As seen from Just Above Sunset

Wednesday, 25 August 2004

Topic: Making Use of History

History - The Liberation of Paris (and the rise of California)

Wednesday, August 25, 2004 looking back on August 25, 1944 - sixty years after Paris was liberated from the German occupiers....

Ric Erickson over at MetropoleParis has many details of what's up in the city on the anniversary. Check it out.

Ric additionally sends this along by email from the scene -

The entry of the French 2nd Armored Division was re-enacted today in front of the city hall of the 14th arrondissement. There were Parisians costumed in WWII French and US uniforms, and as civilians were dressed in 1944. There were scout motorcycles, jeeps, army trucks, a DUK, a half-track with four Brownings, plus some FFI rides, a firetruck and some old Renaults and Citroens.

There was a popular band on a flat-deck and a marching band on the city hall steps. Stage producer Jerome Savary, responsible for this evening's big dance show at the Bastille - and for organizing 1944-era dance lessons using the Hotel de Ville ballroom as a rehearsal hall - was on hand to say a few words mangled by a defective sound system. Schoolgirls sang a popular air of the times, and Parisians in their costumes danced, with flags fluttering.

Just as the rain started the motorcycles were fired up, to lead the ensemble out of the place and over to the Avenue Leclerc, to make the run northwards to the city center. The heavy rain had almost stopped by the time the historical parade reached Denfert-Rochereau, no more than 500 metres away. This place, named for a hero of the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian conflict, was partially renamed for Col. Rol-Tanguy, leader of the FFI resistance fighters. His headquarters were located in the underground catacombs which have their entry in this place.

The parade stalled by accident or design at Denfert-Rochereau, enabling more Parisians to show off their recently acquired jitterbugging skills. Later the parade reached the Luxembourg, which was a scene of heavy fighting on this day 60 years ago. The parade eventually wound through a very crowded Quartier Latin, to the Pont Neuf.

There was a parallel parade, starting from the Place d'Italie. It represented the 4th US Army Division that also entered Paris in tandem with the French 2nd Armored Division. Originally, it was another unit of the French 2nd that entered Paris here, almost entirely manned by Spanish Republicans. The American division came into Paris more from the west in 1944.

Besides a popular 'bal' staged by the French Senat at the Luxembourg Place, there was a solemn ceremony of remembrance at the Hotel de Ville. According to today's papers there was to have been a modern military display of some sort in the Place de la Concorde.

The stage show at Bastille tonight is also supposed to be followed by a popular 'bal' there, but the weather isn't cooperating. Live TV coverage is supposed to begin just after midnight; perhaps as a recap of the day's festivities. Unlike the formal military parades on 14 July and 11 November, all Parisians were invited to take part in today's parades.

And Ric send these shots -

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Additional comments on the day sixty years ago from this:

60 years of memory: Paris of myth, Paris of reality
Mary Blume, International Herald Tribune (Paris) Wednesday, August 25, 2004

... Analyzing the event is like taking apart a birthday cake. What does matter is the emotion Albert Camus described in the Resistance paper Combat: "This huge Paris, all dark and warm in the summer night, with a storm of bombers overhead and a storm of snipers in the streets, seems to us more brightly lighted than the City of Light the whole world used to envy. It is bursting with the fires of hope and suffering, it has the flame of lucid courage and the glow, not only of liberation but of tomorrow's liberty."

... The past, with its defeatist generals and complaisant Parliament who voted Marshal Henri-Philippe P?tain to power by a great majority, was unthinkable, the future unimaginable. "I calmed down and lived wholly in the present," Simone de Beauvoir wrote. The present meant seeking heat in the Caf? de Flore and cooking up her infamous turnip sauerkraut. "But previously the present had meant a happy proliferation of new schemes in which the future bulked large; reduced to itself alone, it crumbled away into dust. Not only time but space had contracted."

... If everyone has his or her own Paris, arguably the city is most important to Americans who, unlike older civilizations, came to it unlumbered by history, tradition or fancy lifestyles of their own. Even Ben Franklin took up flirting in Paris in order to be ? la mode; others studied science or political theory, wrote books or just loafed, moving eastward, as Malcolm Cowley wrote, into new prairies of the mind.

