This is the first time in four years that I can recall a Democrat seriously being concerned about this group of people, and this is racism. This is racism. We are concluding that all Arabs are terrorists. We are concluding that every damn one of them — be they a sheik, an emir — they are all terrorists. They all have ties to terrorists and they all seek our utter, total destruction, and we can’t risk an exception to that. They’re all that way — and welcome to racism Democrats, because the Democrats are leading the show on this just as well as a lot of conservatives are. So when Democrats are illustrating their racism, their xenophobia, they’re also demonstrating that they fully acknowledge we have an enemy. Well, this is a tenuous position for them to take because their kook base doesn’t believe any of this.
All right, well, I’m watching this during the break — the Senate hearings. I’m just watching Sen. “Dick Turban,” ah, Dick Turban is doing his — from Illinois — he of Club G’itmo fame. Ha! I wish Roberts would have shown up in the Club G’itmo T-shirt today. Maybe, maybe a Club G’itmo java coffee cup, just for Dick Turban. Ah, but anyway, Dick Turban is up there saying, “Ah, you’re going to judged here, Judge. You’re going to be judged on one question, just one question. You going to expand the personal freedoms of the Americans, or are you going to restrict them? You going to expand personal freedom, or you going to restrict personal freedom?”
Illustration from the August 2005 issue of The Limbaugh Letter
[Reading from AP report] “One detainee wrapped in an Israeli flag, some were shackled hand and foot in fetal positions for 18 to 24 hours, forcing them to soil themselves.” Ugh! I thought they did that anyway over there.
It’s awfully tempting to simply answer Rush’s maidenly concern about the UAE’s royal family’s delicate feelings with this:
If it were up to you people, we wouldn’t exist as a country today. You would have given in to the Soviets long ago, you would have appeased the Soviet communists. You would appease Iran right now. You probably wouldn’t have cared about the war on terror or the bombing on 9-11. You would have sought out bin Laden and tried to make a deal with him, and this country exists today only because we have been able to prevent you from gaining power to do that kind of thing. We’ve had our run-ins with Neville Chamberlain types, and you’re the modern incarnation
Following up my post below, I’d like to recommend this diary over at Kos by hekebolos. I think this is an excellent insight into why this port issue is having so much resonance:
Time and time again, this president has said that his highest goal, superceding all others, and even superceding any previous precedent of executive authority–is to defend the American people. He has shown time and time again that neither international law, nor federal law, nor the constitution, nor the Legislative or Judicial Branches of the Government of the United States, will prevent him from executing that duty as he and he alone sees fit.
The Bush presidency has not really been the “fuck-you” presidency. Really, it has been the “I can act like a king because I do national security and after 9/11 you can never be too careful” presidency.
And right here, it all comes crashing down. Because for many Bush supporters, it doesn’t really matter whether Iraq helped or harmed national security. It doesn’t really matter whether the domestic spying program assisted or hindered surveillance of suspected terrorists. It doesn’t really matter whether the Patriot Act helps get new leads against terror suspects–because he’s trying his best to do what he thinks is right, in their view, and if they agree with him on other issues, they’ll be willing to forgive whatever mistakes have been made in his quest to protect the country, because he seems to care that much.
The Portgate scandal is crucial because Bush has violated his own doctrine. When Bush said that we need to justify holding a Middle Eastern company to a higher standard, he showed that he in fact does not agree with the key point of his own doctrine: namely, that in a post-9/11 world, you can never be too careful.
He needs to be secretly spy on American citizens without a warrant and he needs to be able to hold them indefinitely in jail without a trial and he needs to be able to torture innocent people with impunity because we just can’t be too careful after 9/11.
But there’s no reason to go overboard by saying that we shouldn’t outsource our port management to a company owned by a state whose leaders have been known to hang out with bin Laden.
Perhaps the best way to put this is that the administration seems to trust the leaders of the United Arab Emirates more than the US congress or the secret FISA Court.
Every converstation I’ve had with people about this port deal, on both the right and the left, has been one of complete befuddlement. Why on earth would Bush do something this politically obtuse? After all the fearmongering and the talk about “oceans don’t protect us” for the last four years it’s just inexplicable that they would go to the wall for a deal that looks so terrible.
