Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Myopic Geopolitics

Atrios has a lively discussion going about today’s Tom Friedman column that more or less defends the notion that the Iraq operation is at least partially about oil. I also believe it is partially about oil, but only to the extent that it is about neoconservative geopolitics and their stale but untrammeled notion of what constitutes American vulnerability.

It is true that Iraq could get nukes and Saddam could extort the entire western world by withholding oil and driving up the price. So could other countries, for that matter. No matter who managed to do this, it would not be a pretty picture. But, evenKenneth Pollack, who is held up as the authority on the necessity of invading Iraq, argues that while Saddam will have to be deposed, it is not so immediate a threat that we could not wait long enough to mitigate some of the potentially dangerous repercussions and plan for our long term responsibilities in the region before taking action.

Confronting Saddam could have waited because what is not waiting is the simmering bloodlust that is sweeping the Middle East, particularly in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Invading Iraq on a thin pretext (which is what is going to happen because this war is already timed for American convenience and nothing else) is possibly going to set off chain of events that could have been avoided if we handled the situation with a little more sophistication and finesse instead of fulfilling some long held neocon wet dream. And that is the real problem.

The Wolfowitz/Perle school never took terrorism seriously when it was becoming a threat on the world stage and they don’t take it seriously now. The influential CSP issued only 2 reports since the 1998 embassy bombing about the threat of terrorism until 9/11. The PNAC has been wringing their hands about Iraq and pushing for missile defense for years, but terrorism was hardly even on the radar screen. They are about China, Iraq, North Korea, Israel, US “benevolent” hegemony and missile defense. Period. Anything else will be subsumed under what they believe is the real agenda.

As with the ever changing justifications for the tax cuts for their rich friends, Bush and his foreign policy mavens are so blinkered and myopic and that they pursue their preordained agenda no matter what the current situation. They seem completely incapable of exercising any flexibility in light of changing circumstances. They just find a way to use the changing circumstances to justify what they plan to do anyway.

This is very dangerous. Bush, with his stupid bellicose posturing has created a needless crisis in Asia by challenging a cornered and neurotically proud despot in North Korea into a nuclear standoff. He has escalated the problem with Iraq to one of immediate danger, when it was a medium term threat at worst, and by conflating it with Al Qaeda and Muslim fundamentalism for no good reason other than political expediency, he has made it a cause for a whole lot of disaffected people in the Mideast and Indian subcontinent to rally to.

All of this is because the primary neocon focus of the last 10 years has been the threat of China and rogue states and thus their obsession with missile defense. This is what they have been lobbying for, this is what they believe is the greatest threat to American hegemony and this is what they want to use their newfound political power to deal with. And, while there is no doubt that individual bad actors with nukes are a serious challenge, there was absolutely no need to put the issue of rogue states immediately on the table next to Islamic terrorism, confusing the world about our intentions and creating a sense of chaos. Events are predictably hurtling out of control because the Bush administration has spoken with a rhetorical blunderbuss and opportunistically used 9/11 as a way to achieve their long held goals instead of refashioning the agenda to meet the changing threat.

And now, even after seeing with their own eyes the dangers of using a crisis to further unrelated goals, they still seem to think that we can beat North Korea or some former Soviet State or a middle eastern power like Pakistan to the punch with this missile shield that is many, many years away from reliability, if ever. The technology for ICBMs, on the other hand, has been around for decades. N. Korea is probably quite close and has shown a willingness to sell such technology. The former Soviet states probably have access to the technology already. Yet, the administration is still barrelling ahead in a near panicked state, ratcheting up the crisis so they can build their fantastical missile shield with the only recourse in the meantime being military intervention and a series of dangerous standoffs.

Meanwhile, just a little over a year ago we got attacked by terrorists who used low-tech box cutters to destroy Americas most vivid symbols of economic and military power. We got attacked on our own shores and thousands died and the success of that action absolutely guarantees that it won’t be the last. For this administration to basically sideline that issue into bullshit “homeland security” with a color coded danger chart and bogus manhunts to pretend they are doing something— in fact, to exacerbate the danger by provoking all manner of violent and unpredicatable global reactions with their swaggering bullyboy rhetoric — mainly because they refuse to relinquish their cherished vision of themselves as astride a great global military Colossus, is about as irresponsible a position as I can imagine.

