Month: December 2006

In 2005, The Per Capita Income Of Kenya Was US $463

by tristero

So sez Centre for Business Information in Kenya. Now, I’m no economist, and I understand one can quibble about how useful per capita income is when comparing economies. Even so, a pci of $463 is a truly sobering figure for those of us in the USA, where a penthouse apartment can set you back as much as $70 million (pending board approval, of course) and where our own pci is $42, 000

So what is the vital issue that the evangelicals of Kenya plan to focus on next year? You guessed it:

Leaders of Kenya’s Pentecostal congregation, with six million adherents, want the human fossils [in Kenya’s National Museum, some of the most important fossils in tracing the evolution of hominids to modern Homo Sapiens] de-emphasized.

“The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact,” said Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, head of the largest Pentecostal church in Kenya, the Christ is the Answer Ministries.

“Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory,” the bishop said.

Bishop Adoyo said all the country’s churches would unite to force the museum to change its focus when it reopens after eighteen months of renovations in June 2007. “We will write to them, we will call them, we will make sure our people know about this, and we will see what we can do to make our voice known,” he said.

Dear Bishop Adoyo, If you ever get tired fighting the good fight in Kenya, Move here! I’m sure you’ll find a really great job that pays a lot more than the price of a single iPod, give or take.

Hey, Hey, Joe and J

by digby

So Holy Joe backed St John McCain’s call for more troops this morning. If Bush agrees, which I think is possible considering his temperament and history, then they can be the Johnson and McNamara of 2008.

Newsweek reports:

Since the election, the Arizona senator has pushed for more, not fewer, troops in the Iraq conflict, claiming “without additional ground forces we will not win this war.” It’s a striking stance for a man considered to be the front runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, considering the American public’s growing impatience for the end of the war. Even in conservative New Hampshire, 38 percent of voters now support bringing troops “home ASAP,” according to the most recent Granite State poll. South Carolina, where a tough defeat ended McCain’s 2000 campaign, will play an even more influential role in 2008 thanks to early placement in the primary calendar. There, too, Republican voters are growing unhappy with the war. “People are wondering how long this is going to go on,” says Buddy Witherspoon, a Republican National Committeeman from Columbia. “I don’t think a proposal like that is going to get McCain any votes down here.”

Privately, some McCain supporters have begun to worry that the senator’s hard line on the war may turn off the moderate, independent-minded voters who’ve long formed the bedrock of his primary support. “We lost independents,” says one campaign adviser, who asked for anonymity discussing the politics of national security. “McCain will have to get them back to win, or at least convince them to trust him.”

Still, some members of McCain’s inner circle are convinced the position could actually work to his advantage—reminding independents of the maverick they fell in love with in 2000. In a 2008 campaign, aides say, the senator would accentuate his differences with the Bush administration over management of the Iraq occupation, stressing his early criticism of ousted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the persistent call for more troops. The hope, the campaign adviser says, is that even antiwar voters will gradually come to accept the position as “a long-term stand based on principle.”

I have written about this before. The McCain Iraq escalation plan is a very dicey proposition, but not necessarily for the reasons stated in that article. He’s making some assumptions about the state of play in 2008, not how voters are thinking in 2006. If there is no escalation and things continue to disintegrate, which it will no matter what we do, it allows McCain to run against both Bush and the Democrats (as any GOP candidate will have to do) and say that if they’d followed his advice we would have won the war. The Democrat will be left with “we should have admitted that we lost two years ago” which is not exactly a stirring refrain. The lines are already being drawn between the cowardly Dems who urged a pullout and the brave Republicans who did their best and were betrayed by the vast hippie conspiracy. Nobody will be better positioned to creatively use that argument for himself than McCain if he can say that he had the “winning” plan and nobody listened.

I realize that is an absurd position. But when you’re talking about presidential politics it’s exactly the kind of position that can win. I think it’s a very smart move.

