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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Sunday, 29 January 2006
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the News (with apologies to Wallace Stevens)
Topic: Chasing the Zeitgeist

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the News (with apologies to Wallace Stevens)

An Index of Items of Interest, Sunday, January 29, 2006 - Which Will Be Forgotten First?

One: Science

The New York Times offers this -
The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.
That's the gist of it, but the Times of course provides a ton of detail - the threatening phone calls to a thirty-year career man who is respected around the world, the hints his career has ended, accusations he's not a "team player" - that his job is not science but supporting the president and all that. He's now on a short leash. His friends are not happy and talking to the Times. He's toast.

So, is global warming a "great hoax" - the work of mad eco-scientists as the novelist Michael Crichton claims? He really does sell a lot of books, like Jurassic Park - and The Andromeda Strain, and The Great Train Robbery, and Congo, and Sphere, and The Terminal Man. They, and others of his, all made fine movies. He may not be a NASA climatologist, but he's made a ton of money. The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy honored Crichton with an invitation to Washington to address its members on global warming. They know. Republican chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, James Inhofe - "With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."

If there is a Republican "War on Science" (there's a recent book that says so), well, they're winning.

There was that set-back in Pennsylvania about "intelligent design" - you cannot teach faith in a supernatural (in the exact sense of the word) clever creator in courses about the evidence of cause and effect in the natural world - it's a bit off topic, and a bit unconstitutional. Save it for some philosophy course, or comparative religion. Ah, but they'll always have Kansas, where they've redefined science to now include the supernatural and paranormal and whatever - science shouldn't be narrowly limited to the, ah, scientific.

Bush, McCain and the rest say Kansas has it right, teach the (cooked-up) controversy - and Senator Santorum from Pennsylvania was with them, but changed his mind late last year (he hopes he'll get reelected soon but it's not looking good).

But Rick from Penn Hills aside, these are the guys who began deploying a missile defense system without any evidence that it can actually work, and banned funding for embryonic stem cell research except on the sixty cell lines already in existence, most of which turned out not to exist, who forced the National Cancer Institute to say that abortion may cause breast cancer in spite of all the peer-reviewed studies that found no evidence for that at all, and who ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to remove information about condom use and efficacy from the web site there. This NASA guy was out of step, on the global warming business. He's one of those "evidence" and "facts" kind of people.

Of course, at the same time the Washington Post gives us this - Global Warming Debate Shifts Focus To 'Tipping Point'.

It may be too late to do anything at all, and the whole question becomes academic, in all senses of the word. And if that is so, why not let the NASA guy say what he will? What does it matter? The stall worked, the political contributions from the oil folks have been deposited, and that's that.

These global warming stories will die. There's about science, and we've been taught to distrust science, as science, while not exactly the work of the devil, makes us think things that make Jesus cry. Who wants to make Jesus sad? Or the oil companies?

And nothing bad will happen this month, or this year, maybe.

Two: Making the Most of Bad Times

A minor item from the Times here -
Two FEMA disaster assistance employees working in New Orleans were arrested yesterday on federal bribery charges, accused of accepting $10,000 each in exchange for letting a contractor submit inflated reports on the number of meals it was serving at a Hurricane Katrina relief base camp there.

The charges against Andrew Rose and Loyd Hollman, both of Colorado, came after they told a contractor hired on a $1 million deal to provide meals in Algiers, La., that he could submit falsified invoices for extra meals, a Justice Department statement said.

The two were arrested hours after accepting envelopes containing $10,000 apiece. These were supposed to be down payments in what the two had said should be a $2,500 weekly bribe for each, officials said.
Had Michael "I'm a Fashion God" Brown not been forced to resign as head of FEMA would these two have been so bold? Probably.

There will be some conventional "oh my" commentaries here and there on this, but there have been a flurry of articles on how all the promises to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast seem like so much bullshit now. Nothing much is happening, and the most "nothing much" is at the federal level - no head of the effort, no big plan, not even many words. All that seems so 2005 - we've moved on.

All that's left is the spoils - not rebuilding most of the schools and issuing vouchers, so the white kids can go to unlicensed Christian Academies, and the minority kids can find something else. Contacts for this and that to Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg Brown Root. The Army Corps of Engineers is letting big contacts to try the levee thing again.

Something will be built there. And these sort of bribery stories will come and go. This is not news. Actually, one expects such things - people get tempted. Human nature.

And sometimes these pole get caught.

And as for the federal response in the long term (week six on out), well, the administration is in a tough place. They really don't need any minority voters, and there's a whole "tough love" bunch of evangelicals who hold people should assume "personal responsibility" and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps (basic physics and basic mechanics not withstanding), and you have to play to them and not go all FDR here. And there are the corporations who bankroll the Republican Party - they expect something. But you have to show some appearance of giving a damn about all the folks who've lost everything - it's basic PR. You just don't say you're all heartless bastards lazing around the White House and these people can rot. That's bad politics. So you do a bit, but not too much, and try to balance it all out.

But wait. There's more. And it regards human nature, and how people get tempted, and take advantage of situations in ways that are not nice at all.

The Times, in the same weekend, also gives us this -
A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.

One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed.
We're pretty good at war. What follows? Well, we subtract that out to the corporations who bankroll the Republican Party and they see there's no oversight, and well, sometimes the temptation is too much.

Most of the Iraqi oil proceeds and cash seized from Saddam Hussein's government - mysteriously gone.

But sometimes it's individuals, not corporations - as with the American soldier assigned as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team. He was given a lot of bucks for that, and somehow end up in the Philippines - he gambled away somewhere between twenty and sixty grand. No one knows the exact figure, and no one kept track of how much money he was handed in the first place.

Things were run a little loosely there -
In another connection to Iraq's Olympic effort, a $108,140 contract to completely refurbish the Hilla Olympic swimming pool, including the replacement of pumps and pipes, came to nothing when the contractor simply polished some of the hardware to make it appear as if new equipment had been installed. Local officials for the provisional authority signed paperwork stating that all the work had been completed properly and paid the contractor in full, the report says.

The pool never reopened, and when agents from the inspector general's office arrived to try out the equipment, "the water came out a murky brown due to the accumulated dirt and grime in the old pumps," the report says.

Sometimes the consequences of such loose controls were deadly. A contract for $662,800 in civil, electrical, and mechanical work to rehabilitate the Hilla General Hospital was paid in full by an American official in June 2004 even though the work was not finished, the report says. But instead of replacing a central elevator bank, as called for in the scope of work, the contractor tinkered with an unsuccessful rehabilitation.

The report continues, narrating the observation of the inspector general's agents who visited the hospital on Sept. 18, 2004: "The hospital administrator immediately escorted us to the site of the elevators. The administrator said that just a couple days prior to our arrival the elevator crashed and killed three people."
Well, tossing around money with no records of anything - your tax dollars congress appropriated for the "reconstruction" of Iraq - means some will slip through the cracks. Here it seems eighty percent of it did - billions. And some folks died.

