Bonehead Justice

Regarding Albert Gonzalez’s assertion that they’re finally getting court approval over their illegal wiretapping, we read from TPM:
Administration officials “have convinced a single judge in a secret session, in a nonadversarial session, to issue a court order to cover the president’s terrorism surveillance program,” Ms. Wilson said in a telephone interview.

Now they’re just getting stupid.  It was offensive before, but now it’s offensive and stupid.  This isn’t going to work and they’ve just opened a whole can of worms they didn’t want.  It’s like someone amongst them wants to be busted.  As if you can just get a fricking warrant for the whole damn program.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  Frankly, I had thought this was a dead issue.  They rode out the storm over warrantless wiretaps, and either Congress was going to do something about it or they weren’t.  But this isn’t going to stop anything and is just going to piss people off.

Of course, this is all provisional until we find out for sure that the story here is true.  But I strongly suspect it is, because it just sounds like the kind of brain-numbing shenanigans these people like to think are clever.  Some bonehead in the Justice Department came up with a harebrained scheme for getting around the problem, and the boneheads in the Whitehouse were so desperate to find a solution they liked that they convinced themselves that it’ll work.  But it won’t, and will only have offended people.  

Liberals who were offended by the original program will be offended more so by the sleight-of-hand.  Liberals who weren’t offended (The New Republic, perhaps), will be offended that they defended a program that the Whitehouse is so willing to revise at the drop of a hat.  And Conservatives will be offended that the Whitehouse gave up any ground at all.  

In fact, that’s the biggest surprise: That Cheney didn’t step in and put a kibosh on the whole thing.  To him, it’s weakness to even do research on whether they need to ask permission about getting permission.  You get the powers because you took the powers, and thus they’re vested solely with you to have or not have.  And if you have to ask whether you can do it, it means that you probably can’t.  It’s that simple.

But I guess this is perhaps a sign of how weak Cheney’s position really has become.  And it’s about time.  Just about every screw-up this administration has had has Cheney’s fingerprints all over it, including its first mistake: Hiring Dick Cheney.  And it’s all been downhill from there.  If someone told me that it was Great Grandpa Cheney’s idea to build New Orleans below sea level, I wouldn’t doubt them.  I don’t know anything about Cheney’s lineage, but wouldn’t doubt if it’s faker boneheads all the way down.

A Carnival Without Biobrain

Guess what, folks.  There was another Carnival of the Liberals, but apparently the Carnival host Shakespeare’s Sister had some falling out with her readers or something, and so she decided to deny them the honor of reading the best post; ie, mine.  And while you’ve probably already read it (it’s only a few days old), I just can’t deny you people the honor of knowing which post was the best one of the Carnival.

It was The Argument Against War, giving my detailed reasons for opposing the Iraq war.  And I must say, it was a pretty good one, even by my own high standards.  And so if you’d like to relive the excitement of a post I’m sure you read last Thursday, go for it.  But remember not to tell any of Shakespeare’s readers or even any of the Carnival readers who don’t already read this blog.  We must preserve the sanctity of the Carnival by respecting the Carnival host’s judgment on which posts they’ll punish people by not selecting.  That’s only fair.

Book Pimping

I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but it seems the blogger Coturnix (aka Bora Zivkovic (an invented name if I’ve ever heard one)) has something to do with a science blog anthology titled The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006.  I can’t say I’ve actually read the thing, or any of the posts that are included in the book, but Coturnix has been a somewhat regular reader and commenter of mine, and best of all, recently nominated me for a few Koufaxes this year (including for the Most Deserving of Wider Recognition award, which I totally deserve), and I’m such a whore for that kind of thing that I don’t mind pimping Cotie’s book in return.  And hell, even if I don’t win a damn one (which I probably won’t), Coturnix’s early nomination sure did help bring in a few extra readers to my site, and that never hurts.

So if you’re interested in reading science blog writings or whatever, and all you were waiting on before purchasing it was the recommendation of someone who isn’t at all familiar with the book, I say go for it.  What’s the worst that could happen?  That you offend our anti-science creator, Suyvwity, who then punishes you for all eternity by making you watch old Bush speeches…and trying to defend them?  Sure, that’s pretty bad, but trust me.  Suyvwity sees everything and already knows you were sort of paying attention in those science classes all those years ago, instead of storming out in protest and flailing yourself in public.  So he was going to get you anyway and you might as well by the book.

Sure, I don’t know if it’s any good, but there’s a lot of worse crap you can buy for $19.95 ($8.69 download).  And with any luck, Coturnix will return the favor by nominating me yet again for the Most Deserving of Wider Recognition award next year; which I’ll still totally deserve, having still not won it this year.  Because I’m still not widely recognized enough for enough people to realize how deserving I am for wider recognition.  That’s irony, people.

Exploratory Committee Confirmation

I can’t go into any details right now, but I just wanted to confirm the rumors that have been swirling around me for the past few days.  The answer: Yes.  My exploratory committee has indeed formed an exploratory committee too see about forming yet another exploratory committee for my presidential run.  And I have assurances that this isn’t just a make-work program by my other exploratory committees to drain my pockets, but is, in fact, going to be the most awesomely impressive way to launch my presidential bid…assuming the exploratory committees’ exploration confirms that I’ve got the presidency locked-up.  Or whatever it is that exploratory committees do.  They never did get around to explaining how this was really supposed to work, beyond the need for lots more exploratory committees.

But no matter what, I should stress that I am not officially running.  Not yet, anyway.  It’ll take a few more exploratory committees before I’ll be in a position to do anything so bold.  I thought it only appropriate that you people were the first to know.  Wish me luck!

Oh, and if anyone out there wants to form an exploratory committee on my behalf; go for it.  I can use as many committees as I can get.  Obama may have stolen my thunder so far, but I plan to beat him on the committee front.

Delineating Bullies

Well, well, well, it looks like Biobrain’s spawned another copycat.  Or so I’d like to believe.  Longtime reader and commenter J. Mumphrey Bibblesnæð has recently started a blog called The Drummondtown Ramblings.  I’m not sure, but at a guess I’d say this is in reference to famed multimillionaire Mr. Drummond from the beloved 70’s sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, as I have no other mental association with that name.  I guess Mumphrey just didn’t like Mr. D’s jive talk.  Or perhaps he’s trying to emulate it, I don’t know.

And just to help Mumphrey get the ball rolling (as he seems to be under the delusion that I’m not the ninth-tier blogger that I really am), I’d just like to play a little tennis with a post he had written after reading one of my posts.  Or maybe this is just ping-pong.  

Anyway, Mumpy’s first post was in response to my post on Respect, in which he lays out the case that conservatives are bullies; in the traditional playground sense.  And I agree with that fairly well, except that it doesn’t really apply to all conservatives.  In fact, I suspect that there are many of them who aren’t really bullies at all, and as I’ll argue, shouldn’t be conservatives at all.  And as it’s always been my theory that having fewer enemies is better than having more, I’d like to make a distinction between these groups.

Know Thy Enemy

First off, I assert that almost all of the Republican and conservative leadership are, in fact, bullies.  They rose to the top because of their bullying ways and their innate understanding of what it takes to make people do what you want them to do.  They are the cream of the crap, so to be speak.  And while the liars, cheaters, and thieves become the staffers and consultants, they push their bullies ahead into the top spots to actually present the material to the masses.  Needless to say, devout conservatives who aren’t competent at any of these activities end-up at think tanks, newspapers, and websites.  Too bad they can’t seem to find anyone with competence.

Thus said, by “leadership” I’m not referring to every Republican politician, but merely the ones who tell others what to do.  For example, Bush, Cheney, DeLay, and Gingrich most definitely fit into the bully category.  Dennis Hastert, on the other hand, had a bully’s demeanor, but really seemed more like the dumb schmuck scapegoat they wanted to put in front of the cameras.  But then again, I understand the guy was once a Football and Wrestling coach, which makes him an honorary bully no matter how dopey he really was.

And what of Bill Frist, who really seemed a little corpse-like to me and who got so thoroughly routed by his Democratic counterpart Harry Reid?  His drubbing could be an indication that he lacks the instinctive kill overdrive so apparent in these others.  So I’m not entirely convinced of his inclusion in this group, but Mumphrey lumps him in with the others and I’ll accept that addition for argument’s sake.

But what about the women?  This may be pure sexism on my part, but I’m not sure if women can be bullies, not in the traditional playground sense that we’re using, so I’ll assert that women conservatives are not bullies.  Sure, they can be real bitches sometimes (and I use that term in the loving sense), but that’s not really the same as a bully.  Bullies bully for the pure sake of asserting their power, while bitches bitch in order to get a specific demand fulfilled.  If someone could read their mind and always give them what they wanted, they’d be perfectly happy people.  But that would just piss bullies off, as they would then be denied their excuse for being assholes.  

Like Dick Cheney.  He doesn’t just want to wiretap our phones and toss us into bottomless gulags.  He wants to do so without any permission of any kind.  He doesn’t even think he should have to ask permission to not have to ask permission.  He just wants to do it completely on his own, and if he deigns to tell us about it, it’s only for bragging rights.  Now that’s a real dick we’re talking about.

