And maybe JPod’s right about Stockholm syndrome. And maybe the media’s selectively choosing what to show of her statements. But it would be nice to hear her say something remotely critical of her captors, particularly about the fact that they murdered her translator in cold blood. I’m very glad she’s alive, but I’m getting a very bad vibe. More, no doubt, to come.
He reminds of one of those guys who says a rape victim didn’t act traumatized enough for him, so she’s probably lying.
Pantload is not just an ordinary GOP dimwit; he apparently can’t even read. She made the tape right after she had been released to the Iraqi Islamic Party offices and before she was in the hands of her friends and colleagues:
Carroll’s captors dropped her off in a Baghdad neighborhood, outside an office of the Iraqi Islamic Party. The politicians inside gave her juice, candy, water and tissues.
Composed, Carroll negotiated her way through the first of many politically laden conversations she would have Thursday, trying to stick to what she wanted and didn’t want to say.
The party officials asked her to write out and sign a statement saying she had not been harmed in her brief time at their offices. They had her record a question-and-answer session on camera that they said was for their records. It showed up on television shortly afterward.
Jill Carroll has more testosterone in her little finger than all these bedwetters put together. I’m sorry that she has not given the 101st one-handed keyboarders the picture of blood and horror they need to get satisfaction from their safe little offices, but I think it’s highly unlikely these bedwetters would have handled themselves with such fortitude in those circumstances. They are after all, the same brave soldiers who believe the shoe bomber is a greater threat to the nation than having thousands of ICBM’s pointed at every major American city.
Update: I’d love to see how Don Imus and his pathetic little crew of flaccid, middle aged gasbags would hold up under her circumstances. I have a feeling that it wouldn’t take much more than the kidnappers putting too much lemon in the bernaise sauce and Imus and these walking viagra commercials would break down and start calling themselves Tanya.
Ah, money. John Aravosis brings the subject up again. A few comments on his post, which is well worth reading:
1. No one should be surprised that, one-on-one, politicians are really, really nice. It’s their job to be nice. If you think about it for twenty seconds it becomes patently obvious that only someone with a nice personality could get anywhere in politics – which, after all, is all about working with other people 24/7. The Nazi-loving Schwarzenegger is really nice. By contrast, The Great KAT, who makes the young Bob Dylan look like a docile interview subject, is likely never to be elected… dogcatcher (couldn’t resist). I’m told even Nixon was nice, even if I find that incredibly hard to believe.
Why is being nice essential to political success? Why is being nice as important for a political leader as being well-read and intelligent? My friends, if you have to ask those kinds of questions, then my advice is to pursue that degree in advanced statistics you’ve always wanted. I couldn’t possibly begin to explain it to you. (Irate statisticians, please note: Musicians easily rival you for the title of professionals with the worst social skills.)
It also goes without saying that because nice-osity is such a critical skill, politicians are exceedingly adept at turning up the charm in order to disarm an opponent, or modulate the niceness in all sorts of subtle ways to suit their ends.
Therefore, John is absolutely right to report on the behavior of the politicians he meets. It is a crucial part of understanding who they are. So we can crush them at the polls.
But John is mistaken, when he writes about the charming Katherine Harris, “That doesn’t mean I think she’s a wonderful human being, it simply means that whatever she is, it’s a lot more complicated than folks would like to present.” It’s not complicated at all, John. One-on-one Harris is professionally nice and she’s so good at it, it looks sincere. It may even be sincere. That is her job. That’s why she has supporters. What’s so hard to understand?
2. The question readers of John’s blog should ask is this: If John goes to these affairs – and why not, since he didn’t have to pay for it, so, hey, the food’s free – will being nice to Katherine Harris help advance the liberal causes John so passionately believes in? Well, it can’t hurt. Being mean to her in that situation gets you nowhere.
3. Point 2 above notwithstanding, he should have kicked Katherine Harris in the shins. Hard.
4. Regarding money, it’s painful to read John’s justifications. That anyone as smart and savvy as John Aravosis would waste his time defending his desire and need to be paid for a job well done! That anyone could object to competent people being paid well to do their job! This just blows my mind.
Phil Glass put it succinctly – you pay me money. I give you music. There isn’t a composer who ever existed (with the exception of Charles Ives) who would disagree. Don’t like Phil’s music? I assure you: Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven (to name just three) had exactly the same attitude.