It cannot be claimed that Paris welcomes foreigners, distrusting the Other as it does, but in ignoring them it tolerates them; it is accommodating in its indifference.

"I have a feeling that there's a voice saying take it or leave it, kid," said Mavis Gallant, who has gladly taken it. "I have lived half my life in Paris," Gertrude Stein said. "Not the half that made me, but the half in which I made what I made."

One thing Americans liked from the start about Paris was that while they fully enjoyed its sensual pleasures they felt they had retained their native virtue. "We have not as much refinement, but more of everything that is good," a New Yorker wrote to his son in the mid-19th century.

This moral self-satisfaction persists. Parisians, for the most part, don't think a lot about high-minded ideas, these having been resolved by the heavy thinkers memorized in the lyc?e. Americans trumpet moral views and find them, especially to their cost today, hard to enact. Americans want to do the right thing, not realizing it can be plural. Parisians want to do things the right way; that is, with precision and style. This can require more discipline than many realize: being Parisian is not a free ticket to indulgence.

The Parisian is deeply superficial, the American superficially profound. This should balance out, but the French are more complicated than we are, as Henry James noted in a letter telling a friend not to be put off "by what I might call the superficial and external aspect of the superficial and external aspect of Paris."

New Yorkers are merely self-absorbed but Parisians are world-class narcissists. This is a city made for preening, and the endless public grandstanding, physical and intellectual, may shock Americans, but in our innermost hearts wouldn't we love to gaze at ourselves in the mirror with unabashed delight and let fall from our lips a well-timed and irresistible mot juste?

The differences are endless, the similarities often more than skin-deep. Maybe we all need a Paris. What Paris is, and not just for Americans, is wishful thinking come true, whatever the wish.

Sixty years ago, the wishes ranged from the most basic (more meat) to the most lofty (peace forever). Many agreed that the thing they had most missed was the freedom to speak. "Paris is fighting today so that France may speak up tomorrow," Camus said. Speaking up meant daring to hope out loud. "Peace," Camus said "will return to this disemboweled earth and to those hearts tortured by hope and memories.... Happiness, tenderness will have their moment." He was surely speaking to the dead as to the living.

You might want to click on the link and read the whole item.
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Other items of interest -

'You can't know how wonderful it was to finally battle in the daylight'
Jon Henley talks to Madeleine Riffaud, a Resistance fighter who helped save the city
Saturday August 21, 2004 in the Guardian (UK) -

August 15 1944 Paris police and metro workers begin all-out strike, followed the next day by postal workers

August 17 German-controlled state radio stops broadcasting; BBC reveals capture of Chartres and Orleans. Heated debate by resistance officials on when to call uprising. Raoul Nordling, Swedish consul, negotiates prisoner exchange that frees Madeleine Riffaud. Marshal Petain, head of Vichy government, told to leave France

August 18 Collaborationist press fails to appear. General mobilisation of Paris declared

August 19 First fighting of the uprising. Several government buildings taken. Police occupy their HQ. German commander Dietrich von Choltitz makes first contact with Resistance.

August 20 Street-fighting continues. US 4th Infantry crosses Seine. De Gaulle lands at Cherbourg. Paris city hall occupied peacefully.

August 21 Street fighting. General Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division send advance detachment to Paris. First Resistance newspapers on sale.

August 22 Street fighting reaches peak. Barricades all over the city. US general Omar Bradley gives Leclerc order to advance on Paris.

August 23 Von Choltitz receives order from Hitler to raze Paris to ground. Leclerc runs into resistance near Orly.

August 24 2nd Armoured fights on. Advance detachment, escorted by Resistance, reaches city hall in evening.

August 25 Von Choltitz signs formal act of surrender at Paris police HQ in afternoon. De Gaulle appears at city hall.

August 26 A million people crowd Champs-Elys?es for De Gaulle's victory parade.

August 31 Seat of provisional French government transferred to Paris.

From l'Agence France-Presse (AFP) by way of The Tocqueville Connection an interesting detail here -

For the French, the liberation of Paris stands as a stirringly patriotic moment. Unlike the D-Day and Provence landings, which were led by US and British forces, the first Allied forces the Parisians saw in the streets were their own countrymen, followed by the Americans.

