Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Watch What You Say

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if Bush, Ashcroft and Company haven’t already screwed this country up so badly that it will never recover:

“How are you?” asked the airport security person who popped up beside me on my way to baggage claim.

“Uh, fine — thanks,” I replied, wondering, why are you asking?

As if she’d read my thoughts, she told me there had been complaints about me on the airplane. Then she asked to see the crossword puzzle I’d been working on during the flight. Huh? I thought. Talk about being puzzled! Still, my grin was smug as I handed it over. I’d just completed the Friday New York Times puzzle, for the first time ever.

But the agent ignored the crossword, turning the paper sideways to read a line I’d scribbled in the margin: “I know this is kind of a bomb.”

She pointed to the sentence, her finger resting on the word “bomb.” “What does this mean?” she demanded.

Suddenly a light went on in my head. I remembered the passenger on my left leaning forward in his seat as I scribbled while we waited for takeoff. Seconds later, he’d clambered hastily over me without apology to make his way to the front of the plane. I’d assumed intestinal complications, but now that I thought about it, he hadn’t used the bathroom. He’d spoken briefly with the flight attendants and returned to his seat. As the security woman looked at me, I now realized the passenger had been about as interested in my puzzling prowess as she was.

“I know this is kind of a bomb” is what I imagine Bucky, my main character, would say to Julie, his love interest, in the critical scene of my novel. I explained to the security woman that this is what happens when a 42-year-old man who is to literature what a karaoke singer is to opera tries to put words in the mouth of a fictional 19-year-old.

I opened my laptop and showed her shining example after shining example of similarly awful dialogue. She understood that that word, b-o-m-b, was no reference to ordnance or terrorist weapons of any kind.

But my explanation wasn’t good enough for the three Dallas police officers who meanwhile had surrounded me — summoned, I supposed, for backup in case the dangerous character tried to write something even worse.

One took my driver’s license to run a fruitless background check (the closest I ever came to being in trouble with the law was accepting a beer at age 17 from the teen-age daughter of the Nantucket Island police chief). A particularly hostile cop asked me a strangely menacing question: “So, how many books have you gotten made?” I started my usual backpedaling answer to that query, honed to perfection in the Dallas bar scene, but he cut me off: “That’s not what I asked.” I told him I must have misunderstood. He responded, “You’re a writer and you don’t understand my words?”

[…]

…the honcho gravely warned me that while I hadn’t crossed the line, I had walked right up to it. And for that I would be on Homeland Security’s watch list.

Have we all just gotten used to the idea of a “Homeland Security Watchlist?” Do we have even the vaguest clue about who might be on it and what criteria are used? Is this one of those times when sage law and order conservatives tell you that if you’re innocent you don’t have anything to worry about?

Here we have a situation in which some nosy asshole sitting in the seat next to you sees that you wrote the word “bomb,” and reports it. And some person in authority says that you’ve walked right up to a “line” you had no idea even existed and are now on a list which means that if anything ever happens again — you are overheard saying “jihad” or perhaps “fuck Bush” — and you are “questioned” again, you are already in the database as someone who is being watched.

Perhaps this doesn’t happen often. But there are other stories of little things happening that make me begin to have doubts about our ability to withstand this threat of terrorism. For instance, there was this story last month about a British journalist’s dealings with American authorities:

Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.

After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. “What do you want?” he yelled. I said I didn’t feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.

As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist’s visa.

[…]

Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents’ names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue – I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, “You are Russian, yet you claim to be British”, an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, “Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I’d have to go back to London to apply for it.

At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their “rules” demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: “How dare you touch my private things?”

“How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?” he shouted back, indignantly. “Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you’d see a big difference.” The irony is that it is only “countries like Iran” (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

After my luggage search, the officer took some mugshots of me, then proceeded to fingerprint me.

Keep in mind, this was last month, not November 2001.

OK, maybe it’s silly for me to get so white hot, angry when I read these stories. It’s just one female journalist and she was in technical violation. It was only a misunderstanding about the word “bomb” written on a newspaper. Perhaps these are isolated cases. That petty bureaucrats use language that is remarkably similar to that used by our president and his political allies in comparing the wonderful treatment under our police state as compared with that under really awful police states is surely just a rhetorical coincidence.

