Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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Bush Inc. has scheduled the latest GOP convention in history, in an attempt to capitalize on the sentiment surrounding the 9/11 anniversary (courtesy of the people who warned Democrats not to "play politics" with the attacks). But they may have been too clever by half.
The GOP's unusually late nominating convention -- it does not begin until Aug. 30 -- is the problem. Bush is not scheduled to accept his party's nomination until Sept. 2, 2004. That falls after the deadline for certifying presidential candidates not only in Alabama, but also in California, the District of Columbia and West Virginia. There are bills in the Alabama legislature to move its deadline from Aug. 31 to Sept. 5. But if, for some reason, they don't pass, the president would be forced to run there as a write-in candidate.
In other states, along with the District, the situation is a bit more murky. The D.C. City Council will need to change its Sept. 1 deadline to accommodate the convention, said Alice Miller, executive director of the Board of Elections and Ethics. She declined to speculate on what might happen if that deadline isn't changed. Cindy Smith, an elections official in West Virginia, can probably sympathize. Her state requires candidates to file by Aug. 31. Smith said she does not know of any effort to move that deadline -- and is unsure of what might happen if the president misses it.
I recall a certain 2000 Republican candidate being very, very insistent that the dates in election laws were sacrosanct and immutable. If the Democrat-controlled assemblies in these three states and DC don't move their certification dates to accomodate him, I'd be somewhat less than sympathetic and the administration would have no grounds to claim chicanery. Not that they wouldn't anyhow. "They refused to change the rules just for us, and we therefore suspect that they are French spies."
A few quick hits:
1. Scientists at Wake Forest University have bred a colony of cancer-resistent mice.
2. Intel has developed voice recognition software that reads lips, and they're open sourcing it.
3. Canada is considering adopting the Netherlands approach toward marijuana, allowing it to be sold in corner drugstores, and a couple in British Columbia "are the first federally licensed medical marijuana growers in Canada to have their crop officially certified 100 per cent organic." In a related story, apostropher begins examining Canadian immigration laws.
4. You may not think this is particularly good news, but since my eating schedule is often as erratic as my sleep schedule and I have some family history of diabetes, I find it exceptionally good news.
Dr. Mattson and his colleagues found mice that were fasted every other day but were allowed to eat unlimited amounts on intervening days had lower blood glucose and insulin levels than either a control group, which was allowed to feed freely, or a calorically restricted group, which was fed 30 percent fewer calories daily than the control group. Despite fasting, the meal-skipping mice tended to gorge when provided food so they did not eat fewer calories than the control group. This finding in mice suggests that meal-skipping improves glucose metabolism and may provide protection against diabetes, Dr. Mattson says.
In the same study, mice on these three diets were given a neurotoxin called kainate, which damages nerve cells in a brain region called the hippocampus that is critical for learning and memory. (In humans, nerve cells in the hippocampus are destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease). Dr. Mattson’s team found that nerve cells of the meal-skipping mice were more resistant to neurotoxin injury or death than nerve cells of the mice on either of the other diets.
Just when you thought you couldn't possibly take PETA any less seriously...
PETA offers Hamburg, PA $15,000 worth of veggie patties to change its name to Veggieburg.
A national animal rights group has offered Hamburg, New York officials $15,000 to change the town's name to Veggieburg.
"The town's name conjures up visions of unhealthy patties of ground-up dead cows," said Joe Haptas, spokesman of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), in a letter faxed Monday to Hamburg Supervisor Patrick Hoak. PETA offered to supply area schools with $15,000 worth of non-meat patties for the name change.
[...]
In 1996, PETA proposed that the Hudson Valley town of Fishkill change its centuries-old name to Fishsave, since the group believed the name conjured up violent imagery of dead fish. The town was named by Dutch settlers in the early 1600s. "Kill" is the Dutch word for "stream."
And in Utah, PETA says they intend to disrupt Saturday's March of Dimes fund-raising walk in Salt Lake City, claiming the birth-defects research charity pours millions of dollars into cruel experimentation involving laboratory animals."
And just for good measure, the president of PETA in her will donates her body to PETA, with a few stipulations.
The leader of a prominent U.S.-based animal rights group said she had drawn up a will directing that her flesh be barbecued and her skin used to make leather products in protest at man's ill-treatment of animals. [...] Newkirk also suggested her feet be removed and made into umbrella stands similar to those made from elephant feet that she had seen as a child. [...] In the document she also suggests her liver be vacuum-packed and sent to France to be used in a campaign to persuade shoppers not to buy foie gras, made from the livers of force-fed ducks and geese.
Ten years ago, I'd never seen an advocacy group do so much damage to the legitimacy of their own cause. Now, they do far less damage, but only because nobody even bothers to pay attention any longer. As veterinarian Baxter Black observes, "It's almost like PETA is being ignored. Like a baby in a crowded room that has soiled its diaper and is stinking up the room, but no one wants to change it."
Reaching heretofore unplumbed depths of shamelessness, Bush says, "Now, you hear talk about deficits, and I'm concerned about deficits, but this nation has got a deficit because we have been through a war."
Tweeeeeet. Time out. So far we have spent 20 billion dollars on the war and authorized roughly seventy billion more. The deficit is projected to be over 400 billion dollars this year. Completely eliminate every bit of money spent on invading Iraq, and we still have the biggest deficit in the history of the United States. We are in deficit because of Bush's war on sound budgetary principles, not his war on Iraq.
Bush said a $550 billion tax cut would create more than 1 million jobs by the end of 2004, compared with the 1.4 million jobs he contends would be created by the original $726 billion version.
Mm-hmm. Let's see, following the 1.7 trillion dollar tax cut, we had the first back-to-back years of job loss in 50 years and a 43% rise in the unemployment rate. But this time, he really, really promises it will work. Even taking his ridiculously Pollyannaish forecast at face value, a $550 billion dollar tax cut to create 1 million jobs means we'd be, in effect, spending $550,000 per job (more, really, since it's expanding the deficit and the associated interest we have to pay on it). Any company that spent over half a million dollars to create a single job would have the board of directors tarring and feathering the CEO.
And this huckster has a 70% approval rate? If there has ever been a more damning indictment of the American educational system, I can't name it.
I have a hunch that whoever wrote the headline Santorum: 'I have a problem with homosexual acts' at CNN had a good chuckle about it. But that isn't half as funny as the exchange at the end of the interview:
SANTORUM:In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality --
AP: I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out.