Therese Henry, 74, told AFP of her experience that day: "On the 25th and in the days following, the Americans gave us chocolate bars with hazelnuts and almonds in them. I never again tasted chocolate that good."

De Gaulle, the designated leader of the free French forces, marched in victory along the famed Champs-Elysees the day after Paris's liberation, on August 26, and attended a mass in the Notre-Dame cathedral to give thanks for the city's liberation.

On Thursday, Chirac -- who sees himself as de Gaulle's political heir -- will attend a mass at Notre-Dame, following in his predecessor's footsteps.

And this below is good - and contains these lines - Nick rolled his eyes when I described to him how I had held forth to Sartre. "Him big cheese in some circles," he commented.

Paris: 1946
Paula Fox - Paris Review - Summer, 2004 - Issue 170 (with link to and interview with the author)

But Le Nouvel Observateur (Semaine du jeudi 19 ao?t 2004 - n?2076) at the kiosks all over Paris this week points to the future. The past is Paris. The future is out here in California, the home of Just Above Sunset.

Here are some of the items -

Californie : Voyage au pays du future

300 km par jour pour travailler ? Los Angeles
Des champignons dans le d?sert
Pour ?chapper ? la saturation immobili?re de L. A., les nouveaux urbains font pousser des villes au milieu de nulle part
(Yeah, folks do commute from Apple Valley to work in Los Angeles - day in and day out.)

Des puces et des hommes
Plong?e dans la soci?t? de demain
C'est l'endroit le plus high-tech de la plan?te mais les machines ? laver y ont parfois vingt ans de retard. Et si ce mariage du pass? et de l'avenir ?tait une des cl?s du g?nie californien?

Aime ton chien comme toi-m?me
Ici, on peut confier ses poissons rouges ? une clinique de remise en forme et faire cloner son chat. Ici, on entend instituer le droit au bonheur des animaux
(To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, "They shant clone Harriet.")

Retour aux racines
Dans l'Etat le plus riche des Etats-Unis, la derni?re mode est ? l'asc?se, ? la m?ditation, ? la protection de la plan?teet aux plaisirs simples et bruts de la vie de pionnier
(Yes, there is a Zen ashram up in the Hollywood Hills not far from here.)

La ru?e vers l'eau
N?cessit? ou g?chis, la Californie a puis? plus que sa part dans le fleuve Colorado et les lacs environnants. Devra-t-elle se rationner?
(Always a problem here, as the city was built in a desert.)

Note also Myl?ne Farmer's breathy pop ditty has these words -

A?roport, a?rogare
Mais pour tout l'or m'en aller
C'est le blues, le coup de cafard
Le check out assur?
Vienne la nuit et sonne l'heure
Et moi je meurs
Entre apathie et pesanteur
O? je demeure
Changer d'optique, prendre l'exit
Et m'envoyer en Am?rique
Sex appeal, c'est Sunset
C'est Marlboro qui me sourit
Mon amour, mon moi, je
Sais qu'il existe
La chaleur de l'abandon
C'est comme une symphonie

C'est sexy le ciel de Californie
Sous ma peau j'ai L.A. en overdose ...

[You can download this in MP3 format here.]

This song from the album Anamorphos?e (1995) did well in France and French-speaking Canada (saw the music video several times when I was living in Canada and it looked as if it actually had been filmed in the courtyard of the apartment building where I live, down by the pool). The album was recorded at the old A&M Studios six blocks east of here, on La Brea, one block south of Sunset Boulevard. The French love California?

Oh yes, Le Nouvel Observateur has the usual political item.

La n?buleuse anti-Bush

Pour battre le pr?sident sortant, ils organisent des concerts, l?vent des millions de dollars et alertent des milliers d'activistes par internet. Ils ont dop? la campagne de John Kerry