The leader sets the tone, and the subordinates reflect that in all they do. Our leader is not very detail-minded. Thus this.

As news stories go, this doesn't have legs. What's done is done - except the next five or six generations of Americans will be picking up the tab here, given what the war and the tax cuts have done to the deficit. It will take some time to pay down the tab the Chinese are now holding in US paper, and pay it down with interest. Perhaps someone in 2024 will be ticked off that we pissed all this money away, letting anyone grab what they could and not even keeping records. But now? We'll sell more treasury bonds and move on.

Three: The Man Who Would be King

Yeah, that's also a movie title (Michael Caine and Sean Connery is a rip-roaring Rudyard Kipling tale set in Afghanistan), but then that's how Newsweek Presents the hottest political story of the last week in January.

On a theater marquee it would look like this:
PALACE REVOLT!
They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees!
They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror!
And they paid a price for it!
(A NEWSWEEK investigation)
But it's not a movie. It's a five page piece of investigative journalism, by Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas.

Still, it reads like a movie.

The quiet heroes are James Comey, former administration deputy attorney general, and former assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith. They have the Jimmy Stewart roles - good guys trying to do their best, humbly and quietly - but finally facing down the bullies and winning the day. Except the story is ongoing so we don't know exactly how it comes out. But it's very Frank Capra.

The bad guys are really bad. The evil mastermind is Vice President Cheney (think Professor James Moriarty as played by Sidney Greenstreet, without the charm). His "muscle" - the enforcer - is his former counsel, David Addington, the fellow who is now his chief of staff, having been given Scooter Libby's job when Scooter was indicted on multiple felonies - short-tempered, nasty and smart as a whip. You don't mess with this Addington guy. Lurking in the background is John Yoo, the administration legal advisor, scribbling away at legal opinions late at night, giggling manically - ah, we can justify torture as long as the pain only simulates organ failure, and if you think real hard, the constitution does imply the president can break any law he wants! Think an Asian Peter Lorre.

Comic relief - the bumbling Polonius role - is provided by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Never quite getting it all, in and out of the hospital with gall bladder problems, knowing he should support his guys Comey and Goldsmith, but when he does, getting hammered by Cheney's crew. Now and then he just sings his song about eagles soaring (change of pace for the audience).

The scene - nine months, from October 2003 to June 2004, the Justice Department.

The conflict - the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who want to give the president virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror. Justice Department lawyers, backed by their "intrepid boss" Comey, demand that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for "riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution." Goldsmith and the others "fought" to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law. "They did so at their peril; ostracized, some were denied promotions, while others left for more comfortable climes in private law firms and academia. Some went so far as to line up private lawyers in 2004, anticipating that the president's eavesdropping program would draw scrutiny from Congress, if not prosecutors."

The hook - "These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their efforts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men."

The irony - "They were not downtrodden career civil servants. Rather, they were conservative political appointees who had been friends and close colleagues of some of the true believers they were fighting against. They did not see the struggle in terms of black and white but in shades of gray - as painfully close calls with unavoidable pitfalls. They worried deeply about whether their principles might put Americans at home and abroad at risk. Their story has been obscured behind legalisms and the veil of secrecy over the White House. But it is a quietly dramatic profile in courage."

What's in quotes is from Newsweek. Dramatic indeed.

Character Notes:
The chief opponent of the rebels, though by no means the only one, was an equally obscure, but immensely powerful, lawyer-bureaucrat. Intense, workaholic (even by insane White House standards), David Addington, formerly counsel, now chief of staff to the vice president, is a righteous, ascetic public servant.

... He is hardly anonymous inside the government, however. Presidential appointees quail before his volcanic temper, backed by assiduous preparation and acid sarcasm.

... Addington and a small band of like-minded lawyers set about providing that cover - a legal argument that the power of the president in time of war was virtually untrammeled. One of Addington's first jobs had been to draft a presidential order establishing military commissions to try unlawful combatants - terrorists caught on the global battlefield. The normal "interagency process" - getting agreement from lawyers at Defense, State, the intelligence agencies and so forth - proved glacial, as usual. So Addington, working with fellow conservative Deputy White House Counsel Timothy Flanigan, came up with a solution: cut virtually everyone else out.
That's a role an actor could really sink his teeth into.

The whole story is complex, and needs to be read for all its twist and turns, but these guys stood up to the Cheney-Addington-Yoo plan to ditch the rules and sort of take over the world, if you will. They may have been Bush appointees and as conservative as you want, but they stood up to a power grab that broke all the rules, and stopped it - or at least slowed it down.

And they had to leave, but they left with their heads held high. They did the right thing. Cue theme music. Fade to black.

It's too bad all this is really not a movie. We're coming close to a ditch-the-constitution screw-the-rules takeover. And it's deadly serious.

Four: We're Being Jerked Around

Long ago in these pages (November 2004), Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, said it - There is No War on Terror. To quote him - "Listen up! There IS no War on Terror! I repeat: There IS no War on Terror! None! We have all been conned!"

Almost fifteen months later the world catches up with him.

See this opinion piece, January 28, 2006, by Joseph J. Ellis in the New York Times - Finding a Place for 9/11 in American History.

Ellis is a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College and his latest book in on George Washington, and he's big on historical perspective -
My first question: where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.

Here is my version of the top tier: the War for Independence, where defeat meant no United States of America; the War of 1812, when the national capital was burned to the ground; the Civil War, which threatened the survival of the Union; World War II, which represented a totalitarian threat to democracy and capitalism; the cold war, most specifically the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which made nuclear annihilation a distinct possibility.

Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to believe so.
They're not the only ones, although they love that we think this way. The administration is playing it exactly the same way. It's useful to them too.

And Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, did have something to say, in August 2004, our dialog about the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. That's here. We saw where this was heading.

Professor Ellis now says this -
My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.

In retrospect, none of these domestic responses to perceived national security threats looks justifiable. Every history textbook I know describes them as lamentable, excessive, even embarrassing. Some very distinguished American presidents, including John Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, succumbed to quite genuine and widespread popular fears. No historian or biographer has argued that these were their finest hours.
Yep. That was the point.

And Ellis' conclusion -
What Patrick Henry once called "the lamp of experience" needs to be brought into the shadowy space in which we have all been living since Sept. 11. My tentative conclusion is that the light it sheds exposes the ghosts and goblins of our traumatized imaginations. It is completely understandable that those who lost loved ones on that date will carry emotional scars for the remainder of their lives. But it defies reason and experience to make Sept. 11 the defining influence on our foreign and domestic policy. History suggests that we have faced greater challenges and triumphed, and that overreaction is a greater danger than complacency.
Context is everything. We need to calm down and act sensibly.

