Month: June 2007

An Operational World

by digby

Laura Rozen posts some interesting observations on the Wapo Cheney story from a newspaper editor friend of hers.

When I read it this morning, I also thought that stuff about Cheney not really being the defacto president and how he’s lost some battles with the big guy seemed pasted on to the story. I ignored them. Certainly this first part of the series gave no examples of such a thing — quite the opposite. The portrait that was painted was of a secretive, megalomaniacal VP who has been running the country through underhanded and unaccountable means by manipulating his ridiculously stupid boss and exerting his power by any means necessary. You really can’t read the article any other way.

Rozen’s friend speculates that this story was held until the dead time in June and the reporters became enraged, which sounds right. And if they hadn’t been enraged before, they almost certainly were when people (like me) started taking pot shots at the media for ignoring the story. Gelman and Becker must have been furious about that if they had this whopper in the chute and their editors were sitting on it.

Fascinating stuff. The DC establishment is at war with itself.

Cuz We’re So Good

by digby

After 9/11, I remember being quite surprised that the US government would so freely use the phrase “good and evil” when our attackers had been extreme religious fanatics. Laden as those words are with religious association, it seemed to me to be fanning the flames when a smarter approach would have been to distance ourselves from such rhetoric and try to redirect the focus to more rational ground. I did a post quite early on in which I compared speeches by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden in which their frequent references to God and good and evil and satan were nearly indistinguishable. Both speeches could have come right out of the 13th century. (It was one of the creepiest posts I ever did, and I recall that at the time we were in the grip of such paranoia, I wondered if I would gather the attention of the authorities for writing such a thing.)From very early on Bush used archaic religious verbal constructions like “the evil ones” and “evil-doers.” Perhaps the most startling example is what he reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mamhoud Abbas in 2003: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.” Yikes.It turns out that anachronistic verbiage was much more than boneheaded rhetoric. As Glenn Greenwald convincingly lays out in devastating detail in his new book “A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency“, this war between “good ‘n evil” became the all-purpose justification for the lawless usurpation of the bedrock values of our constitution. From the extended excerpt in Salon Magazine:

Because the threat posed by The Evil Terrorists is so grave, maximizing protections against it is the paramount, overriding goal. No other value competes with that objective, nor can any other value limit our efforts to protect ourselves against The Terrorists.That is the essence of virtually every argument Bush supporters make regarding terrorism. No matter what objection is raised to the never-ending expansions of executive power, no matter what competing values are touted (due process, the rule of law, the principles our country embodies, how we are perceived around the world), the response will always be that The Terrorists are waging war against us and our overarching priority — one that overrides all others — is to protect ourselves, to triumph over Evil. By definition, then, there can never be any good reason to oppose vesting powers in the government to protect us from The Terrorists because that goal outweighs all others.

But our entire system of government, from its inception, has been based upon a very different calculus — that is, that many things matter besides merely protecting ourselves against threats, and consequently, we are willing to accept risks, even potentially fatal ones, in order to secure those other values. From its founding, America has rejected the worldview of prioritizing physical safety above all else, as such a mentality leads to an impoverished and empty civic life. The premise of America is and always has been that imposing limitations on government power is necessary to secure liberty and avoid tyranny even if it means accepting an increased risk of death as a result. That is the foundational American value.

It is this courageous demand for core liberties even if such liberties provide less than maximum protection from physical risks that has made America bold, brave, and free. Societies driven exclusively or primarily by a fear of avoiding Evil, minimizing risks, and seeking above all else that our government “protects” us are not free. That is a path that inevitably leads to authoritarianism — an increasingly strong and empowered leader in whom the citizens vest ever-increasing faith and power in exchange for promises of safety. That is most assuredly not the historical ethos of the United States.

No, it is not. Greenwald has written a book that finally gets to the meat of the matter and addresses the underlying error that has led inexorably to all the errors that followed. The Bush administration took a simplistic, Manichean, “good vs evil” approach to the threat of Islamic terrorism, and in that one act handed them a victory. One of the great advances of our civilization is the recognition that the line between good and evil is not between one group and another group; the line between good and evil lies inside every human being. All it took was a handful of religious fanatics with a willingness to commit suicide to make an awful lot of Americans forget that.All of you know that Glenn is a writer of rare insight who cuts through the spin and the rhetoric to see the underlying motives and impulses that drive this administration to consistently seek to weaken, if not destroy, the fundamental tenets of our constitution. There is nobody writing today who can as forcefully explain, with both lawyerly precision and personal passion, just how important it is that Americans take these issues seriously if we want to preserve our democracy. The greatest threat to our way of life comes not from the terrorists but from our own complacency in allowing a creeping authoritarianism to change our definition of what it is to be a free people.Ladies and gentlemen, please join Glenn Greenwald (and me) at today’s FDL Book Salon …
(Feel free to talk amongst yourselves over here, of course.)