So I assert that this talk of conservative bullies doesn’t really apply to the women.  But how about the little guys?  The Congressmen who are so insignificant that I will now consult my list of Congressmen to see exactly who I’m talking about.  Well shit, nevermind.  I just looked over a list of Congressmen, and even the names I recognize don’t ring any bells at all; as bullies or otherwise.  Sure, I could say that they don’t seem like bullies, but I really would be talking through my ass and could easily be proven wrong on any of them.  And if there’s one thing I don’t like to do, it’s to be proven wrong.  So I’ll just avoid that all together.  

But I’ll just assert as a whole that most of those guys don’t bring an immediate recollection as being particularly bullying to my mind, so I don’t think they’re so bullying.  That’s a pretty halfass thing to say, I know.  But screw-it, I really don’t even know why I didn’t just delete this section of the post.  If you want, you can just strike it from the record.  Thanks.

The Bully Script

But that’s not at all to say that it’s only the politicians who are bullies.  Hell no.  I suspect that bullies are just attracted to the conservatives, for natural reasons.  I mean, what is modern conservativism other than an excuse to be an asshole?  In fact, I think that most conservatives are bullies.  And that was Mumphrey’s suggestion, so I better do something to set my statement apart.  

Now here’s where my original post idea started: Both my parents are bigtime Rush Limbaugh conservatives.  And both of them listen to many of the other talkradio blowhards, as well as watching Fox News and Bill O’Reilly.  They agree with what they hear, internalize whatever the latest meme is, and repeat it endlessly whenever you try to tell them something that doesn’t fit into their belief system.  And so that’s just a steady stream of bullies they digest on a regular basis.

But here’s the thing: Neither of them are bullies.  Far from it.  They’re intelligent, normal, well-educated people (both with Master’s degrees), who are relatively nice and don’t try to jerk around other people.  They don’t cheat, lie, steal, or bully.  Yeah, I know.  I don’t get it.  They don’t even come from bullying backgrounds.  This makes no sense at all.  But when it comes to Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and the others, they'll believe everything they hear.  And I think the same goes for a lot of Republicans.  In other words, they’re in the wrong damn party.

And yet they are.  Particularly my mom.  When discussing politics, she’ll recite the standard talking points so well you’d imagine that she was creating them herself.  But I know she’s not, because I’ve heard them all before.  She’s saying what they’re programming her to say.  But the thing is, she doesn’t really mean it.  Once you get things off the standard script, she doesn’t really believe that crap at all.  She does think we should help one another.  She does think we should all be nice and play fair.  And I suspect that there are quite a few conservatives in the same boat as her.  It’s only when they find themselves back on the script that they start sounding like O’Reilly again.

Bullies v. Victims

Because all it comes down to is a matter of trust.  For whatever reason, she’s learned to trust what these people tell her, and she won’t listen to anything else.  Even her own son talking about his own personal beliefs become little more than a caricature when we’re talking about this.  It’s not that she doesn’t like me or anything (I hope), but when it comes to liberals, she just doesn’t believe the three-dimensional version of our beliefs that I’m telling her.

And the same with my dad and religion.  He’ll believe O’Reilly’s War on Christmas jazz no matter how many times I insist that no such thing exists.  They’ve got a living, breathing liberal atheist who they’ve known for over three decades standing in front of them, yet they continue to believe in the shadowy stereotypes that these bullies paint for them instead.  Amazing.  

But it’s not because this is really the kind of people they are, but merely because these intelligent people chose to put their trust in the wrong sources and refuse to reanalyze that decision.  They’re not bullies, whiners, or bad people.  They’ve just been misled.  And I think that once you get passed the rhetoric and stereotypes, you’ll find that a lot more conservative Republicans fit into that category than you’ve been led to believe.  Because that’s one of the biggest tricks of bullies: To convince you that they’ve got a lot more allies than they really do.  When too often, those allies are also victims of that very bully.  So rather than lumping them altogether based upon the empty script you hear them recite, it’s best to try to pick beneath the surface and see where their real opinions stand.

Thus said, I don’t think that anything I just wrote rebuts anything Mumphrey wrote.  I wasn’t even trying to.  I just thought that this might have gone unstated in his post and decided to write this small part at the end, but found myself writing a whole bunch more.  But that’s alright.  If you didn’t think it was a good topic, you’d have stopped reading long before now and so I probably didn’t waste too much of your time.  

Now everyone click through to Mumphrey’s blog a bunch of times so he’ll get the impression that I’m a really powerful blogger who can send lots of traffic his way.  Then he’ll think I’m a real prick for not doing it anymore.  That’s what they call power, my friend.  Not just the ability to make things happen, but the ability to turn it off at any time.  And that’s why I got into blogging in the first place.  To be a power-wielding prick.  And in case you were wondering, yes, I used to be a Republican.

Saving Private Chait

I’ve always kind of liked Jonathan Chait.  I haven’t read much of his stuff for the past few years, but he certainly had some good thinking, by TNR standards anyway.  I don’t know went wrong with him, though I suspect he’s spent too much time debating with the fantasyland neo-cons at TNR and has done too much to adjust his arguments to account for their absurdist arguments.  That happens.  I myself feel I abandoned Clinton too much during the last few years of his presidency, simply to adjust my arguments to the Republicans I was constantly debating against; and I’ve regretted that ever since.  I still supported him, but I ceded much too much ground…not that it made any real difference.  But I think I hurt my argument in the process.

And so I just finished reading a decent takedown of Chait by the illustrious Digby.  But fortunately for me, he left one of his arguments incomplete, so I thought I’d step in and finish it.

Speaking of sanctions against Saddam, Chait writes:
But the years that followed that war made it clear just how impotent that tool was. Saddam Hussein endured more than a decade of sanctions rather than give up a weapons of mass destruction program that turned out to be nonexistent.

First off, as I’ve stated before, I do not usually support broad economic sanctions.  Not against dictators like Saddam and Castro, anyway.  I don’t think they were good against the Soviets either.  It makes sense against a nation that wants economic freedom and strength, but evil leaders will gladly accept the economic controls over their citizens.  Not only does it give them a justification for why their economy sucks, but it helps tighten their grip over the country.  Plus, it gives them a universal enemy for their citizens to hate more than the dictator.  And that’s certainly how Saddam used them, who was able to milk the sanctions for billions of dollars, because he controlled the black market.  

Beyond that, I think it’s a much better idea to allow oppressed to enjoy our freedoms and see how great things are elsewhere.  Not only does it make us look like good guys, but it will help them build a middle class, and thus build a power base within the country that is independent of the dictator.  So rather than sanctions acting to end totalitarian regimes, they serve to help further them.

Provoking War

So I’m not big into sanctions.  But I’ve got to protest Chait’s description about Saddam’s nonexistent programs.  Because he seems to be forgetting the real reasons why Saddam opposed the inspections teams.  It wasn’t because he wanted to hide something, though he might have.  And he probably didn’t like the imposition against his authority, which he saw as being absolute; at least within his own borders.  But it was primarily because we were using our access of Iraq to spy on non-WMD programs, as well aiding a coup movement.  

Those were the reasons Saddam gave for opposing the inspectors, and as we now know, he was right.  We were spying where we shouldn’t have been.  We were trying to overthrow Saddam.  And most of all, we were doing all these things so that Saddam would eventually throw-out the inspectors, and thus try to force President Clinton to invade the country.  Because that’s all it was really about.  The neo-cons were upset after the first Gulf war that we didn’t remove Saddam, and they were trying like crazy to make it happen afterwards.  Even the Kurdish no-fly zone over northern Iraq was a part of this plot.  

So none of this was about stopping Saddam’s WMD programs, or Saddam protecting programs that didn’t exist.  It was about trying to provoke a war that the leader of neither country wanted.  But the neo-cons used Clinton’s obvious weakness (created by his Republican opponents) to force his hand to be tougher than he wanted to be.  Fortunately, Clinton was strong enough to avoid being forced into war.  Unfortunately, they played right into Bush’s weaknesses.

Chait’s Friends

Now, I don’t know why Chait doesn’t know this.  All the facts are known.  But again, I strongly suspect that Chait has fallen victim to the TNR’s neo-cons, who were the same people trying to force Clinton to invade against his will.  Far from him being able to make these points, he’s stuck on the other end, defending against why we shouldn’t have invaded sooner. And the neo-cons were so good at planting the liberal position with rhetorical mines that he couldn’t survey the landscape properly.

Even now, a strategic withdrawal is seen as “losing”, and so Chait isn’t allowed to consider the possibility.  Sure, “winning” might be impossible and staying might make things worse, but Chait isn’t allowed to go there.  There’s too much rhetorical turf for him to cover before he can even begin to make that argument to his neo-con buddies, so he’s ceded that territory completely.  

