That thing you wanted, what was it? Oh yeah, information with which to make informed judgements about the world.

I know I'm a couple days behind the curve, and that noone actually reads this blog, but if you happen past here by mistake, on your way to the porno or your facebook page, stop and read this article by T.R. Reid in the Washington Post. He debunks the five most prevalent American myths about health care in other countries in three pages of lucid, matter-of-fact prose.

Reading it, one might be tempted to lose heart. After all, if the American People really are so wholly ignorant of the rest of the world and how they do shit there (even, and especially, shit they do better than we do, which is not only possible but, in many cases, actually the case), then we must truly be fucked and the Republic, god bless her, truly slipping down the slippery slope, past Empire and into a disgruntled senescence, like an Alzheimer's patient with a gun warning them damn liberals to keep their filthy government hands off his Medicare.

Or, on the flip side, you could take heart in the fact that our problems, in this case at least, are solvable. It's been done before. After all, when the mechanic opens the hood to fix your car, he doesn't have to go back and start from first principles. The shop manual has been written. The solution to the problem already exists.

And so it does in the case of health care reform. Sure, the crazies can come out and squawk all they want, and at the end of the day, the rest of us will scratch our heads and wonder how you get so goddamned stupid, but after that, when the squawkers have gone home to refresh the tinfoil and the grownups are left to roll up their sleeves and actually fix the problem (after all, most of the people who seem to think we don't have a problem, i.e. old white people, are on Medicare, so they already have single-payer, government run health insurance), all we have to do is study the health outcomes in other industrialized countries, find the ones we want to emulate, and then do what they did to make it happen, maybe with our own little twist thrown in to make it ours.

I'm not saying it'll be entirely simple and straightforward, but it's a solvable problem, which, if you have to have problems, are the best kind to have.

So chin up, everybody. Stiff upper lip and all that. The crazy always gets extra thick in the summertime. And if you're still feeling all pearl-clutchedy, then read this.

Is it wrong that I hope they will?

“This cannot pass,” the Minnesota Republican told a crowd at a Denver gathering sponsored by the Independence Institute. “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”
Michele Bachmann, today in Colorado

I hope that Michele Bachmann does join with a large coterie of like-minded individuals in slitting their wrists and mixing their blood. That way, they will share any communicable diseases any of them has, which, given the intelligence on display in that subset of the population, ought to include some doozies.

If nothing else, we can recognize them by the matching cold sores.

cafe bustelo, you are my friend.

Posted

The most important difference between America's Democratic left and Republican right is that the left has ideas and the right has discipline.
Robert Reich, in TPMcafe

Posted Without Comment

(h/t Balloon Juice)

dealing with jokers takes cards out of my deck

Today I received my new debit card. I have been waiting on it for more than a month.

As my mother lay dying in the hospital, back in late July, I was obliged to leave her side and take care of some business. I'd dropped everything to come here, and made it just in time, but I was flat on my ass broke and living off of my mother's bank account, which she didn't mind, being that money had become pretty unimportant to her, what with the cancer and all. I had Power of Attorney and all (hat tip to Mom for having her shit together), but we hadn't actually registered it with her bank, and it was going to expire when she did, anyway. When that happened, things were going to get complicated. So I had to take care of it before she died, or risk, being shut out from her checking account, which money I was planning on using to live on and to pay for her memorial service.

So, four days after we'd moved her into the hospice center, where she could be away from the loud noises and obnoxious staff on the regular floors of the hospital, I was obliged to run around talking with bankers and paralegals and so on, and ended up running to the hospital to get a note signed by the doctor that Mom was no longer able to make financial (or, indeed, any) decisions, so that I could get my Power of Attorney recognized by the bank and get the money out of her account so I could continue doing all the things that had to be done.

All well and good, and I made it happen. Problem was, my bank has no branches within twenty miles of Lake Worth. None. And I needed the money pretty much right away. So I decided to set up a checking account there at my Mom's bank, SunTrust. Everyone was very nice, and made all the appropriate noises and made things happen with relatively little hassle (it's amazing how nice people are to you when you tell them your mother is dying). I was able to withdraw the bulk of Mom's checking account, and deposit it into my new account. I ordered checks and a debit card, and got myself set up to do online banking. I got starter checks right away, and was told I'd get a debit card in five to seven business days.

Shortly thereafter, Mom died. Not long after that, I decided I needed to gtfo and I went back to Seattle for a couple weeks, assuming my new debit card would be waiting for me in the mailbox when I got back. I even got my uncle Mike's new wife Diane to check the mail for me a couple of times.

Suffice to say, upon my return I discovered that my debit card had not, in fact, been delivered. Which was not terribly convenient, as I was keeping a good-sized chunk of my living money in there. So I went to the branch and talked to the guy, who'd said that my first card was undeliverable for some reason and ordered me a new one, saying, again, that it would be here in five to seven business days.

Kendal came, and on the sixth business day we went over to the west coast so I could introduce her to some family and show her around New College. By the time we got back, it'd been two full weeks (and 9 business days) since I'd ordered the card. The card I needed, for all the things you need a debit card for. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the card was not in the mail. So I got on the phone.

The first option they offered me was to cancel the card that was presumably still in transit and order a new one, with the attendant five to seven business day waiting period. When I expressed my displeasure at the notion, I was informed that there was an option for expedited two-day shipping from FedEx, but that it would cost me $25.

I waited until I'd been passed up the chain to a 'specialist' before I blew my top. I'll spare you the details, and I did refrain from profanity (difficult though that was), but after I'd made clear my amazement at their incompetence and my willingness to take my business elsewhere, the line went very quiet for a minute (during which time I assume that someone up the chain from the 'specialist' hopped on the line, unheard by me, and authorized her to do the right thing), and the bank agreed to cancel the card in transit and order another, and to eat the expedited shipping cost. That was Thursday, and now, finally, I have received my debit card, so that I can actually spend the money I have deposited in their bank. Calloo callay.

Oh, and the extra hilarious part? The card they cancelled, the one that was already late when I called them and pitched my fit? Got here yesterday in the mail.

Fucking jokers.

posted without comment

The tragedy of American politics is that people who are shat upon too often aspire to get to a position where they can shit shit on others. People whose grandparents were called “micks” and “wops” are all too happy to call today’s immigrants “wetbacks”, people whose grandparents were poor white tenant farmers are all too happy to look down on people whose grandparents were poor black tenant farmers.
-DougJ at Balloon Juice

posted without comment

[Y]ou’re not considered serious on national security unless you bought the case for invading Iraq, even though the skeptics were completely right; you’re not considered a serious political commentator unless you dismissed all the things those reflexive anti-Bushists were saying, even though they all turn out to have been true; and you’re not considered serious about economic policy unless you dismissed warnings about a housing bubble and waved off worries about future crises.
Paul Krugman

posted without comment

Embedding the rendition and detainee program with Brennan in the White House would not have occurred to Terry Gilliam even with ether and a Samoan attorney.
-stiftung leo strauss

posted without comment

[...] your conviction that it just can't be so is not evidence that it isn't so.
-IOZ

random thoughts

it's not that people are dumb. some people are, dumb as a sack of hammers, in fact, but as long as they mean well they usually manage to get through life without hurting anybody too badly.

but people in general are not dumb. they understand basic rationality and the operations of logic and consequence. they might willfully avert their gaze and shut their hears to some things, but the basic machinery of thought and understanding are sound.

the problem is, is capitalism, in its endless obsession over the bottom line, operates at the lowest common denominator. and so, because some people are, in fact, dumb as a sack of hammers, then everybody has to get talked to like they are, and our public debate devolves into the sort of ridiculousness that happened at the health care town halls. that people on medicare would decry socialized medicine is beyond farce. you couldn't make this shit up.

then again, now that i think about it. maybe people are dumb. either way, i'm sure about one thing. when you let the loudest people dominate the debate, the ones who think that that's what debate is, a shouting match in which the winner is decided by volume rather than by who has the best arguments that most match up to the facts, what you get in the end is the worst possible outcome: a milquetoast middle ground that includes none of the good ideas of either party, but displeases both enough that they are satisfied that they gave it to the other guy as good as they got. which is great, if you're a football team, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter who made the highlight reel on sports center, but it matters very much whether or not, say, there is a public option for health insurance, which does all kinds of good things, and, with any luck, will do exactly as its most dedicated opponents fear: provide a benchmark of fairness against which a sector of the market that has no natural profit limitations will have to compete, which'll help economize the system, leading to better outcomes for all, except for the small coterie who presently derive outrageously outsized compensation and profits from the system's present arrangement.