However, if the McCain Iraq escalation plan is actually gaining ground, as it seems to be, with his exact request for 20,000 troops being bandied about by the Pentagon and others, then perhaps McCain is going to see his plan put into action rather than have it as a conveniently theoretical alternate reality. As I said before, I don’t want to see any more troops sent over to that meat grinder. But if it happens, it’s going to mess up McCain, big time.

If he goes into ’08 being the guy who escalated the war when we were about to end it and it didn’t work, he’s got a problem. If it remains theoretical, he may be able to get away with it by appealing to American’s need to believe that we would have won if only we’d done it right. Nobody should delude themselves into thinking that many Americans aren’t going to find that appealing. In America “losing” must be blamed on someone and firmly establishing the other side as being responsible is going to be the number one job of both parties and each individual candidate over the next two years. It isn’t going to be pretty.

St John and Holy Joe are pushing to send more troops to their deaths for cynical political reasons. They are betting that Bush won’t do what they want him to do. I certainly hope they don’t send any more soldiers over there to get killed. But it would probably be better for the Democrats if they did.

If Bush doesn’t do the wrong thing this one time then the Dems had better figure out another way to block his play.

*tristero muses below about another theory — that Bush will withdraw to the borders. St John would drop to his knees and thank the good lord Jesus and Allah too is Bush were kind and generous enough to let that happen. The last thing he wants is for Bush to actually follow his advice.

I realize that it is also cynical for me to even be considering the political implications in all the horrible options. But in my view Bush is going nowhere, no matter what Uncle Jimmie and the boys or anybody else says. It’s just not in his nature — or Cheney’s. So what Democrats do about the war are largely a hypothetical questions to do with the 2008 election. I wish I could believe that someone could make George W. Bush or Joe Lieberman see reason on this but it’s not going to happen. All that’s left is who gets the blame.

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Bush Exceeds Expectations. Again.

by tristero

A while ago (I’ll get the links later), I took a lot of flak from folks when I opined that stay or leave wouldn’t matter very much ’cause Bush would find a way to fuck up either action beyond everyone’s wildest imaginings. What got everyone so steamed was the assumption that somehow I was going all McCain on you. In vain I protested that I was not in way endorsing the idea the troops stay. Of course I don’t. I was simply talking about how spectacularly incompetent Bush was.

But I felt quite certain that if Bush agreed to a withdrawal, he would find a way to do it that would make matters far worse. Exactly how he could manage such an astonishing feat I had no idea, Torch Najaf? Destroy Fallujah again? Nevertheless, I know this president. I knew he was capable of making a troop withdrawal as insane an action as all his others.

It looks like I may be right, unfortunately:

President Bush is weighing a range of options in Iraq, including a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from violence-plagued cities and a troop buildup near the Iranian and Syrian borders, his top security aide said today.

Do I have to spell out what’s so awful about this? Ok, I suppose I do.

Since late this spring, Seymour Hersh has been publishing article after article detailing behind the scenes plan for nuclear war with Iran. That’s right, nuclear war with Iran. Sometime around April, there was a revolt among the US generals who insisted that the nuclear option be removed from discussions about military options re: Iran before they would agree to discuss them. Only after the generals went semi-public did the Administration back down and take the nuclear option out of discussion. Now if you believe Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld stopped jonesing – and planning – for the Big Bang on Iran, you’re a fool. But ok, at least officially, active planning to hit Iran continued, but no nukes (wink, wink).

Recently, Hersh reported after the November election that as far as Cheney was concerned, the Bush administration will simply circumvent Congress if he, Cheney, deems it necessary to whack Iran or Syria. And believe me, he does so deem it necessary.

Soooo, we come to today. The Iraqi civil war that Bush/Iraq ignited has descended, as many said it would, to close to utter anarchy. And the US, weakened -as Kurtz so helpfully informed us – by all those Democrats who want America to “lose” is demanding withdrawal. And lo and behold, Emperor George listens to his subjects. We will given them withdrawal.

Now, no one said where they wanted the troops withdrawn to. Surely you didn’t expect Bush to ship them all to Honolulu and spend the rest of their service sipping Mai Tais and lowering their precious supply of oxytocin engaging in fornication with the locals, now did you?

