Even though the media doesn’t seem to be buying it on the merits, I have to give the administration credit for their smooth pivot from their Katrina failure to defeating Hitler. It was savvy, you have to admit, to go down to New Orleans and give a couple of plodding, desultory speeches while Rummy delivered a half-mad stemwinder about appeasement in the 1930’s. Then, the minute the Katrina “anniversary” was over, Bush hightailed it out of town and immediately evoked the spectre of the Nazis, commies and martians coming to kill us all in our beds. I’m not seeing much about New Orleans anymore.
But I think it’s important to remember, nonetheless, that while Bush drones on and on about terror and fear and struggle and pain and sacrifice this morning, one year ago today Katrina was far from over. Indeed, the story of his incompetence was just beginning.
Today was the day he did this:
After he returned to Washington he held that bizarre, stiff press conference as we watched people begging to be rescued from the top of their houses.
George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.
He can assume a strong, manly pose today and catterwaul about “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” and fearmonger about “a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology” from the comfort of a hand picked audience. But when the chips were down a year ago, he proved he couldn’t lead his way out of a FEMA trailer.
One year ago today, I think we were all just beginning to wrap out minds around the scope of what was happening. I went back and looked at my posts and I think I was watching television most of the time because I only wrote a few. The pace picked up significantly over the following week as we all watched, appalled, at what was happening in an American city.
But it was clear that things were horrible even this early. That morning I wrote:
The pictures coming out of New Orleans are all horrible. But the income disparities among the citizens are brought into stark relief by this tragedy. Everyone is affected of course, but those who had little to begin with are truly left with less than nothing now. A whole lot of people who were hanging by a thread already just dropped into total despair. That dimension of the tragedy really makes my heart ache
.
As we know, it only got worse.
Think Progress has a very thorough timeline of events, here.
Boston Globe: Loose lips sink history The latest effort — transparent as it is inaccurate — tries to draw parallels between Iraq and World War II.
LA Times: Pipe Down, Rummy Rumsfeld’s cranky outburst mangles a historical analogy, bad-mouths legitimate critics.
Seattle PI: Iraq War: The false specter The defense secretary now deals with questioning of the mismanaged campaign by raising the false specter of World War II style appeasement.
Yahoo News: What Keeps Don Rumsfeld Up at Night? Hint: It’s Not the Body Count in Iraq.
How do you eat an elephant?One bite at a time.UPDATE: Sara at The Next Hurrah on Murrow and OlbermannUPDATE 2:From the Salt Lake Tribune
A crowd of thousands cheered Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson for calling President Bush a “dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights violating president” whose time in office would “rank as the worst presidency our nation has ever had to endure.”
The group – including children and elderly and some hailing from throughout Utah – then marched to the federal building Wednesday to deliver a copy of a symbolic indictment against the president and Congress for abuse of power and failure to uphold the U.S. Constitution.
With their signs labeling Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the “axis of evil,” calling the Iraq war a “mission of lies” or comparing the invasion of Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, to invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor, the estimated 1,500 to 4,000 protesters hoped their demonstration at the Salt Lake City-County Building sent a message about the reddest state in the country.
“If they [the Bush administration] lack support in Utah, my God they’re in trouble,” the Rev. Tom Goldsmith of the First Unitarian Church told the lively gathering between protest songs and banner waving.
I find it quite interesting that every few years another picture turns up of some powerful Republican Senator with the grand Kliegels of the Council of Conservative Citizens? George Felix Allen is just the latest.
Many of you will remember this picture from a few years back. (h/t Atrios)
Lott was criticized heavily for his association with the CCC back in the 90’s. Stanley Crouch wrote when the whole “Strom” thing blew up in 2002:
The “he,” of course, is Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). In late 1998 and early 1999, when I was writing column after column about him and calling for his resignation because of his connection to the Council of Conservative Citizens, there was no response from the media at large, with the noble exceptions of Frank Rich and Bob Herbert, both of The New York Times.
That proved to me that all the talk about a liberal media bias was bunk – at least when it comes to race.
What better target could there have been? Here was a man from Mississippi, a heaven for rednecks. Here was the council, an organization that described itself as “pro-white,” that published articles in its organ, the Citizens Informer, that advocated separation of the races and discouraged interracial marriage.
Lott had published a column in the Citizens Informer and had his picture on the cover of an issue in 1992. The photograph showed Lott giving a speech to the council at “the exclusive” (guess what that means) Green Country Club in Greenwood, Miss. The accompanying article quoted Lott as saying: “The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let’s take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries.”