Bruce Springsteen, REM, Jackson Browne, James Taylor en tourn?e pour MoveOn. Un joli coup de plus pour la nouvelle star de la campagne pr?sidentielle am?ricaine! MoveOn? Certainement pas un groupe de rock, encore moins un parti, et ? peine une organisation: avec seulement quatre permanents, mieux vaudrait parler d'un r?seau. C'est pourtant cette n?buleuse de 2 millions de membres qui a convaincu le Boss et ses potes rockers de se lancer dans une s?rie de concerts pour un ?Vote for change?. Les concerts anti-Bush, annonce Eli Pariser, le directeur de MoveOn, constitueront ?la sonnette d'alarme pour l'?lection la plus importante de notre vie?...
MoveOn et consorts sont-ils en train de r?inventer le Parti d?mocrate et la politique am?ricaine en g?n?ral? Trop t?t pour le dire, mais le mouvement a largement d?pass? le stade de l'?piph?nom?ne. Quand Howard Dean s'est pris une racl?e lors des primaires, d?but 2004, on avait beaucoup rican? sur cette n?buleuse internet qui le soutenait. Cette frange d'?lecteurs plus jeunes et plus ? gauche que l'ensemble de la population n'avait pas pes? lourd devant la volont? g?n?rale de d?signer un candidat centriste cr?dible face ? Bush. Mais John Kerry s'est empress? d'emprunter ? la campagne Dean son savoir-faire pour la lev?e de fonds par internet. MoveOn, ACT (America Coming Together) et une n?buleuse de ?comit?s d'action politique? ou de ?groupes de pression? ont pris une importance chaque jour plus grande dans cette campagne.

A l'exception des partisans de Ralph Nader, toute la gauche est aujourd'hui rang?e sous la banni?re ABB (Anybody But Bush - n'importe qui plut?t que Bush). ...

You get the idea.

But back to the past - Wednesday's French national dailies. -

Posted by Alan at 11:45 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Wednesday, 25 August 2004 17:31 PDT home

Tuesday, 24 August 2004

Topic: Election Notes

Spite and its uses... Why One Votes for Bush

Why one votes for Bush? You will find this comment at the end of the last column, From the Department of Useless Advice - "...half the country likes this child bully who can sucker-punch the skinny, brainy wimp and get away with it. Hey, it is entertaining - and plays to the secret fantasy of so many who feel life, and brainy wimps who get along with the French, have treated them unfairly and mocked their lack of education and their simple incurious values and tell them life is complicated when it really isn't."

Here - (Mark Ames in the NY PRESS - Volume 17, Issue 23), curiously, this is explained in great detail - and this is an executive summary with key quotes -

PREMISE: In this country, tens of millions of people choose to watch Fox News not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness. They are attracted to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with accompanying reallys and uh-huhs to show that they're listening to the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than he really is.

PROPOSITION: What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left's wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America's rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left.

THE POWERLESS VOTE OUT OF SPITE AND ENVY: This explains the mystery of why Bush still has a chance of winning in November, even though most Americans acknowledge that his presidency is little more than a series of slapstick fuck-ups with apocalyptic consequences. Inspector Clouseau meets the Book of Revelations. Close to half of this country will support Bush simply to spite that part of America that it sees as most threatened by the Iraq debacle. If the empire ends up collapsing into that filthy, sizzling hellhole in the desert, if more terrorists are created to help set off dirty bombs in Manhattan or Los Angeles, our spiteful voter has a real chance of finally achieving some empowerment.

... Spite voting is mostly a white male phenomenon, which is why a majority of white males vote Republican. It comes from a toxic mix of thwarted expectations, cowardice and anomie that is unique to the white American male experience.

... One look at Bush and you'll know why: Bush is the privileged frat-boy/jock asshole that every spiteful male recognizes from his school days. Spiteful males may have supported him in the past, but only because Bush's cartoonish stupidity gave a daily dose of stomach cramps to the responsible, concerned Americans who voted for Gore. And really, what white male in his spiteful mind could possibly have voted for Al Gore, with that pained "Am I pleasing you?" smile he beamed at you? Spiteful white males don't want to be pleased-they want other people to be displeased.

Of course the whole item is much more detailed, and angrier. This summary is, after all, only that, a summary.

Read the essay here.

What to conclude? Never underestimate the power of spite. The old adage that some people will cut of their nose to spite their face? Maybe that applies here in some way.

The Bush campaign as planned by Karl Rove effectively harnesses this spite. What possible counter effort can his progressive-liberal-Panglossian opponents mount?

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PANGLOSSIAN
ADJECTIVE: Blindly or naively optimistic.
ETYMOLOGY: After Pangloss, an optimist in Candide, a satire by Voltaire (1694-1778).