And that’s really the problem with everyone considered mainstream, reasonable, and serious.  That they ceded too much of the playing field to the conservative position, and they’re not even allowed to call anyone who supports the liberal position reasonable or serious.  That’s what they agreed to several years ago, and even now, after the disaster in Iraq has become undeniable and the election totally went against them; they’re still stuck with these decisions.  The anti-war position is still considered off-limits, and even reasonably intelligent people like Jonathan Chait still aren’t allowed to consider that it was the right position.  Not because it’s what they really believe, but because there were never enough truly liberal voices in their political circles to defend those positions.  You can be a liberal in Washington, but you can’t be anti-war.  It was Chait’s TNR buddies who closed-off that option.

Distancing Allies

But that doesn’t mean we should write-off guys like Chait.  As I said earlier, I myself used to badmouth Clinton in ways that I’m ashamed to admit to now.  I never said anything too bad, and I’m not sure how much I really meant it.  But I found it necessary in order to be considered reasonable in the circles I was debating in, so I did it.  And I didn’t even like those people.  But I sure liked to beat them in debates, and they wouldn’t even consider my arguments unless I first established my credentials as a non-Clintonite.  

It’s the same thing many “independent” conservatives do, by distancing themselves from Bush before denouncing all liberals.  The only difference was that I never fully distanced myself from Clinton, nor claim that I wasn’t a Democrat.  But I came pretty close.  And if anything, I denounced Clinton so that I could support him.  That sounds stupid, but if you saw my arguments, you’d know what I was talking about.

And I’ve been saved and now realize how stupid it was to give as much ground as I did.  I suspect Chait can still be saved too, and I hope he is.  He’s not a dumb man.  He just needs to stop hanging around with the wrong people.  And the more things get worse in Iraq, the less he’ll find any reason to be around those people.  With any luck, it will be his TNR friends who will be distancing themselves from the pro-war position, and not him from ours.  But I don’t have strong hope in that happening.  Because for many of them, they are the pro-war position.

Oh, and while there is definitely documentation to back my claims about the weapons teams being used improperly, I can’t find any in my quickie search.  I can’t even find my own writings about this, though I’m sure I have.  So I’m not linking to anything.  But I’ll find them if anyone’s interested.  But I’d just rather post this immediately and assume that no one is doubting me.

WMD Plants

A point I brushed on in a recent post about WMD’s and Iraq, what if the Bushies had planted WMD’s in Iraq and declared them to be Saddam’s?  The plan wouldn’t even need to come from the Whitehouse itself (though I’m still surprised that Cheney hadn’t loaned some from his personal stock (he could always have gotten them back afterwards).  It could have come from some creepy CIA guy or elsewhere.  Who knows.  Maybe it’s because nobody felt comfortable asking the others if they were planning to do it, and they kept assuming that someone else was working on it behind the scenes.  After all, one important thing about conspiracies is that you tell as few people as absolutely necessary. 

But just think about how differently things would have played-out, had they successfully planted WMD’s in Iraq.  Would you be nearly as smug now about the properness of the Iraq war, had they found a bunch of anthrax or something?  What if the anthrax had been a good match for the stuff that was used in the big scare after 9/11?  Sure, that would be some evidence that it was a batch of our own stuff planted there, but the wingnuts wouldn’t listen to any of that and would be entirely insufferable about the whole thing.  And the more anyone touched upon the idea that we placed it there, the more they’d throw the Conspiracy label at us and insist that it showed our own fringy freakiness.

Or say some clandestine CIA guys bought a few suitcase nukes from the Russian mafia and planted them deep in one of Saddam’s palaces.  Rather than this being way kooky, I’m honestly surprised it didn’t happen.  The fact that it didn’t happen is somewhat comforting, in that it would seem that these things aren’t as easily done as I had been led to believe.  I guess Hollywood has lied to me again.  But again, perhaps they all had assumed that someone else was working on it, and now it’s just too late to do anything about it.

But maybe not.  Wouldn’t it change the whole equation if a whole bunch of anthrax turned-up, or the suitcase nuke?  Sure, knowing what we know now (and which scientists we nabbed and “persuaded” to tell us everything they knew and more), it’s fairly unlikely that it could be legitimate.  But that wouldn’t stop the wingnuts from touting it from every mountaintop as proof of their rightness. 

And the media would stampede over anyone who tried to detract from the best story to hit them in years.  And it would have served as an entire justification of everything that’s happened in Iraq after the war.  Hell, Bush would have been more likely to completely abandon Iraq, had WMD’s given him the justification he needed for invasion.  That’s one of the weird things about this war.  They didn’t need to be right about everything.  All they needed was to be right about something.  Either the WMD’s had to turn-up, or democracy would need to flourish.  It just never occurred to any of them that they’d so clearly miss the mark on both accounts.  Even now, they’re loath to consider the possibility.

And another possible reason for why the Bushies never did this could be that they really did believe all their hype about huge stockpiles of WMD’s.  Sure, they knew that we didn’t have the intel to justify these claims, but they thought the invasion would surely bring the justification they were looking for.  So perhaps they didn’t think to plant anything because they really did believe that it was all there.  And I find that to be the scariest proposition of all.  As with everything the Bush Administration does, I’d much rather believe them to be evil liars than to believe that they’re as wholly incompetent as they appear.  Because the one worse thing than evil leaders with excessive powers, are incompetent leaders with excessive powers who want to be evil.

But the most likely scenario is that anyone who was important enough to want this done and could have taken the initiative to get it done would have had much too much to lose by engaging in such risky plans, while anyone who would have been willing to take the risk would have been waiting for the orders to do so.  Where are the G. Gordon Liddy’s of today?  So they were all stuck having to rely on reality to bring them their WMD justification, and as usual, reality really let them down bigtime.  These guys really only excel when they get to make shit up, and sending in phony WMD’s was much too reality-based for them.  Why, if these damn pansies were around in Nixon’s time, I betcha they would have waited for the Democrats to bug their own phones.

And whatever it was, I’m confident Cheney has privately cursed-out everyone in the government and intel community for not taking care of this.  Surely he’s too cowardly to attempt to influence anyone to take this initiative.  But it’s quite doubtful that he hasn’t seriously wished they had. 

But that really is the problem we have with Cheney: His butt can’t cash the checks his mouth writes.  And were he able to do so, we’d probably all be better off.  Rather than desperately struggling to con any little drop of power from the presidency, he could be off in the real world being evil in his own private company.  Even his evil stint at Halliburton was due entirely to his government contacts and ability to bullshit.  He could never create an empire like that on his own.  He had to rent somebody else’s.  Simply pathetic.

Booze for President

Straight-up, I’ll just tell you that this is a filler post because I think I need to write something today.  But here it goes.  I once read that Bush tried to convince his dad to not concede defeat to Clinton because he was somehow hoping that Sr. would magically pull out a win.  I also read once that Bush used to force his opponents to continue playing tennis and basketball against him, until he’d finally pull out a win.  Maybe it wasn’t both basketball and tennis or Clinton, I can’t remember and I’m fairly drunk and won’t bother looking it up; but the point remains clear.  The guy just doesn’t like to admit defeat.  In fact, he hates it.  He hates it, hates it, hates it.  That’s just the kind of guy he is.

And now he’s dragging our nation down further, hoping somehow to pull out some kind of win in Iraq.  And even more importantly, somehow pulling out a win here politically; because that’s all he really cares about.  If everyone here in America would forget about Iraq, he’d be perfectly happy.  In fact, I’m sure he’d like nothing better than to be back in Crawford, eating some nice BBQ and talking about how great it was to be president.   But as long as he’s in the Whitehouse and we keep talking about it, he’s stuck trying to find a way to win it.  

Because he just can’t admit defeat.  He hates it.  It doesn’t matter if his admission won’t have any influence whatsoever on whether he’ll actually win, or if he might just make things worse for himself by continuing the charade.  All that matters is that he continues things as long as possible, hoping, praying, dreaming that things might turn out better.  That he might just somehow pull-out a win.  But it’s not actually about turning the tide and making things work.  It’s just about drawing out the admission of defeat for as long as possible, and he doesn’t matter how absurd it is or who gets hurt.

Having his dad hold-out on the concession of defeat would have done nothing to help him, and would have made him look bad.  And every one of his opponents knew exactly what he was doing by not allowing them to end on a high note against Bush.  But that wasn’t the point.  It wasn’t about finding a win out of a loss or turning lemons to lemonade.  It was about Bush preserving his self-image.  Not necessarily as an eternal winner who never loses, but as a perseverer who never quits.  He may lose, but he’ll be damned if he allows anyone to think he loses gracefully.

And so we stay in Iraq, and possibly get in war with Iran, and he’ll just keep doing it.  He doesn’t care.  It’s not about winning.  It’s about ego.  It’s about self-image.  And he might hurt his reputation in the short and long-term, but he’ll preserve his self-image.  He didn’t give-up.  He didn’t go easy.  He dragged it on until the end, and even then kept on pushing.  He’d like to have quit a long time ago, but as long as people keep paying attention to his losses, he’s stuck fighting against them in vain.  And it doesn’t matter if it’s the whole world watching or just the poor dope he’s playing tennis against; he can’t allow anyone to think he’s someone who loses on a regular basis.  Instead, it’s very important that he show them how extraordinary it is that he’s losing.  Because everyone loses.  But only losers become accustomed to it.