Just now I sleepily clicked over to Atrios and read this, which just makes it even more unbelievable:
The Central Intelligence Agency did not target Al Qaeda chief Osama bin laden once as he had the royal family of the United Arab Emirates with him in Afghanistan, the agency’s director, George Tenet, told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States on Thursday.
Had the CIA targeted bin Laden, half the royal family would have been wiped out as well, he said.
Here’s the bit from the 9/11 report which doesn’t explicitly name the royal family:
The Desert Camp, February 1999
Early in 1999, the CIA received reporting that Bin Ladin was spending much of his time at one of several camps in the Afghan desert south of Kandahar. At the beginning of February, Bin Ladin was reportedly located in the vicinity of the Sheikh Ali camp, a desert hunting camp being used by visitors from a Gulf state. Public sources have stated that these visitors were from the United Arab Emirates.
Reporting from the CIA’s assets provided a detailed description of the hunting camp, including its size, location, resources, and security, as well as of Bin Ladin’s smaller, adjacent camp. Because this was not in an urban area, missiles launched against it would have less risk of causing collateral damage. On February 8, the military began to ready itself for a possible strike. The next day, national technical intelligence confirmed the location and description of the larger camp and showed the nearby presence of an official aircraft of the United Arab Emirates. But the location of Bin Ladin’s quarters could not be pinned down so precisely.The CIA did its best to answer a host of questions about the larger camp and its residents and about Bin Ladin’s daily schedule and routines to support military contingency planning. According to reporting from the tribals, Bin Ladin regularly went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited the Emiratis; the tribals expected him to be at the hunting camp for such a visit at least until midmorning on February 11. Clarke wrote to Berger’s deputy on February 10 that the military was then doing targeting work to hit the main camp with cruise missiles and should be in position to strike the following morning. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert appears to have been briefed on the situation.
No strike was launched. By February 12 Bin Ladin had apparently moved on, and the immediate strike plans became moot. According to CIA and Defense officials, policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with Bin Ladin or close by. Clarke told us the strike was called off after consultations with Director Tenet because the intelligence was dubious, and it seemed to Clarke as if the CIA was presenting an option to attack America’s best counterterrorism ally in the Gulf. The lead CIA official in the field, Gary Schroen, felt that the intelligence reporting in this case was very reliable; the Bin Ladin unit chief, “Mike,” agreed. Schroen believes today that this was a lost opportunity to kill Bin Ladin before 9/11.
Even after Bin Ladin’s departure from the area, CIA officers hoped he might return, seeing the camp as a magnet that could draw him for as long as it was still set up. The military maintained readiness for another strike opportunity. On March 7, 1999, Clarke called a UAE official to express his concerns about possible associations between Emirati officials and Bin Ladin. Clarke later wrote in a memorandum of this conversation that the call had been approved at an interagency meeting and cleared with the CIA. When the former Bin Ladin unit chief found out about Clarke’s call, he questioned CIA officials, who denied having given such a clearance. Imagery confirmed that less than a week after Clarke’s phone call the camp was hurriedly dismantled, and the site was deserted. CIA officers, including Deputy Director for Operations Pavitt, were irate. “Mike” thought the dismantling of the camp erased a possible site for targeting Bin Ladin.
The United Arab Emirates was becoming both a valued counterterrorism ally of the United States and a persistent counterterrorism problem. From 1999 through early 2001, the United States, and President Clinton personally, pressed the UAE, one of the Taliban’s only travel and financial outlets to the outside world, to break off its ties and enforce sanctions, especially those relating to flights to and from Afghanistan. These efforts achieved little before 9/11.
In July 1999, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Hamdan bin Zayid threatened to break relations with the Taliban over Bin Ladin.166 The Taliban did not take him seriously, however. Bin Zayid later told an American diplomat that the UAE valued its relations with the Taliban because the Afghan radicals offered a counterbalance to “Iranian dangers” in the region, but he also noted that the UAE did not want to upset the United States.
What a tangled web. It certainly appears that the UAE has us wrapped around their little fingers, doesn’t it? And it’s not just that they are “both a valued counterterrorism ally of the United States and a persistent counterterrorism problem.” They are holding something else over our heads as well (again via Atrios):
But he said he would withhold judgment on the deal’s national security implications until after today’s briefing. The United Arab Emirates provides docking rights for more U.S. Navy ships than any other nation in the region, Warner noted. He added: “If they say they have not been treated fairly in this, we run the risk of them pulling back some of that support at a critical time of the war.”