So Americans want withdrawal? They’re getting withdrawal. To the Syrian and Iranian borders. Where else?

Check it out: Bush will tell us, as he always has, that the Iranians and/or the Syrians – it depends on which day it is as to who’s to blame – are the ones doing all the mischief in the Middle East. “That’s why I withdrew ’em!” You can see the smirk, can’t you, as he says he’s just doing what we wanted in the best way he sees fit. And no doubt, the soldiers will be very useful interdicting the clotted mass of terrorists sneaking over the borders.

But here’s the genius of it. If tensions rise maybe – say, if Iranians foolishly get alarmed that American troops are massing on the border after nine months of rumors of an American nuclear attack, and an Iranian sneezes a little too loudly – why how convenient! Before you can fake a bad Colonel Klink accent and mutter “blitzkrieg,” kaboom! That’s one small step for some troops, one more insane new war for a total moron and a horrified world.

Face it, ladies, gentlemen, and Republicans. When it comes to malicious incompetence, they broke the mold when it comes to 43, the Florence Foster Jenkins of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave (with profuse apologies to the dear lady).

PS I hope you realize I’m not whining or angry that folks let me have it when I said it didn’t matter whether the US withdrew or not as long as Bush was in charge, ’cause he’d fuck it up either way. I’m glad you did, I pay close attention to when you disagree, I learn a lot when you do, and I try my best not to take the insults that accompany disagreements personally, even if they were meant to be.

Just don’t call me “Upstart!” Ever. That would be…war.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Articulating The Popular Rage-The Mad Prophecies of Paddy C.

By Dennis Hartley

I couldn’t take it anymore…after viewing the first few episodes of NBC’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, I got up off my couch, switched off the DVR, went to my DVD shelf and made my annual pilgrimage back to The Source-Sidney Lumet’s Network . Back in 1976, this “satire” made us chuckle with its incredulous conceit-the story of a “fictional” TV network who hits the ratings g-spot with a nightly newscast turned variety hour, anchored by a self-proclaimed “angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisy of our time”. Now, 30 years later, it plays like a documentary (denouncing the hypocrisy of our time). The oft-noted prescience of the infinitely quotable Paddy Chayefsky screenplay goes much deeper than merely prophesizing the onslaught of news-as-entertainment (and its evil spawn, “reality” television)-it’s a blueprint for our age. In the opening scene, drunken buddies Peter Finch (as Howard Beale, respected news anchor soon to suffer a complete mental breakdown and morph into “the mad prophet of the airwaves”) and William Holden (as Max Shumacher, head of news division for the fictional “UBS” network) riff cynically on an imaginary pitch for a surefire news rating booster-“Real live suicides, murders, executions-we’ll call it The Death Hour.” Funny punch line back in 1976. Sadly, in 2006, we call it “The Nancy Grace Show”.

Later in the film, when the corporate “hatchet man” for “CCA” the network’s parent company (brilliantly played by Robert Duvall) barks “We’re not a respectable network, we’re a whorehouse”, one can not help but flash on the Fox network. Faye Dunaway steals all of her scenes as Diana Christenson, the completely soulless, ratings obsessed head of development who comes up with the idea to turn Beale’s mental illness into revenue. The most famous scene, of course is Beale’s cheerleading “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” tirade, a call to arms (borne from a “cleansing moment of clarity”) for viewers to turn off the tube, break the spell of their collective stupor, (literally) stick their heads out the window and make their voices heard. Uh, the “Blogosphere”, anyone? (It’s very astute of Digby to choose Beale’s image and an excerpt from that monologue for the “Hullabaloo” masthead). For me, the most defining scene in the film is between Howard Beale and Arthur Jensen (CEO of “CCA”-wonderfully played by Ned Beatty). Jensen is calling Beale on the carpet for publicly exposing a potential buyout of CCA by shadowy Arab investors. Cognizant that Beale is crazy as a loon, yet still a cash cow for the network, Jensen uses reverse psychology and hands him a new set of stone tablets from which to preach-the “corporate cosmology of Arthur Jensen”. The ensuing monologue is surely screenwriter Chayefsky’s finest moment, savagely funny and frighteningly true (accurately presaging the whole WTO/New World Order scenario). Required viewing!

