In its relentless quest to abdicate global leadership and assume the role of rogue nation, the Bush administration is making a complete ass of itself in the global warming talks:
In a sign of its growing isolation on climate issues, the Bush administration had come under sharp criticism for walking out of informal discussions on finding new ways to reduce emissions under the United Nations’ 1992 treaty on climate change.
The walkout, by Harlan L. Watson, the chief American negotiator here, came Friday, shortly after midnight, on what was to have been the last day of the talks, during which the administration has been repeatedly assailed by the leaders of other wealthy industrialized nations for refusing to negotiate to advance the goals of that treaty, and in which former President Bill Clinton chided both sides for lack of flexibility.
At a closed session of about 50 delegates, Dr. Watson objected to the proposed title of a statement calling for long-term international cooperation to carry out the 1992 climate treaty, participants said. He then got up from the table and departed.
Environmentalists here called his actions the capstone of two weeks of American efforts to prevent any fresh initiatives from being discussed. “This shows just how willing the U.S. administration is to walk away from a healthy planet and its responsibilities to its own people,” said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate change project at the World Wildlife Fund.
In the end, though, some adjustments of wording – including a shift from “mechanisms” to the softer word “opportunities” in one statement – ended the dispute.
Hey, I like breathing dirt and I assume that everyone else in the world likes breathing dirt too. Good for us.
In his Friday speech, Clinton blasted the Bush administration’s opposition as “flat wrong.”
But the speech almost didn’t happen.
The contretemps started late Thursday afternoon, when the Associated Press ran a story saying that Clinton had been added at the last minute to the gathering’s speaking schedule at the request of conference organizers. According to the source, barely minutes after the news leaked, conference organizers called Clinton aides and told them that Bush-administration officials were displeased.
“The organizers said the Bush people were threatening to pull out of the deal,” the source said. After some deliberation between Clinton and his aides, Clinton decided he wouldn’t speak, added the source: “President Clinton immediately said, ‘There’s no way that I’m gonna let petty politics get in the way of the deal. So I’m not gonna come.’ That’s the message [the Clinton people] sent back to the organizers.”
But the organizers of the conference didn’t want to accept a Bush-administration dictum. They asked Clinton that he go ahead with the speech. “The organizers decided to call the administration’s bluff,” the source said. “They said, ‘We’re gonna push [the Bush people] back on this.’”
Several hours went by, and at the Clinton Foundation’s holiday party on Thursday night, the former president and his aides still thought they weren’t going to Montreal. “The staff that was supposed to go with him had canceled their travel plans,” the source said.
At around 8:30 p.m., organizers called Clinton aides and said that they’d successfully called the bluff of Bush officials, adding that Bush’s aides had backed off and indicated that Clinton’s appearance wouldn’t in fact have adverse diplomatic consequences.
Via Wolcott I see that the spokesmodel of Open Robe Media, Atlas Shrugged, has a hilarious picture of Howard Dean up photoshopped as Hitler. But it’s ok because it’s totally funny:
Hey guys, its a joke. Helllllllllllllllllllllo, its F-U-N-N-Y (even if Dean’s remarks were far from funny, futile maybe, treasonous maybe, stupid for sure, humorous – not). Actually, the pic is hysterical. I never said he was Hitler, never even called him a Nazi. A clown for sure. That’s a clown pic – this is a clown pic too. Conversely, when the left calls Bush Hitler, they are dead serious. You can not compare the two. The above picture is hysterical. You clowns are as bad as the one in the picture. Sheesh.
Smart as a whip.
Update: For some real fun, read the comments. This one, I thought, was particularly insightful:
The country is driven by Cindy Sheehan. We republicans haven’t got a chance….until election day. You dheminnocrats are sure simple minded. You make up the news and then believe it. Then, you take a phony poll and declare victory. The only thing missing is reality.
But don’t worry, when the train of life is leaving you behind at the station of stupidity, I’ll fart in your general direction.
A Washington truism: Conservatives do meetings better than liberals. They get more done. They coordinate better. When it’s time to rally around John Roberts or Samuel Alito (or torpedo Harriet Miers), they know how to make it happen. Here’s a look at the conservative insider roundtables:
The Wednesday Meeting
HOST: Grover Norquist, Americans for Tax Reform.
LOCATION: Americans for Tax Reform office, 20th and L streets, downtown DC.
TIME: Wednesdays, 10 am sharp.
SETUP: Norquist, flanked by invited guests, presides over a large conference table. Others sit in auditorium chairs.
PHILOSOPHY: Leave-us-alone conservative crowd: Big government is bad; taxes are bad; liberal bureaucracy is bad.