A Voltaire quote -
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O, Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." (Letter to M. Damilaville - May 16, 1767)

Posted by Alan at 15:05 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Election Notes

From the Department of Useless Advice

Previously in The Story That Won't Die - leading to a precise definition of cowardice.... you will find passages from Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo where Marshall makes a brief argument about George Bush, asserting he is a specific kind of coward, a moral coward.

Marshall elaborates a bit a day later (Tuesday, August 24, 2004) and gives us this, and the excerpt here is only a taste. The emphases in bold are mine.

I'm not sure this is good campaign advice for John Kerry.

The current debate about these two men's military service has put the spotlight on physical courage. But that really is a side issue in this campaign, if we're talking substance. The real issue isn't physical bravery but moral cowardice.

President Bush is an exemplar of that quality in spades. And it cuts directly to his failures as president. Forget about thirty years ago, just think about the last three years.

Before proceeding on to that, one other point about the two men's service. On the balance sheet of moral bravery, as opposed to physical bravery, the two men are about as far apart as you can be on Vietnam. On the one hand you have Kerry, who already had doubts about whether we should be fighting in Vietnam before he went, and put his life on the line anyway. On the other hand, you have George W. Bush who supported the war, which means he believed the goal was worth the cost in American lives. Only, not his life. He believed others should go; just not him. It's the story of his life.

That is almost the definition of moral cowardice.

We have a more immediate sense of what physical bravery and cowardice are. In fact, when we speak of bravery and cowardice, the physical variety is almost always what we're talking about. It's whether or not you can charge an enemy position while you're be fired at. It's whether you're immobilized by the fear of death.

Moral cowardice is more complex. A moral coward is someone who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility, to demand accountability, to do what's right when it's not the easy thing to do, to clean up his or her own messes. Perhaps we could say that moral bravery is having both the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your misdeeds.

As I've been saying here for the last couple days, the issue isn't that Bush ducked service in Vietnam. It's that he tries to smear other people's meritorious service without taking responsibility for what he's doing. He gets other people to do his dirty work for him.

... The key for the Kerry campaign to make is that the president's moral cowardice is why we're now bogged down in Iraq. It's a key reason why almost a thousand Americans have died there. President Bush has set the tone for this administration and his moral cowardice permeates it.

Consider only the most obvious examples.

The president didn't think he could convince the public of the merits of his reasons for going to war. So he lied to them. He greatly exaggerated what was thought to be the evidence of weapons of mass destruction and completely manufactured a connection between Iraq and al Qaida. He couldn't get the country behind him on the up-and-up. So he took the easy way out; he took a shortcut; he deceived them. And now the country is paying a terrible price for it.
He and his advisors knew that if they leveled with the public about the costs of war -- in dollars, years, soldiers -- he'd have a very hard time convincing them. So he didn't level with them. He took the easy way out.

The sort of forward planning that would have made a big difference in post-war Iraq was scuttled or attacked because it would make the job of selling the war harder. Those who sounded the alarm had their careers cut short.

Once we were in Iraq and it was clear that we had been wrong about the weapons of mass destruction -- a judgment that's been clear for more than a year -- he wouldn't admit it. And he still hasn't. A year and a half after we invaded Iraq and he still can't level with the American people about this. He still relies on his vice president to try to fool people into thinking Hussein was tied to al Qaida and the 9/11 attacks.

More importantly, once it became clear that the president's plans for post-war Iraq were producing poor results, he refused to shift policy or to reshuffle his team. He refused to demand accountability from his own team because of how it would have reflected on him. He's preferred to continue on with demonstrably failed policies because to do otherwise would be to admit he'd made a mistake and open himself to all the political fall-out that entails. And that's not something he's willing to do.

The stubborn refusal ever to change course, which the president tries to pass off as a sign of leadership or devotion to principle, is actually an example of his cowardice.

For the same reasons, he runs from soldiers' funerals like they were burying victims of the plague -- because it's the easy way out. If there's a problem, he denies it or finds someone else to take the fall for him.

Everyone has these tendencies in their measure. No one is perfect. But they define George W. Bush.

The same sort of moral cowardice that led him to support the Vietnam war but decide it wasn't for him, run companies into the ground and let others pay the bill, play gutter politics but run for the hills when someone asks him to say it to their face, those are the same qualities that led the president to lie the country into war, fail to prepare for the aftermath and then refuse to take responsibility for any of it when the bill started to come due.