But, after seeing the Justice Department issue opinions that the president has unlimited powers in wartime and that anything, including torture, is justified to “defend the homeland” it doesn’t really seem so silly after all. The stories begin to accumulate, each one a random intrusion by dumb, underqualified government authorities who seem to have watched too much television and have very little common sense.

If this keeps up, sooner or later we will all end up, in one way or another, on the “Homeland Security Watchlist” where anyone from a professional rival to a vengeful neighbor can be the instrument of terror in a way that bin Laden and gang can only envy. In fact, these little people with too much power scare me a hundred times more than the Islamic terrorists. The threat that lives among us is ourselves.

Kerry/Edwards — It’s Got A Ring To It

I’m busy today, so I won’t be able to post much, but I did want to weigh in and say how glad I am that Kerry picked Edwards. It was the obvious choice and Kerry handled the mediakids’ anticipatory meltdown like the political pro he is. This is a good ticket — and we know it’s a good ticket by the fevered, hysterical reaction of the GOP. (And whoever duped the Post deserves to be put in the Democratic Hall of Fame.)

Last year right around this time, before the Dean phenomenon took off and before my choice, Wes Clark, entered the race, I posted a piece about John Edwards. When I went back to read it, I was a little bit surprised at how much he impressed me and I was reminded of what I liked about him. If it hadn’t been for the fact that Crusader Codpiece was being hailed as a Warrior King by every press tart from CNN to The National Enquirer, I would have easily supported his candidacy. He is very, very good.

So, in the spirit of welcoming John Edwards to the ticket without reservation, I’m republishing my thoughts about him of a year ago:

6/22/03

“Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none.”

I just read something that blew the top of my head off and has me reeling with appreciation and awe. Maybe everybody in Blogovia has already discussed John Edwards speech of last week, but I just got to it.

This is the single most creative re- framing of issues I’ve seen in many a year. In fact, it is so audacious, it might just work.

Do you want to see a wing nut’s head spin around like Linda Blair’s in the Exorcist? Try comparing Bush’s economic policies to socialism:

This is the most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since socialism a century ago. Like socialism, it corrupts the very nature of our democracy and our free enterprise tradition. It is not a plan to grow the American economy. It is a plan to corrupt the American economy.”

Damn. That is just beautiful.

Edwards gets it. It’s about changing the Left/Right paradigm and putting the Republicans off balance, without moving further to the right. This is new and it has the potential to seriously shake up the dynamic, particularly if the economy continues to sputter. This is just great — a truly new way of coming at the Republicans, using all of their patented propaganda tags against them. It’s awfully smart and I would hope that every Dem candidate keeps this in the back of his mind.

I’m not signing on to any particular campaign this early in the race. But, I think the Democratic candidates are all good people and I wouldn’t be unhappy with any of them (although Lieberman, with his moralizing and religiosity, would be very hard to take.) I am partial to Clark because I think he neutralizes a potent issue for the GOP, has a great Q rating and it would be nice to catch a fucking break like that for once. Earlier, I mentioned that Dean has a fiesty attitude that I find refreshing and inspirational and John Kerry is a good man with a fine mind and a lifetime of experience to prepare him for the job.

But, Edwards is the natural of the bunch. He’s the one who has the talent to really communicate with average Americans and get them to recognize that the Republican Party does not have their best interest at heart. Like Clinton, he is very, very good at explaining complicated issues in understandable terms without being condescending. 20 years as a litigator will do that, and from all reports he was an extremely effective advocate before a jury.

Our economy, our people, and our nation have been undermined by the crony capitalists who believe that success is all about working the angles, working the phones, and rigging the game, instead of hard work, innovation and frugality.

And these manipulators find comfort in an Administration which, through its own example, seems to embrace that ethic.

We will never turn this country around until we put our economy and our government back in line with our values.”

[…]

It’s time for a new approach that trusts people to make the most of their own lives and gives them the chance to do so. It’s time to stop emboldening entrenched interests and start empowering regular people. Above all, it’s time to end the failed conservative experiment and return to the idea that made this country great: Instead of helping wealthy people protect their wealth, we should help working people build their wealth.”