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MSM —1, Digby —0

by digby

Well, when I’m an ass, I’m an ass. Yesterday I complained that the mainstream media had dropped the ball with the Imperial Dick Cheney story, but I was wrong, at least with respect to one paper. Check out this Wapo piece today on the subject. They’ve clearly been working on a major Cheney piece for months and it’s a goodie.

As we all suspected, he is the chief megalomaniacal psychopath:

More than any one man in the months to come, Cheney freed Bush to fight the “war on terror” as he saw fit, animated by their shared belief that al-Qaeda’s destruction would require what the vice president called “robust interrogation” to extract intelligence from captured suspects. With a small coterie of allies, Cheney supplied the rationale and political muscle to drive far-reaching legal changes through the White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon.

And I continue to be stunned to find that amongst the top brass in the Bush administration, John Ashcroft seems to be the only one who had any guts:

To pave the way for the military commissions, Yoo wrote an opinion on Nov. 6, 2001, declaring that Bush did not need approval from Congress or federal courts. Yoo said in an interview that he saw no need to inform the State Department, which hosts the archives of the Geneva Conventions and the government’s leading experts on the law of war. “The issue we dealt with was: Can the president do it constitutionally?” Yoo said. “State — they wouldn’t have views on that.” Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, was astonished to learn that the draft gave the Justice Department no role in choosing which alleged terrorists would be tried in military commissions. Over Veterans Day weekend, on Nov. 10, he took his objections to the White House. The attorney general found Cheney, not Bush, at the broad conference table in the Roosevelt Room. According to participants, Ashcroft said that he was the president’s senior law enforcement officer, supervised the FBI and oversaw terrorism prosecutions nationwide. The Justice Department, he said, had to have a voice in the tribunal process. He was enraged to discover that Yoo, his subordinate, had recommended otherwise — as part of a strategy to deny jurisdiction to U.S. courts. Raising his voice, participants said, Ashcroft talked over Addington and brushed aside interjections from Cheney. “The thing I remember about it is how rude, there’s no other word for it, the attorney general was to the vice president,” said one of those in the room. Asked recently about the confrontation, Ashcroft replied curtly: “I’m just not prepared to comment on that.”

True, he was just miffed because he wasn’t included, but it seems that old John was often put in this position and actually fought back, which is more than you can say about Colin Powell, for instance. He should have resigned, as anyone with a shred of integrity would have, because they sure didn’t care what he thought:

According to Yoo and three other officials, Ashcroft did not persuade Cheney and got no audience with Bush

Ashcroft’s replacement Alberto Gonzales is, as everyone has long suspected, nothing more than a glorified houseboy. But I was surprised to learn that he acted on behalf of Dick Cheney and not George W. Bush. Apparently, even Bush’s long time loyalists treat him like a mentally disabled child:

One lawyer in his office said that Bellinger was chagrined to learn, indirectly, that Cheney had read the confidential memo and “was concerned” about his advice. Thus Bellinger discovered an unannounced standing order: Documents prepared for the national security adviser, another White House official said, were “routed outside the formal process” to Cheney, too. The reverse did not apply. Powell asked for a meeting with Bush. The same day, Jan. 25, 2002, Cheney’s office struck a preemptive blow. It appeared to come from Gonzales, a longtime Bush confidant whom the president nicknamed “Fredo.” Hours after Powell made his request, Gonzales signed his name to a memo that anticipated and undermined the State Department’s talking points. The true author has long been a subject of speculation, for reasons including its unorthodox format and a subtly mocking tone that is not a Gonzales hallmark. A White House lawyer with direct knowledge said Cheney’s lawyer, Addington, wrote the memo. Flanigan passed it to Gonzales, and Gonzales sent it as “my judgment” to Bush. If Bush consulted Cheney after that, the vice president became a sounding board for advice he originated himself.

This is exactly the kind of manipulation that is made possible by a weak and stupid president. Reagan was not particularly bright, but he gathered people around him who were not insane, had known him forever and shared his goals. Bush is a child whose agenda was whatever the last person he spoke with told him it was.

