Month: March 2006

Captain Morgan’s First Lieutenant

by digby

I’m sure most of you caught this a couple of days ago, but in case you didn’t, this round of Golden Wingers is excellent. This only a runner up:

Chickenhawk grunt Christopher Hitchens finally gives himself the promotion he deserves:

Up until now, I have resisted all urges to assume the mantle of generalship and to describe how I personally would have waged a campaign to liberate Iraq.

General Hitch – after consulting with his trusted military advisor, Captain Morgan – outlines his plan of attack:

I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.

Optionally, until I black out. Either one.

Click the link to see the winner (and find out why liberals hate their mommies.)

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Mudcat Love

by digby

It’s clear that Chris Matthews sees the immigration issue as another opportunity to crawl up the GOP codpiece and prove his manly manliness. Yesterday he not only had that silly Dukes of Hazard caricature Mudcat “I call ’em illegal aliens” Saunders on, he said this:

MATTHEWS: Well, the fact is, Bob, it’s not just — and Kate — it’s not just Republicans who don’t like illegal immigration. Seventy-one percent of the country say it’s their number one concern. They want to stop illegal immigration. These are regular Americans. They’re not right-wingers. And they think we ought to have a border.

I don’t know how many times this guy has to twist poll numbers before someone calls a doctor and has him tested for some sort of cognitive disorder. Media Matters corrects this massively ill informed bullshit:

Matthews was apparently distorting a March 10-13 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that found that 71 percent of respondents would be “more likely … to vote for a candidate for Congress” who “[f]avors tighter controls on illegal immigration.”

In a March 9-12 CBS News poll, 4 percent of respondents identified immigration as “the most important problem facing this country today.” And a January 26-29 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 9 percent of respondent thought that illegal immigration “should be the top priority for the federal government.”

I’m sure that with all the legislation, hysterical coverage and massive protests that it has become “number one” to more people lately, but I will be very surprised if it comes even close to being the number one issue any time soon. This country has a lot of problems.

Matthews could have illuminated this debate if he had noted that according to the latest Democracy Corps poll, the single most important foreign policy issue is globalization and outsourcing. It’s more important than terrorism and Iraq. I found that surprising. It explains why there is so much anxiety over immigration right now. The threat of cheap foreign labor is very real to people, they feel powerless to stop it, and the most immediate face of it is low wage Latino migration to the US.

The forces shaping this are massive and it cannot be finessed by crude nativist rhetoric no matter how much people want to run populist campaigns and are tempted to pull out that well-worn playbook. The sharp feelings about immigration right now are a symptom of something much bigger and dislocating than latino day laborers — and it seems that on some level, the public knows it. It’s possible that politicians can cynically divert voters’ angst over globalization by stoking anti-immigrant fervor, but it appears to me that it would be a short term solution at best. Deporting every illegal immigrant and putting up a 25 foot wall won’t solve this problem. Globalization will continue apace, people will still want to buy massive quantities of cheap disposable stuff and working people are going to be squeezed.

Matthews is a simpleton as we all know, and often misstates basic facts. But he and his new idol Mudcat (who Chris practically blew right on camera)are talking a very aggressive short game with immigration and it’s more irritating than usual. I sincerely hope that he is not parroting the establishment CW he’s hearing over cocktail weenies or this issue is going to turn into a xenophobic free for all and leave the real issues that are making Americans uneasy about immigration unaddressed — just as the corporate establishment hopes it does.

Update: I just watched Matthews say that 90% of Americans in small towns in California are upset because “they didn’t move to Mexico, Mexico moved to them.” “Americans” have had it up to here with Mexican culture, apparently.

It was even too much for Hugh Hewitt, wingnut extraordinaire, who happens to be from Orange County once the most conservative region in California. His home town, Santa Ana, has a 76% Latino population. Hewitt, as a California Republican, knows very well that it is political suicide to make such blatant, xenophobic arguments and he wanted nothing to do with them.

I think it is EXTREMELY important, for this as well as many other reasons, that we make it very, very clear that Chris Matthews is not a Democrat. He’s a Republican:

MATTHEWS: People go to vote this November, you know this as well. When I go to vote, I know who my congressperson is. And I always voted for this woman out in Maryland for years, because I know her and like her, a moderate Republican. I always voted for her. Then if I knew somebody running against her personally, I’d vote for them.

It’s the way I look at a lot of the elections. I think Bush is OK the first time, then he changed I thought, so I didn‘t like him the second time. I‘m a thinker about this. Or do people just vote the party who my parents voted.