Game, Set, and Match

Does Michelle Malkin Know About All This?

Think my favorite is Barack Obama pees in your gas tank.

Worth Keeping in Mind

...[M]ass, lower-class participants in revolution cannot turn discontent into effective political action without autonomous collective organization and resources to sustain their efforts. Moreover, the repressive state organizations of the prerevolutionary regime have to be weakened before mass revolutionary action can succeed, or even emerge. Indeed, historically, mass rebellious action has not be able, in itself, to overcome state repression.
Theda Skocpol, from Social Revolutions in the Modern World, quoted in the Duck of Minerva

Yeah, What He Said

Because if you get into the actual gory details of what went on in those years, there’s just no way you come out of that story not wanting to see every banker on Wall Street strung up by his testicles. The crimes of this era were monstrous thieveries, committed against ordinary people in a highly systematic and organized fashion with the aid and compliance of a bought-off government, and the only way you can not perceive what happened as a profound indictment of capitalism is if you blow off the specifics entirely and try to hide the details in vague, airy words like “irresponsibility” and “excesses.”

Because the specifics matter. It’s one thing to say that Citi wasted some of the money taxpayers sent its way via the bailout; it’s another thing to say Citi wasted some of the taxpayers’ money by upholstering the pillows on the private jet Sandy Weill took to Mexico over Christmas vacation with Hermes scarves. It’s one thing to say Wall Street bankers felt pressure to chase profits; it’s another thing to say they achieved those profits by systematically robbing a whole generation of pensioners and working-class homeowners, under the noses of the politicians they bought with tens of millions in campaign contributions.

Matt Taibbi, on Fareed Zakaria, in True/Slant

Exciting Stuff

All in all, with books by Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon, William Vollman, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Paul Auster, Pat Conroy, and Richard Russo still to come, it looks like a fine year for fans of fiction.
TBogg, at Firedoglake

A Very Good Point

Without the obedience of the security forces, the state collapses.
-Robert Farley, at Lawyers, Guns, and Money

Posted Without Comment, the Third

So to recap, we have “no horse in this race,” we should do nothing, we have to negotiate with whichever government emerges, and the victory of the reformers would change nothing about Iran’s nuclear program and “would not stop the country’s rivalry with the United States,” all of which “hard-core non-interventionists” have already been saying for days and days, but it is “naive” to say that an internal Iranian political dispute is really none of our business. Okay, then.
-Daniel Larison, at The American Conservative

Also Posted Without Comment

"The key to understanding Obama is that he is a hybrid of delicate, magic unicorn and ravenous zombie. He will frolic in the woodlands, spreading pixie dust and joy, until his hunger for human brains begins to rise..."
Christopher Orr, in the New Republic

Also Posted Without Comment

"The key to understanding Obama is that he is a hybrid of delicate, magic unicorn and ravenous zombie. He will frolic in the woodlands, spreading pixie dust and joy, until his hunger for human brains begins to rise..."
Christopher Orr, in the New Republic

Posted Without Comment

[T]he fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts.
-Paul Krugman, in today's NYT

Had to Pass This On

Chew Toy

According to every woman I've ever dated, and every dentist I've ever seen, I bite and grind my teeth in my sleep. Loudly. Hard. Like wake-the-girl-up hard. So I've taken, recently, after many years of encouragement to do so, to wearing a night-guard while I sleep, which I like to think of as my own personal chew toy. Sure, it makes me feel like an amateur boxer as I lay me down to sleep, but at least I know that my precious enamel will be safe from its own predations for those six or eight hours while I shuffle off to dream-land.

The only thing is, is I think that having the thing in my mouth makes me bite and chew more. I think. For instance, I woke up today, after a full night's sleep with the damned thing in, and my jaw's as sore as a toothless man's on Thanksgiving. I know I woke up, more than a couple of times, and was acutely conscious of the thing (although I am, slowly, getting used to it), and I think that a great many of my dreams were of an unsettling nature, but I can't figure out which way the arrow of causality is pointing. Do I sleep not so well because I've got this chewy piece of molded plastic in my mouth, or am I chewing more because I'm not sleeping well?

In case you're wondering, there isn't a point to this post. I just felt like writing about something besides why right wingers are jerks or why Barack Obama is starting to frighten me.

One of the Reasons John Rogers Kick Ass

is this.

A sample:

Not to belabor the point (too late), but two things in this world are generally, 99.9999% true:

1.) If you are unhappy with your life, it's not because a brown person made it that way.

2.) If you end any argument or statement with " ... is that racist of me to say?" -- the answer is always "yes."

Here's another:

-- There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Sometimes I wish he didn't have a day-job, so he could blog more.

A bit nitpickety, but

not sure I can let this one slide by.

For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding.
from President Obama's Cairo speech today

So, what was up with that whole War of Norther Aggression thing, then? Oh, right. I remember now. When governments and militaries engage in violence, it's called "force" and it's okay, cuz they're nation-states or something.

It's not that Obama is like Bush...

it's that Bush was really more like Obama.

Fundamentally, Obama's goal was to tell the Muslim world, "We respect and value you, your religion and your civilization, and only ask that you don't hate us and murder us in return." Bush tried to deliver the same message over and over again. The difference with Obama is that people might actually be willing to listen.
Rich Lowry, at the Corner

Guess that whole bombing the shit out of Iraq and then invading for no legitimate reason drowned out President Bush's message of peace somehow. Shame, that.

Missing the Point

George Will thinks people buy fluorescent light bulbs and Priuses because they feel guilty.

Dumbass.

It's not guilt that makes people buy green. It's the smug feeling of superiority you get. You'd think a smug, superior type like George Will would intuitively grasp something like that.

Ah well, I guess we're all blind when it comes to seeing ourselves.

Proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy

Not sure if you can read that or not, but the rainbow ends at the Beer Store.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Populist and dissident conservatives have raised objections for years, indeed decades, that the party has never governed as they would wish it to, but over time the label conservative, emptied of meaning as it has become, has increasingly become a more common label for reliable Republican voters to apply to themselves.
-Daniel Larison

Daniel Larison has a post up from a few days ago in which he explains at great length that the conservative movement that's taken over the Republican party is not actually conservative, at least not in the way that he means it when he says that he's conservative.

Pardon me while I indulge myself with a Nelson Muntz-type moment.

ha-Ha!

While I do feel bad for those five or ten genuine old-school conservatives left out there who want to know what happened to their political representation, along with the genuine, if largely mistaken, principles for which it, and they, stood, I would like to take this moment to remind them that they are at least in part responsible for the dissolution of their brand. While they had some good points, they lost the big argument in the universe of discourse (the one they were having with liberalism), and had to resort to pandering to the cornucopian vein of American crazy in order to win elections. That the nutjobs staged a coup and took the steering wheel was, if not inevitable, then at least a very real possibility that was more than obvious at the time.

And so now Larison, last scion of the house Burke and Oakeshott et al, finds himself standing outside looking in, echoing the form, and indeed the content, of those on the inside who're busy purging their house of people like him, all of them saying, in unison, that they are the true conservatives, and that once they are shut of the unbelievers, all good things will come.

Sorry, man. You guys made your deal with the devil. Now the ride's over, and the bill's come due. Good luck out there in the wilderness. I hope your principles are still magnetized enough to provide you with a compass.

North Korea's Nuclear Test

Any group or nation with sufficient funds to build the industrial capacity to create the necessary materials can build a nuclear weapon. The possession of such weapons isn't a guarantee of security, but it certainly makes invasion and occupation by a foreign power less likely. While America and its allies bicker about whether or not deterrence works, North Korea ably demonstrates that it most certainly does.