I know that I sound like a character in an Oliver Stone movie, (“one pristine bullet? That dog don’t hunt!” ) but I have never been sanguine about the fact that all the big money boyz and all the power brokers in the GOP traipsed down to Austin to meet that grinning moron and came away thinking he was the right choice to run the most powerful nation on earth. It makes far more sense to me that they wanted to install Cheney from the beginning (remember the energy task force?) and they needed an empty suit with a winning personality to actually run for the office. Maybe it really was a quiet coup, who knows?

Be sure to read the whole article. I just highlighted a few passages that I found interesting. There are many others. It seems the Bushie wall of silence has finally broken. Scooter should probably make a deal while it still means anything.

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Saturday night At The Movies

SIFF-ting Through Celluloid-Part 3

By Dennis Hartley

I am continuing my series on a few of the highlights from the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, which ran nearly 400 features and shorts May 24-June 17 this year.

This week, we’re heading north of the border and taking a look at a new Canadian film that I am hoping will find wider distribution in the near future.

“Monkey Warfare”, written and directed by Reginald Harkema, is a nice little cinematic bong hit of low-key political anarchy, tailor-made for a cult audience (think: “The Big Lebowski”).

The film stars Don McKellar and Tracy Wright (the Hepburn and Tracy of quirky Canadian cinema) as “off the grid” Toronto slackers Dan and Linda, who dutifully hop on their bicycles every morning at the crack of dawn to go dumpster-diving for “antiques” to sell on the internet. They live in a ramshackle rental, filled with the type of posters and memorabilia that suggest an aging hippie mindset, with a particular interest and nostalgic attachment to 1960’s radical politics.

The longtime couple’s relationship has become platonic; they interact with the polite diffidence of roommates making a conscious attempt to avoid pushing each other’s buttons. We quickly get the sense that Dan and Linda also have a stronger bond that transcends the relationship itself; perhaps a shared secret from their past that feeds a just-barely palpable sense of chronic paranoia tempered only by smoking pot. A lot of pot.

Panic sets in when their regular dealer is suddenly hauled off to jail. Despair quickly turns to relief when our heroine rides into town-not on a white horse, but on a bicycle (merrily flipping off honking motorists like Emily Lloyd in “Wish You Were Here”). Enter Susan (Nadia Litz) a spirited twenty-something pot dealer/budding anarchist who keeps her basket full of some heady shake she calls “B.C. Organic”.

When Dan invites Susan over to make her first pot delivery, she notices and becomes quite intrigued by his extensive library of subversive literature. Dan, who is deliriously baked on the B.C. and flushed by the attention of such an inquisitive young hottie, decides to give Susan a crash course in revolutionary politics, which (hilariously) includes dusting off his old MC5 and Fugs LPs. However, when he loans her his treasured “mint copy” of a book about the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Dan unintentionally triggers a chain of events that will reawaken long dormant passions between himself and Linda (amorous and political) and profoundly affect the lives of all three protagonists.

“Monkey Warfare” is not exactly a “comedy”, but Harkema’s script is full of great lines and the actors deliver them in that peculiarly Canadian deadpan manner that sort of sneaks up on you (Bill Murray is probably the most universally recognized practitioner of the affectation I’m referring to, which I like to call the “time-released zinger”).

Another thing I like about this film is how Harkema cleverly makes political statements without being overtly political. For instance, I love the fact that all of the principal characters (including a gang of eco-terrorists) ride bicycles. Obviously, Harkema is thumbing his nose at the oil companies, but he’s not hitting us over the head with it; it’s almost subliminal. There is also some basis in reality; the director partially modeled the Dan and Linda characters on the real-life “Vancouver Five”, members of the Canadian anarchist scene who were arrested in 1983 for their links to several politically motivated attacks, including an explosion at a Litton Industries factory where a component for the U.S. cruise missile was being manufactured.

By the way, if you do get an opportunity to screen this film (outside of Canada), be sure to hang around until after the credits roll. There is an audacious scene tacked on the very end in which a gentleman demonstrates, step by step, how to make a Molotov Cocktail as he prattles on in non-subtitled French (The scene was greeted with some nervous titters, even though it is mostly played for laughs- it’s certainly not something you see every day at the multiplex.) According to the director, who was at the screening I attended, this scene has been censored by the Canadian government and must be excised from any prints that are to be distributed in his home country. (Welcome to our brave new world.)