SANTORUM: And that's sort of where we are in today's world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn't have rights to limit individuals' wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire. And we're seeing it in our society.
AP: Sorry, I just never expected to talk about that when I came over here to interview you.
Heh heh heh. It gets funnier every time I read it. I want to see the film.
And speaking of dogs, this has got to be the single toughest dog on the planet Earth. Holy crap.
Well, I can't say that this is encouraging:
As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq's future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites' organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.
The burst of Shiite power -- as demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands who made a long-banned pilgrimage to the holy city of Karbala yesterday -- has U.S. officials looking for allies in the struggle to fill the power vacuum left by the downfall of Saddam Hussein.
As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.
Wait, wasn't this supposed to be part of the War on Terror, where the US was going to confront radical Islam directly? And yet officials "paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics" when planning for a post-Saddam Iraq? Are you kidding me? Apparently, they didn't pay much attention to the logistics of finding WMDs either.
Look, you'll get no argument from me that Saddam was (is?) a bad, bad man that ran a brutal and ugly regime, but let's be honest: the Middle East is packed full of brutal regimes, and that has never been our criterion for which ones we befriend (see the Shah, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc.). However, it does not necessarily follow that Iraq will be better off without him in the long run, no matter what. This has been taken as an article of faith by both the pro- and anti-war contingents, but it is by no means a sure thing. Which is better: an Iraqi Ba'ath government or an Iraqi Taliban-style government?
Yes, I know those are not the only possible outcomes. There's also Chalabi's vision of a secular democracy, but secular and democracy seem to be in open conflict with one another for the time being. Regardless, we have now crashed our way through the walls of one of the biggest hornet's nest in the world and now find ourselves responsible for all the hornets, many of whom harbor more than a little antagonism towards us. I suspect as we settle into ruling Iraq, we will discover that, in trying to keep a lid on an angry, divided, decidedly-foreign-to-us country, Saddam-style repression has a certain logic to it.
The Road to Surfdom has a few further pertinent thoughts on our "liberation" of Iraq:
If you tell someone that you are liberating them, don't be surprised if they take you seriously and demand the right to, say, choose their own system of government.
If you then, having proclaimed that you were liberating them, turn around and say that you don't like the system of government they have chosen and that you think they shouldn't have that system of government and that you will not accept that system of government and that they should have another system of government altogether, then don't be surprised if people call your bluff and call you a hypocrite, because that's exactly what you are.
I'd take it one step further and say don't be surprised when they start throwing bombs at you. Are we any safer as a result of having ousted Saddam? Not by a long shot.
Remember Bernhard Goetz? The fellow who shot the four kids in the NY subway about twenty years ago? I can't say that I've kept up with him much (or any) since then, but he's gearing up for a run for mayor of NYC in 2005.
He's 55 now, still single, still ghostly pale and thin. He's still avidly pro-vegetarian and anti-circumcision. He'd probably be happy to spend his days alone in his apartment, selling electronics on the Internet and rescuing injured squirrels from Union Square Park, then nursing his wild roommates back to health by hand. But with the city again in crisis, Bernie thinks he has some answers.
The article cites Goetz's website as bernie4mayor.com, though it is actually bernieformayor.com. The platform doesn't make him sound much odder than your garden variety libertarian, but then you see pictures of him like this:
Now that's gravitas.
Well, this is certainly good news. Songtao Shi, a pediatric dentist at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, has been able to isolate differentiable stem cells from baby teeth. They aren't as flexible as embryonic stem cells, but the NIH team has been able to grow neural cells from the tooth cells.
To isolate the stem cells, Shi extracted the pulp and cultured the cells for several days, then tested the survivors for markers of stem cell activity. About 12 to 20 cells from a typical incisor tooth turn out to be stem cells.
By culturing the cells in various growth factors, Shi could differentiate the cells into tooth-forming cells, fat cells or neural cells. The differentiated cells survived when implanted under the skin and in the brain of immuno-compromised mice.
How in the hell did I miss this story?
The Moroccan government, according to the Rabat weekly al-Ubsu' al-Siyass, has offered US troops in Iraq "2,000 monkeys trained in detonating landmines" to assist the war effort. Some of the monkeys, it suggested, would come from Morocco's Atlas mountains, while others would be imported. The publication quoted a well-placed source as saying this was "not a scientific illusion but a well-known military tactic."
Trained in detonating landmines? Of what would that training consist? Pumping them full of Mountain Dew then letting them free to run around a field? "Now pay attention, monkey cadets, because Bonzo's only going to get to demonstrate this once..."
I've been unable to confirm whether this story is true, but I'm glad I came across it all the same. I sorely needed the laugh on a long, long Monday...
I recently googled "apostropher" and "posted" to see how many of my comments left on other blogs would pop up (answer: only a few). I did come across one page that I figured was using "apostropher" as the French verb rather than as a reference to me. Having taken six years of Spanish and no French, I ran it through babelfish to try to get an idea of what it said.
"Dr. W I am to you very well. Although I would not be Abracadabra and that it would never have come to me to mind to apostrophize Voyer with this kind of questions, since I am refractory with the anti-infinitiste hobby-horse, I recognize however that the blow of the subtitles, the dates and the indirect answer would not have rained me too much. But, good one will not make a cheese of it!"
Clearly.
"And that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the scriptures. And that verily He didst see his shadow and thereupon followed yet six more weeks of winter."
I find it odd that India's national newspaper, The Hindu, is reprinting the Easter story in their Young Life section. I don't remember ever seeing stories about the Diwali Festival in the the local papers here.
Of course, the holidays have some very different trappings from country to country. David Sedaris riffed on Christmas in the Netherlands where Saint Nick travels with six to eight black men that put bad children in a sack and pretend to kick them, though his discussion of the international oddities surrounding Easter, "Jesus Shaves," is for my money one of the funniest works he has penned.
Despite her having grown up in a Muslim country, it seemed she might have heard it mentioned once or twice, but no. "I mean it," she said. "I have no idea what you people are talking about."
The teacher then called upon the rest of us to explain.
The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability. "It is," said one, "a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and . . . oh, shit."
She faltered, and her fellow countryman came to her aid.
"He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two . . . morsels of . . . lumber."
The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.
"He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father."
In the Philippines, however, Easter is one friggin' hardcore holiday, and don't you wussy first-world Christians forget it. Ow ow ow ow ow. Not exactly Huggy Jesus, is it? I'll take the dyed eggs and chocolate rabbits, if it's all the same to you, thanks.
