The deputy United States defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, who is visiting Iraq, suggested that Iraq’s security forces were still far from being able to patrol the country alone and would need “substantial help” for some time, Reuters reported.

Much more “help” from us and Iraq is going to look like the set of a Mad Max movie.

Would mayhem be considered as severely painful as organ failure, I wonder? That wasn’t discussed specifically in the torture memos so we can’t really be sure. But, it would certainly be justified under the “necessity” clause of Iraq’s new constitution (modeled after ours, of course) in which the president can do whatever he wants whenever he thinks it’s necessary. Maybe a few of those bad insurgency apples would think twice about doing this kind of thing if they lost a hand or two.

Saddam, after all, had great success with the cutting off of ears.