-IOZ

When George W. Bush made his famous Axis of Evil speech in the wake of 9/11, he singled out three nations, none of whom really had anything to do with one another, as the exemplars of America's enemies abroad. It was strange, even at the time, since neither Iraq, Iran, nor North Korea had had anything to do with the plot to hijack commercial aircraft and crash them into a couple symbolic and a couple strategic targets within the continental United States. That the plan for the attacks had originated in Afghanistan, among mujahideen that we'd been arming and funding for most of the Eighties and Nineties as a way of fighting a proxy war with our old sparring partner the Soviet Union, and had been planned and carried out mostly citizens of Saudi Arabia, our petroleum-spewing BFFs over there in the Muslim Holy Land, was seen as, frankly, a distraction from the real business at hand, whatever that was.

One suspects it had something to do with cheap oil, and securing ready supplies of same, but that is a matter for another time and another blog post. I mean, sure, we went to war in Afghanistan and all, but you could tell our hearts weren't really in it. Rumsfeld and Bush ran the Afghan conflict like Bill Clinton (or some other equally namby-pamby bleeding heart) would have, waging war through proxy forces and showing no stomach for American casualties, as evidenced by our still-unbelievable failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and the remains of the Afghan Taliban at Tora Bora.

No, we already knew who we wanted to go after. The list was already in place. And despite all claims to the contrary, we went after Iraq first because we thought it would be the easy one.

(It would have been, too, if only we hadn't so horribly bungled the aftermath of our wildly successful invasion. If we hadn't disbanded the Iraqi Army and basically told the Baathists that the game was over, things in Iraq would have gone much more smoothly. But again I digress).

People think Saddam Hussein was insane not to allow the inspectors in to confirm that he did not, in fact, harbor weapons of mass destruction, but what those people don't understand is that the perception that he might was the only real card he had to play. It's also evidence that the WMD argument for going to war was always a canard. If we'd thought Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction, by which I specifically mean nuclear weapons, we'd never have invaded in the first place, because of the possibility that they'd have been deployed against us, to catastrophic effect. Imagine, if you will, the effect on the American electorate's stomach for war if Saddam Hussein had dropped a nuclear bomb on the Kuwaiti border where our much-vaunted and indeed impressive military machine was massing forces for the invasion. Sure, we'd have nuked his ass back to the Stone Age, but the damage to our national pride and our belief in our military invincibility would have been game-changing. If we'd thought for a minute he had the bomb, we'd never have given him the chance to use it. There was just way too much to lose.

The lesson has not been lost on the Iranians, or the North Koreans. Which is why they're both trying so hard to develop at least the capability of producing nuclear weapons. It's the only demonstrable way to guarantee your national sovereignty against the predations of the American military. After all, we seem to have at least one war for every Presidential Administration, because our national culture demands that every President must carry out at least one military operation, if for no other reason than to prove he's willing to make the decision to do so.

And let's not forget that we did actually invade North Korea, and that the war there hasn't technically ended. We still have tens of thousands of troops stationed in the DMZ between North and South Korea. In fact, you could say that the sole basis for the North Korean state in its present form is in reaction to American aggression. If we weren't there, looming over the horizon like we are, do you really think a joker like Kim Jong Il could maintain a dictatorship in which a million people are sometimes allowed to starve in a given year? Even the Chinese and the Russians do business with us now, and have largely given over the whole Communism thing.

No, the reason North Korea has developed nuclear weapons is because it's the only sure hedge against an American invasion. Yes, there are other considerations. It can be used as leverage in negotiating trade agreements, and also demands that attention be paid to what would otherwise be an almost laughable tinpot dictatorship. After all, the North Koreans were at least willing to talk with us, back at the turn of the century, before we got all distracted and George W. and crew totally dropped the ball. And now we're in a much worse bargaining position than we were before. But at the end of the day, the reason North Korea (and Iran, for that matter) want to develop nuclear weapons is not for the waging of aggressive warfare, or to sell them to terrorists who would like to smuggle them into the United States and set them off, but because they know that the only sure guarantee against American adventurism is to join the nuclear club.

Dick Cheney

The bloviosphere is already awash with the Obama-Cheney National Security Smackdown, and I don't have much to add, but there is this one thing that's been bugging me these last few weeks, and it's something I haven't heard or seen anywhere else.

I don't remember any Senior Administration Official, from any Administration, ever, trying so publicly to undermine a President of the United States or his Administration in the way that Dick Cheney is currently doing with Barack Obama. Never mind the lack of respect for the President himself, or even the much-vaunted Office of the President, which Dick Cheney seemed to care so much about up until January 20th. The most egregious aspect of this behavior is the obvious lack of respect for the will and judgement of the American People.

On the one hand, we had Dick Cheney and what he believes is right, eight catastrophic years of it; on the other hand, we had Barack Obama, who talks to us like grownups and seems to believe that there is, in fact, an entire spectrum of color between black and white. We made our choice, and it was pretty clear that we not only positively chose Barack Obama, but that we soundly repudiated the ideas, beliefs, style, and indeed person of Dick Cheney, and I find it absolutely appalling that he will not take the hint and STFU.

Yes We Can

The administration took the same basic position as its predecessor but placed it in prettier wrapping.
[...]
President Obama has not changed much of substance from the late Bush practices, and the changes he has made, including changes in presentation, are designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run.
-Jack Goldsmith, The Cheney Fallacy in the New Republic

Jack Goldsmith is a law professor at Harvard, and was an Assistant Attorney General during the Bush Administration. He was also the guy in John Ashcroft's hospital room when Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales showed up to try and get Ashcroft's signature on the warrantless wiretapping memo.

In The Cheney Fallacy, he lays out eleven principles of the Bush era War on Terror, and then devotes a paragraph or two to how those principles, and the policies that flow from them, have evolved under the Obama Administration. The answer is not very much.

Aside from a rather tepid repudiation of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, the changes appear mostly to be rather superficial. Instead of altering the policies themselves, which is arguably what Barack Obama was elected to do, the Obama Administration has mostly just altered the way they are presented to the public. There's still warrantless wiretapping, we're still denying habeas corpus rights to the prisoners at Guantanamo (and afforing virtually no rights at all to the prisoners at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan), we're still killing fifty civilians for every Al Qaeda/Taliban leader we get with unmanned Predator drone attacks in the FATA in Pakistan, and we're still calling our conflict with several de- and semi-centralized non-state actors and terror networks a war, instead of a law enforcement action, thus triggering various commander-in-chief powers that Barack Obama, being only human, is apparently loath to give up.

And while the Bush Administration's various over-reaches and blunders were taken up and moderated, by Congress and the courts, during the last years of the Bush Presidency (the differences between 2002-3 and 2008-9 are significant, even if they don't go far enough for many, including this commenter), the case can be made, and Goldsmith makes it (unwittingly, perhaps, as he seems mostly to approve of the current state of play), that, so far at least, what Obama has done amounts, essentially, to putting lipstick on a pig.

Now, some of this stuff is not necessarily Obama's fault. The Bush Administration seems to have done its level best to tie Obama's hands, and many of the problems with the current state of play are the result of decisions made before Obama was elected President, decisions he might have made differently. I, for one, like to think that he would, partly for sentimental reasons, but mostly because I think they were the wrong decisions, from both a strategic and moral standpoint.

For those that take a Machiavellian view of the world, strategy and morality are separate spheres and, mostly, never the twain shall meet. Morality is lovely, no doubt, and most power players pay at least lip service to its virtue and desirability, but the world is a vicious and nasty place, filled with evil men who are willing to do anything to further their own interests, and we, powerful though we undoubtedly are, must bow to the realities we face in a Hobbesian state of nature and fight back with all means necessary. So, while we might, in a perfect world, extend civil rights to the 'enemy combatants' and other unfortunates sucked up in Af-Pak vacuum cleaner, and abstain from torturing them or extraordinarily rendering them to third countries that don't suffer the same (albeit shrinking) compunctions about torture that we do, or holding them indefinitely without charges while an ill-defined conflict with a nebulous, non-state network of enemies plays itself out, over the course of who knows how long, we do not, alas, live in a perfect world, and so, unfortunate though it may be, we must fight the enemy with all the means at our disposal.