The President and I agree on one thing: this campaign should be a debate about values. We need to have that debate, because the values of this president and this administration are not the values of mainstream America, the values all of us grew up with – opportunity, responsibility, hard work.

There’s a fundamental difference between his vision and mine. I believe America should value work. He only values wealth. He wants the people who own the most to get more. I want to make sure everybody has the chance to be an owner.

That is progressivism turned inside out. PoMo populism. As with the flag and God, the smart Democrat (and the one who will beat Bush) will take those “bedrock American” advertising symbols and use the patented GOP rhetorical stylebook to his own purposes, because whether we like it or not, that stylebook defines political speech in this era so we’d better start finding ways to use it to our own ends.

(And, through this whole speech he very subtly digs at Bush’s pedigreed sense of privilege. Junior is a spoiled little fucker and although nobody wants to admit it, it’s something everybody knows. Maybe in 2000 when everybody asumed that they too were going to be rich and privileged, it didn’t matter so much. It could have a little more relevence this time around.)

Look at the choices they make: They have driven up the share of the tax burden for most working people, and driven down the burden on the richest few. They got rid of even the smallest tax on even the largest inheritances on earth. This past month, in a $350 billion bonanza of tax cuts on wealth, they couldn’t find $3.5 billion to give the child tax credit to poor people who work. Listen to this: They refused to cut taxes for the children of 250,000 American soldiers who are risking their lives for us in Iraq, so they could cut dividend and capital gains taxes for millionaires who were selling stocks short until the war was over.

[…]

It is wrong to reward those who don’t have to work at the expense of those who do. If we want America to be a growing, thriving democracy, with the greatest work ethic and the strongest middle class on earth, we must choose a different path.

If Junior ever had to debate a trial lawyer like John Edwards, he wouldn’t stand a chance trying to defend himself against a charge like that. What in the hell can any Republican say to that argument? They’ll scream class warfare, but in light of the charges it starts to sound like sniveling defensiveness. They really have gone to far and all it will take is for somebody to find the right way to educate the American people about what has been done to them.

Third, I will cut taxes to encourage savings and wealth creation for the middle class and working poor, not take away their tax cuts. I believe ordinary Americans are taxed too much, not too little. As a direct result of this President’s policies, all across this country people are seeing their property taxes, their sales taxes, their state and local income taxes, and their college tuition bills go up. Now some in my party want to take away their federal income tax cuts, too. That’s wrong. The answer to Republicans who have made middle-class incomes and nest eggs go down should not be Democrats who make middle-class taxes go up.

I know this President wants to make the next election about taxes. That’s why I’m going to tell America the whole story: “This president is the reason your taxes are going up. I’m going to cut them.”

Woah Nelly. Walter Mondale, take a look in the funhouse mirror. He’s saying that Bush is making taxes go UP for ordinary Americans. That is brilliant. Paula Zahn will pop a vein trying to wrap her mind around that concept. It’s also true, of course, but rather than get into some long winded discussion of tax rates and the state budget crisis’ Edwards just says bluntly, “Bush is making your taxes go up. I’m going to cut them.”

Eat shit Grover.

I care deeply about this, because it’s the reason I’m standing here. My dad worked his whole life in the mill. When I was young, my mom folded sheets on the second shift. Both my parents started out with nothing, except a blessing that was worth more than diamonds and gold – the chance to live in a country whose dream belongs to anyone willing to work for it.

A country where the sweat and toil of mill workers can give a boy the chance to one day run for President is a far different place than a country that says how you’re born, not how hard your work, is all that matters. I owe everything I am to the America I grew up in. I hope you’ll join with me and fight with all we’ve got to save it.

The fucking American dream, baby. The immigrant, the working stiff, the self-made man putting in the hours and sweating the blood so that his kids can have a better life. Being the first in your family to go to college and going on to become one of the most successful lawyers in the country, a US Senator and a presidential candidate. It’s not quite as inspiring as a rich, alcoholic playboy sobering up at 40 and allowing his daddy’s rich friends to buy him a codpiece so he can eliminate the inheritance tax for himself, but it might have a chance.