If you are a regular visitor here, you know I don’t use a rating system, but I am going to give “Monkey Warfare” an honorary “Eh?” plus!

Clearly Canadian: Roadkill (1989), Hard Core Logo, Highway 61,Last Night , Kids in the Hall – Brain Candy, Videodrome , Crash (1996), The Adjuster, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter , I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Why Shoot The Teacher, The Decline of the American Empire, Jesus of Montreal, Mon Oncle Antoine, Goin’ Down The Road (Signature Collection), Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz, Due South(TV series on DVD).

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All American Girl

by digby

Ms Henneberger ventured out into the wilds of Middle America and, lo and behold, found a bunch of women who think just like she does:

So it turns out that the columnist who thinks the Democrats’ pro-choice position is hurting the party, who presents this as objective advice based on empirical observation, who does not mention her own position on the issue, is in fact anti-choice. And the column is doubly wankerrific: it’s hopelessly wrong and dishonest.

Color me shocked.

This, of course, is how it’s done in the exciting fast-paced world of professional columnizing. David Broder goes out among the Common Folk and finds a deep yearning for bipartisan compromise. Tom Friedman takes a taxi and learns that globalization is a force for good. And Melinda Henneberger talks–no, ‘listens’–to women and discovers, amazingly, that they agree with her on abortion. They go out with an agenda and ‘hear’ whatever confirms it.

And even though the self-serving nature of their ‘observations’ is laughably transparent, they all maintain the fiction that they are doing no more than reporting the facts. That’s what makes them wankers.

That is exactly why I don’t trust this stale and silly convention of DC insiders and elite pundits making anthropological forays into Real America and “reporting” back on the thinking of the electorate. They just reinforce their own preconceived notions and come back to their perch at the top of the political power structure secure in the knowledge that they are just like small town, hard working, regular folks after all.

Give me cold poll numbers any day — and if somebody wants to follow up with interviews of a sample of that sample for an article in the paper, then fine. But the notion that DC pundits have some special way of talking to strangers that translates into something meaningful about the population at large is ridiculous.

Henenberger is anti-choice. Fine. She went out and found some anti-choice people just like her and extrapolated from their conversation that abortion was killing the Democratic party, just as she personally thinks it is. But she never says that. Instead, she pretends that she has conducted some objective reporting which led to the inevitable conclusion that the Democratic party is losing because of abortion. That is shoddy journalism, opinion or not.

She should have written a straight up anti-choice op-ed. That’s perfectly legitimate. But she is being completely dishonest to say that her opinion has any empirical value. It doesn’t.

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Court Defectors

by digby

Sidney Blumenthal has written a devastating piece on the current state of the Imperial presidency which rightly notes that in small, incremental ways (and some large ones) the executive theory of the Bush presidency is being legally dismantled. (I suspect we’ll be living with the fallout for a long time, however, if they pay no price — they are zombies with this stuff.)

Blumenthal makes some news, at least to me, and it’s quite interesting because it sheds some light on what might be motivating some of the Scooter Madness that I find so bizarre:

In private, Bush administration sub-Cabinet officials who have been instrumental in formulating and sustaining the legal “war paradigm” acknowledge that their efforts to create a system for detainees separate from due process, criminal justice and law enforcement have failed. One of the key framers of the war paradigm (in which the president in his wartime capacity as commander in chief makes and enforces laws as he sees fit, overriding the constitutional system of checks and balances), who a year ago was arguing vehemently for pushing its boundaries, confesses that he has abandoned his belief in the whole doctrine, though he refuses to say so publicly. If he were to speak up, given his seminal role in formulating the policy and his stature among the Federalist Society cadres that run it, his rejection would have a shattering impact, far more than political philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s denunciation of the neoconservatism he formerly embraced. But this figure remains careful to disclose his disillusionment with his own handiwork only in off-the-record conversations. Yet another Bush legal official, even now at the commanding heights of power, admits that the administration’s policies are largely discredited. In its defense, he says without a hint of irony or sarcasm, “Not everything we’ve done has been illegal.” He adds, “Not everything has been ultra vires” — a legal term referring to actions beyond the law. The resistance within the administration to Bush’s torture policy, the ultimate expression of the war paradigm, has come to an end through attrition and exhaustion. More than two years ago, Vice President Dick Cheney’s then chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and then general counsel David Addington physically cornered one of the few internal opponents, subjecting him to threats, intimidation and isolation. About that time, the tiny band of opponents within approached Karen Hughes, newly named undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, hoping that the longtime confidante of President Bush, now assigned responsibility for the U.S. image in the world, might be willing to hear them out on the damage done by continuation of the torture policy. But she rebuffed them. Two weeks ago, Hughes unveiled her major report, extolling “our commitment to freedom, human rights and the dignity and equality of every human being,” but making no mention of detainee policy. The action part consists of another of her campaign-oriented rapid-response schemes, this one a Counterterrorism Communications Center, staffed by military and intelligence officers, to rebut the false claims of terrorists. Asked whether the administration’s policies might be a factor contributing to the problem, Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, replied, “You’re always going to get people criticizing policy.”