This is obviously a very complicated relationship, which explains why Bush was singing kumbaaya around the drum circle yesterday asking everyone to give peace a chance.
But here’s the thing. Bush has been playing politics with this complicated situation for years now, saying things like “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.” He spent the entire presidential campaign taunting John Kerry for allegedly requiring a “global test” and using his applause lines like a bludgeon:
I will never hand over America’s security decisions to foreign leaders and international bodies that do not have America’s interests at heart.
… the senator would have America bend over backwards to satisfy a handful of governments with agendas different from our own.
This is my opponent’s alliance-building strategy: brush off your best friends, fawn over your critics. And that is no way to gain the respect of the world.
Here’s some vintage Bush cowboy bullshit trash talk, from just last week:
First, when we see threats, we’ve got to deal with them. When I was growing up in West Texas, oceans protected us. You might remember some of those days. Old Mayor Martinez, I know he remembers those days when we felt pretty comfortable here in America. We could see a threat overseas, but oceans made it pretty clear that — to a lot of folks — that nothing would happen, you know. September 11th came along and made it clear that we are vulnerable, that the enemy can hit us if they — if they want to.
And therefore, when you see a threat, you’ve got to deal with it. You can’t take things for granted anymore. The best way to deal with this enemy is to defeat them overseas so we don’t have to face them here at home, and to stay on the hunt. (Applause.) And that’s what we’re doing.
And we’ve got a coalition of countries. I spent a lot of time reminding people about the nature of the war. Listen, the tendency for folks is to say, well, this really isn’t a war. I can understand that. Who wants to walk around thinking there’s a war about to hit us. I mean, that’s — that’s my job to worry about it, not yours. How can you have an economy recover from a recession if people are afraid to risk capital because they’re worried about thinking something is going to happen? And the same thing happens overseas. People kind of want to slip to the comfortable. They don’t believe it’s a war, some of them, and I understand that. And so we spend a lot of time reminding people that we’ve got to work together because the enemy can’t stand what we stand for, and that’s freedom. They just hate freedom. And so we’ve got a good coalition, and — and we’re on the hunt. We’re keeping the pressure on them. It’s hard to plot and plan and execute attacks when you’re on the run.
And so the first step of our strategy is defeat them there so we don’t to have to face them here. And we’ve got some great special forces — I met the special forces command guy here — and there’s great intelligence officers and wonderful coalition folks. We’re cutting off their money. It makes it kind of hard to operate when you can’t get your bank accounts full of money in order to — we’re just doing a lot of stuff. And it’s important for citizens to know that there’s a constant, constant pressure. I think about it every day.
And we’re making progress — Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, September the 11th plotter-planner, is incarcerated; his successor brought to justice. Slowly but surely, we’re finding them where they hide, and they know we’re on their trail.
Secondly, we got to deny them safe haven. These people can’t operate without safe haven. It’s an interesting war we’re in. It’s totally different from what we’re used to because we’re not — we’re not facing nation-states; we’re dealing with an enemy that is international in nature, that hides in states.
When the President says something like, if you harbor a terrorist, you’re equally as guilty as the terrorist, those words mean nothing unless you act upon them. And I said that to the people of Afghanistan — the Taliban. They didn’t listen. And so we acted. And removing the Taliban — (applause) — is a clear signal that we won’t tolerate safe haven. In other words, if you harbor the terrorist, you’re just as guilty as the murderers. And that’s a clear signal that the United States must continue to send in order to win the war on terror.
But, it was never quite that simple was it? We aren’t in a “war” as it is commonly understood, are we? Our “enemies” are sometimes our “allies” and things change from one day to the next. It’s complicated and — dare I say it — nuanced . Our security can’t be assured by simply flexing our muscles and roaring like beasts.
But, after years of that puerile chest beating he can’t expect everybody to do a big 180 and accept this crap:
I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British (sic) company. I’m trying to conduct foreign policy now by saying to people of the world, we’ll treat you fairly. And after careful scrutiny, we believe this deal is a legitimate deal that will not jeopardize the security of the country, and at the same time, send that signal that we’re willing to treat people fairly.”
Is it any wonder that this whole thing has brought about extreme cognitive dissonance?