This is a very interesting direction that Edwards is going. There is some salience to the shame factor among the rich, as well. I happened to listen to a group of Republican ladies discussing politics the other day (don’t ask), and they were quite uncomfortable with the idea that their leaders were saying that poor people shouldn’t get tax cuts and particularly the fact that some were left out of the recent tax cut bill. One of the gals said, “That’s really not right. It makes me feel embarrassed.”

I wish that we didn’t have to use rhetoric of religion, values and tax cuts. It’s tiring to hear it. But, we do. It’s what people’s ears are trained to hear in this era. And, there is no use pretending that reversing Bush’s tax cuts is going to be a simple matter even if we win the presidency. It makes sense to begin laying the groundwork, however, for reversing the outrageous tax cuts on the rich, which will have to be done. This is a very effective way of beginning to make that case.

And, Edwards is using some language that I think has been too long neglected by Democrats and speaks to something that is an undercurrent of discomfort amongst average Americans who don’t follow politics in great detail — the oddly unamerican nature of our current leaders relationship to wealth and power.

“Here in Washington, we like to think we’re important. But what’s great about America is that whether you’re a senator or a bus driver doesn’t make you a better person. You just have different jobs. America is not a nation of kings and commoners, masters and servants. We’re a nation where every person has equal value, every dream deserves an equal chance, and every soul should be as equal in the law of the land as it is in the eyes of God.”

That’s a Democrat talking, there, and everybody knows it.

Bush can spout bullshit like “soft bigotry of low expectations” and “I care about the working people”, but every poll shows that most most Americans do not believe he cares about or understands people like them. There’s power in this message. It’s worth keeping an eye on.

Don’t Tread On Me

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

Samuel Adams

Ye olde civil discourse in action.

I’ve always loved the Fourth of July. It’s not just because it’s in the middle of summer and fireworks and picnics are fun, although those are good reasons. It’s because I’ve always loved the feelings that American patriotism at its best inspires. Phrases like “all men are created equal” and words like “liberty” are concepts that run deeply in my American soul.

It makes me sick to see those words turned into cheap advertising slogans by people who believe in exactly the opposite, but it has ever been thus. Those words are emotional words, they make you feel things, and good advertising men know that’s a key to making a sale. So, I understand. But, I still hate it.

As a Democrat I fall into the liberal category more than the progressive, I’m afraid, although I’m comfortable in each of those camps. I do believe that society needs government for more than defense, policing and contract disputes and I don’t have a strong emotional attachment to property rights above all else. Reasonable taxation seems like common sense to me and certain necessary functions don’t seem to respond well to the market, so I’m not a libertarian.

But, I am a liberal in much of the classical sense. I have a visceral mistrust of power so intense that all intrusions against civil liberties and individual rights are suspect in my mind until proven otherwise. The idea of innocent men being imprisoned with no due process, people being unable to marry who they choose or have dominion over their own bodies, censorship, forced religion and any other use of power against individuals is something that I believes requires a huge amount of deliberation, debate and thought before it should ever be implemented in the name of security, community or anything else. Indeed, in my mind, humans are such unreliable and incompetent creatures that it’s best if we just don’t go there at all.

It’s a strange form of democracy we have because of its dual purpose of fulfilling the desire of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority. It creates a tension between the two pillars of the American system: freedom and equality. We are always measuring our progress between those two poles and it’s never easy. But, to be an American is to hold both of those ideas as ideal. Indeed, America will cease to be America if we don’t.

I have never agreed with this manifest destiny, American exceptionalism crapola. We come up so short, so often, within our own country that it is folly of the highest order to believe that we have a right to evangelize to the rest of the world. But, that doesn’t mean that we haven’t got something fine going here that deserves to be preserved, defended and respected.

There are many reasons to love our country, of course. But, most importantly, I think, it’s that it is the repository of a bunch of great ideas about those words that move me so much — freedom, equality, inalienable human rights. We are very far from achieving the perfection of those ideas, and we do have a bad habit of being most disappointingly willing to toss these concepts aside when it suits us. But, for the most part, we still manage to go one step forward for every two steps back and that’s worth a lot.

If you have a chance today, read the Bill of Rights. It’s our single greatest political contribution to the advancement of mankind.

Happy Fourth of July, my fellow imperfect Americans.

Again?

Maybe those Florida second graders should have had Junior read “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” on the morning of 9/11.

