Shorter David Petraeus
by tristero
Things are so godawful in Iraq it’s going to take at least a year of increased troop presence to have even a glimmer of a hope of making things as godawful as they were in 2006.
Oh, and by the way, people? I can’t guarantee they won’t get much worse.
Overplaying Their Hand
by digby
The other day I mentioned that the press had been completely brainwashed about Petraeus and today they are proving it. They can hardly stop gushing about his fabulousness.
And the Republicans are quite successfully, among the lazy, fangirl media and the Bush-dog sycophants anyway, trying to make today about Move-on rather than Petraeus’s outright lies.
Mike Viquiera MSNBC: Echoing what Republicans are saying on the senate floor… and any number of statements coming over the Blackberry today attacking Move-on, I’m picking up a lot of chatter from Democrats saying they think Move-on really “overplayed their hand this time…”
Gergen: The Move-on ad is undignified. It’s unfair…(By the way, he’s a personal friend of mine)
Matthews: They are totally partisan and the Democratis party will be marred by this…they attacked his character…[Oh Lordy, Lordy!] The polling we’re looking at says that people do mistrust his ability to give an independent assessment, but you still have to give these men respect and I suspect by the end of the day that the Democrats will push back.
Frankly, I think the Move-On ad was absolutely necessary. The Democrats appear to be desperate to throw in the towel, so somebody has to speak for the vast numbers of citizens who aren’t starry-eyed over a hot man in a uniform and actually care about the endless dead bodies and the wasted billions in this godforsaken war in Iraq.
Update: He speaks! The war in Iraq going so well! I had no idea. The surge is not only a success — it’s a rousing success. In fact, things are going so well, I think we can declare victory and go home.
Very impressed by all the charts especially. Reminds me of that fantastic speech by Colin Powell before the UN. That was very convincing too. Too bad he lied.
.
The Oracle Speaks
by digby
Oooh. The excitement is palpable. The Man Called Petraeus is just about to speak! All morning, I’ve been watching the breathless coverage of the handsome General with all those medals on his chest walking in and standing around and then sitting down and then shuffling papers, just holding my breath wondering, “what’s he going to say?” (I only wish they’d provided a countdown clock so I knew just how much longer I had to wait!)
Thankfully, we’ve had team coverage of his entrance and his sitting and standing with lots and lots of speculation that he’s going to say that the surge is succeeding. But how could they know? TMCP is a man of unique virtue and goodness who will speak from the heart and tell the truth like his most similar predecessor General George Washington, who could not tell a lie. So I don’t care what they say. I’m going to sit back and listen to what the Great Man has to say.
And then I will make a sacrifice in thanks for his leadership and Godly attributes. A goat perhaps?
Update: Also, we shouldn’t forget our other oracle, Ambassador Crocker, who was recently quoted in Der Spiegel saying this:
“We had the most brutal of Baath regimes here for 35 years, and now we have a few years of turmoil. It isn’t really all that much.”
Hey, what’s a few hundred thousand deaths in the big scheme of things? It isn’t really all that much. No biggie.
.
Pushing On All Fronts
by tristero
PZ Myers links to a critique of a most remarkable article on legal philosophy by Steven D. Smith. Smith, the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego, is an intelligent design creationist. But in his article, Smith doesn’t discuss the legal issues that have sunk the teaching of creationism so much as try to assault the meta-legal assumptions under which the teaching of creationism is deemed illegal:
[U]nder modern conventions, academic discussion is supposed to be carried on in secular terms, meaning, for the most part, the terms of scientific naturalism and of common sense everyday experience. In attempting to explain som ehappening or phenomenon, it is perfectly permissible for modern scholars to refer to religion–or to people’s beliefs in God. By contrast, actual appeals to God, or to anything that looks metaphysically suspicious or exotic, are out of bounds. As a result of this drastic narrowing of the range of admissible argument or explanation, claims or positions that would once have been framed forthrightly in theological terms now must be translated into more secular terms–or else abandoned. [emphases in original.]
Wow.
It is a mistake, however, to view Smith as a lone nut. Let’s not forget that one of the arguments often advanced to inflict intelligent design creationism on schoolkids is that “modern” science arbitrarily limits and narrows the possible explanations of a given phenomenon solely to the natural, foregoing even the possibility of a transcendental, supernatural explanation. Smith is simply trying the same scam – sorry, I meant to say “argument” – on law. This is all of a piece with Scalia’s highly distorted – sorry, I meant “idiosyncratic” – reading of the Declaration of Independence and of the desire among christianists to overturn the Enlightenment and replace the exercise of reason with appeals to God. If you think I’m kidding or being paranoid, by the way, google up the Wedge Document, for starters, and be sure you put a pillow on the floor to protect your jaw when it drops.
