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Month: May 2015

The “Take ’em out” Doctrine in full effect

The “Take ’em out” Doctrine in full effect

by digby

Here’s my obligatory piece on the this nonsense about the Bush administration being “misled” on the Iraq intelligence.I talk at length about the fixed intelligence, the Downing St Memos and more. But one only hopes that the flurry of such articles this week will at least deter the media from saying ridiculous things like this in the future:

So why in the world is the media once more abdicating their duty by allowing this fiction about how the Bush administration was “misled” or “mistaken” when we know they intended to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq and simply ginned up the rationale after the fact? And once again, it isn’t just Fox News. It’s the mainstream media.

Here’s John Dickerson of CBS News discussing this with Charlie Rose on “CBS This Morning”:

Dickerson: The best way to answer that question is to do what Marco Rubio tried to do which is go back to the moment and say that President Bush was faced with a very difficult decision and he had to choose between two bad options. One was to do nothing and have Saddam Hussein coordinate with terrorists or do something to try to stop him. This again, I don’t usually give advice to political candidates but in this case to try to take people back in time and that is what Marco Rubio tried to do. But his problem is that his answers are in tension when he looks back at the lessons learned.

Charlie Rose: What interesting about this John, as you know, is that Dick Cheney has no problem saying that even if we knew they did not have weapons of mass destruction we should have gone ahead. The president says “I regret very much that we had bad intelligence but sort of on balance it is good that Saddam is gone.” I don’t know why they have a hard time saying “if we did know there were no weapons of mass destruction there we wouldn’t have gone in.”

Knowing what we know, Dickerson still claiming that the choice was between letting Saddam “coordinate with terrorists” or trying to stop him is particularly rich.

Rose also mentions that this is Hillary Clinton’s position, so they should all adopt it, no harm no foul. The problem is that no member of the House or Senate can be held responsible for the stovepiped intelligence they saw. This is not the same as failing to question their judgment — after all, 21 out of 50 Democratic Senators voted no. But if it was the bogus intelligence that convinced them, their responsibility is of a different magnitude altogether than the people who “fixed” that intelligence. In that regard, the buck stops with the president.

And the media was partly responsible for all of that. There’s no need to rehash everything they did wrong, from hiring retired generals as “consultants” to push Pentagon propaganda on television to allowing themselves to be led around by the nose by their government sources. All you have to do is read the New York Times’ belated mea culpa over their pre-war coverage to know where they went wrong:

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

In fact, in one of the most famous examples of government propaganda of that era, Dick Cheney’s henchman Scooter Libby planted the “aluminum tubes” story in the New York Times, and then Cheney boldly went on “Meet the Press” to quote the article as if he’d just read it in the paper that morning over bacon and eggs. Again, they knew these tubes were not being used for nuclear weapons. Condi Rice’s office had dismissed the claims more than a year before. But it was this claim that led to the doomsaying about smoking guns and mushroom clouds which John Dickerson doesn’t seem to remember was utter nonsense.

The upshot of all this is that the GOP is working overtime to fit the Iraq debacle into their preferred narrative once and for all so they can move on and start ginning up the next military adventure. And the media, which has never fully accepted its responsibility in making that war possible, is either suffering from a severe memory lapse or sees it in its self-interest to help them do it.

And that doesn’t even get into the fundamental questions which asked whether we should have gone in to Iraq in that moment even if Saddam did have a nuclear weapons program. Plenty of us thought at the time that this was a daft move. After all, a completely unrelated threat had just taken down the World Trade Center — why would we turn our attention to this? We could just as easily have decided to Lithuania for all the logical sense it made.

Moreover, it was a drastic change in American policy and philosophy, a policy that had gotten us through the nuclear threat of the Cold War. Peter Beinert, who is one of the few former Iraq war supporters to have thoroughly examined his beliefs and come out the other side, put it well in this piece in the Atlantic:

By implying that the only problem with the Iraq War was faulty intelligence, Marco Rubio implies that when the United States has compelling evidence that a hostile dictator is building “weapons of mass destruction,” the correct response is war. This represents a dramatic departure from historical American practice. In the 1940s, Harry Truman—a president Rubio admires—watched Joseph Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers in modern history, build not just chemical and biological weapons, but a nuclear bomb. And yet Truman did not attack the U.S.S.R. In the early 1960s, John F. Kennedy, another Rubio favorite, watched Mao Zedong build a nuclear weapon, and made the same decision.