Warheads found in Iraq not chemical weapons, military says

Artistic License

I haven’t written all that much about F9/11 because everyone else has covered that ground so beautifully. And, as is often the case, Krugman seems to have distilled the blogosphere’s CW and written a wonderful column today that everyone is talking about. He is absolutely correct that the media is bizarrely holding a known left wing polemicist to a higher standard than the president of the United States. How odd.

I only have one small point to add to all this. Susan wrote something today that I hadn’t heard anyone else put quite that way. She said the film is a work of art that tells powerful truths.

This is an important thing to realize about film as opposed to the television and journalistic he said/she said methods of persuasion. Film, like the novel, even in a documentary style, tells emotional truth. And F9/11, in the hands as it is of a powerfully talented filmmaker does just that.

The reason people are responding is because they have been terribly confused. Those of us who have been following this story in minute detail are not surprised by anything the film says, from the more conspiratorial connect-the-dots speculation to the real pain and trauma of seeing actual human beings, children and soldiers alike, hurt and maimed for reasons that make little obvious sense. These are things we’ve been seeing and feeling and trying to sort out since they happened. But, we are filled with a sense of emotional catharsis when we see it because it tells the truth in a much more real way than any news story or blog post has ever done.

And many people who are just living their lives and maybe picked up a paper or watched CNN from time to time have been buffetted by the strange hyper-patriotism, the PR stuntmaking, the reasoning and rationales that don’t seem to connect and they are left feeling oddly fractured and discontented. This movie gives them a sense of order out of chaos in which they are able for the first time to make sense of what they are feeling. A counter-narrative that brings their gut and their brain back into balance.

For instance, many people felt uncomfortable with George W. Bush’s leadership and they didn’t know exactly why. After all, the opinion makers and TV news starts acted as if he were Alexander the Great and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one for a long, long time. Who were they to argue? And yet….

Seeing him read that children’s book after his chief of staff whispered “Mr. President, we are under attack,” says everything you need to know about his leadership abilities. Until this movie, only a small handful of people had ever seen that footage and understood exactly what it meant. President George W. Bush is a frontman who sat and read to schoolchildren, waiting for further instructions, after the nation was attacked. It fits. Ah hah.

The movie has many of those moments, where what you’ve been feeling, what’s been nagging at the back of your mind suddenly makes sense.

As Krugman and others have rightly pointed out, if the media had been doing their jobs, there would be no audience for Michael Moore today. It’s because journalism failed that art has had to step into the void and tell people the bigger, universal truths. To complain that art is not explicitly factual at this late date shows more than a little chutpah.

Joe Blow

Can I just say how much I hope that Kerry doesn’t pick Joe Biden for Vice President? Not that I think he isn’t eminently qualified or that he isn’t smart, capable and somewhat charismatic in his own way. It’s a personal thing. I find him almost insufferably pompous, self aggrandizing and full of shit at least half the time.

Josh Marshall’s interview today does nothing to dispel that opinion. Old Joe is always telling tales about how he told the people in power what was what and they finally have to admit that he was right about everything. It’s a funny thing, though. When I really tuned in to him for the first time was in the Clarence Thomas hearings. He didn’t exactly speak truth to power in that one.

According to this he’s been haranguing the Democratic establishment for years to do things his way and they’ve finally come around. Why, he planned the successful Kosovo strategy virtually all alone, apparently.

Hell, what do I know? Maybe he did. Perhaps it’s just a temperamental thing or he reminds me of someone I used to know or something. But, from the first, I’ve just had the opinion that the guy is an utter egomaniac.

Not that it makes any difference, of course. I’d vote for Satan for VP if he had a D after his name this time.

God Made Him An Offer He Couldn’t Refuse

Marlon Brando died today. I suppose, like all celebrity deaths, some mean more to us than others. This one means something to me.

It’s not that I have any particular feeling for Brando as an individual. He was only mildly interesting as a person. Perhaps the most interesting thing he ever said (and it revealed a lot about his acting) was “The more sensitive you are, the more likely you are to be brutalised, develop scabs and never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything because you always feel too much.” Perhaps his great talent was to be able to channel that enormous sensitivity into his characters.