It may be that we have gotten ourselves into a terrible position in which we cannot “offend” the UAE by blocking this deal because they may reciprocate by blocking access to their deep water ports. If that’s the case, then we are being blackmailed by the UAE for big money and potentially putting our own ports in danger in the process. According to the 9/11 report they have been playing both ends against the middle for years. And we have Yosemite Sam and Quickdraw McGraw in charge of dealing with them. It’s not a big surprise that the whole thing is blowing up in their faces.
Both Kos and Atrios linked to this post about how Rove smeared John Kerry fior allegedly being in cahoots with Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohammed. It was bullshit, of course, and now we find out that Rove’s buddy Abramoff was selling Bush face time and cut a deal for a meeting with Mahathir for 1.2 mil. (And to think the Republicans had coronaries about those silly “white house coffees.”)
This post also notes some other dirty tricks from the last electionthat I was unaware of. From a Miami Herald article dated november 1, 2004:
The visits came as the ground war escalated. The National Jewish Democratic Council reported Sunday that Kerry campaign signs were defaced with stickers reading, ”Arafat Endorses,” suggesting Kerry has the backing of the ailing Palestinian leader.
Bush’s campaign has looked to siphon off traditionally Democratic-leaning Jewish voters, and the stickers echo a Republican Party of Florida mailer that also suggests Kerry is being supported by Arafat.
Kerry supporters have pointed to the senator’s 100 percent pro-Israel voting record to rebuff the Republican claims that Bush is a stronger supporter of the Jewish state.
Republican voters received a torrent of negative anti-Kerry campaign mailings Saturday, some from an organization with strong Republican ties, the Florida Leadership Council.
The group is headed by Cory Tilley, a former aide to Gov. Bush, and David Johnson, former executive director of the Republican Party of Florida.
The mailings range from images of the party’s stalwart leaders — like Ronald Reagan — to more ominous pieces that equate a vote for Kerry as the first step in leading to a terrorist attack on South Florida.
FAKE ARTICLE
The most negative mailing from the Florida Leadership Council has a fake newspaper story from the year 2007 underneath a photo of children in a classroom wearing gas masks.
The dateline is ”Florida Red Zone,” and the fake story reads: ‘President John Kerry warned parents and children in South Florida that mandatory radiation and chemical gear would be required to be worn `for the foreseeable future’ since the Suitcase Dirty Bomb terrorist attack on South Florida in the spring.”
On the reverse side of the mailing, it says “The last line of defense must be stronger than John Kerry.
These are the people who run and win on “moral values.”
Sometimes I get criticism from my readers for suggesting that the Democrats must play on the same playing field as the Republicans. They say, “we shouldn’t become them.” But I never suggest that the Democrats should lie, cheat or play dirty as the Republicans do. I suggest that they wise up and stop pretending that Republicans are anything but ruthless adversaries and adjust accordingly. They can be beaten with smart strategies, but not unless the Democrats internalize the connection between the nice men and women they are working with on capitol hill every day with the thugs they hire to get elected. They are all cogs in the same cutthroat political machine.
Update: When I went to put up the links, I realized that Atrios had written “Always project. Always.” it reminded me of a post I did before the election called “Projection Politics” in which I noted that Rove doesn’t actually attack the strengths of his opponents, as he like to say he does:
Rove has developed a campaign of projection in which he tars his opponents with his own candidates’ weaknesses and then attacks them.
He attacks Kerry for phony heroism thirty years ago when just last year his own candidate had himself filmed in a little costume prancing around on an aircraft carrier pretending he’d won a war that had only begun. But, by tarring Kerry with using war as a PR stunt for his own personal gain, people can process the uncomfortable feelings they are experiencing about Iraq as not really being caused by Junior, but by his rival who is the real shallow opportunist who only pretends to be a man of proven leadership and experience.
[…]
What is interesting about Rove is that his way of dealing with his own candidates’ even more glaring deficiencies is to build a Kerry straw man in Bush’s exact image and then set it afire. I don’t know if it will work, or even if he’s aware that he’s doing it, projection being epidemic in GOP circles. But, it’s disarming and confusing and it makes it difficult to effectively counter attack. You end up with some defensive version of “I know you are but what am I” which doesn’t really advance your position.
It’s projection/innoculation. And they are very good at it. Of course, you always run the risk that it will circle right back on you, which it seems to have done.