Glenn Greenwald puts it nicely -
The total number of Americans killed by Islamic terrorists in the last 5 years - or 10 years - or 20 years - or ever - is roughly 3,500, the same number of deaths by suicide which occur in this country every month. This is the overarching threat around which we are constructing our entire foreign policy, changing the basic principles of our government, and fundamentally altering both our behavior in the world and the way in which we are perceived.

And yet, one almost never hears anyone arguing that the terrorism threat, like any other threat, should be viewed in perspective and subjected to rational risk-benefit assessments. That's because opinions about terrorism are the new form of political correctness, and even hinting that this threat is not the all-consuming, existential danger to our Republic which the Bush followers, fear-mongerers and hysterics among us have relentlessly and shrilly insisted that it is, will subject one to all sorts of accusations concerning one's patriotism and even mental health.
But the president says this is an "unprecedented danger." He never was good at history. Someone is calling him on it. It may be politically incorrect. It just happens to be correct.

You used to get hammered if you said that, putting things in perspective, we don't have an existential threat here. We have a problem. It can be solved. And, perhaps, the solution isn't a military solution - as Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis wrote in these pages recently (see this).

There's something in the air, besides the "we're all going to die" politically correctness. It's been a long time coming.

But over at Hullabaloo, Digby says what's really in the air isn't that nice -
... the endless evocations of pre-9/11 and post 9/11 thinking reminds me of nothing so much as people who are hooked on a stimulating drug.

Of course we all felt real fear in the early days, none so much as those who lived in New York and DC. It was almost unbelievable to see those scenes. But there was a sense of spectacle and drama about it that was literally unreal to those of us who watched it on television. This was fear put to music, with dramatic title treatments and a soaring voice-over. Because of that, on some level, 9/11 was a thrill for many people, even some Democrats. It was sad and horrifying, of course, but it was also stimulating, exciting and memorable because of the way it was presented on television. (When we were talking about this, Jane described it as if "the whole country was watching porn together every time the rerun of the towers falling was broadcast.") And we subsequently fetishized the "war on terrorism" to the point where some people become inexplicably excited whenever it is mentioned. They want that big group grope again, that sense of shared sensation. That is the "fear" that people say they have. And it's why they want to vote for the guy who keeps pumping it into the body politic.

It's why the "war on terrorism" still has some potency for the Republicans that the very ugly, very real war in Iraq does not. We can't lose the "war on terrorism" because it isn't a real war. Unfortunately, because we have allowed those words to be used, we have opened the door for authoritarian Republicans to assume the powers of a dictator under its auspices.

Greenwald and Ellis both argue very persuasively that Islamic fundamentalist terrorism does not present an existential threat to our country. I think that idea is beginning to get some traction in the national security debates. I don't know how long it might take to break this country out of its shared fetish for the "war on terrorism" but perhaps it's time to start addressing that as well. Until we finally admit that we aren't "at war" by any real definition of that term, we are going to be hamstrung in addressing the very real national security challenges we do face.

I haven't the vaguest idea how to do it, though. This nation is on the "war on terrorism" thrill ride and is enjoying it so much they've bought a season pass. And like most thrill rides these days, after the first little while I start to feel nauseated.
He's onto something. Folks like the rush.

But something is up.

Five Through Thirteen: Say What?

These items may be of some importance, or not.

Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos - the New York Times assembles the clear evidence we worked hard to overthrow the elected government of Haiti, undermining the "we spread democracy" business. We don't. This matches out funding of the coup in Venezuela a year or two ago - Chavez was elect in a fair election, a few times, and we funded a coup, announced that it happened and praised the generals who took over, but then it failed in less than a day, and Chavez was back, and we looked stupid. We pulled it off in Haiti. But it's a backgrounder, not a news story as such, and one more nail in the coffin for our claims to be the bringers of democracy. We do that when we must.

Bombs Strike Christian Targets in Iraq - AP lets us know its not just the Sunni and Shiite folks at each other. The bad guys know how to really get to us. Bomb Christians. Crusades, anyone?

Religious Groups Get Chunk of AIDS Money - AP lets us know our government is paying the Christian right with our tax money to tell those who might get AIDS no drugs, no condoms, just don't "do it" like God says. Same groups need not follow employment law - hire only their own, fire those who don't read the Bible enough. Not an issue for hyper-religious America now.

Saddam, Defense Team Walk Out of Trial (AP) and Trial chaos as Saddam walks out, half-brother ejected (AFP) - old judge quit and new judge no better - chaos and farce - and as holding elections doesn't make it a democracy, so holding a show trial doesn't make it justice. Confusion of one part for the whole. Will be in the news, but it's just a mess.

Republicans urge Bush to release records on Abramoff - Reuters lists the Republicans, who, worried about the fall mid-term elections, want to seem "clean" - and don't fear Karl Rove that very much any more. A curiosity, and a bother for the president, but no much more than that.

Enron's Lay: Trial will turn out 'fine' - CNN on the trial opening this week. Ken Lay is whistling in the wind. Folks are still angry about Enron, particularly those who lost their retirement savings. Bush still maintains he doesn't really know the guy he nicknamed "Kenny Boy" all that well - and never did. Lay will get creamed. The president has to look clean, now more than ever. Bad news for Lay

Paper: Berlusconi Vows No Sex Until Voting (AP) - Silvio Berlusconi is one odd duck. The Italians are an odd lot. Focus groups gone wild? Who advised this PR stunt? This is something that will just make heads explode all across evangelical America.

Not Just Another Column About Blogging: What Newspaper History Says About Newspaper Future - Jack Shafer at SLATE.COM with a brilliant analysis of how, just as when computers replaced linotype and hot lead (and with a few other factors), the nature of the newspaper changed, so with dirt cheap web media available to anyone, things will change again, in a big way. Fascinating. Not "hot" news, but he's onto something.

Posted by Alan at 22:48 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Monday, 30 January 2006 06:41 PST home

Going Downtown -
Topic: Announcements

Going Downtown -

The new issue of Just Above Sunset, the weekly magazine-format parent site to this web log is now on line. This is Volume 4, Number 5 for the week of Sunday, January 29, 2006 - full of extended and amended versions of what first, appeared here, and a wealth of new items.

This week's commentaries cover, sequentially, the major stories in the national dialog, and some of the minor ones. Did you know last Monday, the 23rd, was the worst day of the year for most people? Some scientist has it all figured out, and the day bore it our with the president giving one more "if I break a law it probably wasn't a very good law for us all" speeches, and some other matters. But Tuesday a columnist out here really ticked off the country, explaining why he just doesn't support the troops. Read all about it. Wednesday, well, the big gun commentators told us all, and you have to respect them, or not - we're either in a heap of trouble, or not. Then there was the election in Palestine, where the whole theory of the wonders of spreading democracy backfired on us, when the folks there elected, in a landslide, the folks they weren't supposed to elect. Oops. Friday was when the stories you want to bury get released, late in the afternoon. We've been doing what? Amazing stuff. The final item explores an underlying political theory the administration is quite fond of - and it's very odd.