Truman and Kennedy judged that, while nuclear proliferation was bad, attacking countries that posed no immediate threat to the United States was worse. They made that judgment, in part, because earlier generations of Americans, remembering Pearl Harbor, considered preventive war—an unprovoked attack against an adversary simply because it could become a threat one day—to be immoral and un-American. And they made it because they feared that the consequences of such wars would be devastating.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, experts in and outside the Bush administration expressed the same fears. A November 2002 National Defense University report argued that occupying Iraq “will be the most daunting and complex task the U.S. and the international community will have undertaken since the end of World War II.” A collection of experts at the Army War College warned that the “possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious.” White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey publicly mused that rebuilding postwar Iraq might cost $200 billion. He was reprimanded, then fired. And yet the White House plunged ahead.

By claiming that the United States was right to invade Iraq given what its leaders thought they knew at the time, Rubio and his fellow GOP candidates are making George W. Bush’s radical departure from past American practice the new normal. They are enshrining the idea that the correct response to potential nuclear (and perhaps even chemical and biological) proliferation is preventive war. And, not coincidentally, they are doing so while trying to scuttle President Obama’s efforts to strike a diplomatic agreement with Iran over its nuclear program.

They are enshrining the insane Bush Doctrine as if it’s perfectly reasonable. We see that someone might be a threat someday so, in the immortal words of George W. Bush, we “take ’em out”.

And look how well that’s worked out for us so far.

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He’s such a mild mannered fellow too

He’s such a mild mannered fellow too

by digby

Papa Bear’s in the spotlight again:

Gawker’s J.K. Trotter reported Monday that O’Reilly had been accused of physical assault during a three-year custody battle with his ex-wife, Maureen McPhilmy. “A court-appointed forensic examiner testified at a closed hearing that O’Reilly’s daughter claimed to have witnessed her father dragging McPhilmy down a staircase by her neck, apparently unaware that the daughter was watching.” Trotter’s report cited “a source familiar with the facts of the case.” 

O’Reilly and McPhilmy were legally divorced in 2011. Their custody dispute ended three weeks ago, with McPhilmy winning custody of their two minor children.

I have no idea what the guy did or didn’t do. He claims the accusations are “100% false” and won’t speak about it again because of a court mandated gag order.  Custody battles are always ugly affairs. Maybe his daughter lied when she accused him of dragging her mother down the stairs.

But since he’s one to constantly lecture people on morality and ethics and condemn the alleged violence of certain ethnic and racial communities, it’s only natural that people might seize on this, especially since he’s known to have a very short fuse, even when he’s in public:

Double standards for dummies

Double standards for dummies

by digby

So it would seem that the Village is all atwitter this morning over some emails and alleged conflict of interest that Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal had when Clinton was in the state department. I’m sure we’re going to hear tons about this because the underlying story is Benghazi! and the narrative will be that Clinton personally ordered the killing of four Americans in order to reward her friends with big bucks. That how this crapola works.

Someone asked this morning if we wouldn’t have been very upset if we’d heard that some old friend of Dick Cheney’s had been working for the Bush charity and had some financial interest in Iraq and was sending Dick Cheney information that Cheney sent around to his staff and I nearly spit up my coffee I laughed so hard, recalling this story that virtually nobody gave a damn about back in 2003:

Cheney said Sunday on NBC that since becoming vice president, “I’ve severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven’t had, now, for over three years.” 

Democrats pointed out that Cheney receives deferred compensation from Halliburton under an arrangement he made in 1998, and also retains stock options. He has pledged to give after-tax proceeds of the stock options to charity. 

Cheney’s aides defended the assertion on NBC, saying the financial arrangements do not constitute a tie to the company’s business performance. They pointed out that Cheney took out a $15,000 insurance policy so he would collect the deferred payments over five years whether or not Halliburton remains in business. 

Lautenberg, D-N.J., asked the Congressional Research Service to weigh in.
Without naming Cheney or Halliburton, the service reported that unexercised stock options and deferred salary “are among those benefits described by the Office of Government Ethics as ‘retained ties’ or ‘linkages’ to one’s former employer.” 

Lautenberg said the report makes clear that Cheney does still have financial ties to Halliburton. “I ask the vice president to stop dodging the issue with legalese,” Lautenberg said. 

Cathie Martin, Cheney’s spokeswoman, said the question is whether Cheney has any possible conflict of interest with Halliburton, “and the answer to that is, no.” 

Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton from 1995 through August 2000. The company’s KBR subsidiary is the main government contractor working to restore Iraq’s oil industry in an open-ended contract that was awarded without competitive bidding. 