So Bush says he’ll veto any legislation to block the port deal. He says that his government knows what it’s doing and wouldn’t have ok’d the deal if it would harm the nation’s security. This is the same government that did such a great job with Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of the Iraq invasion.
Assuming that we aren’t seeing some sort of kabuki here, it appears that the Eunuch Caucus is getting an earful from their constituents and see no margin in working with the lame albatross right now. He’s threatened vetoes before and the invertebrate Republicans have always fallen into line. This time appears to be different.
If this is true, the Bush administration may be effectively over.
Update: Dan Bartlett is going on and on about the “rigorousness” of the process the administration undertook with this port deal. He keeps saying that they have a lot of experience with this company and that the department of Homeland Security will be in charge of security. Apparently, they have no idea that they have lost the trust of the people on exactly these kinds of things. The rigor of their planning, the “experience” with private companies and the ineptitude of Homeland Security.
They have fear mongered their way to victory for four long years, going on and on about how “the oceans don’t protect us” anymore and now they act as if port security is just another contract and claim it’s important for “our image” to give security contracts to state owned middle eastern companies with ties to terrorism. Wow.
They are left with nothing but the president’s “resolve” to govern. They believe that if he digs in his heels everyone will capitulate out of sheer admiration for his machismo. At 39%, the power of his machismo has shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. He’s in very icy water now.
NGUYEN: Well, it wasn’t quite an apology, but it was an admission. Three weeks after his State of the Union address calling for energy independence, President Bush acknowledged today that his administration has been sending some mixed signals.
Mr. Bush visited one of the nation’s top renewable energy labs in Colorado. He praised the work that’s being done there and acknowledged that just two weeks ago the government laid off 32 workers there. Those jobs have now been restored, just in time for the president’s visit.
I’m sure those 32 workers are grateful, but really. This is becoming embarrasing. I don’t know if you saw him, but he was draped so far forward on the podium he looked like he was trying to crawl over it. Maybe there was a copy of “My Pet Goat” lying open on the floor.
President Bush, on a three-state trip to promote his energy policy, said Tuesday that a budgeting mix-up was the reason 32 workers at one of the nation’s premier renewable energy labs were laid off and then reinstated just before his visit.
Bush addressed the funding problem as soon as he began speaking here at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is developing the sort of renewable energy technologies the president is promoting.
“Sometimes, decisions made as the result of the appropriations process, the money may not end up where it was supposed to have gone,” Bush said.
Right. He never meant to cut those jobs. The money just ended up where it wasn’t supposed to go.
If there are three hallmarks of this failed Bush administration, it is hubris, incompetence and cronyism. This port deal features all three.
The hubris is illustrated by the fact that they actually thought after years of fear mongering and beating of Islamic terrorist war drums, they wouldn’t be questioned about a United Arab Emirates contract for port security. The king shall not be questioned. The incompetence feature is that they believe it is smart to outsource security, of all things, to another country. If there is one thing all sides can agree upon, it’s that the US should control its own borders and ports. It’s common sense.
And finally, as we should have known, via FDL, it turns out this is also another crony cock-up:
The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.
One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World – giving it control of Manhattan’s cruise ship terminal and Newark’s container port.
Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush’s cabinet.
The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World’s European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.
Knowing I have a penchant for Chayefsky, Arthur sent me a link to his discussion of “The Americanization of Emily” a film I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never seen. I’m going to get it today:
Many of the propagandists for war, 40 years ago and ever since — and up to and most definitely including today — consider Emily to be “anti-American” and “anti-war.” It certainly is all that and more — if your view of war is the mythic one. But Chayefsky rejects the myth and all its various aspects totally and across the board. It is unjustified to conclude that Chayefsky is “anti-war” in the sense of advocating pacifism: such a view finds no support in the film. But what Chayefsky does convey is just as threatening to the war lovers: while he may view some wars as absolutely necessary and required, that still does not make any war a “good” one, in the affirmative sense. Any war, even one dictated by the demands of self-defense, is immensely destructive and causes untold suffering. Much of that suffering is endured by people who are entirely innocent.
Chayefsky’s target is the one identified by Charlie: it is the glorification of war, and the countless ways in which all of us “honor the institution.” We build statues of our war heroes and name streets after them; we erect shrines to the dead. We insist on the “ideals” for which we fought, and the “goodness” of our intentions. Many of us do this in the misdirected and destructive search for “meaning” in our lives: our own stunted souls prevent us from finding fulfillment and happiness in our individual lives, so we look for “glory” by climbing over endless piles of corpses.