PARTICIPANTS: 80 to 100 people, including elected officials looking for donations, Hill aides, state officeholders seeking tax-fighting help, even representatives of free-market think tanks in Europe and Asia.
KARL FACTOR: White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove has attended many meetings, including a “buck up the troops” visit before election 2004. Rove sends White House aide Tim Goeglein to take flak when he’s not there.
MEDIA: Conservative and some mainstream media attend with the proviso that the session is off the record.
CLAIM TO FAME: Seeded the 1994 Gingrich revolution. In time Newt’s informal policy shop became the connection between grasstops conservative activists and official Washington. The meeting helps the White House discern the mood of the movement.
NOTABLE GUESTS: Past speakers include Christopher Hitchens, Ralph Nader.
The Arlington Group
HOST: Donald Wildmon, American Family Association.
LOCATION: Family Research Council conference room in DC. Formerly based in the condo of Sandy Rios of Concerned Women for America.
TIME: Every-other-month sessions last up to several days.
SETUP: Conference tables arranged in a square allow participants to look each other in the eye.
FOOD: Sandwiches, chips, and drinks.
PHILOSOPHY: Savvy Christian political action.
PARTICIPANTS: 30 to 45 social-conservative leaders, ranging from Focus on the Family’s James Dobson to the National Association of Evangelicals’ Reverend Ted Haggard, ex-presidential candidate Gary Bauer, influential South Florida pastor D. James Kennedy.
KARL FACTOR: He has briefed the meeting—and listened to complaints—several times via telephone.
MEDIA: None, though details often leak to New York Times conservative-movement chronicler David Kirkpatrick.
CLAIM TO FAME: Conservatives frustrated at the pace of social-conservative legislation convened the group in 2003, and it was instrumental in garnering grassroots support for the Federal Marriage Amendment.
NOTABLE GUESTS: Reporters would love to know.
The Weyrich Meetings: Lunches, Family Forum, and Stanton Group
HOST: Paul Weyrich and staff, Free Congress Foundation; Bob Thompson, Coalitions for America.
LOCATION: Free Congress Foundation, 717 Second Street, Northeast.
TIME: Wednesday Weyrich lunches; biweekly Family Forum meetings; every other Friday for the Stanton Group.
SETUP: Varies.
FOOD: Family Forum serves doughnuts; Weyrich lunches are catered; the Stanton Group offers box lunches.
PHILOSOPHY: American conservatism, broadly construed.
PARTICIPANTS: 20 to 25 social-conservative activists, Hill staffers, and occasionally administration officials.
KARL FACTOR: Rove has attended several meetings.
MEDIA: None.
CLAIM TO FAME: First established in 1979, the Weyrich meetings helped bridge the gaps between the Washington GOP establishment and conservatives backing Ronald Reagan. Coalitions for America, a group linked to Weyrich, coordinates all three meetings.
NOTABLE GUESTS: George W. Bush attended during his father’s presidency.
The Monday Meeting
HOST: PR executive Mallory Factor and hedge-fund director James Higgins; affiliate of the Free Enterprise Fund.
LOCATION: Grand Hyatt, 42nd Street, New York.
TIME: One Monday a month.
SETUP: Chairs face a dais at the front of the room. Factor uses an egg timer to keep things moving.
FOOD: Water.
PHILOSOPHY: Free markets, free minds, but uncertain about cultural issues.
PARTICIPANTS: 200 guests, ten invited speakers.
KARL FACTOR: He hasn’t visited yet, but several allies have.
MEDIA: Conservative writers and a few others attend with the proviso that sessions are off the record.
CLAIM TO FAME: A participant says, “If you’re a conservative and you want to tap into New York money, you have to go there.” Potential 2008 Republican candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Sam Brownback have already stopped by.
NOTABLE GUESTS: Fernando Ferrer, onetime Democratic New York mayoral candidate, once spoke on taxes.
Via Dan Froomkin, I see that Fox News (of all places) is following this story of Bush making political speeches before military audiences:
… lately the president has been saying more than just “hello” to troops. Twice last month in speeches to military audiences, the president attacked Democrats and fired back at their accusations that pre-war intelligence was manipulated by his administration.
“It is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim we misled them and the American people,” Bush said.
On Nov. 11 at the Army Depot in Tobyhanna, Pa., Bush told the audience of servicemen and women that some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq have attempted to rewrite the past.
“The national interest is too important for politicians to throw out false charges,” he added.
The attacks against critics at military settings may have put troops in the awkward position of undermining their own regulations. A Department of Defense directive doesn’t allow service members in uniform to attend “partisan political events.”