If the walls are tumbling as Blumenthal suggests, then keeping Scooter out of jail becomes part of this internecine battle. I’m not sure, based on the information in this piece, how all that fits together, but it seems logical to me that Scooter has an awful lot of leverage at the moment.

This doesn’t excuse the airheaded pundits who are doing his dirty work for him in the name of not “criminalizing politics” (or whatever other lame lines they’ve been fed indirectly by Barbara Comstock) but it does explain the rather frenzied, incoherent desperation of Libby’s Republican defenders. I’m not sure anybody knows who their friends are anymore and the question is which rats are going to jump ship and start squeaking.

Read all of Blumenthal’s piece for his discussion of the dissolving of the legal justifications for Bush’s excesses. It’s really good. And be sure to read Emptywheel’s take on this, which includes some very entertaining speculation as to who these disgruntled, high level former Bush officials might be.

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That Thing Of Theirs

by digby

I’m now at the point where I really want Rudy Giuliani to get the GOP nomination for 2008. While it’s true that he’s a bloodthirsty, incoherent psychopath, the fact that he’s so enmeshed in various criminal enterprises that even the moribund media can’t ignore it, means that the presidential campaign will unfold as a beautiful coda to the Bush years if it happens.

Steve Benen, writing at TPM discusses some of Giuliani’s closest buddies:

Following up on Election Central’s piece, it looks like Rudy Giuliani has a real problem here. Time’s David Von Drehle asked a highly relevant question in his latest piece: “How many alleged criminals can a law-and-order candidate be associated with before it starts to hurt?” Von Drehle posed the question after Thomas Ravenel, the chairman of Giuliani’s presidential campaign in South Carolina, was indicted on cocaine distribution charges, which, of course, comes on the heels of revelations about Giuliani’s connections with Bernard Kerik. But if Von Drehle’s deadline was just one day later, he would have been able to include an even more damaging example of Giuliani’s questionable associations.

Giuliani employs his childhood friend Monsignor Alan Placa as a consultant at Giuliani Partners despite a 2003 Suffolk County, N.Y., grand jury report that accuses Placa of sexually abusing children, as well as helping cover up the sexual abuse of children by other priests. Placa, who was part of a three-person team that handled allegations of abuse by clergy for the Diocese of Rockville Centre, is referred to as Priest F in the grand jury report. The report summarizes the testimony of multiple alleged victims of Priest F, and then notes, “Ironically, Priest F would later become instrumental in the development of Diocesan policy in response to allegations of sexual abuse of children by priests.” […] Placa has worked for Giuliani Partners since 2002. As of June 2007, he remains on the payroll. “He is currently employed here,” Giuliani spokeswoman Sunny Mindel confirmed to Salon, adding that Giuliani “believes Alan has been unjustly accused.”

I confess that I am getting a little bit dizzy from the constant whining from law and order Republicans that the judicial system is arrayed against them and all their friends (even accused child molesters!) while they claim they are the only ones who are man enough to fight the bad guys. Apparently they aren’t aware that their rheumy pearl clutching in the first case kind of makes the second case look ridiculous. This is particularly true of the alleged tough guy in a dress.

But, hey, not my problem. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a Rudy/Newtie ticket.

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Ye Olde Trashfalke

by digby

If it weren’t for all the blood and death, this would almost be humorous:

In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,” abandoning “midlevel” Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops — just, he said, as they did in Falluja.

Robert Farley rightly notes:

while the challenge to Al-Qaeda’s manhood is charming in a fourteenth century kind of way, I seriously doubt that the insurgent leadership is as stupid as, say, Right Blogistan or the braintrust of the Bush administration. Indeed, the idea that fleeing superior numbers, firepower, and technology is somehow “unmanly” is rather quaint; I suspect that insurgents would be happy enough if we threw down our tanks, cruise missiles, fighter jets, and armored personal carriers and settled this dispute by Marquess of Queensbury rules.