The Greek Orthodox Easter falls on an altogether different date than most of the rest of Christendom (I spent 7-1/2 years of the '90's married into a Greek Orthodox family). The method for calculating the date of Greek Easter is described here, which helps illuminate why the word "byzantine" has come to its current meaning of "convoluted."
And as more of an aside than anything else, my all-time favorite overeducated-geek/heretic joke: What does the H stand for in Jesus H. Christ? Haploid.
UPDATE (9:20 pm): I forgot the link to the Hindu article.
Noah Schactman's always interesting DefenseTech links to this Wired article about the various projects that comprise the Pentagon's plans for network-centric warfare.
Department of Defense futurists call it network-centric warfare. Other military strategists simply refer to it as the digital war. The first Gulf War was analog, they say. This one was digital.
Digital it may have been -- using real-time video images to target missiles in flight, wireless PDAs to connect with stateside medical records from the battlefield, and virtual-reality simulations to provide just-in-time delivery of material to front-line troops. But the nascent version of network-centric warfare waged in Iraq was but a pixilated, low-res harbinger of computer combat to come.
This is probably not what George and Dick had in mind.
Nearly 100 Islamic clerics have affirmed an emerging fundamentalist, anti-American position for Shiite Muslims in the capital, asserting authority over the country's Shiite community, whose governance is among the most pressing issues in the new Iraq.
[...]
"We are all against the coalition because they are infidels," said Sheik Abbas al-Zubaidi, one of the Shiite clerics who have taken control of several Baghdad hospitals. "We are demanding an Islamic state."
"We will have an Islamic state here that mainly orders good and prevents evil," Mr. Zubaidi said. He added in the state he envisions, "Televisions are not allowed, dominoes are not allowed, women wearing makeup are not allowed, dubbed foreign films are not allowed. It will be a state whose laws are written in the Koran"
Gee, sounds like . . . Afghanistan, 'bout a year and a half ago. Zubaida has proclaimed himself mayor of Baghdad which is bad enough, but then I stop and think: dominoes? Dominoes make the top three?
By this morning, at least 31 Iraqis were dead and more than 150 wounded in clashes, including 17 believed to have been killed by American marines in disputed shootings. Looters had destroyed the city's most treasured buildings. American soldiers had been attacked, and one had been wounded.
In the midst of the vacuum, new leaders emerged, and mosques became the center of relief efforts. There is still gratitude toward America here, but the events of the last week have fed deep suspicions of the United States.
The problems all reflect a severe shortage of Americans troops on that Friday, the presence of suspected fedayeen fighters and an aggressive approach taken by the marines to stabilize the city.
"We must be united and support each other against the Anglo-American invasion," said Sheik Ibrahim al-Namaa, a cleric now seen as a rising leader in Mosul. "We must try to put an end to this aggression."
"This is not only my opinion," he said. "This is the opinion of all the people in Mosul."
How American forces came to be seen as aggressors and not liberators is a tale of bad luck, miscues and the web of Mosul's political and ethnic rivalries, American military officials said.
As Iraq teeters into the post-Saddam Hussein era, a lack of security, water, and electricity, as well as shattered local governments and police, are tearing apart the nation's already weak medical system.
Sparse hospital staffs are inundated by a growing number of victims of crimes and road accidents due to the absence of police patrols. The doctors who haven't fled have not been paid in two months.
Hospital wards have become disease magnets because there's no water to clean them. Surgeries cannot be performed because there's spotty or no electricity to run medical equipment. Surgeons cannot even wash their hands before and after an operation.
The spiraling medical system has become a lightning rod for anti-American anger at a time when the United States is trying to create a stable post-war administration.
"The Americans take our money, they take our oil," said Dr. Nagham Saeed, 26, as she treated patients at Basra General Hospital. "And they give Iraqis small biscuits and a bottle of water. And then they go on television and act like they're helping us."
But it will all be better soon now that Pizza Hut and Burger King have finally set up their first franchises in Iraq.
Over at the Whiskey Bar, Billmon has a brief but fascinating social history of the Scotch-Irish settlers, with King James I as the 17th century Ariel Sharon and Ulster as the West Bank. When James turned on his settlers and drove them in huge numbers to the American colonies, the piece argues, he created today's "militaristic, xenophobic, and paranoid" Republican core constituency. Check it out.
Since the Mighty Wurlitzer has begun cranking up about their next "new Hitlers," Todd Morman over at Monkeytime is dropping some badly needed context and background about Syria and Hezbollah.
And since I don't link to Todd nearly enough, you should also follow his links about our continued use of depleted uranium munitions, which look increasingly responsible for Gulf War Syndrome, not just in our troops, but in their children as well. Our soldiers there now have already started getting sick. Apparently "supporting our troops" includes marching them into a toxic wasteland to set up camp, then cutting their medical benefits. If our pre-emptive war doesn't qualify as a war crime, our poisoning of the Iraqi land and people certainly should.
Now that we are frantically combing Iraq to find those dreaded chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, a little light has been shed on one nagging question. Given all the intelligence the administration claimed they had regarding these weapons, many wondered why they didn't share it with the UN inspectors while they were here. Most assumed it was because if the inspectors actually found anything, it would prove the inspections were effective and would blunt Bush's drive toward invasion. But now, it is pretty clear why they didn't share their intelligence: they didn't have any. None. Nada. Just like the vaunted Saddam-al-Qaeda link, there isn't any "there" there.
Now, I believe fully that they thought the weapons were there, but all the satellite photos and secrets they couldn't share to protect their sources have turned out to be pure bullsh*t. Even if the weapons are there, we don't have the first idea where they are, despite Rumsfeld's claim that we knew they were "east, west, south, and north" of Baghdad and Tikrit. I'm amazed that Gore somehow got tagged as "the liar" in the 2000 race. Bush and his minions are mendacious to a level heretofore unseen in American politics outside of Lyndon LaRouche. Bush stated during his "48 hour" ultimatum that "[i]ntelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Atrios muses that it could be true depending on your definition of the words "intelligence," "gathered," "doubt," "possess," "conceal," "some," "most," "lethal," and "devised." Even the surrendered Iraqi scientists who headed the former programs, who now have no reason to lie about it, insist that the programs were dismantled already.
[Aside: Collegiate Times speculates that all the "missing" stocks that Bush listed during his State of the Union address could well have been the result of the producers having their thumbs on the scales in order to skim the profits. Feasible, but conjecture all the same.]