That's the argument John Kerry needs to be making. And he needs to make it right now.

All very well argued, but were John Kerry to stand in front of a national audience and say this - "President Bush. Be a man. Take responsibility for what you do, and what you have done. Grow up." - Kerry would change no voters' minds.

Almost all votes have made up their minds already. And half the country likes this child bully who can sucker-punch the skinny, brainy wimp and get away with it. Hey, it is entertaining - and plays to the secret fantasy of so many who feel life, and brainy wimps who get along with the French, have treated them unfairly and mocked their lack of education and their simple incurious values and tell them life is complicated when it really isn't.

I don't think this will fly.

Posted by Alan at 09:46 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Monday, 23 August 2004

Topic: Election Notes

The Story That Won't Die - leading to a precise definition of cowardice....

As a follow-up to Attack Ads: The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and all that...

Below? Arguments that Bush is either a liar or cannot remember what he said, he's a moral coward who has others do his dirty work, and he's a shallow sadist.

Monday's statement from President Bush, as reported the Associated Press (byline David Espo, AP Special Correspondent - Monday, August 23, 2004)

President Bush on Monday criticized a commercial that accused John Kerry of inflating his own Vietnam War record, more than a week after the ad stopped running, and said broadcast attacks by outside groups have no place in the race for the White House.

"I think they're bad for the system," added Bush, who had ignored calls to condemn the ad while it was on the air. ...

And this is followed by a whole lot of reported comment - Democrats saying this was too little too late, Republicans calling for Michael Moore's movie to be pulled, and late in the day Bush saying he was disappointed that Kerry didn't join him in this call for and end to these "Exception 527 to the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill" advertisements.

Yeah, when Bush signed the bill into law he said these 527 exemptions were wonderful - allowing for free speech to bloom. Oops.

Nick Confessore over at Tapped rightly says this (with active links to document it all) -

President Bush's denunciation of 527s is hypocritical and self-contradictory. This is especially true given (let me add some more examples) that the campaign finance law the president signed just a few years ago deliberately avoided closing the 527 loophole; that Bush beat Sen. John McCain (R-Ari.) during the 2000 primary in part with the help of a 527 run by his supporter Sam Wylie; that Bush's own campaign manager, campaign counsel, and political guru (Ken Melhman, Ben Ginsburg, and Karl Rove, respectively) have attended fundraising and organizational events for Progress for America, a 527 founded by Bush's political director from the 2000 campaign, Tony Feather; that GOP chairman Ed Gillespie and Bush campaign chairman Mark Racicot recently issued a statement designating PFA and yet another GOP 527, the Leadership Forum, as a good place for Republicans to give money to; and that the second-biggest 527 in the U.S. is the Republican Governors Association, a group spun off by the Republican National Committee two years ago specifically to collect and harness soft money for state and local GOP candidates.

If President Bush is opposed to 527s, somebody better tell his senior campaign staff, and quick.

Oh well, Bush's statement sounds good for the masses, now that it is too late to do anything about the anti-Kerry ads. Ha, ha.

[Over at Open Secrets you will find a ranked list of political 527 organizations with the amounts they have spent so far.]

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo gives this perspective -

THERE WAS A brief hubbub over the web earlier this afternoon when it seemed that President Bush had denounced the Swift Boat ads. Needless to say, of course, he had done no such thing. He simply repeated the line Scott McClellan has been peddling for days -- that he denounces all independent expenditure ads.

Then Marshall prints a long block of verbatim comments from Bush ending with this -

BUSH: Absolutely. I don't think we ought to have 527s.

I can't be more plain about it. And I wish -- I hope my opponent joins me in saying -- condemning these activities of the 527s. It's -- I think they're bad for the system. That's why I signed the bill, McCain-Feingold.

I've been disappointed that for the first, you know, six months of this year, 527s were just pouring tons of money -- billionaires writing checks. And, you know, I spoke out against them early. I tried to get others to speak out against them as well. And I just don't -- I think they're bad for the system.