Yes indeed. But as humorous as this is, the startling truth is that the Bush administration’s entire GWOT strategy is based upon this kind of silliness. They actually believe that these ayrabs only attacked us cuz they thought we wuz a buncha lily-livered pansies. They’re primitives who don’t have our kinda suffisticated unnerstandin’ so we gotta git down tah their level and show em wut a real man is.

Don’t take my word for it. This is the group that distributed a discredited “anthropological” tome from the 70’s called “The Arab Mind,” to members of the administration and the military, the thesis of which dwelled to an unseemly degree on the idea that Arabs (who are all alike by the way) are so hung up on sex that the way to get to them is through sexual humiliation. (Good thing that crackpot idea was never put into practice, eh?)

If you are still not convinced, perhaps the neocon granddaddy, Norm-Pod himself will convince you. All of em, from Nixon to Carter to St Ronnie to Clinton were nothing but a bunch of big babies who let those brown bastards get away with murder. Real men lash out in violent rage at the least provocation, lest 20 years later, some loser in Afghanistan thinks he’s soft:

[T]o the extent that American passivity and inaction opened the door to 9/11, neither Democrats nor Republicans, and neither liberals nor conservatives, are in a position to derive any partisan or ideological advantage. The reason, quite simply, is that much the same methods for dealing with terrorism were employed by the administrations of both parties, stretching as far back as Richard Nixon in 1970 and proceeding through Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan (yes, Ronald Reagan), George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and right up to the pre-9/11 George W. Bush.
The record speaks dismally for itself. From 1970 to 1975, during the administrations of Nixon and Ford, several American diplomats were murdered in Sudan and Lebanon while others were kidnapped. The perpetrators were all agents of one or another faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In Israel, too, many American citizens were killed by the PLO, though, except for the rockets fired at our embassy and other American facilities in Beirut by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), these attacks were not directly aimed at the United States. In any case, there were no American military reprisals.

Our diplomats, then, were for some years already being murdered with impunity by Muslim terrorists when, in 1979, with Carter now in the White House, Iranian students—with either the advance or subsequent blessing of the country’s clerical ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini—broke into the American embassy in Tehran and seized 52 Americans as hostages. For a full five months, Carter dithered. At last, steeling himself, he authorized a military rescue operation which had to be aborted after a series of mishaps that would have fit well into a Marx Brothers movie like Duck Soup if they had not been more humiliating than comic. After 444 days, and just hours after Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, the hostages were finally released by the Iranians, evidently because they feared that the hawkish new President might actually launch a military strike against them.

Yet if they could have foreseen what was coming under Reagan, they would not have been so fearful. In April 1983, Hizbullah—an Islamic terrorist organization nourished by Iran and Syria—sent a suicide bomber to explode his truck in front of the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Sixty-three employees, among them the Middle East CIA director, were killed and another 120 wounded. But Reagan sat still.

Six months later, in October 1983, another Hizbullah suicide bomber blew up an American barracks in the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. Marines in their sleep and wounding another 81. This time Reagan signed off on plans for a retaliatory blow, but he then allowed his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, to cancel it (because it might damage our relations with the Arab world, of which Weinberger was always tenderly solicitous). Shortly thereafter, the President pulled the Marines out of Lebanon.

Having cut and run in Lebanon in October, Reagan again remained passive in December, when the American embassy in Kuwait was bombed. Nor did he hit back when, hard upon the withdrawal of the American Marines from Beirut, the CIA station chief there, William Buckley, was kidnapped by Hizbullah and then murdered. Buckley was the fourth American to be kidnapped in Beirut, and many more suffered the same fate between 1982 and 1992 (though not all died or were killed in captivity).

It goes on, if you can stomach it. This article lays the neocon case out in all its glory. Of course, the neocons barely mentioned terrorism prior to 9/11, obsessed as they were with Israeli politics, China, Iraq and North Korea, but after the attacks they suddenly discovered that this had been the animating feature of global politics for decades.

But I don’t think we are talking about policy at all. We are talking about psychology. And it isn’t confined to the neocons, although they gave this psychology an intellectual veneer. The conservatives generally, evidently including members of the top military brass, seem to be driven by a primitive fear not of attack or physical violence, but of humiliation. This is what makes them tick and it’s the essence of what’s gone wrong since 9/11.