Colin Powell now has zero credibility in my eyes for taking part in this charade. He is either a rank liar or a dupe, and I don't think anybody believes he could be duped by the likes of Bush and Cheney. He was the one person in this administration who had any integrity to hold up and now I wouldn't vote for Powell for anything higher than a county school board. To have sacrificed the staggering amount of respect and honor he had from the American people for the likes of the current administration tells me one thing: both the man and his judgment are manifestly untrustworthy.
Feeling smart? Go wrap your head around Scientific American's feature story on parallel universes. And once you get all your brains up off the floor and stuffed back in your head, this is only a little less complicated: the Lincoln Plawg does a yeoman's job of sifting through the various Shi'a factions and splinter groups in the mix in Iraq. Part One and Part Two.
Sam Tanenhaus at Slate wistfully notes the passing of the 69-year-old journal Partisan Review and observes an irony no doubt missed by most.
Depending on your point of view, or Weltanschauung, as Partisan Review contributors (and readers) used to say, it is either a supreme irony or a hilarious coincidence that the greatest of all Trotskyist publications should have announced its demise at the very moment that a belated species of Trotskyism has at last established itself in the White House.
The connection is not as tenuous as you might think. A number of commentators - Ian Buruma for one, Michael Lind for another - have recently observed that the architects of the Iraq war, and several of its most articulate supporters, seem transfixed by Trotsky's idea of a "permanent revolution," orchestrated on a very large scale. Yesterday it was decadent capitalist democracies that looked on the brink of transformation. Today it is the billion people held captive by "fascist" tyrants in the Middle East. In both instances the agent of change is an idea - the idea of oppositionism.
They do have a point.
Robert Fisk's latest dispatch from Iraq paints a frightening picture of exactly how we are losing the "hearts and minds" battle in Iraq. Nobody there could fail to notice that the American troops have allowed almost every single government building to burn, except the Ministry of Oil and the Ministry of the Interior, both of which have heavy military presences inside and out. And you could hardly blame Iraqis for suspecting not just American non-chalance but outright complicity in the mounting destruction.
Because there is also something dangerous - and deeply disturbing - about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the great libraries and state archives. For they are not looters. The looters come first. The arsonists turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses. I followed one after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and it sped out of town.
The official US line on all this is that the looting is revenge - an explanation that is growing very thin - and that the fires are started by "remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no doubt, who feature in the marines' curfew orders. But people in Baghdad don't believe Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires. And neither do I.
The looters make money from their rampages but the arsonists have to be paid. The passengers in those buses are clearly being directed to their targets. If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn't start the fires. The moment he disappeared, they would have pocketed the money and forgotten the whole project.
It's worth repeating the question he poses toward the end: "In whose interest is it to destroy the entire physical infrastructure of the state, with its cultural heritage?" Nobody's. Unless you're a superpower shedding jobs and sliding back into recession. In that case, you have the opportunity give out many billions of dollars of building contracts to American conglomerates without any budget worries, because you're going to use the occupied country's oil profits to pay them.
The military-industrial complex wins again.
The late Herve Villechaize asks in song, "Why Do People Have to Fight?" (480K mp3)
Neal Pollack answers, "Because we've all gone insane."
UPDATE (4/21/03, 12:16pm): I see that I am being accused of stealing the bandwidth of the site that hosts the Herve song, which was certainly not my intention. Click http://www.aprilwinchell.com/multimedia/ and it's the fifth from the bottom under "TV Stars Who Insist on Singing." Plenty of other stuff there for your amusement as well. Mea culpa, Ms. Winchell.
Payback's a bitch (link via Daily Kos).
Sharon Bush, the estranged wife of President George W. Bush's younger brother Neil, is planning to write a tell-all book about her two decades with the Bush family, The Observer has learned.
[..]
In her book, Ms. Bush wants to detail her disillusionment with the family. According to her associates, she has grown despondent about her treatment at the hands of the Bushes. She said family members have turned their backs on her ever since last year, when she learned that her husband wanted to end their marriage after carrying on an extramarital affair with one of Barbara Bush's former assistants.
But her disappointment with the family is only one of many subjects she wants to address, those close to her say. In her book, she has told associates, she hopes to show that the family has relentlessly managed its public image to a far greater extent than previously known.
Live by the yellow journalism, die by the yellow journalism. Prepare for the demonization of Sharon Bush. The same Limbaugh types who swallowed any crazy story finanaced by the Arkansas Project will howl the loudest about the injustice of it all. $50 says the War Room on this is already set up and running at full speed.
Neil Bush, you might recall, is the brother who got caught up in the Savings and Loan scandal, but managed to skip away unscathed. Small wonder with this family history that Bush is so enamored of Ahmed Chalabi. 20 bonus points were awarded to this paragraph's first link for detailing all the bizarre links between the Bushes and the Hinckley family, best known for the Reagan-shooting Hinckley.
With the snipe hunt for illegal weapons continuing, it is becoming clear that even if such weapons are found - and they very well may be - what is left of Iraq's stockpile is entirely too small to even be notable by Middle Eastern standards. The country's conventional offensive capability had been reduced to practically nothing since the last war. The links to terrorist groups were insignificant. The only rationale given that is left standing is the humanitarian one, and only the very most gullible Americans could believe that is Bush's motivation.
So what is left? The PNAC assertion of power theory has been bandied about plenty and is certainly driving the support of one administration faction. There actually are some hyper-idealists who believe we can remake the Middle East in our image. Coming from each perspective, both camps landed on invading Iraq as the best entry to their big picture.
And, of course, there is oil. The Bushies puff dismissively when this line of reasoning appears. "It would be easier just to buy it" is the common refrain, which is correct on its face. But the stakes are much larger than the oil. Iraq is a sprawling, inhospitable country with a large population, and distributing services is an enormous task. At this, Saddam's government was actually very efficient, but the entire network has now been demolished and must be rebuilt from the ground up. Taking bids, window three.
As Naomi Klein explains, Iraq is now wholly for sale as the neo-cons construct their ideological wonderland, "fully privatized, foreign-owned and open for business."
The $4.8 million management contract for the port in Umm Qasr has already gone to a US company, Stevedoring Services of America, and the airports are on the auction block. The US Agency for International Development has invited US multinationals to bid on everything from rebuilding roads and bridges to printing textbooks. Most of these contracts are for about a year, but some have options that extend up to four. How long before they meld into long-term contracts for privatized water services, transit systems, roads, schools and phones? When does reconstruction turn into privatization in disguise?