At last count Halliburton (KBR) made almost 40 billion dollars on those contracts once Dick got the job done. There was no need for middle men in that administration. The Vice President handled that stuff personally. And hey, it only resulted a few thousand American deaths, tens of thousands of American injuries, trillions in dollars, the total destabilization of the middle east and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. Whatevs.

I realize it’s cheap to point out that there’s a double standard.  It’s so obvious it’s embarrassing. But the Village  scribes are taking these little tips from the GOP oppo shop and running with them as if they’re Watergate (again…) and it has to be pointed out to the younger generation that they are being used and when all is said and done their reputations will forever be tainted with this crap if they don’t recognise what’s going on. Jeff Gerth and his ilk may still be doing the right wing’s dirty work and getting paid for it but everyone knows what he is. Any journalist who doesn’t want to have an asterisk after his or her name should be very cautious about this stuff unless they are planning a career as one of Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch’s second string minions.

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Congress plots to pay for trade deal by raiding Medicare, by @Gaius_Publius

Congress plots to pay for trade deal by raiding Medicare

by Gaius Publius

It just doesn’t get more cynical than this. Note that we’re talking about a bipartisan trade deal, thanks to 14 Democratic senators led by Ron Wyden and Chuck Schumer.

If Democrats fail to regain the Senate or put their next neo-liberal candidate in the White House — or both — they will have done it to themselves through cynical moves like this.

Michael Hiltzik, writing in the LA Times (my emphasis):

Medicare means many things to many people. To seniors, it’s a program
providing good, low-cost healthcare at a stage in life when it’s most
needed.

To Congress, it’s beginning to look more like a piggy bank to be raided.

That’s
the only conclusion one can draw from a provision slipped into a
measure to extend and increase the government’s Trade Adjustment
Assistance program, which provides assistance to workers who lose their
jobs because of trade deals. The measure, introduced by Rep. David
Reichert (R-Wash.), proposes covering some of the $2.7-billion cost of the extension by slicing $700 million out of doctor and hospital reimbursements for Medicare.

The plan on Capitol Hill is to move the Trade Assistance Program
expansion in tandem with fast-track approval of the Trans-Pacific
Partnership trade deal, possibly as early as this week
. We explained
earlier the dangers of the fast-track approval of
this immense and largely secret trade deal. But the linkage with the
assistance program adds a new layer of political connivance:
Congressional Democrats demanded the expansion of the Trade Assistance
Program, Congressional Republicans apparently found the money in
Medicare, and the Obama White House, which should be howling in protest,
has remained silent.

Let’s pause. “Congressional Democrats demanded the expansion of the Trade Assistance
Program, Congressional Republicans apparently found the money in
Medicare” — and 14 pro-money Democrats voted for it in the Senate. The bill was dead without them.

Now Hiltzik again:

The Medicare raid was so stealthy that critics in Congress, including
members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are just now gearing
up to oppose it. “It was sort of buried” in the bill, Rep. Keith Ellison
(D-Minn.), the caucus co-chair, told me Monday. The caucus expects to
circulate a letter opposing the arrangement as soon as later this week.
Ellison, an opponent of granting fast-track authority on the TPP, says
the Medicare cut amounts to piling the costs of trade liberalization
onto its victims.

There will be fabulous wealth generated by the
Trans-Pacific Partnership
,” he says. “The people who are hurt shouldn’t
have to pay for it with their jobs and then have inadequate Medicare
when they get older.”

If Fast Track passes in the House, it will need both Democrats and Republicans to do it. For just this maneuver alone —  a move that will result in deaths — may each of them rot that does it. (My complete coverage of TPP and Fast Track is here.)

GP

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How many dead people can’t vote? by @BloggersRUs

How many dead people can’t vote?
by Tom Sullivan

Turning the dead people voting meme on its head, Daniel McGraw crunched some numbers on a Politico napkin to take a swag at how many voters will die off before the 2016 presidential election:

“I’ve never seen anyone doing any studies on how many dead people can’t vote,” laughs William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in demographic studies. “I’ve seen studies on how many dead people do vote. The old Daley Administration in Chicago was very good at that.”

Maybe soon it will be Republican zombies headed down to the DMV (Dead Men Voting) office to obtain their photo IDs. It turns out that mortality rates are more of a problem for Republicans than for Democrats. (And for Texans last weekend.) It’s not called the Grand Old Party for nothing:

By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats.

Next come the caveats, of course, and there are lots of them: where those voters live, whether they are in swing states or not, turnout rates, etc. But adding in 6 million new youth registrations (recent exit polls put the split at about 65-35 D-to-R) puts Republicans at a nearly 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016, McGraw estimates. Ruy Teixeira wrote last fall, “By the 2016 election, Millennials should be about 36 percent of eligible voters and roughly a third of actual voters.”