I have long thought that he was the greatest American film actor ever. There was a time in my life when such a thing seemed very important and I spent long hours watching and studying film. In my view, nobody could touch him at his best. I still think so.

He is now thought of as The Godfather, which isn’t a bad role to have as your enduring image. It’s the most memorable role in one of the most iconic movies ever made. (In my view, the best movie ever made.) But, Brando’s filmography actually contains a handful of the best performances ever captured on film.

In the 50’s he epitomized “the method” the natural acting style popularized by the Actor’s Studio. But, Lee Strasbourg said that he didn’t teach Brando a thing. He showed up fully formed as an actor — he just had it. For those of you who are too young to have paid any attention to him as anything beyond Don Vito, you really should take a look at A Streetcar Named Desire, On The Waterfront, Viva Zapata and The Wild One.

As great an actor as he was, he wasn’t the smartest guy on the block. He got himself caught up in the 60’s and did almost nothing of note. And then along came The Godfather. But, that same year he made another movie which I think may be his greatest performance ever — Last Tango in Paris. Most people remember it for it’s explicit sexuality, which was groundbreaking at the time. But, Brando delivers a performance so complex, so intimate, so amazingly sensitive yet brutal that when I was a freshman in college and saw it the first time it went so far over my head that I hated it. Ten years later I saw it again and it left me speechless with wonder. Still does.

Brando reached his peak with those two incredible performances, I think, although Apocalypse Now has stood the test of time much better than I thought when I first saw it. I was caught up in the process of filmmaking in those days and appalled to read that Brando had so compromised Coppolla’s vision of Col. Kurtz by showing up on the set overweight and unprepared that I overlooked how remarkable his large, bald shadowed head and hypnotic voice really was. His performances were often like that for me. I’d see the film and get a certain impression. Then I’d see it again later and the brilliance of the performance would just wash over me like a warm wave and I’d get it.

In later years, he was this overpaid character actor with bad celebrity kids.(And sometimes he was just beyond weird as in The Island of Doctor Moreaux.) But, there were flashes of his brilliance from time to time as when he sent up his Godfather role in The Freshman or when he somehow managed to make himself charming and sexually attractive in Don Juan DeMarco despite being an elderly man who weighed 350 pounds. (Now that’s acting!)

I’m sure there will be much finer eulogies and obituaries than this one over the next few days. But, this one’s from the heart. His legacy is a precious gift to the art of film and acting. RIP Marlon Brando. Thanks.

Flounder Filet

Q. Did anyone in the White House or the administration ask Irish television or its reporter, Carol Coleman, to submit questions in advance of her interview with the President last Wednesday?

MR. McCLELLAN: Bill, a couple of things. I saw I guess some reports on that. I don’t know what every individual office — whatever discussions that they have with reporters in terms of interviews. But obviously, the President was — is pleased to sit down and do interviews with journalists, both from abroad, as well as here at home, and to talk about the priorities of this administration. And I think anytime that there is an interview that’s going to take place, obviously there are staff-level discussions with reporters before that interview and to —

Q. — what are the —

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, to talk about what issues might be on their mind, and stuff. That’s — but, reporters —

Q. That’s not the same thing as asking for —

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me finish. Let me finish.

Q. — and my question is, were questions asked for.

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me finish. Reporters, when they meet with the President, can ask whatever questions they want. And any suggestion to the contrary is just —

Q. Right, but that doesn’t answer the question. Did somebody in the administration ask her for questions in advance, and is that your policy?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, in terms — you’re talking my policy?

Q. No, the administration’s policy.

MR. McCLELLAN: I don’t know what an individual staffer may or may not have asked specifically of this reporter, but some of these interviews are set up by people outside of my direct office and control.

Q. Well, will you say from this lectern that it is not the policy of this White House to ask for questions in advance?

MR. McCLELLAN: Will you let me complete what I’m trying to say? Thank you. Just hold on a second. As I said, and you know very well from covering this White House, that any time a reporter sits down with the President, they are welcome to ask whatever questions they want to ask.

Q. Yes, but that’s beside the point.

It goes on. I sometimes wonder what the public sould think if they actually saw these little performances by Flounder. The phrase “bullshit artist” comes immediately to mind.