Got Chayefsky? A few more I recommend: The Americanization of Emily, The Hospital and Altered States (although he had his name taken off in protest to director Ken Russell’s brutal script revisions, a few unmistakable “Paddy meltdowns” remain intact).

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Corruption, Cronyism and Incompetence

by digby

I sincerely hope that the Democrats in the House and Senate, no matter how much pressure they get to do otherwise from the “centrist” Mandarins and callow Kewl Kidz, go hard after the Bush administration on war profiteering, cronyism, corruption and waste. This is a rare opportunity for the Democrats to properly expose the Republicans for the crooks they are — and dispell the myth once and for all that they are the wise stewards of the taxpayers money.

With Rumsfeld’s ignominious and overdue downfall, and the new willingness, however tepid, among the press to look at the malfeasance in the pentagon, this may be the best opportunity they will have in decades to show just what a mistake it is to write blank chacks for military spending.

Jason Vest spells it out in this interesting new article about what Robert Gates is really facing at the Pentagon — and what he’s likely to do about it:

“Rumsfeld will have two legacies. One is the war—it’ll go down in history as much as Rumsfeld’s war as Bush’s war,” says Winslow Wheeler, a veteran former Senate staffer and investigator who now runs the Straus Military Reform Project at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Center for Defense Information. “But initially, people will probably miss the other legacy, which is the total mismanagement of the Pentagon. He inherited gigantic problems—ones that had nothing to do with Iraq—and made them worse. Iraq is only one part of Gates’ job. He’s going to have to undo a disastrous legacy on budget, program, and management issues.”

Despite all the at-odds-with-reality praise once lavished on Rumsfeld for his supposedly brilliant management style (2002’s The Rumsfeld Way: The Leadership Wisdom of a Battle-Hardened Maverick probably won’t be meeting the test of time), nonpartisan studies and government audits have long shown Rumsfeld to be a less-than-able Pentagon steward. In 2002, for example, Bush’s own White House Office of Management and Budget initiated the President’s Management Scorecard, a sort of quarterly report card assessing the top management of 25 major federal agencies and departments.

It uses a “Stoplight Scoring System,” with green for success, yellow for mixed results, and red for unsatisfactory. Wheeler notes that the DOD’s columns are more often defined by red and yellow than green. “The last time I checked, DOD ranked 24 out of 25—hardly a ringing endorsement,” Wheeler says.

Another solid indicator of the true nature of Rumsfeld’s legacy can be found in the files of the Government Accountability Office, the congressional investigative arm. Of the hundreds of GAO investigative reports devoted to the Defense Department on Rumsfeld’s watch, 25 deal in some way with Iraq. The other 861 have titles that, in many cases, indicate that Iraq wasn’t the only crisis crying out for Rumsfeld’s attention. Some pull no punches (“DOD Wastes Billions of Dollars through Poorly Structured Incentives”); others are, intentionally or not, drolly understated (“Hurricane Katrina: Better Plans and Exercises Need to Guide the Military’s Response to Catastrophic Natural Disasters”). It’s also hard not to be struck by the frequency with which subtle-yet-pointed phrases like “actions needed,” “issues require attention,” and “room for improvement” appear. (“Oversight,” for example, often appears in contexts that indicate a marked lack of the practice.)

Though the GAO organizes its reports by subject matter and agency, it also pinpoints “High Risk” areas, which it defines as activities with “greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” In this area, Wheeler notes, “Rumsfeld’s DOD has earned itself more GAO High Risk reports on failed management than any other federal agency.”