Terrorism is a tactic for spreading fear, to be sure, but because it is an elusive, nettlesome sort of warfare, it’s also quite effective at tweaking the massive egos of these manly western warriors who seem to have extreme difficulty dealing with the juvenile taunts and sophomoric trash talk that characterizes so much of the Islamic extremist rhetoric. I get why the extremists do it — chest pounding rhetoric is all they have. But it is unworthy and counterproductive for a great nation to play their game. Yet from the moment George W. Bush stood on that rubble and shouted puerile threats into the bullhorn like the high school cheerleader he was, that’s exactly the game we’ve been playing. The invasion of Iraq was just a massive exercise in preening, unctuous, muscle flexing.

The problem, of course, is that once you prove you are too muscle bound to move quickly and effectively, calling the other side “cowards” for failing to confront you actually is humiliating. And stupid. Your opponent just laughs while he runs circles around you.

If you need further proof of stunted wingnut psychology, Jonathan at ATR has the latest on Fred “the surge” Kagan, who is now whining that the Democrats didn’t properly taking Bush to task for his conduct of the war. (Yeah… I know.)

Oh, and Stormin Norman Podhoretz is still trash talking with the best of them: we must bomb Iran. As a way of “sending a message,” of course, to wogs everywhere who deign to challenge the size of America’s huge swinging manhood.

Of course, by the grace of God, the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, and Ronald Reagan, we won World War III and were therefore spared the depredations that Finlandization would have brought. Alas, we are far from knowing what the outcome of World War IV will be. But in the meantime, looking at Europe today, we already see the unfolding of a process analogous to Finlandization: it has been called, rightly, Islamization. Consider, for example, what happened when, only a few weeks ago, the Iranians captured fifteen British sailors and marines and held them hostage. Did the Royal Navy, which once boasted that it ruled the waves, immediately retaliate against this blatant act of aggression, or even threaten to do so unless the captives were immediately released? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, using force was the last thing in the world the British contemplated doing, as they made sure to announce. Instead they relied on the “soft power” so beloved of “sophisticated” Europeans and their American fellow travelers.

But then, as if this show of impotence were not humiliating enough, the British were unable even to mobilize any of that soft power. The European Union, of which they are a member, turned down their request to threaten Iran with a freeze of imports. As for the UN, under whose very auspices they were patrolling the international waters in which the sailors were kidnapped, it once again showed its true colors by refusing even to condemn the Iranians. The most the Security Council could bring itself to do was to express “grave concern.”

Enough, already. These Republican grown-ups are all a bunch of emotionally damaged head cases. We are in desperate need of mature leadership.

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That Bad Pun Again

by tristero

Unforgivably, PZ Myers linked to an exceptionally weird – in an unpleasant way – interview with creationist George Gilder. One thing is certain: this “expert on microchips” can pack more bullshit into less space than just about anyone:

The Darwinians essentially uphold that the human brain is all the intelligence in the universe.

I have never heard anyone, ever “uphold” this, even essentially.

Here’s another little bit of classic Gilderiana:

It seems that Darwinian materialism is the kind of hard science that all the social theorists use to justify their blindness to creativity or ideas or mind.

I confess that like many Americans of my generation, I failed to learn a foreign language with anything remotely resembling facility. It is something I’m deeply ashamed of, but I can only understand English. Therefore, I have absolutely no idea what Gilder could possibly be talking about. I’ve read quite a bit of Darwin recently, and I’m talking in the realm of several thousand pages of Darwin. To associate Darwin, of all people, wtih supporting anyone’s “blindness to creativity or ideas or mind” – No, Gilder is not talking English but some strange language that uses the words and grammar of English to mean something entirely different. What that meaning could be, I have no idea.

But maybe it’s not my fault, after all. Maybe Gilder is speaking English but ingested the wrong kind of ‘shrooms at a crucial age. For if we read on, it becomes more and more likely that he inhabits one of those parallel universes he asserts in the interview can’t exist, one in which we are still in the 20th Century:

It’s a blindness that covers the whole intellectual world in the aftermath of Marx and the other materialist theories that have afflicted this century.

Surely, this century hasn’t been afflicted by “Marx and other materialist theories.” No, this century has been afflicted by fundamentalisms – political movements that exploit the iconography of religion in order to seize and wield secular power. Christianism and islamism for starters, but there are many others. It is one of the most salient features of 21st century human culture (and a very ominous one).