The Bush administration shows every day that they are willing to compromise American security rather than compromise goals that anyone else would have reevaluated in light of the new priorities wrought by the destruction and death of September 11th. But, apparently even the demolition of the World Trade Center was not enough to blow them off the course they set those many years ago.

One can only hope that their misguided relentlessness doesn’t blow back on us in ways that are too terrible to contemplate.

Hide the rabbit, Senator

Roger Ailes has a funny post up about Margaret Carlson fawning over Fred Thompson on Capital Gang.

Am I crazy or wasn’t there some chatter at one time about Margaret having a big crush on Thompson and stalking him all over DC?

I didn’t think so:

The New York Post, of all venues, reported recently that the Tennessee senator had of late become something of a sex object for “Capitol Hill hotties,” one of whom complained about “all these other women” who wouldn’t leave the senator alone. “I can’t get up to get a cocktail at a party without coming back and finding some girl sitting at my chair,” the woman was quoted as saying.

Margaret Carlson, the writer for Time and host for CNN, is described this way: “She calls his apartment all the time. It’s the joke all over Washington that Margaret has this huge crush on him. And Fred is clearly not interested.” (To which the gallant Thompson responded: “I generally don’t comment on these matters, but as it relates to the statements made about my friend Margaret Carlson, I should be so lucky.”)

It’s History Day on Calpundit:

For some reason, every generation loses the ability to appreciate the emotional impact of events from the previous generation. They become merely words in history books, and the players seem somehow like misguided little children making silly mistakes that, really, are sort of obvious in hindsight, aren’t they?

Hey, we’re not even paying attention to the words of various revered Greatest Generation types who are still alive and fully appreciate the emotional impact of events of their generation. The videogame cowboys who think to prove their manhood by saying things like “glass ‘em” apparently believe these men don’t have a clue about war and geopolitics. After all, they only lived through a worldwide depression, a war of survival that took the lives of about 50 million people and then ran the world during the following 40 years of nuclear standoff known as the cold war. Surely, they could not possibly have anything useful to say about Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il.

As Kevin Drum says, “these two are not the first thuggish dictators we have had to face.” Try Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler on for size.

How ironic it is that the Republican baby boomers, most of whom “supported” the Viet Nam war but were awfully busy and didn’t have time to actually participate, would find in their middle years that the elders and the Generals whose favor they so unctuously sought in their youth are now openly contemptuous of their adolescent bloodlust. Because the fact is that many of the elder statesmen who lived through the bloody 20th century are not very impressed with the bellicose prattle emanating from the President and many of his advisors.

I don’t consider him to be a liberal pushover, but Andy Rooney was on Donohue last night and pulled absolutely no punches in his criticism of the Bush administrations foreign policy. (No transcript available.) Studs Terkel is downright

A Horse is a Horse, of course, of course

He’s rested, he’s glossy, he’s ready to go. And right oughta the box, we’ve got our favorite feature Whore of the year!

It wasn’t easy for me. I was torn between Howard Fineman (who is such a wild and crazy guy that he just drops to his knees and delivers his specialty in front of Chris Matthews, God and everybody) Margaret Carlson and The Mickster. The problem is that I get the feeling that Fine loves his work so much that he wouldn’t even be mildly chagrined to be called whore of the year. In fact, it has come to represent a sort of advertising for him.

So, I was drawn to the next obvious choice, Margaret Carlson for her bizarre (and frankly bi-polar) choice of the Wellstone tribute as the outrage of the year. It’s possible that she dropped a Steven Colbert special (mushrooms and Ecstasy — takes you to a really special place) just before the show, but she didn’t have quite the requisite tranquility. Or maybe she was playing naked truth or dare with little Ben Shapiro and lost. It was definitely something along those lines because there can be no rational explanation as to why she would choose this GOP propaganda ploy unless she was high or simply had no choice. I suspect somebody’s got something on Maggie and it isn’t pretty.