Read the whole thing. The level of corruption and mismanagement is so overwhelming that it’s almost impossible to believe that Republicans who built their careers screaming “tax and spend liberals!” have the nerve to even slink around the beltway like the lying weasels they are. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Being as he is a Bush crony himself, Gates has more than a few skeletons in his closet with their hands out, so I wouldn’t hold out any hope that he’s going to be a crusading good government reformer. Not to mention the fact that his history shows that he is more than willing to, shall we say, shade the truth. But he’s only in for two years anyway, so his only job will be to hold things together until Junior can be safely spirited back to Crawford and they can begin to re-write history without him around to muck it up. Nothing serious will get done until there is a new administration.

But these two years can serve a very important political purpose for the Democrats if they play their cards right. They have a once in a generation opportunity to shine the light on the Republican revolving door with the pentagon and defense contractors that makes the process so corrupt they don’t even bother to put the numbers in the budget anymore. The way to do this is to contrast this bloated cronyism with the lack of body armor for the troops, the treatment and benefits they receive when they get back, the unwillingness to properly spend money on homeland security and all the rest. Now is the moment to show that these people have been getting rich off the backs of Americans overseas and taxpayers at home.

This issue touches every aspect of the Republican cock-up of the last six years from the insistence on tax cuts for the rich in the face of wartime spending, to corruption, malfeasance and failure. It will illustrate better than any other issue the fact that Republicans in both the congress and the White House are incapable of seriously dealing with the threats we actually face and are willing to steal the treasury blind whenever they get their hands on the check book no matter what the circumstances. The polls showed that corruption was a salient issue for voters this time but they are only aware of the tip of the iceberg. Now is the time to tattoo this image on the foreheads of every Republican office holder in the country.

If they can use “acid, amnesty and abortion” against the Democrats for thirty years, the Democrats can use “corruption, cronyism and incompetence” against them. Every time they talk about Democrats “taxing and spending” the Democrats should counter with “taxing and stealing.” These people have shown over and over again that they will rob the citizens of this country blind and then blame it on black people or single mothers or the working man who didn’t happen to be born rich. The Dems have a chance to turn that back on them for a generation if they do this right.

There are huge problems awaiting the next president. Unbelievably huge problems. If this country elects another Republican he will be just as beholden to the same interests that spent five years getting filthy rich off the backs of dead people in Iraq and Afghanistan — and New Orleans. If over the next two years the Democrats can peel back the curtain on the deals that were made, the American people might just recognize that we cannot afford to allow any more of these con-artists and screw-ups to run the country.

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Mistah Kurtz, He Weird.

by tristero

Double-plus wow from Stanley Kurtz:

America’s growing contingent of post-60’s doves and the hope of military transformation are two sides of the same coin. The post-Vietnam rise of reflexive opposition to American military involvement has given birth to the dream of military transformation: war conducted by technology, with a “light footprint” from soldiers. So I “blame” both the administration’s over-hopefulness, and the very real domestic political constraints that make almost any American military venture difficult to undertake.

Check out that second sentence in the above excerpt, folks. Read it again and marvel. Kurtz is saying that the Rumsfeld doctrine – “a war conducted by technology, with a ‘light footprint’ from soldiers” – is, in fact, a response to liberals who made the American public, for the past 30 years in the wake of Vietnam, risk adverse. Put another way, using the rhetoric Kurtz’s pals applied to brand people like me “objectively pro-Saddam,” Rumsfeld and Bush are merely political compromisers who made the mistake of taking the “anti-war left” too seriously in making their plans for war.

I’m sure Kurtz thinks this is a thoughtful, nuanced, and balanced argument. After all, he’s assigning blame equally to an overly optimistic administration and an overly cautious public. And indeed, Kurtz thinks Josh Marshall’s criticism of his drivel is – such a thoughtful word! – “simplistic.” So let’s provide another example of Kurtz’s fair-minded, sophisticated “analysis:”

In fact, a huge chunk of the Democratic Party was against the Iraq war from the start, and would have opposed it even if–no, especially if–they thought that war could be won.

You read that right. Kurtz said many Democrats would have opposed the war because they thought the US would win it.