Really? Yeah, he said the opposite, but this is probably not lying. He probably believes he once said that. He didn't. But, you know, he has some problems in expressing himself. We get the idea. Maybe he didn't understand what he was signing? It happens.

But all though the verbatim transcript Bush will NOT say that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth advertisements were wrong in and of themselves.

Marshall nails it here -

... of course the bigger point is that President Bush won't denounce the ads. If someone asks me to denounce Joseph Stalin and I say, "Well, yes, I'm against all politicians who support the death penalty" then I haven't denounced Joseph Stalin, right? This is the same thing.

Now, let's step back and consider where we are. Everyone in the country seems to have an opinion on this -- just go see the chat shows, the opinion columns and talk radio. Everybody has an opinion but George W. Bush, the man at the center of it all.

The reason, as we said earlier, is that the president is a coward -- a fact for which this dust-up constitutes merely an example. And ... President Bush's moral cowardice -- not his physical cowardice or bravery, of which we know little and which is simply a side issue -- is the essence of this campaign.

And what did Marshall say earlier?

He said this -

I don't say he's a coward because he kept himself out of Vietnam three decades ago. I know no end of men of that age who in one fashion or another made sure they didn't end up in Indochina in those days. (I quickly ran through both hands counting guys I talk to on a regular basis.) And they include many of the most admirable people I know.

He's a coward because he has other people smear good men without taking any responsibility, without owning up to it or standing behind it. And when someone takes it to him and puts him on the spot to defend his actions ... he's literally speechless. Like I say, a coward.

The pattern is clear. Marshall goes into great detail of what the Bush folks did to McCain in 2000 and all the rest.

But the key contention - that moral cowardice is the essence of this campaign? Gee, which of the two candidates volunteered for service in Vietnam? Cheney himself managed five deferments in a row - as, he has said, he had other priorities.

And now their surrogates claim Kerry wasn't really any kind of hero and his wounds superficial and his medals not merited. And Bush says, oh well, everyone should stop such ads.

The Middle East expert from the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, puts it this way -

The true absurdity of the entire situation is easily appreciated when we consider that George W. Bush never showed any bravery at all at any point in his life. He has never lived in a war zone. If some of John Kerry's wounds were superficial, Bush received no wounds. (And, a piece of shrapnel in the forearm that caused only a minor wound would have killed had it hit an eye and gone into the brain; the shrapnel being in your body demonstrates you were in mortal danger and didn't absent yourself from it. That is the logic of the medal). Kerry saved a man's life while under fire. Bush did no such thing.

What was Bush doing with his youth? He was drinking. He was drinking like a fish, every night, into the wee hours. For decades. He gave no service to anyone, risked nothing, and did not even slack off efficiently.

The history of alcoholism and possibly other drug use is a key issue because it not only speaks to Bush's character as an addictive personality, but may tell us something about his erratic and alarming actions as president. His explosive temper probably provoked the disastrous siege of Fallujah last spring, killing 600 Iraqis, most of them women and children, in revenge for the deaths of 4 civilian mercenaries, one of them a South African. (Newsweek reported that Bush commanded his cabinet, "Let heads roll!") That temper is only one problem. Bush has a sadistic streak. He clearly enjoyed, as governor, watching executions. His delight in killing people became a campaign issue in 2000 when he seemed, in one debate, to enjoy the prospect of executing wrong-doers a little too much. He has clearly gone on enjoying killing people on a large scale in Iraq. Drug abuse can affect the ability of the person to feel deep emotions like empathy. Two decades of pickling his nervous system in various highly toxic substances have left Bush damaged goods. Even for those who later abstain, "visual-spatial abilities, abstraction, problem solving, and short-term memory, are the slowest to recover." [source linked at site] That he managed to get on the wagon (though with that pretzel incident, you wonder how firmly) is laudable. But he suffers the severe effects of the aftermath, and we are all suffering along with him now, since he is the most powerful man in the world.

... decades of this sort of behavior do not leave a person untouched. Our world is in crisis and our Republic is in danger. It should not be left in the hands of a man who spent his life like this.

What? He's either a liar or cannot remember what he said, he's a moral coward who has others do his dirty work, and he's a shallow sadist.

So? He sort of won the last election. He will probably win this one. Maybe that's what we want.