Questions have been raised about the military’s attendance at events where Bush says something like “they spoke the truth then, they’re speaking politics now.” Several members of the military told FOX News that Bush is inviting the troops to take sides in a partisan debate in his speeches.
“This is a very bad sign,” said retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, who led Central Command in the early 1990s and is an administration critic. “This is the sort of thing that you find in other countries where the military and political, certain political parties are aligned.”
Bush often appeared with troops in his 2004 campaign. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., endorsed him before hundreds of cheering soldiers.
“Where you have our uniformed members being put in a position where it looks like they’re rooting for one side or another is very disconcerting,” said Greg Noone, a former Navy lawyer.
Presidents have generally avoided such military settings due to the chance for attacks from opponents.
“They could be divisive,” said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. “And as commander-in-chief, he represents all the people as does the military defend all the people.”
I wrote about this a few days ago. It’s not only the president, of course, who is doing this. The VP spoke before the troops this week as well. It’s done for the specific purpose of giving the impression that the military backs the administration politically. It’s inappropriate to give speech after speech before these captive audiences in the first place, but to take pot shots at the political opposition is really beyond the pale. There are Democrats among the troops, but they are not allowed to give their political opinion in this situation (by booing, for instance) the way a regular citizen could (theoretically, at least.)
And, as Stephen Hess points out, when Bush dons his Commander in Chief hat he’s no longer supposed to be partisan. In that capacity, he’s supposed to represent all the people. The military is always supposed to represent all the people.
Meanwhile, Dan Bartlet proves once again that the White House believes that they can speak gibberish and everyone will just let it slide:
“They’re the ones who are defending our freedom,” said White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett. “They should be able to listen to the debate, they should be able to hear both sides.”
I’ll be looking forward to seeing John Kerry and John Murtha addressing the troops every couple of days. After all, they should be able to hear both sides.
I’m not religious but I’ve always loved Christmas — the food, the lights, the tree, the music, the whole thing. Now the right wing pricks have gone and made it a cause in their goddamned culture war and I can’t enjoy it anymore. One sniff of fruitcake and a picture of Bill O’Reilly enters my mind. I’m instantly nauseated.
Everywhere I go, even here in the very heart of godless secular humanism, the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, there are carolers on the sidewalk (singing songs like “Oh Holy Night” no less) “Merry Christmas” is written on store windows, decorated trees and twinkling lights are all over the place. And all I can think is “what in the hell are these wingnuts going on about? Christmas is everywhere! Are they nuts???” And then the pure, simple, childlike enjoyment I usually feel for the holiday just slips away.
I resent the hell out of these wingnut bastards turning Christmas into a political football. Is nothing sacred to these people?
Update: Oh, and please tell me again how secularists are declaring war on Christmas:
Many American “megachurches”, huge Christian ministries with thousands-strong congregations, have horrified traditionalists by closing on Christmas Day.
Sunday services on Dec 25 are being cancelled because clergy fear attendance will be poor. Worshippers are instead being encouraged to spend the day with their families.
[…]
Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois, one of the six largest US churches with a weekend attendance of nearly 22,000, is among those closing its doors.
“At first glance it does sound contrarian,” the Rev. Gene Appel, its senior pastor, said. “We don’t see it as not having church on Christmas. We see it as decentralising the church on Christmas: hundreds of thousands of experiences going on around Christmas trees.
“The best way to honour Jesus’s birth is for families to have a more personal experience on that day.”
Christmas Sunday services were not the most effective use of staff and volunteers, a spokesman said.
Other megachurches closing on Christmas Day are in Kentucky, Texas, Georgia and Michigan.
“We feel that Christmas is definitely a time that should be spent with family,”said Kris McNeil of Michigan’s Mars Hill Bible Church.
Cindy Willison, a spokesman for the evangelical Southland Christian Church, near Chicago, said at least 500 volunteers were needed, plus staff, to run Sunday services for the estimated 8,000 worshippers. Many volunteers appreciated the chance to spend Christmas with their families.
The closures contrast starkly with Roman Catholic parishes, which see some of their largest congregations at Christmas, and Protestant ministries, such as the Episcopal, Methodist and Lutheran churches, where Sunday services are hardly ever cancelled.
The number of megachurches in America, defined as non-Catholic congregations of at least 2,000 people, has soared from 10 in 1970 to an estimated 800 today.
Many function like corporations, running businesses such as publishing houses.
I didn’t know that the Christmas tree actually functioned as an alter, but I’m not surprised. This is America and that’s where the presents are.
I’m awfully impressed by the piety of the conservative evangelicals who attend these churches and lord their superior religiosity over the mainline churches.