Here's why this is wrong.

The real battlefield in this 'war' is the hearts and minds of world's peoples, most especially the world's Muslims. There are two sides, two alternatives for them to choose from. On the one hand, there's the Taliban and Al Qaeda, who represent the most radical and intolerant aspects of their faith (not unlike, perhaps, some of the more radical evangelical elements of the American population, only somewhat better-armed and more willing to actively kill people who fail to live up to their rather stringent standards of behavior and comportment), and who cut people's heads off on videotape and throw acid in the faces of women who take a walk in public without a male relative to escort them.

On the other hand, there's us, a more complicated case. We're more tolerant, more modern, have greater prosperity and more individual and collective freedoms. We also send evil robots to bomb the shit out of civilians in order to get at a few select targets who may or may not be players in the Taliban/Al Qaeda universe. We grab people off the ground, or buy them from their enemies, and put them in prison half a world away with little or no hope of freedom or even a fair trial.

George W. Bush used to say the terrorists hate our freedoms, and to some extent he was right. There is a hard core of dedicated Islamist nutjobs who genuinely hate the freedom we take for granted and exercise on a daily basis (never mind that there seems to be an almost equal number of radical evangelicals and conservatives that also hate this freedom). But the vast majority of people who take up arms against us do so for more personal reasons, like, say, we dropped a bomb on their cousin's wedding party, or we nabbed them and threw them in prison for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

And here's where the strategic meets the moral. To win the battle for hearts and minds, we have to be the good guys. We've already got the whole best outcome thing locked down. You can choose to live under Sharia law, and live in a medieval world of poverty and oppression, or you can choose engagement with the West, and move towards our greater prosperity, comfort, and freedom from undue government intrusion into your daily life (yes, I know we're not exactly doing a great job on this one lately, but compared to life under the Taliban, it's no comparison at all). If the world were made of rational actors pursuing enlightened self-interest, then it would already be no contest.

But the world is not made of rational actors pursuing enlightened self-interest, and so we must not only produce better societal outcomes in order to win the battle for hearts and minds, we must also be the good guys, the ones not willing to cross certain lines, even if the bad guys do. This is, in fact, the difference between being the good guys and being the bad guys, and while the bad guys almost always consider themselves the good guys, and the morally repugnant things they feel they have to do to win to be unfortunate negative consequences of the conflict they're in, in actuality, they are not the good guys, at least not in any objectively defensible sense of the term.

And while it may be that there's a case to be made about doing bad things in the service of good (there is certainly a strain of the American mentality that gets off on the notion, cf. every action flick ever), in the present case, where we are not engaged in a conventional war with a state or coalition of states that fields an army and meets us in battle, and our enemy, such as it is, relies on secrecy and terrorism, and depends on the good will of the surrounding population to stay hidden and thus out of our reach, it is not only morally necessary to fight with the proverbial one hand tied behind our back, it's strategically necessary, too.

Look, I understand that there is a hard core of dedicated extremists that will do anything, and I mean anything, in order to blacken our eyes and bloody our noses (which is really about all they're capable of doing at present), and that we have little or no choice but to hunt those men down and kill them, or, even better, throw them in prison for the rest of their lives (a much worse punishment in my, and probably their, view). But the vast majority of the world's Muslim population would almost certainly gravitate to our way of life and thinking if given half the chance, and the less we do to alienate them, the likelier we are to win the struggle for hearts and minds.

Win that, and we win the war.

Maybe then we can start ramping down from the national security state, and return America to the path it was meant to be on.

dept. of corrections

President Obama said on Wednesday that he is seeking to block the release of photographs that depict American military personnel abusing captives in Iraq and Afghanistan, worrying that the images could “further inflame anti-American opinion.”

dear mr. president,
it's not images of american military personnel abusing prisoners that inflame anti-american opinion. it's american military personnel abusing prisoners that inflames anti-american opinion.
sincerely,
dallas taylor

torturing iraqis

so, the latest meme to burble up to the surface from the torture hearings/memos/debate/debacle is that dick cheney repeatedly urged the torture (i mean waterboarding. no, wait, i mean enhanced interrogation) of iraqi intelligence agents after our invasion in order to prove the saddam/al qaida connection.

so much for the ticking time bomb that supposedly justifies the use of these techniques. unless you think of it metaphorically, in which case one hopes that there is indeed a (metaphorical) ticking time bomb attached to the base of dick cheney's freedom from prosecution.

it does point up something, though, that can't be stressed enough. when you ask the experts, actual professional interrogators and intelligence agents and historians and the like, they'll tell you over and over that torture is mostly useless for garnering actionable intelligence, but that it's awesome for generating false confessions.

what amazes me is that, given the political climate in 2003, cheney apparently failed in his attempt to order torture on prisoners of war. i guess the system did not entirely fail, which is of some small comfort to this american patriot.

not as much as, say, a truth commision followed by war crimes prosecution would be. but i guess i'll take what i can get for now, and keep clapping my hands and believing in fairies.

catch 22

so, i've noticed lately that every time i pay down one of my credit cards, about two weeks later i get a letter saying the bank has decided to lower my limit by that much. the reason, the letters invariably say, is that my ratio of debt to credit is too high. which is funny, because that ratio would be less high if they didn't lower my credit every time i paid them.

i wonder if institutions are capable of perceiving irony.

yeah. what that guy said.

I continue to find the whinging and apocalyptic fear-mongering from certain quarters of the finance and business community about the government's present involvement in economic affairs despicable. For chrissakes, people, what did you expect? The bloody economy has gone off the rails, the global financial system is in tatters, and millions of citizens are seething on the unemployment line. (2010 election motto: I'm unemployed, and I vote.) The market failed. Deregulation didn't help. And the only economic actor with the will and the financial wherewithal to borrow heavily enough from the future—our future, natch—to fix this shitstorm is the government. Did you really think you were going to get government help without a government (read political) agenda? What are you smoking?
-The Epicurean Dealmaker

can't say as i've got anything to add to that.

The Chattanooga Declaration

We, the delegates of the Secession movements represented at the Second North American Secessionist Convention, acknowledging our differences, yet agree on the following truths:

1. The deepest questions of human liberty and government facing our time go beyond right and left, and in fact have made the old left-right split meaningless and dead.
2. The privileges, monopolies, and powers that private corporations have won from government threaten everyone’s health, prosperity, and liberty, and have already killed American self-government by the people.
3. The power of corporations endangers liberty as much as government power, especially when they are combined as in the American Empire.
4. Liberty can only survive if political power is returned from faraway and self-interested centers to local communities and states.
5. The American Empire is no longer a nation or a republic, but has become a tyrant aggressive abroad and despotic at home.
6. The States of the American union are and of right ought to be, free and self-governing.
7. Without secession, liberty and self-government can never be sustained, and diversity among human societies can never survive.

the part that freaks me out is that i agree wholeheartedly with about half of that.

hawt

i once had a girlfriend who (no kidding) got her ten-year-old son's name tattooed below/as a part of her tailbone tattoo. suffice to say, cognitive dissonance followed. but this is just awesome. the only worse (or better, depending) one i've seen was a girl i saw walk by the ladro once with the words 'god forgive me' tattooed across her lower back.

I'm a little amazed

that they actually put this on air, but I have to admit, it's pretty effin' hilarious.



Think they must've hired somebody from the Daily Show on their writing staff. Go MSNBC.

this makes far too much sense

to ever be implemented. but, if you'd like to know what the government is supposed to do with insolvent banks, you should read this.

just remember, everybody. the solution to the credit crisis is actually pretty simple and straightforward, and only requires that some laws be passed allowing the government to take over investment banks and bank-like entities in exactly the way that they are already allowed, even compelled, to take over insolvent commercial banks.

the reason for all the pretzel-twisting and the public-private partnership ponzi scheme is just so that stakeholders who underwrote bad bets and can't or won't pony up now that they lost won't have to lose the money the put on the horse with three legs and a bloodstream full of steroids.