But maybe you think I am lifting Kurtz’s crap out of context, creating bullshit from pure gold. Ok. Here are the following sentences:

The doves hugely exaggerated even minor problems, such as those we faced in the first week or two of the shooting war. And as I noted in “Troop Dearth,” the polarization of debate during even the early and more successful phases of the war made it tough for the administration to admit errors on troop strength and correct course. But that doesn’t mean I hold the administration blameless. Far from it.

Yup, that’s what Kurtz wrote. He actually blames Bush’s penchant for suppressing bad news and his failure to admit mistakes on none other than we liberals who are way too quick to criticize him.

Now there are many ways to respond to this kind of garbage. One way is to do what Josh Marshall does, correctly note that Kurtz’s argument is beyond absurd, but argue with it anyway, patiently reminding everyone that Republicans completely controlled the government for nearly all of the past six years. To take his argument as serious enough to deserve refutation (and Josh does refute it with passion), however, provides Kurtz with gravitas he doesn’t deserve. It’s as if Neil de Grasse Tyson took time out to refute convincingly a clown who thinks the moon is made of green cheese – a significant portion of the DC punditocracy will start to smell something funny during a full moon. Hey, y’never know!

Another response is to ignore Kurtz, which unfortunately has the effect of letting this stuff fester and grow, as the history of rightwing nuttiness in America proves it will.

A third response is to note that this life is far too short, and the situation in Iraq is far too dire, to take seriously a man who blames the tragedies perpetrated by the Bush administration on the profound influence Michael Moore – via proxy – had on Donald Rumsfeld’s military strategizing in 2001.

A fourth alternative: Offer Stanley Kurtz an internship on the writing team for The Colbert Report. But there’s a slight problem: Kurtz isn’t the slightest bit funny in the “funny ha-ha” meaning of the word.

I choose Door Number Three.

Palestine Debate

by poputonian

Former president Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has, according to Democracy Now, been completely ignored by the print media:

… the nation’s newspapers have largely ignored Jimmy Carter’s book since its publication two weeks ago. The book hasn’t even been mentioned in the news pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Boston Globe or Los Angeles Times.

But, interestingly, the points raised in his book about the apartheid in Palestine are debated elsewhere, even in Israel. Carter points out on Hardball:

… the people in this country, in America, never know about this [apartheid], they never discuss this, there‘s no debate about it, there‘s no criticism of Israel in this country. And in Israel, there is an intense debate about the issues in this book. In this country, no.

He reiterates this point in the Democracy Now Q & A:

So the book is deliberately — I wouldn’t say controversial, but it’s deliberately designed to be provocative, because, as I said earlier, in Israel and in Europe, these kind of issues are debated every day, in a most vehement way, particularly in Israel. Pros and cons, arguing back and forth, in the news media, television, radio, the major newspapers. Never, in this country, do you hear any of these issues proposed publicly by an elected member of the House or the Senate or in the White House or NBC or ABC or CBS, New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times. Never. And I think it’s time for Americans to start looking at the facts about the Mid-East situation. And only then, and based on the knowledge of the facts, will we ever have a chance to move forward and consummate a peace agreement that would give Israel what they need and what they deserve — permanent peace, recognized by their neighbors and all Arab countries and the rest of the world — and the Palestinians to have their human rights, their land and a chance to have their own state, side by side, living in peace with their Israeli neighbors.

On the Hardball segment last Tuesday, Carter deconstructed the book’s title along with its purpose, which in part is to stimulate the debate:

Let‘s look at the entire title, if you don‘t mind. The first word is Palestine, which involves the land that belongs to the Palestinians, not the Israelis. I didn‘t refer to Israel, because there‘s no semblance of anything relating to apartheid within the nation of Israel.

And I also emphasized the word ‘not‘ — that is, peace, and not apartheid. That is what I hope to accomplish with this book, is sort of move to that goal. But there‘s no doubt that within the Occupied Territories—Palestinian land—that there is a horrendous example of apartheid. The occupation of Palestinian land, the confiscation of that land that doesn‘t belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonization of that land, and then the connection of those isolated but multiple settlements—more than 200 of them—with each other by highways, on which Palestinians can‘t travel and quite often where Palestinians cannot even cross.