So long after history has written-off Bush as a complete disaster, he’ll retain his own dignity as a guy that didn’t quit.  As a guy who normally was successful.  He may have done severe damage to America’s reputation for decades and seriously crippled our economic prospects, but he’ll know he kept things going strong until the end.  And for a mental cripple like him, that’s all that really counts.  It’s not about winning.  It’s about never admitting defeat.  And I can kind of relate.  Not only did I used to be a sore loser as a child, but I myself have just turned a lame filler post into a somewhat respectable one on Bush psychology.  I hadn’t meant to, but I just kept on typing until one came out.  I think it was the booze talking.  If only we had someone as bright as booze to talk for Bush.

When "No" Means "Don't Ask"

The intrepid Glenn Greenwald was discussing the issue of the Bushies’ belief that the president can declare war any damn time it wants to (with the provision that this only applies to Republican presidents), and writes :

The superb Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe reported last November that Vice President Cheney actually urged the first President Bush (when Cheney was his Defense Secretary) not to seek Congressional approval for the Persian Gulf War, arguing that the President had the power to start whatever wars he wanted regardless of whether Congress approved or not:

"I was not enthusiastic about going to Congress for an additional grant of authority," Cheney recalled in a 1996 PBS "Frontline" documentary. "I was concerned that they might well vote 'no' and that would make life more difficult for us."

And I don’t have much to add here, except to say that my kids do this exact same thing.  Especially our teenage son.  If he has even an inkling that the answer will be “no”, he just won’t ask.  He’ll just do it and worry about any possible consequences later.  For him, it’s better to get away with doing something then to be told he can’t do it and do it anyway.  Because he knows he’ll do it anyway, so it’s just better not to ask. 

Essentially, it comes down to him preferring to be punished for doing something wrong than to be punished for doing something wrong and disobeying us.  And that does make sense.  Especially as we might not even find out at all, and he might totally get away with it; which is much less likely to happen if he asks.

I’ve even tried to explain it to him, that if he thinks the answer might be “no”, then he shouldn’t do it anyway.  And if he does something that I know he obviously should have asked about first, then I punish him more than if he had disobeyed.  But it’s no use.  This seems to be ingrained behavior, and nothing seems to get that out of him. 

But fortunately, as he’s getting older, he seems to be getting out of this habit more and more.  He was really bad about this as a kid, but now that he’s sixteen, he’s really gotten to be more responsible about his actions.  If only we could say the same about the Bush Administration.

Quote of the Day

Jennalee Ryan, Designer Embryo Creator:
"Who wants an ugly, stupid kid?"

Indeed.

The Boer Plan of Defeat

Note: As the post script details below, the rightwing blogger who is the subject of this post now claims that his post was a “thought experiment”, though I’m not entirely sure how appropriate either of those words are in regards to any Republican.


What in the hell is the matter with the video game industry that they haven’t given us the proper games to sate our violence-starved wingnuts?  I’m speaking now of Red State co-founder Joshua “Tacitus” Trevino, who clearly doesn’t have enough adventure and depravity in his life.  But as I’ll show below, I suspect that beyond the excitement of planning such a thing, the real point of this exercise is nothing more than to give Joshua rhetorical cover for why the Iraq war would have been a good idea, if only we’d done what we needed to do.

In this recent post (via Sadly, No!) Joshua cites the example of the British Empire’s attack on the Boers as tactics we should emulate in order to defeat the Iraqis.  But he’s totally full of shit and his ideas are absurd and entirely immoral.  Good tactics for a sophisticated video game maybe, but clearly nothing that we could actually use.  And even then, if the game was sophisticated enough, these tactics would fail as surely as they would in the real Iraq.  So even with the moral dimensions removed, they’d fail.  And in real life, they’d lead to a failure much graver than anything a basic withdrawal would lead to.

His plan is to put Iraqi women and children into concentration camps, before turning Iraq into a giant concentration camp.  Specifically, by setting up garrisons in blockhouses throughout Iraq and stretching wires between all the blockhouses.  And when any Iraqi breaches the wires, we bomb the shit out of them, and then repair the wires for the next Iraqi.  Thus turning all of Iraq into a grouping of small concentration camps surrounded by a large death camp.  And who ever said brown-skinned people couldn’t self-govern?

Fantasyland Tactics

Frankly, I’m a bit confused as to how this would actually work, as he seems to be suggesting that we’d need a garrison for each 20 sq km of Iraq.  And that would require awfully long wires and would be a very large space for the kind of quick reaction he mentions against the “presumed insurgents”.  But for the sake of argument, we’ll pretend that this somehow makes sense, and it’s even possible that it does.  Joshua says the British had each blockhouse within visual contact with one another, and I can’t really see how this works otherwise.  But whatever.

As Joshua says referring to the Boer War, “Absent women and children, the rules of engagement were lax.”  And that’s clearly code for Anything Goes.  Nobody could go anywhere without our permission and we’d kill a lot of stray dogs and innocent people; and possible quite a few of our own soldiers.

And then there’s the problem of people getting food or going to work or anything.  But that’s just the price you’ve got to pay when you don’t depose your evil dictator for yourself, I suppose.  Perhaps Joshua’s taking this into account in some way oblivious to me, but he never says and I suspect he doesn’t really care.  

But in a video game, this could be a great idea.  And if this war was truly necessary to win for our survival, and no other course of action would prevail, I suppose I would support these means.  But those are two impossible if’s that we shouldn’t be concerned with outside of video games.  He even gives us a back of the envelope bullshit estimate on how many troops would be needed to do this, and needless to say, it’s a number of troops that we wouldn’t be sending there short of a draft.  

And that was assuming a garrison can handle a 20 sq km area, which I still can’t quite fathom.  I suspect a more realistic number pushed his troop needs even further into the impossible; so he just had to invent a number that worked better.  Why not?  His enemies will be too busy attacking him for his immorality and his readers (both of them) will support him no matter what he wrote.  Besides, if you’re bullshitting anyway, why not make the bullshit more paletable?

Needless to say, he gives us no estimates on the costs of these troops, the equipment needed for the task (particularly of all that wire), or of building the blockhouses; which would be an odd omission from the once fiscally-serious conservatives, were they not to have already shown us what unprinicipled liars they were in that regard.

Outcomes

Just to be clear, I’ll outline a few of the obvious reasons why this would be bad.  First off, I’m not so sure how many people outside of the region supported the Boers, but needless to say, there would probably be a few Muslims a bit upset at us for turning Iraq into a concentration camp.  And when I say “a few Muslims” and “a bit upset”, I mean that we would be in deep doodoo in large parts of the world that already aren’t so happy with us.  

And I suspect that the non-Muslim parts of the world might be a bit shocked at our tactics too.  I’m not sure if this would be on the scale of us nuking Iraq, but surely this would be widely condemned by the entire planet; thus losing us any moral authority that Bush has left us.  And rightly so.  There is such a thing as right and wrong in this world, notwithstanding the conservatives need for eternal victory.  Even the British had serious qualms about these tactics during the Boer War, and they generally liked that kind of thing.

And for what end?  I’m not sure.  Why do this?  Because we must.  We started a war, and now we have to win it.  That’s all that’s important at this point.  Joshua denounces anyone who thinks that defeat in Iraq is “palatable”; even if that’s the only option left to us.  But what would we really win, if we won this way?  Would we be keeping the concentration camps and blockhouses forever?  I’m sure that’s not part of Joshua’s plan.  But he doesn’t really seem to tell us what outcome we are to expect from this, beyond victory.

Surely we’d eventually want to turn the country back over to the Iraqis, but wouldn’t they sort of resent what we did to them?  Wouldn’t they, in fact, totally hate us forever and ever?  Of course they would.  So what exactly would we achieve?  The British wanted to keep control of the country in order to rape it of its natural resources.  But do we really want Iraq?  I don’t know about you, but I don’t.  And I betcha that Joshua doesn’t either.  He just wants a win.  And as I mention below, it’s not really the Iraqis he needs the win against, but us.

The Moral Plane

And that leads us into one of the oddest statements in his very odd-statement-filled post.  He writes (emphasis added):

What was good about the President’s speech? He remains committed to victory. Whether he will achieve it or not is a separate matter; the mere fact that he seeks it sets him on a moral plane above the mass of the American left that thinks defeat a wholly palatable option.

Being committed to victory is a higher moral plane??  What?!?  Who the hell is Mr. Concentration Camp to be talking about morality?  I’m so boggled by this statement that I have nothing more to say about it, other than to suggest that this is the entire point.  Conservatives have long ago mastered the art of the mind-boggling statements, which are intended to stifle debate and place rhetorical hurtles over any kind of serious discussion.  You’re supposed to shake your head in amazement at the huge gulf between your side and theirs.

And at this point, Joshua is totally talking through his ass.  He needs victory at any cost and is feeling desperate.  So desperate, in fact, that he needs to offend liberals by stating this entirely stupid plan.  It’s all he’s got left.  He knows we won’t do it.  It’s unlikely he’d truly want to if he could.  He’s left with nothing more than feel-good toughguy talk.  Everything else has fallen through, and if he can’t hang-on to some level of “Victory at All Costs” then he’s got nothing left and would have to stop blogging about the war.