In the Lott scandal our indignation reached critical mass. A lot of conservatives, many of them 50 and under, decided enough is enough, let’s end this, let a new party be born. And by the way, in the particular case of Trent Lott, it didn’t start yesterday. Stanley Crouch just surprised me by sending me a column he wrote almost four years ago for the New York Daily News. It was about a Lott appearance before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist group. I said it was springtime and it’s time to throw out the garbage, and Mr. Lott should go.
I wonder if any Republicans will be willing to publicly decare their desire to throw old Felix out with the garbage? I tend to doubt it. Racism is the new black this election season. But even if they do, it’s quite clear there are many more where he came from. There always are.
In sum, that’s Ramesh Ponnuru response to lefty criticism of Club for Growth’s targeting of Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) at the possible expense of a GOP majority in the Sen. For months now, progressive bloggers have been decrying the lack of media attention RI SEN has received compared to their efforts to unseat Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT). There are many things that distinguish the two races (Chafee was never a GOP VP candidate, for starters) but the more important difference is mentioned by Ponnuru: the Club for Growth does not exist to help the GOP control Congress.
On the other hand, pure partisanship is the stated goal of DailyKos’ founder Markos Moulitsas in his book Crashing the Gates. This is part of what made the targeting of Lieberman such a story. Perhaps it is a function of who is in power, and who is not, but the lefty blogosphere is much more concerned with tactics and strategy than ideological purity. If the Dems have a Sweet November, then maybe we’ll see if Lieberman-like purges become the norm, instead of the exception.
Uhm. Ok. But if the lefty blogosphere, under the iron rule of our Exalted Overlord Markos, only cared about “pure partisanship” then why would we target a Democratic senator in a safe seat? Kicks? Anyway, I thought we were a bunch of fanatical hippies trying to inflict our marginal 60% Iraq position upon the Democratic party against its will in order to re-run the 1972 election. Which is it?
And, yes, it’s true that the Club For growth doesn’t “exist to help the GOP control Congress,” but then the GOP already controls congress, doesn’t it? It doesn’t make them any less partisan. Here’s what the Club For Growth itself has to say about its intentions:
The Club for Growth exists to encourage, and make possible, the enactment of pro-growth economic policies by the federal government. The primary tactic of the Club for Growth PAC has been to provide financial support from Club members to viable pro-growth candidates to Congress, particularly in Republican primaries.
—–
One lesson we’ve learned from the Left, is that if you really want to advance your agenda, take on an incumbent who opposes you. Let the people know the truth about how they vote in Washington. This terrorizes all the rest. In fact, it’s amazing how fast cowardly politicians see things our way when they believe that their political careers are in danger.
Ed Crane of the Cato Institute has praised the Club for Growth as “the conscience of the Republican Party.”
Yikes. Maybe they ought to change some of that “terrorize” rhetoric. Lord knows if we ‘angry leftists” said it there would be rending of garments from one end of the radio dial to the other. And I don’t know when the Club “learned” this from the left because the last I heard we blogofascists had just started this thing in Connecticut. When has this technique ever been used by lefty groups? Our special interests won’t even withhold their support from Republicans when they stab them in the back over and over again?
The Club For Growth admits that it exists for the sole purpose of hammering Republicans who don’t toe their line and puts big, big money into play in Republican primaries to mau-mau the incumbent or turn the seat over to someone they prefer. They brag about it all over their site. Yet we lonely bloggers sitting in our homes around the country, mostly as a hobby, are Stalinists who are purging the Democratic Party of anyone who deviates from our party line, which is … pure partisanship.
The Club For Growth wrote the book on purging the Republican Party of politicians whom they deem to be insufficiently conservative on issues they care about. Why it should be considered a national story when “the angry left” challenges a senator they believe is out of touch with their values and not a story when “the angry right” does the same thing makes no sense.
Certainly, it’s puzzling, to say the least, that nobody deems it a problem that a very close senate election looms — and “the angry, suicidal left” was pragmatic enough to choose a safe Democratic seat to make their point, while the Republican Club For Growth (don’t bullshit me) may just cost the Republicans the Senate.
No story there, nosiree.
I want to say thank you to the Club for Growth, one of the nation’s most conservative organizations! They’ve always taken on tough races in order to help conservative candidates win in Republican primaries. The Club for Growth added a significant punch – just when we needed it most.
—After winning the GOP primary run-off in North Carolina’s 10th district, Patrick McHenry,2004
It looks like Bush has finished his walk-on performance in the Katrina pageant and is moving directly into his next project, “They’re Comin’ Tah Gitya! Part VXIII”
QUESTION: So do you think your new series of speeches are going to have an impact on midterm elections?