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: As my boss [Colin Powell] once said, Bush had a lot of .45-caliber instincts, cowboy instincts. Cheney knew exactly how to polish him and rub him. He knew exactly when to give him a memo or when to do this or when to do that and exactly the word choice to use to get him really excited.

from vanity fair's oral history of the bush white house. it's long, but worth reading in its entirety.

i know it's wrong

so very, very wrong, but i really, really want to see sarah palin and michelle bachmann get in a fight.

gawd, that would be so hot.

a thought going forward

if there are no good options, then why can’t we let justice instead of pragmatism guide our response to the financial crisis?

i mean, the house of cards is going to fall, right? we’ve been dithering and hemming and hawing and such for weeks, months, now, hoping somebody has a lightbulb go off over their head and comes up with the magic answer that saves the day and lets us all go back to the magical wonderland we lived in up until a couple of years ago, where everything but wages experienced a double-digit rise every year and we were all going to get rich flipping houses or buying tech stocks and the neverending gusher of oil from poorer nations we could stomp all over with our awesome military whenever they got uppity or we just felt like it would keep our hummers and suburbans commuting back and forth to the ‘burbs that would sprawl as far as the eye could see from the high ground we would never have to retreat to because the oceans were definitely not going to rise, at least not enough to swamp our coastal cities, which were filled with latte-sipping elites anyway, so who cared?

unregulated market-evangelistic capitalism had a good run, but it’s pretty obvious by now that it wasn’t the way, the light, and the truth. mammon is simply not a worship-worthy god, and even if you take care of him, he isn’t going to take care of you (an experience not unlike waiting on a wealthy person at a restaurant).

so, as we plot the course forward, if there’s no way to avoid the rocks the masters of the universe have steered us onto, shouldn’t we at least see to it that they get wiped out along with the rest of us? and yes, i understand that dinging the bondholders along with the credit default swappers would clean out many worthy investors and regular people, but for those of us that think some kind of modified socialism, where, say, a baseline comfortable existence is guaranteed, which the ambitious and those otherwise desirous of greater prosperity could build on and out-earn should they choose, is the way forward anyway, it seems to me that putting everybody in something like the same straits to begin with just makes it that much easier.

if, at the end of the day, the people who made the bad choices that landed all of us in this totally fucked-up situation don’t suffer the same consequences as the rest of us, not only will i be outraged because of the injustice and unfairness of it all, i think we will have squandered the opportunity to evolve as a society into a better, more just, more harmonious configuration (and resource-allocation scheme). that there will be pain between now and whatever comes next is inescapable. so let’s make sure where we end up is better than where we came from.

can we please stop referring to the whinings of wall street traders and their fluffers in the financial press as "populist?" seriously, the cognitive dissonance is giving me a headache.

on a lighter note...

burien cop beats unarmed teenage girl

fuck. i don’t even know where to begin.

that boys don’t hit girls is the first thing i remember learning. it’s a hard and fast rule. period. end of fucking story.

to say i am disgusted only scratches the surface. and not just at that shit-eating cunt of a cop, but at the strain of the american mentality that underwrites this kind of behavior. i understand that being a police officer is incredibly difficult, and requires not only the judicious use of violence but also dealing with the worst that our fucked-up society has to offer. but it also seems to attract some of the worst kinds of people, and then hides them behind a badge and gun and sets them loose on the rest of us, this rotten sonofabitch being a prime example (there’s also the grandma-shooters in atlanta, the speeder-tazing state patrolman in utah, and the execution-style killer of the oakland bart, just to name a few examples off the top of my head).

i realize that many, even most, police officers are genuine public servants who do an incredibly difficult job, and i’m grateful to them for doing so, but this culture of impunity must end.

the worst thing is that, even if he’s convicted, the most he’ll get is a year. one year. disgusting.

a theory about theories

according to this week's poll watch in the week magazine, only 39% of americans believe in the theory of evolution. part of it certainly has to do with the religiosity of americans and the christian right's insistence on creationism and/or 'intelligent design,' but i think a good chunk of it has to do with the different uses to which the word 'theory' is put in and out of the world of scientific inquiry.

in everyday language, to say you have a theory about something is to say that you have what seems to you a rational explanation for whatever phenomenon you're attempting to describe, whether or not you have put said 'theory' to any sort of test at all. it is, at best, an educated guess and, more generally, just a regular guess that fits both the facts and the way that your worldview inclines you to see them.

were you a scientist, you would call such a thing a hypothesis, and you would then attempt to devise a test to see if your hypothesis stood up to scrutiny. then you would repeat the test, and repeat it again, and again, and so on, until you were pretty sure that you had reliable data which either did or did not back up your hypothesis. then you would publish those results, and other scientists would see if they could replicate your results without you there, going through a number of iterations, over and over, until they reached a conclusion, whether or not it was the same conclusion you reached or not.

this sort of testing would go on and on, and be carried out many, many times, by many, many different scientists, and be published and reviewed many, many times. and it would all have to come out the same, meaning all those experiments, all those tests of your hypothesis, would have to come to the same conclusion.

then you could call it a theory. and even then your hypothesis/theory would only stand until a better explanation of whatever phenomenon you were trying to describe was posited, tested, reviewed, etc.

so, in the world of scientific inquiry, for something to be called a theory implies many years of rigorous testing and failed attempts at falsification; it means the idea has been tested and stood up to that testing, and that noone has been able to come up with a better explanation.

in regular life, a theory is just a reasonable explanation somebody came up with, but that lacks the key evidence that would make it so.

to put it in regular people parlance, my theory about why fewer than 4 in 10 americans believes in darwin's theory of evolution, one of the most tested, tried, and true of all scientific theories, one that's been tested, over and over again, for a hundred fifty years, and stood up to those tests, is that most people hear the words 'theory of evolution' and mistake the scientific meaning of the word for its more colloquial usage, and assume that it's just some explanation some guy thought up a hundred years ago but that is equivalent to, say, the theory that brad pitt left jennifer aniston for angelina jolie because angelina has bigger boobs.

maybe i'm wrong, but, as the saying goes, nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the american people.

just found this on balloon-juice. click on it. it'll make you feel better. i promise.

i have to say, i wholeheartedly approve of the wage cap president obama is seeking to impose on executives at banks and other financial firms that receive federal aid. given that most of these guys are the ones responsible for the financial straits that not only their companies but the whole fucking economy are in, it seems that the very first belts to get tightened should be theirs.

in fact, i'll go obama one better. i think that, as a condition of receiving federal bailout money, every upper echelon executive at said firm oughtta be fired, with no severance, and that the next tier of people oughtta get moved up the ladder, with the salary cap in place. if they can pay the money back and take the company back to the private sector, where it can stand on its own two feet and compete, then let their boards pay them however much the market dictates. but the bums that got us into this situation oughtta be thrown out on their asses and left to survive on their measly hundred of millions in compensation they took before their companies went ass-up because of their mismanagement.

actions should have consequences. they done fucked up, and oughtta pay the price. it's not like they're gonna starve.


update: goddamnit.

tom daschle can eat a big fat dick.

sorry to be so nasty about shit, but seriously, who outside the beltway thought this guy was or is anything but a joke? i mean, he makes harry reid look like a freakin' action hero. he got rolled as majority leader. he got rolled as minority leader. look up 'hapless' in the dictionary, and he's the noun in the example sentence.

this is the guy who was supposed to push comprehensive health care reform through congress? the guy who couldn't even articulate a rationale against going to war in iraq?

i dunno. all the inside baseball players seem to think he would have been super-effective at making it happen, but i just don't see it. i mean, the guy couldn't even get it together to threaten a filibuster, or invoke cloture. and he's supposed to get the republicans (or even the blue dogs) on board for a giant rewrite of our totally-fucked-from-top-to-bottom health care system? i'd laugh if i wasn't one of the umpteen million americans who're just one serious injury or illness away from being a debt-slave for the rest of my truncated life.