Because this really isn’t about Iraq at all.  This is about his personal victory over his enemies in this country: Us.  Liberals.  So he’s pulling out all the stops and refuses to admit defeat to us.  He refuses to admit that this war was a crushingly huge mistake, just as we had been warning him it would be.  So anything short of total victory is entirely unacceptable to him.

Just like McCain and his once hypothetical surge, Joshua is forced to escalate his rhetoric further and further into batshit crazy territory, or be forced to admit defeat.  But the further they go, the more rhetorical territory the cede to us, and that just makes them crazier.  But they don’t really believe this stuff.  They won’t do what they want to do.  Hell, even McCain himself is shitting bricks now that Bush is implementing his plan, and is forced to push deeper into fantasyland; so as to not be stuck taking the blame for Bush’s doomed plans.

So Joshua pushes the envelope in ways that a mainstream guy like McCain only dreams he could, but it all amounts to the same thing: Rhetorical victory at all costs.  Were they to believe they could vanish the Iraq war and put Saddam back in power, they surely would.  But they can’t.  They once saw this war as a way of defeating us politically forever, and now they’re stuck escalating their war rhetoric to higher and higher absurdities; desperately searching history for some cruelty that would finally give them the weapons they need for victory.

And long after the defeat in Iraq is finalized, they’ll continue to hold onto their statements that they could have won the war, if only they had been allowed to.  Just as they refuse to admit that Vietnam was a lost cause or that Nixon truly deserved to be impeached.  It’s really all they’ve got.  In their heart of hearts, they don’t really believe it; but when it comes to real-life political victories, it’s all they’ve got.


Post Script: I had written most of this early this morning, but before posting it this evening, I looked back over Joshua’s post and saw he gave an update.  He says his post was merely a “thought experiment” (I had to reread that first word, as I wasn’t sure that conservatives were capable of such things), and wasn’t intended as a policy prescription.  

He accuses his critics of poor reading comprehension because they didn’t notice that in the second sentence of the fourth paragraph he was saying that we should consider the Boer War because it maximized efficacy per soldier, thus yielding a more plausible figure for soldiery.  I guess I have poor reading comprehension, as I did read that line, but didn’t take it to mean that his entire post was meant to be hypothetical.  Perhaps he might want to actually say upfront what he’s doing next time, rather than leaving it to one line in the fourth paragraph.  I thought he was just trying to outdo Bush, to give him a rhetorical highground, and that’s still what I think he’s doing.

Of course, even if we take his update as being honest, he’s still a fairly big fool.  Because his example of a totally different type of war in a totally different type of country using completely different technology doesn’t mean a damn thing.  Even as it was, he had to invent his 20 sq km rule just to make his numbers reasonable.  Yet I didn’t see it as such, and thought his entire plan was utterly absurd.  As you read above, I never took him seriously anyone, and thought he was just trying to sound tough.  I still think that’s the case.

Oh, and I liked this quote from his update: “suffice it to say that genocide and murder are the last items on any sane wartime agenda.”  This, from the guy who also wrote of the Boer War: “Make no mistake: those means were cruel. I have stated previously that I endorse cruel things in war — to eschew them is folly.”

So he’s suggesting that something that is the last item would be folly to eschew??  I suspect what he was saying was the “last item” would be the Nazi-style genocide, rather than the Boer techniques, which I strongly suspect he supports.  He never said that, but he never explicitly condemned them either.  But then again, I’ve never quite understood the big difference between war and murder.  In either case, you’re dead.  Necessary war leads to unfortunate but necessary death; but this war in Iraq was always far from necessary.  It was a wrong war which led to wrongful deaths (ie, murder), and so I’m having trouble with the distinction that these people make.

Oh, and I also like how he says that none of us were upset at the immorality of his post; that we were just trying to score points.  I suppose that might apply to me, as I didn’t think he was serious about this and did, in fact, use this to score points against him.  But I suspect that this really applies far better to Joshua than any of us.  Because none of this is really about Iraq, but rather about “points-scoring”, and that this is a bit of projection on his part.  As is his “implacable opposition to the genocide-minded murderers and indiscriminate killers whom we fight in Iraq.”   Would it be rude to suggest that we didn’t need to worry about those killers until doofuses like Joshua got involved?  

Oh, and as a final note: It really and truly sounds like Joshua is admitting that we can’t win in Iraq.  He says we’d need a lot more troops just to do his idea, which he says requires the fewest number of troops possible.  And that number is clearly not going to happen.  And if we assume that he isn’t proposing that we do this Boer plan, then we’d need even more troops; thus making this war unwinnable for us.  He never says that and clearly denounces anyone who would say it, but that would seem an extremely obvious position from what he said.  I think poor Joshua is confused.  I already thought he was talking through his ass, and if he’s not suggesting that defeat is almost assured, I can’t imagine what he thought he was saying.  It doesn’t seem that he knows either.

The Argument Against War

Argh.  I don’t necessarily think that I’m smarter than other people (though it’s quite possible), but I’ve got a great imagination as well as a fear of underestimating the worst case scenario.  Perhaps it was my Cub Scout training to Be Prepared, I don’t know, but when it comes to dreaming-up bad outcomes, I don’t screw around.

I say that after reading this from Eric Alterman:
The Bush/Cheney war in Iraq has proven to be even more catastrophic than those who had the good sense to oppose it could have predicted.

I’m hoping that he was just being hyperbolic, because I thought things could have been far worse than they were.  I also thought they could have been much better.  In fact, I didn’t really have a “prediction” as much as a wide, wide range of possible outcomes; and many of them were far worse than any threat Iraq realistically posed.

And that’s why I opposed the war, because it was much too unpredictable and we couldn’t know where we’d end up after it was over.  I wasn’t blogging back then and only wrote about it on the now defunct Yahoo messageboards (which is where I honed my rhetoric before it was blog-ready); so you’ll just have to take my word for it.  But I’m telling you now the same stuff I was writing back then…and being dismissed as a whackjob traitor by all the nutjobs who are still trying to justify the crap they were told to believe back then.

Possible Outcomes

Let’s see the bad side.  First off, say Saddam really did have WMD’s that he’d suddenly need to dump quickly.  He could have snuck them over to Syria and given them to terrorists, who would then bring them to America and cause all kinds of mass destruction, death, and mayhem.  And that’s based on all the same assumptions the wingnuts were using at the time (which many are still clinging to); except they thought Saddam was already planning this.  But war would certainly have made that option far more likely, had it been possible.

Or heck, they could have just toted a nuke over to Kuwait and detonated it in the middle of one of our big bases; killing large numbers of soldiers (including our top brass there), as well as numerous contractors and Kuwaitis.  And what could we do about it?  Invade Iraq again?  That’s far, far worse than what happened, and was one of the many scenarios I wrote about.  

And let’s face it, if Saddam really was planning to harm America, then an invasion of Iraq would be a perfectly legitimate opportunity to do so.  And we couldn’t even complain about it, as we started it first.  And let’s not forget that it could have angered thousands of Muslims and other sympathetic people here in America to turn extremist and attack us.  The fact that these things didn’t happen really go far to demonstrate that the threats were probably overstated.

And there are all kinds of permutations along those lines that would also have been worse.  Like say if our soldiers’ actions during the invasion angered the OPEC nations enough to boycott us.  Or had Saddam actually had his men put up a real fight, things could have dragged on for a lot longer.  Or hell, even the civil war thing could have broken out a lot sooner, and been bloodier and more expensive for us.  And don’t even get me started on how much worse the Halliburtons could have ripped us off.  They can always do things worse.

Or conversely, what if things had turned out so well that we immediately took the neo-cons up on their offer to invade Syria, Iran, North Korea and a few others (China, perhaps); and then we found ourselves tied-down all over the globe with a massive, intractable war that really did threaten to ruin America forever?  That would also be far worse than the situation we’ve found ourselves in.  As things stand, the worst that has happened to us was to ruin our reputation and damage our wallets.  That’s a mere pittance compared with the suffering we could have faced.

And that’s why we shouldn’t have invaded.  Because war is always an extremely risky proposition with too many variables to properly calculate, and that’s why it should always be considered an option of absolute last resort.  Just ask Hitler, or all those dudes in WWI.  Or Saddam, whose dumb invasion of Iran was topped by his much dumber invasion of Kuwait.  Or just about any major war that’s ever been conducted.  Even Caesar had unexpected trouble with the Britons, and he was fricking Caesar.  There are no assurances in life, and war makes things that much shakier.

Osama, Iraq, & WMD

And I also warned liberals to take it easy in the prediction department.  For example, I wish that people would stop tying Bush’s fate to the capture of Bin Laden.  He will be dead someday, and then every conservative will rub every statement of “Bush can’t get Bin Laden” in our faces.  Even if Osama dies of old age or AIDS, they’ll attribute his death to Bush and be completely obnoxious about their supposed victory.  Sure, it’s easy for us to score points by referencing Bin Laden’s continued freedom, but it will work just as easily against us someday.  Time is against us on this one, and conservatives will be the likely winners.  The only way out is if his dead body is never recovered or if he ends-up taking over the world.  I’m fairly doubtful of that second alternative, but with a boob like Bush still in charge, anything’s possible.