Ah, but there's Paris. Our Man in Paris, Ric Erickson, offers an account of a cold Saturday night there, with a fellow from Los Angeles and a woman from Japan, and he somehow wishes he were out here. Two Paris photos there.

Bob Patterson is back, in his WLJ column with some curious political thoughts, and in his Book Wrangler column with a primer on Orwell.

The photography this week? Three extended collections - a famous film location, the old movie palaces downtown, and the street scene on the other Broadway, the one out here in the middle of this city, Los Angeles.

The quotes? They're about humor. As Charlie Chaplin said - "In the end, everything is a gag."

Direct links to specific pages -

Current Events ______________________

Low Points: They Call It Stormy Monday, But Tuesday's Just The Same
Controversy: Maybe honesty isn't actually the best policy…
Perspectives: Those Who Tell Us What It All Really Means
Voting: People Deciding What They're Not Supposed to Decide
Friday Follies: A Media Tradition
Political Theory: Power Doesn't Corrupt, It Forces Pragmatic Dreariness

The International Desk ______________________

Our Man in Paris: Now Playing

Bob Patterson ______________________

WLJ Weekly: from the desk of the World's Laziest Journalist - Are Judas Goats Leading The US Toward A Third Term For Dubya?
Book Wrangler: "How many fingers, Winston?"

Southern California Photography ______________________

Landmark Architecture: On Location at the Bradbury Building
Past Glory: Broadway Movie Palaces, Los Angeles
Street Scenes: In and Around Broadway, Downtown Los Angeles

Quotes for the week of January 29, 1006 - Lighten Up

The interior of the Bradbury Building, as seen in Blade Runner and many other films -



Posted by Alan at 10:41 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Saturday, 28 January 2006
Political Theory: Power Doesn't Corrupt, It Forces Pragmatic Dreariness
Topic: For policy wonks...

Political Theory: Power Doesn't Corrupt, It Forces Pragmatic Dreariness

The old saw is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But put aside consideration of the Republican Party in firm control of the executive and legislative branches of the government, and about to pack the highest court with its newest "yes man," and the coincidental Abramoff lobby scandal, and the former leader of the House under indictment in Texas, and the current leader of the Senate under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Medicare Plan D mess with the pharmaceutical corporations and HMO's raking in the bucks while hundreds of thousands of the elderly and poor suddenly cannot get their medications and the states have to toss in millions so people don't die, and the half-hearted effort to fix New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and all the business with Halliburton and the other contractors in Iraq scamming the system left and right, and the president's supporters, and the president, claiming he can break any law he decides is keeping him from doing what he alone decides is best (eminent scholar and Federal Judge Richard Posner says that's fine here, and discussion here). And disregard the tax cuts that hit the middle class and let the rich get much richer, the budget that cuts services and rewards corporations who make donations to the ruling party, the soaring deficit and all the "pork" in the budget for each home district or state, and all that economic stuff. This isn't about that.

Imagine you're a struggling minority party, one most everyone reviles, and suddenly you're voted into power and have to run things. What do you do then? Does the sudden ascension to full power make you power mad - you can now do all the things you were screaming about - or do have to drop all the inflammatory rhetoric and settle down and do the nuts and bolts things all governments must do, that dreary stuff like making sure everything runs and someone pick up the garbage and the electricity and water keeps flowing?

That is what seems to be playing out in the Middle East. There were those elections Wednesday the 25th in Palestine and the Islamic fundamentalist group, Hamas, to the surprise of everyone, won 76 of the 132 seats on the Palestinian Legislative Council. They didn't expect that themselves. No one expected it. And now they have to run things.

So what will that mean? Of course, Hamas proudly claims responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians - they have a militant arm" - and their core aim is to wipe out Israel. We designate them a "terrorist group" and so does Israel and the European Union. They are not good guys. But then they have long run their network of health-care and social programs for Palestinians, and ran on the platform that the Fatah Party was corrupt and not taking care of its own people - and was talking too much to Israel and the United States.

It seems voters there agreed the relatively moderate Fatah Party was a bunch of crooks and not taking care of things. They threw the bums out. And they got the alternative - the people who do some good, and are a bit more honest - even if they are wild-eyed terrorists willing to kill women and children and plan to wipe out Israel and are shunned in horror by most of the civilized world.

You cannot have everything.

You do get riots in the streets - anger at the old party that lost, the Fatah police and militias screaming this and that. Chaos.

As mentioned elsewhere - People Deciding What They're Not Supposed to Decide - the Bush drive to democratize the Middle East has backfired, big time. Democracies are peaceful, so we'll let folks vote and everything will be fine.

Israel told us this Palestinian election was a really, really bad idea. We told them elections were always good - and they were wrong, Hamas should be on the ballot. Others, in a more general way, suggested holding elections was only a small part of establishing a democracy, in Iraq and in Palestine and anywhere - you need a culture and institutions to make things work, and a shared sense of cooperation and all that. The administration preferred the cartoon version - people vote and things will be fine.

So now Hamas will set policy for the Palestinian Authority. And former Fatah leader Abbas remains president and commander of Palestine's official police force. Yipes.

This wasn't in the script.

How did this happen? Scott MacMillan offers an explanation here -
Critics say Bush himself deserves much of the blame by promoting what Daniel Pipes and others have pejoratively dubbed the "pothole theory" of democracy: the idea that if you allow radical Islamists into the political fold and get them competing for votes - and dealing with mundane civic issues like fixing potholes and collecting garbage - they will, by necessity, turn moderate and palatable. At the very least, so the theory goes, such inclusion will force a split between the "hard men" and those willing to pursue Islamist goals through peaceful means.
Well it's nifty theory.

But Hamas has no idea how to run a government. Hamas asked Fatah to enter into a coalition. Fatah refused, maybe, as MacMillan suggests, because they screwed things up so badly there's no money for anything and everything was so mismanaged there's no fixing it all - let them sink. There's this quote from Ziyad Abu Ein, a Fatah official - "Let Hamas alone bear its responsibilities, if it can."

This is not looking good.

But can the nifty "pothole theory" of democracy actually work, and Hamas turn, well, mundane and harmless? They do have a government to run, after all.

MacMillan says there's evidence it might, noting in London's Financial Times earlier this month, an anonymous senior official in the Bush administration cited two French scholars, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, who have long noted that political Islam becomes less caustic the less it is repressed. But they're French.

But there is this -
In Egypt, the banned Muslim Brotherhood has donned democratic garb since President Hosni Mubarak began tolerating the group in the mid-1980s.