But to borrow a phrase, don’t be too proud of this demographical terror you’ve calculated. Counting young voters and getting them to turn out are two different things. Their staying home in 2010 (as in other mid-term elections) contributed to the Republican wave election that handed over so many state legislatures to GOP control. They stayed home again in 2014. Democrats got hammered, and not in a fun way.

More on the Fox Effect

More on the Fox Effect

by digby

James Fallows draws our attention to an analysis by former GOP advisor Bruce Bartlet who makes the case that Fox News is ruining the Republican Party. It’s very interesting:

[T]he mode of perpetual outrage that is Fox’s goal and effect has become a serious problem for the Republican party, in that it pushes its candidates to sound always-outraged themselves.

I recommend the whole thing, but here are a few samples. First, on misinformation, a quote from an academic study:

People who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news. 

“Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll. “Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”

Also:

Another problem is that Republican voters get so much of their news from Fox, which cheerleads whatever their candidates are doing or saying, that they suffer from wishful thinking and fail to see that they may not be doing as well as they imagine, or that their ideas are not connecting outside the narrow party base. As a recent academic study found: 

‘Exposure to programs featured on Fox News, such as those hosted by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, resulted in a greater wishful thinking effect by Romney supporters. In other words, while Romney supporters were substantially more likely to predict their candidate would win the 2012 presidential election, watching Fox News programming exacerbated this effect.’ 

It may be that some Republican Fox viewers became complacent and didn’t work as hard as they might if they had been more aware of how badly Romney was doing in the final days of the campaign.

On mood, Bartlett includes this quote after the 2012 election from Lincoln Mitchell, a political scientist at Columbia:

‘Fox has now become a problem for the Republican Party because it keeps a far right base mobilized and angry, making it hard for the party to move to the center or increase its appeal, as it must do to remain electorally competitive….One of the reasons Mitt Romney was so unable to pivot back to the center was due to the drumbeat at Fox, which contributed to forcing him to the right during the primary season.’

None of this is “news” to people who have followed the evolution of the media. But it is put together in a lucid and cumulatively effective manner that gives the arguments new heft.

Fallows wonders what will happen when the GOP decides it needs to do something about this. Can it do anything about it?

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QOTD: Rick Santorum

QOTD: Rick Santorum

by digby

On Iran and other countries accused of aiding global terrorism:

Let’s Load Our Bombers Up, and Bomb Them Back to the 7th Century

It’s not quite a colorful as Curtis LeMay’s famous quote about Vietnam (“they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age”) but it gets the point across.

As Jesus said in the book of Rick: “You’ve gotta make these primitives understand who’s boss amirite?”

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Don and Bruce

Don and Bruce


by digby








MAD MEN SPOILERS — BE WARNED

I don’t usually write about culture stuff because there are so many people who do it better than I can. But I did want to write a short comment about Mad Men which has been my favorite show for years and its ending is kind of like saying good bye to my own memories in some ways.  I’m Sally’s age and related to much of her story, although my family was very different in many important respects.  But I never related to her as much as I have these past two weeks to the news that Betty Draper was dying of cancer.  Just like Sally, my mother died of cancer at exactly the same age. And like her I grew up in a cloud of smoke and took up the habit myself in my late teens. Why we do such stupid things is a question for the ages. Luckily I quit and haven’t smoked in many, many a moon.

And the central theme of women at work and their roles in the home is obviously something I experienced.  I started working during the 70s and I can tell you that not all that much had changed.  It was 20 years later before I really saw some progress and even then it took way more effort that it should have to make men treat women decently in the workplace. But just as it’s portrayed in the show you just endure the crap because it was the norm.  And they behave that way because it was the norm. Until it isn’t anymore. And then you wonder what in the hell you were thinking.

It’s the story of Don, of course, that fascinates so much, this alpha male with such a huge vulnerability — a secret so big it could destroy him. I always thought that he was a quintessential American archetype, the man who reinvented his life and made something completely different of himself. Whether an immigrant who landed in America and started a successful business or someone who moved out west and settled someplace new, one of the enduring myths of American culture has been the idea that you didn’t have to be the person you were born as.  And I always thought that Don Draper may have been the last of that breed. In today’s smaller world can you really ever reinvent yourself, leave the past behind and do what Don always said, “don’t think about it just move forward”? We really do have a “permanent record” now, don’t we?