He’s a thinker, all right. A Republican thinker.

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by digby

Those of us who live in California have always known that Howard Kaloogian is a clown. It’s nice to see that he’s getting the national exposure he deserves.

On The Future Of Afghanistan

by tristero

In the comments to my recent post on Afghanistan, I wrote,

I have no idea what the Taliban’s future is, but I do know Afghanistan’s.

Violence bordering on sheer anarchy. Religious extremism. The oppression of women. Heartbreakingly-deep poverty.

In response, commenter gilpead wrote:

To paraphrase:

They’re a bunch of wogs who are, due to their backwardness, doomed to a future of misery. Afghanistan can never, ever join the community of nations because the country as a whole is a cesspool of violence and oppression and the poor savages are incapable of ever changing the way things are done”

I’ve decided to respond to this rather than ignore it and to respond in a serious fashion. *

Dear gilpead,

I’m afraid your paraphrase of my remarks is not accurate, both in the details about my remarks or in the intent behind them.

I have never used the term “wog” in my life. In fact, I don’t even know what it means.

I do not believe Afghans are “backwards” and never said so. I have no idea what you mean by that.

I believe that the future for Afghanistan is miserable, the future being defined as “over the next five years.” That is a realistic assessment based upon the instability of the present situation and the lack of a serious commitment by the US and the international community to assist the Afghans in overcoming very real, and very serious problems. No one can predict with any degree of accuracy where Afghanistan will be much beyond five years, but if you insist, I would side with those who feel that over the next ten years, the obstacles will make it excessively difficult for there to be much improvement over the present, and with tremendous potential for things to get a lot worse.

Afghanistan can never “join” the community of nations, because it already is a part of that community. The question is whether Afghanistan can join the community of nations which offers its citizens a life free of warlords, fundamentalism, chronic terrorism, and gut-wrenching poverty. Given the lack of interest on the part of other nations, including the US, to help in a truly serious way, the answer is “not very likely.” To hope that Afghanistan can pull itself up by its own bootstraps is to hope for the impossible. They need help. And they are not getting anywhere near enough.

Yes, the country (except within the circle of safety created by Karzai’s bodyguards) is rife with oppression and violence. I reject the phrase “as a whole” because it too vague, if not meaningless. I’m sure there are plenty of places that have not been scarred by violence. The same is true of Iraq. And Sierra Leone. The problem is that there is far more violence and oppression within Afghanistan’s borders than is compatible, in many, many places, with a minimum sense of safety.

I don’t know what you mean by the term “poor savages.” I have no idea what you’re talking about because I neither use such language or understand why anyone would.

Again, the Afghans require the determined, and sensible, longtime assistance of other nations to help rebuild their country. Without it, the situation will remain catastrophic and get worse. It is nothing in “the character of the Afghan people” that compels this. A United States in as bad a shape as Afghanistan would require an equal amount of help.

I have no idea what you mean by a phrase as vague and crude as “changing the way things are done.” A country is not a machine. Nor, as the world once again has learned, can any country be compelled into democracy by invasion, conquest, or coercion EXCEPT under very specific circumstances which were not the circumstances in either Iran or Iraq pre-invasion. For details, go to ceip.org and search for articles on nation-building, democracy after invasion, and the like.

LIke any sane human being, the Taliban and their ideas disgust me. But I fail to see where overthrowing the Taliban to replace it with anarchy, violence, poverty and slaughter that can -and will -be blamed directly on the United States is any improvement. The victims of the horrors may be slightly different, but the intensity, even if slightly lessened, will be laid at your feet, and mine.

Afghanistan fascinates me – the people, the culture, the architecture and music, and the geology. I would love to visit someday but I’m afraid I’ll never get there. That’s merely a personal disappointment, but the tragedy is that the greatness of Afghanistan has been so beaten up and battered that without serious, competent, help – which the Bush administration has proved over and over it is simply incapable of providing – that greatness will be beyond serious recovery for several generations or longer.

One last comment. I assume you will take what I’ve written here, caricature it, and proceed to refute the caricature. Doing so is your prerogative. Until George W. Bush, however, people who lived their lives within a cartoon reality usually didn’t hold places of serious influence within the US government. Sure, Cheney and Rumsfeld were paid with my tax dollars at an earlier time, but their boss knew better than to mistake their screwiest ideas as the products of rational deliberation on foreign policy.

To paraphrase, believe whatever you want. Just stay out of my government and take your hallucinating friends with you.