Posted by Alan at 20:44 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Monday, 23 August 2004 20:52 PDT home

Topic: Election Notes

Guest Columnist Rick Brown -
It's the Electoral College, Stupid!

Not being a sports fan, I have little clue what the term "fantasy football" means, but if it is what I think it is, then it must be something like what I concocted below. Lots of fussing around with arcane figures, the results of which probably resemble reality as much as what happens inside the head of your average six-pack quarterback approximates the real NFL. But whatever. As they say, it's only a game.

The presidential race is not just a horse race, of course, it's also a numbers racket, and it was a glance at a list of such numbers in a recent special section of the New York Times devoted to the Electoral College, under a huge headline "Could It Happen Again?", that brought me to the startling conclusion that 538 is an even number!

Not to argue that this is a huge breakthrough in mathematical theory, only that it makes one wonder how close we could be to having a dead-heat in the horse race in 2004. So I started diddling around to find out.

First, just to remind anyone who may have forgotten about what happened in 2000, George Bush needed one-half of the 538 electors, plus one, to win; he got plus two, or 271. (Leaving the Supreme Court issue out of the discussion, of course.)

By the way, that should have left Al Gore with 267, but in fact, Barbara Lett-Simmons, a 73-year-old elector from the District of Columbia, turned in a blank ballot to protest DC's not having any votes in Congress.

But the year 2000 was also a census year, which means that since then, states gained or lost electors according to population shifts. So I asked myself, what if, in 2004, Bush were to win the same states as he did last time, and Kerry were to take the same states that Gore took in 2000?

It seems that Bush would have triumphed, with 278 electors to Kerry's 259. (In short, Bush was favored in states that had small but growing populations.)

And again, just for the fun of it, I wondered what it would take for a tie, which would throw the whole contest into the House of Representatives.

As it turns out, if just one state, Colorado, which was not too far from 50-50 in 2000, actually took its present nine votes from Bush and gave them to Kerry, it would give Bush 269 to Kerry's 268. It would then hopefully be a simple matter to persuade all three of the DC electors to play along and cast all of their votes this time, bringing Kerry and Bush even at 269 votes each.

What happens then? It goes to a vote in the House of Representatives, in which each state has one vote. And how would that go? There's no guarantee that each state would follow their original votes, but if they did, Bush would win, 30-21. (This tally assumes DC has a vote in the House. I forget whether or not they do, but it wouldn't change the outcome if they didn't.)

(With the exception, of course, of Colorado -- and, of course, my having that stray DC elector actually cast his/her vote this time -- all of the above assumes that this year's Democratic candidate still gets the majority of the popular vote. In other words, even if there were a tie in the Electoral College in this fantasy race, the Constitution once again will allow the people to be overruled. This whole electoral system, including that House of Representatives chaser, seems to favor the candidate who is liked by the less populous states. I suppose we really should get around to fixing that problem someday.)

But before we end this, let me lead this back to the real world, in which things are apparently happening that might lift the spirits of the "Anyone But Bush" crowd, and which brings me back to my original premise: "It's the Electoral College, Stupid!"

With all of these neck-and-neck polls we hear about every weekend, we tend to forget, as we do every presidential election year, that all these polls about the popular vote don't really mean that much in a close popular race; what really matters is what's happening in the states.

And yes, even though pundit Charlie Cook -- reputedly as good at this political prediction stuff as anyone can be -- is now saying that Kerry is way ahead, I myself imagine it's still too early to nail it all down.

Still, go look at electoral-vote.com, a website I just found, that allows you to roll your mouse over a map of the country and get the most recent poll results from each state. It's really neat! You should bookmark it, because it changes from day to day.

When I went there just now, they had Kerry with 286 electoral votes to Bush's 233, which does not include the two states shown to be "Exactly Tied," Wisconsin and Colorado. (See what I'm telling you? This whole race may swing on Colorado!) Of course, some of the states are listed as "Weak" or "Barely" for a certain candidate, so things could change at any time, especially during whatever bounce, if any, happens after the upcoming GOP convention in New York.

By the way, I tried to imagine a tie scenario on that electoral-vote.com map, but I couldn't do it. Still, this is not to say that couldn't change over the next two months.

- Rick Brown

Posted by Alan at 13:55 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Monday, 23 August 2004 19:05 PDT home

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