So the persecution of the Palestinians now, under the occupying territories—under the occupation forces—is one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation that I know.
…
What is being done to the Palestinians now is horrendous in their own territory, by the occupying powers, which is Israel.

They‘re taken away all the basic human rights of the Palestinians, as was done in South Africa against the blacks. And I make it very plain in this book that the apartheid is not based on racism, as it was in South Africa. But it‘s based on the desire, of a minority of Israelis to acquire land that belongs to the Palestinians and to retain that land, and then to exclude the Palestinians from their own property and subjugate them, so that they can‘t arise and demonstrate their disapproval of being robbed of their own property. That‘s what‘s happening in the West Bank.

The transcript at Democracy Now covers most of what you get from the one at Hardball, but also goes beyond it with more information and assertions, and mentions three possible options for Israel. I would recommend that it be read first before delving into a debate here. Also, it’s worth reiterating that Carter is not ascribing racist underpinnings to this case of apartheid, and its use is only in reference to what is happening inside Palestine, not within Israel. In Israel, he acknowledges that Palestinians have full voting rights and are not separated out (by the State) from other Israeli citizens.

Greenwald

by tristero

Greenwald skewers Friedman, easy pickings as those of us who have been appalled by his writings for years know. But Greenwald truly advances the dubious discipline of Tom Friedman Studies: The poor guy went back and reviewed Friedman’s pre-war columns and noticed among the scrambled metaphors, stupid aphorisms, basic grammatical mistakes, and bad analogies an incredibly dishonest pattern. I’ll leave it to you to go to Glenn’s site and read that part; it is well worth your while. What especially interested me was later on in the post, as it is apropos of our own discussions here:

It is not merely the case that having been pro-war doesn’t count as a strike against anyone. That is accurate. But far worse, the opposite is also true. It is still the case in Establishment Washington that having been pro-war in the first place is a pre-requisite to being considered a ‘responsible, serious’ foreign policy analyst. And having been anti-war from the start is the hallmark of someone unserious. The pro-war Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are serious national security Democrats but Russ Feingold, Nancy Pelosi and Jack Murtha are the kind of laughable losers whom Democrats need to repudiate.Establishment Washington really is not interested in how to end this horrendous and despicable debacle we unleashed in Iraq. They are not interested in how to maximize U.S. interests. They are only interested in how to find a way to bring this disaster to some sort of slow resolution that looks as though it is a respectable and decent outcome — anything that makes it seem like it wasn’t a horrendous mistake in the first place.

That is exactly right. And it is outrageous. Why? Because it means that Bush/Iraq will be repeated real soon now somewhere else, by people who think the only problem was that Bush didn’t know how to do war right.

Who Is This Chickenshit?

by digby

It seems that the Bush family has a habit of getting bent out of shape when new Senators don’t properly kiss their asses:

At his first White House reception with Bush Sr., Wellstone wasted no time in buttonholing the president about his progressive priorities. When Wellstone finally let him be, President Bush was heard asking an advisor, “Who is this chicken shit?”

I suppose before one becomes a Senator one might think that one has the right to speak seriously to the president about important issues when one is in his presence. Equal branch of government and all that rot. Apparently, that’s simply not done. At least it’s not done if the President is named Bush.

Perhaps the key to solving this particular problem is to not have any more presidents named Bush. Ever.

h/t to pastordan

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Killing The Bear

by digby

Since Hullabaloo seems to be obsessed with Josh Marshall’s posts of yesterday, I will continue with this observation from one of our readers on the subject of Stanley Kurtz’s offensive proposition that poor little Bushie was unduly constrained by the cowardly American public from doingwhatneededtobedone:

The other side of this stupidity is that Bush is under no real constraint to care what the American on the street thinks of his war, and in fact has not really given any indication of doing so.

Exactly. How many times have we heard this?

PRESIDENT BUSH: …Look, people didn’t agree with my decision on Iraq, and I understand that. For Europe, September the 11th was a moment; for us, it was a change of thinking. I vowed to the American people I would do everything to defend our people, and will. I fully understood that the longer we got away from September the 11th, more people would forget the lessons of September the 11th. But I’m not going to forget them. And, therefore, I will be steadfast and diligent and strong in defending our country.