Love,

tristero

*A few words of explanation: I chose to respond not because I think gilpead had even an inkling of a good point, but because gilpead’s arguments are standard neo-conservative idealism of the sort Wolfowitz used to intimidate anyone who dared who talked reason to him or his fellows**, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to take those kinds of remarks seriously. Perhaps, some useful ways to debunk them might come out of it or better yet, spark someone else’s mind to come up with something far more effective.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no interest in “engaging” trolls, but I do have a lot of interest in developing arguments and rhetoric that can be used to refute the influential people from whom the trolls steal – men like Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Kristol, HItchens and even Packer (should he fall prey once again to the temptations of his narcissistic, naive idealism).

**Wolfowitz at Georgetown University October 31, 2003::

“We hate your policies. We are tired of being feared and hated by the world,” Ruthie Coffman (SFS201906) said, also calling Wolfowitz’s policies “deplorable.”

The killing of innocents is not the solution but rather the problem,” she said.

“I would infer that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power,” Wolfowitz responded.”War is ugly,” he said, “but the alternative is far worse.”

Afghanistan

by tristero

It seems that when the Taliban announced there would be “a new offensive this year,” they meant it:

Taliban militants launched a rare attack on a coalition base in southern Afghanistan Wednesday, killing an American and a Canadian soldier and sparking fierce U.S.-led retaliation that left 32 insurgents dead in the bloodiest fighting in months.

The attack came a day after at least 10 people were killed in two separate roadside bombings and reflected a growing intensity of militant assaults after the Taliban warned of a renewed offensive this year.

”Over the last five or six weeks there have been various proven attacks mainly at night by the Taliban on that base, but I think it is fair to say this is the largest we have seen thus far,” British spokesman Col. Chris Vernon told reporters in Kandahar.

The battle began hours after Taliban insurgents ambushed an Afghan supply convoy as it returned to the remote forward operating base late Tuesday, killing eight Afghan soldiers, Vernon said.

Odds and Ends

by tristero

Many of these come via the wonderful Cursor

Ken Mehlman thinks Republican candidates should align themselves with Bush. I agree. That way it will be that much easier to brand the entire Republican party “incompetent.”

No question about it: Scalia is losing it. First he had the lack of class to write a letter of complaint to the Boston Herald for reporting his rude gesture. And he wrote in part:

From watching too many episodes of the Sopranos, your staff seems to have acquired the belief that any Sicilian gesture is obscene – especially when made by an ‘Italian jurist.’ (I am, by the way, an American jurist.)”

In fact, the article called him an “Italian-American jurist.” [Scroll down. Original available only to susbcribers]Unfortunately for the country, his jurisprudence is just as sloppy and immature as his correspondence. [UPDATE: A commenter disputes my assertion that Scalia is sloppy (but not that he’s immature) because the Web version of the article reads as Scalia describes. In comments, at 3.30.06 2:37 am, I respond by examining Scalia’s letter in the light of this discrepancy. I argue that if we assume Scalia read only the online version, then a different part of Scalia’s letter is sloppy.]

[Update: Atrios posted the Boston Herald photograph of Scalia flipping the bird at the camera. When you look at it, remember: You are looking at a Supreme Court Justice. In a few moments, and while still in church, he will say, “Fuck you.”]

Does anyone other than your humble blogger find the headline “Brain drain hits Homeland Security” incredibly funny, in a “I-have-to-laugh-or-I’d-have-to-cry” kind of way?

Howard Kaloogian, he who can’t (or his staff who can’t), tell the difference between Baghdad and an Istanbul suburb, is quite an asshole.

Want to guess who is responsible for all the violence in Iraq? Wrong! It’s not the Clintons! Well, not yet anyway. But it’s only a matter of time before some wingnut will say that in fact, had Clinton invaded Iraq when urged to by PNAC, then the utterly incompetent Bush wouldn’t have been forced to screw up so badly.

[Update: Scalia’s deployment of exaggeration and straw man in his letter looks like a possible geoffy. Amazing how often Scalia seems to do this.]

Live Symphony Recordings On iTunes

by tristero

I don’t know how many other orchestras or other music groups are doing this yet, but this is just a great idea that’s long overdue. Live New York Philharmonic performances of the last three Mozart symphonies on iTunes. Ten bucks for all three.

By the way, if you folks know of similar live concert offerings, drop a note into comments with a link and I’ll post the first 25 here. In the interest Let’s limit the list to live classical music and jazz. You know, things like live La Scala concerts, Cleveland Orchestra, broadcasts of Kronos, Anthony Braxton.

Update below

Jeffie Alert

by digby

Bush just pulled a honker of a Jeffie.