And what is lost in all of this is the unbearable horror and pain inflicted on individual human beings, and the particularized, specific costs of our quest for glory, or meaning, or “national greatness,” or honor.
On The Internet No One Knows You’re A (Singing) Dog
by tristero
Thanks, folks, for all the nice comments about my music – including the ones that that truly were LOL. Just a few things before once again scooting back, more or less, into the closet.
I sent Digby the Times review and he asked if he could mention it. I said it was fine with me. The main reason I don’t write more about what I do is that I’m really not trying to promote my musical career in my blogging.* It’s not that I’m above promotion; no one is. Even Stravinsky was shameless when it came to hyping his work. It’s rather that it seems like a blog is the wrong place to flack external reputations.
For me, the most interesting aspect of blogging has nothing to do with anyone’s accomplishments but rather the present quality of their thought and the extent of their knowledge. While it is much less true now than it was in the olden days five years ago, it is still the case that prior reputation counts for much less in the blogosphere than it does Out There. You are read, or not read, based entirely on your ability to persuade from post to post. And in order to be persuasive, not only must you be a decent writer, but you damn well better know how to back up your assertions with convincing, relevant, links. Whether you’ve got a doctorate in political science from Stanford or are an 11 year old afraid to come out of your bedroom really is besides the point.
That is how it should be. If it does anything, blogging can make hash of the rhetorical fallacy of appealing to authority. One’s authority as a blogger, to the extent anyone has any, comes entirely from the merit of the posts. And that is wonderful. You don’t read Josh Marshall’s blog because he’s got a reputation as an ace reporter. You read his blog because with every post, he reports. He is actively making a reputation in a way that, say, a NY Times reporter doesn’t have to. The mere act of being hired by the Times confers (even now, of course) an authoritative reputation, whether or not it is deserved. To put it into big words: At its best, blogging transmutes reified power – authority – back into something contingent. Authority is no longer a noun, but a verb. You earn your reputation with every word. It’s never assumed.
And brother, do we need to stop listening to unearned authority.
In 2002, the experts in the press gave the experts in the Bush administration a free pass to market an insane, unnecessary war. It was so obviously a mistake that even a musician immediately could understand it was doomed to catastrophe. During 2002 and early ’03, I went all over the world for concerts of my music. It was an exciting time, and I loved every minute of it. But there was one thing that was quite striking, wherever I went. Everyone, and I mean I everyone from cab drivers to diplomats, thought the United States had gone insane in its advocacy for an Iraq invasion. And yet, back home the experts assured us it would be a cakewalk.
A few weeks after returning from Sydney, Australia where, John Howard aside, everyone was as alarmed as I was at the impending war, I began blogging in February, 2003. I figured that, artist or no, I knew an imminent foreign policy disaster when I saw one. And to my horror, I was right. I have never wanted to be more wrong than I was about the Bush/Iraq war, but I never doubted that it would end up, more or less, where it has.
And so here I am, still blogging and hoping against hope that this country I love will no longer heed the advice of people who understand the world a lot less well than a fellow who’s spent most of us life composing. It’s not that I know so much, although I’m not stupid or uneducated. It’s that the Bushites know so very, very little.
What the present crisis teaches us, a crisis in which the country is being led by clowns posing as experts, is that the opinions of ordinary citizens are vital to the running of a major democratic power. It’s not that expertise isn’t essential. Of course it is. But political expertise in a democracy must always confront the full range of public opinion in a meaningful manner. Otherwise, there lie monsters.
Today, the public discourse is so clotted and constrained, so limited to the right and far right, that it really is imperative for those of us who object to the direction the country is going to speak out, strongly and often. Not because we all deserve a prominent media role but rather in the hopes that eventually the media will be forced to broaden its coverage of political opinion to acknowledge voices like ours. Voices expert and persuasive enough to articulate alternatives to Bushism. Heaven knows we need them, and fast.
****
*When I first started to blog, I was a bit concerned about how my politics would affect my career, but didn’t care that much. If anything, I care more now. By which I mean that I think it is extremely important to stand up and be counted in opposition to Bush. But I like being Tristero, it’s part of who I am, and I don’t see any reason to bump the guy off, any more than there’s a reason to promote my music.