California Republican Congressman Darrel Issa has introduced a bill that would require the Defense Department to build a CDMA cell-phone system in postwar Iraq in order to benefit "US patent holders." As Farhad Manjoo noted in Salon, CDMA is the system used in the United States, not Europe, and was developed by Qualcomm, one of Issa's most generous donors.
And then there's oil. The Bush Administration knows it can't talk openly about selling off Iraq's oil resources to ExxonMobil and Shell. It leaves that to Fadhil Chalabi, a former Iraq petroleum ministry official. "We need to have a huge amount of money coming into the country," Chalabi says. "The only way is to partially privatize the industry."
[...]
Some argue that it's too simplistic to say this war is about oil. They're right. It's about oil, water, roads, trains, phones, ports and drugs. And if this process isn't halted, "free Iraq" will be the most sold country on earth.
It's no surprise that so many multinationals are lunging for Iraq's untapped market. It's not just that the reconstruction will be worth as much as $100 billion; it's also that "free trade" by less violent means hasn't been going that well lately. More and more developing countries are rejecting privatization, while the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Bush's top trade priority, is wildly unpopular across Latin America. World Trade Organization talks on intellectual property, agriculture and services have all bogged down amid accusations that America and Europe have yet to make good on past promises.
So what is a recessionary, growth-addicted superpower to do? How about upgrading Free Trade Lite, which wrestles market access through backroom bullying, to Free Trade Supercharged, which seizes new markets on the battlefields of pre-emptive wars? After all, negotiations with sovereign nations can be hard. Far easier to just tear up the country, occupy it, then rebuild it the way you want. Bush hasn't abandoned free trade, as some have claimed, he just has a new doctrine: "Bomb before you buy."
So no, it's not about oil, per se; oil is just a good-sized part of a much more grandiose equation. And by the way, we've discovered how to turn raw sewage and animal guts into oil. Any sort of garbage except nuclear waste, it seems. It's a fascinating read.
US troops open fire on crowd in Mosul, anti-American protests erupt elsewhere.
United States troops opened fire on a crowd hostile to the new pro-American governor in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul yesterday, killing at least 10 people and injuring as many as 100, witnesses and doctors said.
[...]
At the US-sponsored talks near the southern city of Nasiriyah, crowds earlier denounced the US presence in Iraq. Thousands protested that they did not need US help now Saddam Hussein had gone. "No to America. No to Saddam," chanted Iraqis from the Shia Muslim majority oppressed by Saddam. Arabic television networks said up to 20,000 people marched.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, hundreds of people chanting "our blood and our soul we give to Iraq" gathered outside the Palestine Hotel in protest against the US presence. The hotel now houses US military and reporters.
Get used to stories like this. As evidenced by the intra-Shi'a violence in Najaf, we have a pretty poor understanding of the various factions, rivalries, and grudges re-emerging without Saddam's regime repressing them. Not entirely unlike, oh, post-Tito Yugoslavia, except several times as byzantine. The one thing most of them do seem to agree on: they want to settle their scores without our interference. Even the Iraqi exiles in Iran who stormed and looted the Iraqi embassy in Tehran did so while chanting "Death to America."
I ask again: how can this situation in any way be considered a win for us?
The Collective Lounge (welcome to the blogroll and thank you for the link, whoever you are...), espousing the sort of academic socialism for which I have a long-running affection, links a couple of documents that help establish some context for our Middle East adventuring.
First up is the Project for the New American Century 2000 position paper on defense policy, just in case you are tempted to believe that this war is about WMDs, Ba'athist repression, terrorism, or anything other than a raw assertion of American power and hegemony. Notice how anxious they are to militarize space, a singularly awful idea that has been Rumsfeld's wet dream for some time.
And if you think that parts of this administration aren't actively looking for an excuse to roll tanks toward Damascus, remember that Doug Feith and Richard Perle carry huge weight in this administration a couple years after publishing this report for the Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies that recommends "rolling back" Syria. Convenient how they put it all down on paper, rendering conspiracy theories passé.
I also happened upon freelixir's excellent new blog Project for a New Century of Freedom after seeing posts in the comments over at Daily Kos. It has only been up for a month, but he (she? - whichever, "they" get permanent billing as well) has a mighty fine eye for more obscure yet vital links, including this post which points out that consistency is not one of this administration's strong suits. Longer, less link-oriented pieces can be found at freelixir's related site, Project Freedom. I wish somebody from the executive branch would answer even a few of the questions posed here.
Noah Schactman explains why over and over US military spokesmen announce they have found suspected chemical weapons, only to announce later that they have not: everything from brake fluid to pesticides will bring back a false positive at first. After the staggering string of discredited or falsified evidence about WMDs Washington threw around in the months leading up to the invasion, if any are actually found, most of the world will find it difficult not to believe that they weren't flown in on an American C-130. After all, I no longer believe a single word that comes out of this administration, and I'm rather more sympathetic than most of the Arab/Muslim world.
It must be distressing that the only caches they have found consist of defenses against chemical weapons - chem suits, antidotes, and the like - or crumbling facilities that clearly haven't been used in years. It is inconvenient that Gen. Hussein Kamel, the late Iraqi defector from whom America received most of its information on Saddam's WMD programs, claimed in 1995 that the vast majority of all of those systems had already been destroyed. So the banned weapons they have been able to positively identify so far have consisted of some al-Masoud missiles that were illegal because (by Iraqi admission) in 13 of 40 tests they went a few miles further than the allowed 93, and a drone made out of a go-cart engine, balsa wood and duct tape that has a range of five whole miles.
But never mind that. Rumsfeld assured us that we know where they are: "in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north of there." Talk about hedging your bets. Now we can't find any, but the new explanation is that the Syrians are hiding them for Iraq. Mm-hmm. Syria is not a signatory of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and hence there is nothing illegal about them deploying chemical weapons. And given that half the countries in the region, including Israel, have chem weapons programs, it becomes a little problematic for the United States, who has the largest and most advanced stockpiles of these weapons, to complain too bitterly about that. Tellingly, Syria has invited UN inspection teams to come in any time and promised unfettered access to any sites. Sneaky bastards.
Hey look! The guy in charge of harassing less-than-compliant press in Iraq is the same guy that was organizing the Republican riots in Miami-Dade during the election. He's taken to wearing desert camoflage to press gatherings, despite not being in the military, but a civilian political operative. Hmm, maybe every country doesn't need a Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf.