Brian Leiter makes mincemeat of Smith’s thesis. But that won’t stop Smith or other legally-trained christianists from wasting this country’s valuable time confronting and deflecting this crap. Smith’s ideas are part and parcel of a wide intellectual assault, advancing arguments that have been refuted long ago (the Argument From Design was debunked at least as early as the Rennaissance, I think). They should be viewed not merely as crackpot notions to be laughed at (although ridicule is entirely called for) but also as a very dangerous rightwing movement. Consider how much time has been wasted fighting back attempts to redefine science as open to non-scientific explanations. It’s been an incredibly difficult fight. And that is exactly the same kind of stultifying, intellectually vacuous mischief that Smith and his cronies are trying to create in law.
No, Duh
by tristero
A bunch of us have been saying this for years:
In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.
The next thing to study is which kind of brain is more grounded in reality. One guess what the results will be.
[UPDATE: I suppose I should make clear that I take findings like this cum grano salis. As more was learned about hemispheric localization of brain function, the right brain/left brain differences were found to be more subtle and complex than merely right brain equals holistic, left equals analytic. I’m pretty certain that future studies will show that the relationship between political orientation and simple perceptual/behavioral tasks will show similar complexity.
Then again, it’s just like a liberal to distrust an unequivocally clear result.]
Feith’s Brilliant Idea
by tristero
When you’re right, you’re right, even if you’re the stupidest fucking guy on the planet:
Should the United States create a civilian reserve corps to train, equip and deploy volunteer civilians for civilian reconstruction tasks, just as we do military reservists for military tasks?
Great, great idea!
Okay, folks, who would you volunteer to send to Iraq to work on civilian reconstruction tasks?
I volunteer…Ann Coulter.
Bring It On, Girly Man
by digby
Seemingly taunting Osama bin Laden, President Bush’s homeland security adviser said Sunday the fugitive al-Qaida leader is “virtually impotent” beyond his ability to hide away and spread anti-American propaganda.
The provocative characterization came just days after bin Laden attracted international attention with the release of a video in which he ridicules President Bush about the Iraq war and reminds the world that he not been captured.
Ahead of the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, White House aide Frances Fragos Townsend made a clear attempt to diminish the influence — or the perception — of the man who masterminded those attacks.
“This is about the best he can do,” Townsend said of bin Laden. “This is a man on a run, from a cave, who’s virtually impotent other than these tapes.”
In appearance on two Sunday talk shows, she used the “virtually impotent” reference both times, suggesting the language was chosen with careful purpose.
“We know that al-Qaida is still determined to attack, and we take it seriously,” Townsend said. “But this tape appears to be nothing more than threats. It’s propaganda on their part.”
Townsend was considerably more direct than even Bush in rebuking bin Laden. The president responded to bin Laden’s tape last week by saying it was a reminder that the world is dangerous and that Iraq is part of the war against extremists. He never identified bin Laden by name.
The consensus of the nation’s top intelligence analysts is that bin Laden’s terrorist network is anything but impotent.
[…]
Taunting bin Laden as “virtually impotent” would likely not provoke him to respond, because his strategy of attacks involves lengthy planning that would not be derailed by a single comment, said Sanderson, a senior fellow at CSIS. But such a comment could prove incendiary to like-minded followers of bin Laden who see themselves as a “vanguard of a global assault on the United States,” he said.
“A provocation like that,” he said, “is not helpful.”
I assume they thought this was very clever, having a blond American woman insult bin Laden’s manhood. (She might as well have held her thumb and forefinger up like she was measuring an inch while she said it.) I’ll bet Bush snorted and snickered all afternoon. But sadly, it’s probably true that some of bin Laden’s followers are just as insecure about their manhood as Townsend’s boss is and some poor schmoe in Afghanistan or Iraq or somewhere else willpay the ultimate price for her little taunt.
Hey, if she’s lucky, maybe some al Qaeda type will lose it before Tuesday and give The Man Called Petreaus a big boost for his testimony by blowing up a bunch of people. This sophisticated marketing plan of theirs is killer.
.
Giuliani’s Unhinged Adviser
Rudy Giuliani, in his campaign for the US presidency, has taken [Norman Podhoretz] on as a foreign policy adviser. Those who think the Iraqi disaster has killed the influence of neoconservativism should follow Giuliani’s campaign with interest.
And here are some of the notions NoPod, from his recent book, “World War IV” is feeding Mr. Giuliani:
He describes the dispute between opponents of Bush’s war and its defenders as “no less bloody than the one being fought by our troops in the Middle East,” indeed as “nothing less than a kind of civil war.” I myself was opposed to the war, and do not always hold tender feelings for my intellectual opponents, but I hardly think of our differences as comparable to the burning of Atlanta or the battle of Fallujah….
Podhoretz still argues that the Bush administration’s claims [that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda] were at least partly true. As evidence, he quotes the Senate Intelligence Committee’s assessment that, in Podhoretz’s words, “Al Qaeda had in fact had a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam.” This is flimsy. Cultivating such informal relationships is what agents do. In any case, a declassified report from the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006 showed, according to The Washington Post, that “intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify invading Iraq.”