But let’s cut to the chase. “Materialism” and its cognates are mentioned at least 12 times by Gilder (and several times by the interviewer). “Materialism” allows Gilder, somehow, to link Marx and Darwin. Hmm… Now, there’s a thought, not a smart thought, but it is a thought.

Darwin. Marx. Darwin. Marx… Well, I guess they did both sport white, fluffy beards. And “Karl” is German for Charles… In a time when Michael Totten thought it helpful to point out that there was precious little similarity between Iraq and Vietnam because one is mostly flat and arid and the other jungle, I suppose all this does imply intellectual affinity, if not identity. But to be honest, the only real intellectual association between Darwin and Marx is that George Gilder has completely misunderstood both of them.* [also, see update.]

But I digress. Once again, an intelligent design creationist has made that bad pun that deliberately confuses two meanings of materialism, the philosophical (a theory of reality) and the colloquial (greedy materialists). But I’m beginning to suspect that bad puns and searching for the deep meaning behind homophones are two major distinguishing features of this particular brand of rightwing discourse. For in addition to mating Darwin with Paris Hilton – now, there’s another thought – Gilder jumbles up human creativity with divine creation in utterly remarkable ways – talk about primordial chaos! He does the same thing with the hierarchical design of microchips, implying that somehow Carver and Mead’s theories are relevant to the structure of the universe and imply God (geez, don’t ask me to explain it, I haven’t even smoked pot in 25 years). Somehow all this means that scientists have become idolators. “They made idols of math,” Gilder says but then allows that, “the Tree of Knowledge might be a particularly exalted source code.”

I have a question for Dr. Gilder. Has he ever considered that “dog” spelled backwards is “God?” Think about it.

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*I hope Michael was joking, but frankly, it was difficult to tell because he also advanced a lot of other arguments using the same tone, and, ridiculous as they were, he clearly meant them to be taken seriously.

[updated slightly]

[UPDATE: Several commenters wrote that I am mistaken, that there is a connection between Darwin and Marx. They suggested the following readings:

The Part Played by Labor in the Transition From Ape to Man

colp, ralph, jr. “the contacts between karl marx and charles darwin” journal of the history of ideas, v35 #2, (apr-jun, 1974).

ball, terence. “marx and darwin. a reconsideration.” political theory, v7#4, nov 1979.

I want to thank yellowdogblue and fellow traveler for this information. There are many pleasures to bloggings. One of them, of course, is being right when the professionals get it wrong. But just as enjoyable is being wrong and have knowledgeable, intelligent people correct you. I’m always amazed at bloggers who have to be right all the time. Nothing pleases me more than learning something new that helps me understand a subject better, especially if it causes me to change my mind.

I look forward to reading some of this material.]

[UPDATE 2: I’ve read the article linked to above by Engels. Eh. It’s not very good. Nor do I see any fundamental relationship or derivation of Engels’ ideas from Darwin.

Clearly, Engels had read Darwin or descriptions of his work, and accepted his ideas. But I don’t see where he built upon them. Had natural selection never been described, he could still have argued that in the beginning was labor. Evolution per se is not what Darwin is about. It’s evolution by specific means and Engels’ arguement does not depend upon Darwin’s specifcs.

Also their methods are totally different. Engels simply reads, speculates, and fantasizes, whereas Darwin collects facts, observes, experiments, and infers.

To make the kind of causal connecetion that Gilder makes between Marxism and Darwin is a stretch, based on reading that article. Maybe the other articles can make a better case for a real connection but merely being aware of Darwin and citing him does not mean that Darwin and Marx have related ideas, regardless of what Marx may have written. If Darwin refused to comment on Marx’s citations of him, as someone in comments said, the reason is obvious: Engels, at least, is a lightweight when it comes to the science. Marx himself (I assume) had other fish to fry than refining the arguments on the origin of species, which was Darwin’s interest. Theories of economic production and revolution most certainly were not.

So I still fail to see any serious relationship, based on what I’ve read and I continue to assert that Gilder’s talking out of his hat.]

Shameless

by digby

If there is a hell, Senator Tom Coburn will be going there. Read this powerful post by Meteor Blades if you doubt me.

It shouldn’t surprise us that Coburn would put a hold on something like the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. He is, after all, the same fellow who sterilized women against their will and said “lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in Southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.” But it should make us ashamed that someone like him is one of the most powerful men in the US government. I don’t know what Oklahoma Republicans have against this country but it’s hard to see how the two troglodytes they’ve sent to the US Senate (Inhofe being the other one) can be interpreted as anything but hatred for their fellow countrymen.

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