Update II: I missed this Atrios post yesterday making essntially the same point.
Kevin Drum is asking some questions about what happened on that flight in Miami yesterday. It all sounds a little “screwy” to me too, but not just because the witness accounts sound as if the marshalls may have overreacted. There’s something else screwy about this.
The marshalls were obviously persuaded that it was quite possible that this man had a bomb in his carry on bag. And apparently, the marshalls went through the plane after the fact, looking for accomplices, pointing guns at the passengers and knocking cell phones out of their hands ostensibly because they thought they might contain guns.
Now I know that the marshalls are taught to shoot first and ask questions later and all that, so no lectures please. But I still find it amazing that after all this time, they automatically assume that a group of people could get a bomb and “cell phone guns” through the gate security in a US airport. Goes to show you how useful all that boarding gate crap really is, doesn’t it?
My favorite comment on this matter is Monica Crowley this morning saying that the good thing about all this is that “the system worked.”
In the latest installment of the “Democrats are in Disarray” show, Fred Barnes just did a reverse triple axel that would make Michelle Kwan weep. After going on and on about how the Democrats are all over the map, they don’t know what they are doing, they are rudderless and lacking in ideas, he said that Nancy Pelosi has got the democrats voting in “lock-step” which is empowering the (apparently useless) GOP moderates. (Then he pouted and stomped his tiny foot in frustration.)
I assume that everyone can see the problem with Barnes’ statement, even if he is so unaware of his own illogic that he makes both of these statements in the same breath.
The best moment today, however, was watching these rich, privileged, middle aged fucks sit around chuckling at the prospect of Stanley Williams asking for clemency. I don’t know what it is these Republican assholes find so amusing about executions but they can’t seem to contain their mirth when someone suggests the possibility of redemption.
These are the same people complaining about a war on Christianity.
Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory heard Howard Dean’s shocking shocking comparison between Iraq and Vietnam and was led to do a rather unusual thing. He went back and read what our leaders were saying during Vietnam and compared it to what they are saying to today. What he found was quite interesting.
Howard Dean, unsurprisingly, is not full of shit after all.
I had meant to review “Syriana” when I saw it over the Thanksgiving week-end, but with one thing and another, I let it slide. Now I see that the reviews are coming in fast and furious and I’m left in the dirt. Typical.
I’m not going to bore anyone with a synopsis, because anyone who is reading this can go to the web-site and see the trailer and read all about it right now. (God I love these internets.)
I happened to have loved “Traffic” (written by the same screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who also directed “Syriana”) so this frenetic, multi-tentacled, highly textured plot line was right up my alley. I like thrillers that I can’t figure out until the end and which require me to go back and review the entire movie in my mind, seeing certain scenes through the prism of the climax and understanding them entirely differently than I did the first time. And I especially like it when a film’s confusing plot is almost a character of the story, as this one is.
On a cinematic level it is not as polished or interesting as “Traffic” which had the brilliant Steven Soderberg at the helm. He used light and color to differentiate the varying threads of the plot to keep things straight in the audience’s mind. This film is less dazzlingly directed, so the complicated plot becomes more challenging. Nonetheless, I found it gripping from start to finish mainly because it is about something that we here in the blogosphere have been talking about since the war began and it asks a question that everyone’s asking (why are we in Iraq?) without ever bringing Iraq up at all.
The film observes various American and middle east actors running about with idealistic, nihilistic, greedy and personal agendas, bumping into each other sometimes at random and at others by design. But the single most important player is oil (which in real life, for reasons that are mystifying, is widely considered to be a tin-foil hat, loony-left explanation, even among liberals.) I don’t normally consider myself a cynic, but on this topic, it’s very hard not to be. In the final analysis, this really is a modern version of the Great Game. When we ask ourselves “why are we in Iraq?” it makes more sense to refine the question and ask whether we would be in Iraq if it weren’t for oil. I think it’s fairly obvious that we would not be. Terrorism, in the grand scheme of things, is not an existential threat no matter how hard the warbloggers wank. Invading Iraq was actually counter-productive to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and may end up creating another Islamic state. Even the Bush administration knew that this was not an adequate rationale for invading Iraq so they pimped the WMD threat.
Atrios has posted an interview with ex-CIA agent Robert Baer, on whom the George Clooney character was based, that is quite interesting. Here’s another interview from Baer on Chris Matthews that I think speaks to my point:
MATTHEWS: What‘s the future look like?
BAER: I‘ll tell you what the Saudis are doing. They are building a fence to keep the chaos in Iraq from moving south, and so are the Jordanians. They‘ve put out contracts.
MATTHEWS: If you had to choose now between Americans forces staying in that country for two more years or getting out now, what is better?