But Don’s story ended up showing me something I didn’t expect. Of course you can still reinvent yourself.  We even have highly developed rituals and processes for doing it which Don never did until the very end:  if you admit your sins and have empathy for your fellow man, you can cleanse your spirit and start anew. (I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s certainly something many humans of all cultures believe is true.) He confessed to Peggy when she asked “what have you done Don, that is sooo bad…” (There are echoes in all that of Peggy’s Catholicism and her own unwillingness to “confess” to the priest — but Peggy wasn’t reinventing herself so much as becoming herself.) When Don finally admitted what he’d done, finally felt the pain of another person, he was able to let go and integrate Dick Whitman with Don Draper. And then he went home — to work, where he and Peggy both were their most fully authentic selves.

And the joke is that both of these characters, who are truly two sides of the same coin in many ways, are their most authentic selves in the most inauthentic field in the world: a job in which people like Don and Peggy poach people’s innermost feelings to sell back to them packaged in a shiny new box. Don seeing his consciousness raising meditation at sunrise as the perfect way to sell coke to the youth obsessed love and peace culture of the time says it all. (That movement was co-opted by Madison Avenue so quickly it’s hard to know if it ever really existed. Roger and Mona’s foray into their daughter’s commune showed the darker side before we ever saw the light.)

So was his reinvention real? I don’t know.  But I do know that after watching the show last night I idly flipped through the channels and landed on Bruce Jenner who happened to be sitting bathed in light on a Malibu cliff, confessing his secret and talking about how distressed he was at the thought of hurting his kids and how hard he was trying to make the best of it all. And I thought about how torturous it is to have to keep such secrets. Bruce Jenner is a real person doing this unbelievably brave thing: confessing his secrets to the whole world and becoming the person he really is.

And like Don, he’s doing all this in a world that is contrived and unnatural (although advertising can at least claim some artistic pretension) — Reality TV.  Is Bruce Jenner the Don Draper of our time?

Anyway, I’ll sure miss the show. But it was time to grow up. Again.

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RW hissy fit hypocrisy

RW hissy fit hypocrisy

by digby

The Wall Street Journal had a hissy fit last week when Paul Krugman had the nerve to criticize Alan Greenspan for agreeing to appear at a right wing circus to “counter” the Fed meeting. It was ever so uncivil and yet another example of liberal fascism because Krugman was said to have scared Greenspan away by attacking his policies which is apparently tantamount to character assassination.

Which is funny considering the Journal’s history of character assassination. I wrote about all this in Salon this morning:

The good news is that the right wing is fighting for civic decency, particularly the columnists and editorialists of the Wall Street Journal, which goes out of its way to take the high road. Here’s a perfect example from one of their columnists last week:

I wonder if any aspirant for the presidency except Hillary Clinton could survive such a book. I suspect she can because the Clintons are unique in the annals of American politics: They are protected from charges of corruption by their reputation for corruption. It’s not news anymore. They’re like . . . Bonnie and Clyde go on a spree, hold up a bunch of banks, it causes a sensation, there’s a trial, and they’re acquitted. They walk out of the courthouse, get in a car, rob a bank, get hauled in, complain they’re being picked on—“Why are you always following us?”—and again, not guilty. They rob the next bank and no one cares. “That’s just Bonnie and Clyde doing what Bonnie and Clyde do. No one else cares, why should I?”

That’s Peggy Noonan, of course, another civility cop who routinely smears the reputations of Democratic politicians with all the finesse of a 15th century House of Borgia hit man, and then whines whenever someone on the other side decides to fight fire with fire. This has literally been going on for decades. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal has pretty much defined the genre of high end character assassination for decades now. Famously, they targeted former Clinton aide Vince Foster several times, in “a string of highly critical editorials in the Wall Street Journal in June and July 1993,” as the Washington Post put it, which “ left Foster even more ‘distraught.’”

Suffering from clinical depression, Foster killed himself shortly thereafter. And then the right wing media, the congress and much of the mainstream political press which blindly followed them as if they were Pied Pipers, spent years and many millions of dollars torturing the family with absurd allegations and investigations into his death, some even suggesting that Hillary Clinton murdered him. (That included, among others, Rush Limbaugh, who has continued to make this insinuation in the years since. That would be the same Rush Limbaugh who Weekly Standard editor William Kristol once described as “almost a Wall Street Journal editorial page of the airwaves.”)

Read on for more examples. Links are all in the original article.

Honestly, the delicate right flowers of the right wing media are just too much. They love to swagger around brandishing their rhetorical weapons and then get all bent when the other side gives the mildest criticism. Krugman didn’t disparage Greenspan’s character, although he did point out that he was once an avid Ayn Rand cultist, which is true, and I can certainly understand why anyone would find that embarrassing.

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