i mean, he knew this would come up. and he didn't even see fit to tell obama, not until a month after his nomination. he knew there was supposed to be a new sheriff in town, and that things were supposed to be different. that lobbyists weren't gonna be running the show anymore. but he just wanted back in soooo bad, he just couldn't help but clap his hands and believe in fairies, just like he did when he was in office. i mean, for an incumbent to lose his seat, much less a guy who holds a position in the senate leadership, does not bode well for the guy's judgement or effectiveness. seriously.

and while i'm at it, what the fuck is up with the democratic bench? i mean, i expect republicans to be dirty-ass motherfuckers. it's kind of their thing; they only enter government so as to help the private sector screw the public more effectively, at least anymore (i think once upon a time conservatism actually stood for something, but that time is long past). but are there really not enough capable folks in the democratic party to fill one branch of government who don't think and act like the rules that apply to everyone else don't also apply to them? i mean, nancy killefer was one thing, that kind of oversight i can understand: it's complicated stuff, and she was only off by a few hundred bucks. but tom daschle (and tim geithner, who i don't even want to get started on) was on the senate finance committee. they write the fucking tax code. and he owed a hundred-odd thousand dollars in back taxes, which means hundreds of thousands in undeclared income, which if i did it would land my ass in some seriously hot fucking water.

as for obama, i'm somewhat less upset. as john cole at balloon-juice pointed out, in this case, the system worked. obama set high standards. daschle didn't meet them, and he didn't even make it to the senate for confirmation hearings. obama's people should've vetted him better, and he shouldn't have put his name in the hat in the first place, and though it's a bit of a shiner for barack, it ain't all that bad, as these things go. what i really wish is that the who's who could learn how to keep their fucking noses a little cleaner. the same rules are supposed to apply to everybody.

what's the old saying? they come to washington to do good, and they stay to do well.

think we're gonna have to do something about that.

this is awesome.

cheers to the agitator for laying it out so clearly. everybody oughtta leave michael phelps the fuck alone. if brother wants to smoke a little pot on his own time, then that oughtta be his business and not ours.

enough with this demonizing the demon weed. it's so much less harmful than all kinds of legal shit, including most of the pharmaceutical drugs america's all heffed-up on, and the current conventional wisdom is bullshit, a fucking snow job perpetrated by harry anslinger because he was in bed with dupont, who wanted to make nylon rope, but couldn't break into the market, because hemp had a lock on that shit.

ps: what ioz said.

my personal working assumption is that reality exists, but that it is fundamentally unknowable.

what can be known is limited to immediate sense-data and its reflections in the mental landscape that each of us presumably inhabits. think schrodinger’s cat meets through a glass, darkly. because we are humans, and our brains work a certain way, we perceive the world as quanta (small packets of information) which become the anchor-points for the picture that our minds backfill in order to provide us with a coherent narrative or at least a pattern we can recognize and pretend to understand. most of these narratives and patterns are received (like your gene sequences are received), and they color perceptions and thoughts (the only knowable things) in the way that the spectrum of visible light colors the things you see when you look around you.

the trick is to try and align the narratives and patterns through which you understand the world as closely as possible to how reality and the world actually are. because, while reality is fundamentally unknowable, it can be (and needs to be) approximated. the closer your approximation, the more efficacious your worldview.

you know, kind of like the way science works, if your starting point is the uncarved block.

i've been trying to pull my head out of the aethosphere a little bit lately.

mostly out of political junkyhood, i've been living out in the universe of discourse a lot for the last couple years. it's a funny, private little way to live in the world, confined as it was to interacting with my computer screen and taking my stories and facts pre-digested by mama birds whose insight and disgust mirrored my own. occasionally i'd toss my own two cents in the ring; mostly not. i've always been more of a reader than a writer, though i've read you can't be the latter unless you're the former. unless you're bukowski maybe. and even he had a hero or two.

but i just can't do it anymore. the good guys won, or something. i'm cautiously optimistic about the new crew in dc, but who can say for now? they're not actually governing yet. everybody who's got their panties in a bunch about anything other than real problems either just really likes and is used to having their panties in a bunch, or is getting paid for it, or, more likely both. dunno about you, but my parents always told me to do what you love, and figure out how to make money from it after.

i don't know if i love what i do. but i do a lot of the things i do well. that's what i tell myself, anyway. other people tell me that too.

anyway, i feel like i'm coming back to the world. i'm reading books again, instead of using up all my reading time online. i let my subscriptions to harper's and the atlantic lapse. i'm watching way less tv.

it's good. i think everyone should do it.

The regnant strain of "conservativism" in America uses a rhetoric of "personal responsibility" in order to denigrate and scapegoat the less privileged and more marginal members of our society because it is not conservativism: it's conservativism's tatooed ex-con brother-in-law: white ethnic nationalism. Its fundamental ethos is a hastily constructed set of cultural resentments. Its commitment to economic liberty is window-dressing for mere acquisitiveness. Its cultural exceptionalisms would make a young Kipling blush.

-ioz

Never Trust a Teetotaler

In vino veritas.
With those three words, Pliny the Elder gave voice to a saying so old its origins were already lost by the time he wrote them. Think of it as the first cliche, a phrase they probably coined about a week after the first human tribe figured out that drinking fermented grape juice could make them happy.
In wine, the truth.
Everybody knows that alcohol lowers your inhibitions; that’s one of the main reasons people drink it. You can say and do things after a few drinks that you couldn’t or wouldn’t normally. It’s liberating and fun, one of the great rewards of surviving to your majority and one of the great consolations for what you lose in getting there. By choosing to drink, you choose to liberate yourself, to shake off the strictures of the routine workaday world and live a little. Also it tastes good.
Yes, it sometimes makes you say and do stupid things, things you wouldn’t normally be stupid enough to say or do, but hey, that’s all part of growing up and learning about life. The worst part is that you probably meant it at the time. Shame on you. But as long as you apologize and learn your lesson then everything is generally alright, as long as you didn’t get pregnant or catch the AIDS.
Used properly, alcohol really is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, just like Ben Franklin said. It’s good for you, body and soul, for more reasons than I have world enough or time to share at present.
But some people don’t drink. And not all of them are Muslims.
(Muslims are excused from the following series of sweeping generalizations. They are prohibited by their religion from drinking alcohol (although the word alcohol is, oddly enough, Arabic in origin), and I respect anybody willing to take their religion seriously, as long as I don’t have to also.)

Now, I’m not saying that everyone who abstains from alcohol is not to be trusted. There are many fine people who, for perfectly rational reasons, choose not to drink.
Having said that, when you meet someone for the first time, and they tell you that they don’t drink, you should immediately become suspicious, and be on your guard with them, until such time as you know them well enough to revisit that judgement from a more informed position.
Let me explain.
Very few people don’t drink because they have never drunk. If you meet one, you shouldn’t trust them because they are too closed minded to find out for themselves what something is all about. People who are afraid to have their preconceptions and received wisdom shaken up are dangerous, because they will usually do and say anything to keep those preconceptions and nuggets of received wisdom from coming into question. A brittle worldview is not the sign of a robust mind, or of a soul at ease with itself. Trust these teetotalers least of all.
But most teetotalers fall into another category, those folks who have indeed imbibed of Demon Rum, and been burned by his fiery kiss. Usually those folks go on to burn others, one way or another.
They usually have a story, or several. They don’t like themselves when they drink. Lots of times they have very good reason not to.
And that’s the problem. And that takes us back to the beginning.
In vino veritas. In wine, the truth.
Alcohol makes us simpler creatures. It burns away the artifice and veneer, the surface persona we cultivate to show to others in the daylight. We become more truly ourselves when we drink, more honest about who we are and what (and who) we want. Some people are happy drunks; some people are angry drunks. Some people are horny drunks. Whatever it is that is truly inside you is all you’ll have left after enough cocktails, and the truth will out, at least until you learn how to handle yourself, which is the crux of the matter. Because people who choose not to drink (or even fantasize about quitting drinking) have usually decided that the person they really are is something they can’t handle one way or another.
We all have our faults and our shortcomings, our peccadilloes and embarassments. We all sometimes get the urge to do or say things that we know we shouldn’t and that we’ll regret later. Alcohol exacerbates these tendencies, along with other, more positive tendencies (we are, after all, as much more disposed to love and generosity in the embrace of lady liquor as we are to violence and depravity, if such is in our hearts). The reason you can’t trust a teetotaler is not that they have evil in them per se, it is that they either have too much evil in them, or they lack the character and determination to overcome that evil through force of will.
The reasons that people decide to stop drinking are generally that they do or say stupid and/or terrible things when they’re drunk, and they can’t manage to take control and stop themselves. And if they have it in them to do or say those stupid and/or terrible things, then you have to be careful until you’re sure they won’t do or say them to you.
Again, I’m not saying never ever trust a teetotaler. There are some generally wonderful human beings out there who simply choose not to drink, for a wide variety of good reasons. All I’m saying is that when you do meet someone who claims not to drink, be careful, because the likeliest explanation is that, deep down, there’s something there they don’t like, and neither, most likely, will you.