5. To clarify point 4, please understand: I think John Aravosis is absolutely right about money. It is a crime that he should be wasting his valuable time defending his need to be paid. However, it clearly is necessary for him to educate his audience in reality. Hopefully, they’ll get it. But if they don’t, John will simply have to learn to ignore them. (For the little that it’s worth, full disclosure: I’ve never been paid to do any political writing, or political work, of any kind, including blogging. Nor am I seeking payment. This makes me morally superior to nobody who does earn money – honestly, duh – from political work.)
6. John really should have kicked Katherine Harris in the shins when he had the chance.
7. John’s last point is the most important. From the small involvement I’ve had with “real” politics, via blogging, attending conferences, interviewing and talking to politicians and diplomats, I am certain that politics has the potential to be enormously enjoyable.
Yes, indeed: Confronting the far-right – and destroying their ability to influence mainstream American politics is a moral obligation, I believe, for any American that cares about the well-being of his/her family, friends, and neighbors, not to mention the rest of the world. It’s also potentially a lot of fun (and yeah, it can be dispiriting; no one said it was gonna be easy fun).
There simply is nothing wrong to be paid well for fighting effectively for liberal causes AND having fun. In fact, that’s also part of the fun. Only crazy puritans think you should be miserable when you do good.
8. God-DAMMIT, John! Crutches! I want to see Katherine Harris on crutches! I want to sign the fucking cast on her leg! How could you pass up the chance?!??!
U.S. officials are practically ignorant of this silent advance of fear. And their response to the exposed tip of the iceberg–open violence–has been misguided. Despite tough proclamations and battles against so-called insurgents in isolated valleys, U.S. military and civilian officials remain obsessed with ‘Al Qaeda’ and any possible manifestations of an Osama bin Laden-style, ideological confrontation. This concern acts as a set of blinkers, blinding Americans to the real problems in Afghanistan and vastly contributing to the Afghans’ disillusionment.
The fact is, except in a training capacity, Al Qaeda hardly has any presence here. This is logical: Why would Al Qaeda send Arab or Chechen operatives to notoriously chauvinistic southern Afghanistan, which hated the domineering Arabs when they were guests of the Taliban, and where foreigners stick out like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? For ideological combat against the West, Iraq is a far more convenient and penetrable battleground, which is one reason why countless more Americans die there than in Afghanistan.
Even the ‘suicide bombings’ in Afghanistan that have garnered mentions in the Western press of late are often something else. In one case I investigated carefully–the target, an Afghan official, was a friend of mine–much evidence contradicted the notion that the attack was a suicide bombing, as it was immediately labeled: the condition of my friend’s body, the type and location of the survivors’ wounds, and eyewitness descriptions. Everything pointed to a remote-controlled mine planted ahead of time. But no Afghan or U.S. official bothered to collect this evidence or to examine it seriously when it was presented to them.
Why such sloppiness? Because the terrorist suicide bombing explanation suits everyone. Americans are comfortable spending their resources searching for the Al Qaeda bogeyman; the real perpetrators take cover behind the Al Qaeda label; and Afghan officials are absolved of complicity or incompetence and the responsibility to properly investigate.
The steadily worsening situation in southern Afghanistan is not the work of some ineffable Al Qaeda nebula. It is the result of the real depredations of the corrupt and predatory government officials whom the United States ushered into power in 2001, supposedly to help fight Al Qaeda, and has assiduously maintained in power since, along with an ‘insurgency’ manufactured whole cloth across the border in Pakistan–a U.S. ally. The evidence of this connection is abundant: Taliban leaders strut openly around Quetta, Pakistan, where they are provided with offices and government-issued weapons authorization cards; Pakistani army officers are detailed to Taliban training camps; and Pakistani border guards constantly wave self-proclaimed Taliban through checkpoints into Afghanistan.
But beleaguered Afghans have a hard time getting U.S. political and military officials to focus on these two factors, which feed on each other. U.S. personnel cling to the fictions that Afghans are responsible for the local officials who rule over them–despite the overwhelming moral and material support the United States has provided these officials–and that the Pakistani government is cooperating in the war on terror. And so the Afghan villagers, frightened, vulnerable, and disillusioned, are obliged to come to terms with the ‘fairies who come at night.’
This state of affairs is so bewildering that Kandaharis have reached an astonishing conclusion: The United States must be in league with the Taliban.
From Anchorage it takes 90 minutes on a propeller plane to reach this fishing village on the state’s southwestern edge, a place where some people still make raincoats out of walrus intestine.
This is the Alaskan bush at its most remote. Here, tundra meets sea, and sea turns to ice for half the year. Scattered, almost hidden, in the terrain are some of the most isolated communities on American soil. People choose to live in outposts like Dillingham (pop. 2,400) for that reason: to be left alone.