And Dyncorp, the private paramilitary that America hires to do some of its dirty work, is headed to Iraq. I guess the Bosnian child sex slaves had gotten dull and they wanted a bit more exotic locale. Somehow, I don't think using Dyncorp is going to improve our standing in the eyes of the locals. Anywhere. These guys should be serving time in Bosnian prisons.
The American Prospect's two lead stories at the moment aver that:
1. George Bush is the most dishonest president in history...
Other presidents have had problems with truth-telling. Lyndon Johnson was said, politely, to have suffered a "credibility gap" when it came to Vietnam. Richard Nixon, during Watergate, was reduced to protesting, "I am not a crook." Bill Clinton was relentlessly accused by both adversaries and allies of reversing solemn commitments, not to mention his sexual dissembling. But George W. Bush is in a class by himself when it comes to prevarication. It is no exaggeration to say that lying has become Bush's signature as president.
...and 2. He's the most dangerous president in history.
None of these presidents, great or awful, seems quite comparable to Bush the Younger. There is another, however, who comes to mind. He, too, had a relentlessly regional perspective, and a clear sense of estrangement from that part of America that did not support him. He was not much impressed with the claims of wage labor. His values were militaristic. He had dreams of building an empire at gunpoint. And he was willing to tear up the larger political order, which had worked reasonably well for about 60 years, to advance his factional cause. The American president -- though not of the United States -- whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis.
Yes, I know: Bush is no racist, and certainly no proponent of slavery. He is not grotesque; he is merely disgraceful. But, as with Davis, obtaining Bush's defeat is an urgent matter of national security -- and national honor.
It's almost as if they don't like him.
Jalal Ghazi examines the apparently widespread (outside the US) rumor that the fall of Baghdad, and indeed Iraq in general, was a "safqua," Arabic for a secret deal, brokered by Saudi Prince Abdullah between Washington and the Ba'athists. A conceivable scenario, but obviously only one of several. Still, it would explain why so much of the Iraqi military was neither captured nor killed, but essentially vanished.
Speaking of vanishing Iraqis, I am really going to miss Information Minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf. Every government should have a version of this guy. The laughs just don't come as easily without him around, so we'll make do with Ron Reagan Jr. waxing diplomatic that "my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush." Guess he'll be joining Helen Thomas, Canada, and the Dixie Chicks on the enemies list.
The Guardian claims to know that Bush has vetoed Pentagon plans for invading Syria. Perhaps, though there is certainly a contingent there that's just itching to do it, and vetoed for now is likely more correct. Especially since wedging several hundred thousand troops between Syria and Iran (possibly amid a chaotic Iraqi civil war) greatly increases the chances of unplanned conflicts with both. No matter which side eventually wins the argument, they likely want to stop for a while and reload. Keep your eyes on the Perpetual War Portfolio - now would be the time to start buying.
Events on the ground in Iraq are moving quickly. The war against the Hussein regime may be drawing to a close (though fighting continues and Tikrit and Mosul remain), but the war itself has only just begun. Cities are sliding into chaos and restoring order there will be rather more challenging than confronting a WWII-armed military. I'm relieved that the worst-case scenarios of taking Baghdad did not materialize, though, again, we may find controlling it and the various blood feuds in it almost as bad. Let's hope not.
However, the wisest course of action is always to hope for the best but plan for the worst. The cheering crowds currently on CNN are a welcome respite, but as Israeli peace activist (and former Knesset member and IDF soldier) Uri Avnery recalls, the Israelis saw the same thing when they invaded Lebanon.
On the fourth day of the 1982 Israeli attack on Lebanon, I crossed the border at a lonely spot near Metulla and looked for the front, which had already reached the outskirts of Sidon. I was driving my private car, accompanied by a woman photographer. We passed a dozen Shiite villages and were received everywhere with great joy. We extracted ourselves only with difficulty from hundreds of villagers, each one insisting that we have coffee at their home. On the previous days, they had showered the soldiers with rice.
A few months later I joined an army convoy going in the opposite direction, from Sidon to Metulla. The soldiers were now wearing bulletproof vests and helmets, many were on the verge of panic.
What had happened? The Shiites had received the Israeli soldiers as liberators. When they realized that they had come to stay as occupiers, they started to kill them.
When the Israeli troops entered Lebanon the Shiites were a down-trodden, powerless community, held in contempt by all the others. After a year of fighting the occupiers, they became a political and military power. The Shiite Hizbullah is the only military force in the Arab world that has beaten the mighty Israeli army.
Sharon is the real father of the Shiite force in Lebanon. Bush may well become the father of Shiite power in Iraq. The Shiites, 60% of the Iraqi population, have until now been down-trodden and powerless. When they realize that the Americans intend to stay, they will start a deadly guerilla campaign. Bush does not intend to leave Iraq, as Sharon did not intend to leave Lebanon.
Also relevant is this interview with Sayed Mohamed Baqer Al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Like Ayatollah al-Sistani (who continues to refuse to meet with the Americans), he has called for the Shi'a not to interfere with the coalition, which has been misinterpreted by many in the pro-war camp as assisting or acquiescing to them. But the two are not the same thing.
The US has turned its back on world public opinion, which was opposed to this war. This perception has affected the way people have reacted. The second reason has to do with people's strong sense of nationalism, the painful memories of the war of 1991 and the fear that anyone who rises up against the regime will be crushed. Worse still, today I received calls from inside Iraq and people were telling me that allied troops have been ordered to quell any attempts at protest or uprising by civilians. Some members of the Iraqi opposition were told this bluntly by the Americans. Allied troops are now targeting civilians and in Al-Emmara governorate in Besan district, which is located between Basra and Nassiriya, five civilian cars have been shot at and innocent people were killed by the allied troops. Now Iraqis are caught between Saddam Hussein's forces and the occupation forces. This is why I urge all Iraqis not to get involved in the fighting. They should not side, either with Saddam's forces, or with the US-led forces.
[...]
We understand this war to be about imposing US hegemony over Iraq. They have to resist this hegemony by all means possible. I have always told the people of Iraq to defend their land and be united in the face of this hegemony. If Americans are planning to stay in Iraq as an occupation force after Saddam, we have repeatedly stated that they will be faced by fierce armed resistance.
Any of the administration idealists who believe that Ahmed Chalabi (who has not lived in Iraq in over 40 years and has very close CIA ties) is going to be able to command any respect or loyalty from Joe Iraqi have an unpleasant surprise coming. He will be (rightly) viewed as a puppet of the US and Israel and it would have been in our best interests to keep him the hell away, but it's too late. I could list all the challenges we face in trying to administer a civil society in Iraq, but I would mostly be just repeating Steve Gilliard's excellent analyses over at dailykos.com, so go read them here and here.