Huseyin Kalkan, the mayor of Batman, Turkey, said
that the town would sue Warner Bros. for a portion of the
royalties from the movie "The Dark Knight." "There is,"
said Kalkan, "only one Batman."

from this week's harper's weekly.

friend of mine sent this along. write a goodbye letter to george w. bush. or send him a picture. it's super fun.

one of the things i like best about barack obama is one of the most anathematic things about him, at least as far as his liberal base of support would be concerned, were they not so intent on his chances of victory, and that is his clear recognition of the central front in the war on terror, or islamic extremism, or whatever you want to call it.

afghanistan, and pakistan.

whatever aspersions have been cast on him over here for his politicization, witting or un-, it is undoubtedly a good thing that david petraeus is ascending to command of centcom. he's a smart, capable guy, and we need that, because, despite the enduring popularity of iraq so far as media attention and public outcry go, afghanistan and pakistan is actually a much more dangerous and potentially catastrophic situation than iraq could ever hope to be. the taliban is, at least to some extent, a cat's paw for the pakistani intelligence service, which exists as an independent power/player in that less-than-ideally-stable country's political ecosphere.

they are also getting strong enough to mount direct attacks on our military outposts, which is horrifically scary. that they don't have to skulk about in hiding and constrain themselves to guerrilla tactics means they have men and materiel to spare, which means that we're creating insurgents/terrorists/taliban fighters faster than we can kill them. the most probable explanation is that, because we lack sufficient boots on the ground to guarantee order and stability we are constrained to fight more of the conflict from the air. when we do that, we end up killing civilians in large numbers.

think about it from the locals' perspective: assholes from the other side of the world drop a satellite-guided bomb on top of somebody's wedding, killing dozens on what should be a joyous day. how do you think you would feel about people that did that, whether they acknowedged their error or not? what if that was your cousin getting married? or the kid you grew up with?

this kind of stuff happens all the time over there. and one of the main reasons it happens is because all of the available combat brigades that the army and the marines can muster are deployed in iraq, which when you take an objective look at it is really a second-order concern, so far as the national security interests of the united states are concerned (yes, we need that oil, but we need it less once we commit to a domestic green energy revolution, which we have to do anyway, but more on that some other time).

and yes, barack obama is right that we will need to redeploy a significant number of the troops that are freed up when we draw down forces in iraq directly to afghanistan, but even if we were able to redeploy the entire force there, which is absolutely ridiculous to even speculate could happen, we would still be far from the threshhold established back when it might have mattered by soon-t0-be-outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff eric shinseki in terms of the ratio of soldiers to civilians necessary to ensure the stability and good order which would be necessary (though not sufficient) to establish some kind of viable self-sustaining political order that would be able to take over eventually. to wit, we do not have the military (or, at this point, economic) resources, or the national will, to occupy afghanistan in sufficient depth to ensure a good outcome politically.

which brings me back to david petraeus, the guy who turned iraq around when most people had concluded that it couldn't be done.

the conventional wisdom is that the additional deployment of combat troops, the surge, as it were, was the primary change-engine. that the nobility and professionalism of american soldiers and marines was of such great magnitude that the simple addition of a few extra combat brigades was enough to turn the tide.

that such nobility and professionalism exist i do not doubt. to attribute the anbar awakening and the standing down of the mahdi army to the presence of a few extra troops is magical thinking at best, and not even the good kind. the end of the shiite intra-fighting (between the mahdi army and the iraqi army) was brokered by the iranians, for one thing. and the sunni awakening had a lot to do with a) them realizing what assholes the al qaeda guys were (al qaeda in iraq did mostly bomb iraqis, remember) and b) us giving them lots and lots of money and guns.

the reason capitalism always wins is that everybody likes money. and the more they have, the less interested they are in unrest. once we started paying the sunnis to police themselves and turn on the foreign fighters in their midst, things mellowed out quite a bit. so long as they get their piece of the pie they'll be invested in the general good, which removes a major destabilizing factor from the overall political equation.

which brings me back to david petraeus, the guy whose idea most of this was, and what a good thing it is that he's moving on to the afghanistan theatre.

when first we fought the afghan war, and chased the taliban in the mountains of waziristan, we were playing right into bin laden's trap. his avowed strategy (and it wasn't a half-bad one, really) was to punch us in the nose, which he did, then draw us into a long, drawn-out land war in afghanistan, bleeding us like they bled the soviets back in the eighties until we decided to leave them alone and let them establish their caliphate or something. the reason we stomped them so definitively was because we bribed the other warlords in afghanistan, who knew the terrain and the people, and who'd coexisted uneasily with the taliban and were glad enough to be rid of them if they could, to fight with and for us.

all we had to do was finish the job ourselves, which we didn't. we had the fuckers holed up in caves, for fuck's sake, but we'd had such a clean war i guess nobody wanted any americans to die, even to get bin laden. it's the only reason i can think of that isn't too horrible to contemplate. i treasure american servicemen and -women as much as the next red-blooded american, but part of what they are for is to die so we can kill fuckers like bin laden.

and because we didn't, the taliban was able to retreat to a safe haven (in nuclear-armed pakistan, which is totally awesome. they shoot at us when we chase the taliban back to the border now) and regrow their forces to the point that they can now mount traditional military offensives on american positions in broad daylight.

but we won't have enough soldiers to deploy the forces necessary to do what has to be done ourselves, and our nato allies aren't going to pony up enough either, since none of their populations have the stomach for ongoing military casualties that we do, and even we're kind of shaky these days. which means we're going to have to figure out who to bribe and how much to get some local help. and i'm glad david petraeus is in charge there now, because he seems to understand this kind of thing pretty well.

and yes, he's going to need some more soldiers. but hopefully he'll be smarter about using them, and hopefully, when barack obama is president, this theater of operations will get the attention it deserves, because it is far and away the number one threat to world stability and american national security.

sarah palin may be kind of hot, but she has an ugly nose. i keep noticing that.

her voice really grates, too.

so, i do want to give credit where credit is due, and john mccain last night actually made some news with his proposal for the federal government to buy up $300bn worth of bad mortgages and renegotiate with the borrowers at their home's new, much lower value, basically eating the loss for them, so that people can stay in their homes.

i actually think that's a pretty good idea, and brought up something similar in a discussion with some friends that can be found at schadenfreude666.wordpress.com. i think the money ought to come out of the bailout (ahem, i mean rescue) bill that was just passed (instead of being new spending), but i think it's a solid idea, and addresses at least part of the core problems of what wall street did to the american economy. if the mortgage market is stabilized, and the foreclosures slowed or stopped, it seems to me that those toxic collateralized debt obligations whose monetary obligations are freezing up the credit markets become less toxic, easier to value, and that once that value was established and everybody knows or at least has a better idea what's on the balance sheet, then maybe the credit markets thaw up some since banks will know what kind of cash on hand they'll need and can lend out the rest to other banks and businesses short-term, which is a major underpinning of american capitalism.

shit, even the state of california was running day-to-day operations on short-term loans. schwarzenegger just asked treasury for $7bn, after all.

i should also mention, fwiw, that i think that movement conservatives are going to eat john mccain alive for such a liberal, progressive policy proposal. i mean, i think it's a great idea, and might actually help some people that need help, but it definitely goes against everything the republican party stands for.

pakistan will give nuclear weapons to terrorists before iran ever does. mark my words, and god help us all.

so, i just watched face the nation on dvr, and i just want to ask everyone to remember that david brooks, weaselly-as-usual, just said that sarah palin is not qualified to be president.

got this from andrew sullivan, one of whom's readers wrote this to him in an email after seeing garry shandling, of all people, on bill maher's show.