Or take Iraq (please).  Iraq still might someday succeed as a healthy democracy.  And if it does, conservatives will attribute it entirely to Bush and his boneheaded policies, even if it was entirely in spite of his policies.  Too many liberals describe it as unwinnable, but why?  It IS winnable.  That’s not a likely scenario, but it’s certainly possible.  And so it’s just plain stupid and dangerous to insist that it can’t be won.  Because then we’ll look stupid if things turn out ok.  And seeing as how much of the political establishment already thinks of us as stupid losers, this won’t be doing us any favors.  

Same with WMD’s.  I didn’t know that Saddam didn’t have them.  I thought he probably would have something.  But that it just wasn’t worth it, and that we were being lied to about it.  But they could have turned up.  Hell, they still could turn up, assuming Saddam had some super-secret team of scientists and research that we haven’t found yet.  So we should stick with what we know (that Bush lied about what we knew); rather than base everything on unknowns.  Frankly, I can’t figure out why they didn’t just place WMD’s there and be done with it.  That’s what I always suspected would happen, so I was never basing anything on them not turning up.  I’m sure Cheney’s still upset that he didn’t use some of his personal WMD stash for the job; but perhaps he thinks he might still need them for a rainy day.  Like once the impeachment proceedings begin.

Because this isn’t about Osama, or Iraq, or WMD’s.  This is about risks and necessity.  And on all these issues, the risks are too great and the necessity nonexistent.  That’s what this is about.  Not the specific issues of people or places, but on the greater issues of war and security.

Outcomes v. Incomes

Overall, this wasn’t about how things turned out.  Hindsight is easy, but unless you’ve got a time machine or a working crystal ball, you don’t base judgments on hindsight.  You base them on foresight; on what you knew beforehand.  And what we knew beforehand was that this was a risky, unpredictable scheme that we should have avoided.  Not because it turned out badly, but because it could have and we just couldn’t know what would happen.  

Again, we should count ourselves damn lucky that things have turned out as well as they did.  That’s what I’ve been saying since the war began and what I’ll say for all future wars.  You don’t do them unless you need to, and we most certainly didn’t need to do this one.

So perhaps Eric Alterman sees all this as a really bad outcome, but I will continue to praise Allah (metaphorically speaking) that things have gone as successfully as they have.  I’m not dead.  America wasn’t attacked.  Saddam didn’t have nukes to give to terrorists.  We’re just in a really, really bad situation that’s embarrassing politically and more expensive than we can afford.  And there are a lot of worse things that can happen.

So all things considered, Bush’s war went relatively well.  Bush wasn’t a victim of a bad turn of events, and the unpredictability was entirely predictable.  He was a damn lucky man that history won’t hate as much as it should.  But our judgment shouldn’t be based on how badly things went, but on how much worse things could have been; and things could have gone a lot worse.  That’s how all decisions should be judged, and by that measure, Bush’s war was a disastrous decision.  It’s unfortunate that things had to go as badly as they did; but it was a bad decision even if things had gone perfectly.

Biobrain Exclusive: Bush Will Not Seek Re-Election

You heard it here first, people. During tonight’s State of the Union address, Bush will announce that he will NOT again run for re-election, but rather will step aside on January 20, 2009, turning power over to Iraqi Security Forces and the Iraqi people. As Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down. Bush has entrusted Dick Cheney with the task of ensuring a smooth transition.

Bush will also announce his plans for breaking ground on the first ever Presidential Hotel & Casino at his ranch in Crawford. Included will be a dog track and presidential-themed amusement park. This will be officially sanctioned by the federal government, including the use of the Presidential Seal on all gaming tokens; and the entire town of Crawford will be declared a federal district akin to Washington D.C. and will be outside of any taxing or regulatory authorities. Once complete, Bush will be named President for Life of the District of Bushland and be issued a really cool crown and scepter.

And finally, the country of Iraq will now be under the control of Halliburton subsidiary KBR, though details are still sketchy as of this time. I’ll keep you posted as I learn more.


Update: Although none of the major news wires have yet to confirm this story, my sources assure me that it is entirely solid.

Second Update: Oops. Jumped the gun alittle on this exclusive. It turns out this is Bush’s SOTU speech for 2010. Looks like we’ve got George to kick around for six more years. My bad.

Pop Culture

I didn’t want to be dragged into this, but I’ve been left with no choice. Rosie’s a failure and Barbara’s a liar. There, I’ve said it. Donald’s right. The girls suck. End of story. I have nothing further to say.

Quotes of the Day

From Matt Taibbi, (via Carpetbagger)
And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they're blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by "keeping our noses to the grindstone" and "making lemons out of lemonade."

Wow. That’s a far better version of what I wish I had tried to say.

And shit, I liked his ending too, so I’ll quote that:
This isn't a pile of lemons we're dealing with, and there's no way to make it into lemonade. This is the Middle East, a place populated with Muslim people, and we know absolutely nothing about them and have no business being there. There's no horse to get off and no one there is looking for a handout or a hand up. They just want us to get the fuck out of there. How long is it going to take for people to figure this out?

And that’s just too true. Some things can be broken down to catchy phrases and analogies, and some things can’t be. And too often, people forget that the catchy phrases are merely symbols and aren’t the actual problem you’re dealing with. But people don’t really like dealing with problems and learning stuff is hard, so we get bromides and bumperstickers instead. Freedom’s not free. Don’t cut-and-run. Quitters never win. Etc.

So if that’s what they like, I’ve got a new one: Either know what the fuck you’re talking about, or shut the fuck up. Not so catchy, but it’s got the dirty word thing going for it, and everyone loves dirty words.

Department Store Democracy

Atrios provides us with our blog fodder for the day: A Q&A with WaPo Congressional Reporter Shailagh Murray.

The question asked is:
Why won't the politicians follow the polls when it comes to leaving Iraq?

To which Shailagh responds:
Would you want a department store manager or orthodontist running the Pentagon? I don't think so. The reason that many politicians are squeamish about hard and fast goals of any kind in Iraq is that there is no simple response or solution -- it would have emerged by now. A withdrawal by year's end carries enormous, very serious implications.

First off, let’s give a big WTF?!? for the withdrawal “carries enormous, very serious implications” line. What the fuck does that mean? Exactly which option doesn’t carry enormous, very serious implications in Iraq? He’s clearly using the “seriousness” as a device to dismiss this option; despite that it applies to anything we choose to do there. I suspect that this is more evidence that the Washington Establishment still refuses to acknowledge that staying in Iraq might be significantly worse than leaving.

And sure, that’s a debatable point. Yet Shailagh is clearly using the “seriousness” of it as a means of ending debate. Or specifically, to show that he doesn’t even see that there is a debate. All he knows is that withdraw is a bad option, so we’re stuck with “Stay the Course” or escalation. STC has been proven to be untenable politically, so we’re stuck with escalation.

Shailagh never says that, and probably would refuse to do so if prompted. But that’s obviously the only option he thinks we have. Sure, Americans continue to roundly dismiss that option; but the Washington establishment is convinced it’s the only way they can save their bloody war from being declared an official disaster. Just as McCain and Bush have done. The reality is that the “enormous and very serious implications” that Shailagh refers to are those associated with promoting the war; in that a withdraw would seal their fate as having been proven wrong on Iraq. But as long as they can keep troops there, everything is still in play.

Civilian Idiots

And then we have his idea that regular citizens like department store managers and orthodontists shouldn’t run the Pentagon. I suppose failed businessmen born with silver spoons would be much preferable over people who had actually accomplished things in life. After all, they already picked their expertise; whereas Bush was clearly the blank slate looking for something to finally succeed at. Odd that after six years, Shailagh still hasn’t noticed that governing isn’t Bush’s forte either. Would it be too late to get the store manager?

And then there’s the fact that civilians are supposed to be running the Pentagon. The civilians tell the military guys what we want done and the military guys then figure-out how to do it. But the military should have absolutely zero say in whether we stay or leave. Or perhaps not zero, but as much as say as any other citizen has. They can give opinions on how likely it is to work, but then the civilians need to choose the strategy. And Shailagh clearly knows that, as he continues to refer to civilian Bush as the guy pushing the “surge” and not the generals. But when it comes to his anti-democracy talk, this is the best he’s got.

Just to be sure it wasn’t a mistake, Shailagh clearly says this same line again. Like this:
One could certainly argue the Iraq strategy should be determined by the military and others who are running the war, and not by public opinion.

And despite his coyness, it’s obvious that the “one” who could certainly argue this would be Shailagh himself. This is his argument. Sure, one could also argue that Iraq strategy should be determined by the civilians who have been hired to run the military. And that one could also argue that these civilians should probably take cues from the people who hired them. But Shailagh won’t make that argument, because he’s completely lost his grip on how our government is supposed to operate.