The movement now speaks of pluralism and civil liberties, although its supporters still hate Jews, call the Holocaust "a myth," and dismiss al-Qaida as "an illusion." A similar shift took place in Tunisia between 1975 and 1990, when the national Islamist movement adopted more liberal positions on women's rights and democratic reforms as the government temporarily relaxed its repression.
Well, will this work out in this case? MacMillan acknowledges the commentators who worry that Hamas will create a Taliban-like fundamentalist enclave - "Hamastan" - in the West Bank and Gaza - these folks who say Iran will step in to finance the Palestinian Authority as funding from the European Union, the United States, and Israel goes away. That's possible.

But as is clear, "the more immediate issue is how Hamas will adapt to the reality of the existence of Israel, whose citizens now play the role of lab rats in Bush's grand experiment with potholes and democracy."

Yep, whatever the Hamas rhetoric, Israel is not going to magically disappear without a trace - and one assumes the people of Israel are not happy about being lab rats in this experiment to see if Hamas, of necessity, turns boring and bureaucratically efficient.

We'll see what happens. It is a grand experiment. One suspects many will die as we see if it works, or not. But then again, they won't die here.

Posted by Alan at 16:20 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Saturday, 28 January 2006 16:27 PST home

Friday, 27 January 2006
Friday Follies: A Media Tradition
Topic: Couldn't be so...

Friday Follies: A Media Tradition

As a rule, you manage the news by keeping the bad stuff under wraps until late Friday afternoon. The national broadcast news shows for Friday have by then been set in stone - timed and rehearsed for the twenty-two available minutes in the half-hour. The nifty graphics have all been worked out. And the cable news shows have all been booked and set up. And Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" doesn't air on Friday night. And too, no one much reads the newspapers Saturday morning, and even if a big story breaks, there's no broadcast echo chamber to keep it alive - the cable news folks know that people, if they are in on the weekends, watch sports if they watch anything at all, so they run "in-depth" backgrounders or light fare - stuff about celebrities or travel or health. Here in Los Angeles, the lefty progressive AM station has no "Air America" on the weekends, but does have long blocks of back-to-back half-hour commercials for this cure or that (elixirs and odd quasi-vitamins and other things that drive the few serious folks at the FDA to exasperation). "Saturday Night Live" might offer some satire, but it's material that has been rehearsed all week, and not that very topical.

So you release bad news late Friday, and hope that, by Monday, other matters will have come up and no one will notice.

The Associated Press, Friday, January 27th, at 3:39 in the afternoon (Eastern), ran this -
The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of "leveraging" their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.

In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family's door telling him "to come get his wife."
We're not supposed to do that sort of thing. It's against the rules, and not likely to win the hearts and minds of those who we want to consider us the good guys. And in addition to being illegal and impractical, some might thing it's just wrong. Some might feel it's pretty much kidnapping and blackmail - using the wife and kids to get someone who might be one of the bad guys to agree to anything to free them, or save them from captivity, or from torture, or from death.

One supposes a defense of this would be that this is war, and we lost three thousand of our people five years ago, so, as the aggrieved party, such things should be allowed. Secondary, a defense would be that we wouldn't really harm the wife and kids - we are not bad people - but it's useful of someone we suspect is a bad guy thinks we would do that. We get what we want without actually doing anything bad, like hurting innocent women and children. We just keep them off balance by having them think we're going to get their families - so it's clever and effective without our having to actually do what they might think we'd do. So we keep the moral high ground - we didn't do anything - while the bad guy feels like a fool.

Still, it seems mighty odd, but maybe you actually have to be "in theater" and frustrated and angry to understand why this is an informal policy now. It seems unlikely that the Rumsfeld Department of Defense will say it's official. The hypothetical defense above will come from Rush Limbaugh and the media on the right, and, one assumes, from Alan Dershowitz, the fellow who suggested legalizing torture with what he would call "torture warrants." (Maybe you have to be "in theater" at some Harvard faculty room to get with his thinking.)

Of course, you have to consider this in the context of the kidnapped American journalist Jill Carroll, on assignment in Iraq for the Christian Science Monitor, after the Wall Street Journal laid her off. Her kidnappers threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are freed, and their deadline has long passed - and no one knows if Carroll is dead or alive. On Thursday we did free five of eleven women we say we are holding in Iraq (we hold over fourteen thousand prisoners). No news on Carroll yet.

The "free the women" thing seems to be a big issue. They don't see holding them indefinitely as clever and effective on our part. Yes, we're misunderstood.

The AP item cites two sides to this. Hind al-Salehi, an Iraqi human rights activist (they have those?) is saying that our "anti-insurgent units," coming up empty-handed in raids on suspects' houses, have detained the wives to pressure the men into turning themselves in. But Iraq's deputy justice minister, Busho Ibrahim Ali, dismisses these claims - taking hostages was a tactic used under Saddam Hussein and "we are not Saddam." Good to know. And a command spokesman in Baghdad, one Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, says we only hold really, really bad people in the long-term (never get out) facilities - Iraqis who pose an "imperative threat."

So who are you going to believe? But then we let five women go. Why? We suddenly discovered they were just not "imperative threats." What changed? It's all very odd.

In any event, the Friday afternoon release was two documents about incidents in 2004, the result of an American Civil Liberties Union request for information on detention practices. Yes, Bill O'Reilly has told America that the ACLU is itself a terrorist organization, and thus most Americans agree, but put that aside. They made a Freedom of Information Act request and actually got some documents, whether they had a right to them or not, and whether or not revealing how we wage this war is unpatriotic or not. The government did cough them up, so let O'erilly rant about the Pentagon aiding the terrorists. Let him rant about the evils of the Freedom of Information Act.

Tarmiya, northwest of Baghdad, on May 9, 2004 - a raid on a suspect's house - Task Force (TF) 6-26, a hush-hush military unit formed to handle high-profile targets. One of the senior officers, with fourteen years of experience - "During the pre-operation brief it was recommended by TF personnel that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to leverage the primary target's surrender." He objected. The team leader, a senior sergeant, seized her anyway.

Hey, who's in charge? The Army does promote itself with ads urging young guys to join up and become "an Army of one," but do you disregard your senior officers?

Detail from an intelligence officer later - "The 28-year-old woman had three young children at the house, one being as young as six months and still nursing." She was held for two days and was released after he protested the whole thing. (His name is blacked out. To protect him from the senior sergeant?)

What's going on here? The spokesman, Johnson, said he couldn't judge, months later, just what were the factors that led to this woman's incarceration. Who knows? Stuff happens?

Like most names in the released documents, the officer's signature is blacked out on this for-the-record memorandum about his complaint.