BUSH: My series of speeches are — they’re not political speeches. They’re speeches about the future of this country, and they are speeches to make it clear that if we retreat before the job is done, this nation will become even more in jeopardy. These are important times.
And I would seriously hope people wouldn’t politicize the issues that I’m going to talk about. We have a duty in this country to defeat terrorists. That’s why we’ll stay on the offense to bring them to justice before they hurt us, and that’s why I work to spread liberty in order to keep the peace. Anyway, thank you all.
PHILLIPS: That was the president in Little Rock. He’s now on his way to Nashville, Tennessee. That’s where our White House correspondent Ed Henry is.
Ed, he has got these series of speeches talking about the war on terror, capabilities of al Qaeda, and what the administration has done to protect the nation but he’s saying these are not political speeches.
ED HENRY, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, very interesting. The White House confirming today that the president will have a new series of speeches, as you’re noting. He will start it tomorrow at the American Legion, and will go right through September 19th when he speaks to the United Nations General Assembly.
Does this sound familiar, a series of speeches from the president? It should. He’s done at least three of these series. And I think this is a tacit acknowledgement by the White House that it really has not sold so far, and that’s why he’s taking yet another crack at it.
As far as the president’s claiming he does not want this to get political, that’s hard to believe at this point, obviously, given the fact that Democrats today are very upset with the comments yesterday from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, basically suggesting that critics of the White House war strategy are similar to those who were calling for appeasement that sparked Naziism back in the 1930s and ’40s. That’s gotten Democrats pretty hot today.
And it’s interesting given that last week the president said that he’s not questioning anyone’s patriotism when they criticize his war strategy. Then you hear that from Secretary Rumsfeld.
What we’re hearing from the White House is that the president is going to focus on broader themes about the struggle between freedom and tyranny. It certainly sounds like a two-prong strategy. The president putting out these larger, more flowery themes whereas some of his key officials like Secretary Rumsfeld really employing that hardball strategy, Kyra.
The previews don’t look so good. The press is all over Rumsfeld’s statements. Ken Mehlman on Hardball just about had a full-on meltdown under the withering questioning of Norah O’Donnell, of all people, who kept referring to Rumsfeld’s speech as calling the Democrats “Nazi-era appeasers.” (Evan Thomas even looked up from his snuff box, rearranged his lace cravat and intoned “it does have a whiff of desperation about it, what, what?”) Victoria Clark on The Situation Room twice raised her voice above a whisper and appeared to have a pulse under a grilling by the robot named John King.
Maybe it’s time for a rewrite. Or better yet, just close this turkey out of town.
I’m on vacation, and net access is bad around here but I got an email from Professor Michael Berube, DP* and he informs me that his new book What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? is now available through Amazon. I’ve read it and it’s flat-out wonderful.
Like all of Berube’s writing, the book is crystal-clear, often very funny, and eloquent. His ostensible subject is the modern liberal arts education as seen from inside the belly of the beast, the English Department, ground zero of the extreme right assault on American academia. But as interesting as that is, and it’s very interesting, that’s just the maguffin (google it). It’s like saying Gravity’s Rainbow’s about WW II rocketry. Well, yeah, but…
To be brief about it, if you have any interest in what liberalism really is, what it can accomplish in the US today, and why it is crucial to vehemently resist the far right’s relentless obsession to eliminate it, you should read this book.
Full disclosure: Yes, Michael’s a friend of mine. If you read the book, you’ll understand why. He asked me to read What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? in galleys and, if I liked it, to blurb it. I did so, happily. In fact, I’m quite honored he asked me, of all the people he could have asked.
*DP = “Dangerous Professor.” Dr. Berube has been designated by David Horowitz one of the most Dangerous Professors in America and I am so totally jealousl I could spit.
There’s plenty of commentary this morning about this Brian Williams interview with the president yesterday. But can I just point out that neither Williams nor Bush make any damned sense? Take this exchange:
WILLIAMS: When you take a tour of the world, a lot of Americans e-mail me with their fears that, some days they just wake up and it just feels like the end of the world is near. And you go from North Korea to Iran, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, and you look at how things have changed, how Americans are viewed overseas, if that is important to you. Do you have any moments of doubt that we fought a wrong war? Or that there’s something wrong with the perception of America overseas?
BUSH: Well those are two different questions, did we fight the wrong war, and absolutely — I have no doubt — the war came to our shores, remember that. We had a foreign policy that basically said, let’s hope calm works. And we were attacked.
WILLIAMS: But those weren’t Iraqis.
BUSH : They weren’t, no, I agree, they weren’t Iraqis, nor did I ever say Iraq ordered that attack, but they’re a part of, Iraq is part of the struggle against the terrorists. Now in terms of image, of course I worry about American image. We are great at TV, and yet we are getting crushed on the PR front. I personally do not believe that Saddam Hussein picked up the phone and said, “al-Qaida, attack America.”