Finally, I’m left with the choice I somehow knew I’d end up with from the beginning. Mickey “the good liberal” Kaus is my favorite because he believes that poor people should stop thinking that money will solve their problems and realize that they should just strive to be nice to rich people so that rich people will be nice to them. He calls it “social equality” and thinks it is a lot better than “economic equality.” (I call it “feudalism” and think kissing the asses of a bunch of in-bred rich people to survive it is only slightly better than being dead. But, that’s just me.)

He should win the award, though, because he wrote that Ann Coulter was being maligned by the liberal media because it turned out that only 97% of her footnotes were bogus instead of the 98% claimed by the leftist media behemoth (or something along those lines…). He even links to Lucianne Goldberg, which goes beyond whoredom and enters the dark realm of submissive BDSM.

Finally, nobody has been more whorish than Mickey Kaus when he postulated on his blog that the liberal outcry against Trent Lott must have been orchestrated by the Wizard of Oz aka Sidney Blumenthal, the great liberal puppeteer. He even mused that Atrios might actually be Sidney Blumenthal…

I’ll bet he got a big ole Rovian kiss on the lips for that one.

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It’s Just Not Faaair!!!

Don’t you just love hearing poor little conservatives whine like itty bitty babies about their victimhood at the hands of the big, tewwible liberal media? It’s just heart rending, I tell you.

Check out Laura Ingraham on Reliable Sources when it repeats. She is just beside herself at the possibility that conservatives might be seen as anything but oppressed minorities who are shunned and cast aside by the monolithic liberal media that refuse to even acknowledge their right to exist! How could anyone even suggest that Republicans like Rush are doing anything but fighting back with their tiny fists against the liberal monsters who refuse to give them an even break? They are fighting for their lives! Sean and Bill and Neal may be vicious on the outside, but they’re quivering in fear on the inside, singing “we shall overcome” and “swing low sweet chariot” through a veil of tears.

And what really makes her just stomp her feet with exasperation is when people claim they aren’t liberal when they are! It’s dishonest and just plain evil. I mean, sure, George W. Bush has gotten some ok coverage but that’s just because he’s such a goood President compared to Clinton who was an evil President. That’s the difference. And even then, sometimes those icky liberals are just so mean to Bush when they say he might even be wrong sometimes and they try to get him to translate his sentences into English at press conferences. I mean, how much more biased can you get??? Why can’t everybody be fair and balanced and unapologetic, huh?

I just have to wonder something, though. They have complete control of the government, yet they are still unhappy and feel oppressed and powerless. What exactly do these people want? One party rule? World domination?

(oh yeah, that’s right…..)

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The Liquid List is gooood.

Check this out!

(And while I readily admit to knowling zilch about web design, I have to say that this one looks really good to me.)

Talk about Kewl!

Sisyphus Shrugged finds another example of the hateful liberal media in action.

And that special gal mentioned in the piece, Jennie Taliaferro of The Greatest Jeneration, should never be mentioned without quoting her at her very super-coolest:

We are at War–as much with Liberals as we are with Islamist terrorists. Your side is, unfortunately, the Enemy.

JennieTaliaferro

courtesy Martin Wisse at Progressive Gold

Again from His Purplosity, and on the subject of his earlier post on Rhandi Rhodes I’m pointed to a post by Skippy who lists a number of liberal radio voices who have been canned, eased out or otherwise metaphorically “disappeared” under suspicious circumstances.

But, he leaves out the best talk radio host ever in my book, the great Michael Jackson (not that one) who is considered by many in the radio business as having been the first talk show host.

His was on KABC until 1997, when the station unceremoniously demoted him to weekends. After being in drive time for more than 35 years, Jackson wasn’t too happy with his weekend gig at KABC, and eventually left the station in 1998.

He is famous for his “little black book,” which contains the name and phone number of anybody who is anybody-the rich, powerful, famous or infamous. Jackson has interviewed every U.S. President since Lyndon Johnson, and he was the first and only talk radio host to interview President Bill Clinton following the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

His show is erudite, intelligent, informative — but unfortunately he doesn’t get into any shouting matches with his guests, he doesn’t pontificate about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket because of the evil Americans who don’t agree with him and his callers seem to be more interested in asking questions than sharing their learned opinions on every subject. In other words, his show doesn’t appeal to the angry morons who seem to be the most coveted audience in America.