The second incident is from in June 2004 - email exchanges among six Army colonels, discussing female detainees held in northern Iraq by the Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division. A military police colonel advises staff officers of the Northern Command that Iraqi police just wouldn't take control of these jailed women without any charges being brought against them. A command staff officer asking an officer of the unit holding the women - "What are you guys doing to try to get the husband - have you tacked a note on the door and challenged him to come get his wife?" The brigade's deputy commander to his command - "As each day goes by, I get more input that these gals have some info and/or will result in getting the husband. These ladies fought back extremely hard during the original detention. They have shown indications of deceit and misinformation." The command staff colonel, referring to a commanding general - "CG wants the husband." No one knows what happened to the women. No one is saying if the husband (or husbands) gave themselves up. It's very mysterious.

The spokesman, Johnson - "It is clear the unit believed the females detained had substantial knowledge of insurgent activity and warranted being held."

It is?

Well, you could argue these savages have Jill Carroll, so we have the right to do the same. But we did it first, of course.

A bitter Andrew Sullivan here -
You may have heard of the tactic. As a way to leverage information or capture an enemy, terrorists sometimes kidnap innocent women and children in order to put pressure on their husbands or relatives. It's called kidnapping and blackmail. Except that in Rumsfeld's military, the United States now uses the tactic. Sure, it's against the Geneva Conventions. Sure, those Conventions are supposed to apply in Iraq. But this is the Bush administration. King George doesn't have to obey the law; and his military can do anything they want. The Pentagon has gotten used to denying hard evidence of abuse - and no one, of course, has been disciplined for following the instructions given ultimately in Washington. "It's very hard, obviously, from some of these documents to determine what, if anything, actually happened," says the Pentagon spokesman. No, it isn't. And so we slowly descend toward the level of the enemy. Because King George can.
We slowly descend toward the level of the enemy? No, we got there first in this case.

And then there's this. Of course, David P. Gushee doesn't have the moral weight of Pat Robertson, as he's only a professor of moral philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, and author of a book or two. In Christianity Today he offers a detailed theological (and practical and moral) argument that torture is always wrong. He doesn't address kidnapping and blackmail. But he does address those who favor all these things, the administration and the evangelical (we must confront evil with might) right -
It is past time for evangelical Christians to remind our government and our society of perennial moral values, which also happen to be international and domestic laws. As Christians, we care about moral values, and we vote on the basis of such values. We care deeply about human-rights violations around the world. Now it is time to raise our voice and say an unequivocal no to torture, a practice that has no place in our society and violates our most cherished moral convictions.
Ah, but then the bad guys win, and no one is safe, and we all die.

So, shall we smite others for God? The argument now is that this is what real Christians do - like Sampson they take up the jawbone of the ass and kill them all, women and children included. (It's in the Bible - Judges 15:15). Gushee is, it seems, just weak, and not a real Christian.

None of it matters. The kidnap-the-wife-and-kids-for-the-greater-good story will be gone Monday. Other things will come up.

This late-week story will be gone too, a detail of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

As reported in the New York Times here, the chief of the Justice Department's public integrity division, Noel Hillman, who has been leading the Abramoff lobbying investigation for two years, is suddenly gone. President Bush has nominated him for a federal judgeship and he has resigned -
Colleagues at the Justice Department say Mr. Hillman has been involved in day-to-day management of the Abramoff investigation since it began almost two year ago. The inquiry, which initially focused on accusations that Mr. Abramoff defrauded Indian tribes out of tens of millions of dollars in lobbying fees, is being described within the department as the most important federal corruption investigation in a generation.
Bye, Noel.

That's convenient, and will throw the investigation into disarray, as they say. It was getting too close to the White House.

Of course, the appointment had been suggested by two Democrats from New Jersey - more than a year ago.

Funny thing it should happen now. The Times quotes a White House spokesman saying it had nothing to do with the Abramoff investigation. Just a coincidence.

Right. And this was timed badly as the nomination was listed late Wednesday night. That gave Democrat senators Chuck Schumer and Ken Salazar - and two Congressman - time to call for the appointment of a special prosecutor, and time to write Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a letter, and time to hit the media -
The timing of Mr. Hillman's nomination "jaundices this whole process," Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said in an interview. "They have to appoint a special counsel. I think there will be broad support for one."
Maybe. Maybe not. The Republicans control congress. They'd love this to go away. And the damage is already done, so what would be the point?

This did hit the media - MSNBC late Friday on "Countdown" - but as fishy as it seems, that was too late to cause real damage. The weekend was all but already underway. The timing was good enough.

Other items that were well timed?

Canada elected a new government - conservative in the American style - and that was going swimmingly. Bush called the new Canadian leader, Stephen Harper, and they chatted for fifteen minutes. There was much crowing in the conservative media south of the border that now Canada would dump it socialized medicine program and go the American way - expensive, barely regulated private health insurance only for those who could afford it - and repeal gay marriage and stop being so lenient with pot smokers and close those swingers clubs, and send troops to Iraq and allow us to build our anti-missile defense units all over the uppers reaches of that cold place. Harper agrees with some of that, but doesn't have enough votes for any of it. But then, late in the week, things turned sour, as you can read in the AP story here and the Independent (UK) story here.

Things came to a head at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, late in the week, where Harper and our ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, appeared together for a bit of a chat. (Disclaimer: this writer lived and worked in this particular London, halfway between Toronto and Detroit, for two years, and found the city wonderful, and the people even more wonderful.)

Wilkins casually commented that now all the artic waters - the North-west Passage - were "neutral waters" and would be open to everyone (global warming has freed up a lot of possible new shipping lanes) and having Harper in command was way cool (not his words, but that was the idea). Harper reminded Wilkins that those waters were Canadian territorial waters, no matter what Bush and Wilkins now thought - "The United States defends its sovereignty, the Canadian government will defend our sovereignty. It is the Canadian government we get our mandate from, not the ambassador of the United States."

Ouch.

What did Bush and Wilkins expect? Harper is not Tony Blair. The Canadians are not fools.

From the Independent -
The assumption here is that Canada's new leader was sending a message that he would be no pushover for Washington.

With global warming steadily melting the passage, the period during which it is navigable is growing year by year, offering access to untapped fish stocks, and a shipping route that shortens the journey between Europe and Asia by almost 2,500 miles.

But climate change also provides new opportunities for smugglers and traffickers. For that reason, Canada's new leadership says, it must assert its sovereignty over the remote area.

Control of the Arctic sea lanes has long been a contentious issue, with the US in particular sending submarines through waters claimed by Canada. During the Cold War - and perhaps even now - British, Russian and French submarines also traveled under the ice. But without the resources to enforce its sovereignty, Ottawa generally turned a blind eye.

That attitude may now be changing. During the campaign, Mr Harper said he would send three armed Canadian Navy icebreakers to the North-west Passage, and build a $1.7bn (#995m) deep-water port in Iqaluit in south-east Baffin Island. The new government also plans a network of underwater "listening posts" to monitor sea traffic.
Harper hasn't yet said whether he would order military action if these ships or this new port detected an unauthorized submarine in Arctic waters.

Well, President Bush may be King George south of the border, and if he told the Brits they had stop playing cricket and play baseball, and had to drive on the correct side of the road (top right), they would, and apologize for having had it wrong all this time.