Timing The Attack

Ezra Klein makes an interesting point about political attacks in this post. First, he says that for a political attack to be useful, it must be accurate. Second, it must be politically accurate and third, it must be effective.

The first point may actually be debatable. For the most part, it seems to me that it only needs to be believable in order to resonate. Still, I would not suggest adopting the character assassination method of political attack. If it isn’t accurate, I’m against it.

His second point is really the one that caught my eye because I don’t think people understand this and it’s important that they do:

Political accuracy is a bit different. It relies on the American people being ready to believe something is true. In April, 45% of Americans said honest and trustworthy were not words that applied to Bush. With that in mind, I think the populace is primed for a discussion over whether or not he is a liar. It’s an argument I think we’ll win, which is why I advocate it. Now, if less than half think Bush is dishonest, it stands to reason that even fewer will be willing to call him — or hear him called — a criminal. That’s why I argue against that label. The general rule of thumb here is that levying the charge shouldn’t do us damage — if it does, we’re better off keeping our mouths shut.

Absolutely. Here among ourselves in the clubby left blogosphere we’ve been hurling every insult imaginable at Bush for so long that it’s almost impossible to believe that the public in general doesn’t see that we are dealing with the most dishonest president in American history, and that includes Nixon. But, until fairly recently, his image held up as the all-american “straight shooter.” Only now are they ready to hear the charge that we all know has been true for quite some time.

This is an interesting thing and it’s worth thinking about a bit. When, exactly, did the tide begin to turn on that and what precipitated it? How did we finally reach a point where a polemic like F9/11 could cross into mainstream popular culture and have such an impact? When did the public give itself permission to challenge the orthodoxy and why?

There are many possibilities, but I think it’s actually one specific event and one slow realization combining to bring people to that conclusion. The first was the strut across the deck of the aircraft carrier which, while it thrilled the punditocrisy and many partisans, also stunk to high heaven as a phony PR stunt. Straight shooters don’t play that way.

The second, of course, is the missing weapons of mass destruction. People may not consciously blame Junior for lying, but there is a strong sense of discomfort at the idea a president would say the words “I will disarm Saddam Hussein” about 4,752 times and it turns out there was nothing to disarm. The dissonance is palpable.

So, we seem to have reached a point at which the public is ready to hear that the Empty Codpiece is a liar without it shocking their emotional perception of him as a straightshooter.

But, Ezra’s point is extremely important. While those of us in the vanguard of leftwing politics are out there shaking our fists, which is as it should be, we must also recognize that politicians have to be aware of the greater public’s capacity to absorb that reality. They must be coaxed along, not bludgeoned by our leaders. The bludgeoning is our job.

P.S. That Ezra’s good isn’t he?

Oh Hell

American military police yesterday raided a building belonging to the Iraqi ministry of the interior where prisoners were allegedly being physically abused by Iraqi interrogators.

The raid appeared to be a violation of the country’s new sovereignty, leading to angry scenes inside the ministry between Iraqi policemen and US soldiers.

[…]

Iraqi ministry of interior officials admitted that around 150 prisoners taken during a raid four days before in the Betawain district of Baghdad had been physically abused during their arrest and subsequent questioning.

The men were captured in the first big Iraqi-led anti-crime and anti-terrorism operation, which took place a few days before the transfer of power, with US military police in support and using US satellite images.

Senior Iraqi officers described those captured as ‘first class murderers, kidnappers and terrorists with links to al-Ansar’ – a militant group in the former Kurdish no-fly zone – who had all admitted to ‘at least 20 crimes while being questioned’.

[…]

US military spokesmen would not comment. “We can’t confirm that this took place,” a spokesman said.

One of the prisoners bared his back after his initial arrest to reveal open welts allegedly caused by baton and rubber hoses.

A bodyguard for the head of criminal intelligence, Hussein Kamal, admitted that the beatings had taken place.

Nashwan Ali – who said his nickname was Big Man – said: “A US MP asked me this morning what police division I was in. I said I was in criminal intelligence.

“The American asked me why we had beaten the prisoners. I said we beat the prisoners because they are all bad people. But I told him we didn’t strip them naked, photograph them or fuck them like you did.”

We sure could use a big ole whiff ‘o that moral clarity right about now.