Asked about his relationship with Pootie-poot, he rambled on about how he thinks it’s important that he can talk to him face to face. Then he said:

“Some say we shouldn’t go to the G8. I disagree…”

Has anyone heard of this movement to withdraw from the G8? I’ve heard people say that we should purge the G8 of cheese eating surrender monkeys, but this is news to me.

In fact his entire commentary is one long jeffie about “some” who have isolationist tendencies and “some” who want to withdraw within our borders and some who don’t think others can govern themselves. He’s on a roll.

“I’ll be unabash-ed [yep, he pronounced it that way — very Shakespearean of him] about trying to work for more free societies. I believe that’s the calling of the 21st century. I MEANT WHAT I SAID, when I said in the 21st century the goal of the US should be to end tyranny!”

He was really wound up by that point, hunched all the way over the podium, red-faced, pointing his finger at the audience. You know, the hectoring, drunken father bit.

This was good:

“China has recently read the book on Mao.(???) It’s an amazing history of a couple of things, one of which was how fooled the world was — and how brutal the country was.”

Sounds like five years into his presidency Junior finally cracked a high school history book. Good for him, seeing as he has a degree in history from Yale.

But civics was never his strong point. Nor economics. Clearly, the 7th grade primers they gave him got his mind all confused ‘n stuff:

“One of the most pure forms of democracy is the marketplace, the demand causes something to happen. Excess demand causes prices to go up and vice versa and that stands in contrast to governments that set prices and try to control demand.”

Reminder: this is the most powerful man in the world. Can anyone still say it doesn’t matter if the president is intelligent?

Update: Oooops. Apparently “some” have said the US should boycot the G8 becuase of the charge that Russia gave US war plans to Saddam. My bad:

Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said on ”Face The Nation” that if it turns out to be true, the United States should review its relationship with Russia and whether to attend the G8 summit in St. Petersburg this summer.

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Progress

by digby

On Fox this morning:

Bill Hemmer just back from Iraq showing off awsome butch pics of himself all dressed up in uniform and lookin’ hot, hot, hot. (The barbie doll who “interviewed” him introduced the segment with “you got to hang out with the marines!”)

Lots of good news over there. Lots. He ran some tape of an earlier story that went something like this:

We’re in a “cop-shop” outside Falluja. A year ago, they went out on patrol for three hours. Later it was one hour. Then seven minutes. Now they can’t get them to go out at all.

But then again, the building wasn’t even here a year ago, so there is progress.

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Update below

Coincidence I’m Sure

by digby

Garance Franke-Ruta would be breaking her new rule against linking to (presumed to be corrupt) pseedonymous bloggers like me if she linked to my post from last night on Ramesh Ponnuru’s “Party Of Death,” but I can certainly link to her post from this morning which makes exactly the same observation more than twelve hours later.

It’s always possible that a reader just happened to have made the same extremely obscure observation at roughly the same time I did. It can happen. Or it could be that the observant reader read my post and did not credit me when he or she sent it to Franke-Ruta. Normally I would assume the second and let it go at that. Unfortunately, I can’t help but wonder now if Franke-Ruta believes her new policy allows her not to credit pseeudonymous work, which would make her little better than Ben Domenech. Let’s hope that’s not the case.

Disclaimer: I haven’t been paid by any political entity to write that or anything else. Ever. And my real name is Spartacus.

Update: Franke-Ruta forwarded an e-mail containing the tip, which made no mention of my post. As I wrote, it is entirely possible that someone out there came up with that exact obscure observation at the same time. Nothing is impossible. It’s also, considering the time of the e-mail, possible that the person read my post and didn’t credit it. It happens all the time.

My point, however, is that those of us who are pseudonymous are naturally going to have to be vigilant about such things with people who have a blanket policy of refusing to link to us. Psuedonymous or not, I have to protect myself. When someone refuses on principle to link to me and then publishes items that could be attributed to my work, I can’t just automatically chalk that up to coincidence as I normally would.

Franke-Ruta didn’t much like having her integrity called into question on this and I can’t say I blame her. I’m not too crazy about having mine impugned either.

Update II: The e-mailer had not read my post. In fact, he e-mailed me the same tip although I had already written my piece and posted it moments before, which he did not see. As it happens I informed him of the Garance Franke-Ruta connection in a return post, at which point he tipped her to the information.

So, Garance Franke-Ruta is in the clear, as is her e-mailer who independently found the same item that I did. It’s not pleasant being so suspicious of someone whose work I’ve been following for years and who has never shown the least tendency toward corruption. I hate when that happens.

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