So eyebrows were raised in January when the first surveillance cameras went up on Main Street. Each camera is a shiny white metallic box with two lenses like eyes. The camera’s shape and design resemble a robot’s head.
Workers on motorized lifts installed seven cameras in a 360-degree cluster on top of City Hall. They put up groups of six atop two light poles at the loading dock, and more at the fire hall and boat harbor.
By mid-February, more than 60 cameras watched over the town, and the Dillingham Police Department plans to install 20 more — all purchased through a $202,000 Homeland Security grant meant primarily to defend against a terrorist attack.
Your federal tax dollars at work, folks. Bridges to nowhere and terrorist surveillance in remote arctic villages. This is how the Republican party keeps the nation safe, promotes small government and shows fiscal responsibility.
Not when it comes to science it ain’t. Check this out from Discovery Institute’s so-called Center for Science and Culture, the clowns who brought you “intelligent design” creationism, the clowns with ties to Christian Reconstruction and the Moonies. Now don’t peek, but can you spot, as PZ Myers says, the “serious problem in the logic” of “intelligent design” creationist Jonathan Witt’s argument?:
In Dover, they [mainstream scientists] insisted that physical evidence presented against their theory wasn’t an argument for intelligent design. Darwinist [sic] Kenneth Miller made this argument on the stand and the judge concurred. But in Ohio they wanted to scare people into thinking that simply teaching students the scientific evidence for and against Darwinism was somehow legally dangerous. Since it isn’t, the Darwinists had to get creative, had to change their story. So now they asserted that simply exposing students to the evidence against Darwinism constitutes the teaching of intelligent design. Thus, their Ohio position flatly contradicts their Dover position.
Give up? All right, go to Pharyngula and marvel at the extent to which these people can lie without breaking a sweat. And the president of the United States thinks their “theories” deserve equal time with real science. Incredible.
[Note to creationists: All attempts to prosleytize for your nonsense will be ignored. As usual, please take your science questions or your disputations to a science site and air them there. If a reputable scientist – meaning a scientist who understands Darwin and accepts evolution – says you have a legitimate point, come on back and let us know exactly what they said (no “paraphrases” or partial quoting). ]
I’m sure most of you caught this a couple of days ago, but in case you didn’t, this round of Golden Wingers is excellent. This only a runner up:
Chickenhawk grunt Christopher Hitchens finally gives himself the promotion he deserves:
Up until now, I have resisted all urges to assume the mantle of generalship and to describe how I personally would have waged a campaign to liberate Iraq.
General Hitch – after consulting with his trusted military advisor, Captain Morgan – outlines his plan of attack:
I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.
Optionally, until I black out. Either one.
Click the link to see the winner (and find out why liberals hate their mommies.)
It’s clear that Chris Matthews sees the immigration issue as another opportunity to crawl up the GOP codpiece and prove his manly manliness. Yesterday he not only had that silly Dukes of Hazard caricature Mudcat “I call ’em illegal aliens” Saunders on, he said this:
MATTHEWS: Well, the fact is, Bob, it’s not just — and Kate — it’s not just Republicans who don’t like illegal immigration. Seventy-one percent of the country say it’s their number one concern. They want to stop illegal immigration. These are regular Americans. They’re not right-wingers. And they think we ought to have a border.
I don’t know how many times this guy has to twist poll numbers before someone calls a doctor and has him tested for some sort of cognitive disorder. Media Matters corrects this massively ill informed bullshit:
Matthews was apparently distorting a March 10-13 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that found that 71 percent of respondents would be “more likely … to vote for a candidate for Congress” who “[f]avors tighter controls on illegal immigration.”
In a March 9-12 CBS News poll, 4 percent of respondents identified immigration as “the most important problem facing this country today.” And a January 26-29 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 9 percent of respondent thought that illegal immigration “should be the top priority for the federal government.”
I’m sure that with all the legislation, hysterical coverage and massive protests that it has become “number one” to more people lately, but I will be very surprised if it comes even close to being the number one issue any time soon. This country has a lot of problems.
Matthews could have illuminated this debate if he had noted that according to the latest Democracy Corps poll, the single most important foreign policy issue is globalization and outsourcing. It’s more important than terrorism and Iraq. I found that surprising. It explains why there is so much anxiety over immigration right now. The threat of cheap foreign labor is very real to people, they feel powerless to stop it, and the most immediate face of it is low wage Latino migration to the US.