Interestingly, he just spent the last couple of years at a Clear Channel station KLAC. Of course he was let go this last November when Clear suddenly decided to change from the talk show format to oldies. As it said in this article in the Long Beach Press Telegram:

The change comes at a time when, perhaps, Jackson has never been better. His in-studio guest list reflects that: Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Al and Tipper Gore all in the last week, all shunning phone interviews they might have given other radio hosts to meet in person with Jackson.

“Nobody turns us down,’ he says proudly.

But that only adds to the sting Jackson feels in losing his show. He explains the machinations that have put the political right in talk- show ascendancy, while making liberal hosts such as himself an endangered species.

“Talk shows are dominated by conservatives, probably because they reflect the political leanings of station managers, who, in the main, come up through the ranks of sales rather than through news, entertainment and programming. Also, they are in the main, although not entirely, hoping to emulate the success of (Rush) Limbaugh.’

KLAC, its sister station, KFI [on which appear Limbaugh, Elder, Hannity et al] and nearly 1,300 others are owned by Clear Channel Radio. But those vast holdings may prevent the company’s front office from correctly measuring the politics, public opinion, and personalities in its local markets.

Says Jackson, “The change at KLAC had nothing whatsoever to do with me.’ And, he adds, it had nothing to do with the rise of conservative talk-show hosts. “I don’t want to sound like sour grapes. I don’t want to sound as if hosts on the political right have driven me out. The decision was a business one where the owners feel that they can make more money by cutting the staff, in front of the microphone and backstage, and by running canned music.

“My show was way ahead of expectations in the ratings at this stage of development. I had been on the air for just one and a half years, and the company had decided that they were not going to spend any money promoting the project. By contrast, look around. Our successful sister station, KFI, is publicized and advertised everywhere.’

The guy is the absolute best and he is having trouble staying on the air in Los Angeles, for Gawd’s sake! This makes no sense whatsoever.

It is possible, he says, that Clear Channel has misread the L.A.-area market, and has failed to grasp the presence of an extensive audience for a liberal talk show. (He defines a liberal talk-show host as one “open to all points of view.’)

“California is different from the rest of the nation,’ he says. “Every single major elective office in the state is held by a Democrat: the governor, lieutenant governor, the assembly and senate, the mayor of L.A., the attorney general, all of them. And so, KLAC turns off the microphones to talk.’

No kidding. Los Angeles is one of the most liberal cities in the country and we have no liberal talk shows. We have one of the best talk show hosts in the country right here, the man who is credited as inventing the genre and he can’t keep a job.

Sorry. This simply does not compute.

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There’s just something about it they don’t like

Atrios has a post up about John Edwards coming out against legacy admissions, a position which is immediately derided by some as being silly because the federal government can’t do anything about such things.

This is true, of course, but then the Government can’t make people go out “and love a neighbor like you’d like to love yerself,” as our President preaches, but he says it anyway.

The point is that Edwards is using the legacy issue as a way of drawing attention to the fact that there are many dispensations given for a variety of reasons in college admissions, so why is the race issue being used as the only example of discrimination in this area? It’s a smart way of putting the anti-affirmative action forces on the defensive by making them explain why one is so much worse than the other. After all, if a student is denied access to the college of their choice because someone with lower scores was admitted due to their race, how is it that no one complains if the same person is denied admittance because someone with a lower test score was admitted because their father graduated there? If one is discrimination, isn’t the other?

Clearly, the GOP is trying to mislead the public into believing that affirmative action is the only impediment to colleges being a pure scholastic meritocracy, which is nonsense. Admissions take many factors into account, race being only one of them. One could easily ask whether it is fair that a musically gifted student should be given admission even though her test scores and grades are lower than some others. Certainly many athletes are given preference over others with far more impressive academic credentials. Any one of these jocks could have “taken the slot” that would have gone to the student who would have made the cut if only scores and grades had been taken into account.