The Canadians know an arrogant fool when they see one. And they know hereditary royalty is pleasant, but insignificant.

Of course, the story that was getting play at the end of the week was something that is just not going to happen, the filibuster to stop the appointment of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. That is being led by John Kerry (he explains himself here). Ted Kennedy is with him, but the numbers don't work out and the rest of the Democrats would rather not raise a stink. The guy will mostly likely do his best to overturn Roe v. Wade, and has long held the president is not required to follow any law he sees as cumbersome (at least if the president was Reagan or would be Bush). He generally thinks the police can do no wrong, and folks who sue for discrimination are without standing, and so on. But it comes down to the rest of the Democratic Party not wanting to look like "negative people" no matter what principles are involved - and, yes, the votes aren't there.

On the other side, they're itching for another opening. Ann Coulter Thursday night said she thought that that liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned, to free up another seat for a real conservative (details here). But she said she was joking. But she said with Alito at least now there'd be a "fair vote" on abortion. Charming woman. But not negative? Nope. Just kidding around.

The president's poll numbers are lousy on all issues (late week Gallup results here), but there's no alternative. The Democrats cannot agree with each other, and John Paul Stevens might want to be careful about his desserts. Coulter may be joking. Many take her seriously.

And John Kerry just cannot catch a break.

There's the problem with Iran building nuclear weapons. There seems no good way to stop this, but the president latched onto the Russians' suggestion - let Russia make the nuclear fuel and process the waste, but Iran runs the reactors for power, just as they claim was the idea in the first place. Call their bluff. Bush loves it.

But as noted here, that was exactly what John Kerry proposed when he ran for president. Back then Bush said it was "ignorant" and "dangerously wrong." It rewarded Iran for bad behavior.

Is that so?

The Bush supporters are all upset (see this) but Bush says - "I think that is a good plan. The Russians came up with the idea and I support it," he added.

He has a short memory. His supporters do not.

So the weekend will be John Kerry, drinking heavily. And these stories will all be eclipsed by what comes next.

Posted by Alan at 22:43 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 27 January 2006 22:55 PST home

Thursday, 26 January 2006
Voting: People Deciding What They're Not Supposed to Decide
Topic: Couldn't be so...

Voting: People Deciding What They're Not Supposed to Decide

Thursday, January 26th was a day of one momentous story, but the others wouldn't go away. Out here on the far side of the continent we woke to the news about the Palestinian Authority elections. The Hamas Party, which has called for the annihilation of Israel - that's what they do - overwhelmed the ruling Fatah Party. They won the election in a landslide, and the Fatah government resigned. Maybe the Fatah Party has been stringing Israel along for the last few years, talking nice and doing little, but they made the right sounds.

Of course, both the United States and Israel designate Hamas a terrorist group - and both have now pledged not to negotiate with the party if it does not change its platform. And that seems unlikely. The CNN account is here, the Washington Post account here, and the Israeli view ("we won't deal with the folks"), in the Jerusalem Post is here.

This is quite a mess. The whole neoconservative "reverse domino theory" seems to have gone down in flames.

As you recall, the idea was that we would toss out Saddam Hussein and our guy, Ahmed Chalabi, with his band of exiles who had been living here in the United States, would then rule Iraq, turning it into some sort of Jeffersonian free-market secular democracy. Chalabi even promised the new Iraq would recognize Israel - full diplomatic relations and all that. This would go so well everyone in the area would see what a fine thing Jeffersonian free-market secular democracy really was, and it would spread like wildfire in the region. There'd be elections and the people would do the right thing. The Palestinians would then realize they were on the wrong side of history, and agree to some sort of two-nation arrangement with Israel, and the lion would lie down with the lamb, and so forth and so on.

As theories go, this one was pretty nifty. The president is fond of saying it's our job to spread democracy, because democratic nations are peaceful and if everyone gets to vote, no one will fight, and everything will work out just fine. And all the voting in Iraq resulted, in the end, in a theocratic Shiite-Kurd government, aligned with Iran, with an Interior Ministry staffed by thugs who go out and kill Sunnis and their families, with subsidiary militias bullying anyone they feel like bullying. The Brits, trying to keep the lid on things in Basra, have been arresting police officials there, as this is way out of hand. There are reports (the Los Angeles Times has been on the story), that we're trying to convince the ruling Shiite guys to put a token Sunni or neutral person in some of the new ministries, but that's not going well.

The theory bumped up against the reality - give people the vote and they may not vote for what you want. They tend to vote for what they want. You have to account for that. You don't just hope for the best, or assume what you want to happen will happen. Heck, Ahmed Chalabi didn't get a whole lot of representation in the new Iraq government; in fact, he didn't get enough votes to get a seat even for himself. This is not what was supposed to happen. What's wrong with these people?

Well, the neoconservatives are asking that of the Iraqis, and the rest of us are asking the same thing about the neoconservatives.

Now we have the Palestinians just not doing what they were supposed to do. They're messing up the theory.

Andrew Sullivan puts it well here -
Here's the nightmare we foreign policy neocons haven't fully come to grips with. What if a country democratically elects a terror-sponsoring leadership? We already know that democracies, like Britain or Holland or France, spawn Islamofascists among their citizenry. Now, in the Palestinian territories, we have an aggressively terrorist democratically-elected regime. And the margin is a landslide. We can hope that eventually citizens demand accountability from their leaders and will nudge them toward the civilizing aspects of democratic government: building roads, running schools, delivering services. But what if even this is all done within a theocratic-terrorist paradigm? Democracy is not itself a panacea. It never was. What happened yesterday represents one critical pillar beneath the Bush foreign policy crumbling into dust.
And the president called a surprise news conference shortly after the result of the vote was clear, because, one assumes, his folks told him it was time for some damage control - the whole theory of "let them vote and only good things will happen" was looking silly.

The White House transcript of the press conference is here, but the words on the page don't begin to convey how bizarre the thing seemed. This was major league tap-dancing. Of course he praised the democratic process - people sometimes voted out those they felt had not done a good job. Voting is good. (Maybe after everything from the missing WMD to the business with Hurricane Katrina to the business with the Medicare drug plan making everyone - young, old, left and right - furious, he shouldn't have said that.) But then he said he hoped the Fatah leaders who resigned would reconsider and keep running the government over there. Huh? What about the election? They lost, George. That's how these things work. They will have a new government. And then he said we wouldn't work with this new government at all, unless they stopped standing for everything they've always stood for, even if they were definitively elected.

Well, he was in a tough spot. And he wanted to reassure us all. Don't worry about this too much. Should we trust him on that?

Well, this is what we signed up for. He's told us that. He had his "accountability moment" with the 2004 election, and whatever he does is what we obviously want. No one has any right to complain. You can have your say when you vote in late 2007 for whoever follows him.