And now, about the hiatus. I am flying to New Orleans early tomorrow morning for a long weekend of French Quarter debauchery with old friends, so probably will not have the chance to post here again until Sunday night at the earliest. By then, I'm sure the situation will have evolved massively in many different directions at once.
And just like that, www.iraqwar.ru announces they have ceased operations due to official pressure from above and the deteriorating information situation on the ground.
The Guardian points out what many savvy media consumers have already noticed: the most reliable information on the Iraq war often comes from the GRU, the espionage arm of the Russian military.
GRU is the most sophisticated agency of its kind in the world. And, since Glasnost, the most transparent. GRU has thousands of agents worldwide (especially in countries such as Iraq, where Russia has traditional trade links). Intelligence has always been a top priority for Ivan. The number of agents operated by the GRU during the Soviet era was six times the number of agents operated by the KGB.
Russia, superpower that it was, still has spy satellites, state-of-the-art interception technology and (unlike the CIA) men on the ground. The beauty of GRU is that it does not (like the CIA) report directly to the leadership but to the Russian ministry of defence. In its wisdom, it makes its analyses publicly available. These are digested as daily bulletins on www.iraqwar.ru.
The Russians have a contrarian view on the current conflict. What was it Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq war - "Ideally we'd like both sides to lose"? That's what the Kremlin thinks about Operation Free Iraq.
From its neutral stance, GRU offers detailed, top-grade, and wholly unspun analysis. The bulletins are in Russian (bilingualism is suddenly in demand on Wall Street). You can get English translations a day later on Venik's Aviation website (www.aeronautics.ru).
Excellent as Suzanne Goldenberg's dispatches and Dan Chung's pictures are, anyone who wants to know what is really going on at the gates of Baghdad should click on to Venik (it's a pseudonym) before reading their newspaper. Check it out. GRU has been absolutely right about every pendulum swing in the fighting. It gave, for example, the true picture of the ambiguous on-off "occupation" of Basra as it happened.
First quarter fundraising totals are in for the Democratic candidates, and it appears to be down to a three-way race between Kerry, Edwards, and Dean. I like Dean personally and am impressed that his fund-raising is coming primarily from small donors who are incredibly energized. However, I can't shake the feeling that he will get his ass handed to him in the South in a general election, and winning will take landing one mid-sized or two small southern states (e.g., West Virginia and Arkansas) in the blue column.
Edwards topped the fundraising list, which can't be overlooked. After all, had it not been for GWB's tidal wave of money, we'd have seen a Gore-McCain election in 2000. Kerry gets big momentum for actually returning fire on Tom DeLay. It's high time somebody on the Democratic side of the aisle realized that the rope-a-dope strategy involves more than absorbing head shots. I still believe that Bush is deeply vulnerable in 2004, despite the attempts to project an air of invincibility, especially if the economy continues to limp along for the next year-and-a-half. Kerry/Edwards would be a formidable ticket, and one that would finally punch back.
I do believe that Edwards makes a better VP than pres candidate, but oh how I would love to see him debate Bush. One of the most accomplished trial lawyers in the country versus a guy who can't pronounce "nuclear"? That would be a beating worthy of pay-for-view.
Just about the only thing weirder than a squid is a giant squid. What's weirder than a giant squid? A colossal squid.
"We know so little about the marine environment in general. If animals like this are turning up, what's going to be at 3,000-meters (10,000-foot) depth. We don't know," O'Shea said.
Maybe the elusive ginormous squid?
During the ramp-up for the war, I was amazed at the size and immediacy of the anti-war rallies. Millions of people moving in concert into the streets in cities all over the world in response to a war that had not yet been launched? This was historic, an event the world had never before witnessed. I am convinced that history books will look back at this war as a watershed event - not so much in geopolitical terms (though it may well be), but as the catalyst for the creation of a new socio-political model.
Information now moves more quickly than governments can control it. Effective organizing has become several orders of magnitude easier, no matter what the cause or belief. The internet has supplanted the cable news networks as the best source for information and opinion on the war. Weblogs disseminate alternative news, fact-check the governments and major media, and act as organizing hubs for protest and direct action. The public square, so central to democracy and so long missing, has been re-established as a sort of trans-democratic institution that increasingly ignores geopolitical boundaries.
A new international progressive movement is arising, with the ability to move hundreds of thousands of people into the streets at a few days' notice. And yet, it is largely leaderless and decentralized. It is a new political form that has evolved in response to the rapid centralization of power in the hands of governments and corporations, a pair whose interests are increasingly difficult to disentangle and at times directly antagonistic to those of their citizens and customers.
Jim Moore is a senior fellow at Harvard whose blog is batting around some very big ideas - including the notion that the biggest winner of the US-Iraq war is China - despite being a whopping four days old. He has an article up in which he labels this neo-populist phenomenon the second superpower:
The Internet and other interactive media continue to penetrate more and more deeply all world society, and provide a means for instantaneous personal dialogue and communication across the globe. The collective power of texting, blogging, instant messaging, and email across millions of actors cannot be overestimated. Like a mind constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons, the social movement is capable of astonishingly rapid and sometimes subtle community consciousness and action.
Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of “emergent democracy” that differs from the participative democracy of the US government. Where political participation in the United States is exercised mainly through rare exercises of voting, participation in the second superpower movement occurs continuously through participation in a variety of web-enabled initiatives. And where deliberation in the first superpower is done primarily by a few elected or appointed officials, deliberation in the second superpower is done by each individual—making sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions. Finally, where participation in democracy in the first superpower feels remote to most citizens, the emergent democracy of the second superpower is alive with touching and being touched by each other, as the community works to create wisdom and to take action.
How does the second superpower take action? Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq. By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war. And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally. The symbol of the first superpower is the eagle—an awesome predator that rules from the skies, preying on mice and small animals. Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants. Ants rule from below. And while I may be awed seeing eagles in flight, when ants invade my kitchen they command my attention.
In the same sense as the ants, the continual distributed action of the members of the second superpower can, I believe, be expected to eventually prevail. Distributed mass behavior, expressed in rallying, in voting, in picketing, in exposing corruption, and in purchases from particular companies, all have a profound effect on the nature of future society. More effect, I would argue, than the devastating but unsustainable effect of bombs and other forms of coercion.