When you frame the issue this way, it makes you wonder why affirmative-action has become the only focus of these supposed legions of white students who have been denied admission to college because someone less qualified took their place. You have to wonder why they are so sure that their place was taken by undeserving African-Americans or women or Hispanics. Is it not just as reasonable that their place was taken by an undeserving football player, legacy C student or ballet dancer?

Why is it that only “less qualified” minorities make everyone so upset?

You only hurt the one you love

Via Cursor:

Following up on the item I posted yesterday on anti-trust investigation of the alternative media the SFGate reports on the issue and I obviously misunderstood the depth of the problem and was much too flippant in characterizing it as political. Apparently, it is also about whether there is too much style coverage in alternative papers and whether anybody in LA should ever have to answer to somebody in New York. It’s a super-duper crisis in the alternative press that some evidently believe can only be resolved with a tough US Attorney and a visit by some G-men.

The inquiry is the result of a horse-trading deal last October in which each of the two firms agreed to shut down one of its papers in a city where they competed. The arrangement between the nation’s two largest alternative newsweekly chains left Los Angeles and Cleveland with only one citywide weekly each.

[…]

If so, the trend would be one more sign that weekly newspaper chains are moving farther away from their progressive, grassroots origins and acting more like the gargantuan daily newspaper conglomerates they were meant to provide an alternative to in the first place.

Do read the entire article. You will see that the real problem is the corporate dominance of the alternative press by such behemoths as The Village Voice and New Times and how this is hampering the spread of progressive ideas.

Liberal critics seem to agree that we must help John Ashcroft stop these corporate media tyrants. Like progressive political writer “Marc Haefele, a former political columnist for the LA Weekly who resigned from the paper within a month after the New Times-VVM deal, and was first approached by justice investigators in mid November.” He told them, “The LA Weekly to a large extent is being edited under New York oversight at this point in time. This was basically going on before they made the [deal]. I was asked about whether I felt that had an effect on the content of the paper … and I said that, yeah, I thought the paper was basically run from New York by New Yorkers, and it was a paper about Los Angeles, and that did not necessarily work out all the time.”

If that doesn’t require federal intervention, I don’t know what does.

However, some people like Los Angeles Magazine editor in chief Kit Rachlis inexplicably find the much welcomed Justice Department investigation to be a bit more complicated:

“There’s a terrible irony in the John Ashcroft Justice Department investigating the alternative press when, in fact, they have allowed far larger corporate entities to get away with transactions that have certainly raised a lot more antitrust issues than the LA Weekly-New Times deal has, and which had far greater effect on society,” he says. “I don’t think it’s too paranoid to say that they’re looking into the alternative press for political reasons.”

As the article then points out:

Indeed, the U.S. Justice Department has done nothing to derail the endless media mergers that have taken place between corporate giants in recent years, and has yet to block a single joint-operating agreement between competing newspapers since the Newspaper Preservation Act was passed in 1970.

Oh please. Is he trying to say that there is something unusual about Ashcroft investigating a media company for anti-trust violations? Well, so what if there is, anyway? It is far more important that reporters from the LA Weekly don’t have to take orders from some stupid New Yorker. And if it takes crawling into bed with the Bush administration to make that point, well then I don’t see that you have any choice. As long as those rotten editors get theirs (and they stop publishing all that icky arts and culture junk that actually make people pick up the rags in the first place.)

Seriously, this is nuts. It sounds like NewTimes and VVM made a deal that was a technical violation of the Anti-Trust act. But, to believe that this “violation” of anti-trust in any way impedes competition in a marketplace that is totally dominated by mega-media corporations who own everything from the cable coming into your house, your computer dial-up, your only local mainstream newspaper, several radio stations and at least one of your local TV stations plus many more cable networks is ridiculous. The Justice Department is NOT investigating because of its grave concern about competition in the marketplace of ideas and those who are helping them out of myopic concern that these corporate chains are infecting the alternative press with commercial values are hopelessly naive.

Gleefully helping the Feds lean on the Village Voice just doesn’t seem to me to be the smartest thing for liberals to do in this day and age. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s going to guarantee a more “responsive” alternative media going forward.