The forces shaping this are massive and it cannot be finessed by crude nativist rhetoric no matter how much people want to run populist campaigns and are tempted to pull out that well-worn playbook. The sharp feelings about immigration right now are a symptom of something much bigger and dislocating than latino day laborers — and it seems that on some level, the public knows it. It’s possible that politicians can cynically divert voters’ angst over globalization by stoking anti-immigrant fervor, but it appears to me that it would be a short term solution at best. Deporting every illegal immigrant and putting up a 25 foot wall won’t solve this problem. Globalization will continue apace, people will still want to buy massive quantities of cheap disposable stuff and working people are going to be squeezed.
Matthews is a simpleton as we all know, and often misstates basic facts. But he and his new idol Mudcat (who Chris practically blew right on camera)are talking a very aggressive short game with immigration and it’s more irritating than usual. I sincerely hope that he is not parroting the establishment CW he’s hearing over cocktail weenies or this issue is going to turn into a xenophobic free for all and leave the real issues that are making Americans uneasy about immigration unaddressed — just as the corporate establishment hopes it does.
Update: I just watched Matthews say that 90% of Americans in small towns in California are upset because “they didn’t move to Mexico, Mexico moved to them.” “Americans” have had it up to here with Mexican culture, apparently.
It was even too much for Hugh Hewitt, wingnut extraordinaire, who happens to be from Orange County once the most conservative region in California. His home town, Santa Ana, has a 76% Latino population. Hewitt, as a California Republican, knows very well that it is political suicide to make such blatant, xenophobic arguments and he wanted nothing to do with them.
I think it is EXTREMELY important, for this as well as many other reasons, that we make it very, very clear that Chris Matthews is not a Democrat. He’s a Republican:
MATTHEWS: People go to vote this November, you know this as well. When I go to vote, I know who my congressperson is. And I always voted for this woman out in Maryland for years, because I know her and like her, a moderate Republican. I always voted for her. Then if I knew somebody running against her personally, I’d vote for them.
It’s the way I look at a lot of the elections. I think Bush is OK the first time, then he changed I thought, so I didn‘t like him the second time. I‘m a thinker about this. Or do people just vote the party who my parents voted.
Those of us who live in California have always known that Howard Kaloogian is a clown. It’s nice to see that he’s getting the national exposure he deserves.
Many of you will remember that his group Moving America Back to the Dark Ages did an ad recently during the John Bolton confirmation hearings:
Wife: Honey, were you watching C-SPAN today? Did you hear how disloyal Senator Voinovich was to Republicans and President Bush? Voinovich stood with the Democrats and refused to vote for John Bolton, the man President Bush has chosen to fight for the United States at the UN
Husband: No, I was streaming it on the Internet at the office, but from what I could tell, Senator Voinovich played hookey from the hearings?
Wife: Yeah that’s right. He’s missed most of the Bolton confirmation hearings, but then shows up at the last minute and stabs the President and Republicans right in the back.
Husband: That’s ridiculous – the United Nations needs reform, we need someone who will stand up for the United States and fight the UN’s corruption and anti-Americanism.
Wife: Shame on Senator Voinovich. After the Democrats smeared Condoleeza Rice for Secretary of State and Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, how could Voinovich side with the Democrats in smearing John Bolton?
Husband: It seems like Senator Voinovich has become a traitor to the Republican Party.
Wife: Enough’s enough. I’m logging on to Move America Forward dot com to register my protest with Senator Voinovich’s office.
Husband: What was that site? Move America Forward dot com ?
Wife: Yep, Move America Forward dot com
Cute, huh? This was also the group that got on a bus and went down to Crawford to confront Cindy Sheehan and ended up fighting with each other.
But my favorite thing is this “Howard Is A Liar” site that is run by Republicans angry that kaloogian took credit for the California Recall. Lying about the Bagdad pic is just par for the course. He’s so bad even Republicans recoil.
In the comments to my recent post on Afghanistan, I wrote,
I have no idea what the Taliban’s future is, but I do know Afghanistan’s.
Violence bordering on sheer anarchy. Religious extremism. The oppression of women. Heartbreakingly-deep poverty.
In response, commenter gilpead wrote:
To paraphrase:
They’re a bunch of wogs who are, due to their backwardness, doomed to a future of misery. Afghanistan can never, ever join the community of nations because the country as a whole is a cesspool of violence and oppression and the poor savages are incapable of ever changing the way things are done”
I’ve decided to respond to this rather than ignore it and to respond in a serious fashion. *
Dear gilpead,
I’m afraid your paraphrase of my remarks is not accurate, both in the details about my remarks or in the intent behind them.