Meanwhile, over in Tokyo, Joi Ito is examining the same notions. His essay "Emergent Democracy" looks in rather deeper detail at the formation of this movement and the political economy and theory of it. The essay defies easy summation, so you should take the time to read it (if that's your cup of tea). He concludes the piece by saying:
The world needs emergent democracy more than ever. Traditional forms of representative democracy are barely able to manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are very limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach consensus. Emergent democracy has the potential to solve many of the problems we face in the exceedingly complex world at both the national and global scale. The community of toolmakers should be encouraged to consider their possible positive effect on the democratic process as well as the risk of enabling emergent terrorism, mob rule and a surveillance society.
We must protect the ability of these tools to be available to the public by protecting the commons. We must open the spectrum and make it available to the people, while resisting increased control of intellectual property, and the implementation of architectures that are not inclusive and open. We must work to provide access to the Net for more people by making the tools and infrastructure cheaper and easier to use.
Finally, we must explore the way in which this new form of democratic dialog translates into action and how it interacts with the existing political system. We can bootstrap emergent democracy by using the tools to develop the tools and create concrete examples of emergent democracy. These examples can create the foundation for understanding how emergent democracy can be integrated into society generally.
I do agree that something enormous and profound is occurring. For the past couple of decades, activism has seemed to be on the wane due to a sense of fatalism and disempowerment among progressives. People's eyes are opening to a new set of power dynamics at work in the 21st century. It is nascent and still evolving, and the outcome is not yet determined, but I just can't see how this doesn't herald the beginning of a new polity.
I suspect there was a time when this didn't seem quite so odd:
usagreetings.com's Happy Ba'ath Revolution Day cards
The Jordan Times gives the rundown of April Fool's jokes from newspapers around the world (thanks, Steph). My favorite:
In South Africa the Afrikaans Beeld newspaper told its readers that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had accepted an offer of exile in the country in exchange for a top job running the country's oil industry.
As part of the deal, Saddam would be offered a luxury game farm near the smoggy oil city of Sasolburg, the daily wrote.
Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, has an op-ed in today's Guardian (which, I might add, has become one of my first stops every day) that starts out much like the rest of the literary world's denunciation of BushWarII, focusing particularly on the doublespeak and hypocrisy of the Anglo-American government positions. But then, surprisingly, she then embarks on an impassioned defense of the American and British people.
In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody - perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets the parameters for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking. There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all the crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd inability to separate governments from people: America is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the same carelessness with which they say, "All Muslims are terrorists"). Even in the grotesque universe of racist insult, the British make their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they're called. Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being "anti-American" and "anti-west", find myself in the extraordinary position of defending the people of America. And Britain.
Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would do well to remember the hundreds of thousands of American and British citizens who protested against their country's stockpile of nuclear weapons. And the thousands of American war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They should know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the US government and the "American way of life" comes from American citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of their prime minister comes from the British media. Finally they should remember that right now, hundreds of thousands of British and American citizens are on the streets protesting the war. The Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not people. More than one third of America's citizens have survived the relentless propaganda they've been subjected to, and many thousands are actively fighting their own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the US, that's as brave as any Iraqi fighting for his or her homeland.
While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen.
Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of American people on the streets of America's great cities - Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the American government, is American civil society. American citizens have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we not salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon that responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.
[...]
Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US president would have probably done the very same things, but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.
Take it to heart, folks. We still have the power. I'm sick to death of being ashamed of my government, of being represented to the rest of the world by an arrogant, dim-witted sociopath. It's easy to whip the American public into a frenzy but it is much, much harder to maintain it. Despite the Rovian plan to project an air of invincibility, Bush is deeply vulnerable. He's ours for the next year and a half, but he's also ours to kick to the curb next November, along with his shadowy cadre of Rasputins.
It will take a generation to repair the damage that this lunatic fringe has inflicted upon our economy, our alliances, and our moral standing in just 2-1/2 short years. Let's all roll up our sleeves and get the reconstruction started by delivering a Shock and Awe campaign on the Bushistas next November. And before the American left forms its predictable circular firing squad because each person's pet issue isn't front and center, remember: The Democrat you hate the very most would still be infinitely better than what we have now. Keep your eye on the ball.
-From Kynn, Major League Baseball has ordered the Toronto BlueJays to play God Bless America during the 7th inning stretch of their home opener, Sunday games, and holiday games. I think we can expect some heavy-duty booing, after which GWB will begin the planning to liberate Canada.
-RickR alerted me to this article about Kim Jong-il's odder paranoiac manifestations. Seems all triplets are being forcibly taken from their parents and raised in orphanages. Good to know that we're expending all our time, money, and effort to punish an already completely contained and neutered Saddam, instead of dealing with the far more dangerous and truly unpredictable North Koreans.
-German military historians go through the history of sieges of large cities (Baghdad would be the largest ever) and conclude that the the US is in deep sh*t.
-Digby on Newt Gingrich's continuing role in the Rumsfeldian military philosophy.
-David Neiwert on the increasingly thuggish tactics of the pro-war contingent.
-The Left Coaster gives the rundown on the Democratic candidates' recent news, whle Daily Kos notes that while most pundits are pooh-poohing John Edwards' chances, he has raised a fairly stunning amount of cash, and is almost certainly the front-runner in that department.
-Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg notes that the invasion of Iraq looks eerily similar to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, which occupies roughly the same spot in the Israeli consciousness that Vietnam does in ours.
-At Ethel the Blog, Steven Baum reports on the Bush Administration's plan to eliminate overtime pay for hundreds of thousands of workers.
-Skimble points out that GWB's re-election polling numbers - even with the war bounce - are still marginally worse than his daddy's numbers at the same point in his Iraqi adventure. Hope springs eternal.
For the month of March, apostropher registered 21,603 hits from 3,260 visits and logged page views from (in descending order by number of hits) Germany, the UK, Canada, New Zealand (Aotearoa), Australia, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Austria, Lithuania, Italy, Norway, Argentina, Brazil, Singapore, Hungary, Netherlands, France, Japan, and Portugal. Not bad for only its second full month in existence.
Just on the first day of April, page views were registered from UK, Australia, the Russian Federation, Germany, France, and Italy. Given that my technorati cosmos has never shown more than six inbound links at any given time, I'm impressed and curious. If you're here from outside the US (for that matter, outside of my circle of family and friends), would you hit the comments and tell me how you happened upon me?
Slacktivist noticed that we have assuaged their doubts, won their hearts and minds, and now we can proudly add the mighty Solomon Islands to our coalition of the willing. It's nice, but we might want to work on adding some countries that actually have a military. Forward march!