Was there even chance that [Saddam would use chemo weapons] , if the US didn’t go to war against him first? Podhoretz still believes that there was. [emphasis added]. British intelligence, he says, had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger.” In fact, there was no evidence that any transaction ever took place. Suggestions to the contrary were based on forged documents. And the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded: “The language in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that ‘Iraq also began vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake’ overstated what the Intelligence Community knew about Iraq’s possible procurement attempts…”
The problem is not Bush, the “great president,” or Rumsfeld, Cheney, or anyone in the US government. On the contrary, Podhoretz is convinced that the savage murders and daily atrocities in Iraq are actually “a tribute to the enormous strides that had been made in democratizing and unifying the countr under a workable federal system.” He wonders why men in the “so-called ‘insurgency'” would be shedding so much blood if they didn’t think the US mission in Iraq was working…
If anyone is to blame, in Podhoretz’s view, for setbacks in our war against Islamofascism, it isn’t Bush, but Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, and those campus guerrillas of the “hard Left…” But even if Podhoretz were correct about the leftist distrust of US benevolence and the rightist distrust of everything foreign, these opinions didn’t cut much ice when President Bush decided to go to war. They were marginal voices at best, reduced to the odd shouting match on television, and barely heard in the mainstream press.
This is not how Podhoretz sees it, however. Spooked by his obsession with elitist and anti-Israel traitors undermining American power, he seriously proposes that US television was “drowning us with material presenting Islam in glowing terms. Worse, “the media,” including such august organs as The New York Times, had cloaked themselves in a dangerous “stance of neutrality” between “America and its Islamofascist enemies,” which “logically implied that the two were morally equivalent.” The only exception, Podhoretz concedes, was the Fox network. I remember watching a great deal of American television in 2003, as well as reading the papers. My impression was not that the media produced “an antiwar and in many cases anti-American stance as an alternative to the pro-American Fox.” In fact, such an impression strikes me as unhinged [Emphasis added].
Unhinged.
Exactly. The views NoPod holds are screaming yellow bonkers. They are out there with Lyndon LaRouche, Rushdoony, the Heaven’s Gate cult, and the Flat Earth Society. And Giuliani, a leading Republican presidential candidate, depends on this purveyor of unhinged, crackpot, reality-lacking notions for advice on foreign policy. Even assuming he has other other foreign policy advisers, which he surely does, it is an indication of how unhinged Giuliani is himself that he respects NoPod’s opinion enough to pay him to repeat them.
Folks, Buruma’s evisceration of Podheretz’s book is the way to talk about really bad ideas and really bad proposals. You don’t dignify sheer nonsense – as Dr. Biddle did in outlining his presumptively “non-polemical” case for the surge – you dismiss it as unworthy of serious consideration.
Any other approach enhances the status of those bad ideas. This country does not have the luxury to entertain idiocy as if it is reasonable. And it requires both politicians and intellectuals with the courage and strength of character to label a bad idea as unhinged even if it is being vigorously pursued by the president of the United States.
One more observation, not about NoPod, but Richard Perle, whom Buruma quotes which illustrates the genuine danger of permitting crackpots to influence a president and his administration:
I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, “Should we go into Iraq?,” I think now I probably would have said, “No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.”
Most folks, including Buruma focus on the “Delphic,” where Perle assures everyone he’s not an hallucinating young girl. But instead, note the last sentence. It can be read two ways. Firstly, as a colloquial way of expressing alarm that Saddam might be supplying wmd to terrorists. Or it can be read literally as an assertion of fact, namely that Saddam is supplying weapons to terrorists.
You think most folks who hear Perle say things like that will pick up the first reading? You think someone like Perle will hasten to clarify exactly what he meant? Hell, you think Perle is even clear-headed enough to tell the difference between a fear and fact?
That’s why you don’t propagate sheer garbage like “the chance of success is a long shot but greater than zero” and deem such arguments “defensible” when they clearly aren’t. Because people start to take sheer nonsense seriously. And that’s why truly first-rate minds don’t mince words when they encounter truly bad ideas and reasoning that are embraced by the powerful.
Cheyenne B.’s A Bargain At $5,995.
by tristero
And after the nuptials, you can get started right away on your very own full Quiver. What fun!
[UPDATE: In case you’re wondering, at least one of these sites is quite real.]
The USTA Has A Wicked Sense Of Humor
by tristero
Last night, we went to the US Open to see Henin clobber Kuznetsova to win the women’s championship. Now, as part of the warm-up, there was a video homage to the career of the great Billie Jean King. My ear got drawn to the background music which was very stirring and, I suddenly realized, very familiar.
It was the main theme to “Jurassic Park.”