Talk about dumb and dumber. I know the president is intellectually handicapped and I don’t expect much from Williams either. But couldn’t someone have written down the questions for him beforehand so he doesn’t ramble incoherently when he’s interviewing the president?
And why oh why can’t somebody pin the codpiece down when he says in one breath that the war came to our shores and that’s why we’re fighting in Iraq? Couldn’t Williams have followed up with, “but if Iraq wasn’t involved in the attacks, in what way was it part of the struggle against terrorism? Until we invaded, Iraq didn’t have any terrorists.” Bush would blather on about weapons of mass destruction and our oceans not protecting us, but at least it would be out there. That would be too much to ask, I guess.
The thing about how we are “great on TV but getting crushed on the PR front” is just bizarre. I have no idea what he meant by it other than it’s something someone said about about himself and he applied it to the country. I can’t figure out any other explanation.
This next part makes me feel sad for Bush the first. Junior is a terrible son, condescending and rude. Shakespeare is needed to explain it properly:
WILLIAMS: Is there a palpable tension when you get together with the former president, who happens to be your father? A lot of the guys who worked for him are not happy with the direction of things.
BUSH: Oh no. My relationship is adoring son.
WILLIAMS: You talk shop?
BUSH: Sometimes, yeah, of course we do. But it’s a really interesting question, it’s kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant. My dad means the world to me, as a loving dad. He gave me the greatest gift a father can give a child, which is unconditional love. And yeah, we go out and can float around there trying to catch some fish, and chat and talk, but he understands what it means to be president. He understands that often times I have information that he doesn’t have. And he understands how difficult the world is today. And I explain my strategy to him, I explain exactly what I just explained to you back there how I view the current tensions, and he takes it on board, and leaves me with this thought, “I love you son.”
He speaks as if his father is some simple working class bloke who loves his highly successful son and keeps him grounded with homespun wisdom. Bush doesn’t listen to him about important things. But that’s ok, because his simpleminded old Dad “understands that often times I[Junior] have information that he doesn’t have.” Sad, sad, sad.
Williams actually asks one interesting question:
WILLIAMS: The folks who say you should have asked for some sort of sacrifice from all of us after 9/11, do they have a case looking back on it?
BUSH: Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.
Dear God. He brags endlessly about lowering taxes and then calls it a sacrifice for the war effort. It’s true that having air travel disrupted for a week was truly a lot to ask of us but we rose to the occasion. The economy he’s been pumping as being great for years is now seen to have “tanked” and caused Americans great suffering. I won’t even mention the war we didn’t need to fight that’s costing huindreds of billions of dollars — which he promised would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues and which will instead cost every American child more than can even be calculated.
The truth is that we have been asked to make a lot of very important sacrifices. As the blogger Phila at Boufonia writes:
It’s often claimed that George W. Bush has asked for no sacrifices in this time of war. On the contrary, he’s asked us to sacrifice our humanity and our compassion. He’s asked us to sacrifice our privacy and freedom, and our respect for our fellow citizens. He’s asked us to sacrifice every irreducible ideal – and there were few enough of them, God knows – on which this country was founded, and whatever fragile steps we’ve taken towards implementing them under the law. He’s asked us to sacrifice any religious truth that would interfere with the dreary, mechanical pursuit of redundant wealth and false security. He’s asked us to sacrifice our souls and our conscience, in exchange for his snake-oil promise that we’ll never have to suffer the consequences of our own inhumanity. He’s asked us to sacrifice our present for his future, and our future for his present.
And we have to take off our shoes at airports too.
Update: I just saw an extended version of the interview and Williams did follow-up with Bush about al Qaeda in Iraq and as predicted, Bush blathered on about all the usual crap about “suiciders” and state sponsors of terrorism and the world being safer without Saddam. But the question was, at least, asked.
So Mounthir Abbas Saud, whose right arm and jaw were ripped off when a car bomb exploded six months ago, must have thought the worst was over when he arrived at Ibn al-Nafis Hospital, a major medical center in Baghdad.
Instead, it had just begun. A few days into his recovery at the facility, armed Shiite Muslim militiamen dragged the 43-year-old Sunni mason down the hallway floor, snapping intravenous needles and a breathing tubes out of his body, and later riddled his body with bullets, said family members.
In his book appropriately titled Liberty and Freedom author and historian extraordinaire David Hackett Fischer says, “In early uses, both words implied a power of choice, an ability to exercise one’s will, and a condition that was distinct from slavery. In all of those ways, liberty and freedom meant the same thing.”