Ignoring the Weather

This is also obvious when he responds to Rockville, MD, who didn’t ask a question, but merely stated that “polls do change a lot and to use them would be like following a weather vane”. To which Shailagh responds: “Where are the crazies today? You people sound so reasonable.”

Reasonable?? Nobody has suggested that politicians base their opinions on each and every poll that comes out. But these particular polls haven’t been changing like weather vanes; but rather have been building in the same direction for years. And in directions that almost the entire establishment has been wholly against. Had they allowed things to fall as they would, we would have been out of Iraq years ago. But then again, we wouldn’t have been there in the first place. This is the Washington Establishment’s war, and they haven’t given a damn what the “polls” tell them. And the “reasonable” people are those who agree with the establishment.

Moreover, people DO use weather vanes and they can be quite helpful. That’s why people have them. In fact, it would be stupid to ignore them if you needed them. And again, there’s the fact that these “polls” reflect the wishes of the people who hire the civilians who run the military. Imagine a corporation that went so entirely against their shareholders’ wishes. It’s almost as if the entire establishment has become convinced that the people vote as a reflection of God’s desire for who we should elect. Our opinions aren’t important. Our wishes are frivolous. All that’s important is to see who God told us to vote for on Election Day. We can be wholly ignored the rest of the time, as God already made his choice on that day. And as I suggested in my last post, perhaps “God” is just a shorthand way of referring to themselves.

One questioner actually follows up on the orthodontist line by saying that Jordan is being run by a dentist (something I’d never heard before); and that people there are happy with him. Upon hearing this, Shailagh can only make a joke about dental insurance and leaves it at that. But the point is irrefutable: Dentists and other regular citizens can run governments. And they do. And they run ours. The really weird thing isn’t that regular experts like doctors and lawyers can run things, but rather that we got saddled with a legacy president like Bush, with no sign of expertise whatsoever.

But Bush had the right breeding and background, and that’s always so important to these establishment types. And as long as the Washington Establishment stays tied to Bush’s fate, they’ll continue to consider his opinion to be far more valuable than store managers, orthodontists, and the rest of us rabble who are actually expected to do stuff successfully.

When Gods Speak

I’m not going to link to anything as I’m too bored to bother, but I just wanted to highlight the absurdity of the Beltway wisdom.  This time, their belief that John McCain’s continued support of the Iraq war and his new policy of escalation are somehow bold and dangerous for the guy’s presidential bid in 2008.  Because for how much they talk about the boldness of the whole thing, they all seem to be in total agreement about how great he is for doing it.  They’ll say it’s unpopular and not poll-driven, but solely as a means of honoring him with praise; praise that was as predictable as the setting sun.

And isn’t that the whole point?  Or shouldn’t we at least have suspicions that a person acting in a way that gets them lauded publicly as being brave and strong might be acting that way so as to be lauded publicly as being brave and strong?  Sure, maybe that wouldn’t be the first thing that’d pop into the Beltway brains.  But you’d think that at some point they’d finally sit back and realize how entirely calculated his maneuver really was.  Not as a way of saving things in Iraq, but of saving McCain’s butt here in America.

And the truth is that it was the only position he could take.  He can’t flipflop by being against the war (especially as it would alienate the “toughguy” conservatives he’s banking on in ’08), yet “stay the course” was clearly no longer an option.  So he was stuck with the fantasyland escalation plan.  Reality left him with no other choice.  In fact, his only real miscalculation was to not realize that Bush wasn’t left with any other option either; with the only difference being that McCain thought he was speaking hypothetically, and Bush not knowing that it only works that way.  But I guess that’s the problem with everything Bush does.  I mean, it’s easy to advocate quickie solutions, just as long as you’re not in a position to do something about it.  And unfortunately for everyone, Bush is stuck in such a position.

Back to the Pundits

But back to the pundits.  They universally praise McCain as taking a dangerous position, which completely undermines the whole dangerousness of it.  It’s as if they don’t see themselves as being part of the crowd that McCain is trying to impress.  And really, I suspect that this is because they continue to see themselves as being “above” the story.  They’re not participants in the drama being played out before them; they’re the audience.  The people the drama is being played for.  Objective observers far removed the hot-headed events the rest of us are caught-up in.  News stories are written by them, not about them.  And don’t even think about looking at them directly; they’ll know it for the impudence it is.

And that really does sort of make sense, in their crazy-ass fashion.  Because they really don’t see these things as being real.  It’s a drama.  It’s something interesting to talk about at parties.  The new gossip.  Like watching the movies, but without THX.  Because they really don’t care about this shit and don’t see it as real.  They’ve got satisfied, uncompelling lives with nothing much to strive for and no real interests, so they’re left desperately searching for interest anywhere they can find it.  Rock stars end up with drugs and sex.  If only our pundits could be so lucky.

Sure, they’re fully aware of the influence they play, and they relish it.  But they don’t do so as “players”.  In fact, the best way to see them is as Greek Gods.  They have a relatively strong influence on the actions of the mortals they watch, but they certainly don’t see themselves as being a part of it.  They’re above it all.  Looking down.  Mocking.  Always the cool head.  Always ready to disengage.  They’ll toy with us, but they’re not really interested.  And it just never occurs to them that they haven’t nearly the powers they think they have, or that they’re being used and abused just as egregiously as the people they think they’re watching.  McCain has long ago learned to play these people as suckers, and yet they continue to see themselves as being above the fray.  In fact, it is their belief in their own superiority that allows them to be abused so horribly.  

At this point, imagine I had some great ending for finishing this up.  I’ve got one in mind, but can’t quite word it properly and it’s late and I’ve got to wake the kids up early tomorrow.  And frankly, I’m starting to like these Monty Pythonish non-endings.  I’ll probably milk this a few more times before I get too ashamed and start making real finales.  But until then, this is it.

Unfinished CBS Greenwald Post

I’m not even sure what my original point was, but I had only meant to write a short little post.  It was Sunday morning and Glenn Greenwald (once again) wrote something that I needed to comment on.  Well I never got around to writing that, but wrote a bunch more about something else in the post, and now it’s late Sunday night (technically, Monday morning) and I figure this is the last shot I’ve really got at posting this material.  It’s not finished.  I’m not even sure if I like it.  It needed a bunch more to be done, but I quit writing when I realized how much more it would be and how the payoff was so little.  So I quit.  But here it is anyway, another unfinished post.


And on another point regarding his stuff on the CBS-Bush National Guard documents, is that the wingnuts weren’t even really right about that one.  Because they didn’t just leave it with the idea that the documents were forged (a theory that is still unproven).  No, they pressed-on ahead and were not only certain that CBS and Dan Rather knew the documents were forgeries, but that they were responsible for creating them themselves.  And that the reason why they did all this was because they’re flaming liberals involved in a giant plot to screw Bush.  This wasn’t just a story about a news crew getting suckered into a false story; this was a conspiracy.  They were convinced of this.  CBS was trying to rig a presidential election, and the wingnuts needed to save democracy from this all too obvious attack.  How heroic.

And that’s what they always do.  Their idea of “investigation” involves an intricate game of leapfrog, where each wingnut takes turns straining the truth out of the previous wingnut’s speculation.  And when all the dust settles and the truth is known, they look back through their mental archives and try to match the truth with some earlier statement they had made, so they can continue to claim victory over the truth.  And even still, they never really get a good look at the truth anyway.  I’m not sure if they still think CBS was trying to throw the election to Kerry, but they have long since declared victory on this one and refuse to look back.

And the problem is that conservatives are usually Big Picture analyst type people, and not detail-oriented fact diggers.  That’s how they got suckered into being conservatives in the first place: It has a great storyline and many of the facts can be known to fit.  The only problem is that they’re craptacularly bad at uncovering facts and are entirely dependent on whomever they trust to give them those facts.  And so garbage in, garbage out.  They’re fed crap, digest it for awhile, and pump out even worse crap; which is then fed to someone else for further treatment.  

I went on to write about how many liberal bloggers (myself included, as well as Digby, Publius, and Greenwald) are also analyst-types who don’t specialize in new information, but rather put perspective on what’s already known.  But then it got complicated.  But I betcha that most of these types were once conservatives or Republicans (including myself), before we finally were overwhelmed by truths that didn’t fit into the Republican/conservative picture, and were forced to switch sides to a model of the universe that works much better.  But again, this part got really complicated and speculative, and so I just quit writing.  So I’ll just end it now.

Phoning it In

I’m going to rest on my laurels this time around and write nothing more than this.

WTF?!? of the Week

And for our WTF?!? of the Week, we have this story from the AP regarding House committee name changes that the Democrats have made with their new session.  These changes were to undo changes that Republicans made when they swept into office in 1994.  Here are the changes made by the Republicans in ’94:

The Committee of Education and Labor became the Committee of Education and the Workforce.

The House Natural Resources Committee (which had been the Committee on Public Lands until 1993) became the House Resources Committee.

The Foreign Affairs Committee became the International Relations Committee.

The Committee on Science, Space, and Technology became The Science Committee.

Government Reform and Oversight Committee became the Government Reform Committee.