I don’t govern by polls, you know. I just do what I think is right. And I understand some of the decisions I made are controversial. But I made them in the best interest of our country, and I think in the best interest of the world. I believe when you look back at this moment, people will say, it was right to encourage democracy in the Middle East. I understand some people think that it can’t work. I believe in the universality of freedom; some don’t. I’m going to act on my beliefs so long as I’m the President of the United States. Some people say, it’s okay to condemn people for — to tyranny. I don’t believe it’s okay to condemn people to tyranny, particularly those of us who live in the free societies.

Bush really believes he’s some sort of Jesus-like figure and he’s made his disasterous decisions without any regard to the desires of the public.He has made a fetish of it. He believes he is morally superior to the hoi polloi. To now say that he has been restrained by the people is ridiculous. When he got into office with a dubious one vote majority on the Supreme Court he governed as if he had a mandate. He never cared what the congress thought — just ran roughshod over them. The man has always done exactly what he wanted to do.

The only public support he has ever cultivated (at Rove’s careful direction) was the 35% or so of his red-meat base or the business interests that paid for his presidency. On foreign policy he operates from his “gut” which means that he picks and chooses, without analysis or informed knowledge, from a variety of advisors with no thought to coherence or how such decisions might be implemented. Even Cheney cannot adequately control him. It could just as easily be decisionmaking by Ouija board. The problem is not that the public failed to approve of Bush’s harebrained schemes. The problem is Bush’s scemes themselves.

The Iraq invasion was the result of an absurd amalgam of greed, rage, naivete and hubris that was Shakespearean in its complexity. But for the president and many of his followers it was quite simple:

In State of Denial, Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush’s chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war:

“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate—on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, “in order to make a point that we’re not going to live in this world that they want for us.”

He is, of course, being disingenuous. (It’s Kissinger, after all.) Iraq was a secular government, for all its ills. Invading it had nothing to do with radical Islam. Kissinger may be a nobel prize winning Harvard professor but his remarks are entirely based on lizard brain primitivism. And it’s that primitivism that informed George W. Bush’s vaunted “gut” and led the most powerful nation on earth into Iraq for no good reason.

It’s similar to what happens when a wild animal like a bear comes down out of the hills and mauls someone. Back in the day they used to round up a posse (now they call in the professionals) grab their guns and go out to kill the bear. It doesn’t really matter which bear just that the defenders of civilization can bring home a bear carcass and show everyone that if a bear kills one of them they are going to get revenge — preferably by killing one that was even bigger than the one that did the killing. They always say that it was because the bear was dangerous and it had developed a taste for human blood or something like that. (The people don’t ever really know if the dead bear is the one, do they?) The purpose isn’t really to kill the bear that did the deed. And it isn’t as Kissinger says, to show the other bears that they will be killed if they do this again. It’s to quell their own fear by proving to themselves that they are not helpless.

George W. Bush was very, very frightened after 9/11 and for a variety of motivations his administration persuaded him that killing the Iraq bear would make him feel better. The public’s support or lack of support was irrelevant.

Update: For a perfect example of post 9/11 pants-wetting masquerading as Kissingerian message-sending, here’s Tom Friedman:

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through – but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”

There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we’re going to get our turkey back.

You can smell the fear all over those words, can’t you?

h/t to Glenn Greenwald for reminding me of Friedman’s inchoate rage and incoherent CYA. It’s been an amazing sight to see these last three years.

Update II: Just so there is no mistake. I am not insulting hunters or any other professional who deals with wildlife. This is a (lame) parable not a comment on the culture of gun owners. Nor is it meant to imply that people who work for animal control do not care about the animals or do not try to insure that the animals they kill are indeed dangerous animals. My point was that it didn’t matter if the animal that they killed was the “guilty” party in order that the fear in the community (or among some hunters who are more like George Bush)is quelled.

No disrespect was intended toward bears either.

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