I have never used the term “wog” in my life. In fact, I don’t even know what it means.
I do not believe Afghans are “backwards” and never said so. I have no idea what you mean by that.
I believe that the future for Afghanistan is miserable, the future being defined as “over the next five years.” That is a realistic assessment based upon the instability of the present situation and the lack of a serious commitment by the US and the international community to assist the Afghans in overcoming very real, and very serious problems. No one can predict with any degree of accuracy where Afghanistan will be much beyond five years, but if you insist, I would side with those who feel that over the next ten years, the obstacles will make it excessively difficult for there to be much improvement over the present, and with tremendous potential for things to get a lot worse.
Afghanistan can never “join” the community of nations, because it already is a part of that community. The question is whether Afghanistan can join the community of nations which offers its citizens a life free of warlords, fundamentalism, chronic terrorism, and gut-wrenching poverty. Given the lack of interest on the part of other nations, including the US, to help in a truly serious way, the answer is “not very likely.” To hope that Afghanistan can pull itself up by its own bootstraps is to hope for the impossible. They need help. And they are not getting anywhere near enough.
Yes, the country (except within the circle of safety created by Karzai’s bodyguards) is rife with oppression and violence. I reject the phrase “as a whole” because it too vague, if not meaningless. I’m sure there are plenty of places that have not been scarred by violence. The same is true of Iraq. And Sierra Leone. The problem is that there is far more violence and oppression within Afghanistan’s borders than is compatible, in many, many places, with a minimum sense of safety.
I don’t know what you mean by the term “poor savages.” I have no idea what you’re talking about because I neither use such language or understand why anyone would.
Again, the Afghans require the determined, and sensible, longtime assistance of other nations to help rebuild their country. Without it, the situation will remain catastrophic and get worse. It is nothing in “the character of the Afghan people” that compels this. A United States in as bad a shape as Afghanistan would require an equal amount of help.
I have no idea what you mean by a phrase as vague and crude as “changing the way things are done.” A country is not a machine. Nor, as the world once again has learned, can any country be compelled into democracy by invasion, conquest, or coercion EXCEPT under very specific circumstances which were not the circumstances in either Iran or Iraq pre-invasion. For details, go to ceip.org and search for articles on nation-building, democracy after invasion, and the like.
LIke any sane human being, the Taliban and their ideas disgust me. But I fail to see where overthrowing the Taliban to replace it with anarchy, violence, poverty and slaughter that can -and will -be blamed directly on the United States is any improvement. The victims of the horrors may be slightly different, but the intensity, even if slightly lessened, will be laid at your feet, and mine.
Afghanistan fascinates me – the people, the culture, the architecture and music, and the geology. I would love to visit someday but I’m afraid I’ll never get there. That’s merely a personal disappointment, but the tragedy is that the greatness of Afghanistan has been so beaten up and battered that without serious, competent, help – which the Bush administration has proved over and over it is simply incapable of providing – that greatness will be beyond serious recovery for several generations or longer.
One last comment. I assume you will take what I’ve written here, caricature it, and proceed to refute the caricature. Doing so is your prerogative. Until George W. Bush, however, people who lived their lives within a cartoon reality usually didn’t hold places of serious influence within the US government. Sure, Cheney and Rumsfeld were paid with my tax dollars at an earlier time, but their boss knew better than to mistake their screwiest ideas as the products of rational deliberation on foreign policy.
To paraphrase, believe whatever you want. Just stay out of my government and take your hallucinating friends with you.
Love,
tristero
*A few words of explanation: I chose to respond not because I think gilpead had even an inkling of a good point, but because gilpead’s arguments are standard neo-conservative idealism of the sort Wolfowitz used to intimidate anyone who dared who talked reason to him or his fellows**, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to take those kinds of remarks seriously. Perhaps, some useful ways to debunk them might come out of it or better yet, spark someone else’s mind to come up with something far more effective.
Don’t get me wrong. I have no interest in “engaging” trolls, but I do have a lot of interest in developing arguments and rhetoric that can be used to refute the influential people from whom the trolls steal – men like Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Kristol, HItchens and even Packer (should he fall prey once again to the temptations of his narcissistic, naive idealism).
“We hate your policies. We are tired of being feared and hated by the world,” Ruthie Coffman (SFS201906) said, also calling Wolfowitz’s policies “deplorable.”
The killing of innocents is not the solution but rather the problem,” she said.
“I would infer that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power,” Wolfowitz responded.”War is ugly,” he said, “but the alternative is far worse.”