What the fuck is the matter with these people?  I mean, really.  This stuff is just blatantly stupid.  And why the hell hadn’t I heard about this sooner?  Because this stuff is so obvious.  It’s like they’re telegraphing what jerks they are and they just don’t care.  Like take that last one.  In 1999, they decided to drop the Oversight function from their committee.  No oversight, just government reform.  And by government reform, I’m sure they meant making it more to their liking.  Is there any other way of reading that?  I don’t think so.  They’re just telling us that they don’t give a damn and they don’t give a damn who knows it.

Or the change from Foreign Affairs to…International Relations??  That’s just stupid.  Is it because some dipshit Republican on the committee didn’t like the idea of being associated with an affair?  Or is it just that they hated being associated with foreigners?  Or both??  If taken literally, it’s like we’re no longer supposed to care about the affairs of other nations, but rather solely concern ourselves with our relation to them.  Am I wrong?

And I can see dropping the Space function, assuming they’re not doing that anymore; but why drop the Technology part?  They did it in 1995, and technology totally boomed during that time.  Who knows?  Maybe getting the Republicans’ filthy hands off of it really paid off.

Sure, sure.  Maybe there’s some good reason why they did all this.  And it’s quite possible that everyone in the world knows about those reasons far better than I can ever understand.  I don’t care.  I just needed a quickie blog post and this one just wrote itself.  Yet still, I’m outraged.  So I call this a good post.  I got to call them dipshits and jerks, and isn’t that really what it’s all about?  I think so.

I'm a General

Hey folks, guess what!  Bush just made me one of his generals in Iraq!!  It’s true.  I was having a phone conversation with my brother about Iraq and being all sarcastic about how I think we should stay in Iraq until every last dirtbag was hanging from every last lamppost, and suddenly Bush cuts in and asks me if I’d like to be one of his new generals.  He said he liked my style and how America needed more guys like me.  I explained to him that I had absolutely no military training whatsoever and was being sarcastic, and he said that he didn’t know what that meant, but that his records showed that I had once played Ghost Recon on the PS2 and that was more experience than he ever had and he was fricking Commander-in-Chief.  I couldn’t disagree with him there, so it looks like I’m off to the Green Zone.  Wish me luck!  I think I can win this sucker.


Update: Sorry folks, I blew it.  Turns out that Bush just read this post and had someone explain to him what sarcastic meant, and now I’m in Gitmo.  Damn.  So close.  Sure not a lot of leeway in this guy’s thinking anymore.  Oh well, it’s time for my morning enema and then it’s off to the rack.  This place really is like a health spa.  Unfortunately, they only have dial-up.  Talk about torture…

Second Update: Well that’s over and I’m now back home.  I just confessed to absolutely everything, including my Iranian plot to blow up America using American Flags dipped in Osama’s explosive urine, and they let me go.  Cheney said it was the best confession he had ever heard, and he’s heard a lot of them.  Looks like those three years of Junior High victimization finally paid off.  I knew there was some reason we were subjected to that crap.  So I’m back, and just in time for the weekend.  And my Whitehouse contacts now tell me that Bush is seriously considering me to head-up his new Citizen’s Army division in Iran.  Excellent.  With any luck, they’ll be getting us all Ghost Recon II for training purposes.  I can’t wait!

I Won Again!!

Holy shit!  Just won the latest Carnival of the Liberals.  Not that that was any surprise, but I just like starting posts with exclamations.  And if you’re feeling charitable, you can go ahead and read some of the other winning posts.  But remember, mine was the TOP winner.  You can tell.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Via Anonymous Liberal (guesting for Greenwald), I read this quote from “Pundit Superstar” Bill Kristol, writing shortly before Bush’s war began:
It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain.

And I just wanted to mention that these are two things that conservatives never got right.  

First off, Respect and Fear are two entirely separate things, and are often mutually exclusive.  Fear is only required when respect isn’t there.  And the feeling people have towards those they fear isn’t respect, but resentment.  They might follow your orders, but they’ll resent every moment of it, and will be thinking of revenge the entire time.  Only a fool wants to be feared.  Even dictators like Saddam and Castro relied heavily on building goodwill with loyal followers, and can’t rule solely with an iron fist.  Fear is the last resort and won’t be effective if used too often.  

And if the people you want to scare aren’t actually under your control (North Korea, Iran, etc), then it is in their best interests to actively fight against you.  And conservatives know that.  If a bully tries to scare you, it’s almost always in your best interest to fight back.  Submission is almost never an option.  So why do conservatives seem so surprised when these rogue nations act exactly like anyone would act when threatened?  Particularly as the key lesson in Iraq was that the Bushies were going to get you, even if you weren’t doing anything wrong.  Just like what any dumb bully does.  So these rogue leaders would be fools to submit to our demands.

And the other issue they get wrong is sensitivity.  Conservatives often mocked Clinton for feeling people’s pain and still harp against “political correctness”.  And that’s just stupid and conservatives should know that more than anybody.  They’re the great victims of the world and cry in bitter agony every time someone slights them in the smallest way.  Because it’s not really about feeling “pain”.  It’s about respect.  Showing respect for other people.  That’s what we expect from everyone and what everyone expects from us.  And there’s no better way to lose someone’s respect than by showing them that you don’t respect them at all.  Even the most respected celebrity or politician can totally blow it by being rude to people (Macaca, anyone).

I guess the real problem is that Republicans and conservatives are exclusivists who think that only the “right” people deserve to be treated with respect.  It’s not enough that they don’t treat the “other” people with respect; they don’t respect people who pay respect to the wrong people either.  Only their team is owed proper respect, and within that team, the higher-ups clearly deserve more respect than the lower-downs.  And it continues that way until we finally get to the top of that sadomasochistic pyramid and see a frightened, lonely old man with a very large bank account, cackling to a joke that he can’t explain to anyone else.

And so Clinton and the Democrats think that everyone is worthy of respect.  What could be so wrong about that?  Nothing, of course.  But the Republicans got a nice sounding spinline against Clinton and were still repeating it years after he left office.  And it wasn’t even a good line.  Because it doesn’t take much to realize that Clinton looked good by showing empathy for people.  The only people it really hounded were the conservatives, because it went against their better judgment.  They’re authoritarians, and it offends them to think anyone would need to pay respect to black people, or Hispanics, or Muslims, or Iraqis.  To conservatives, those people are dogs who only respond appropriately to a kick in the ass and a gun to the head.

Needless to say, America would have done a lot better in Iraq, had we been more worried about showing our respect towards the Iraqi people than in insisting that they show their respect for us.  We had the guns, we were the invaders, the least we could have done was to show a little respect.  But no.  This wasn’t about winning in Iraq.  This was about being a badass.  Showing the world how tough the wimpass neo-cons really were.  Bill Kristol wants respect, but the most he can ever hope for is fear.  And the longer they fear us in Iraq, the worse things will continue to be for us.

RIP Turkey Blog

Much unreported in the liberal media, the frozen turkey from the frozen turkey blog has now been cooked and eaten. The nation can now relax.


Update: Sorry, linked to the wrong post. Been fixed.

Obsession for Researchers

What the hell is the matter with people?  This time: Researchers.  I just read an article about a study which showed that girls who read magazine articles about weightloss were more likely to go to extreme measures to lose weight.  And for these researchers, that showed that these magazines cause these problems.  

As it said:
Teenage girls who frequently read magazine articles about dieting were more likely five years later to practice extreme weight-loss measures such as vomiting than girls who never read such articles, the University of Minnesota study found.

What the fuck?  That’s just stupid.  Sure, it’s possible.  But more likely, girls who are obsessed with their weight are more likely to read those magazines, as well as being more likely to take extreme measures to lose weight.  That just makes sense.  A real no-brainer.

Yet that idea isn’t even mentioned in the article.  The closest they come is when they write:
In the new study, it was unclear whether it was the diet articles themselves or accompanying photographs of thin models that made a difference.

Or maybe it’s that people who are obsessed with something are more likely to learn more about it and do stupid stuff related to that obsession.  Duh.  

Oh, and then there was this little piece of idiocy:
"The articles may be offering advice such as cutting out trans fats and soda, and those are good ideas for everybody," said Alison Field of Harvard Medical School, who has done similar research but wasn't involved in the new study. "But the underlying messages these articles send are 'You should be concerned about your weight and you should be doing something.'"

Oh no.  How dare anyone send a message that people should be concerned with their weight and actually DO something about it?  What kind of fool would do such a thing?  Oh, well, except for almost the entire fucking medical community.  But besides them, nobody would suggest that people should be concerned with their weight.  You can only get that kind of advice from magazines.  Schmucks.

Rumors

I really can’t get into any details right now, but I just thought I’d put a monkey wrench into the rumor mill before it got started by stating unequivocally that I had no foreknowledge of Saddam’s faked execution and am not harboring him at this time.  Any other questions will have to be directed to my attorney.  Oh, and I’m not harboring Ken Lay right now either.  So don’t even think about asking.  I’ll just continue to deny it.


UPDATE: A few of the sentences above were no longer operative as of the time I originally published this item, though I am not currently at liberty to say which sentences they were.  Needless to say, I’ll continue to deny everything.  I hope you understand.