On 9/11, Al Qaeda had no expectation of a traditional military victory against the United States. The point of the attack was economic -- to draw the U.S. into expensive and protracted foreign wars that would deplete our resources and destabilize our government. By invading Iraq, George Bush became the happy idiot to assist Al Qaeda in this goal. Now, Sarah Palin and John McCain take the leaders of Al Qaeda at their word when they say Iraq is the major front in the war on terror.

Neither consider the possibility that Al Qaeda wants Iraq to be the major front because it furthers their goal of weakening the U.S. while inflicting minimal damage on their operations.

Seven years after 9/11, we are seeing Al Qaeda's long-term goal being realized: the destabilization and economic collapse of the United States. Even as it's happening, the people who supported it all along want to continue facilitating our own long-term disintegration by clinging to simplistic concepts of traditional military victory and defeat. In this sense, they are possibly the most myopic, least strategic thinkers in the history of this nation.

As Gary Shandling said, with this approach, our only hope of killing Osama Bin Laden is that he'll laugh himself to death.

the really awful thing is that bin laden pretty much said this was the plan from the get-go. it was supposed to be afghanistan where it happened; bin laden figured he could do to us what he and the mujahideen did to the soviets and bog us down in afghanistan for a decade or two, bleeding our military and our national will slowly but surely by drawing us into a land war in asia (which, as anyone who has seen the princess bride knows, is the only blunder, historically speaking, greater than going in against a sicilian when death in on the line). that we were smart enough to buy off the warlords that were going to help him bleed us redounds to our credit as a nation. that we didn't finish the job ourselves more or less completely erases that credit, but for a while it looked like we were actually smart and savvy enough to out-strategize some spoiled rich asshole whose worldview is stuck in the middle ages.

lucky for him, we've got our own spoiled rich asshole, who didn't like the gift-wrapped war he got for christmas and so he decided he was gonna get the one he wanted that santa didn't bring him, and show his daddy up to boot, come hell or high water (pace new orleans).

and now here we are, half a decade later, our much-vaunted military near-broken, our economy swirling down the toilet (thanks to the aforementioned spoiled rich asshole's aversion to economic oversight), trillions of dollars in debt to the people who brought us lead-painted toys and milk with industrial additives to boost the apparent protein content, and, bless their li'l hearts, one major party's presidential ticket thinks we should keep on down the road we've been travellin'.

it's like the manchurian candidate, except i'm convinced that nobody in bin laden's organization is that smart. it's just that these fucking people really are that fucking dumb.

after all, one of the definitions of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. i guess when you create your own reality, maybe that works. unfortunately, it only works in the make-believe reality inside your head, which doesn't really overlap with the world you share with the rest of us.

clap all you want, kids. tinkerbell's dead.

i knew john mccain was an opportunistic jerk. it was apparent early in his presidential campaign, as he reached out to embrace the agents of intolerance as eagerly as he came to embrace many bush administration policy positions that he had at least initially opposed (though whether from principle or because, pre-9/11, he intended to run against bush for the 2004 republican party nomination), like tax cuts and torture.

i knew he was a jerk when i first heard the story of how he dumped his first wife after she got in a car crash and wasn't beautiful anymore, going on to marry an heiress twenty years his junior, who was.

but it wasn't until i read this in rolling stone that i began to understand just what an unbelievably gigantic fucking opportunistic jerk he really is.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

i saw this youtube clip today (on culture11's confabulum blog). it's sarah palin reading a quote from madeleine albright about there being a special place reserved in hell for women who don't support other women. she made the obvious point, obviously, as well as getting in a dig at the msm, wondering what they'd make of it in tomorrow morning's papers, but what i thought was funniest (aside from an anti-choice governor who cut significant funding for victims of sexual assault in the state which has the highest per-capita rates of rape and sexual assault talking about women supporting women) was the source of the quote.

she read it off the side of her starbucks mocha cup.

she does know that a mocha is just a latte with chocolate syrup in it, right? isn't that supposed to be one of them elite coffe drinks that them damn coastal elites drink while they talk about what rubes and hicks everybody who doesn't live on the coast is?

guess that's just sarah being sarah.

so i watched the palin-biden debate last night after i got home from work (yay dvr). i thought joe biden did about as well as could be expected. he knew his shit, was comfortable in his own skin, and spoke in a way that not only demonstrated that he understood the complexities of the policy and political challenges that face the country, and indeed the whole world, but that he was able to take that understanding and translate it into terms that were meaningful to folks who don't work in the senate for a living. i think the format of the debate, with the time limitations involved, kept him from making that third or fourth paragraph verbal blunder that is something of a signature move for him, and it kept him focused and his answers crisp and to the point.

i think he pretty clearly won, at least by any objective standards, and i also think that there was no way he was ever going to lose, at least by any standards that ought to matter to serious-minded people.

i think sarah palin did as well as she was ever going to, and i felt for her as i watched. she was clearly nervous from the get-go (she actually seemed to be gushing when she greeted biden as they walked onstage and shook hands), and it was also obvious that, despite the many cogent talking point sentences that had been drill-baby-drilled into her mind, she had very little idea about the answers to many of the questions that gwen ifill asked, and knew it. she was clearly most comfortable when speaking in vacuous folksy-isms, blessing hearts and six-packing with joe, and clearly uncomfortable when expected to answer any questions about almost anything substantive. according to politico, on at least ten occasions she dodged, evaded, or outright ignored the question put to her, to the point where she even acknowledged herself that she was going to skip one of the questions put to her in order to go on the attack against biden and obama. and, like many people of less-than-sparkling intellect, she wasn't half bad at sticking the knife.

that she managed to fill all of her time with words (cogent and on-topic or not), and neither fainted nor farted into the microphone, has apparently re-energized the twenty-odd percent of america that thinks she's just the bee's knees and would be a great commander-in-chief-in-waiting.

i can only assume that these are the same sorts of people who think their children should get sports trophies just for showing up.

in fact, what the debate reminded me of most of all was the parent-child scrimmage i do for last practice of the season for the kids' soccer team i coach. the kids are ten or thereabouts, and even the ones who've picked up on the basic skills and introductory understanding of the game that i've managed to instill in them aren't playing the same game that the grownups (many of us players, both active and retired) are. and hey, noone expects them to. the whole point is to get them out there, have some fun, build some skills, some self-respect, a little character maybe. and hey, if they win their games, or lose them, it doesn't really matter. they're kids. it's fun. and if their parents want to buy them trophies at the end of the season so they feel better about the whole endeavor, then i will gladly keep my mouth shut and smile as i call their names one by one.

but you wouldn't let one of the ten-year-olds coach the team, even at the extremely non-serious level at which these kids play. letting sarah palin anywhere near national office, at least at her present level of understanding of the many serious issues that we face as a nation and a people, would be just like that, only with nucular weapons.

makes me shiver just thinking about it.

noone who cannot successfully pronounce the word 'nuclear' should be taken seriously on any subject that matters.

what you say: i'll have a long island.

what the bartender hears: i'm a cheapskate jerk.

what you say: i'll have a strong island.

what the bartender hears: i'm the biggest asshole in the room.

i haven't so much as glanced inside a rolling stone for years, but i sure do love me some matt tabibi ranting. it's like my id and my brain tag-teaming reality and calling her all the dirty little names she deserves.