There was, of course, a lot of whistling in the dark over all this Palestinian election from other quarters. You have to make the best of what you've got.

There was this in the International Herald Tribune - Uri Dromi, director of international outreach at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem, calling the results of the election a "blessing is disguise" as all the cards are on the table now -
Come to think of it, I am glad that Hamas won the elections. Things might now become much clearer. There will be no whitewashing, no Arafat-style double-talk, or endless Abbas impotence. It's better to deal with a pure enemy: Fight him ruthlessly while he is your enemy, and sit down and talk to him when he is genuinely willing to cut a deal. History has seen such things happen.
Well, that's one was to look at it.

And there's Emanuele Ottolenghi, who teaches Israel studies at Oxford University, writing in the National Review with this -
Contrary to initial responses, Hamas's projected victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections is a positive development. Not, as its apologists claim, because the proximity of power will favor a process of cooptation into parliamentary politics, and therefore strengthen the pragmatic wing of Hamas. There is no pragmatic wing in Hamas, and all differences within the movement - the armed wing and the political wing, Palestine Hamas and Hamas in Syria - are arguably tactical differences. No, the reason is, as Vladimir Ilich Lenin would put it, "worse is better."
It is? Maybe so.

The president was probably relieved when the topic turned to other matters, like the NSA warrantless "search all the email mail and telephone conservations" thing.

Our friend, Ric Erickson, the editor of MetropoleParis, fired off an email to Hollywood, about those other matters.

He notes the New York Times, reporting on Bush's press conference, has this -
Asked if he would support efforts in Congress to spell out his authority to continue the eavesdropping program, Bush cited what he said was the extreme delicacy of the operation.

''But it's important for people to understand that this program is so sensitive and so important that if information gets out to how we run it or how we operate it, it'll help the enemy,'' he said. ''Why tell the enemy what we're doing?''

''We'll listen to ideas. If the attempt to write law is likely to expose the nature of the program, I'll resist it,'' the president said.
Ric's comment -
Has anybody suggested that the NSA explain to American taxpayers how it works?

I'll expose the 'nature of program.' The NSA is reading everybody's mail, listening to their conversations. Americans know it, foreigners know it, good guys know it and bad guys know it. Bad guys are taking counter-measures without waiting for Bush to tell them anything. The rest of us are cringing.

Is there any particular reason that GW Bush did not say anything about the legality of the warrantless searches? Does he think some new law must be written to make them legal? Or is he happier with things as they are?

Has he decided that he's not going to tell us that he's ignoring the law? Who was it that said, 'ignorance is not a valid defense?'

Just as not talking about something is not a valid defense.
Ric signs that "Curious in Paris." But of course, it's easy to see things clearly from Paris. You're not bombarded with US entertainment-based news shows about it all. You have the luxury of many sources of information, and can be logical and everything. (See the former CNN guy Aaron Brown, the same day, with this - "The truth no longer matters in cable news.")

For Ric I found a run-down of the what's going on, from Tim Grieve, here -
George W. Bush took another shot at defending his warrantless spying program this morning, saying once again that Congress gave him the authority to initiate the secret program when it passed its use-of-force authorization in 2001. That authorization gave the administration "the power to conduct this war using the incidents of war," Bush said. "Congress says, 'Go ahead and conduct the war, we're not going to tell you how to do it.'"

That may be how the White House interprets the use-of-force authorization now, but it wasn't how it viewed it back in 2001.

As the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has explained, the White House initially proposed a use-of-force authorization that was much broader than the one Congress ultimately approved. In the original White House version, the president would have been given authority to use "all necessary and appropriate force" to "deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States." As CRS has said, that language would have "seemingly authorized the president, without durational limitation, at his sole discretion" to take military action against anyone anywhere in the name of preventing terrorism. Congress balked at such a broad grant of authority, rewriting the White House draft in such a way that made it clear that the president could use such force only against those who attacked the United States on 9/11 or were materially involved in helping or harboring them.

As that draft was about to go to the Senate floor for a vote, the White House tried one more time to broaden the scope of the resolution. As then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle has explained, the White House came to him on the eve of the vote on the resolution to ask for additional language that would have authorized the president to use force "in the United States" as well as outside of it. Daschle refused. "This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act - but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens," Daschle explained last month. "I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused."

In light of this legislative history, it's clear that Congress didn't write Bush a blank check for conducting the war however he saw fit - and that the White House didn't think that the president was getting that kind of authority at the time Congress was acting.

But the president doesn't seem much concerned with history of any sort. He said today that prior presidents have also believed that they had the power to do what's necessary to keep the country safe; it was apparently a reference to the White House's discredited "Clinton did it, too" argument. And Bush stressed that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - in which Congress set forth clear standards the White House has ignored - was passed way back in 1978. "We're having a discussion in 2006," the president said. "It's a different world."

Maybe that's right. A lot has changed since the late 1970s, but acts of Congress don't expire just because time passes or the world changes. The White House failed in its attempts to get broader authority from Congress in 2001, and it rejected an effort to ease the FISA rules in 2002. Having done so, it's in no position now to argue that the president was free to ignore the law because it was out-of-date or obsolete.
Maybe so, but that is what he is arguing, and no one in the mainstream media want to tell him he's full of crap.

Some are worried, and see what Ric sees from Paris, like Jacob Weisberg here - "Is Bush turning America into an elective dictatorship? - It's tempting to dismiss the debate about the National Security Agency spying on Americans as a technical conflict about procedural rights. President Bush believes he has the legal authority ..." And he runs down all the details.

Weisberg ends by saying all these theories of unfettered executive authority "as the lawyers say, prove too much" -
The Article II plus AUMF justification for warrant-less spying is essentially the same one the administration has advanced to excuse torture; ignore the Geneva Conventions; and indefinitely hold even U.S. citizens without a hearing, charges, or trial. Torture and detention without due process are bad enough. But why does this all-purpose rationale not also extend to press censorship or arresting political opponents, were the president to deem such measures vital to the nation's security?

I don't suggest that Bush intends anything of the kind - or that even a Congress as supine as the current one would remain passive if he went so far. But the president's latest assertion that he alone can safeguard our civil liberties isn't just disturbing and wrong. It's downright un-American.
That may be clear from Paris, but even here some are wondering.

And there's spill-over. The man nominated to the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito, who subscribes to these theories, is facing some opposition. The New York Times has called for a filibuster of the nomination, and Senator Kerry is trying to organize one. It won't happen, but there's something in he air. One poll shows fifty-two percent of Americans would like to see Bush impeached if he has broken the law that was supposed to keep the government from snooping in all our lives.

We live in interesting times. And maybe here, not just in Palestine and Iraq, folks will vote for what they want. Of course there are these new voting machines. Oh well.

Posted by Alan at 23:27 PST | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 27 January 2006 06:22 PST home

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