BAER: Chris, the problem is oil. Muslims sit on 70 percent of oil. We cannot afford to see Saudi Arabia destabilized. We‘re going to have to keep troops in the area. I don‘t know where you are going to keep them, on the border, in the rear bases, but we cannot let the chaos in Iraq spread.
MATTHEWS: It would?
BAER: Absolutely. Look at the bombings in Jordan. That came directly from Iraq.
MATTHEWS: You say we have to stay, but when can we come home, ever?
The vice president today sounded like we‘re never really coming home.
That we have to fight for American influence in that part of the world.
BAER: We have to come home one day, it‘s $5 billion a day. We‘re going to run out of money. And we‘re going to run out of soldiers and run out of tolerance from the American people.
We have to find a way to remain the policemen of the Gulf and however you do that, leave that up to the military. But we cannot keep our troops as they are deployed now in Iraq forever.
I would suggest that what Baer says is worth considering as we contemplate what the meaning of “withdrawal” or “victory” or “bringing home the troops” really means. I think that we are going to be in the middle east for a long, long time, the only question is on what terms.
The powers that be in the US (and the United Kingdom of British Petroleum) believe they must control this region’s valuable resource. Indeed, some of the big thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski (in “The Grand Chessboard“) and the PNAC nuts believe that the US must control “Eurasia” or risk being shut out of the future. There is nothing new under the sun and the pursuit of precious necessary resources that belong to others has been going on forever.
Oil is certainly not the only reason we are in this mess. It is, perhaps, the fundamental reason we are in this mess. And it’s the reason that this mess isn’t going to be solved by either bringing the boys home or creating a “democracy” in the middle east. We may leave Iraq as an occupying force due to a lack of domestic support, or we might be chased from the region by violent events. But if we have any illusions that the United States is not going to be deeply involved in the middle east for the forseeable future, we need to wake up. Sadly, whether we know it or not, by our blind and profligate actions the American people lend credence to the insane ramblings of that miniskirted harpy, Ann Coulter:
“Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil.”
Why not, indeed? I wonder what would happen if the question was posed just that starkly? At this point, the Great Game players, the oil companies and the politicians who dance to their tune are unwilling to put it that way. They work to keep citizens in the dark about what is at stake, encouraging them to guzzle cheap gasoline at a fantastic pace while droning out messianic statements about good and evil and spreading freedom.
Syriana’s “confusing” plot speaks to that. It’s conveys the sense of drugged vagueness we all feel when we try to unravel the motivations behind these actions. There are a thousand different reasons why we could be doing what we are doing, but nobody knows for sure what is the real one.
There is only one character in the film who holds all the disparate threads in his hands — the James Baker (Christopher Plummer) character who walks freely among the politicians, the oil companies, the ruling sheiks, the spooks and the regional puppets. He is the Grand Master of the Great Game. He ensures that none of the players know what the others are doing, each kept in the dark, flailing about with everything from torture to idealism to pragmatic everyday power politics without ever knowing that they are being manipulated by greater forces.
I suppose that we could prosaically assume that he represents a worldly reality like The Carlyle Group (or in an earlier time, The Trilateral Commission.) But I think he simply symbolises Power and Arrogance. He is fundamentally anti-democratic, amoral and relentless in his quest for more of what he is made of. He is America’s id, perfectly represented as an elderly Texan with his steely talons dug deeply into every consequential player in the New Great Game.
The only character who sees through the subterfuge is the ex-CIA agent, abandoned by his country, whose life of dirty deeds on behalf of The Company prepares him alone to understand his role and dig his way out. That is the most out-of-sync Hollywood moment in an otherwise completely cynical film. (But then, it’s George Clooney who can’t help but be seen as a hero.) In reality, there can be no such neat denouement. The claws would turn deadly if he were to do what he does.
I’ve read a number of reviews in which the writer finds this movie a simple-minded portrayal of evil corporate masters holding the puppet strings of great nations and vast empires. It’s the same complaint about the slogan “No blood for oil”, as if those who see our presence in the mideast in such terms are silly dupes and fools. But I would submit that it is the jaded sophisticates who are missing the point. “Syriana”, for all its “confusion” really does get to the heart of the matter and forces you to deal with the one simple fact that nobody wants to accept. This planet really is running out of oil — and we are entering an era in which our nation is going to be asserting our power to get it.
Rather than finding “Syriana’s” plot confounding, by the end I thought its multiple plotlines led to a bracing clarity: Oil. I don’t know that it’s all that important to understand anything else and if America sees this movie and comes away with that understanding then I think it succeeds as both a film and a political statement.