But Fischer goes on to describe other ways in which their original meanings were different.
Our English word liberty comes from the Latin libertas and its adjective liber, which meant unbounded, unrestricted, and released from restraint. A synonymn was solutus, from the verb solvos, to loosen a set of bonds. These words were similar to the Greek eleutheria and eleutheros, which also meant the condition of being independent, separate, and distinct. The Greeks used these terms to describe autonomous cities, independent tribes, and individuals who were not ruled by another’s will. That ancient meaning survives in the modern era, where eleutheros has spawned scientific terms such as eleutheropetalous or eleutherodactylic, for separate petals or fingers or toes. Eleutheria, like the Roman libertas, always impled some degree of separation and independence.
Freedom has another origin. It derives from a large family of ancient languages in northern Europe. The English word for free is related to the Norse frie, the German frei, the Dutch vrij, the Flemish vrig, the Celtic rheidd, and the Welsh rhydd. These words share an unexpected root. They descend from the Indo-European priya of friya or riya, which meant dear or beloved. The English words freedom and free have the same root as friend, as do their German cousins frei and Freund. Free meant someone who was joined to a tribe of free people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.
A very similar meaning also appeared in the Sumerian ama-ar-gi, the oldest know word for anything like liberty or freedom, which appeared on clay tablets in Lagash before 2300 B.C. Ama-ar-gi came from the verb ama-gi, which meant literally going home to mother. It described the condition of servants no longer in bondage who returned to their free families.
In that respect, the original meanings of freedom and liberty were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection. A person with libertas in Rome or eleutheria in ancient Greece had been granted some degree of autonomy, unlike a slave. A person who had Freiheit in northern Europe or ama-ar-gi in southern Mesopotamia was united in kinship or affection to a tribe or family of free people, unlike a slave.
The question has been asked many times whether people in Iraq were better off under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Is that possible? I’m not necessarily asking is that so, but more is it possible for someone to enjoy a higher degree of freedom while existing beneath a dictator’s umbrella?
Fischer again:
Roman libertas gave rise to a complex vocabulary of stratification and mobility that still echoes in modern English speech. The Latin adjective liberaliter meant knowing how to behave gracefully and generously, in the manner of a highborn person who is secure in the possession of many liberties. It is the root of our word liberality. The noun libertinus meant an emancipated slave who had been granted liberties that he had not been prepared to use. Our modern word libertine preserves this ancient meaning.
Within this social frame, ancient philosophers developed libertas and eleutheria as ethical ideas of high complexity. The leaders were the Stoics, who wrote at greater length about liberty than others in the ancient world, especially the slave Epictetus (A.D. 55-135) and the emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180). Both argued that to be truly free is to cultivate a spirit of independence from things that are not in one’s control: bondage, tyranny, illness, pain, and death. This Stoic condition of liberty could be achieved even in a despotism. It is striking that the leading stoic philosophers of liberty in ancient Rome were an emperor and a slave.
The article linked to above continues:
Authorities say it was not an isolated incident. In Baghdad these days, not even the hospitals are safe. In growing numbers, sick and wounded Sunnis have been abducted from public hospitals operated by Iraq’s Shiite-run Health Ministry and later killed, according to patients, families of victims, doctors and government officials.
As a result, more and more Iraqis are avoiding hospitals, making it even harder to preserve life in a city where death is seemingly everywhere. Gunshot victims are now being treated by nurses in makeshift emergency rooms set up in homes. Women giving birth are smuggled out of Baghdad and into clinics in safer provinces.
In most cases, family members and hospital workers said, the motive for the abductions appeared to be nothing more than religious affiliation. Because public hospitals here are controlled by Shiites, the killings have raised questions about whether hospital staff have allowed Shiite death squads into their facilities to slaughter Sunni Arabs.
I guess in some cases it really sucks to be free.
Perhaps the great young inde-rocker Conner Oberst (with Emmylou Harris) said it best in his song Landlocked Blues:
We made love on the living room floor With the noise in the background of a televised war And in the deafening pleasure I thought I heard someone say “If we walk away, they’ll walk away”
But greed is a bottomless pit And our freedom’s a joke We’re just taking a piss And the whole world must watch The sad comic display If you’re still free start running away Cause we’re coming for you!
UPDATE: Here is a very nice set of photographs set to this Bright Eyes song (via You Tube) — stay with it long enough to hear the bugle (is it a bugle?) that follows the words above, and of course, to hear the beautiful voice of Emmylou Harris. For those not familiar with Conner Oberst, the Bright Eyes front man, Rolling Stone Magazine tagged him as this generation’s Bob Dylan.
